a sailor navigating by the stars. Vis was supposed to come to him, though. He’d
wait. If his hunch was right, he could put Jubal and his hawkmasks to work for
Kadakithis without either knowing – or at least having to admit – that was the
case.
If so, he’d be free to take the band north – what they wanted, expected, and
would now fret to do with Tempus gone. Only Tempus’s mystique had kept them this
long; Crit would have a mutiny, or empty barracks, if he couldn’t meet their
expectation of war to come. They weren’t babysitters, slum police, or palace
praetorians; they collected exploits, not soldats. He began to form a plan,
shape up a scenario, answer questions sure to be asked him later, rehearsing
replies in his mind.
Unguided, his horse led him slumward – a bam-rat, it was taking the quickest,
straightest way home. When he looked up and out, rather than down and in, he was
almost through the Shambles, near White Foal Bridge and the vampire’s house,
quiet now, unprepossessing in the light of day. Did she sleep in the day? He
didn’t think she was that kind of vampire; there had been no bloodless, no
punctures on the boy stiff against the drop’s back door when one of the street
men found it. But what did she do, then, to her victims? He thought of Straton,
the way he’d looked at the vampire, the exchange between the two he’d overheard
and partly understood. He’d have to keep those two quite separate, even if
Ischade was putatively willing to work with, rather than against, them. He
spurred his horse on by.