Even Roxane was afraid now. Ischade knew it. “Get out of him!” Ischade yelled
into the wind. “Witch, you’ve lost, get out of him, leave this place!”
I’ll know when to go, the voice came back. Give me Niko. “Fool,” Ischade
murmured, holding tight. “Fool, fool-You won’t get him, Roxane, I’ll send his
soul to hell before you get your hands on it, hear me?”
And then a gate would exist indeed, snake swallowing its tail, a gaping hole in
the world’s substance which would pull them all in. She said it and knew it was
not bluff, that she was not going to let go; she did not know how to let go, in
the way that Roxane did not know how; and at the end that was what would happen,
the thing would find its way up out of the pit that had opened in this place and
take the sleeper, and when it did, when it did, that snake-swallowing-tail
effect would envelop them all. Her doing, and Roxane’s.
Storm broke overhead.
Something else had manifested. Lightnings crashed. The ground shook; and of a
sudden a bolt crashed down nearby, where the gate was. All of existence
shuddered.
And there was sudden nothingness in her arms and in Janni’s. The sleeper melted
from them. The sky dissolved in rack and lightnings.
And a dark shape flew from the direction of the meadow to mingle with it, one
fused whirling mass of lightnings, of gray cloud, and of night that shot
destruction everywhere….
Niko’s unbandaged eye opened. He flung himself in a spasm against Jihan’s
strength and Tempus’s inert weight and Molin flinched at the scream that came