and composed himself to inner quiet.
And it occurred to him, staring Tempus eye to eye, that he had been a fool and
that he might have just killed the partner he was trying to save, because it was
not reason he saw there.
“What?” Tempus asked with economy.
“Strat-after we cleaned up on riverside, the witch-left. Strat and I parted
company. He’s gone missing. He’s not back at riverside.”
Of a sudden it seemed like his problem, like something he never should have
brought here. He seemed like a thoroughgoing fool. There was another tread on
the stairs now, and that was Jihan coming down, trouble in duplicate. But
Tempus’s face got that masklike look, his long eyes gone inward and deep as he
looked aside, a frown gathering and tightening about his mouth.
“How far-missing?” Tempus asked with uncomfortable accuracy and looked him
straight in the eye.
“He told me to go to hell,” Crit said, had not wanted to say, but Tempus did not
encourage reticence with that look. “Commander, he’d listen to you. She’s got
him-bad. You, he’d listen to. Not me. I’m asking you.”
For a long, long moment he reckoned Tempus was going to tell him go to hell too.
And assign him there. But he was a shaken man, was Critias. He had seen the most
practical-minded man he knew go crazy and desert him. Possession he could have
coped with; he might have put an end to Strat the way he would have dispatched a
comrade in the field, gut-wounded and suffering and hopeless; a man dreamed
about a thing like that and never forgot it, but he did it. Not this time. Not