it’ll bring your god back, Strat. Rouse Vashanka from wheresoever the Pillage
Lord is sleeping. The men think so, that’s sure enough.” The mage rose up and
made a pass over the quartered dog and all four parts of it-fore and hind-rose
into the air, dripping fluids, and floated away toward the field altar out
behind the training ground.
Strat watched the pieces disappear around a corner before he said, “Vashanka?
Back? What makes you think the god’s gone? He’s reverted to His second
childhood, is all. He’s lost all sense of proportion like a child.” Then Strat
turned on Ischade, as she’d thought he might, and his eyes were as flat and hard
as her nerves told her his heart had become.
“Does this suit you, then, Ischade? All this ‘order’ that you see here? Will it
help us-give us a few nights more for you to lie with me without your ‘needs’
taking over? Are you sated? Can a necromant ever have enough? Is it safe for you
to take me home?”
Home to her embrace, he meant. To her odd and shadowed house, all gleam and
velvet by the White Foal’s edge. Straton made her soul ache and because of him
she’d mixed in where no necromant belonged. And it was true: The death here was
partly of her making; she’d be content now, without having to stalk the night
for victims, for days.
She saw in his eyes that he knew too much, that all she’d done to give him what
he wanted-her-for stolen evenings on brocade cushions was about to exact the
price she’d always known it must.
Randal, knowing the conversation was getting too intimate for outsiders, hurried