'Open the window,' she instructed her intruder/guest, and he moved, slowly, with the look of a man caught in a bad dream. 'Open it,' and he did so. She launched Peruz and he flew, with a clap of wings, a hurtling out towards the dark, a lingering coolness of wind.

So he was sped. Her employer had all he had paid to have - and well paid. And she was alone. She let go her mental grip on the ruffian ... and at once his face showed panic and he whipped up the knife he had in hand. She stopped that. He looked confused, as if he had quite forgotten what the dagger was doing in his hand. And that effort would cost her, come the morning: on the morrow would be a fearful headache and a mortal lassitude, so that she would want to do nothing for days but drowse. But now the blood was still quick in her veins, the excitement lingered, and in the threat of ennui and solitude which followed any completed task ... she felt another kind of excitement, and looked on her uninvited visitor knowing, quite knowing that at such times she was mad, and what it cost to cure such madness for the time...

Attractive. Her tastes were broad, but in that curiously com-partmented mind of hers, it pleased her ... the mission done ... that there was room for Mradhon to go. Here stood instead an unmissable someone - he had all the marks of that condition. It was justice owed her for her pains ... twice as sweet when it all came together just as it did now, her satisfaction and the last untidy threads of a business, tied together and nipped short.

She held out her hand and came closer, feeling that sweet/sad warmth that sex set into her blood ... and had felt it, at every weakening moment, from the time she had robbed the wrong wizard and left him living. In the morning she would even feel some torment for it, a tangled regret: the handsome ones always left her with that, a sense of beauty wasted. But for the moment reason was quite gone.

And there had been so many before.

Hanse still held the knife and could not feel it; then heard the distant shock it made hitting the floor. There was no pain of the bruises, no sensation but of warmth and of the woman's nearness, her dark eyes regarding him, her perfume enveloping him. And the amulet at his throat, which gave off a bitter cold: that was the one last focus of his discomfort. She put her arms about his neck and her fingers found the chain. 'You don't want this,' she said, lifting it ever so gently over his head. He heard it fall, far, far away. Truth, he did not want it. He wanted her. It came to him that this was the way that Sjekso had gone, before he had ended up dead and cold outside the Unicorn, and it failed to matter. Her lips pressed his and oh, gods, he wanted her.

The floor wavered, and a wind swept in, laden with sweetish incense...

'Pardon me,' Enas Yorl said, and the couple on the verge of further intimacies broke apart, the woman staring at him wide-eyed and Shadowspawn with a hazy desperation. The russet silks in the room still billowed with the draught he had set up.

'Who are you?' the woman Ischade asked, and at once Enas Yorl felt a small trial of his defences, which he shrugged off. Ischade's expression at once took on a certain wariness.

'Let him go,' Enas Yorl said with a back-handed wave towards Shadowspawn. 'He's admirably discreet. And I'd take it kindly. - Go on, Shadowspawn. Now. Quickly.'

Shadowspawn edged towards the door, hesitated there, with a look of violated sanity.

'Out,' Enas Yorl said.

The thief spun about and opened the door, a fresh gust of wind.

And fled.

Hanse hit the stairs running, hardly pausing for the steps, never saw the figure loom up at the bottom until he was headed straight down at the knife that aimed at his gut.

He knocked the attacking blade aside and grabbed for arms or clothes, whatever he could hold, fell, in the shock of the collision, tumbled with the attacker and the blade, and lost his purchase in the impact with the ground. He hit on his back, desperately got a grip on the descending knife hand with Mradhon Vis's face coming down on him with a weight of body a third again his own. It was his left hand he used on the descending arm, left hand, knife hand, involved with that, and his battered muscles shook under the strain while he plied his unaccustomed right hand trying to reach the knife strapped to his leg. His left arm was buckling.

Suddenly Vis's weight shifted rightwards and came down on him, pinning his other arm - a limp weight, and in the space Vis's grimace had occupied, most improbably, Cappen Varra stood with a barrel stave in both his hands.

'Did you want rescue?' Cappen asked civilly. 'Or is it all some new diversion?'

Hanse swore, kicked and writhed his way from under Vis's inert weight and went for his dagger in fright. Cappen checked his arm and the heat of anger went out of him, leaving only a sickly shiver. 'Hang you,' he said feebly, 'couldn't you have hit him easier and given me a go?'

And then he realized the source of the light which was streaming down on them by way of the stairs, and that above them was the open door in which two wizards met. 'Gods,' he muttered, and scrambling up, grabbed Cappen by the arm.

And ran, for very life.

'Not my doing.'

'No?' Enas Yorl felt his shoulders expand ever so slightly, his features shift, and in his pride he refused to look down at his hands to know. Perhaps it was not too terrible, this form: Ischade's eyes flickered, but seemed unappalled.

'None of the killings that interest you,' she said, 'are mine. They're not my style. I trust I'm somewhat known in the craft. As you are, Enas Yorl.'

He gave a small bow. 'I have some unwilling distinction.'

'The story's known.'

'Ah.' Again he felt the shift, a wave of terror. He bent down and picked up the amulet which lay on the floor, saw his hand covered with a faint opalescence of scales. Then the scales faded and left only a young and shapely male hand. He tucked the amulet into his robes and straightened, looked at Ischade somewhat more calmly. 'So you're not the one. I don't ask you then who hired you. I can guess, knowing what you did - ah, I do know. And by morning the priests will have discovered the loss and made some substitution - the wars of gods, after all, follow politics, don't they? And what matter a riot or two in Sanctuary? It interests neither of us.'

'Then what is your interest?'

'How did they die, Ischade - your lovers? Do you know? Or don't you wonder?'

'Your curiosity - has it some specific grievance?'

'Ah, no grievance at all. I only ask.'

'I do nothing. The fault's their own ... their luck, a heart too fragile, a fall... who am I to know? They're well when they leave me, that's the truth.'

'But they're dead by morning, every one.'

She shrugged. 'You should understand. I have nothing to do with it.'

'Ah, indeed we have misfortunes in common. I know. And when I knew you'd come to Sanctuary -'

'It took me some few days to acclimate myself; I trust I didn't inconvenience you ... and that we'll avoid each other in future.'

'Ischade: how am I - presently?'

She tilted back her head and looked, blinked uncertainly. 'Younger,' she said. 'And quite handsome, really. Far unlike what I've heard.'

'So? Then you can look at me? I see that you can. And not many do.'

'I have business,' she declared, liking all of this less and less. She was not accustomed to feel fear ... hunted the sensation in the alleys of cities in the hope of discovering a measure of life. But this was far from comfortable. 'I have to be aboutit.'

'What, some new employer?*