He did not like what he saw of the man who was being helped from the storm
wracked ship that had come miraculously to port with no sail intact, who
murmured through pale cruel lips to the surrounding Ilsigs, then climbed into a
Rankan litter bound for the palace.
He spurred the horse. ‘Who?’ he demanded of the eunuch-master whose path he
suddenly barred.
‘Aspect, the archmage,’ lisped the palace lackey, ‘if it’s any business of
yours.’
Behind the lackey and the quartet of ebony slaves the shoulder-borne litter
trembled. The viewcurtain with Kitty’s device on it was drawn back, fell loose
again.
‘Out of my way. Hound,’ squeaked the enraged little pastry of a eunuch-master.
‘Don’t get flapped, Eunice,’ said Tempus, wishing he were in Caronne, wishing he
had never met a god, wishing he were anywhere else. Oh, Kitty, you have done it
this time. Alain Aspect, yet! Alchemist extraordinaire, assassin among
magicians, dispeller of enchantments, in a town that ran on contract sorcery?
‘Back, back, back,’ he counselled the horse, who twitched its ears and turned
its head around reproachfully, but obeyed him.
He heard titters among the eunuchs, another behind in the crowd. He swung round
in his saddle. ‘Hakiem, if I hear any stories about me I do not like, I will
know whose tongue to hang on my belt.’
The bent, news-nosed storyteller, standing amid the children who always
clustered round him, stopped laughing. His rheumy eyes met Tempus’s. ‘I have a
story I would like to tell you. Hell Hound. One you would like to hear, I humbly