"Well, thank you, Master Fehrwight, thank you! I didn't expect… well, let me get a work order and some papers for you to take with you, and we'll be set."

"Now, let me ask — do you have all the materials you need for my master's order?" "Oh yes! I know that off the top of my head." "Warehoused here, at your shop?" "Yes indeed, Master Fehrwight." "About how long might I expect the construction to take?"

"Hmmm… given my other duties, and your requirements… six weeks, possibly seven. Will you be returning for them yourself, or will we need to arrange shipping?" "In that, too, I was hoping for something a little more convenient."

"Ah, well… you having been so very civil, I'm sure I could shift my schedule. Five weeks, perhaps?"

"Master Baumondain, if you and your daughters were to work on my master's order more or less exclusively, starting this afternoon, at your best possible speed… how long then would you say it might take?"

"Oh, Master Fehrwight, Master Fehrwight, you must understand, I have other orders pending, for clients of some standing. Significant people, if you take my meaning." Locke set four more gold coins atop the coffee table.

"Master Fehrwight, be reasonable! These are just chairs! I will bend every effort to finishing your order as fast as possible, but I cannot simply displace my existing clients or their pieces…" Locke set four more coins down, next to the previous pile.

"Master Fehrwight, please, we would give you our exclusive efforts for far less, if only we didn't already have clients to satisfy! How could I possibly explain this to them?"

Locke set eight more coins directly in the middle of the two stacks of four, building a little tower. "What is that now, Baumondain? Forty solari, when you were so pleased to receive just twenty-four?"

"Sir, please, my sole consideration is that clients who placed their orders before your master's must, in all courtesy, have precedence…"

Locke sighed and dumped ten more solari onto the coffee table, upsetting his little tower and emptying the purse. "You can have a shortage of materials. Some essential wood or oil or leather. You need to send away for it; six days to Tal Verrar and six days back. Surely it's happened before. Surely you can explain." "Oh, but the aggravation; they'll be so annoyed…"

Locke drew a second coin-purse from his satchel and held it poised like a dagger in the air before him. "Refund some of their money. Here, have more of mine." He shook out even more coins, haphazardly. The clink-clink-clink of metal falling upon metal echoed in the foyer. "Master Fehrwight," said the carpenter, "who are you?"

"A man who's dead serious about chairs." Locke dropped the half-full purse atop the pile of gold next to the coffee pot. "One hundred solari, even. Put off your other appointments, set aside your other jobs, make your excuses and your refunds. How long would it take?" "Perhaps a week," said Baumondain, in a defeated whisper.

"Then you agree? Until my four chairs are finished, this is the Fehrwight Furniture Shop? I have more gold in the Villa Verdante's strongbox. You will have to kill me to stop forcing it upon you if you say no. So do we have a deal?" "Gods help us both, yes!"

"Then shake on it. You get carving, and I'll start wasting time back at my inn. Send messengers if you need me to inspect anything. I'll stay until you're finished."

"As you can see, my hands are empty, and it is unthinkable that anything should be concealed within the sleeves of such a finely tailored tunic"

Locke stood before the full-length mirror in his suite at the Villa Verdante, wearing nothing but his breeches and a light tunic of fine silk. The cuffs of the tunic were drawn away from his wrists and he stared intently at his own reflection.

"It would, of course, be impossible for me to produce a deck of cards from thin air… but what's this?"

He moved his right hand toward the mirror with a flourish, and a deck of cards slipped clumsily out of it, coming apart in a fluttering mess as it fell to the floor. "Oh, fucking hell," Locke muttered.

He had a week of empty time on his hands, and his legerdemain was improving with torturous slowness. Locke soon turned his attention to the curious institution at the heart of Salon Corbeau, the reason so many idle rich made pilgrimage to the place, and the reason so many desperate and downtrodden ate their carriage dust as they trudged to the same destination. They called it the Amusement War.

Lady Saljesca's stadium was a miniature of the legendary Stadia Ultra of Therim Pel, complete with twelve marble idols of the gods gracing the exterior in high stone niches. Ravens perched on their divine heads and shoulders, cawing half-heartedly down at the bustling crowd around the gates. As he made his way through the tumult, Locke noted every species of attendant known to man. There were physikers clucking over the elderly, litter-bearers hauling the infirm (or the unabashedly lazy), musicians and jugglers, guards, translators and dozens of men and women waving fans or hoisting wide silk parasols, looking like nothing so much as fragile human-sized mushrooms as they chased their patrons under the growing morning sun.

While it was said that the floor of the Imperial Arena had been too wide for even the strongest archer to send an arrow across, the floor of Saljesca's re-creation was just fifty yards in diameter. There were no common seats; the smooth stone walls rose twenty feet above the smooth stone floor and were topped with luxury galleries whose cloth sunscreens flapped gently in the breeze. Three times per day, Lady Saljesca's liveried guards would open the public gates to the better class of Salon Corbeau's visitors. There was a single standing gallery (which even had a decent view) to which admission was free, but the vast majority of spectators at the stadium would take nothing less than the luxury seats and boxes that needed to be reserved at some considerable expense. Unfashionable as it was, Locke elected to stand for his first visit to the Amusement War. A relative nonentity like Mordavi Fehrwight had no reputation to protect.

On the floor of the arena was a gleaming grid of black and white marble squares, each one a yard on a side. The squares were set twenty by twenty, like a gigantic Catch-the-Duke board. Where little carved pieces of wood or ivory were used in that game, Saljesca's playing field featured living pieces. The poor and destitute would man that field, forty to a side, wearing white or black tabards to distinguish themselves. This strange employment was the reason they risked the long, hard trudge to Salon Corbeau.

Locke had already discovered that there were two large barracks behind Lady Saljesca's stadium, heavily guarded, where the poor were taken upon arrival in Salon Corbeau. There they were made to clean themselves up, and were given two simple meals a day for the duration of their stay, which could be indefinite. Each "aspirant", as they were known, was assigned a number. Three times per day, random drawings were held to select two teams of forty for the coming Amusement War. The only rule of the War was that the living pieces had to be able to stand, move and obey orders; children of eight or nine were about the youngest taken. Those that refused to participate when their number was drawn, even once, were thrown out of Saljesca's demi-city immediately and barred from returning. Without supplies and preparation, being cast out onto the roads in this dry land could be a death sentence.

The aspirants were marched into the arena by two dozen of Saljesca's guards, who were armed with curved shields and lacquered wooden sticks. They were robust men and women who moved with the easy assurance of hard experience; even a general uprising of the aspirants would stand no chance against them. The guards lined the aspirants up in their starting positions on the board, forty white "pieces" and forty black "pieces", with sixteen rows of squares separating each double-ranked army.