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the farthest edge of exhaustion, only a knife blade from collapse. The steps hesitated again, and then stopped about five paces from him.
“Ryan.”
The touch of a moth’s feathery wing brushed at his hearing-Krysty’s voice, seeming to come from a great distance, from somewhere in the deeps of the ville.
“Lover?” he said. “What is it?”
“The power of…of the Earth Mother came…to…to me. Was as though Gaia herself took possession of…”
The words faded away.
“What is it? What happened? Fireblast! If only I was free I could… Krysty, tell me what’s happened. Tell me.”
She came closer, and he finally felt her hand on his arm. “Ryan. Oh, but… I’ve killed Jabez Cawdor.”
Since he already anticipated death within the next few hours, Ryan wasn’t too shaken by her words. The mur-der of his brother’s only child didn’t make a whole lot of difference. The Trader used to say that a man could only get himself chilled once.
“How? No, make that why?”
“Came in to rape me. He was the most evil… evil bas-tard I ever met, Ryan. So I took him. Wasted him.”
“Had it coming, lover,” he said.
Then she broke down, lying across him, hanging on as if she were drowning, her tears wetting through his clothes. The girl’s whole body was shaken by sobbing, the sound muffled as she pressed her face to his chest. De-spite being bound and helpless, Ryan tried to comfort his woman, muttering softly and kissing the side of her neck. He could feel that her long, sentient hair was coiled tightly at the back of her head in a defensive bundle.
“Tell me ’bout it.”
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Krysty fought for self-control, sitting back on her heels, trying to steady her breathing. “Chilled him. But… that isn’t all. The power was worse than I ever knew.”
“How d’you mean? Worse?”
Her voice was so quiet that Ryan could barely hear it, but he eventually made out what she was saying. And the flesh crawled on his nape at the horror of it. She hadn’t just killed the young man. She’d slipped into a blind frenzy and ripped his body apart.
Ryan tried to speak and found that his voice had gone, choked in a fearful dryness. He’d seen Krysty use her power before, and witnessed the awesome strength at such times. But to rend a corpse limb from limb… He swal-lowed hard and found words again.
“Don’t ever get angry with me, lover,” he whispered.
He felt her relax a little, the hair loosening at her neck. She even managed a muffled giggle at his weak joke. “Try not to, Ryan. If we live that long. What can we do?”
“Nobody outside in the passage heard?”
“No. I’m good at it, lover.”
“I know. Are there bars on your window?”
“Some. You can lean out, but I doubt you could es-cape that way.”
“They fear magic in the Shens. Always talk of sha-mans and wizards. I know that Harvey was always terri-fied of such things. You could sink the… the body in the moat and say you fell into a deep sleep and babble about demons and spirits possessing Jabez. The door’s locked?”
“Yes. On the inside. And there’s some old shrouds and some chunks of iron in a chest. I could weight the bits.”
“Do it. At least it might take the blame away from you. Who knows, lover? Can you do it? You’re not too weak?”
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“I can try. By Gaia! What I want most is to sleep for a month. With you, Ryan.”
“Don’t forget. He came in and was babbling some sort of shit that sounded bad. You blacked out, and when you came around Jabez was gone. Just a lot of blood on the floor.”
“I’ll try, lover. Will Harvey and his bitch-wife fall for it?”
Ryan smiled in the darkness. “If they don’t, things can’t be worse for us. And if they do… Who knows, Krysty? Who knows?”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
harvey cawdor looked like a man in the last stages of some dreadful ague. His whole body quivered and shook, his chins flapping from side to side like enormous dew-laps. His face was as pale as parchment, and a thread of spittle trailed from one corner of his thick lips. Sweat glistened on his pallid forehead and trickled over the pudgy acres of his cheeks.