‘Good. The First Eunuch is no fool.’

‘Nifadas will be sharing command with Prince Quillas Diskanar.’

Hull Beddict slowly turned to face her. ‘She’s risen far, then.’

‘She has. And for all the years since you last crossed her son’s path… well, Quillas has changed little. The queen keeps him on a short leash, with the Chancellor close at hand to feed him sweet treats. It’s rumoured that the primary holder of interest in the seven merchant houses that defied the treaty is none other than Queen Janall herself.’

‘And the Chancellor dares not leave the palace,’ Hull Beddict said, and she heard the sneer. ‘So he sends Quillas. A mistake. The prince is blind to subtlety. He knows his own ignorance and stupidity so is ever suspicious of others, especially when they say things he does not understand. One cannot negotiate when dragged in the wake of emotions.’

‘Hardly a secret,’ Seren Pedac replied. And waited.

Hull Beddict spat into the fire. They don’t care. The queen’s let him slip the leash. Allowing Quillas to flail about, to deliver clumsy insults in the face of Hannan Mosag. Is this plain arrogance? Or do they truly invite war?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘And Buruk the Pale – whose instructions does he carry?’

‘I’m not sure. But he’s not happy.’

They fell silent then.

Twelve years past, King Ezgara Diskanar charged his favoured Preda of the Guard, Hull Beddict, with the role of Sentinel. He was to journey to the north borders, then beyond. His task was to study the tribes who still dwelt wild in the mountains and high forests. Talented warrior though he was, Hull Beddict had been naive. What he had embraced as a journey in search of knowledge, the first steps towards peaceful coexistence, had in fact been a prelude to conquest. His detailed reports of tribes such as the Nerek, and the Faraed and the Tarthenal, had been pored over by minions of Chancellor Triban Gnol. Weaknesses had been prised from the descriptions. And then, in a series of campaigns of subjugation, brutally exploited.

And Hull Beddict, who had forged blood-ties with those fierce tribes, was there to witness all his enthusiasm delivered. Gifts that were not gifts at all, incurring debts, the debts exchanged for land. The deadly maze lined with traders, merchants, seducers of false need, purveyors of destructive poisons. Defiance answered with annihilation. The devouring of pride, independence, and self-sufficiency. In all, a war so profoundly cynical in its cold, heartless expediting that no honourable soul could survive witness. Especially when that soul was responsible for it. For all of it.

And to this day, the Nerek worshipped Hull Beddict. As did the half-dozen indebted beggars who were all that was left of the Faraed. And the scattered remnants of the Tarthenal, huge and shambling and drunk in the pit towns outside the cities to the south, still bore the three bar tattoos beneath their left shoulders – a match to those on Hull’s own back.

He sat now in silence beside her, his eyes on the ebbing flames of the dying hearth. One of his guards had returned to the capital, bearing the King’s Reed. The Sentinel was Sentinel no longer. Nor would he return to the southlands. He had walked into the mountains.

She had first met him eight years ago, a day out from High Fort, reduced to little more than a scavenging animal in the wilds.

And had brought him back. At least some of the way. Oh, but it was far less noble than it first seemed. Perhaps it would have been. Truly noble. Had I not then made sore use of him.

She had succumbed to her own selfish needs, and there was nothing glorious in that.

Seren wondered if he would ever forgive her. She then wondered if she would ever forgive herself.

‘Buruk the Pale knows all that I need to learn,’ Hull Beddict said.

‘Possibly.’

‘He will tell me.’

Not of his own volition, he won’t. ‘Regardless of his instructions,’ she said, ‘he remains a small player in this game, Hull. Head of a merchant house conveniently placed in Trate, with considerable experience dealing with the Hiroth and Arapay.’ And, through me, legitimate passage into Edur lands.

‘Hannan Mosag will send his warriors after those ships,’ Hull Beddict said. ‘The queen’s interest in those merchant houses is about to take a beating.’

‘I expect she has anticipated the loss.’

The man beside her was not the naive youth he had once been. But he was long removed from the intricate schemes and deadly sleight of hand that was so much the lifeblood of the Letherii. She could sense him struggling with the multiplicity of layers of intent and design at work here. ‘I begin to see the path she takes,’ he said after a time, and the bleak despair in his voice was so raw that she looked away, blinking.

He went on, ‘This is the curse, then, that we are so inclined to look ahead, ever ahead. As if the path before us should be any different from the one behind us.’

Aye, and it pays to remind me, every time I glance back.

I really should stop doing that.

‘Five wings will buy you a grovel,’ Tehol Beddict muttered from his bed. ‘Haven’t you ever wondered how odd it is? Of course, every god should have a throne, but shouldn’t it also follow that every throne built for a god is actually occupied? And if it isn’t, who in their right mind decided that it was worthwhile to worship an empty throne?’

Seated on a low three-legged stool at the foot of the bed, Bugg paused in his knitting. He held out and examined the coarse wool shirt he was working on, one eye squeezing into a critical squint.

Tehol’s gaze flicked down at his servant. ‘I’m fairly certain my left arm is of a length close to, if not identical with, that of my right. Why do you persist in this conceit? You’ve no talent to speak of, in much of anything, come to think of it. Probably why I love you so dearly, Bugg.’

‘Not half as much as you love yourself,’ the old man replied, resuming his knitting.

‘Well, I see no point in arguing that.’ He sighed, wiggling his toes beneath the threadbare sheet. The wind was freshening, blessedly cool and only faintly reeking of the south shore’s Stink Flats. Bed and stool were the only furniture on the roof of Tehol’s house. Bugg still slept below, despite the sweltering heat, and only came up when his work demanded light enough to see. Saved on lamp oil, Tehol told himself, since oil was getting dreadfully expensive now that the whales were getting scarce.

He reached down to the half-dozen dried figs on the tarnished plate Bugg had set down beside him. ‘Ah, more figs. Another humiliating trip to the public privies awaits me, then.’ He chewed desultorily, watching the monkey-like clambering of the workers on the dome of the Eternal Domicile. Purely accidental, this exquisitely unobstructed view of the distant palace rising from the heart of Letheras, and all the more satisfying for that, particularly the way the nearby towers and Third Height bridges so neatly framed King Ezgara Diskanar’s conceit. ‘Eternal Domicile indeed. Eternally unfinished.’

The dome had proved so challenging to the royal architects that four of them had committed suicide in the course of its construction, and one had died tragically – if somewhat mysteriously – trapped inside a drainage pipe. ‘Seventeen years and counting. Looks like they’ve given up entirely on that fifth wing. What do you think, Bugg? I value your expert opinion.’

Bugg’s expertise amounted to rebuilding the hearth in the kitchen below. Twenty-two fired bricks stacked into a shape very nearly cubic, and indeed it would have been if three of the bricks had not come from a toppled mausoleum at the local cemetery. Grave masons held to peculiar notions of what a brick’s dimensions should be, pious bastards that they were.

In response to Tehol’s query, Bugg glanced up, squinting with both eyes.