Within the bedroom, a bronze bar creaked as it was lifted from the door slots. Samlor drew his long dagger and laid it on an intaglio table. Only the edge of the steel winked. The hilt was of a hard, pale wood, smooth but wrapped with a webbing of silver wire for a sure grip. The morning room had been decorated by a former occupant. In its mosaic battle scenes and the weapons crossed on its walls, the room suited Samlor's appearance far better than it did that of the young Rankan lord who now owned it.

The door was opened inwards by a sour, grey-haired woman in temple garb. The air that puffed from the bedroom was warm and cloying like the smell of an overripe peach. Two branches of the sextuple oil lamp within had been lighted, adding to the sunlight seeping through the stained glass separating the room from the inner court.

If the midwife looked harsh, then Samlane herself on the bed looked like Death. All the flesh of her face and her long, white hands seemed to have been drawn into the belly that now mounded her linen wrapper. A silk coverlet lay rumpled at the foot of the bed. 'Come in, brother dear.' A spasm rippled the wrapper. Samlane's face froze, her mouth half open. The spasm passed. 'I won't keep you long, Samlor,' she added through a false smile. 'Leah, wait outside.'

Midwife, husband, and doctor all began to protest. 'Heqt's face, get out, get outV Samlane shrieked, her voice rising even higher as a new series of contractions racked her. Her piercing fury cut through all objection. Samlor closed the door behind the midwife. Those in the morning room heard the door latched but not barred. Regli's house had been built for room-by-room defence in the days when bandits or a mob would burst into a dwelling and strip it, in despite of anything the government might attempt.

The midwife stood, stiff and dour, with her back to the door. Regli ignored her and slashed at the wall again. 'In the year I've known her, Samlane hasn't mentioned her brother a dozen times -and each of those was a curse!' he said.

'You must remember, this is a trying time for the lady, too,' Mernorad said. 'With her parents, ah, unable to travel, it's natural that she wants her brother-'

'Natural?' Regli shouted. 'It's my child she's bearing! My son, perhaps. What am I doing out here?'

'What would you be doing in there?' the doctor observed, tart himself in response to his patron's anger.

Before either could say more, the door swung open, bumping the midwife. Samlor gestured with his thumb. 'She wants you to fix her pillows,' he said curtly. He picked up his knife and began walking across the morning room towards the hall. The midwife eeled back into the bedroom, hiding all but a glimpse of Samlane's face. The lampstand beside the bed gave her flesh a yellow cast. The bar thudded back in place almost as soon as the door closed.

Regli grabbed Samlor's arm. 'But what did she want?' he demanded.

Samlor shook his arm free. 'Ask her, if you think it's any of your business,' he said. 'I'm in no humour to chatter.' Then he was out of the room and already past the servant who should have escorted him down the staircase to the front door.

Mernorad blinked. 'Certainly a surly brute,' he said. 'Not at all fit for polite company.'

For once it was Regli who was reasonable. 'Oh, that's to be expected,' he said. 'In Cirdon, the nobility always prided itself on being useless - which is why Cirdon is part of the Rankan Empire and not the reverse. It must have bothered him very much when he had to go into trade himself or starve with the rest of his family.' Regli cleared his throat, then patted his left palm with the quirt. 'That of course explains his hostility towards Samlane and the absurd-'

'Yes; quite absurd,' Mernorad agreed hastily.

'-absurd charges he levelled at her,' the young noble continued. 'Just bitterness, even though he himself had preserved her from the, oh, as he saw it, lowering to which he had been subjected. Actually, I have considerable mining and trading interests myself, besides my - very real - duties here to the State.'

The diversion had settled Regli's mind only briefly. He resumed his pacing, the shuffle of his slippers and his occasional snappish comments being almost the only sounds in the morning room for an hour. 'Do you hear something?' Mernorad said suddenly.

Regli froze, then ran to the bedroom door. 'Samlane!' he shouted. ' Samlane /' He gripped the bronze latch and screamed as his palm seared.

Acting with dreadful realization and more strength than was to be expected of a man of his age, Mernorad ripped a battle-axe from the staples holding it to the wall. He swung it against the door panel. The oak had charred to wafer thinness. The heavy blade splintered through, emitting a jet of oxygen into the superheated bedroom.

The room exploded, blasting the door away in a gout of fire and splinters. The flames hurled Mernorad against the far wall as a blazing husk before they curled up to shatter the plastered ceiling.

The flame sucked back, giving Regli a momentary glimpse into the fully-involved room. The midwife had crawled from the bed almost back to the door before she died. The fire had arched her back so that the knife wound in her throat gaped huge and red.

Samlane may have cut her own jugular as well, but too little remained of her to tell. She had apparently soaked the bedding in lamp oil and then clutched the open flame to her. All Regli really had to see, however, to drive him screaming from his house, was the boot knife. The wooden hilt was burned off, and the bare tang poked upright from Samlane's distended belly.

Samlor had asked a street-boy where the Temple of Heqt was. The child had blinked, then brightened and said, 'Oh - the Black Spire!' Sitting on a bench outside a tavern across from the temple, Samlor thought he understood why. The temple had been built of grey limestone, its walls set in a square but roofed with the usual hemispherical dome. The obelisk crowning the dome had originally commemorated the victories of Alar hit Aspar, a mercenary general ofCirdonian birth. Alar had done very well by his adopted city - and well enough for himself in the process to be able to endow public buildings as one form of conspicuous consumption. None of Alar's boasts remained visible through the coating three decades of wood and dung smoke had deposited on the spire. Still, to look at it, the worst that could be said about the Temple of Heqt was that it was ugly, filthy, and in a bad district - all of which were true of most other buildings in Sanctuary, so far as Samlor could tell.

As the caravan-master swigged his mug of blue John, an acolyte emerged from the main doorway of the temple. She waved her censer three times and chanted an evening prayer to the disinterested street before retreating back inside.

The tavern's doorway brightened as the tapster stepped out carrying a lantern. 'Move, buddy, these're for customers,' he said to the classically handsome young man sitting on the other bench. The youth stood but did not leave. The tapster tugged the bench a foot into the doorway, stepped onto it, and hung the lantern from a hook beneath the tavern's sign. The angle of the lantern limned in shadow a rampant unicorn, its penis engorged and as large as the horn on its head.

Instead of returning to the bench on which he had been sitting, the young man sat down beside Samlor. 'Not much to look at, is it?' he said to the Cirdonian, nodding towards the temple.

'Nor popular, it seems,' Samlor agreed. He eyed the local man carefully, wondering how much information he could get from him. 'Nobody's gone in there for an hour.'