The sky had begun to brighten when I let myself into Cavendish Case – a two-storey flagstone house only a few blocks from the Festhall. My father had bought this place the day I was born, as he never tired of telling me: one of the few topics of conversation between us that didn't dwindle into awkward silence.

I had intended to slip inside quietly, pick up some things I would need for the next few days, then slip out again. Of course, I'd leave my mother a note explaining that I'd be gone for a while… and of course, I wouldn't tell her the truth. Something like, «Urgent commission for the Modron Ambassador – must stay at Mechanus embassy till finished.» That would please her and avoid the unpleasantness of lying to her face…

…except that she was standing in the front hall as I slunk inside.

«And did we make a special friend last night?» she asked sweetly.

«No, Mother.»

«Britlin,» she said, «a gentleman's only civilized excuse for staying out till dawn is if he spent the night with a lady. All other alternatives are dclass.»

«Yes, Mother.»

She gave me a winsome smile – Mother had somehow convinced herself I was accumulating a long string of romantic conquests. The truth was much more restrained: yes, there had been a handful of women (and one or two of those had been quite a handful!) but I was no dashing rake with my head on a different pillow every night. Some Sensates strive for quantity and others for quality; I preferred the second approach.

«And what is the news on the street today?» she asked, a question that came up every morning. I rattled off juicy tidbits of rumor about the high and mighty – who was sleeping with whom, who had gone bankrupt in the latest financial scandal, whose souls had been collected overnight by baatezu calling in contractual obligations – a grab-bag of gossip related to me by TeeMorgan when he brought me breakfast at the Festhall. Mother had never met any of the people I talked about, but she nodded knowingly at each blunder and impropriety. The names were unimportant; she simply loved to hear about folly.

She loved to sing about it too. My mother Anne wasn't exactly a bard – she never played for anyone outside the family – but she wrote witty little songs that were then bought by practicing bards from every ward of Sigil. Although Mother didn't know it, the performers always presented the songs as «classical tunes, written in days long past»… mostly to explain why the verses were written in such courtly language. My mother, in songs as in life, genteelly avoided the slang of the street.

It was a strange occupation for a woman born the daughter of a duke; but then, she had long ago abandoned her heritage, and good riddance to it. Her father Urbin, Duke of Aquilune on some petty Prime world, had been a brutal man, a bully who beat his wife to death and then moved on to his daughter. Anne suffered untold agonies at his hands – untold to me, anyway – but tiny hints over the years suggested Urbin had raped her on numerous occasions, loaned her to his friends for sport, and degraded her in every conceivable way… all of this beginning when she was about eight years old and continuing till the time she turned sixteen.

On the very day of Anne's sixteenth birthday, a young swordsman named Niles Cavendish arrived at Duke Urbin's castle. Bitter though I was at my father for never being home, I could never truly hate him: in the first heroic act of his excessively heroic career, Niles Cavendish had proved himself a saint by saving Anne from her misery. As a child, I believed he had actually killed my wicked grandfather… but the Niles of that day was not such a legendary warrior that he could single-handedly slay a well-guarded duke in the heart of his castle. Niles saved Anne by marrying her, then bringing her back to his hometown of Sigil; and if he won Urbin's permission to wed by holding a rapier to the old berk's throat, neither of my parents would say.

So how does a woman leave behind such a hellish childhood to become a writer of comic songs? One day at a time. It helped that I was born shortly after she arrived in Sigil – taking care of a baby occupied so much of her attention, she had no time for ugly memories. It helped that my father was constantly away adventuring: she could concentrate entirely on her child, without having to coddle a husband too. Sometimes to quiet me, she played the harpsichord my father gave her as a wedding gift; and in time, she began to write little songs to greet him when he finally came home… songs that my father encouraged her to write down, songs that he showed to his bard friends who said they were worth money…

A happy ending, some would say. Some who had never seen the scar down my mother's cheek, made by a drunken uncle who wanted to test a new dagger. Some who had never seen the empty eyesocket that she refused to explain. Some who didn't know that in the thirty-two years she'd lived in Sigil, Anne Cavendish had never stepped outside the house or seen another face besides my father and me. Before I was old enough to do the shopping, delivery boys dropped food into a chute out front and Mother shoved their payment through a slot in the door. Even when she began to sell her songs, she couldn't bear to meet customers – one of Father's friends acted as her agent, picking up sheet music left on the front stoop and sliding the proceeds under the door.

In short, Mother laughed, she told jokes, she was utterly charming… but even I couldn't venture too close without making her flinch.

We blew each other a lot of kisses.

«I should tell you,» I said when I finally ran out of gossip, «I won't be around for a few days. Maybe as long as a week.»

«Good for you, Britlin!» she beamed. «Whoever you met last night must be ravenous for more.»

«It's not a woman, Mother…»

«A man then? I'm broadminded. Is he cute?»

«It's… an assignment. A painting assignment.»

«I see: painting.» She said it with a sly wink, as if she knew that couldn't possibly be the truth.

Sometimes, I had to reflect how lucky I was my mother never got out of the house. Otherwise, she'd bring home a different woman to meet me every night, desperately wanting her son to be showered with constant, all-consuming adoration. I was her substitute, a stand-in who might find the kind of passion she dreamed of: not Duke Urbin's bestial lust; not my own father's heroic pity; «a soul-completing love, a mutual cherishment to make weak hearts brave.»

That last bit was from one of her songs.

«I have to pack some things,» I told her.

«By all means,» she replied. «A gentleman always takes appropriate precautions.»

I laughed and shook my head. Some days, my mother had an unshakably one-track mind. As I began to climb the stairs, she called after me, «Wear the brown jacket, dear, and those nice black pants. They make you look so handsome, your lady will peel off your clothes with her teeth.»

When I returned to the Festhall, I was wearing my father's best rapier, and carrying a sketchbook to while away my off-hours for the next few days. Just inside the door, a factotum gave me a note from Lillian (every word a different color), saying I could find Hezekiah in an inn called She Who Sings the Sky. The place was just down Crystal Dew Lane and it had a good reputation – more expensive than most but the price bought you a good night's sleep without interruption by cracksmen or body-baggers. The next time I saw Lillian I'd have to congratulate her for ensuring the boy's safety.

By the time I got to the inn, Hezekiah was awake and seated at the breakfast table, munching through a stack of Outland pancakes as tall as the Great Foundry's chimney. For a moment I worried he might have spilled some secrets to the other patrons eating there; but the long-suffering woman cooking the pancakes said he had talked about nothing but Lillian and the Festhall.