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.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.Finally, to one of her desperate men, she had given something great enough to get that tenderness she had longed for."Oh, Moria," he said; and spoiled it with: "Oh gods, from there! Dammit, Moria! Fool!" But he hugged her and held her till it hurt.The river house waited, throwing out light from one unshuttered window, across the weed-grown garden, the trees and the brush and the rosebushes which embedded the iron fence and the warded gate.Inside, in the light of candles which were never consumed, in a clutter of silks and fine garments that lay forgotten once acquired, Ischade sat in her absolute black, black of hair, of eye, of garments; but there was color in her hands, a little lump of blue stone that had also known that fire.She had gathered it out of the ash in a moment's distraction-she was also a thief, by her true profession; and if her hand had suffered bums from the ash, the stone had sucked all the heat into itself, and rested cool in unscarred, dusky fingers.It was the largest piece of what had been the globe.It was power.It had associated with fire, and flame was the element of her own magic, fire, and spirit.It was well it reside where it did; and it was best if no one in Sanctuary were aware just where it resided [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]