prophecy.
Only the Tr6s horse’s distress truly touched him now: animals were pure and
honest, not dour and divisive like the race of men. It might not be his fault
that Straton lay, somewhere, in the clutches of the revolution (Crit was sure),
dead or held for ransom; it might not be because of Tempus, called the Riddler,
that Niko was the perennial pawn of demons and foul witches; it might not be
directly attributable to him that his daughter, Kama, was now sought as an
assassin and revolutionary by his own Stepsons and the palace guard, thus
creating a rift between her unit, the Rankan 3rd Commando, and the other
militias in the town that no amount of diplomacy would ever bridge if she were
executed; it might not be on his account that Randal, once a Stepson and the
single “white” magician Tempus had ever trusted, was a burned-out husk, or that
Niko stared sightlessly at the pillar of flame uptown in which Janni, his one
time partner and a Stepson who’d sworn Tempus a solemn oath of fealty, burned
eternally, or that Jihan had been stripped of her Froth Daughter’s attributes,
humbled to the lowly estate of womankind, or that Tempus’s own son, Gys-kouras,
looked at him with fear and loathing (even trying to shield his half-brother,
Alton, from Tempus whenever the children saw him come).
But it probably was-he was the root and cause of all this slaughter: it was his
curse, habitual (as Molin Torchholder, a Nisi-blooded slime in Rankan clothing,
maintained) or invoked by jealous gods or hostile magic. He didn’t know or care