The room went white, and blue and green, and thunder cracked, spinning her through the dark, through warm summer air, through-
-nowhere, till she came to herself again, lying dazed under a starry sky, with the ramshackle maze of Sanctuary buildings leaning above her. She felt nothing for a while, nothing at all, and shut her eyes and blinked at the stars again, her fingers exploring what should have been silk, but was instead dusty cobblestone. The back of her head hurt where she had fallen. She felt bruised along her whole back, and where he had touched her she felt a burning like acid.
He never lost consciousness. For a moment he was clearly elsewhere, then lying stunned on pavement with a curbside against his ribs. He had hit hard, and he ached; and he likewise burned, not least with the slow realization that he was not in the riverside house, that he was lying in a midnight street somewhere in the uptown, and that he hurt like very hell.
He did not curse. He had learned a bloody-minded patience with the doings of gods and wizards. He only thought of killing, her, anything within reach, and most immediately any fool who found amusement in his plight.
When he had picked himself up off his face and gained his balance again there was no question which direction he was going.
It was a long tangle of streets, a long, limping course home, in which she had abundant time to gather the fragments of her composure. Her head ached. Her spine felt quite disarranged. And for the most urgent discomfort there was no relief until she rounded a comer and came face to face with one of Sanctuary's unwashed and ill-mannered.
The knife-wielding ruffian gave her no choice and that contented her no end. She left him in the alley where he had accosted her, likely to be taken for some poor sod dead of an overdose of one of Sanctuary's manifold vices. His eyes had that kind of vacancy. In a little while he would simply stop living, as the chance within his body multiplied by increments and everything went irredeemably wrong. The poor and the streetfolk died most easily: their health was generally bad to begin with, and his was decidedly worse even before she left him lying there quite forgetful that he had been with any woman.
She was, therefore, in a more reasoning frame of mind when she arrived on the street by the bridge, and walked up the road which most ignored, to her hedge and her fence on this back street of Sanctuary. But she was not the first one.
Tempus was already there, walking sword in hand about the perimeter, up along the fence; and he stopped in his tracks when she came from beyond the trees, into the feeble glow of the stars overhead and the light from between her shutters. There was rage in every line of him. But she kept walking, limping somewhat, until they were face to face. He looked her up and down. The sword inclined its point to the ground, slowly, and hung in his fist.
"Where were you?" he asked. "And where in hell is my horse?"
"Horse?"
"My horse!" He pointed with the sword to the front of the fence and the hedge, as if it were perfectly evident. In fact there was no horse in sight and he had ridden in; she had heard him. She gathered her forces and limped on to the front of the en-hedged fence, where the ground, still soft from the rain, was churned and trampled by large hooves.
And where one of her rosebushes was trampled to splinters.
She stood there staring at the ruin, and the light inside her shuttered house flickered brighter, glowed with a white incandescence. It died slowly as she turned. "A girl," she said. "A girl is the thief. At my house. From my guest."
"This wasn't your doing."
His voice was calmer, restrained.
"No," she said in soft and measured tones, "I do assure you." And drew herself up to all her height when he reached for her. "I've had quite enough, thank you."
"It threw you too."
"To the far side of the mage quarter." She drew in a hissing breath through wide nostrils. It smelled of horse and mud, trampled roses, and bitch. And there was wrath and chagrin both in this huge man, wrath that began to assume a certain embarrassed self-consciousness. "Our curses are not compatible, it seems. Storm and fire. And we were so well begun."
He said nothing. His breathing was rapid. He walked past her to the trampled ground and gave a whistle, piercingly shrill.
She caught it up for him, reached inside and flung it to the winds, so that he winced and faced her in startlement.
"If that will bring him," she said, "that will carry to him."
"That will bring him," Tempus said, "if he's alive."
"A young woman took him. Her smell is everywhere. And krrf. Don't you smell it?"
He drew in a larger breath. "Young woman."
"Not one I know. But I will. My roses come very dear."
"A bloody young bitch." It sounded particular and specific, his eyes narrowing in some precise identification.
"In frequent heat. Yes."
"Chenaya."
"Chenaya." She repeated the name and stored it away carefully. She waved the gate open. "A drink, Tempus Thales?"
He slid the sword into its sheath and walked with her, a light touch beneath her arm, steadying her as she walked up the steps, and wished the door open, a blaze of light into the dark thicket of the yard.
"Sit down," he said when they were inside; his voice was a marvel of self restrained gentleness; he poured wine for her, and then for himself. Then: "I owe you an apology," he said, as if the words were individually expensive. Then further: "There's mud in your hair."
She gave out a breath of a laugh, and breathed larger and wider and found herself awake. It was not a pleasant laugh, as the look on Tempus's face was not a pleasant one. "There's mud on your chin," she said, and he wiped at it, with a hand likewise smudged. They both stank of the streets. He grinned suddenly, wolflike. "I'd say," Ischade said, "we were fortunate."
He drank off his glass. She poured another round.
"Do you get drunk?" he asked, directly.
"Not readily. Do you?"
"No," he said. There was a difference in his tone. It was not arrogance. Or pride. He looked her straight in the eyes and it was clear that tonight, this moment, it was not a man-woman piece of business. It was similar perspective. It was a rare moment, she sensed, that a man got this close to Tempus Thales. And a woman-perhaps it was the first time.
She recalled him in the alley, on the horse, that something-to-prove manner of his.
But defeated, robbed and offended, he was being astonishingly sensible. He was going far to excess in it, and again she felt that precarious balance, polar opposite to the direction black rage insisted he go. He smiled at her and drank her wine, issues all forever unresolved.
One expected a man of vast lifespan to be complex. Or mad, at least to the limited perspective of those who lacked perspective. It was vitality of all sorts which was his curse, healing, sex, immortality.
Annihilation was hers. And the apposition of their curses was impossible.
She laughed, and leaned her elbow on the table and wiped her mouth with the back of a soiled hand.
"What amuses you?" There, the suspicion was quite ready.
"Little. Little. Your horse and my roses. Us." As distant hooves echoed in the streets, within her awareness. "Shall we dice for the bitch?"
He had heard the horse coming. He recovered himself, as she had guessed, became the stranger again, and headed for her door.