What if there were someone to hold you up if she neglected you-do you see the
freedom that would give you? For the first time since you died, poor slave, you
can choose from moment to moment. You can say-this moment I’m hers; or: for
these few I’m his. And if anything should happen to me-that choice will be gone
again. Do you understand?”
There was warmth all through him. Warmth and the natural give of his stiffened
ribs-it hurt, like cramped muscle. His heart beat at a normal rate and the
socket of his eye ached with a stab of pain that was acute and poignant and for
a moment giddy with strength.
Haught caught him as it faded and the river-cold came back. Stilcho shivered, a
natural shiver; and Haught’s face before him was pale, beaded with sweat:
“There,” Haught gasped, “there, that’s what I could do for you if I were
stronger.”
Stilcho only stared at him, and the living eye wept at the memory and the dead
one wept blood. It was a seduction’ as wicked as any ever committed in
Sanctuary, which was going some: and he knew himself the victim of it. Of drugs
and temptations he had sampled in his life, of ghassa and krrf and whatever
lotos-dreams the smoke of firoq gave, there was no sensation to equal that
moment of painful warmth, and it was going away now.
He needs a focus, Stilcho thought; he had learned his gram-marie in bitter and
terrible lessons and knew something of the necessities of black sorcery. He
wants a familiar. Nothing so simple as snake or rat, not even one of the birds
he wants a man, a living man. 0 gods, he’s lying. He knows what I’m thinking.