But what slept behind those eyes, what wandered there sometimes sane and sometimes not, and sometimes one mind and sometimes another... was death. It had reasons, if it remembered them, to take a slow revenge; and to hurl magic against the wards (he felt them restored) which held that soul in-

Haught prayed to his distant gods and cringed against the shutters, made an unwanted rattle and flinched again. Ischade had been there. Ischade had been near enough long enough that perhaps this thing that looked like Tasfalen would pick that up; and remember its intentions again in some rage to blast wards and souls at once.

But the revenant merely lifted a hand and touched his face, lover's gesture. "Dust," it said, which was its only word; daily Haught swept up the dust which infiltrated the house, and sifted it for the dust of magics which might linger in it, the remnant of the Globe of Power; with that dust he made a potion, and dutifully he infused it into this creature, stealing only a little for himself. He was faithful in this. He feared not to be. He feared a great deal in these long months, did Haught, once and for a few not-forgotten moments, the master mage of Sanctuary; he suspected consequences which paralyzed him in doubt. Because he had choices he dared none of them: his fear went that deep. It was his particular hell. "It's all right," he said now. "Go back to bed. Go to sleep." As if he spoke to some child.

"Pretty," it said. But it was not a child's voice, or a child's touch. It had found a new word. He shuddered and sought a way quietly to leave, to slip aside till it should sleep again. It had him trapped. "Pretty." The voice was clear, as if some deeper timbre had been there and now was lost. As if part of the madness had dispersed. But not all.

He dared do nothing at all. Not to scream and not to run and not to do anything which might make it recall who it was. He could read minds, and he kept himself from this one with every barrier he could hold. What happened behind those eyes he did not want to know.

"Here," he said, and tried to draw the arm down and lead it back to bed and rest. But it had as well be stone; and all hell was in that low and vocally masculine laugh.

The slow hooffalls echoed in the alleyway, off the narrow walls; and another woman, overtaken alone in this black gut of Sanctuary's dark streets, might have thought of finding some refuge. Ischade merely turned, aware that some night rider had turned his horse down the alley, that he still came on, slowly, provoking nothing.

In fact, being what she was, she knew who he was before she ever turned her face toward him; and while another woman, knowing the same, might have run in search of some doorway, any doorway or nook or place to hide or fight, Ischade drew a quiet breath, wrapped her arms and her black robes about her, and regarded him in lazy curiosity.

"Are you following me?" she asked of Tempus.

The Tr6s's hooves rang to a leisurely halt on the cobbles, slow and patterned echo off the brick walls and the cobbles. A rat went skittering through a patch of moonlight, vanished into a crack in an old warehouse door frame. The rider towered in shadow. "Not a good neighborhood for walking."

She smiled and it was like most of her smiles, like most of her amusements, feral and dark. She laughed. There was dark in that too: and a little pang of regret. "Gallantry."

"Practicality. An arrow-"

"You didn't take me unaware." She rarely said as much. She was not wont to justify herself, or to communicate at all; she found herself doing it to this man, and was distantly amazed. She felt so little that was acute. The other feeling was simply awareness, a web the quiverings of which were always there. But perhaps he did know that, or suspect it. Perhaps that was why she answered him, that she suspected a deeper question in that comment than most knew how to ask. He was shadow to her. She was shadow to him. They had no identity and every identity in Sanctuary, city of midnight meetings and constant struggle, constant connivance.

"I heal," he said, low and in a voice that went to the bones. "That's my curse."

"I don't need to," she said in the same low murmur. "That's mine."

He said nothing for a moment. Perhaps he thought about it. Then: "I said that we would try them... yours and mine."

She shivered. This was a man who walked through battlefields and blood, who was storm and gray to her utmost black and stillness; this was a man always surrounded by men, and cursed with too much love and too many wounds. And she had none of that. He was conflict personified, the light and the dark; and she settled so quickly back to stasis and cold, solitary.

"You missed your appointment," she said. "But I never wait. And I don't hold you to any agreement. That's what I would have told you then. What I did, I did. For my reasons. Wisest if we don't mix."

And she turned and walked away from him. But the Tr6s started forward as if stung, and Tempus, shadowlike, circled to cut her off.

Another woman might have recoiled. She stood quite still. Perhaps he thought she could be bluffed, perhaps it was part of a dark game; but in his silence, she read another truth.

It was the challenge. It was the unsatisfiable woman. The man who (like too many others) partly feared her, feared failure, feared rejection; and whose godhood was put in question by her very existence.

"I see," she said finally. "It isn't your men you're buying."

There was deathly silence then. The horse snorted explosively, shifted. But he did not lose his control, or lose control over the beast. He sat there in containment of it and his own nature, and even of his wounded honesty.

Offended, he was less storm and more man, a decent man whose self-respect was in pawn: whose thought now was indeed for the lives and the souls he had proposed himself to buy. He was two men; or man and something much less reasonable.

"I'll see you home," he said, like some spurned swain to the miller's daughter. With, at the moment, that same note of martyred finality and renouncement. But it would not last at the gate. She did not see the future, but she knew men, and she knew that it was for his own sake that he said that, and offered that, in his eternal private warfare-with the storm. Man of grays and halftones. He tormented himself because it was the only way to win.

She understood such a battle. She fought it within her own chill dark, more pragmatically. She staved things off only daily, knowing that the next day she would not win against her appetites; but the third she would be in control again; so she lived by tides and the rhythms of the moon, and knowing these things she kept herself from destructive temptations. This man served a harsher, more chaotic force that had no regular ebb and flow; this man warred because he had no peace, and no moment when he was not at risk.

"No," she said, "I'll find my own way tonight. Tomorrow night. Come tomorrow."

She waited. In his precarious balance, in his battle, she named him a test of that balance and she knew even the direction his soul was sliding.

He fought it back. She had not known whether he could, but she had been sure that he would try. She knew the silent anger in him, one half against the other, and both suspecting some despite. But there was the debt he owed her. He backed the Tros and she walked on her way down the alley unattended.

Another woman might have suffered a quickening of the pulse, a weakness in the knees, knowing who and what eyes were staring anger at her back. But she knew equally well what he was going to do, which was to sit the Tr6s quite still until she had passed beyond sight. And that he would wait only to prove that he could wait, when the assaults would come on his integrity, not knowing any tide at all.