chill of the air. He was not sure at all now what side Yorl was … and it
occurred to him to tear the amulet from his neck, drop it in the alley and run.
But how far? And how long? He thought a second and chilling time of the wizard
and his connections; recalled Sjekso; and Kithakadis himself … a prince of
some small gratitude for services a thief had rendered; but more than dangerous
if certain rumours started, that Yorl could spread … effortlessly.
The pair headed back the way they had come, and he set out after them, seeing no
other course.
More and more bizarre, this midnight wandering. Cappen went rigid in his hiding
place first as the quarry passed, and then as he caught sight of Hanse again,
padding after them as before.
So there was no encounter. They went out and they did murder and came back,
while Hanse followed after having seen what Hanse had seen … very unlike
Hanse. Cappen suspected motives ill-defined, gave shape to nothing, only sure it
was something more than Hanse’s private impulses that moved him now. He recalled
the way in which the woman had passed a roomful of patrons at the Unicorn, in
which she and her companion went where they liked on the street, in which guards
died like slaughtered cattle…
The relief Cappen felt at seeing Hanse mobile and not lying stiff in the alley
further on, gave way to a horror at the silence of all that was done, the
neatness of it; and a subtle dread of this pacing about the streets. The
procession which had started to be humorous and might have become yet more so on