hazel eyes and his understated manner, something that made it seem perfectly
reasonable that this self-effacing youngster with his clean long limbs and his
quick canny smile had been the right-side partner of a Syrese legend twice his
age for nine years. Tempus would rather have been doing anything else than
trying to give comfort to the bereaved Stepson Nikodemos. Choosing a language
appropriate to philosophy and grief (for Niko was fluent in six tongues, ancient
and modern), he asked the youth what was in his heart.
“Gloom,” Niko responded in the mercenary-argot, which admitted many tongues, but
only the bolder emotions: pride, anger, insult, de-claratives, imperatives,
absolutes.
“Gloom,” Tempus agreed in the same linguistic pastiche, yet ventured: “You will
survive it. We all do.”
“Oh, Riddler… I know…. You did, Abarsis did-twice,” he took a shivering
breath; “but it is not easy. I feel so naked. He was… always on my left, if
you understand me-where you are now.”
“Consider me here for the duration, then, Niko.”
Niko raised too-bright eyes, slowly shaking his head. “m our spirits’ place of
comfort, where trees and men and life are one, he is still there. How can I
rest, when my rest-place holds his ghost? There is no maat left for me . . .do
you know the word?”
Tempus did: balance, equilibrium, the tendency of things to make a pattern, and
that pattern to be discernible, and therefore revivifying. He thought for a
moment, gravely, not about Niko’s problem, but about a youthful mercenary who