would ever be enough, that there was no man in all the world sufficient to ease
that power which threatened to break loose in the muttering storm and in her
vitals. She blinded herself: she saw too much of hell and not enough of where
she was going, and if a gang of Sanctuary’s predatory worst had confronted her
and seen her eyes this moment, at dawn’s breaking, they would have stopped cold
and slunk away in terror. She had become-known. Victims were harder to come by.
Only fools approached her. And they were without sport and without surprise.
Tasfalen. Tasfalen. She clung to that name and that promise as to sanity itself
a prey that offered wit, and hazard, and difficulty.
Tasfalen could be savored, over days. Put off and extended for a week-
She might, she reasoned with herself, make Strat understand.
She might-yet-get through that shell of unbelief Strat made around himself,
teach him the things he had to know. He was ready for that. His infatuation was
sufficient. That her hunger threatened him, this, everything-was unbearable.
It was weakness. And she had not yet accounted for Roxane. No scouring of the
town had discovered her. That the dimwitted fiend had not found her tracks, but
that she had discovered nothing to indicate that Roxane had not perished-did not
make her secure in her present weakness. It was exactly the moment and the mode
in which the Nisi would seek her out….
… Strike through Strat, through this stranger Tasfalen, through anything at
all she least expected; most of all through a weakness….