"Campaign-" Neuhalle bit his tongue, but the prince's eyes had already turned to him. And the prince was smiling prettily, as if all the fires of Hel didn't burn in the imagination concealed by that golden boy's face.

"Why, certainly there shall be a campaign," Egon assured him, beaming widely. "There will be no room for sedition in our reign! We shall raise the nobility to its traditional status again, reasserting those values that have run thin in the blood of recent years." He winked. "And to rid the kingdom of the proliferation of witches that have corrupted it is but one part of that program." He gestured idly at the wooden framework taking place on the lawn outside the pavilion. "It'll make for a good show at the coronation, eh?"

Neuhalle stared. What he had thought to be the framework of a temporary palace was, when seen from this angle, the platform and scaffold of a gallows scaled to hang at least a dozen at a time. "I'm sure your coronation will be a great day, sire," he murmured. "Absolutely, a day to remember."

A damp alleyway at night. Refuse in the gutters, the sickly-sweet stench of rotting potatoes overlaying a much

Nastier aroma of festering sewage. Stone walls, encrusted in lichen. The chink of metal on cobblestones, and a woman's high, clear voice echoing over it: "I don't believe this. Shit! Ouch."

The woman had stumbled out of the shadows mere seconds ago, shaking her head and tucking away a small personal item. She wore a stained greatcoat over a black dress of rich fabric, intricate enough to belong on a stage play or in a royal court, but not here in a dank dead end: as she looked around, her forehead wrinkled in frustration, or pain, or both. "I could go back," she muttered to herself, then took a deep breath: "or not." She glanced up mid down the alley apprehensively.