The informant had never showed his face, which didn’t really surprise Alberich. He’d never reckoned the odds to be better than even at best. The man might have gotten cold feet; or he might even be entirely cold at this point—cold and dead. If so, it was fifty-fifty whether Alberich would ever find out what had happened to him. Bodies didn’t always turn up. Even when the river was frozen over, there were plenty of ways in which a corpse could vanish without a trace. The people Alberich suspected of intrigue against the Queen were powerful, and had a very great deal to lose if they were unmasked. They had the ways and means to insure that more than one petty informant vanished without a trace if they cared to make it so.

The Herald sipped his stale beer, and watched the rest of the customers from beneath lowered eyelids. In the back of his mind, he felt his Companion fretting at the situation, and soothed him wordlessly. He knew that no one was going to recognize him, no matter what Kantor thought. Alberich did not stand out in this crowd of ne’er-do-wells, pickpockets, and petty thieves.

He probably wouldn’t had he not bothered to disguise himself; he never would wear the traditional uniform of Herald’s Whites even when presiding over the classes of Heraldic Trainees in his capacity as the Collegium Weaponsmaster, preferring instead a leather uniform of a slightly darker gray than the color used by the Trainees.

Herald’s Whites—let those with fewer sins on their souls wear the Whites. He’d have worn black, if the Queen hadn’t expressly forbidden it.

“Bad enough that you look like a storm cloud,” she’d told him. “I won’t have them calling you ‘Herald Death.’ You stand out quite enough as it is from the rest of the Heraldic Circle.” He didn’t point out to her that they might as well call him “Herald Death,” that his business was Death, the ways and means of dealing it out. He simply bowed and let her have her way. She was the Queen, after all.

But at the moment, he was not on official duty, and he wore nothing like a uniform; his clothing was as drably no-colored, as tattered and patched as that of any man around him. His unfashionably short hair was concealed beneath an ancient knitted cap of indeterminate shape and origin. Only his sword and knives—themselves both disguised beneath plain, worn leather sheaths—would have told a different story about him.