She was scared beyond clear thought. She scanned the street and walked down it
with the flounced swish that had (since the Beysib) become fashionable; and all
the while knew that she had just delivered something deadly to that house. She
had let fall a small silver ball, and it had rolled away from her feet and lost
itself. Perhaps a Beysib snake would investigate it. It was too small for
anything else to notice.
It did not at all shake her confidence that even Ischade’s sorceries needed
physical objects to anchor them. It shook her more to know how tiny those
objects could be, hardly more than a bead, a droplet of silver, undetectable
without magic to use in turn-and perhaps not then. If that was not a witch who
had met her, then she was no judge.
A lifelong resident of Sanctuary learned to judge such things.
Strat balked at the alley-mouth: he had half-thought of a fast move and a quick
break; but so, obviously, had Vis. Vis was not alone. Three men were in the
alley; waiting. One more behind. So it was either revenge or a serious talk; and
it was easy to get bad hurt trying to get out of this now.
He went on in and stopped as close to the street as he could; or tried to. One
caught his arm and dragged and he found the sharp point of a knife in his back
from Vis’s side.
He stopped struggling then. Kidney-hit was a bad way to go, not that there were
good ones. He was a professional himself, and this was not one of the times to
turn hero. He let them push and haul him along to a bending of the alley and