They think I am still blind to the finer workings, she'd said to the raven perched on the stone finial beside her. Their first mistake. Let's see if there are others.

No one bothered her as she picked her way across the open expanse of mud surrounding the new White Foal bridge. It was probable that none of the bravos running between Downwind and the more profitable riots uptown could see her though even she was uncertain how far her magic, or her curse, extended in such directions, now that her power had resumed its normal proportions.

Her house showed signs of her indisposition. The black roses brawled with each other, sending up bloomless canes armed with wicked thorns that flaked the rusted iron fence where they rubbed against it. And the wards? Ischade shuddered at the sight of the heavy blotches of power smeared stridently across her personal domain. With small movements of her hands, hands now less powerful but once again skilled and certain, she constrained the roses and reshaped the wards into a more acceptable pattern.

The gate swung open to greet her; the raven preceded her to the porch.

Once across the threshold, Ischade kicked the heavy-soled boots the Beysib soldier had given her into a comer where, in time, her magic would twist them into something delicate and brightly colored. She retrieved her candles, lit them, and settled into the small mountain of shimmering silk that was, in the final sense, her home.

Inhaling the familiarity-the lightness-of it, she gathered the tangled skein of imaginary silk which bound the Peres house to her and studied her options. She touched each strand gently, so gently that no one in the uptown house would suspect her interest as she reacquainted herself with what rightly belonged to her. Then she drew the thread that bound her to Straton as surely as it bound him to her.

Straton!

Ischade lived at the fringes of time, as she lived at the fringes of the greater magics practiced by the likes of Roxane or even Randal. She was older than she looked; probably older than she remembered. Straton was not the first who cut through her defenses-even her curse-to hurt her, but anguish had no sense of proportion: it was now. The Peres house, Moria, Stil-cho, even Haught; she wanted those back through pride but the sandy-haired man who hated magic had a different claim. Not love.

Partnership, perhaps-someone who, because he had shattered the walls which surrounded her, lessened the loneliness of existence at the fringes. Someone whose demands and responses were simple and who, like all the others, eventually broke the rules which were not. She'd sent Straton away for his own good and he'd come back, like all the others, with his simple, impossible demands. But, unlike the others, he hadn't died and that, the necromant realized with a shiver, might be- for want of a better word-love.

He would not die, or be stripped of his dignity, in the Peres house, if she had to destroy the world to stop it.

Walegrin paced the length of the dark, malodorous cellar. Life, specifically combat, had been much easier when he had been responsible for no more than the handful of men he personally led. Now he was a commander, forced to stay behind the lines of imminent danger coordinating the activities of the entire garrison. They said he did the job well but all he felt was a vicious burning in his gut as bad as any arrow.

"Any sign?" he shouted through the slit window to the street.

"More smoke," the lookout shouted back so Walegrin missed Thrusher's hawk-call.

The wiry little man swung himself feet first through another window, landing lightly but not before Walegrin had his knife drawn. Thrush took the arrows out of his mouth and laughed.

'Too slow, chief. Way too slow."

"Damn, Thrush-what's going on out there?"

"Nothing good. See this?" He handed the blond man one of his arrows. "That's what the piffle-shit are using. Blue fletch-ings-like the one that took Strat down up near the wall."

"So it wasn't Jubal starting all this?"

"Hell no-but they're in it now: them, piffles, fish. Stepsons-anyone with an edge or a stick. They're giving no quarter. It's startin' to bum out there, chief."

"Are we holding?"

"Holding what-" Thrusher began, only to be interrupted by the lookout and the arrival of a messenger with a scroll from the palace. "There's no territory bigger than the ground under your feet."

Walegrin read Molin's message, crumpled the paper, and stomped it into the offal. "Shit-on-a-stick," he grumbled. "It's gonna get worse-a lot worse. The palace wants plague sign posted on Wideway and the Processional; seems our visitors have arrived."

"Plague sign?" Thrusher whistled and broke his remaining arrow. "Why not just bum the whole place to the ground? Shit-where're we supposed to get paint?"

"Use charcoal, or blood. Hell, don't worry about it; I'll take care of it. I got to get out of here anyway. You find me Kama."

The little man's face blanched beneath his black beard. "Kama-she started the whole thing... taking Strat down with Jubal's arrow! There isn't a blade or arrow out there not marked for her back!"

"Yeah-well, I don't believe she did it, so you get her back to the barracks for safe-keeping. You and Cythen."

"Your orders, chief? She's probably meat by now anyway."

"She'll be alive-hiding somewhere near where we caught her that night."

"An' if she's not?"

"Then I'm wrong and she did start it. My orders, Thrush: Find her before someone else does."

Walegrin endured Thrush's disappointed sigh and watched as the little man left the same way he'd come; then he went up to the street.

Plague sign: the palace wanted plague sign to keep the visitors on the straight and narrow. It might work. It might keep the Imperials tight on their ship, away from the madness that was Sanctuary. But it would sure as hell bring panic to what was left of the law-abiding community and, the way things were going, it would probably bring plague as well.

He wrenched a burning brand out of a neighboring building and, after sending the lookout down to the cellar, headed off to the wharves. It wasn't two hours since the afternoon sky had been split by a dark apparition streaking between the Peres house and the palace. Damn witches. Damn magic. Damn every last one of them who made honest men die while they played games with gods.

Understanding came slowly to Stilcho, which was not at all surprising. There was no peace in Ischade's one-time house for understanding and a man, once he understood himself to be dead, did not reconsider the issue. Indeed, his first reaction on seeing Straton there with an arrow by his heart was considerably less than charitable. This bleeding hulk who had supplanted him in Her affections; this murder-dealing Stepson who had massacred his comrades was getting naught but what he deserved.

His opinion hardened further when the globe was spinning madness into all of them and the injured Stepson had summoned the strength to reach into that dazzling blue array of magic to disrupt it. At first, all Stilcho had seen was the globe passing from Haught to Roxane: from bad to worse; he had cursed Straton with all the latent power his hell-seeing eye possessed. He had not been gentle getting his hands under Strat's shoulders and dragging him along the hallway while Roxane gloated and Haught wore a superficial obsequiousness.

Then he saw the little things they did not: the subtle wrong-ness in the globe wrought wards, the holes through which She might be yet able to reach. He felt the pulse of fear and anticipation pounding at his temples, making his hands sweat-and that he had never expected to feel again; he even remembered, distantly, what it meant.