Jihan would attend, there had been none of the obligatory teasing of the mage that passed for fellowship. Strat hadn’t even called Randal “Witchy-Ears.”
Tempus knew he was pushing matters, but he had his reasons. And the god, risen in him, was all the sign he needed that his instinct wasn’t wrong.
A part of this outrageous enterprise-the freeing of whatever lurked behind
Tasfalen’s doors-he undertook to right a balance out of whack. It was something none of those about him sensed, but Niko, the absent Stepson, would have understood: Tempus labored now for maat, for equilibrium in a town that teetered toward anarchy; and for the Stepsons, who soon might go where Nisibisi magic was still strong and had better not, with a debt outstanding to a witch of Nisi blood.
But the greatest part of this seemingly evil deed-that Randal had begged him not to undertake and that had troubled Ischade enough to bring her here-he did because of Jihan, and her father, and a marriage that, if consummated, would bind a god to Sanctuary that no little thieves’ world could or should contain.
Three hundred years and more of kicking around this world of god-inspired battlefields and wizard-won wars had taught Tempus that instinct was his only guide, that any man’s sacrifice went unappreciated unless it was to propitiate a god, and that the only satisfaction worth having was wrested from the deed itself-was in the process of accomplishment, never in the result.
So the sacrifice he was about to make-not the sacrifice of laying the ox thighs on the’oil and sending smoke up to heaven, but the sacrifice of his own peace of mind-would go unremarked by men. But he would know. And the god would know. And the powers who tended the balance which expressed itself in fate and weather would know.