At her unspoken command the front door faded from its hinges. Ischade crept
through, bristling with alertness and prepared to utilize every trick in her
carefully prepared arsenal. There was nothing to challenge or greet her as she
glided along the hallway, vanishing amid her numerous possessions.
She found the trail Straton’s blood had made and followed it through to the
kitchen. Stilcho’s heroism had borne fruit; but Straton’s safety was not her
only goal. Haught was here; the Nisi witch was here and she would not leave
until she had consigned both to hell and beyond.
Continuing her search, Ischade swept from room to room to the waist-thick beams
of the cluttered attic where her search had to end. Haught crouched outside the
sphere, enraptured by the nether-world dazzle of the globe, his eyes as wide and
glazed as any Beysib’s. Shiey’s cleaver lay in a twisted lump at his feet.
Tasfalen sang with a dead man’s voice, dragging one leg stiffly as he shambled
around the perimeter of the globe’s light.
Tasfalen?
Ischade did not immediately comprehend the changes which had overtaken Tasfalen
Lancothis. Had Haught somehow kept the globe? Had she simply imagined Roxane’s
taint on the corroded wards? Surely Tasfalen’s flawed resurrection had been her
one-time apprentice’s work; Roxane’s efforts were brutal but never so crude.
Concealed by shadow and the skein of magic she had spun, the necromant dared
briefly to listen to the globe’s song until she could piece the truth together.
She noted, even as Haught had noted, the carelessness which marked the Nisi