The streets lay barren, for dawn was approaching. Aside from the city guards and a few nursing mothers, the only ones who had reason to be up so late of the night were the King’s bakers, who at that very moment were drawing the foam off the King’s ale and mixing it with their dough so that the loaves would rise by dawn. True, the eels were running on their annual migration in the River Wye, so one might imagine a few fishermen to be out by night, but the fishermen had emptied their wicker eel traps an hour past midnight and had delivered kegs of live eels to the butcher for skinning and salting well before the second watch.

Outside the city walls, the greens south of Castle Sylvarresta were dotted with dark pavilions, for caravans from Indhopal had come north to sell the harvest of summer spices. The camps outside the castle were quiet but for the occasional braying of a donkey.

The walls of the city were shut, and all foreigners had been escorted from the merchants’ quarter hours ago. No men moved on the streets at that time of night—only a few ferrin.

Thus there was no one to see what transpired in a dark alley. Even the King’s far-seer, who had endowments of sight from seven people and stood guard on the old graak’s aerie above the Dedicates’ Keep, could not have spotted movement down in the narrow streets of the merchants’ quarter.

But in Cat’s Alley, just off the Butterwalk, two men struggled in the shadows for control of a knife.

Could you have seen them, you might have been reminded of tarantulas in battle: arms and legs twisting in frenzy as the knife flashed upward, scuffling as feet groped for purchase on the worn cobblestones, both men grunting and straining with deadly intent.

Both men were dressed in black. Sergeant Dreys of the King’s Guard wore black livery embroidered with the silver boar of House Sylvarresta. Dreys’ assailant wore a baggy black cotton burnoose in a style favored by assassins out of Muyyatin.

Though Sergeant Dreys outweighed the assassin by fifty pounds, and though Dreys had endowments of brawn from three men and could easily lift six hundred pounds over his head, he feared he could not win this battle.

Only starlight lit the street, and precious little of that made its way here into Cat’s Alley. The alley was barely seven feet wide, and homes here stood three stories tall, leaning on sagging foundations till the awnings of their roofs nearly met a few yards above Dreys’ head.