Tempus had sent Janni’s team deliberately to destruction because Stealth had
rejected the Riddler’s offered pairbond.
One who knew better answered sagely that this was a Mygdonian message, a
Nisibisi warning of some antiquity, and he had heard it straight from Stealth’s
broken lips.
‘What did that?’ Jihan moaned, bending low over Janni’s remains. Tempus did not
answer her but said generally: ‘And Niko?’ and followed a man who headed off
towards the whitewashed barracks, hearing as he went a voice choked with grief
explaining to Jihan what happens when you tie a man spreadeagled over an
animal’s burrow and smoke the creature out.
The Stepson, guiding him to where Niko lay, said that the man who’d brought them
wished to speak to Tempus. ‘Let him wait for his reward,’ Tempus snapped, and
questioned the mercenary about the Samaritan who’d delivered the two Stepsons
home. But the Sacred Bander had gotten nothing from the stranger who’d rapped
upon the gates and braved the angry sentries who almost killed him when they saw
what burden he’d brought in. The stranger would say only that he must wait for
Tempus.
The Stepson’s commander stood around helplessly with three others, friends
ofNiko’s, until the barber-surgeon had finished with needle and gut, then chased
them all away, shuttering windows, barring doors. Cup in hand, then, he gave the
battered, beaten youth his painkilling draught in silence, only sitting and
letting Niko sip while he assessed the Stepson’s injuries and made black guesses
as to how the boy had come by green and purple blood-filled bruises, rope burns