"The doors to the chamber were neither locked nor guarded," the Doctor pointed out. 'Unoure may have been on any sort of errand and come back to find his master killed. As for-"

Doctor Skelim shook his head and held up one hand towards the Doctor. "These womanly fancies and this unhealthy attraction to mutilation may represent a form of sickness in the mind on your part, madam, but they have little to do with the business of apprehending the culprit and getting the truth out of him."

"The doctor is right," Polchiek told the Doctor. "It is clear that you know your way around a corpse, madam, but you must accept that I know mine around an act of villainy. Running is invariably a sign of guilt, I have found."

"Unoure may simply have been frightened," the Doctor said. "He did not appear to be possessed of a great amount of wit. He may simply have panicked, not thinking that running away was the most suspicious thing he could have done."

"Well, we shall shortly apprehend him," Polchiek said with an air of finality. "And Ralinge here will find out the truth."

When the Doctor spoke it was with a degree of venom I think all of us found surprising. "Will he, indeed," she said.

Ralinge smiled broadly at the Doctor. Polchiek's scarred face took on a look of some grimness. "Yes, madam, he will," he told her. He flapped one hand at the corpse still lying between us. "This has all been most diverting, I'm sure, but on the next occasion you wish to impress some of your betters with your macabre knowledge of human anatomy I would ask you not to include those of us with better things to do, and certainly not me. Good day."

Polchiek turned and left, ducking under the doorway and acknowledging the salute of a guard. The scribe who had been sick looked up hesitantly from his incomplete notes and appeared uncertain what to do next.

"I agree," Doctor Skelim said with a note of relish in his voice as he brought his small face up towards the Doctor's. "You might have bewitched our good King for now, madam, but you do not. deceive me. If you have any regard for your own safety, you will request leave to depart from us as quickly as possible and return to whatever decadent regime raised you. Good day."

The grey-faced scribe hesitated again, watching the Doctor's impassive face as Skelim swept smartly out of the chamber, head held high. Then the scribe muttered something to the still smiling Ralinge, closed his slatebook with a snap and followed the small doctor.

"They don't like you," Duke Quettil's chief torturer said to the Doctor. His smile broadened still further. "I like you."

The Doctor looked across the slab at him for a few moments, then held up her hands and said, "Oelph. A wet towel, if you please."

I ran and fetched a pitcher of water from a bench, picked a towel from the Doctor's bag and soaked it, then watched her as she washed her hands, not taking her gaze off the small, round man across the slab from her. I handed her a dry towel. She dried her hands.

Ralinge kept on smiling. "You might think you hate what I am, lady doctor," he said softly. His voice sounded distorted by his grisly collection of teeth. "But I know how to give pleasure as well as pain."

The Doctor handed me the towel and said, "Let us go, Oelph." She nodded at Ralinge and then we walked towards the door.

"And pain can be pleasure, too," Ralinge called after us. I felt my scalp crawl and the urge to be sick returned. The Doctor did not react at all.

"It's just a cold, sir."

"Ha. Just a cold. I've known people die from colds."

"Indeed, sir, but you should not. How is your ankle today? Let's take a look at it, shall we?"

"I believe it is getting better. Will you change the dressing?"

"Of course. Oelph, would you…?"

I took the dressing and a few instruments from the Doctor's bag and arranged them on a cloth on the King's huge bed. We were in the King's private chamber, the day after Nolieti's murder.

The King's apartments at Yvenir are arranged within a splendid domed cupola set high at the rear of the palace, upon what is the roof to the main part of the great building. The gold-leaf-covered dome is set back from the terraced edge of the roof and separated from it by a small formal garden. As the roof level is just above the height of the tallest trees on the ridge behind, marking the summit of the hills on this side of the valley, the view from the northfacing windows which bring light into the most spacious and airy apartments is of nothing but sky beyond the clipped geometrical perfections of the gardens and the white tusk balustrade at their edge. This lends the apartments a strange, enchanted air of detachment from the real world. I dare say the clear mountain air contributes to this effect of isolated purity, but there is something most especially about that lack of sight of the mundane disorder of the landscape of men which gives the place its singular spirit.

"Will I be well enough for the ball at the next small moon?" the King asked the Doctor as he watched her prepare the new dressing for his ankle. In truth the old dressing looked spotless, as the King had taken to his bed with a tingly throat and sneezing fits shortly after the news of Nolieti's demise had been communicated to us in the Hidden Gardens the day before.

"I should imagine you will be able to attend, sir," the Doctor said. "But do try not to sneeze over everybody."

"I am the King, Vosill," the King told her, sniffing into a fresh handkerchief. "I shall sneeze over whom I please."

"Then you will spread the ill humour to others, they will incubate it while you grow well again, they will perhaps subsequently inadvertently sneeze in your presence and consequently reinfect you, who will play host to it again while they recover, and so on."

"Don't lecture me, Doctor. I'm in no mood for it." The King looked round at the slumped pile of pillows propping him up, opened his mouth to call a servant but then started to sneeze, his blond locks bouncing as his head went back and forth. The Doctor stood up from her chair and, while he was still sneezing, pulled the King upright and rearranged his pillows. The King looked at her in some surprise.

"You are stronger than you look, are you not, Doctor?"

"Yes, sir," the Doctor said with a modest smile as she went back to undoing the dressing on the King's ankle. "And yet still weaker than I would be." She was dressed as she had been the day before. Her long red hair was more carefully prepared than was usual, combed and plaited and hanging down her long dark jacket almost to her slim waist. She looked at me and I became aware that I was staring. I looked down at my feet.

Poking out from under the great bed's valance was a corner of cream-coloured clothing that looked oddly familiar. I wondered at this for a moment or two until, with a pang of jealousy for the right of Kings, I realised it was part of a shepherdess's costume. I pushed it further under the valance with my shoe.

The King settled himself back amongst his pillows. "What is the news on that boy who ran away? The one who killed my chief questioner?"

"They caught him this morning," the Doctor said, busying herself with the old dressing. "However, I do not think he committed the murder."

"Really?" the King said.

Personally, Master, I did not think he sounded as if he particularly cared one way or the other what the Doctor thought on this matter, but this was the cue for the Doctor to explain in some detail — especially to a man, however exalted, who had a cold and had just eaten a light breakfast — exactly why she had convinced herself that Unoure had not killed Nolieti. I have to say that the consensus amongst the other apprentices, assistants and pages, arrived at in the kitchen parlour of the palace the previous evening, was that the only perplexing aspect about the whole business was how Unoure had been able to put off the dark decd fox so long.