North to where streets widened. The Piazza della Settimana di Polvere was a trimmed garden of fox-rose and tall stones, looked on by the stuccowork bay windows of Nigh Sump. Ori did not like it here. He had grown up in Dog Fenn. Not the gang-jungle of Badside, not so bad as that, but the child Ori had run through rookeries of buildings reshaped by the ingenuity of the poor, over planks looking down on washing and outhouses. He had scavenged pennies and stivers from roadside dirt, squabbled and learned sex and the fast-spat performative slang of the Dog Fenn Dozens. Ori did not understand the geography of Nigh Sump and the uptown parts. He did not understand where children here would run. The austere houses cowed him, and he hated them for it.

He felt cocky challenge at the glances from the well-dressed locals. Night was coming. Ori fingered his weapons.

At the junction he saw his contacts. Old Shoulder and the others did not acknowledge him, but they walked at the same pace under the willows that softened each corner and on to Crosshatch Avenue.

It was one of the city’s prettiest places. Shops and houses pillared, studded with fossils in the old Os Tumulus style. They were fronted for a stretch by the famous glasheim, a facade of stained glass centuries old whose designs ranged across the divides of the buildings. Guards protected it, and no carts could pass over the cobblestones outside it and risk shards. Once, Ori had suggested trying to break it, as a provocation, but even Toro’s crew had seemed shocked. They were not here for that. Old Shoulder slouched toward an office.

And then the careful ballet that they had walked through so many times in the deserted warehouse: two steps, one two, Ori was by the door, and bumping, three four, into the woman Catlina; they shuffled as rehearsed; Ori tripped; Marcus slipped into the office with Shoulder as Ori and Catlina yelled, decoying.

Elyctro-barometric lights were spitting all around them, making the glasheim incandesce and staining Ori and Catlina ghost colours. They abused each other, and he watched the door over her shoulder, ready to call her dog, the signal for her to draw attention with screams should anyone seem ready to look inside the office where their comrades were. They must be interrogating their quarry. Who’ve you sold out? Shoulder would be saying.

The glasheim guards approached but did not look anywhere but at him and Catlina. The shopkeepers watched wary and amused, and the uptown shoppers stared from café fronts. Ori was astonished. Didn’t they know that things were happening? How did Nigh Sump shield itself?

Soon-and the thought was uncomfortable though he strained for ruthlessness-soon Old Shoulder would kill the informant. He would do it quickly, then stab his deadness with a double-horned cestus that left marks like a bull’s gore.