"Why won't you believe us?" demanded the youngest of the three when he saw the captain. "We heard nothing, nor saw it neither. He went in, the door was locked—we never so much as heard a scream!"

"And the evidence shows you as liars," replied Captain Qais. "You'll give up the facts when our truthsayers have a go at you." To Sandry he said, "Why don't you wait for his grace here?"

She walked ahead of him into the open room past the captives. He mustn't know that she was nervous; she did her best to hide it. She was no hardened—what had Pasco called them—Harrier, that was it. She was not one of those, but if her great-uncle was in this mess, that was where she had to be as well.

Inside was a plain office belonging to Jamar Rokat's secretary or assistant, it would seem. Sandry walked through the open door at the back of the room into the next office and halted. Her uncle sat on the window seat, keeping out of the way of the Provost's Guards who were going over the room inch by inch. They each wore the silver braid trim on their sleeves that marked then as investigators, not street Guards.

There was blood everywhere. The hacked body of the man who had greeted them so smoothly that morning lay on the floor. His fine clothes were slashed and sodden rags. His jewels lay in a bloody heap atop his desk, as if whoever killed him had wanted to say they were too disgusting to steal. Worst of all, the man’s head had been placed in a sling made of his turban and hung from an overhead lamp.

A tiny woman in brown and blue stood by the dead mans feet, shaking her head. For all her small size, she had the lightly seamed face of someone in her fifties. "I can only guess they were waiting for him when he come in, cap'n, your grace," she said absentmindedly, staring at bloody slippers. "His guard spells never warned him."