The second attack ame three nights later, an hour before dawn, as the lamps burned low. Faust was in the library, half asleep over his papers, when the first scream split the house.
By the time he reached the great hall, steel was ringing in the corridors.
They were not assassins this time.
Fifteen, perhaps twenty, in unmarked leather and grey cloaks, pouring through the broken servants' door with weapons that glittered with the same dim wrongness as the blade in Rita's room. Half the swords in the Frost armoury had gone for their throats before anyone had time to understand what was happening. The Herzog's household guards, hurriedly roused, fought in their nightshirts.
The old butler, who had tripped over a body on the stair, was swinging a candlestick like a man possessed.
He did what he always did for the past months. He drew the deck.
'Not the Fool,' he thought, with grim humour. 'Not the Wheel. Anything but the Wheel.'
The card came up warm and heavy in his fingers, and he felt the cold shiver of knowing before he saw it.
[XV — THE DEVIL].
He had not used it in earnest since the night he'd bound the deck to his blood. He did not like using it. It made the voice in his skull sit up and purr. But the hall was a slaughterhouse and Rita's chamber was twenty paces away, and he closed his hand around the card and walked straight into the nearest knot of fighters.
"You," he said, to the largest of them. His voice came out soft and warm, a voice for sickrooms. "You are tired of being paid in coin."
The man turned. The sword in his fist glowed faintly. Faust looked at him with his one good eye and felt the hook of the card slide neatly into the soft place beneath the mercenary's ribs, the place where every man keeps what he wants and cannot have.
"What would you rather," Faust said gently, "than a hired man's wage?"
The man's eyes went glassy. His sword hand dropped half an inch. Something unspooled behind his face, a hunger Faust had no wish to name.
"The estate," the man whispered. "The silver. Whoever pays him, he's paying us less than he promised—"
"Then why," said Faust, "do you suppose he is not here?"
The man looked round the burning hall. He looked at the bodies. And Faust watched the comprehension arrive, slow and ugly, like water seeping under a door.
The mercenary turned on his neighbour.
It was a small thing. It was a very small thing, one man's sword in another man's belly. But in the dark and the confusion of the hall it travelled, and men who have been betrayed by their paymaster will gladly believe any lie that offers revenge.
In three minutes the invaders had half-turned upon each other.
Faust leaned against the wall, shaking with a chill that had nothing to do with the cold, and felt the voice in his head rolling over in deep satisfaction.
'Good,' it purred. 'Again.'
He put the card away with hands and went to find Rita.