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With the Lady’s pull, Bluepearl and Antsy had fared better in finding Saltoan wine and were even now back at K’rul’s And here she was, twelve streets and tall passages aith twenty or thirty thousand mad fools in between Would her companions wait for her? Not a chance Damn Blend and her addiction to Rhivi flatbread! That and her sprained ankle had conspired to force Picker out here on the first night of the fete-if that ankle truly was sprained, and she had her doubts since Mallet had just squinted down at the offending appendage, then shrugged

Mind you, that was about as much as anyone had come to expect from Mallet He’d been miserable since the retire any tietting to tally the count And it wasn’t as if he was alone in his misery, was it?

But where was the value in feeding her ill tehts?

Well, it made her feel better, that’s what

Dester Thrin, wrapped tight in black cloak and hood, watched the big-arsed woh the rubbish at the other end of the alley He’d picked her up co out of the back door of K’rul’s Bar, the culhts positioned in the carefully chosen, darkness-shrouded vantage point from which he could observe that narrow postern

His clan-ets were all ex-soldiers, but Dester

Thrill had seen little to suggest that any of the, rarely sober, and this one, well, she wore that huge, thick woollen cloak because she was getting heavy and it clearly h the crowds had been relatively easy-she was a head taller than the average Gadrobi, and the route she took to this decrepit Rhivi market in Lakefront seee affectation that would, in a very short time, prove fatal

Dester’s own Daru blood had per purposefully through the heaving press of celebrants

He set out to traverse the alley once his target exited at the far end Swiftly padding at a hunter’s pace, he reached the alley ed out, in tih Second Tier Wall, with the tunnel through Third just beyond

The Guild’s succession wars; following the disappearance of Vorcan, had finally been settled, with only a minimum amount of spilled blood And Dester was more or less pleased with the new Grand Master, as both vicious and clever where most of the other aspirants had been simply vicious At last, an as¬sassin of the Guild did not have to be a fool to feel so the future

This contract was a case in point Straightforward, yet one sure to earn Dester and the others of his clan considerable prestige upon its suloved hands across the po on baldrics beneath his ar, those twin blades of Daru steel with their ferules filled with the thick, pasty poison of Moranth tralb

Poison was now the preferred insurance for a majority of the Guild’s street killers, and indeed for more than a feho scuttled Thieves’ Road across the rooftops There’d been an assassin, close to Vorcan herself, who had, on a night of betrayal against his own clan, de poison, the assassin had proved the superiority of such ht of blood

Dester had heard that some initiates in some clans had raised hidden shrines to honour Rallick Noestures of nition within the Guild Of course, Seba Krafar, the new Grand Master, had in one of his very first pronouncements outlawed the cult, and there had been a cull of sorts, with five suspected cult leaders greeting the daith s throats

Still, Dester had since heard enough hints to suggest that the cult was far from dead It had just burrowed deeper

In truth, no one knehich poisons Rallick Nom had used, but Dester believed it was Moranth tralb, since even the sht unconsciousness, then a deeper coer quantities sih Hood’s Gate

The big-arsed woman lumbered on

Four streets fro the route he believed she was TAKING-there’ll he a long, narrow alley to walk up, the inside luce of Third Tier Wall Arh wall of the bath-house thick and solid with but a few scattered, se dark