In truth he had nothing left of loyalty himself-not to comrades, not to anything
so much as the thin thread that each time hauled him up out of hell when Ischade
sent him down.
That thin thread grew strongest when he looked closest into her eyes, when he
shared her bed and each morning died for it and came back from hell again,
because the thread was always there. It was all he had of pleasure. It was all
he had of life. He knew what hell was, being too frequently a visitor; and when
he went down again the souls of his dead would cling to him and clamor at him
and beg him for rescue-and he would strike at them and leave them in the dark,
clawing his own way to the light like a drowning man, back to the next breath
that he could win in the world and back to the bed of the woman who killed them.
So much for loyalties. This constant passage back and forth left him no
illusions such as Janni had-of ties to anything. There was only fear. And
sometime pleasure. But more of fear.
Ischade-had a new amusement. Ischade had herself a man she had not yet killed;
one useful to her in this world, and Stilcho was starkly terrified that when
Strat died-she might find Strat still useful, in place of a scarred and maimed
husk that had never been the man Straton had been.
Stilcho was, at the depth of his attentuated life- terrified; and Janni had put
the name to it.
Brush moved, ever so quietly. It might have been the wind. But a touch brushed
his arm, a touch where no sound had been; and Stilcho gasped and spun, and all