serve him, meanwhile motioning close a girl whose breasts were mottled gray with
dirt and pinkish white where she had sweated it away, saying to her that Niko
was to be taken to the office.
In it, he watched the man called One-Thumb through a one-way mirror, and
fidgeted. Eventually, though he saw no reason why it happened, a door he had
thought to be a closet’s opened behind him, and a woman stepped in, clad in
Ilsig doeskin leggings. She said, “What word did my brother send to me?”
He told her, thinking, watching her, that her eyes were gray like Askelon’s, and
her hair was arrestingly black and silver, and that she did not in any way
resemble Tempus. When he was finished with his story and his warning that she
not, under any circumstances, go out this evening-^not, upon her life, attend
the Mageguild fete, she laughed, a sweet tinkle so inappropriate his spine
chilled and he stiffened.
“Tell my brother not to be afraid. You must not know him well, to take his
terror of the adepts so seriously.” She moved close to him, and he drowned in
her storm-cloud eyes while her hand went to his swordbelt and by it she pulled
him close. “Have you money, Stepson? And some time to spend?”
Niko beat a hasty retreat with her mocking, throaty laughter chasing him down
the stairs. She called after him that she only wanted to have him give her love
to Tempus. As he made the landing near the bar, he heard the door at the stairs’
top slam shut. He was out of there like a torqued arrow-so fast he forgot to pay
for his drink, and yet, when he remembered it, on the street where his horse