If there was some bond of fate between her and egregious Tempus, the thread must
be cut. Even if it were Niko’s life, she must do the deed. And the baby god
could not be suffered to survive. Both children’s lives and souls were promised
to a certain demon of her recent, intimate acquaintance.
And the cold she felt, which raised gooseflesh on sanguine Nisi skin as smooth
as velvet, which drew back lips as beautiful as any that had ever spoken death
for men-that cold had to do with failing and winning, with perishing and
surviving.
As the door to her outer chamber shivered from something scratching on its
farther side, she decided.
She let the globe spin faster, let the colors from its stones bathe her in their
light.
A rushing wind filled the scrying room and in its midst was a woman’s form,
changing shape.
Black mist spun around the comeliest of female guises. Black wizard hair grew
long and covered limbs cut clean and meant to hypnotize any man. Her fine long
nose grew chitinous, then hooked; her firm flesh sprouted feathers.
And by the time Snapper Jo, still wiping his claws on his barman’s apron,
thought he’d better open up the door himself, an eagle with a wingspan ten feet
wide stood where Roxane was before.
And Snapper, her spy among the Sanctuary denizens, who tended bar at the Vulgar
Unicorn, clacked prognathic jaws together and wrung his clawed and warty hands.
“Mistress,” he gurgled in his fiendish, grating voice, “is that you?” His eyes
that looked every which-way squinted at the eagle swathed in dusky light. He