How Jihan’s father would react, only Jihan would know.
A movement caught his eye, and the god’s eye within him knew it female. His scrotum drew up, ready to face Jihan in all her insatiable glory.
But it was Ischade, not Jihan, who came.
Tempus felt a twinge of distress, of uncertainty-something he’d rarely felt in all these years. Could Jihan ignore his invitation? His challenge? The power in the game he played? Could Stormbringer have gotten wind of Tempus’s intention and mixed in? Tricking a god wasn’t easy. But then, neither was tricking the
Riddler.
Randal had assured him Jihan had said she’d be here. He knew she thought she was involved with Randal to make him jealous, to make him fey, to make him come to heel. The question was, however, whether Jihan herself understood what she did and why-that Stormbringer had turned her eyes toward Randal.
Tempus wondered, suddenly, whether it would matter to Jihan if she did know. She wasn’t human, any more than Ischade, so slight and yet so full of menace, or
Roxane.
Jihan was still learning how to be alive; womanhood lay heavy and confusing on her, as it didn’t on the witches and the accursed women who fought the witches of blood.
Ischade, no bigger than a child to Tempus, came striding up swathed in black, her face like a magical moon on midsummer’s eve, her eyes wide as the hells she guarded.
“Riddler,” she breathed, “are you sure?”
“Never,” he chuckled. “Not about anything.”
And he saw the necromant draw back, sensing the god cohabiting with him, a god the fighters called Lord Storm, whose name had been translated into more languages than the thieves’ world knew, but always meant the same: the nature of man to fight and kill for lust and territory. On bad days, Tempus thought that the god who dogged him, chameleonlike, adapting by syncretism to different wars in different lands, was merely an excuse his mind made up-a way to hang his excesses and his sins on others, a faceless repository for all the blame of every death he’d caused.