nightwalker caught in the Stepsons’ barracks, where she shouldn’t have been.
Pity. Haught, uncover the lantern.”
The Nisi lifted up a lantern from the ground and unshuttered it. There seemed no
light in it at all; yet when Mriga looked from it to Ischade and the corpse, and
the altar, they all were throwing shadows that showed impossibly blacker against
the ground than the midnight they all stood in. “This won’t hurt, child,” said
Ischade. She lifted up the sickle, and swung it at the ground. A scream followed
that Mriga thought would have frozen any mortal’s brain. She was irrationally
satisfied to glance sideways and see Siveni’s knuckles going white on the haft
of her spear as the corpse fell down again.
“Well, maybe it will hurt,” Ischade said, not sounding particularly moved. She
straightened, holding in her free hand what looked like a wavering, silken scrap
of night. It was the shadow she had cut loose. Delicately, with one hand, she
crumpled it till nothing of it showed but a fistful of darkness. Ischade held
out her hand to Mriga. “Take it,” she said. Mriga did. “When I tell you, swallow
it. Now, then …”
She moved to Razkuli, who stood leaning on the ghost of a sword, and watched her
without eyes, and without a face, looking taut and afraid. “That one is nothing
to me,” said Ischade. “Her soul can go where it pleases. But yours might have
some use. So … something alive …” She looked around her. “That tree will do
nicely. Hold still, Razkuli.”
The second scream was harder, not easier, to bear. Ischade straightened, shook