But first things first. Having made contact with the Seraphic and given him reason to know he was being watched, he could turn his attention to more important things. Let Skeal Eile believe the demon was only interested in the black staff. Let him believe he could manipulate and deceive with impunity. He would learn the truth quickly enough.

The ragpicker was a harsh taskmaster.

He worked his way through the sleeping village to the council hall, intent on paying a visit next to the Drouj prisoner locked away in the building’s basement storeroom.

It took him only minutes to reach his destination. Once there, he stood in the shadows, hidden from prying eyes, searching for the guards on duty. There would be two, he had learned—one keeping watch from without and one stationed at the door to the makeshift prison in the basement. A double measure of protection, it was said, against any sort of escape attempt.

When he was satisfied there was no one in the building save the guards and their prisoner, the ragpicker detached himself from the shadows and walked to the main entrance. The first guard was sitting in the shadows against the veranda wall. He waited until the ragpicker had started to climb the steps before calling out to him to stop. The old man gestured vaguely, muttered something about his weary bones, and continued on until he had reached the top riser. He stopped there, stretching his arms and muttering on aimlessly.

When the guard walked over to escort him back down again, the ragpicker seized the man by the front of his tunic and cut his throat with a single swipe of his hunting knife.

Dragging the man inside, the ragpicker left him slumped in a corner of the room, bleeding out his life. It would have been quicker and less messy simply to crush his windpipe and leave him to strangle, but that form of killing wouldn’t have suited his purposes in this business.

The ragpicker walked through the hall to the basement stairway and started down the steps. A voice called out to him—the other guard presumably—but he made no response. The second guard met him at the bottom of the stairs and had only just started to ask him his business when the ragpicker swiped his blade across this man’s throat, too.

Amateurs, he thought.

Without bothering to move the body, the ragpicker reached down to extract the storeroom keys, stepped carefully around the spreading pools of blood, and walked over to the storeroom door. Two tries with two different keys and he heard the lock give and pulled open the door.

The prisoner was chained to a wall ring in the far corner, sitting on a pallet and looking at him through the gloom. His face, like chiseled wood, was blank and expressionless, but there was a cunning in the gleam of his eyes as he studied this newcomer.