And morning seen him dead as that drunken fool in a Sanctuary alley, who was by now neither drunken nor any longer a fool, nor able to see the dawn in front of his eyes.

"We can't both leave," Stilcho concluded. Sleep eluded them both. They were hoarse and blear-eyed and exhausted, sitting opposite each other at the rickety little table. "I can't leave you here alone with that thing."

"I found it, dammit." Moria wiped back a stringing lock and brought the hand hard onto the table. "Don't treat me like a damn fool, Stilcho, don't tell me how to manage! I carried it clean across town! We melt it-"

"What with, for godssakes? On the damned little firepot we cook on? We just get a damned hot lump of-"

"Hssssst!" Her hand came up out-turned toward his mouth, her face twisted in fury. "These walls! These walls, dammit, how many times do I have to tell you keep your voice down! I'll steal us the stuff, how do you think we come by anything lately, except / steal it, and you live on it! Don't you tell me what to do! I've had it all my life, and I'm not taking it, I'm not taking any of it, not from you and not from anybody!"

"Don't be a damned fool! You go flashing gold bits around this town you'll get your throat cut, this isn't silver, dammit, listen. Listen! You-" Of a sudden, even in the gray morning light filtering through the window, the vision of the lost eye shifted in, stronger than the living one. He stopped, his heart laboring in terror.

"Stilcho?" Moria's voice was higher, frightened. "Stilcho?"

"Something's wrong," he said. In that inner eye, soiled, filmy shapes went streaming like smoke through the gates, the gates-the fires, the lost reaches.... "A lot of people just died." He swallowed hard, tried to calm his shaking, tried to get back the sight of Moria across the table, and not that black vision where Something waited, where by the riverside-in the woods-

"Stilcho!" Her nails bit into his hand. He blinked and tried again to focus, succeeded finally in seeing her, beyond a veil like black gauze.

"Help me. M-moria-"

She rose and her chair overset, crashing down so violently she came and grabbed him and held on to him with all her might. "Don't, don't, don't, dammit, don't, come back-"

"I don't want to go down there, I don't want to die again -oh gods, Moria!" His teeth would not stop chattering. He could shut his living eye. He had no such power over the dead one. "It's in hell, Moria, a piece of me is in hell and I can't blink, I can't shut it, I can't get rid of it-"

"Look at me!" She jerked his head by the hair and looked him in the face. Another jerk at his hair. "Look at me!"

His sight cleared. He caught her around the waist and hugged her tight, his head against her breast, in which her heart beat like something trapped. Her hand caressed his head, and she whispered reassurance; but he felt her heart hammering fit to shake her small body. No safety. As long as she was with him there was none for her, and there was nowhere any for him.

Get out of here, he would tell her. But he dreaded the day he would slip and Moria would not be there to pull him back; he dreaded the solitude in which he might then go mad. If he were a brave man he would tell her go. But not today. They would climb out of this pit together; for that much they needed each other he needed her skill and she needed his restraint and his protection to use the gold; but after that, after she was set up and he had a chance as well, then he would find a way to let her go.

"Damn!" Crit hissed. The news had come down the hill with the swiftness only bad news could manage; but Straton said nothing at all. Straton headed out the barracks door and whistled up the bay, which came; of course it came. It made trouble in the stables, it cleared the stable fence like a gull in flight, and nothing held it. It came to him in this early dawn, and he went to the tackroom to get what belonged to it.

"Where are you going?" Crit asked him, meeting him outside as he came out into the dusty yard, his right hand hauling the saddle, the treacherous left unburdened with anything but the bridle and the blanket. Crit was careful with him nowadays, uncommonly patient, a perpetual walking on eggshells.

"Town," Strat said. He cultivated patience, too. He saw Crit's analytical look, the inevitable reckoning what small house lay on his way. And he had not thought of that till he saw Crit think of it; then it got its claws into his gut, and the thought began to grow that of powers in Sanctuary which ought to be warned, which might exert a calming influence on the town-

-damn, she had contacts in all the right places. With Moruth the beggar-king; with the rats in the very walls when it came to that, the rabble that was most like to take the slaughter uptown very hard indeed. Zip arrested. That would not last long. Best he be arrested till someone had a chance to talk sense to him. Likely Walegrin.

"Stay off riverside," Crit said, and laid a hand on his arm, delaying him a moment. In months past that would have gotten a shrug-off, at best a surly answer. But Crit was fighting for Strat's soul, and Strat had gotten to know that, in a kind of fey gratitude for a friend with a lost cause, or at best a cause that was not worth the effort Crit spent on it. I'm crippled, dammit, you got me back, you risked your damn neck pulling me out, but you have to get another partner, Crit, one who won't let you down in a pinch, and you know it and I know it. The fire's dying and I'm not going to be again what I was, when I get the twinges I know that. Tomorrow I'll tell you that. When we're out of this damned city I'll tell you that. And you'll tell me I'm a damned fool, but neither of us is. Time we split. Leave me to fend for myself: you don't have to go on carrying me, Crit.

Crit's hand dropped. There was a worried look on his face. Strat's stares could put it there, lately. And that usually got Crit's temper up when other provocations failed. This time he just stood there.

"Yeah," Strat said. "I'm going to drop out a few hours on the way back, expect it: I'll be pulling in a few contacts." He hung the bridle on his shoulder, flung the blanket over the bay's back, not-not looking more than he must at that coin-sized patch just by the bay's hipbone. "I may talk to her. Figure I can walk out of there, too. It's all cooled down; she's got her choices, I have mine." He slung the saddle up, and the bay never offered to move. It had as well been a statue that breathed and smelled like a horse. "She's sleeping around. We got corpses to prove it."

"Don't be a damn fool."

"Hey." He turned his head and looked at Crit. "Trust me to do what needs doing. All right? You're not my mother."

Crit said not a thing.

Damn mistake, Crit. Say it. My mind's like the damned shoulder, on and off, I never know when. I can't think, I can't know when I'm on target, can't know when I'll flinch.

She's got herself another lover. One I can't match, can I?

I can meet her and ride away again. You don't know how easy it is. I've seen her in the streets, Crit. Like the rest of the whores. With a pox that'll kill you.

He slipped the bridle on, cinched up, and hurled himself into the saddle without the least twinge from the shoulder. "See you." he said, and rode for the gates.

"Where?" Tempus snapped, just arrived on the hill, just arrived inside Molin's offices. It was not a good day for Molin either, but Tempus was clearly begun on a worse one. "When and who?"