Crit, who'd born the brunt of delegated tasks, weaved on his feet with exhaustion as he set torches in the rubble of the house across from Tasfalen's; had the light been better, the black circles under his eyes would have told a clearer tale of what he'd been through and what it cost him to petition Is-chade for leave to do what tonight must be done here.

Strat, Crit's partner, worked silently beside him, unloading ox thighs rich with fat from a snorting chestnut who didn't like its burden, and oil in child-sized stoneware rhytons, and placing all on a makeshift plinth exactly opposite Tasfalen's door.

Tempus watched his Stepsons work without a word, waiting for the witch to show. Ischade had decreed this meeting be at midnight-necromants will be necromants. She was crucial to this undertaking, so Randal said.

Tempus hardly cared; the god was in him fierce and strong, making everything seem fire-limned and slow: his task force leader; the witch-ridden Stepson, Strat; the horses bearing sacrificial burdens. If he hadn't remembered that he'd thought it mattered, that he'd felt need to leave here owing nothing, he'd have left this stone unturned.

But Ischade owed him this favor-if it really was one. And he, in turn, owed a debt he was loath to carry-a debt to the Nisibisi witch last seen behind that ward-locked door across the street.

Tasfalen's door. It had not opened since the pillar of flame had scoured the neighborhood about it. What might come out of there, not even Ischade was certain. Powers had convened to cleanse the ground here, but stopped just short of the house. Powers that no one thought would ever work together had taken a hand to bar that door-Ischade's sort of powers, and others from deeper hells; Stormbringer's primal fury, and thus those from the sort of heaven Jihan's father ruled.

Or thus, at any rate, Tempus understood it. The god in him understood something different-something of passion inbound and lust unreleased.

There was a something in there all right, the god was telling him: something very hungry and very angry.

Whatever it was-Nisibisi witch, a ravening ghost thereof, a demon entrapped, a shard of Nisi power globe-it hadn't survived in there since winter's end on stored foodstuffs and the occasional mouse.

If it was Roxane, behind Ischade's iron wards that not even the rip in magic's fabric could weaken, then the Unbinding would have to be carefully done. If it was Something Else, Tempus was prepared to give it battle-he'd once fought Jihan's own storm-cold father to a draw over matters he had less stake in.

Snapper Jo scuttled up to the Tros horse by which Tempus stood, the fiend's knuckles nearly dragging on the ground, its snaggle teeth gleaming in the torchlight: "Sire," it grunted, "see her? Snapper can't tell." The fiend, in its distress, ramped like a bear-side to side, side to side. "Mistress won't like, won't like ... Snapper go now?"

"Did you place the stone. Snapper?" The stone'in question was a bluish gem, crazed and fractured, Ischade had given Crit. For what payment, when the stone would help release her enemy and perhaps release Straton, too, for duty to the east, Tempus hadn't asked.

And Crit never made excuses. But there'd been no soldierly cursing, no banter between the Stepsons here this evening. When Randal had come by briefly, to say Jihan would attend, there had been none of the obligatory teasing of the mage that passed for fellowship. Strat hadn't even called Randal "Witchy-Ears."

Tempus knew he was pushing matters, but he had his reasons. And the god, risen in him, was all the sign he needed that his instinct wasn't wrong.

A part of this outrageous enterprise-the freeing of whatever lurked behind Tasfalen's doors-he undertook to right a balance out of whack. It was something none of those about him sensed, but Niko, the absent Stepson, would have understood: Tempus labored now for maat, for equilibrium in a town that teetered toward anarchy; and for the Stepsons, who soon might go where Nisibisi magic was still strong and had better not, with a debt outstanding to a witch of Nisi blood.

But the greatest part of this seemingly evil deed-that Randal had begged him not to undertake and that had troubled Ischade enough to bring her here-he did because of Jihan, and her father, and a marriage that, if consummated, would bind a god to Sanctuary that no little thieves' world could or should contain.

Three hundred years and more of kicking around this world of god-inspired battlefields and wizard-won wars had taught Tempus that instinct was his only guide, that any man's sacrifice went unappreciated unless it was to propitiate a god, and that the only satisfaction worth having was wrested from the deed itself-was in the process of accomplishment, never in the result.

So the sacrifice he was about to make-not the sacrifice of laying the ox thighs on the'oil and sending smoke up to heaven, but the sacrifice of his own peace of mind-would go unremarked by men. But he would know. And the god would know. And the powers who tended the balance which expressed itself in fate and weather would know.

How Jihan's father would react, only Jihan would know.

A movement caught his eye, and the god's eye within him knew it female. His scrotum drew up, ready to face Jihan in all her insatiable glory.

But it was Ischade, not Jihan, who came.

Tempus felt a twinge of distress, of uncertainty-something he'd rarely felt in all these years. Could Jihan ignore his invitation? His challenge? The power in the game he played? Could Stormbringer have gotten wind of Tempus's intention and mixed in? Tricking a god wasn't easy. But then, neither was tricking the Riddler.

Randal had assured him Jihan had said she'd be here. He knew she thought she was involved with Randal to make him jealous, to make him fey, to make him come to heel. The question was, however, whether Jihan herself understood what she did and why-that Stormbringer had turned her eyes toward Randal.

Tempus wondered, suddenly, whether it would matter to Jihan if she did know. She wasn't human, any more than Ischade, so slight and yet so full of menace, or Roxane.

Jihan was still learning how to be alive; womanhood lay heavy and confusing on her, as it didn't on the witches and the accursed women who fought the witches of blood.

Ischade, no bigger than a child to Tempus, came striding up swathed in black,

her face like a magical moon on midsummer's eve, her eyes wide as the hells she guarded.

"Riddler," she breathed, "are you sure?"

"Never," he chuckled. "Not about anything."

And he saw the necromant draw back, sensing the god cohabiting with him, a god the fighters called Lord Storm, whose name had been translated into more languages than the thieves' world knew, but always meant the same: the nature of man to fight and kill for lust and territory. On bad days, Tempus thought that the god who dogged him, chameleonlike, adapting by syncretism to different wars in different lands, was merely an excuse his mind made up-a way to hang his excesses and his sins on others, a faceless repository for all the blame of every death he'd caused.

But seeing Ischade's reaction to the god high in him made him realize it wasn't so.

The necromant took a step forward resolutely, cocked her head, licked her lips, and said, "You jest with me? When He is here?" Then, when he didn't respond, she made a warding sign, withdrawing with a mutter: "Have your witch loosed, then. There's less trouble over there than is right here, with you."

And my fighter, Strat? he or the god wanted to ask, but did not. You didn't ask Ischade, you negotiated. Tempus wasn't in a position to negotiate, right now. Unless ...