Or perhaps not; to a slum-dwelling bullyboy, his sword was his life, and many of them bore weapons of superior make. A blade that bent or snapped, or wouldn’t hold an edge, wasn’t the sort of tool to risk your life on. Alberich was supposed to be that sort of sell-sword, a man whose blade went to the man with the price of it, with no questions asked on either side.

In the absence of his informant, Alberich was going to have to pretend he was here for the same reason as everyone else; to get drunk. He would probably have to use this tavern again, and he definitely needed to keep in character; he didn’t dare break this carefully constructed persona. It had taken too long to build.

Most of the beer was going to hit the floor, though. Like many of the patrons here, he had his own mug, a leather-jack, tarred on the inside to make it waterproof and kept tied to his waist when not in use. Only, unlike theirs, his had a hole in the bottom; he seldom took an actual sip when the mug went to his lips. He relied on the slow but steady leak and the crack in the table he sat at to conceal where the rest of it got to. No one in this place was going to notice beer on the floor under the layer of rushes that hadn’t been changed for a year or more. Only when his mouth dried or he needed something to wash the stench of the place from his tongue did he actually drink. The beer, stale and flat, was still preferable to the taste left behind in breathing the miasma of this miserable tavern.

Impatience made his head throb, and he forced himself to look bored instead of pained. He was wondering just how many more mugs of the noxious stuff he’d have to down before he pretended to stagger out, when the street outside erupted into what sounded like a riot.

Shouts—screams! His heart rose into his throat, and his pulse hammered in his ears as every nerve in his body reacted to the alarm.

He—and virtually everyone else in the tavern—jumped to their feet and ran for the door. He wasn’t slow to react, but there were still plenty of people who were between him and it. He ran right into a wall of jostling bodies.

He told himself that this was a good diversion to get out and back to the Collegium, but he couldn’t help himself. The noise out there was of panic and fear, and he had to respond. For the rest, of course, any disturbance held a potential for profit. . . .