Two men stood in the rain out in front of the Hanged Man, backs pressed against the windowless walls. They hung close enough to either side of the entrance for Temper to hear the droplets pattering off their leather cloaks. He’d felt their eyes on him as he approached. Now near they ignored him.

‘Bastard night for a watch,’ Temper grinned to the one on the right.

The man’s eyes flickered to him, looking him up and down, then squinted back into the rain. ‘We’re waiting on a friend.’

Temper paused at the steps down to the front entrance. Everyone knew the Hanged Man was a veteran’s bar, so there was little need for these two to pretend they weren’t keeping an eye out for friends inside. He almost called them on it but didn’t; they looked new. Maybe they just didn’t know the drill. Feeling old, he thumped down the steps.

Coop’s Inn was the other oldest building in the town of Malaz, or so Coop avowed. True or not, the building did stand much lower than the street, and its outer walls were large hand-hewn limestone blocks – the same sort as lay in nameless ruins all over the island. The inn’s common room was so far beneath street level that the steep stairwell leading to it was eerily like a ship’s companionway down to the lowest hold. Rainwater had poured down the worn steps and pooled at the threshold. Temper’s cloak dripped into the puddle as he shook the moisture from his head. He took hold of the oak door’s iron handle and, with the other hand, reached up to the chiselled scars that crossed as faintly as spider’s webbing along the low lintel. He believed everyone had their own personal superstitions, soldiers and sailors more than most. This was one of his. He thought of it as an acknowledgement of the forgotten folk who’d raised the stones in the first place. A sort of blessing – given or received, he wasn’t sure – and as a gesture towards his own continued safety. After all, he did live upstairs. Or rather he lived at ground level. His arrow-slit of a window stood barely an arm’s span above a rat-run between the inn and Seal’s whitewashed brick and timber house behind.

The Hanged Man’s common room was large and wide, the ceiling beams low enough to touch or, if one weren’t attentive, seriously damage one’s head on. They’d brought more than one drunk’s evening to an abrupt and painful end. Fat stone pillars stood in a double row down the chamber’s centre as if marking a path from the entrance to the crackling, rowboat-sized fireplace directly opposite. Long oak tables stretched to either side of this central walk, shadowed in differing distance to the fire. The stone walls were stark, unrelieved but for the occasional miniature vaulted recess, each now dimly illumined by a lamp. Most of the room’s light, however, came from bronze oil lanterns hung from crusted iron hooks set deep into the pillars and the walls. The huge fireplace lit the far end of the room with flickering amber light, dispelling the chill air of the chamber and adding, sullenly, to the illumination.