Then the houses fell away and the roads broadened. Mithos paused, looked doubtfully about him, and wheeled to the right, uncertainty in his eyes and sweat on his face. At the next junction he brought the horse to a complete halt. It snorted with fatigue in the sudden silence. Mithos was glancing wildly about, his desperation all too apparent. Not good. He turned and looked at me for assistance and then I knew we were really in trouble. My sense of direction is legendary, meaning that it is a minor miracle that I can make it to and from the toilet by myself. I shrugged, as bewildered by his asking me as I was about where we might be. He gazed quickly about him and made a snap decision. We went straight for another block and turned right. The street ended abruptly in the irregular brick of a tanner’s yard.

Cursing under his breath, Mithos turned the horse and headed back the way we had come, but at the second junction, three infantrymen saw us and called out. They were directly ahead, blocking the street, their spears raised to shoulder height like javelins. I caught the sound of footsteps behind me and turned back to the junction we had just passed. Five more soldiers-their cloaks and armor spectrally pale in the gloom-were emerging and advancing on us like phantoms.

So this, as they say, was it: the end of my rather erratic career as an adventurer, and probably a lot of other things, including-the thought butted in like a friendly moose-my life. The Empire, in their idiocy, had elevated me to the same rank as Mithos and the rest of them, and while this had brought me a faintly invigorating sense of notoriety, it would now bring no more than a pretty horrible death. I had faced the possibility of being reduced to a sobering lesson for the people of Stavis rather a lot over the past few weeks, but I can’t say the novelty had ever really worn off. The prospect of the rack, the curved and spiked knives they used for disemboweling, the gibbets, the flails, the thumbscrews, and the other knickknacks the Empire used to make passing into the next world just a bit less enticing filled me with the same cold dread it did the first time I found myself running from a patrol. The sight of the soldiers now in front of me had me clutching desperately at Mithos’s back without a coherent thought in my head.