The soldier closed his eyes, remembering what she'd bade him forget until thetime was right. And when he opened them, they'd softened just a bit. "Yourplace?" he said tiredly. "Or mine?"
That night, down in Sanctuary on a perpetually dank street called Mageway, in atower of the citadel of magic, Randal the Tysian Hazard woke in his Mageguildbed, strangling in his own sheets.
The slight mage went pale beneath his freckles-pale to his prodigious ears-asthe sheets, pure and innocent linen as far as anyone knew, bound him tighter. Ifhe ever got out of this alive, he'd have to have a talk with his treacherousbedclothes-they had no right to treat him this way. Had his mouth not beenstoppered by their grasp, he could have shouted counterspells or cursed hisinanimate bedclothes, come alive. But Randal's mouth, as well as his hands andfeet, was bound tight by hostile magic.
His eyes, alas, were not. Randal stared into a darkness which lightenedperceptibly before the bed on which he struggled, helpless, as the Nisibisiwitch Roxane coalesced from nimbus, a sensuous smile upon her face.
Roxane, Death's Queen, was Randal's nemesis, a hated enemy, a worrisome foe.
The young mage writhed within the prison of his sheets and wordless exhortationscame from his gagged mouth. Roxane, whom he'd fought on Wizardwall, had sworn tokill him-not just for what he'd done to help Tempus's Stepsons and Bashir'sguerrilla fighters reclaim their homeland, Wizardwall, from Nisibisi wizards,but because Randal had once been the right-side partner of Stealth, calledNikodemos, a soul the witch Roxane sought to claim.