convenient, either way.
She saw an enclosed Beysib wagon, overturned by brigands. Bald heads of Beysib
males littered the environs like playballs from some devil’s game, their
accustomed torsos near but not attached. She saw what fate was dealt a pair of
Beysib women. and wondered what the rebels thought to gain. If they kept their
war to downtown, they might win it. Up here, they asked for retribution that
would last for generations.
Amid pathetic cries, she stopped awhile, and closed her eyes-trusting to a
cloaking spell to hide her. When she moved on, she was emboldened, strengthened,
but sick at heart: for her to be reduced to scavenging was demeaning. But war
did what it willed.
Thunder wracked the streets and she looked upward, grateful for the lowering,
stormy dark but wary: she’d finish what she started, unless the stormgods
intervened. She owed Tempus something. And she owed Haught a different thing.
She had her word to make good. She had her interests to secure. She had work to
do before retiring to the White Foal’s edge.
It was not painless for Ischade, this sneaking to Tasfalen’s in the daylight.
Janni, one others, was still trapped in the cone of flame, where Stormbringer
and demons argued, where Rox-ane had been and now was not.
What would Tempus, who wanted the souls of his soldiers freed of strings and
tortures, make of Janni’s plight? Hardly an honorable rest, in his terms. But a
piece of bravery, in hers, the like of which she’d never seen.
All for Niko, or for something more abstract? she wondered as she found