hugged herself against the cold.
ARMIES OF THE NIGHT
C. J. Cherryh
I
It was an uncommon meeting of Stepsons, recent and previous. It took place one
night at winter’s edge, outside the weed-grown garden of a smallish house on the
riverside, a house in which the outer dimensions and the inner ones did not well
agree. Ischade was its owner. And this meeting was on a midnight when She was
occupied with another visitor in the inside of this outwardly-small house .
and a bay horse waited sleepily at the front.
“Stilcho,” the Stepson-ghost whispered; and Stilcho, fugitive from his bed
within the house (rejected lately, solitary within the witch’s abode) stirred in
his dejected posture and lifted his head from his cloaked arms and opened his
eyes, only one of which existed.
Janni hovered by the back step, in one of his less palatable manifestations,
adrip with gore, rib-bone showing through shreds of skin. Stilcho gathered
himself to his feet, wrapped his cloak about him and put a little distance
between them-he was no ghost, himself, but he was dead: so he understood ghosts
all too well and knew an agitated one when he saw it, both in this world and the
next.
“I want to talk with you,” Janni said. “I’ve got to talk.”
“Go away.” Stilcho was acutely conscious of the living presence in the small
house, of wards and watches that existed all about the yard. He spoke in his
mind, because Janni was in his head as much as he was standing on the walk-and
just as definitely as Janni was there in his mind, he was standing on that walk.