and she suddenly knew it: once she knew that name, it took on shape and became
Janni, a torn and failing ghost that blew in tatters in the wind.
“I need his help,” she said. “Janni, I need yours.”
She had raised only his Seeming out of hell; the part of Janni that stood there
flaring with light came on loan from elsewhere, an elsewhere with which she had
as little to do as possible, wanting its expensive bargains no more than hell’s.
But he had come for this. To stand here. For hell’s reason: revenge; and a
reason out of that other place: raw devotion. It shone out of him like a candle
through paper, and made his face unbearable: she flinched and avoided the
sight of it. He blinded. He burned the eyes and left his imprint when she
looked aside, so that a shadow-Janni drifted in front of her eyes when a
shining hand at the edge of her vision indicated the sleeper by the
streamside.
“Niko,” she said, and exerted all the power she had stored, one vast push
against the wind and the accumulated ruin of this place. “Niko. Nikodemos.
Stealth, it’s not your time. Do you hear me?”
Mine, a voice said on the wind. Damn you. Damn you, Ischade.
It was, delivered out of a witch’s power, a curse that wrenched at the locks on
hell.
“Fool!” Ischade whirled in the echoing gust and shoved back with all that was in
her, keeping that Gate shut. It strained. It manifested, over across the stream,
a barred door in the stone cliff beside the stream, a door bent and creaking
under the blows of what might be a shoulder, an arm, a fragment of night itself