exempt? – Alone of all the others,
Cappen stared back at her with his mind clear and with knowledge, with something
gut-wrenching telling him that everything about this woman was askew.
She smiled at him, a parting of the lips on white teeth, a flash of dark eyes,
an impression that she admired what she saw… and all the fineness he kept so
studiously, his elegance, different from others about him, his talents, his – if
streetwom – finery … was suddenly perilous to him, marking him out among all
the rest. And most of all… she knew he resisted her.
She left then, swept out of the door which Mradhon Vis held open, a gust of wind
and a sudden thud of the door closing. Cappen wanted wine… but his hand
stopped short of the cup she had just set down again, the metal she had had her
lips to and the wine her mouth had tasted. He pushed back from the table and the
bench scraped loudly over the noise of the other patrons. He hesitated, looking
at the door which led out to the backways, not wanting to go out there, in the
gathering dark.
But Mradhon Vis, linked with that, and Sjekso cold dead with no mark on him; and
Hanse outright disappeared, hunting Mradhon Vis, as all the Maze surmised …
Hanse had involved himself in something which was likely to be the death of him,
and what concern that was to Cappen Varra was unclear to Cappen himself, only
that he had drunk with Hanse of late, with a short and lately successful thief
and ruffian who had wanted – almost pathetically – to acquire style, who spent