"Go to sleep." If he came to her now she would feel the tension in him, and know his terror. But she got up, a creak of the rope-webbed underpinnings, and came up behind him, and pressed her sweaty, weary self against him, her arms about him. He shivered even so and felt those arms tense.

"Stilcho." There was fear in her voice now. "Stilcho, what's wrong?"

"A dream," he said. "A dream, that's all." He held her arms in place, cherished her sticky, miserable heat against him. Heat of life. Heat of passion when they had the strength. Both had returned to him, along with his life. Only the eye that Moruth had taken-kept seeing. He had fled Ischade, fled mages, fled the agencies that used him as their messenger to hell. He was alive again, but one of his eyes was dead; and one looked on the living, but the other-

A third shiver. He had seen into hell tonight,

"Stilcho."

He put his back to the window. It was hard to do, his naked shoulders vulnerable to the night air; and worse, his face turned to the room, with its deeper dark in which his living eye had no power. Then the dead one was most active, and what moved there suddenly took clearer shape.

"They've let something loose, oh gods, Moria, something's gotten loose in the town-"

"What, what thing?" Moria the thief gripped his arms in hands gone hard and shook him for the little she could move him. "Stilcho, don't, don't, don't!"

The baby squalled and shrieked, from the window down the shaft. The poor shared their violence and their tempers, lived in such indignities, the noise, the raised voices audible from apartment to apartment.

"Hush," he said, "it's all right." Which was a lie. His teeth wanted to chatter.

"We should go back to Her. We should-"

"No." He was adamant in that. If they both starved.

But sometimes in not-quite dreams, in that inner vision, he felt Ischade's touch, plainly as he had ever felt it, and suspected in profoundest unease that she knew precisely where her escaped servants were.

"We could have a house," Moria said, and burst into tears. "We could be safe from the law." She burrowed her head against him and hugged him tight. "I came from this. / can't live like this, it stinks, Stilcho, it stinks and I stink and I'm tired, I can't sleep-"

"No!" The vision was there again. Red eyes stared at him in the black. He tried to shift his sight away from it, but it was more and more real. He tried to push it away, and turned to the little starlight there was and clung to the sill till his fingers ached. "Light the lamp."

"We haven't-"

"Light the lamp!"

She left him; he heard her rattling and fussing with the tinderbox and the wick and tried to think of light, of any pure, yellow-golden-white light, of sun in mornings, of the burning summer sun, anything that had the power to dispel the dark.

But the sun he limned in his one living eye, there in the dark, reddened, and became paired, and lengthened, winking out in a blink as deep as hell and reappearing in slitted satisfaction.

The lamp glow began slowly, brightened, profligate waste. He turned and saw Moria's face underlit, haggard and sweaty and fear-haunted. For a moment she was a stranger, a presence he could no more account for than he could account for that vision which had waked him, of a thing launched into the skies over Sanctuary and hurtling free. But she moved the lamp and set it on the little niche shelf, and it made her body all shadows and flesh tones, her hair all wispy gold, all over. The magic that Haught worked had been thorough. She had still the look of a Rankene lady, however fallen.

She needed him, in this place. He persuaded himself of that. He needed her, desperately. At times he feared he was going mad. At others he feared that he was already mad.

And at the worst times he dreamed that she might wake and discover a corpse by her, the soul dragged back to hell and the body suffering whatever changes two years might have wrought in it, in its natural grave.

Day, brutal heat in the still air that settled in over Sanctuary since the rains. Shoppers at market were few and listless; merchants sat fanning themselves and keeping to the shade, while vegetables ripened and rotted and the remaining few fish did the same. There was trouble in the scarred town. The rumor ran up from Downwind and down from the hill, and all the byways murmured with the same names, furtively delivered.

High up on the hill an officer of the city garrison met with higher authority, and received orders to carry elsewhere.

In Ratfall there was a certain stirring, and certain merchants received warnings.

And a furtive woman went out on the streets to steal again, in gnawing terror, knowing her skills were not what they had been, and knowing that the man she had taken up with was approaching some crisis she did not understand. For this woman there must always be some man; she was adrift without that focus, shortsighted, on some life that made hers matter; she wanted love, did this woman, and kept finding men who needed her-or who needed, at any rate... and who lacked something. Moria knew need when she saw it, and went to that in a man like iron to a lodestone, and never understood why her men always failed her, and why she always ended giving away all she had for men who gave nothing back.

Stilcho was the best, thus far, this dead man who, whenever he could, gave her more gentleness than anyone had ever given but a strange doomed lord who still filled her dreams and her daydreams. Stilcho held her gently, Stilcho never demanded, never struck her. Stilcho gave something back, but he took-Shipri and Shalpa, he took; he drained her patience and her strength, waked her at night with his nightmares, harried her with his wild fancies and his talk of hell. She could not provide enough money to get them out of this misery, and a single mention of seeking help from Ischade drew irrational rage from him, made him scream at her, which in her other men had ended with blows, always with blows. So she flinched and kept silent and went out again to steal, her bright Rankene hair done up in a brown scarf, her face unwashed, her body anonymous and all but sexless in the ragged clothes she wore.

But desperation drove her now. She thought again and again of the things she had known, the luxuries she had had in the beautiful house, the gold and the silver that would have melted in the fire that ended that life. And even among Sanctuary's brazen thieves there was a notable reluctance to venture into that charred ruin; they came, of course. But none of them knew building from building or where the walls had stood, or where certain tables had been.

So when evening fell she went back again and began her sooty search, furtive as the rats which had become common in this stricken district, hiding from other searchers. She had never yet found a thing, not the silver, not the gold, which must exist as a flat puddle of cold metal somewhere below; but she had tunneled for weeks into the sooty ruin, and searched what had been the hall.

That was why she came late home. And this time-gods, she trembled so with terror in the streets that her legs had practically no strength left for the stairs this time she brought a lump of metal the size of her fist; and to Stilcho's anxious, angry demand where she had been, why she was besooted (she had always washed before, in the rainbarrel, and wiped it all to general grime on her dark clothes) and why she had let wisps of her yellow hair from beneath her scarf-

"Stilcho," she said, and held out that heavy thing which was, for all the fire and its changing, too heavy to be other than what it was. Tears ran down her face. It was wealth she had, as Sanctuary's lower levels measured it. Where she had rubbed it, it gleamed gold in the dim light from the lamp he had burned waiting for her.