the Shambles. No doubt she wanted the job done right.’
The sounds of panic were starting to compete with the roaring of the flames. Shutters were being thrown open across the building, people hanging out amongst spumes of smoke.
‘You think this will work?’
‘Maybe at least they’ll stop banging on about rights for a while. To hear their talk, you’d think that rights were handed to each and every one of them when they were born.’
Someone shrieked, and then a smoking body landed before them with a thud against the cobbles with a thud. More people began to rain down; crack crack crack went the splintering of their legs.
Swan hopped back as a skull spattered its contents out across the street. She stared at the gory mess in fascination.
A baby was crying close by. She spotted it amongst the moving bodies, still wrapped in the arms of its broken mother. For all she knew, it was the same infant she’d seen in the room at the very top.
‘Lucky you,’ Swan said to it as she bent down for a closer inspection. To her brother: ‘They cry so quietly, these children of theirs. Have you noticed?’
‘No,’ he replied amidst the screams and the roaring of the flames. ‘Let’s go.’
She nodded, then left it there bawling; someone else’s problem.
Pedero glanced behind him as he knocked on the heavy door of tiq. His hand was shaking as it fell to his side, and he felt the wetness of his armpits where they had bloomed as stains against his priestly white robes.
In his belly lay a sense of dread so intense he thought he might throw up from it.
Get a grip on yourself, the spypriest commanded, and took a deep breath, and exhaled, and clenched his fists tightly.
He was admitted into the room by an Acolyte in plain clothing. The man frisked him roughly, his gaze sweeping over Pedero’s appearance in displeasure. ‘Wait here,’ he instructed, then walked the length of the large room to where a wooden stall was fitted against the far wall; a house-slave stood next to the open doorway of the stall with a bowl of sponges in his hand.
Pedero tried to calm himself as he waited in front of the heavy desk. The rest of the space was crammed with various boxes of files still waiting to be unpacked, much like his own office in the other wing of the building, following the yearly move of the Élash order to its new anonymous premises. A half-eaten breakfast lay amongst the documents on his superior’s desk. Through a doorway behind the desk, he noticed the heavy travelling chest on the floor of the other room, sealed tight by a leather latch and a wrapping of hairy rope.
‘Make it quick!’ came Alarum’s rough voice from his personal privy. ‘I must leave soon for the harbour.’
Pedero’s head jerked around at the spymaster’s sudden announcement. ‘I have a report for you, sir. I think – I think it best that you read it.’
‘Is that you Pedero?’
‘Yes. Yes it’s me.’
‘Well, can’t it wait?’
Pedero looked down at the report he clutched in his trembling hand. The ink of the small, neat handwriting had smudged in places from the sweat of his fingers. ‘I don’t believe so. It’s from one of our listening posts. Concerning a Diplomat by the name of Ché. I understand he’s accompanying the Holy Matriarch on her campaign.’
A hand emerged from the open doorway.
Pedero sidestepped towards it, stuffed the document into the waiting hand without looking. He bowed his head as he stepped back to a respectable distance, clasping his own hands behind his back.
After some moments: ‘He said this? To his damned house-slave?’
‘Yes, sir.’
A mumble of oaths ensued. Alarum wasn’t normally a bad-tempered man. Since declaring that he was to accompany the Holy Matriarch as her personal intelligence adviser, though, he’d been waspish with everyone around him.
‘The time stamp is dated for last night. Why am I only hearing of this now?’
Pedero coughed for air. ‘There was some confusion,’ he began, wincing, ‘concerning the paperwork.’
‘You mean it’s been sitting on your desk all this time, and you didn’t bother to read it until several moments ago.’
He couldn’t deny it. He’d already tried to think of a way that he might push the blame of his own error downwards, but his mind had been gripped by a greater terror just then – sitting there behind his desk with the report trembling in his hand, his mind in a panic at what it had just