Morveer peered down. His trouser-leg had caught upon a spike bent upwards well above the others, and torn almost as far as his rump. He thrashed his foot, trying to untangle it, but only succeeded in entrapping it more thoroughly.

“Damn it.” Plainly, this had not been part of the plan. Faint smoke was curling now from the balustrade around which the rope was knotted. It appeared the acid was acting more swiftly than anticipated.

“Damn it.” He swung himself back to the roof of the bank and perched beside the smoking knot, gripping the rope with one hand. He slid his scalpel from an inside pocket, reached forwards and cut the flapping cloth away from the spike with a few deft strokes. One, two, three and it was almost done, neat as a surgeon. The final stroke and—

“Ah!” He realised with annoyance, then mounting horror, that he had nicked his ankle with the blade. “Damn it!” The edge was tainted with Larync tincture and, since the stuff had always given him a swell of nausea in the mornings, he had allowed his resistance to it to fade. It would not be fatal. Not of itself. But it might cause him to drop off a rope, and he had developed no immunity to a flailing plunge onto hard, hard cobblestones. The irony was bitter indeed. Most practitioners of his profession were killed, after all, by their own agents.

He pulled one glove off with his teeth and fumbled through his many pockets for that particular antidote, gurgling curses around the leather, swaying this way and that as the chill wind gusted up and spread gooseflesh all the way down his bare leg. Tiny tubes of glass rattled against his fingertips, each one etched with a mark that enabled him to identify it by touch.

Under the circumstances, though, the operation was still a testing one. He burped and felt a rush of nausea, a sudden painful shifting in his stomach. His fingers found the right mark. He let the glove fall from his mouth, pulled the phial from his coat with a trembling hand, dragged the cork out with his teeth and sucked up the contents.

He gagged on the bitter extract, spluttered sour spit down onto the faraway cobbles. He clung tight to the rope, fighting dizziness, the black street seeming to tip round and round him. He was a child again, and helpless. He gasped, whimpered, clung on with both hands. As desperately as he had clung to his mother’s corpse when they came to take him.

Slowly the antidote had its effect. The dark world steadied, his stomach ceased its mad churning. The lane was beneath him, the sky above, back in their customary positions. His attention was drawn sharply to the knots again, smoking more than ever now and making a slight hissing sound. He could distinctly smell the acrid odour as they burned through.

“Damn it!” He hooked both legs over the rope and set off, pitifully weak from the self-administered dose of Larync. The air hissed in his throat, tightened now by the unmistakable grip of fear. If the cord burned through before he reached the other side, what then? His guts cramped up and he had to pause for a moment, teeth gritted, wobbling up and down in empty air.