Thoadrin of the Cult inclined his head and said simply, "No such treachery is contemplated, or will be."

"And the other practice I regard as treachery?" Marlel asked. "Hiring someone else to attempt the same task while I'm under hire? Or to cut me down after I make capture but before I can bring the captive to you?"

The Cult warrior scowled. "I'm not accustomed to enacting such fool-headed business practices. They might work for someone who knows he'll be dead on the morrow-but not for me. I intend to be spinning coins for the Followers thirty years from now."

"Understood." Marlel slid a folded armorweave sack out of one leg-pouch, and tipped the coffer until its shining flood of rubies began to flow into the sack. "I hope you'll not take offense if I leave you your valuable coffer and take the rubies away in this."

"None taken," Thoadrin replied, raising his goblet again in smoothly steady hands. "I do have one professional question, though."

Marlel raised his eyebrows in silent query.

"How do you plan to… get the deed done?"

The Cult warrior sounded genuinely curious. The Dark Blade of Doom smiled his crooked smile and answered, "With, among other things, this."

He held out one lazy, long-fingered hand. In it gleamed something small, curved, and silver: a Harper badge.

There was a moment of chill blue mists, with nothing beneath their boots and the sensation of softly, endlessly falling… then the light changed around them, and small stones scraped solidly under their boots amid scrub grass. They were standing in unfamiliar wilderlands, gazing out from a hilltop across rolling hills beyond number, those ahead and to the right crowned by ragged forests.

"You're looking north," Tessaril murmured from beside Shandril's shoulder. "If you go north, on that road down there-" she pointed off to the left with her drawn sword at a distant ribbon of ruts, whereon a line of wagons could be seen crawling, like so many fat white ants "-the ferry to Scornubel is less than half a day from here." She turned and pointed in another direction with her blade. "If you go down from these heights that way, following the brook, you won't be seen from afar. Stay on this side of the water, and it'll take you right down to the ditch beside the road."