Chel looked beyond the walls, at the distant hill that rose behind the dark block of the city, wreathed in swirls of morning mist and the shimmer of the city’s emissions. Through the haze, he picked out tiered stockade walls and terraced gardens, dotted with domed buildings, grander structures at the hill’s summit lost in low cloud. It seemed both part of the city and apart from it, overlooking it and distinct in appearance and construction … overseeing it.

‘And what do you think?’ he said.

‘I think our options are sorely fucking limited. There are three other townships on the list after this place, all smaller, all colder, and I don’t know a bastard in any of them.’

‘How do we get in? The gate guards take a pretty friendly interest in the passing traffic.’ He watched as one of the mailed heavies at the gate emptied out a trader’s hand-cart and kicked the contents through the frozen slush of the roadway. Beyond them, a group of robe-clad pilgrims of some kind were remonstrating with another guard as he pored over what seemed to be a blackened tree trunk lashed to a donkey cart.

‘Don’t fret, little man, there’s a system. The right words in the right ears, a greasing of palms, a little light off-market commerce and we’ll be through with no questions asked.’

Chel’s mouth pulled to one side in an expression of wry scepticism. ‘You sound like Lemon. Does that mean you don’t know what you’re doing?’

Rennic bristled. ‘Get fucked. See that cluster of huts over there, round the wall? We go there, ask for a specific name, exchange some of our remaining coin for a little leaf, do the handshake on the guards at the gate and gambol through like lambs. Understand?’

‘We bribe the guards with leaf? Why not just give them the coin?’

Rennic shook his head, a little light in his eyes. ‘Bribing an agent of the city is a capital offence, little man. But if they were to discover contraband and confiscate it in performance of their duties, well, they’d simply be doing their job, wouldn’t they?’

Chel groaned. ‘And I suppose the leaf makes its way back to the folk in the huts in fairly short order, ready for another go-around?’

Rennic cuffed his shoulder. ‘Count yourself lucky, little man. If the stuff were fresh, we could be strung from the battlements for bumping the wrong person. The City Wards come down pretty hard on anyone engaging in the medicinal trade within the walls.’

‘The who?’