He wasn’t sure which he liked better, but he liked both alternatives dough to bare his teeth in a humorless smile as he waited.
And waited. And waited. He stood. He sat. He paced. He leaned. He heard his horse nickering, then pawing the cobbles. He checked its tack, Stroked its nose. Strat’s bay horse would have evoked the nicker he’d heard, but Crit didn’t see the bay horse anywhere.
Just as well; the bay made him nervous. Made everybody nervous who didn’t like reincarnated horses with spots on their withers through which a man could glimpse hell itself if the light was right.
Because of the nicker, Crit realized he didn’t want to see Strat right now. Not until he’d solved the problem of Kama and Torchholder. Not now, when the gray sky and the gray buildings and the gray dockside melded with the gray horse Tempus had left him, to take the sting out of deserting him.
The gray was a prize, one of the best from the Stepsons’ stock farm up at Wizardwall. Worth more than a block of the Maze, contents included. Worth more than the whole town, to some men’s way of thinking.
But Crit would have given it to Strat gladly if Strat would only re- nounce the ghost-horse and the vampire woman who’d conjured it for him . – .
“Psst,” said a voice from behind him and Crit refused to flinch, or jump, or betray the heart-stopping urgency within him that counseled a dive for cover, a drawn sword.
He turned slowly and said, “You’re late, hawkmask.”
“We aren’t hawkmasks any longer,” said an oddly accented voice from under a shadowing hooded cloak. “And I never was. We’re just free- lancing, we are. Just workin’ for pay. You like meres, bein’ you was one.” A languorous, professional lilt in a northern-accented voice that never- theless had a deadly, nervous edge to it.