A drizzle was pattering softly around them as they walked out through Vel Virazzo's north gate a few hours later. Sunrise was a watery line of yellow on the eastern horizon, under scudding charcoal clouds. Purple-jacketed soldiers stared down in revulsion from atop the city's fifteen-foot wall; the heavy wooden door of the small sally-port slammed shut behind them as though it too was glad to be rid of them.

Locke and Jean were both dressed in tattered cloaks and wrapped in bandage-like fragments from a dozen torn-up sheets and pieces of clothing. A thin coating of boiled apple mash, still warm, soaked through some of the "bandages" on their arms and chests, and was plastered liberally over their faces. Sloshing around wearing a layer of the stuff under cloth was disgusting, but there was no better disguise to be had in all the world.

Slipskin was a painful, incurable disease, and those afflicted with it were even less tolerated than lepers. Had Locke and Jean approached from outside Vel Virazzo's walls, they never would have been let in. As it was, the guards had no interest in how thed'r entered the city in the first place; thed'r nearly stumbled over themselves in their haste to see them gone.

The outer city was an unhappy-looking place: a few blocks of crumbling one— and two-storey buildings, decorated here and there with the makeshift windmill-towers favoured in those parts for driving bellows over forges and ovens. Smoke sketched a few curling grey lines in the wet air overhead, and thunder rumbled in the distance. Beyond the city, where the cobbles of the old Therin Throne Road became a wet dirt track, Locke could see scrubland, interrupted here and there by rocky clefts and piles of debris.

Their coin — and all of their other small goods worth transporting — were tucked into a little bag tied under Jean's clothes, where no guardsman would dare search, not if a superior stood behind him with a drawn sword and ordered it on pain of death.

"Gods," Locke muttered as they trudged along beside the road, "I'm getting too tired to think straight. I really have let myself slouch out of condition."

"Well, you're going to get some exercise these next few days, whether you like it or not. How" re the wounds?"

"They itch," said Locke. "This damn mush does them little good, I suspect. Still, it's not as bad as it was. A few hours of motion seems to have had some benefit."

"Wise in the ways of all such things is Jean Tannen," said Jean. "Wiser by far than most; especially most named Lamora."

"Shut your fat, ugly, inarguably wiser face," said Locke. "Mmmm. Look at those idiots scamper away from us."

"Would you do otherwise if you saw a pair of real slipskinners by the side of the road?" "Eh. I suppose not. Damn these aching feet, too."

"Let's get a mile or two outside town, then find a place to rest. Once we've put some leagues under our heels, we can ditch this mush and pose as respectable travellers again. Any idea where you want to strike out for?"

"I should" ve thought it was obvious," said Locke. "These little towns are for pikers. We're after gold and white iron, not clipped coppers. Let's make for Tal Verrar. Something's bound to present itself there." "Mmm. Tal Verrar. Well, it is close." "Camorri have a long and glorious history of kicking the piss out of.? our poor Verrari cousins, so I say, on to Tal Verrar," said Locke. "And glory." They walked on a way under the tickling mist of the morning drizzle. "And baths."

Though Locke saw that Jean remained as unsettled by their experience in the Night Market as he was, they spoke no more of the matter. There was a job to be done.

The close of the working day for honest men and women in Tal Verrar was just the beginning of theirs. It had been strange at first, getting used to the rhythm of a city where the sun simply fell beneath the horizon like a quiescent murder victim each night, without the glow of Falselight to mark its passing. But Tal Verrar had been built to different tastes or needs than Camorr, and its Elderglass simply mirrored the sky, raising no light of its own.

Their suite at the Villa Candessa was high-ceilinged and opulent; at five silver volani a night, nothing less was to be expected. Their fourth-floor window overlooked a cobbled courtyard in which carriages, studded with lanterns and outriding mercenary guards, came and went with echoing clatters.

"Bondsmagi," muttered Jean as he tied on his neck-cloths before a looking glass. Til never hire one of the bastards to do so much as heat my tea, not if I live to be richer than the Duke of Camorr."

"Now there's a thought," said Locke, who was already dressed and sipping coffee. A full day of sleep had done wonders for his head. "If we were richer than the Duke of Camorr, we could hire a whole pack of them and give them instructions to go lose themselves on a desolate fucking island somewhere."

"Mmm. I don't think the gods made any islands desolate enough for my tastes."

Jean finished tying his neck-cloths with one hand and reached for his breakfast with the other. One of the odder services the Villa Candessa provided for its long-term guests was its "likeness cakes" — little frosted simulacra fashioned after the guests by the inn's Camorr-trained pastry sculptor. On a silver tray beside the looking-glass, a little sweetbread Locke (with raisin eyes and almond-butter blond hair) sat beside a rounder Jean with dark chocolate hair and beard. The baked Jean's legs were already missing.

A few moments later, Jean was brushing the last buttery crumbs from the front of his coat. "Alas, poor Locke and Jean." "They died of consumption," said Locke.

"I do wish I could be there to see it when you talk to Requin and Selendri, you know."

"Hmmm. Can I trust you to still be in Tal Verrar by the time I finish?" He tired to leaven the question with a smile, only partially succeeding.

"You know I won't go anywhere," said Jean. "I'm still not sure it's wise. But you know I won't."

"I do. I'm sorry." He finished his coffee and set the cup down. "And my chat with Requin isn't going to be all that terribly interesting."

"Nonsense. I heard a smirk in your voice. Other people smirk when their work is finished; you grin like an idiot just before yours really begins."

"Smirking? I'm as slack-cheeked as a corpse. I'm just looking forward to being done with it. Tedious business. I anticipate a dull meeting."

"Dull meeting, my arse. Not after you walk straight up to the lady with the brass bloody hand and say, "Excuse me, madam, but…"

"I have been cheating," said Locke. "Steadily. At every single game I" ve played since my partner and I first came to the Sinspire, two years ago."

Receiving a piercing stare from Selendri was a curious thing; her left eye was nothing but a dark hollow, half-covered with a translucent awning that had once been a lid. Her single good eye did the work of two, and damned if it wasn't unnerving.

"Are you deaf, madam? Every single one. Cheating. All the way up and down this precious Sinspire, cheating floor after floor, taking your other guests for a very merry ride."

"I wonder," she said in her slow, witchy whisper, "if you truly understand what it means to say that to me, Master Kosta. Are you drunk?" "I'm as sober as a suckling infant." "Is this something you" ve been put up to?"

"I am completely serious," said Locke. "And it's your master I would speak to about my motivations. Privately."

The sixth floor of the Sinspire was quiet. Locke and Selendri were alone, with four of Requin's uniformed attendants waiting about twenty feet away. It was still too early in the evening for this level's rarefied crowd to have finished their slow, carousing migration up through the livelier levels.