Ischade treading the aisles of the barracks, surveying murder-satisfied. Sated. It was not death that appealed to her. It was these deaths.

"You all right?" he asked of the woman staring so close into his eyes. "Ischade, are you all right tonight?"

Blink. He heard his pulse. Hers. The world hung suspended and day or night made no difference. He cleared his throat or tried to.

"You think I better get out of here?"

She shifted her position and rested her arms on his shoulders, joined her hands behind his head. Still silent.

"I want to ask you," he said, trying, in the near gaze of her eyes, the soft weight of her against his side. "-want to ask you-" That wasn't working. He blinked, breaking the spell, and took his life in his hands, grinned in the face of her darkness and sobered up and kissed her. His best style. He could get things out of a body one way; he had, now and again, used pleasanter persuasions. He was not particularly proud of it, no more than the other. It was all part of his skill-knowing a lie from a scrap of truth, and following a lead. He had one. Truth was in her silence tonight.

"You want something," he said, "you've always wanted something-"

She laughed, and he caught her hands down. Hard.

"What can I do," he asked, "what is it you want me to do?" No one held onto Ischade. He sensed that in the darkening of her eyes, in the sudden dimming of the room. He let go. "Ischade. Ischade." Trying to keep his focus. And hers. Right now he ought to get up and head for the door and he knew it; but it was infinitely easier to sit where he was; and very hard to think of what he had been trying to think of, like the memory gaps, like the things they did/he thought they did in that bed sprawled with silks. "You've got Stilcho, got Janni, got me-is it coincidence, Ischade? Maybe I could help you more if I was awake when you talked to me-" Or is it information you go for? "Maybe-our aims and yours aren't that far apart. Self-interest. Weren't you talking about self interest? What's yours, really? And I'll tell you mine."

Arms tightened behind his head. She shifted forward and now there was nothing in all the room but her eyes, nothing in all the world but the pulse in his veins. "You think hard," she said. "You go on thinking, thinking's a counterspell, you've come here all armed with thinking, and yet it's such a heavy load-aren't you tired, Strat, don't you get tired, bearing all the weight for fools, being always in the shadow, isn't it worth it, once, to be what you are? Let's go to bed."

"What's going on in town?" He got the question out. It wandered out, slurred and half-crazed and half-independent of his wits. "What have you got your hand into, Ischade? What game are you using us for-"

"Bed," she whispered. "You afraid, Strat? You never run from what scares you. You don't know how."

4

"I don't know," Stilcho said, limping along through the streets in Haught's company. Haught took long strides and the dead Stepson made what speed he could, panting. A waterskin sloshed in time to his steps. "I don't know how to make contact with him-he's here, that's all-"

"If he's dead," Haught said, "I'd think you had an edge. I don't think you're trying."

"I can't," Stilcho gasped. Twilight showed Haught's elegance, his supercilious gaze, and Stilcho, about to clutch at him, held back his hand. "I-"

"She says that you will. She says that you'll be quite adequate. I really wouldn't want to prove less than that, would you?"

The thought ran through Stilcho like icewater. They were near the bridge, near the running-water barrier, and while it did not stop him (he was truly alive in some senses) it made him weak in the knees. There was a checkpoint the other side of the bridgehead, that was a line of no color; and few meddled with that one, which had some living warders, but not all that patrolled the streets beyond were alive, and the Shambles suffered horrors and the malicious whimsy of Roxane's creatures. "Listen," Stilcho said, "listen, you don't understand. He's not like the dead when he's like this. Dead are everywhere. Janni's tied to one thing, he's got an attachment, and he's like the living in that regard. No good news for what he's attached to-But you can't find him like the rest of the dead. He's got place, where applies to him same as you and me-"

"Don't lump me in your category." Haught brushed imaginary dust from his cloak. "I've no intention of joining you. And whatever you told the mistress about that business with the rosebush-"

"Nothing, I told her nothing."

"Liar. You'd tell anything you were asked, you'd hand her your mother if she asked-"

"Leave my mother out of this."

"She down in hell?" Haught wondered, with a sudden wolfish sharpness that sent another icy chill through Stilcho's gut. "Maybe she could help."

Stilcho said nothing. The hate Haught had toward Stepsons was palpable, a joke most of the time, but not when they were alone. Not when there was something Haught could hold over him. But Stilcho glared back. He had been a marsh-brat and a Sanctuary drayman before the Stepsons recruited him, neither occupation lending itself to bright, sharp acts of courage. He was slow to anger as his lumbering team had been. But there was a point past which not, the same as there had been with his plodding horses. The beggar-king who tortured him had found it; Haught had just located it. And Haught perhaps sensed it. There was a sudden quiet in the Nisibisi wizardling. No further jibes. Not a further word for a moment.

"Let's just get it done," Stilcho said, anxious less for Haught than for Her orders. And he gathered his black cloak about him and walked on past the bridge. A bird swooped overhead-a touch of familiarity, perhaps, avian inquisitiveness. But it was not the sort to be interested in riverside unless there was a bit of carrion left. It napped away to the Downwind side of the bridge, heedless of barriers and checkpoints, as other birds winged their way here and there.

That one was bound for the barracks, Stilcho reckoned. Across the bridge he saw, with his half-sight-(the missing eye was efficacious too, and had vision in the shadow-world, whether or not it was patched: it was, lately, since he had recovered a little bit of his vanity, under the sting of Haught's taunts.) He saw the PFLS bridgewarder, but he saw several Dead gathered there too, about the post where they had died; and Haught was with him, but not exactly in the lead as they walked down the street and cut off toward the Shambles.

"Gone back to the witch, that's where." Zip dropped down on the wooden stairs of a building in the Maze, there on the street, and the beggar-looking woman who slouched in her rags nearby was listening, although she did not look at him. Zip was panting. He pulled out one of his knives and attacked the wood of the step between his legs. "He's one damn fool, you know that."

"Mind your mouth," Kama said. It was a slim woman and a lot of weaponry under all that cloak and cloth, and her face was smeared with dirt enough and her mouth crusted with her last meal, part of the disguise. She would even fool the nose. "You want to make yourself useful, get the hell to the Unicorn and pick up Windy. Tell him move and leave the rest to him."

"I'm not your damn errand-boy."

"Get!"

He got. Kama got up and waddled down the darkening street in her best old-woman way, toward another contact.

Moruth heard the dull flap of wings before the bird alit in the window of Mama Becho's. The beggar-king clenched his hands and listened, and when it appeared, a dark flutter outside the shutters, he resisted going to that window at the tavern's backside. But a hard, chisel beak tapped and scrabbled insistently. Wanting in.