By one o’ the clock, no one was left in the public rooms of Mayor’s House except for a quartet of cleaning women, who performed their chores silently (and nervously) beneath the eye of Eldred Jonas. When one of them looked up and saw him gone from the window-seat where he had been sitting and smoking, she murmured softly to her friends, and they all loosened up a little. But there was no singing, no laughter. Il spectro, the man with the blue coffin on his hand, might only have stepped back into the shadows. He might still be watching.

By two o’ the clock, even the cleaning women were gone. It was an hour at which a party in Gilead would just have been reaching its apogee of glitter and gossip, but Gilead was far away, not just in another Barony but almost in another world. This was the Outer Arc, and in the Outers, even gentry went to bed early.

There was no gentry on view at the Travellers’ Rest, however, and beneath the all-encompassing gaze of The Romp, the night was still fairly young.

2

At one end of the saloon, fishermen still wearing their rolled-down boots drank and played Watch Me for small stakes. To their right was a poker table; to their left, a knot of yelling, exhorting men—cowpokes, mostly—stood along Satan’s Alley, watching the dice bounce down the velvet incline. At the room’s other end, Sheb McCurdy was pounding out jagged boogie, right hand flying, left hand pumping, the sweat pouring down his neck and pale cheeks. Beside and above him, standing drunk on a stool, Pettie the Trotter shook her enormous bottom and bawled out the words to the song at the top of her voice: “Come on over, baby, we got chicken in the barn, what barn, whose barn, my barn! Come on over, baby, baby got the bull by the horns...”

Sheemie stopped beside the piano, the camel bucket in one hand, grinning up at her and attempting to sing along. Pettie swatted him on his way, never missing a word, bump, or grind, and Sheemie went with his peculiar laugh, which was shrill but somehow not unpleasant.

A game of darts was in progress; in a booth near the back, a whore who styled herself Countess Jillian of Up’ard Killian (exiled royalty from distant Garlan, my dears, oh how special we are) was managing to give two handjobs at the same time while smoking a pipe. And at the bar, a whole line of assorted toughs, drifters, cowpunchers, drovers, drivers, carters, wheelwrights, stagies, carpenters, conmen, stockmen, boatmen, and gunmen drank beneath The Romp’s double head.