“Yes, I know.”

“We can’t let them find him. There’s a sick irony in the Monks’ existence, because their reasons are so justified. Nobody wants magic back in the hands of the Mages, if they’re even still alive. But madness informs the Monks’ methods, and all they can do is destroy. There’s no reasoning in them. This lad sounds more innocent than any of us.”

“They won’t know he has an uncle here. They won’t know where he lives.”

“Don’t you believe it. They have their ways, their methods. Come on, show me where you took him.”

A’Meer shut the door on her rooms without once looking back.

At this early hour the streets outside were quiet. A few drunks lay in the gutters or huddled in doorways, and there may have been more in other places hidden by darkness. The life moon was hidden by clouds, the death moon pale, and the only light in the streets came from weak oil lamps in windows and on hooks outside taverns and drug dens. There were a handful of people walking the streets, because in a town like Pavisse there is plenty of business carried out only at night. Some of them walked past Kosar and A’Meer without looking up, while others, perhaps catching sight of A’Meer in the ghostly light, hurried on or changed direction altogether.

Kosar saw shapes flitting through shadows without traversing the lit spaces in between. Wraiths. They were there in the daytime too, but sunlight negated them.

At the junction of two streets there was a band of militia smoking fledge pipes. They were muttering to one another, moving on the spot to keep warm. There were six of them, the dregs of law-keeping in Pavisse, many of them more criminal than some of those they sought to catch. Kosar knew that these men ran protection rackets, whoring houses and drug circles, and although they provided something of a ceiling above which crime was not allowed to stretch, it was a sad irony that they initiated much of it. They would have questions for the two of them, especially A’Meer. Fighters and mercenaries were not wholly uncommon, although their existence was grudgingly accepted rather than welcomed. But a fighter moving through the streets by night . . . yes, they would have questions.

Kosar and A’Meer backtracked and found an alternate route around the militia. It meant crossing the river, but they stole a small rowing boat and paddled over silently, the water tarry across the bow. The river smelled much fresher by night than it did in the day, as if darkness could bleed it of refuse, shit and the stink of animal corpses thrown in from sheebok farms up in the mountains. Unseen things made splashes but nothing troubled them, and they reached the far shore in a few minutes.