Never too hasty. Take one’s time. Never let the victim get his defenses together either, or forget there was worse to come.
“He was seventeen, pig.”
Slowly, through the afternoon streets, still in drizzling rain, the shops’ business slow, the citizens who did find reason to be out on the streets moving about all muffled up in cloaks.
But no few stared at the sight of a Stepson with a black-cloaked woman riding pillion behind him, slowly and deliberately through street and street and street; and a one-eyed man beside them, where Stepsons had searched frantically all day, and rousted citizens and searched warehouses.
Perhaps it was the fey, dire feeling about them, that coursed through Strafs bones and set his teeth on edge.
“Wrong,” Stilcho said softly, above the soft clip and clop of hooves on cobbles. “Wrong-”
“Is it me you see?” Ischade whispered. “Or else?”
“I don’t know,” Stilcho said hollowly, in a voice which itself could raise the hair’s at a man’s nape.
“Hereabouts,” Ischade whispered. “Hereabouts. Steady, Straton. Don’t flinch.”
He felt something at his back-felt it, like fire and ice, burning through his armor, into his bones. And suddenly the horse whickered and gave a thrust of its hindquarters, skittering forward and taking an undirected turn into an alley, into a maze of balconies and rubbish and discarded barrels. It was crazed. It headed them up a nook and stopped, facing a dead end.
“Here,” Ischade said.
‘Where?” Blank walls surrounded them, windowless, doorless. Strat looked about them in desperation, and twisted about as Ischade slid down.
“The horse knows. It has the scent.”
He dismounted and dropped the reins, drawing his sword, looking above them, for some window, any aperture.
The horse pawed the cobbles, put down its head and nosed the rubbish.
Above a hinged iron plate set in the cobbles.
“Damn,” Strat said. “Damn.”
And dropped to his knees and pulled at it with his fingers. It would not move.
“Bolted,” he said. “Dammitall!” Desperation welled up in him.
Blue fire ran around the opening, down the hinges, dim in daylight. Metal grated.
“Now,” Ischade said.
He pulled and it lifted.
And the sound, the half-human sound that came from somewhere in the depths, ran right through his nerves.
He did not stop. He saw the steps and he went, writhed his way through a hole too small for a man to take easily, down into the echoing dark.
“Stilcho!” he heard Ischade whisper urgently. He heard the slither of someone behind him, but another such moan wrenched at his gut. He felt his way down and down, one hand for the sword, one for the wall, his eyes straining at dark absolute except the little gray light that got through from the open trap above, and that fitful, with his partners leaning over it.
He heard laughter echoing through the vault, soft and awful, coming from everywhere.
And caught himself with his heart in his throat as his foot missed a step and he saved himself at an unexpected landing. There was a chain there. He grasped it and felt it to find the steps, descending again, till he heard the sound in front of him-
He felt ahead of him with his sword, probing the dark till it suddenly touched stone. He felt either side and found nothing, and, with his bare hand, in front of him, and felt a wooden door. He put his ear against it.
And pulled it open, carefully, carefully as dim lamplight spilled against his eye.
“. . . friend,” he heard.
And a sound hardly human at all.
He saw a light, old columns, watermarked, a pair of figures low to the ground against a mound of dirt. He eased his way in, flexing his hand on his sword-hilt, hardly daring to breathe.
The damned hinge creaked. The man looked around.
“Haiiii!” Strat yelled, for what shock could do, and was halfway across the room before the man jerked Crit up by the hair and brought the point of a dagger right up under Crit’s left eye.
“You want him blinded? Drop it! Drop the sword!”
Crit tried to say something Fool, probably And arched his back and struggled as the knife jabbed
“Drop it'”
Strat dropped it, and saw the man drop the knife and snatch twohanded at something in the straw beside him, but he was already moving, launched with all his strength and speed across that intervening space-
Crossbow Cut’s Firing The bolt tore into him He spun with it, staggered and kept moving, clawing his way up again, tearing the dagger from his belt, hurling himself and the weapon missilelike against the man with the spent bow
He hit the man in the gut, he felt that, felt the rush of blood over his hand, the tumble of threshing limbs tangled with his as he went down with the bolt shocked by the fall and the dark closing around him
“I couldn’t stop it,” Stilcho said “I couldn’t reach him-”
Ischade held up her hand, dismissal, absolution-whatever Stilcho would accept-and looked down at the carnage that spread blood through the straw
“Witch-” Crit said, or tried to say, looking at her through the one eye that still would work It came out a raven’s croak And after so much else, he spat at her
“Gratitude Of course.” Straton washer concern She tucked her robes away from the blood that was everywhere and felt of his back and his neck, where a pulse still beat The bolt had hit high The bad shoulder Again.
“Damn you,” Crit whispered, “damn you to hell, let him be.”
She touched Strat’s face when Stilcho had turned him over He was bloody everywhere. He was half-conscious, and he tried to say something, but she touched his lips and his brow and put him to sleep She did other things too, and bent and kissed him on the brow and on the lips, bloody as he was
“Let him be, you damned ghoul'”
Somewhere Critias had found that much voice, and struggled to an elbow, to try to throw his body into her, if only that
She whirled and stopped him, her hand on his throat, and flung him back down, spat at again
But she restrained herself “He came after you He came to me for you But you will not remember that ” She held him with her eyes only now, cut him free with the knife she drew from the dead man, then put her joined hands to Crit’s face, and let the mage-fire flow, mending the eye, the hands, everything that might cripple a man “Sleep, Critias ”
It was part of her curse and her talent, that mesmeric talent that could erase her very passage from a mind, make seeing eyes blind, create elaborate memories that had never been
Such, largely, had been her affair with Strat until she began to take risks, with Stilcho to die his deaths, assuage her needs, fulfill the curse
“Come,” she said to Stilcho, taking him by the hand “We have Mona to see to Crit will take care of things ” And drew Stilcho with her, hesitating at the last, bewildered, surely But she turned his face to her with a touch of her finger, and erased his memory of this place, before she led him up to the light
It was luck, surely, that a searcher spotted Strat’s bay horse m an alley searchers had been down a dozen times that day, spotted the trap left up, and investigated, all on a hunch that had come on the man even to go down that often-searched alley Crit had run out of strength, dragging Strat’s half-conscious weight toward the stairs, collapsing there in the dark with Strat damned near bleeding to death and the stairs yet to go.
After that it was horse litters to get them as far as the guard-barracks infirmary, Crit more exhausted and bruised and with cracked ribs that bandages could help, Strat the worse off of the two of them.
Strat, who had come through for him and done what he had done, before the damned IIsigi lunatic had had time to carve him up Strat, who had distracted the killer and taken the bolt, knowing he was going to take it, because that was the only way to get across that distance and knife the bastard that was going to cut Crit’s throat.
Strat had had enough strength left m him to cut Crit loose And then fainted
Crit ought to have been in his own bed He was not He sat by Strat’s, just holding onto his arm, thinking, damn, he would go to the witch by riverside, he would go down there and he would beg if that was what it took The sight of Strat deliberately distracting that bastard, deliberately taking the shot and still having it in him to aim true and hard-would haunt him, like the thing Strat had said when he managed, m his pain, to cut him loose-