Stilcho. Ischade’s probably taught him a lot of interesting things. I’m not
jealous.”
The hell you’re not.
Haught’s eyebrow twitched. Dangerously. And the cold eyes took on a little
amusement. “Only of your loyalty,” he said. “That, I’ll have. What you have in
your bed is your business. As long as I have the other. I don’t hold anybody my
property. Moria.”
Slave, she remembered, remembered the whip-scars on him, and saw his face grow
hard.
“I was apprenticed on Wizardwall,” he said. “And Ischade was fool enough to take
me on. Now I have what I need. I have this house, I have hands to do what I
want, and I have one of my enemies. That’s a beginning, isn’t it?”
He looked up toward the head of the stairs. Moria did, unwillingly, and saw
Tasfalen standing there naked to the waist and with his hair all rumpled as if
he had just risen from sleep.
But there was something wrong in the way he stood there, in the lack of
reaction, in the way the hand reached out listlessly for the bannister, all the
reactions of life but no reaction to what ought to stir a man. As if he did not
know that there was anything amiss with him or in what his eyes must register in
the hall below him.
“The body’s working,” Haught said. “The mind’s rather spotty, I’m afraid.
Memory’s not what it was. The soul might retain the missing bits-decay sets in
very soon, you know; some tiny bits of him have just rotted, already. So a lot
it had is gone. But it doesn’t need a soul, does it? It doesn’t need one for
what I want.”
“You said you’d help me,” Stilcho said from where he knelt by the wounded