there was nothing else to do. He was not afraid of that, viewed it with
fatalistic patience. But Moria was so small, and Mradhon’s hate so much.
She lingered, looking at them both. ‘You come,’ she said, in a quiet, fearful
voice, ‘too.’
Mradhon said nothing, but stared into the fire. Go, Haught shaped with his lips,
nodded towards the bed, and so Moria went, paused by the table, and finished off
the wine all at a draught. –
‘Sot,’ Mradhon said under his breath.
‘She just gets started at it sometimes,’ Haught said. ‘Alone – the storm…’
The rain spatted against the door. The wind knocked something over that went
skittering along the alley outside. The door rattled. Twice. And ceased.
Mradhon Vis looked that way, long and keenly. Sweat ran on his brow.
‘It’s just the wind,’ Haught said.
Thunder cracked, distantly, outside, and the shingles of the small riverhouse
fluttered like living things. The gate creaked, not the wind, and disturbed a
warding-spell that quivered like a strand of spider web, while the spider within
that lair stirred in a silken bed, opened eyes, stretched languorous limbs.
The visitor took time getting to the door: she read his hesitancy, his fear, in
the sound of uneven steps her hearing registered. No natural hearing could have
pierced the rain sound. She slipped on a robe, an inkiness in the dark. She
wished for light, and there was, in the fireplace, atop the logs that were
nothing but focus and never were consumed; atop candles that smelled musty and
strange and perfumed with something sweet and dreadful.