A stooped man came through the door. He was tonsured, suggesting that he might be a cleric of some kind, and he moved with a curious motion, like a bobbing bird. He went straight to the central table and, taking something out from under his shirt, laid it in front of Le Sourd.

Le Sourd picked it up and examined it carefully. It was a pendant on a golden chain.

“Unusual,” said Le Sourd. He passed it across to the man who looked like a scholar. The scholar inspected it, remarked that it wasn’t from Paris and gave it back. Le Sourd turned to the stooping man: “We’ll have to find out what it’s worth. You’ll get your share.”

Those were the rules of Le Sourd’s kingdom. Whatever was stolen was brought to him. He found the market and gave the thief a share. Once or twice men had tried to bypass the system. One was found with his throat slit. Another disappeared.

The stooping man moved to the back of the room to join some of his fellows. Jean Le Sourd resumed his conversation with the scholar. And several minutes passed before the door of the tavern opened again.

This time however, as the newcomer entered, the buzz of conversation died down to a hush.

He was a young man. Twenty years old, perhaps. He had fair hair and blue eyes. He was wearing a short cloak and a sword that immediately proclaimed he was a noble. And the fact that he had entered such a place alone told everyone that he did not know Paris.

It might be dangerous to kill a noble, but the inhabitants of that quarter were no respecters of persons. One of the men nearest the door quietly rose, with a knife in his hand, and stood behind the visitor, awaiting a signal from Le Sourd.

At the same time, the stooping man at the back of the room shifted position slightly, so that he was in the shadows. But he spoke a word to his neighbor, who walked over to Le Sourd and whispered something in his ear.

Le Sourd looked at the intruder thoughtfully, while everyone waited. They all knew what the young man did not: that his chances of leaving the Rising Sun alive were not good. Not good at all.

Guy de Cygne was in Paris for only a week, and this was his second day. His parents had made him come and, from the moment he came through the Porte Saint-Jacques, he couldn’t wait to leave.

For Paris was rotten. It had been rotten a century ago when the Black Death came and killed nearly half its people. It was even more rotten now.

Worse, despite plague, famine and war, like a pestiferous plant, Paris had grown. On the Right Bank, they had built a new fortification line, hundreds of yards beyond the old wall of Philip Augustus, so that the Louvre was now well inside the city gates, and the former Temple too. Country lanes had turned into narrow streets, orchards into tenements, streams into open sewers. And two hundred thousand souls now dwelt in this dark, godforsaken city.