The glamours that formed were identical. Three women, tall, marble-skinned, dressed in silken white gowns that reached the floor. Their hair was spun gold and they wore laurel crowns. Black blindfolds covered their eyes.

They stood in a line before the first accused.

Via the orating glamour, the official declared portentously,

‘Behold, the personification of Justice! One holds the key to mercy. The others, annihilation.’

He turned to the first condemned man.

‘You have a span of twenty beats in which to make your choice.’

Pointing to each of the statuesque glamours in turn, he counted them off.

‘One, two or three. Prisoner, you hold your destiny in your own hands. Let the test commence!’

An unseen drum began to pound, steady as a heartbeat. Nervously, the accused man’s gaze flicked from one motionless glamour to the next. The deathly hush that had blanketed the crowd was broken as people started to call out their favoured numbers.

Karr noticed the anger on Caldason’s face, and that he was clutching the hilt of his sheathed sword, white-knuckled. He reached out and stayed his hand. ‘No, my friend,’ he whispered. ‘The odds are too great, even for you.’ Caldason glared at him, eyes blazing. ‘Think of the boy,’ Karr added.

Reeth sobered. He shook free of Karr’s grasp and looked to Kutch.

The boy was staring intently at the platform and the unfolding drama. Under his breath he mumbled, ‘Two… number two… pick

two

.’

Abruptly, the drumming stopped. Once more, the crowd fell silent.

‘How do you choose?’

the official demanded, echoed by the resonant mouth.

The prisoner’s hesitant reply couldn’t be heard far beyond the platform. The mouth glamour broadcast it.

‘He chooses… three!’

Those in the crowd who agreed with the choice shouted approval. There were some cheers and boos, but mostly the response was mute.

‘

No

,’ Kutch groaned, ‘it’s two.

Two.

’

‘Let the named one be revealed.’

The third glamour drifted forward. At a command gesture from the sorcerer it underwent a transformation. Its features blurred and melted, and in seconds it returned to an eddying green cloud. That held for a few seconds. Then the wisps of emerald haze dispersed, showing the glamour reconstituted. But differently.

A roar went up from the crowd, a mixture of disappointment, rage, and a little glee.

The glamour was draped in rags. Her hair was stringy and grey, and the laurel headdress had rotted. The hands and arms were stripped to bone. Where there had been a noble, comely face now there was a bleached skull, a grinning death’s head, jaw agape.

‘The accused stands condemned! In accordance with the authority vested in this tribunal, the penalty shall be exacted.’

What happened next was at least mercifully swift, if shocking. A brawny militiaman approached the prisoner. As he moved he swung a two-hand broadsword in a high arc. Its blade glinted briefly in the sun, then severed the man’s neck. His head sprang from his shoulders, bounced across the platform and came to rest near the edge. The body, hanging by chains, pumped copious blood. It splashed the other, horrified prisoner shackled alongside.

There was uproar in the crowd. A patter of refined applause came from the spectators’ stand.

Kutch turned away from the sight, stunned, and in reflex buried his face in Reeth’s side, suddenly more child than man. Taken aback, Caldason gingerly encircled him with a comforting arm.

Matters stood for a moment. Then Karr asked gently, ‘How did you know, Kutch? That he’d got the wrong glamour, I mean. You seemed very certain if it was a guess.’

Kutch disentangled himself from Caldason, looking bashful. ‘It wasn’t a guess,’ he sniffed despondently. ‘They’re using quality magic, expensive stuff, which makes it hard to tell. But not impossible.’ He shrugged. ‘I recognised it from experience, I suppose.’

‘Come on,’ Caldason said, ‘let’s go.’

Before they could push their way out of the mob, the official’s surrogate mouth announced the next test. The crowd pressed forward again.

There were three new glamours on the platform. These were male, clothed in white togas and sporting long black hair. They weren’t wearing blindfolds; they simply had no eyes, just smooth skin where they should have been.

The second ordeal commenced, the drum began its doleful pounding.

But the accused wasn’t going to co-operate. He started to shout, loud enough for some of his words to carry. They were parts of slogans or a speech and the only string they heard was,

‘…freedom! Long live the -’

‘Forfeit!’

the mouth bellowed.

The militiaman came again and finished his work with the sword. It took two swings this time.

‘We should leave,’ Karr suggested softly.

The crowd began to disperse, quietly shuffling.

Reeth and Karr each took one of the boy’s arms to guide him through.

‘It would have been number three that time,’ Kutch told them, blinking back the tears.

13

Jecellam, the capital of Rintarah, sprawled in the middle of a fertile plain and was backed by distant snow-capped mountains. Three rivers served the city, one running through, the others looping it. Ranches and farms of enormous acreage surrounded and supplied the metropolis.

The ethos of the eastern empire was collectivist, or at least outwardly so, and nowhere was Rintarah’s doctrine more apparent than in Jecellam. Its streets were clean and orderly, with buildings arranged in neat rows. As far as possible, lives were regulated and necessary tasks centrally organised. The city was policed with vigilance, and according to the state was practically free of crime.

Despite Rintarah’s egalitarian order, disparities existed, not least in the distribution of magic. The grandest, most expensive products of sorcery were invariably to be found where the affluent lived. And there were such people, whether the system recognised it or not.

The city was predicated on there being a place for everything and everything being in its place. There were residential quarters, and different areas where things were made, youngsters educated, the sick tended.

Officially sanctioned houses of pleasure existed too, well away from the homes of the elite. They clustered in the oldest part of the city, where cleanliness and conformity were less rigidly enforced, and where the unacknowledged poor congregated. Places which respectable citizens, fearing to walk, would visit in carriages with shaded windows.

A particularly notorious street ran adjacent to the docks. The bordellos lining it were said to cater for every taste. Consequently it was one of the few places where the highest and the lowest mingled.

The many establishments the street had to offer ranged from the dismally sordid to the gaudily opulent. One particular building, narrow, tall and outwardly unremarkable, fell somewhere near the middle of this spectrum. Like the others it was always open for trade, as the demand for its services was by no means restricted to the hours of darkness. But around noon few women were working and there was only a trickle of clients. This was a time when the burghers who covertly owned the business saved money by not employing minders.

A visitor to the house, once past its heavy front door, would be aware of shabbiness and neglect. Reasonably luxuriant long ago, the interior was now down at heel. Wall hangings depicting erotic scenes from antiquity and legend were faded. Woodwork was chipped and in need of varnish, rugs were threadbare. The faint odour of rot wasn’t quite hidden by incense.

Creaking stairs led to several storeys in like condition, each with half a dozen or so client chambers. On the top floor there were just two rooms, both with their doors shut.