clean up. I’ll take care of the rest.”
She tightened her lips as if she would spit at him. It occurred to her.
Childhood reflex. Then her eyes fixed on a move behind his shoulder. On
Tasfalen, who had stood listless till then; now Tasfalen’s head lifted and the
eyes focused sharp; the chest gave with a wider breath and the whole body
straightened. Damned trick of his, she thought, to scare me with it.
“Not a trick,” Haught said, turning even while that cold touch ran over her
mind. “We have a visitor. Hello, Roxane.”
IV
Crit slid down from the saddle breathless and sweating, was on the marble steps
at the second stride, and took them two at a time. “Watch my horse,” he yelled
at men whose proper job at the doors was not hostelry, but one of them ran to do
that, and Crit kept going, inside the building in long strides-he wanted to run.
Being what he was, where he was, he refused to show that much of his anguish to
the locals.
He grabbed a middle-aged man by the arm, a Beysib who turned and stared at him
in that way a Beysib had to, with eyes that had no white and no way to turn in
their sockets. “Tempus,” Crit spat. “Where?” His haste was such that he had no
time to waste hunting; no time even to hunt an honest Rankan: he took the first
thing he could get.
“Torchholder’s office,” the Beysib lisped, and Crit let him go and strode on.
Broke finally into a jog, his steel-studded boots ringing down the marble hall
and echoing off the central vault. He saw the room, saw white-robed priests
hanging about outside its open door, and came up on them in his haste.