• • •

I came back to consciousness lying horizontal once again, and hurting in so many places that I missed out the blissful ignorance stage and went directly into the asking of stupid questions.

“Where am I?” Nasal and hesitant.

The bright but flickering light and the faint unnatural whine helped me to remember. Somewhere with Builder-globes. I made to sit up and found myself tied to a table. “Help!” A little louder. Panicked, I tested my strength against the ropes and found no give in them. “Help!”

“Best save your breath!” The voice came from the shadows by the door. I squinted. A thickset ruffian leaned against the wall, looking back at me.

“I’m Prince Jalan! I’ll have your fucking head for this! Untie these ropes.”

“Yeah, that’s not going to happen.” He leaned forwards, chewing something, the flickering light gleaming on his baldness.

“I’m Prince Jalan! Don’t you recognize me?”

“Like I know what the princes look like. I don’t even know the princes’ names! Far as I’m concerned you’re some toff who got juiced up and went swimming in a sewer. Just your bad luck to end up here. Horace, though, he did seem to know you from somewhere. Told me to keep you here and off he went. ‘Keep an eye on that one, Daveet,’ he said. ‘Keep a good watch.’ You must be some kind of important or you’d be floating down the river by now with your throat cut.”

“Kill me and my grandmother will raze this quarter to the ground.” A blatant lie, but, spoken with conviction, it made me feel better. “I’m a rich man. Let me go and I’ll see you’re fixed up for life.” I’ll admit I have a gift for lying. I sound least convincing when I tell the truth.

“Money’s nice an’ all,” the man said. He took a step away from the wall and let the flickers illuminate the brutality of his face. “But if I let you go without Horace’s say-so then I wouldn’t have no fingers to count it all with. And if it turned out you really were a prince and we let you go without the boss’s say-so, well me and Horace would think having our fingers taken was the easy part.” He bared his teeth at me—more gaps than teeth, truth be told—and settled back into the shadow.

I lay back, moaning from time to time, and asking questions that he ignored. At least the strange compulsion that had me running headlong into this mess in the first place had now faded. I still had that sense of direction, but the need to pursue it had lessened and I felt more my old self. Which in this instance meant terrified. Even in my terror, though, I noticed that the direction that nagged at me was changing, swinging round, the urge to pursue it growing more faint by the minute.

I drew a deep breath and took stock of my surroundings. A smallish room, not one of those long galleries. They’d been growing plants there? That made no sense. No plants in here, though. The broken light probably meant it wasn’t suitable. Just a table and me tied to it.