“Mind your mouth,” Kama said. It was a slim woman and a lot of weaponry under
all that cloak and cloth, and her face was smeared with dirt enough and her
mouth crusted with her last meal, part of the disguise. She would even fool the
nose. “You want to make yourself useful, get the hell to the Unicorn and pick up
Windy. Tell him move and leave the rest to him.”
“I’m not your damn errand-boy.”
“Get!”
He got. Kama got up and waddled down the darkening street in her best old-woman
way, toward another contact.
Moruth heard the dull flap of wings before the bird alit in the window of Mama
Becho’s. The beggar-king clenched his hands and listened, and when it appeared,
a dark flutter outside the shutters, he resisted going to that window at the
tavern’s backside. But a hard, chisel beak tapped and scrabbled insistently.
Wanting in.
He went and shoved the window open. The bird took off and lit again, glaring at
him with shadowy eyes in the almost-night. It lifted then with a clap of wings
and flapped away, mission accomplished.
Moruth had not the least desire in the world to go out tonight; he lived in
constant terror, since the massacre over by Jubal’s old estate, in the Stepson
barracks. There were a lot of souls out on patrol in Sanctuary, round Shambles
Cross. Old blind Mebbat said so; and Moruth, who had carried on warfare in the
streets with Stepsons and hawkmasks, had no particular desire to meet what
walked about on such nights.
But he went to the door and sent a messenger who sent others, and one ran up to