“Shadow is the sister of darkness,” says Brother For, Sagot’s kindly priest. And where there is darkness, the Nameless One is never far away.

What absolute nonsense! The Nameless One and the shadow? Entirely different things. You might as well compare an ogre and a giant. The shadow is life, freedom, money, and reputation. Shadow Harold knows about such things firsthand. For a shadow to appear there has to be at least a scintilla of light, and to compare it with darkness is stupid, to say the least. But of course, I don’t tell my old teacher that. You don’t go teaching your grandmother to suck eggs.

It’s quiet. So quiet you can hear the moths scrabbling at the coolness of the night with their fragile little wings. It’s a long time now since the watch patrol passed me and it’s high time for me to be going about my business, but somehow I’m feeling extracautious tonight… Some premonition makes me remain in cover, beside the wall of the building that is submerged in gloom.

There were no suspicious sounds to be heard in that narrow little street with the old stone houses that could remember the old Quiet Times. Nothing but a painted tin sign above the baker’s shop creaking in the faint wind. The slow-stirring grayish yellow mist for which our capital is famous lay thick across the rough stone paving of the road, chipped and battered by the cart wheels. They say the mist was a trick played by some half-trained wizard back in the distant past. But ever since then not one of the kingdom’s archmagicians has been able to rid the city of the consequences of his innocent prank.

The silence alarms me. The only place that is ever this quiet is a rich man’s vault after a visit from one of the city’s bands of petty thieves.