not a guard, a watch. I want that woman found. I want Mor-am watched. Finesse,
hear me? It’s not a random thing we’re dealing with. / want Stilcho back. I
don’t care what it takes’
The Stepson left in all due haste. Dolon leaned head on hands, staring at the
map that showed the Maze, the streets leading to the bridge. It was not the only
thing on his desk. Death squads. A murder uptown. Factions were armed. The
beggars were on the streets. And somehow every contact had dried up, frozen
solid.
He saw things slipping. He called in others, gave them orders, sent them to
apply force where it might loosen tongues.
‘Make examples,’ he said.
The streets gave way to one naked rim along the White Foal shore, an openness
that faced the rare lights of Downwind, across the White Foal’s rain-swollen
flood. The black water had risen far up on the pilings of the bridge and gnawed
away at the rock-faced banks, trying at this winding to break its confinement
and take the buildings down, this ordinarily sluggish stream. Tonight it was
another, noisier river, a shape-changer, full of violence; and Mradhon Vis moved
carefully along its edge, in this soundless darkness of deafening sound, in the
lead because of the three of them, he was most reckless and perhaps the most
afraid.
So they came up in the place he had aimed for, in the underpinnings of the
bridge on the Mazeward side; in this deepest dark. But a star glimmered here
like swampfire, and above it was a pale, hooded face.
He felt one of his two companions set a warning hand on his arm. He kept walking