their own. They were gone. Eichan might have pulled them when their lair became
unsafe.
But Mor-am had been followed on the bridge, and that follower had not led her
back to Mor-am, when she had turned round again after passing him. Panic ran hot
and cold through her veins, and guilt and self-blame and outright terror. She
had become alone, like that, in the space of time it took to walk the bridge and
turn round again; and find that the follower did not lead her to Mor-am, or to
anything; he himself had hesitated this way and that and finally recrossed the
bridge.
Mor-am would be at home, she had thought; and he was not.
She kept walking now, casual in the mutter of thunder, the before-storm
movements of the street people, moving because if something had gone wrong,
nowhere was really safe.
They hunted hawkmasks nowadays; and Eichan had cast them adrift.
There was one last place to go and she went to it, toward Mama Becho’s.
The door still spilled light into the dark, where a few patrons sprawled, drunk
and unheeding of the storm. Moria strode into it in a gust of wind, but the
bodies sprawled inside in sleep were amorphous, heaped, drunken. There was no
sign of Mor-am. A further, darker panic welled up in her, her last hope gone.
He still might be hiding, she tried to tell herself; might have gone to earth
and determined to stay there; or it was bad and he was still running. Or even
sleeping off a drunk.
Or dead. Like the murdered hawkmasks. Like one who had been nailed to a pole by
the bridge.
She turned and strode for the door, almost colliding with the human mountain