That was why Strat had made him so angry when he’d become entangled with
Ischade: Strat had become a victim, and Crit had a horror of helplessness. Even
if Strat were just a lovesick fool, Crit still thought he’d been right when he
had shot past his friend that night on the balcony-if it had served to bring
Straton to his senses, then Crit wouldn’t be here, pulling himself up into the
sometimes-saddle of Strat’s sort-of-corporeal bay, riding into he-didn’t-know
what for abstracts of honor and duty that weren’t going to keep him alive if the
steaming stable toward which the bay was ineluctably heading crashed down upon
his head.
The stables weren’t exactly ablaze, but they had corn magazines and straw and
hay in them and sparks smoldered on the roof.
Crit reached forward to catch up the bay’s reins, but the beast had had a mouth
like iron in life and it was no better in afterlife.
He sawed on the reins to no avail, then quit trying in time to duck as the horse
trotted determinedly through the open stable doors and headed for wide stairs
which must lead to the stable’s loft.
Crit shifted his weight, thinking to throw one leg over the saddle and check out
the stable loft on foot, when the horse started climbing.
“Vashanka’s balls,” the task force leader swore, flattening himself to the
horse’s neck as it climbed a flight never meant for anything of its size and
boards creaked and groaned. “Horse, you’d better be right.”
It was: at the stair’s head was a landing, and as the bay’s bulk appeared there,