Hecht said, "I get the feeling that I keep disappointing Principate Delari. But I can't figure out how."

"You'll have to tell me more than you have. Unless it involves your super-secret Collegium business."

He described recent visits with Muniero Delari. Anna asked questions. Good questions.

"Obviously, there's more than a big map down there. Just having it buried like that, all secret, means you have to think that it's a powerful magic artifact. Or will be when they finish it. It sounds like they're still building it."

"We're home. Let me look around first." He still had that sense of a presence close by. Though his amulet remained dormant. "You kids need to get right to bed." That would not be a hard sell. Vali was groggy, all reserves exhausted, and would have to be carried. Pella was dragging.

Hecht saw nothing unusual. He paid the coachman, adding a generous gratuity. The man fawned. Times were hard.

The coach team clip-clopped away, on damp cobblestones. A light sprinkle had begun. Hecht entered the house last, backing in, like a rearguard covering a desperate retreat. There was no light outside once the coach and its lamps turned a corner, the driver in a hurry to get away.

Hecht made sure of the locks and shutters while Anna put the children to bed. Vali had to be carried.

In bed, still nervously alert, Hecht remarked, "What you said about the Principate's map. That's why I love you. I never thought of that." Could his blindness be the cause of Principate Delari's disappointment?

"Talk to me about that ambush, Piper. Were they after you?"

"I don't think so."

"What did you and the old man talk about? When you were having coffee."

"Rudenes Schneidel."

"Does he think you know something you're not telling?" Plainly, she thought he was holding out on her.

"Honey, I never heard of Rudenes Schneidel till a couple weeks ago."

"So maybe he never heard of Piper Hecht, either. Or you might know each other by different names. There's a lot of that going around."

Worth reflection, Hecht thought.

He was about to say he knew no one from Artecipea, nor had he heard of the High Athaphile or Artecipea before hearing that Schneidel called them home. He stopped as his mouth opened. He had had a thought about Vali. Which should have occurred to him long ago. One that meant a visit with the newest Episcopal Chaldarean before Consent's information sources dried up.

Anna continued. "There's been some fibbing about where people really come from, too. But forget that. It's time to find out if I drank too much to enjoy anything else."

The nightmare was so real it remained convincing after Hecht awakened. Anna demanded, "What was it? You're shaking."

"Nightmare. Haven't had it for a long time."

"The one about your mother?"

Hecht frowned. He did not believe Anna was psychic. She made no such claims. But she surprised him sometimes.

"It started there. Same as always." The same as memories he had had when he had cried himself to sleep in the Vibrant Spring School, back when they took the new slave boy in. He doubted he would recognize his mother today, even as she had been then, if she walked up and boxed his ears.

"Must be awful, being little and having no family."

"You make your own family there. Or you don't survive. That's the whole point." The Sha-lug schools produced hard men who disdained anyone who was not Sha-lug.

Piper Hecht feared he had softened during his sojourn amongst the Infidel, but his core remained adamantine Sha-lug. The Sha-lug were still his brothers, his family.

"It started out?"

"Huh? Oh. Yeah. Then it turned dark. There was a monster I couldn't see but I knew what it was. If I could catch it I could kill it. But I couldn't catch it. It kept doing awful things to people I cared about. And getting closer and closer to ambushing me. Meaning I wasn't really the hunter."

"That's ugly, Piper, but it sounds like standard dream fare."

Hecht grunted. He agreed. But… "It had more than a dream flavor. Like my mind was trying to create images it could understand."

"Think you can lay down and go back to sleep?"

"Probably not. But I'll try."

Sleep came more swiftly than he expected, though that sense of the nearness of horror never went all the way away.

Anna let him sleep in. She wakened him, though, when neighbors came looking for someone who could act in an official capacity. "They don't know where else to turn," she told him as he pulled himself together.

Grumbling, he stumbled out into the cold to see the body some children had found. Pella and Vali ducked around Anna, tagged along, though not so close that Hecht would notice and send them home.

Hecht stiffened when he saw the corpse. Not because of the atrocities he had suffered but because he knew the man. Who had no business being anywhere within a thousand miles of the Mother City.

"You know him, Your Honor?"

"Sorry. No. It's the wounds."

One gawker said, "This ain't the first one that's been chewed up like that."

Another agreed. "And this one, he's got a foreign look to him."

Hecht nodded. The dead man looked like someone pretending to be Brothen without knowing the nuances.

Alive, he had been Hagid, son of Nassim Alizarin al-Jebal, a soldier in Else Tage's company. He had been placed there by his father, for seasoning in the field. Nassim Alizarin, called the Mountain, was a crony of Gordimer the Lion. A classmate from his old school. Nassim had sent Hagid out with the unstated understanding that the boy would come home if everyone else had to die to make it so.

Back in the house, with the kids still outside, Hecht told Anna, "He was a good kid. He tried hard. But he started fifteen years behind the rest of the company. I can't imagine him ever leaving al-Qarn once I got him home alive."

"You're sure it isn't somebody who looks like the boy?"

"I'm sure!" He was angry. "Here's another mystery I don't have time to solve. And I can't hand it off to anyone else."

"We'll see."

"Honey! Before you get any ideas, go look at what happened to…"

Pella burst in. "Anna, you shoulda seen! Part of his skin was gone and his stomach was cut open. They said they pulled out his heart and his liver."

Hecht's glower shut him off. "I want you to remember that there's someone out there who does that to people."

Pella was suitably cowed. For maybe thirty seconds.

"At least Vali has sense enough to be scared," Anna said as the children raced off to the kitchen. "I'd better keep an eye on them." But the children, excited, returned eating seed cakes and scattering crumbs. "They're hopeless!" Anna' complained. "Freke will quit on me." Freke (pronounced Freck-ie) Blagowidow was Anna's part-time maid and housekeeper. A desperate refugee, she would not quit no matter what.

"I'll talk to Herrin and Vernal next time I visit the baths."

"Oh, no. This is my house. You won't bring any of your toys in here."

Hecht leapt into the squabble happily. It distracted Anna from thoughts of Hagid.

A Captain-General was seldom alone. Especially since the attempts on Hecht's life. He wanted to vanish into the confusion of the Mother City, to sneak off to the Dreangerean embassy or the hideout of a spy from the Kaifate of al-Minphet, but the opportunity never arose.

Principate Delari asked, "Did you collect this body, too?"

"I did, sir. I thought you'd want to examine it."

"We're developing quite a collection. Though we've started releasing those from the other night. People are claiming them. We buried the ones that attacked you. Nobody wanted them."

Hecht was surprised. "People are claiming them?"