stutter when he got excited. The burly thugs of Codesh exchanged snickering leers and for a moment Cerk thought—hoped—they’d all walk out of the abattoir. But Brother Kakzim didn’t harangue with words. Like a sorcerer-king, Kakzim used the Unseen Way to focus his audience and forge them into a lethal weapon. Brother Kakzim worked on a smaller scale than Lord Hamanu: forty hired men rather than an army, but the effect was the same.
The mat slipped out of Cerk’s hands. It bounced down the stairs and rolled unnoticed against the wall.
Cerk returned to the killing floor in an open-eyed trance. His inner voice frantically warned him that his thoughts were no longer his own, that Brother Kakzim was bending and twisting his will with every step he took. His inner voice spoke the truth, but truth couldn’t overcome the images of hatred and disgust that swirled up out of Cerk’s deepest consciousness. The dark-dwellers were vermin; they deserved to die. Their death now, for the cause of cleansing Urikj was the sacrifice that redeemed their worthless lives.
With his final mote of free thought, Cerk looked directly at Brother Kakzim and tried to give his whipped-up hatred its proper focus, but he was no mind-bending match for an elder brother of the Black-Tree brethren. His images were overwhelmed.
The last thing Cerk clearly remembered was grabbing a torch and a stone-headed poleaxe that was as long and heavy as he was. Then the mob surged toward a squat tower at the abattoir’s rear, and he went with them. Brother Kakzim stood by the tower’s door. His face shone silver, like a skull in moonlight.
Delusion! Cerk’s inner voice screamed when Brother Kakzim’s eyes shot fire and one of the thugs fell to the ground. Mind-bending madness! Go back!
But Cerk didn’t go back. Wailing like a dwarven banshee, he kept pace with the mob as it made its noisy way to the cavern.
Later, much later, when he’d shed his bloodstained clothes, Cerk consoled himself with the thought that he wasn’t strong, even for a halfling. He had no skill with heavy weapons. It was possible—probable—that he hadn’t killed anyone. But he didn’t know; he couldn’t remember anything after picking up the torch and axe.
He didn’t know how his clothes had become bloodstained.
He was afraid to go to sleep.
Chapter Two
All residents of Urik knew precisely when Lord Hamanu’s curfew began, but few knew exactly when it ended. Those who could afford to laugh at the Lion-King’s laws said curfew ended one moment after it began. Templars said curfew ended at sunrise and they’d arrest or fine anyone they caught on the streets before the sun appeared above the city walls, but usually they left the city alone once the sky began to brighten. Someone had to have breakfast waiting when the high and mighty woke up. Someone had to entertain the nightwatch templars before they went on duty and again when they left their posts. Someone had to sweep the streets, collect the honey jars, kindle the fires; someone had to make breakfast for the entertainers, sweepers, honeymen, and cooks. And since those someones would never be the yellow-robed templars of the night-watch, compromises as old as the curfew itself governed Urik’s dark streets.
Law-abiding folk—the good and honest folk of Urik who greatly outnumbered all others and whom the Lion-King cherished as any herder cherished his passive flock—were wise to shut themselves behind doors with locks, if they could afford them. But the other folk of Urik—the folk who were above the law, beneath its notice, outside it, or whose lives simply could not be lived within its limits—went about their business throughout the night. The templars, in their watchtowers along the city’s outer walls and the inner walls where neighborhood quarters abutted each other, knew them all by type, if not by face. So long as nightwatch palms were liberally greased, those with business could go about it. Urik’s nights were more dangerous than its days, but no less orderly.
Nowhere were the nighttime rituals more regular than in the templar quarter itself, especially the double-walled neighborhood that the high templars called home. Even war bureau templars, each with a wealth of colored threads woven into their yellow sleeves, knew better than to question the comings and goings of their superiors. They challenged no one, least of all the thieves and murderers, who’d undoubtedly been hired by a dignitary with the clout to execute an overly attentive watchman on the spot, no questions asked. And