Londer looked as if he was going to have a fit right there and then, and Skif thought he might have hit gold—but it turned out that Londer had just gotten rough with one of his paid women, and he thought that Skif was her brother. Not but that Skif was averse to seeing him terrified over it, but that wasn’t the street he wanted to hound his uncle down.

So he quickly established that the apocryphal sister was one of the children snatched off the streets, and the interview continued on that basis.

Skif must have looked and sounded twice as intimidating as he thought, because Londer was reduced in very short order to a blubbering mound of terror and tears. Skif would have been very glad to have the Heraldic Truth Spell at his disposal, but he figured that fear was getting almost as much truth out of Londer as the Spell would have.

Unfortunately, there was very little to get. Londer knew some of what was going on, as Skif had thought; he knew some of the men who were doing the actual snatches, what their method was for picking a victim, how they managed it without raising too much fuss, and where they went with the victims afterward. Which, as Skif had guessed, was one of Londer’s own warehouses. But who the real powers behind the snatches were, he had no idea; his knowledge was all at street level. Even the warehouse had been hired by a go-between.

Which was disgusting enough. Londer whimpered and carried on, literally sweating buckets, trying to make out that the poor younglings grabbed by the gang were better off than they’d be on the street. Sheltered and fed, maybe, but better off? If they were incredibly lucky and not at all attractive, they’d find themselves working from dawn to dusk at some skinflint’s farm, or knotting rugs, sewing shirts, making rope, or any one of a hundred tasks that needed hands but not much strength.

If they were pretty—well, that was something Skif didn’t want to think about too hard. There had been a child-brothel four streets over from the Hollybush that had been shut down when he was still with Bazie—there were things that even the denizens of Exile’s Gate wouldn’t put up with—but where there was one, there were probably more. The only reason why this one had been uncovered was because someone had been careless, or someone had snitched.

But by far and away the single most important piece of information that Skif got was that the man who was in charge of the entire ring always came to inspect the children when they were brought to the warehouse. It seemed he didn’t trust the judgment of his underlings. If there was ever to be a time to catch him, that would be it.