think despite the erotic mist that hazed the seeping brick, the effluvium of
rubbish and the gutter. The bay’s steps clopped along with a distant, dazed echo
in the alley’s wending transformation into a street where a dope den and a
tavern maintained half-open doors and a clutch of krrf-dazed sleepers sitting in
the mire outside. Music wailed; strings needed tuning. No one cared, least of
all the player. The alley meandered on. The horse did, while the mist came and
went.
Tempus would want him at that gathering at Peres. Tempus would want to talk to
him, want sense out of him, would look at him with that piercing stare of his
and spit him with it till he had spilled everything. That was what Ischade knew.
That was why Ischade wanted him out of there.
But then what, when he had fought with Crit and defied his commander and dealt
with Jubal and through Jubal, with the gangs. There were ways and ways to die.
He had invented one or two himself. Lying to Tempus offered worse. Desertion,
dereliction. Treason.
He felt a stab of ecstasy, and one of utmost terror; and knew he ought to take
that ring and fling it in the mud and go confess everything to Tempus, but that
was against his very nature- he had never run for help, had never thrown himself
at anyone’s feet, never in his life. Fixing things took nerve. It took the raw
guts to hang on to a situation long after it stopped being safe.
He was no boy, no twenty-five-year-old in shining armor, head full of glory
stories. He had worked the Stepsons’ shadowy jobs for a decade. He had just