“Hush,” he said, “it’s all right.” Which was a lie. His teeth wanted to chatter.
“We should go back to Her. We should-“
“No.” He was adamant in that. If they both starved.
But sometimes in not-quite dreams, in that inner vision, he felt Ischade’s touch, plainly as he had ever felt it, and suspected in profoundest unease that she knew precisely where her escaped servants were.
“We could have a house,” Moria said, and burst into tears. “We could be safe from the law.” She burrowed her head against him and hugged him tight. “I came from this. / can’t live like this, it stinks, Stilcho, it stinks and I stink and
I’m tired, I can’t sleep-“
“No!” The vision was there again. Red eyes stared at him in the black. He tried to shift his sight away from it, but it was more and more real. He tried to push it away, and turned to the little starlight there was and clung to the sill till his fingers ached. “Light the lamp.”
“We haven’t-“
“Light the lamp!”
She left him; he heard her rattling and fussing with the tinderbox and the wick and tried to think of light, of any pure, yellow-golden-white light, of sun in mornings, of the burning summer sun, anything that had the power to dispel the dark.
But the sun he limned in his one living eye, there in the dark, reddened, and became paired, and lengthened, winking out in a blink as deep as hell and reappearing in slitted satisfaction.
The lamp glow began slowly, brightened, profligate waste. He turned and saw
Moria’s face underlit, haggard and sweaty and fear-haunted. For a moment she was a stranger, a presence he could no more account for than he could account for that vision which had waked him, of a thing launched into the skies over