"Then that's all I need from you." Burke turned to go.
"Wait!" This from Ariadne. Her dark eyes pinned their host's deep-set orbs. "Daedalus, I've a promise to make you."
"A promise—?"
"A vow, if you will." Never had Ariadne looked more beautiful—or more deadly. Her smile held the shadow of impending doom. "For if there's any trick to this, smith, or if word should reach my father of what's happened here tonight, I swear an hour will come when you'll pray for death to end your agonies!"
Then she and Burke were out in the night again, silent as shadows, feeling their way back through the murky maze of alleyways and corridors and buildings to the central court.
Burke pulled the girl to a halt there, in the narrow slot between two pillars. "Where are we going?" He held his voice low; spoke with his mouth close to her ear to compensate for the buffeting of the wind. "We can't chance your rooms, you know. That guard's snapped out of it by now."
"Of course. I've a place in mind across the court, closer to the shrine."
"All right, then."
But again, as before, tension rose within Burke. A guard's shouted challenge somewhere far off started him sweating. When the low, mingled laughter of a man and a woman drifted from a nearby window, he froze in his tracks.
The role of hero, he decided, ill became him. He thought too much of consequence and peril; found it too difficult to lose himself in an emotional haze of recklessness.