The anteroom Maytera Mint entered had, it appeared, been the owner’s study. A massive mahogany desk, lavishly carved, stood against one wall, and there were shelves of books, mostly (she scanned the titles on a shelf at the level of her eyes) erotic if not pornographic: Three Maids and Their Mistress, The Astonishing Exploits of a Virile Young Man and His Donkey, His Resistance Overcome…

She turned away. What had it been like to be here under such a master? She tried to picture the lives of the women who had endured it, and failed. They had been bad women, as the whorl judged, but that only meant that they had commanded defenses greatly inferior to her own.

Strange, how she had come to think in military metaphors during the past few days.

The desk drawers seemed apt to tell her a good deal about the owner, who counted for nothing now, and nothing about the Ayuntamiento and those who served it. She opened a drawer at random anyway, glanced at the papers it had held — all of them concerned in some fashion with money — shut it, and made sure no corpse lay concealed in the leg hole.

“General!”

Turning so quickly that the long, black skirt of her habit billowed about her, she hurried out of the study and across the sellaria. “What is it, Your Eminence?”

He met her at the doorway, visibly struggling to conceal his pleasure. “I have the — ah — it is my unhappy duty—”

“You’ve found a body. Whose?”

“The, um, late councillor’s, I believe. If, perhaps, you would not care—”

“To see it? I must! Your Eminence, I’ve seen hundreds of bodies since this began. Thousands.” There had been a time when she had found it nearly impossible to cut the throat of a goat; as she pushed past Remora, she reflected that she would find that difficult still, and find it literally impossible to cut a man’s, even an enemy’s. Yet she had made plans and given orders that had clogged entire streets with corpses.