-so he thought, o gods large and small, gods of hell and gods of earth, only of
getting out into that light where the sun would warm the stone step and the
bricks and warm his dead flesh which right now had that lasting chill of rain
and mud and misery. He could not abide the stink and the cold of mud, that made
him think all too much of being dead, in the ground, in the river cold-
I’m not running, I’m not going anywhere, just the sun…. That, for Haught’s
benefit, should he wake-with his hand on the door.
The hair stirred at Stilcho’s nape. His flesh crawled. He stopped still and
turned and looked, and saw Haught sitting up in the shadows, a bedraggled Haught
with a bloody scrape on his face and the whites showing dangerously round his
eyes. Stilcho set his back against the door and gestured toward it with a shrug.
“Just going out to get the-“
Do you play games with me? With me, dead man?
No, he thought quickly, made that a torrent of no, letting nothing else through,
and felt every hair on his body rise and his heart slow, time slow, the world
grow fragile so that for a moment he knew the progress of Haught’s mind, the
suspicion that his one failure had diminished the fear of him, that a certain
piece of walking meat needed a lesson, that this thing Ischade slept with (but
not with him) could be dealt with, shredded and sent to the deepest hell if it
needed to learn respect-
-Stilcho knew all that the way he suddenly knew Haught was running through his
thoughts, knowing his doubt, his dread, his hate, everything that made him