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  Hours pass. I hear the Crier calling Sabap, the time for afternoon prayer. At this all faithful members of the True Church—in theory the whole population of the city—are supposed to get down on their knees and pray. Pray for the second time, as all true devotees will also have prayed at Sabam, the start of the day. I missed the morning prayers. Didn’t wake up in time. I haven’t done in years. I decide to pass on the afternoon session as well.

  The door rattles and Captain Rallee strides in.

  “Don’t you know all citizens are legally obliged to pray during Sabap?” he says.

  “I don’t see you on your knees.”

  “I’m excepted for official business.”

  “What business?”

  “Coming down to order you to stop being such a fool and tell the Prefect what he wants to know.”

  It’s some relief to see Captain Rallee, though not much. We’ve known each other a long time; we even fought in the same battalion during one of the Orc Wars. We were fairly friendly once, but since I left the Palace and set up on my own we’ve grown apart. He knows I’m not a fool but he doesn’t owe me any favours.

  “Look, Thraxas, we don’t want to keep you here. We’ve got better things to do. No one thinks you personally stuck a knife in Attilan.”

  “Prefect Galwinius does.”

  Captain Rallee makes a face indicating he doesn’t think too much of the Prefect.

  “We ran a test on the knife. Our Sorcerer reports that your aura isn’t on it. Of course some Sorcerers could remove their aura, but you aren’t good enough to do that.”

  “Absolutely, Captain. I’m strictly small time.”

  “But he picked up your aura in the house. What were you doing there?”

  I continue staring at the ceiling.

  “You know how serious this is, Thraxas? Attilan was a Niojan diplomat. Their Ambassador is raising hell. The Palace is raising hell. The Consul himself’s been down here asking questions.”

  I’m impressed. The Consul is Turai’s highest official, answerable to no one except the King. Captain Rallee stares at me. I stare at him. He’s weathered his middle age better than I have. With his long blond hair and broad shoulders he’s still a handsome man. Probably still a hit with the ladies, in his smart black tunic and cloak. No fool, though. Sharp as an Elf’s ear in comparison to some of the blunderers they’ve got in the Civil Guard.

  “So what’s going on?”

  I remain silent.

  “I don’t reckon you killed Attilan,” says the Captain. “But I reckon you might have been involved in a little robbery.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Stupid? Maybe. Maybe not. I’ve never known you rob anyone before, but then again, I’ve never known you owe the Brotherhood five hundred gurans before.”

  He sees my look of surprise.

  “You’re in big trouble, Thraxas. Yubaxas will have your head if you don’t pay. You need money badly, which naturally makes us suspicious when you’re found in rich people’s houses where you haven’t been invited. So why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

  “I don’t discuss my business with the Civil Guard. Or anyone else. If I did, I’d soon be out of clients.”

  “Who’s your client?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “In that case, Thraxas, you’d better reconsider your attitude to prayer. Unless you tell us what we want to know it’s going to take divine intervention to get you out of this cell.”

  He departs. I remain. Languishing, I believe would be the correct term.

  Later I bribe a jailer to let me have a news-sheet.

  The Renowned and Truthful Chronicle of All the World’s Events is one of the various rags published each day in Turai. It’s neither renowned nor truthful, being given more to hinting at scandalous relationships between Senators’ daughters and officers of the Palace Guard, but it’s entertaining. It’s a single sheet, poorly printed, and often contains nothing but gossip, but today it has the sensational news of Attilan’s death, about which the Niojan Ambassador is indeed raising hell. He has protested to the King about this gross breach of diplomatic privilege. He has a point. You can’t have your diplomatic privilege violated much more than being murdered. For our King, always keen to appease the Niojans, it’s a tricky situation, and the Palace needs the murder cleared up quickly. Quickly enough to pin it on me, quite possibly.

  Thinking it over in my cell, I can’t make much sense of the affair. I’ve no idea who killed Attilan. Or why the Princess sent me to recover some love letters which turned out to be a spell for putting a dragon to sleep. Who needs to do that? There are no dragons around, apart from the King’s pet in his zoo, and the new one from the Orcs. I muse about this. It’s an interesting tale. This dragon, newly arrived at the King’s zoo, was on loan. The Orcish nation of Gzak sent it to King Reeth-Akan last week to mate with the King’s dragon as a token of friendship. There is, of course, no friendship whatsoever between Turai and Gzak, or any Human and Orcish nation, peace treaties notwithstanding. Why exactly the Orcs have sent it I’m not sure. I doubt very much that they are overly concerned that King Reeth-Akan’s dragon might be feeling lonely. Maybe it’s just to fool people into thinking they aren’t planning another war as soon as they can get their armies up to strength after the last beating we gave them. Gzak is one of the richest Orcish nations and has its own gold and diamond mines. It won’t take them too many years to build up their strength again.

  Why, however, Princess Du-Akai might want to put this or any other dragon to sleep is a mystery.

  I glance at the rest of the news-sheet. Usual round of Palace intrigue and scandal, and a story about a killer called Sarin the Merciless who’s apparently carried out a string of murders and robberies in the southern nations, making her the most wanted criminal in the west. This makes me laugh. I tangled with Sarin the Merciless a long time ago. Ran her out of town, if the truth be known. Just another small-time crook. The news-sheets always like to build up these petty criminals into something they’re not. I hope she comes back to Turai. I could do with some reward money.

  Under this is a piece about Senator Lodius, the leader of the opposition, who is haranguing the Consul for the outbreak of lawlessness in Turai. Killings and robberies are on the rise, and there’s still no sign of the Red Elvish Cloth, for which the Treasury will have to pay the Elves, even though we haven’t got it.

  What makes this cloth so rare and valuable is its ability to form a total shield against magic. It’s the only substance in the world no sorcery can penetrate. Very handy in a world full of enemy Sorcerers. But it’s presumably far away from the city by now. If it had been brought to Turai by the hijackers, our government Sorcerers would have traced it by now. In its finished state, the cloth is undetectable, but Elves aren’t dumb. Any time they despatch some, they brand it with a temporary sorcerous mark only they can remove. Once the Cloth reaches our King, an Elvish Sorcerer removes it. So someone has spirited the stuff away from the city. It’s well known the Orcs have been after Red Elvish Cloth for years. If they’ve finally acquired some, it’s bad news for us.

  My musings are interrupted as the cell door bangs open and the jailer ushers in a young woman. She introduces herself as Jaisleti and flashes an official seal at me.

  “I’m Princess Du-Akai’s handmaiden.”

  “Whisper. You never know who’s listening.”

  Jaisleti whispers, “The Princess is worried.”

  “It’s okay. I hid the box before I was arrested. I’ve kept her name out of it.”

  Jaisleti looks relieved. “When can she get the letters back?”

  “As soon as I get out of here.”

  “We’ll see what we can do. But you mustn’t mention her name. Now Attilan’s been murdered it would be an even worse scandal if the relationship were to be discovered.”

  “Don’t worry. Stubborn silence is one of my strongest points.”

  She departs, sticking to the pretence a
bout love letters. No mention of dragons at all.

  Chapter Six

  The call for Sabav, evening prayers, rings out through the jail. Sabam, Sabap, Sabav. Three prayer calls a day. Gets me down. Still, we get off lightly in Turai. In Nioj they have six. I kneel down to pray in case some jailer is spying on me; there’s no sense in giving the authorities another excuse to hold me here. Perhaps it isn’t such a bad idea, because I’m released shortly afterwards. God may now be on my side. More likely the Princess pulled some strings. Captain Rallee is most displeased. He can’t understand how a guy like me can still have any influence in this town.

  “Who you working for, the Royal Family?” he grumbles, as a Sorcerer mutters the spell to let me out the front gates. “You watch yourself, Thraxas. The Prefect’s got his eye on you. You try putting anything over on him and he’ll be down on you like a bad spell.”

  I smile graciously in reply, and climb into a landus heading for Twelve Seas. I stop off at the public baths, wash off the stink of prison, grab a beer and food at the Avenging Axe and head off out.

  “Where have you been?” asks Makri as I’m leaving.

  “In prison.”

  “Oh,” says Makri. “I thought maybe you were hiding from the Brotherhood.”

  I glare at her. “And why did you think that?”

  “Because you can’t pay your gambling debts.”

  I am outraged to learn that Makri knows about this too.

  “Does everyone in Twelve Seas have to stick their noses into my personal affairs? It’s high time people around here started minding their own damned business.”

  With which I storm out into the street. A beggar sticks a withered hand in my direction.

  “Get a job,” I bark at him. It makes me feel slightly better.

  It’s dark by the time I reach Attilan’s house. It’s risky returning so soon but it has to be done. In the time between my discovery in the garden and my arrest, I threw the box under a bush and I need it back. No one seems to be around, apart from a young Pontifex hurrying home after a hard day’s praying. I wish I could make myself invisible but the invisibility spell is way too complicated for me. Trusting to luck, I haul myself over the fence, scramble through the garden and dive beneath the bush. The box isn’t there. Someone beat me to it. Two minutes later I’m back over the fence and hurrying south, not pleased at the way things are going.

  Horse traffic is banned in the city after dark. The night is still hot and it’s a tiring walk. When I reach Pashish I decide to drop in on Astrath Triple Moon. I’ve promised Makri I’ll ask him if he can help her. More to the point, I need a beer.

  Pashish, just north of Twelve Seas, is another poor suburb, though relatively crime-free. Its narrow tenemented streets comprise mainly the dwellings of harbour workers and other manual labourers. It’s an unlikely place to find a Sorcerer, but Astrath Triple Moon is somewhat of an outcast among his kind, thanks to certain allegations a few years back when he was the official Sorcerer at the Stadium Superbius, with responsibility for ensuring that all chariot races and suchlike were run fairly, without outside sorcerous interference. Certain powerful Senators felt that their chariots weren’t getting a fair deal, leading to a Praetor’s investigation accusing Astrath Triple Moon of taking bribes.

  Astrath employed me to dig up evidence on his behalf. He was, in fact, as guilty as hell but I managed to cloud the issue enough for him to escape prosecution or expulsion from the Sorcerers Guild. This allowed him to remain in the city—no Sorcerer expelled from the Guild is allowed to practise here—but the stigma attached to his name thereafter forced him to leave his high-class practice in Truth is Beauty Lane. He ended up in straitened circumstances with a small practice in Pashish ministering to the humble needs of the local population.

  Astrath is still a powerful Sorcerer. As always he is pleased to see me. Not many men of my learning and culture visit him these days. He pours me a beer and I down it in one. He pours me another.

  “Hot as Orcish hell out there,” I say, emptying the glass.

  He pours me a third. He’s not a bad guy for a Sorcerer. I dump my cloak and bag on the floor among the astrolabes, charts, test tubes, herbs, potions and books that form the standard paraphernalia of a working Sorcerer.

  I ask him about the spell, describing it as best as I can remember.

  “That’s a rare item,” says Astrath Triple Moon, stroking his beard. “As far as I know, no Human Sorcerer has ever concocted a successful spell for putting a dragon to sleep. The best we’ve come up with is some temporary distraction.”

  He’s right. I know from painful experience. My platoon faced a dragon in the last Orc Wars, and I tried my sleep spell, full strength. I had more power in my spells then but the dragon hardly blinked. Still, we killed it in the end.

  “Do the Orcs have a spell like that?”

  “They might,” replies Astrath Triple Moon. “After all, they have more experience with dragons than us. And their Sorcerers work on a different system. Weaker in some ways, stronger in others. It wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve mastered dragoncraft enough to put one to sleep. I wouldn’t have thought they’d let a spell like that out of their hands though. There’s always Horm, of course.”

  “Horm the Dead?”

  I suppress a shudder. You can forget to include me in anything involving Horm the Dead. He’s not the only mad renegade Sorcerer in the world but he’s one of the most powerful and, by all accounts, by far the most frightening.

  “You ever have any dealings with him?”

  Astrath strokes his beard.

  “Not really. But a few members of the Sorcerers Guild have encountered him in the course of their travels and they told me stories about him. That was back when I could still go to Sorcerers Guild meetings of course. Takes dwa and flies, apparently.”

  “So do a lot of people.”

  “No, he really can fly. So they say anyway. And rides dragons.”

  “I thought only Orcs could ride dragons.”

  “Horm is half Orc,” says Astrath. “And he spends his time in the Wastelands working out ways to combine Orc and Human magic. Last we heard he was working on a spell to send a whole city mad. The Eight-Mile Terror, he called it. So we were told anyway. Of course, you can’t trust informants from the Wastelands, but it worried the Guild enough to start work on some counterspell. Horm the Dead doesn’t much care for Humans.”

  “I can’t see why he’d have any involvement in this spell the Princess had though.”

  “Neither can I,” admits Astrath Triple Moon. “And from what you can remember of the spell, it doesn’t really sound like his work. More likely it was stolen from an Orcish Sorcerer. Or maybe their Ambassadors brought it here just in case the dragon decided to go mad and start burning the city.”

  I should hurry home and work this one out. After another beer, a little klee, and a portion of beef from Astrath’s servant, I do just that. I sit in my shabby room and mull it over. What would a Niojan diplomat be doing with an Orcish spell? Trying to sell it perhaps? A valuable item, certainly, which any government would pay well for, but how did he get it? How did the Princess learn of it and why did she want it? And where is it now? Who removed it from Attilan’s garden?

  Faced with so many questions, I go downstairs for a beer. Makri comes over to my table and I tell her about the case. She’s a sensible woman, often good for talking things over with, providing she’s not haranguing me about helping her get into the Imperial University.

  “I don’t think Attilan was ever on diplomatic duty in the Orcish lands, but its possible he’s come across the Orcish diplomats at our Palace. They don’t show themselves in public but they must meet other Ambassadors sometimes.”

  “Maybe he didn’t steal it,” suggests Makri. “Maybe they gave it to him.”

  “Seems unlikely, Makri. Niojans are all swines, but they don’t like Orcs any more than we do. And even if he was working with them, what was he doing with that spell? And why i
s the Princess involved? She sent me to find it. How did she know he had it? And what did she want it for?”

  “Maybe the dragons in the King’s zoo make her nervous.”

  “Could be. Dragons would upset anyone.”

  “I fought one once,” says Makri.

  “What?”

  “I fought one. In the Orcish slave arena.”

  “On your own?”

  “No, there were ten of us. Big fight to entertain the Orc Lords. We beat it, though I was the only one left alive at the end. Tough skin. My sword wouldn’t go through it. I had to stab it in the eyes.”

  I stare at her. I’m not sure if she’s telling the truth or not. When the twenty-year-old Makri arrived in Turai a year ago after escaping from the Orcish gladiator slave pits, she was a hardened fighter but unused to the ways of civilisation. That is to say, she didn’t tell lies. After a year in the Avenging Axe, surrounded by notable embroiderers of the truth like Gurd and myself, she’s learned the art.

  “I fought a dragon too, back in the Orc Wars,” I say, which is true, though rather beside the point. I just don’t like Makri to think she’s the only one round here who’s done any serious fighting.

  Some customers call for beer. Makri ignores them.

  “I hope you’re not going to get Princess Du-Akai into trouble,” she says.

  “Why?”

  “Because if you do a good job for the Princess she’ll be grateful and you could ask her to use her influence to get me into the University.”

  The standard degree course at the Imperial University features rhetoric, philosophy, logic, mathematics, architecture, religion and literature. Why the hell Makri wants to learn all that is beyond me.

  “Also,” adds the young Barbarian, “I heard that Du-Akai is sympathetic to the Association of Gentlewomen.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “At a meeting.”

  I stare at her. I’d no idea Makri was going to Association of Gentlewomen meetings.