Crit, who’d born the brunt of delegated tasks, weaved on his feet with exhaustion as he set torches in the rubble of the house across from Tasfalen’s; had the light been better, the black circles under his eyes would have told a clearer tale of what he’d been through and what it cost him to petition Is-chade for leave to do what tonight must be done here.
Strat, Crit’s partner, worked silently beside him, unloading ox thighs rich with fat from a snorting chestnut who didn’t like its burden, and oil in child-sized stoneware rhytons, and placing all on a makeshift plinth exactly opposite
Tasfalen’s door.
Tempus watched his Stepsons work without a word, waiting for the witch to show.
Ischade had decreed this meeting be at midnight-necromants will be necromants.
She was crucial to this undertaking, so Randal said.
Tempus hardly cared; the god was in him fierce and strong, making everything seem fire-limned and slow: his task force leader; the witch-ridden Stepson,
Strat; the horses bearing sacrificial burdens. If he hadn’t remembered that he’d thought it mattered, that he’d felt need to leave here owing nothing, he’d have left this stone unturned.
But Ischade owed him this favor-if it really was one. And he, in turn, owed a debt he was loath to carry-a debt to the Nisibisi witch last seen behind that ward-locked door across the street.
Tasfalen’s door. It had not opened since the pillar of flame had scoured the neighborhood about it. What might come out of there, not even Ischade was certain. Powers had convened to cleanse the ground here, but stopped just short of the house. Powers that no one thought would ever work together had taken a hand to bar that door-Ischade’s sort of powers, and others from deeper hells;