But not in walking the Maze by dark and unseen. Hanse was in his element, and Cappen followed him artlessly, down the length of the Serpentine, and into territory of the city at large - where the law came, and where a wanted thief was less than safe. The houses and shops here were more sturdy, and finally magnificent, and those latter existed behind walls, and most with bars on the windows. Walkers grew scarce for a time, and Cappen hung further back, afraid that he himself might attract the notice of the pair Hanse followed ... which he earnestly did not want.

One street and another, and sometimes a passage through narrower ways where Cappen found Hanse going more carefully, where they four were virtually alone and where a false move could alert the pair ahead. Cappen stayed far back then, and once he thought he had lost them all... but a quick move around a comer put them all in view again. Hanse looked back in that instant, while Cappen tried to stay inconspicuously part of a stack of barrels, recalling Hanse's knives, and the murk of the night. The fog was coming on and the light played tricks; a light mist slicked the stones ... and still the pair kept moving, out of the merchant quarter and into the quarter of the gods, past the square of the Promise of Heaven, where prostitutes, bedraggled in the mist, sat their accustomed benches like rain-soaked birds. - They swung past this place and into the Avenue of Temples itself; and Cappen shrugged his cloak about him with a genuinely wretched chill and marvelled at the trio ahead, who moved, pursued and pursuer, with such a tireless purpose.

And then another alley, a sudden move aside, which almost caught Hanse himself by surprise, near the magnificence of the dome of the temple of Ils and Shipri.

There Hanse tucked himself away into shadow and Cappen quite lost sight of him, among the buttresses and the statuary of the out-thrust wing of the temple ... vanished.

Then the woman in black went out into the street, ascended the plain centre of the steps of Ils and Shipri, towards the temple guards who warded the constantly open doors in these uneasy times ... four men and well armed, setting hands on hilts at once as they were approached. The woman cast back her hood: swords stayed undrawn, hands unmoving, numb as the patrons of the Unicorn.

Then another shadow began to move, from the unwatched side of the steps, a man from out of the shadows, knife in hand, a swift stalking... which afforded Cappen even less of comfort and made him think that a wayward minstrel perhaps should have spent a safer, drier night in the Unicorn.

Follow, the wizard had said, and Hanse pressed himself close against the wall, in the scant shadow afforded by a bit of brickwork, pressed himself there and watched in chill discomfort -blinked in horror while it happened, and four men died with swords still in sheath - only the last attempted a defence, and Mradhon Vis cut his throat in one quick and unmistakable move. Hanse blinked again and discovered to his consternation that the dark one, the woman, was gone, Mradhon Vis crouching now in sole possession of that bloody threshold. Hanse fingered his belt knife like a warding talisman; and wanted only to stay put, but all the while the icy cold at the pit of his neck, more biting than the cold of the mist, reminded him what he was there to do - what other power there was to offend. And he waited, reckoning every small move Mradhon Vis made, crouched over the bodies of the guards - every small shifting of a man busy at corpse-looting, every glance about as some hardy passerby noised along the main avenue - but none saw, none came near.

The woman delayed about her business inside: it might have been a moment, or far longer - time did tricks in his mind. Hanse shifted uneasily, finally gathered his nerve, slipped out of that safe concealment and, in the turning of Vis's head towards a distraction on the street... he eased past a gap in cover and into the alley Vis and the woman had left, along the temple itself.

He reached the first of three barred windows, and with utmost silence took the chance and seized the bars, hoisted himself up to see. The breath passed silently over his teeth and his gut knotted up - a robber of wizards, Enas Yorl had said: and now a thief who preyed on gods.

That struck hard ... not that he darkened the doorway of his city gods with his presence or practised alms; but there were territories, there were limits to a thief's audacity ... or it went hard for all. It was his craft, by the gods, his art the woman involved; and they were old, those gods, and belonged in Sanctuary, as the Rankan emperor's new lot never would. And the woman, the foreigner, the witch-thief, climbed up to the lap of bearded Ils himself and lifted the fabled necklace of Harmony from about the marble neck.

'Shalpa,' Hanse swore silently, and with chilling appropriate-ness - let himself ever so carefully down from his vantage with one chill throbbing about his neck and another one travelling his backbone. So Enas Yorl wanted a report. And the gods of old Ilsig were plundered by a foreign witch while the Rankans moved in with their new lot of deities down the block, with scaffolds and plans and the evident intent of overshadowing the gods of Ilsig. Prince Kithakadis and the Rankan gods; and: 'recommended', Enas Yorl had said, sending a thief out to keep watch on this god-thievery.

Hanse flattened himself back into his concealment with a sense of a world amiss, of matters under way no mere thief wanted part of. He had mixed in Kitty-Rat's connivances once to his discomfort ... but now, now it was possible Enas Yorl had a side of his own.

And hired help.

A footstep towards the temple front warned him: he crouched low and held his breath - Ischade, rejoining Mradhon Vis. 'Done,' he heard her say; and 'here's an end. Let's be gone, and quickly.'

Of course an outsider like Mradhon Vis - of course a man not Ilsig, who would have no scruples in killing Ilsig priests or robbing Ilsig gods.

In the Emperor's hire? Hanse wondered, which was far too much and too clear wondering for a thief; the sweat was coursing down his ribs despite the misty chill of the air. He was not sure at all now what side Yorl was ... and it occurred to him to tear the amulet from his neck, drop it in the alley and run.

But how far? And how long? He thought a second and chilling time of the wizard and his connections; recalled Sjekso; and Kithakadis himself ... a prince of some small gratitude for services a thief had rendered; but more than dangerous if certain rumours started, that Yorl could spread ... effortlessly.

The pair headed back the way they had come, and he set out after them, seeing no other course.

More and more bizarre, this midnight wandering. Cappen went rigid in his hiding place first as the quarry passed, and then as he caught sight of Hanse again, padding after them as before.

So there was no encounter. They went out and they did murder and came back, while Hanse followed after having seen what Hanse had seen ... very unlike Hanse. Cappen suspected motives ill-defined, gave shape to nothing, only sure it was something more than Hanse's private impulses that moved him now. He recalled the way in which the woman had passed a roomful of patrons at the Unicorn, in which she and her companion went where they liked on the street, in which guards died like slaughtered cattle...

The relief Cappen felt at seeing Hanse mobile and not lying stiff in the alley further on, gave way to a horror at the silence of all that was done, the neatness of it; and a subtle dread of this pacing about the streets. The procession which had started to be humorous and might have become yet more so on the return ... now assumed a thoroughly macabre character, such that he forbore to contact Hanse when he had, for one instant, the chance. Hanse's face too, in the small glimpse he had had of it as he passed, had the wan, set look of terror.