Pearl’s head turned. ‘But no longer?’

‘I cannot say. I believe, however, that his mission has gone terribly wrong.’

The name slipped from Gamet’s lips unbidden but with a certainty heavy as an anchor-stone: ‘Felisin.’

He saw the wince in Tavore’s face, before she turned away from all three of them to study one of the tapestries.

Pearl seemed far ahead in his thoughts. ‘When was contact lost, Adjunct? And where?’

‘The night of the Uprising,’ she replied, her back to them still. ‘The mining camp called Skullcup. But there had been a ... a loss of control for some weeks before then.’ She gestured at the scroll on the table. ‘Details, potential contacts. Burn the scroll once you have completed reading it, and scatter the ashes in the bay.’ She faced them suddenly. ‘Pearl. Captain Lostara Yil. Find Felisin. Find my sister.’

The roar of the mob rose and fell in the city beyond the estate’s walk. It was the Season of Rot in Unta, and, in the minds of thousands of denizens, that rot was being excised. The dreaded Cull had begun.

Captain Gamet stood by the gatehouse, flanked by three nervous guards. The estate’s torches had been doused, the house behind them dark, its windows shuttered. And within that massive structure huddled the last child of Paran, her parents gone since the arrests earlier that day, her brother lost and presumably dead on a distant continent, her sister — her sister . . . madness had come once again to the empire, with the fury of a tropical storm . . .

Gamet had but twelve guards, and three of those had been hired in the last few days, when the stillness of the air in the streets had whispered to the captain that the horror was imminent. No proclamations had been issued, no imperial edict to fire-lick the commoners’ greed and savagery into life. There were but rumours, racing through the city’s streets, alleys and market rounds like dust-devils. ‘The Empress is displeased.’ ‘Behind the rot of the imperial army’s incompetent command, you will find the face of the nobility.’ ‘The purchase of commissions is a plague threatening the entire empire. Is it any wonder the Empress is displeased?’

A company of Red Blades had arrived from Seven Cities. Cruel killers, incorruptible and far removed from the poison of noble coin. It was not difficult to imagine the reason behind their appearance.

The first wave of arrests had been precise, almost understated. Squads in the dead of night. There had been no skirmishes with house guards, no estates forewarned to purchase time to raise barricades, or even flee the city.

And Gamet thought he knew how such a thing came to pass.

Tavore was now the Adjunct to the Empress. Tavore knew . . . her kind.