never had to think that Tempus himself might be involved in a mistake. The man
the gods chose-But gods had self-interest right along with the rest of creation;
gods might trick a man-might trick an empire, play games with souls, with a man
who served their cause.
Tempus could be wrong. Gods know he could be wrong. He doesn’t care for this
town. I do. I can give it to him. Is that treason?
An empire runs on what works, doesn’t it?
I’ve just got to live to get it working. Prove it to Crit. Prove it to Tempus.
If it takes staying out of their way till I can get this thing organized-I know
holes Crit doesn’t.
Damn, no. They’ll go for her.
He gripped the ring in his pocket, suffered a twinge that dimmed his vision and
reminded him it was no small power the Stepsons might take on in Ischade. There
would be fatalities. Calamity on both sides.
He made up his mind, then, what he had to do.
The sun was a glimmer of red-through-murk above Sanctuary’s east when Ischade
came to the simple little shop in the Bazaar; she came after a trek through
Sanctuary’s streets and in a sordid little room in the Maze left a dead man the
world would little miss. That man left her disgusted, pricklish, soiled; and
such was the charge of energies in the air of Sanctuary that she hardly felt
that ebb of power his death made, felt not even a moment’s relief from what ran
along her veins and suffused her eyes and made that victim, in the last moment
of his life, wish he had never existed at all.
It left not the least satisfaction; more, it left a gnawing terror that nothing