Robert Asprin - The Face of Chaos

And then he was easy prey for anything, for that cloaked form, its height, its manner, waked memories. He heard a presence near, Haught or Moria at his back, or both, but he could not have moved, not from the beginning. That figure well belonged with ghosts, with witchery, with nightmares that waked him cold with sweat. Lightning flashed and showed him a pale face within the hood.

'For Ils' sake get in!' Moria's voice. A hand tugging at his naked shoulder. But it was a potential trap, that room, lacking any other door; while somewhere, somehow in his most secret nightmares he knew, had known, that Ischade had always known how to find him when she wished.

'What do you want?' he asked.

'Come to the bridge,' the witch said. 'Meet .me there.'

He had gazed once into those eyes. He could not forget. He stood there with the rain pelting him, with his feet numb in icewater, his shoulders numb under the force of it off the eaves. 'Why?' he asked. 'Witch, why?'

The figure was blank again, lacking illumination. 'You have employ again, Mradhon Vis. Bring the others. Haught - he knows me, oh, quite, quite well. 'Twas I freed him, after all; and he will be grateful, will he not? For Moria indeed, this must be Moria -1 have a gift: something she has misplaced. Meet me beneath the bridge.'

'Gods blast you!'

'Don't trade curses with me, Mradhon Vis. You would not proft in the exchange.'

And with that the witch turned her back and walked away, merged with the night. Mradhon stood there, chilled and numb, the sword sinking in his hand. He felt distantly the touch against him, a hand taking his arm - 'For Ils' sweet sake,' Moria said, 'get inside. Come on.'

He yielded, came inside, chilled through, and Moria flung shut the door, barred it, went to the fire and threw a stick on it, so that the yellow light leapt up and cast fleeting shadows about the walls. They led him to the fire, set him down, tucked the blanket about him, and finally he could shiver, when he had gotten back the strength.

'Get my clothes,' he said.

'We don't have to go,' Moria said, crouching there by him. She turned her head towards Haught, who came bringing the clothes he had asked for.' We don't have to go.'

But Haught knew. Mradhon took the offered clothes, cast off the sodden blanket, and began to dress, while Haught started pulling on his own.

'Ils save us,' Moria said, clutching her wrap to her. Her eyes looked bruised, her hair streaming wet about her face. 'What's the matter with you? Are you both out of your minds?'

Mradhon fastened his belt and gathered up his boots, having no answer that made sense. In some part of him panic existed, and hate, but it was a further and cooler hate, and held a certain peace. He did not ask Haught his own reasons, or whether Haught even knew what he was doing or why; he did not want to know. He went in the way he would draw his hand from fire: it hurt too much not to.

And with scalding curses at them both, Moria began getting dressed, calling on them to wait, swearing impotence on them both in Downwind patois, in terms even the garrison had lacked.

'Stay here,' he said, 'little fool; you want to save your neck? Stay out of this.'

He said it because somewhere deep inside he understood a difference between this woman and the other, which he had never fully seen, that Moria with her thin sharp knife was on his side and Haught's because they were fools themselves, and three fools seemed better odds.

'Rot you,' Moria said, and when he took his muddy cloak and headed for the door, when Haught overtook him in the alley, Mradhon heard her panting after, still cursing.

He gave her no help, no sign that he heard. The rain had abated, sunk to a steady drizzle, a dripping off the eaves, a river down the cobbled alley, which sluiced filth along towards the sewers and so towards the bay where the foreign ships rode, insanity to heap upon the other insanities that life was here, where the likes of Ischade prowled.

If he could have loved, he thought, if he could have loved anything, Moria, Haught, known a friend outside himself, he might have made that a charm against what drew him now. But that had gone from him. There was only Ischade's cold face, cold purposes, cold needs: he could not even regret that Moria and Haught were with him: he felt safe now only because she had summoned them together, and not called him alone, not alone into that house. And he was ashamed.

Moria came up on his left hand, Haught on his right, and so they took that street under the eaves of the Unicorn and passed on by its light, by its shuttered, furtive safety that did not ask what prowled the streets outside.

'Where?' Dolon asked, at his desk, the sodden watcher standing dripping on the floor before him. 'Where has he gotten to?'

'I don't know,' the would-be Stepson said: Erato, his partner, was still out. He stood with his hands behind him, head bowed. 'He -Just said he had a message to take, to carry for her. He said her answer was maybe. I take it she wasn't sure she could do anything.'

'You take it. You take it. And where did they go, then? Where's your left-hand man? Where's Stilcho? Where's our informer?'

'I -' The Stepson stared off somewhere vague, his face contracted as if at something that just escaped his wits.

'Why didn't you do something?'

'I don't know,' the Stepson said in the faintest, most puzzled of voices. 'I don't know.'

Dolon stared at the man and felt the flesh crawling on his nape. 'We're being used,' he said. 'Something's out of joint. Wake up, man. Hear me? Get yourself a dozen men and get out there on the streets. Now. I want a watch on that bridge not a guard, a watch. I want that woman found. I want Mor-am watched. Finesse, hear me? It's not a random thing we're dealing with. / want Stilcho back. I don't care what it takes'

The Stepson left in all due haste. Dolon leaned head on hands, staring at the map that showed the Maze, the streets leading to the bridge. It was not the only thing on his desk. Death squads. A murder uptown. Factions were armed. The beggars were on the streets. And somehow every contact had dried up, frozen solid.

He saw things slipping. He called in others, gave them orders, sent them to apply force where it might loosen tongues.

'Make examples,' he said.

The streets gave way to one naked rim along the White Foal shore, an openness that faced the rare lights of Downwind, across the White Foal's rain-swollen flood. The black water had risen far up on the pilings of the bridge and gnawed away at the rock-faced banks, trying at this winding to break its confinement and take the buildings down, this ordinarily sluggish stream. Tonight it was another, noisier river, a shape-changer, full of violence; and Mradhon Vis moved carefully along its edge, in this soundless darkness of deafening sound, in the lead because of the three of them, he was most reckless and perhaps the most afraid.

So they came up in the place he had aimed for, in the underpinnings of the bridge on the Mazeward side; in this deepest dark. But a star glimmered here like swampfire, and above it was a pale, hooded face.

He felt one of his two companions set a warning hand on his arm. He kept walking all the same, watching his footing on this treacherous ground. He could look away from that face, or look back again, and a strange peace came on him, facing this creature who was the centre of all his fears. No more running. No more evasion. There was a certain security in loss. He stopped, took an easy stance, there above the flood.

'What's the job?' he asked, as if there had never been an interlude. The light brightened fitfully, in the witch's outheld hand.

'Mor-am,' she said. A shadow moved from among the pilings to stand by her. Light fell on a ruined, still-familiar face.