the folds of coarse linen. He smoothed her ash-brown hair over the bruise on her
neck and, reluctantly, folded the cloth over her face. There was no doubt, this
time, that a sob escaped from the shadowed depths of his cowl. There had been
many women when he had been young and handsome. They had pursued him and he had
squandered his love on them. Now he could remember no face more clearly than the
one he had just covered with the linen.
The mage, Enas Yorl, shuffled back into the shadows, lit an ordinary candle, and
sat at a rough-plank desk, his face cradled in his unspeakable hands. She had
been a woman from the Street of Red Lanterns; from the Aphrodisia House, where
blue-starred Lythande was a frequent guest. Yet they’d brought her to Enas for
the postmortem. And now he understood why.
Dipping the stylus in the inkwell, he began his report in a script that had been
antique in his own youth. ‘ Your suspicions are confirmed. She was poisoned by
the concentrated venom of the beynit serpent.’
Lythande had most likely suspected as much, but the Order of the Blue Star
neither knew nor taught everything. It fell to such as himself, more shunned
than feared, to research the arcane minutiae of the eon; to recognize the poison
for what it was or was not. Enas Yorl continued:
The mark on her neck concealed two punctures – like those of the
beynit serpent, though, my colleague, I am not at all certain
that a serpent slithered up her arm to strike her. Our new
ruler, the Beysa Shupansea, has the venom within her – as she