your eyes. Shut them. And remember everything. And do it.”
Stilcho made a strangled sound. Flinched from him.
Stilcho remembered. Haught took that for granted; and smiled in Stilcho’s
distraught face.
Before he swept the russet cloak back, set a fine hand on the elegant sword, and
walked on down the street like a lord of Sanctuary.
Straton stood still and blindfolded as the door closed behind, as the little
charade played itself out. He heard the tread of men on board and the scrape of
a chair and smelled the remnant of dinner and onions in this small, musty room.
“Do I take this damn thing off?” he asked, after too much of this shifting about
had gone on.
“He can take it off,” a deep voice said. “Get him a chair.”
So he knew even then that his contact had not played him false; and that it was
Jubal. He reached up and pulled off the tight blindfold and ran a hand through
his hair as he stood and blinked at the black man who faced him across a table
and a single candle-a black man thinner and older than he ought to be, but pain
aged a man. White touched the ex-slaver’s temples, amid the crisp black: lines
were graven deep beside the mouth, out from the flaring nostrils, deep between
dark, wrinkle-set eyes. Jubal’s hands rested both visible on the scarred
tabletop; those of the hawknosed man in the chair beside him were not visible at
all. And Mradhon Vis, who lately sported a drooping black mustache to add to his
dusky sullenness, sat in the comer with one booted foot on the rung of the next
chair and elbow on knee, a broad-bladed knife catching the candlelight with