the basement, which might pass a door in the middle of the night and come
padding up the stairs-
The latch of her room gave gently. The hinge creaked softly. She lay with her
back to these sounds in that paralysis that a bad dream brings, in which a thing
will not be real until one looks and sees it standing by one’s bed-
The step came close and lingered there. There was a water-smell, a river-smell,
a beer-smell unlike Haught’s perfumed, wine-favoring self. It was wrong, wrong-
She spun over the edge of the bed and came up with the knife she kept there on
the floor, as someone dived across the bed at her. She leaped back with that
knife held with no uptown delicacy: she was a knife-fighter, and she crouched in
her be-ribboned lace and satin whipping the tail of her gown up and aside to
clear her legs. A ragged shape hulked on its knees amid her bed, silhouette in
light from the hall. It held up its hands, choked for air.
“M-mo-ri-a,” it said, wept, bubbled. “Mo-ri-a-“
“0 gods!”
She knew the voice, knew the smell of Downwind, knew the shape and the hands
suddenly, and fled for the door and the lamp to borrow light in the hall, her
hands atremble and the straw missing the wick a half a dozen times before she
lit the lamp and brought it back again in both hands, the knife tucked beneath
her arm.
Mor-am her brother huddled like a lump of brown rag amid her satin sheets. Mor
am stinking of the gutters, Mor-am twisted and scarred by fire and the beggar
king’s torture, as he was when She withdrew her favor.