“How much?”

Malden pulled his bodkin out of the desk’s top. “One part in fifty of everything you earn. To be paid monthly, in silver. A trifle.”

“That’s just robbery by another name,” Doral spat. “I won’t pay it.”

“Ah, no man would submit to such blandishment, be he a creature of honor. I told Cutbill you were too high-minded to accept his offer. Alas, he bid me make it anyway. Very good. I’ll take my leave now, with compliments to you and your lovely wife.” Malden stood up from behind the desk and sketched a graceful bow.

“If I see you again-”

“Oh, you shan’t,” Malden told the merchant as he strode toward the door. “When next I come, you won’t see me at all.”

He walked directly past the merchant and reached for the latch of the door.

He didn’t make it that far.

“Wait,” Doral said. “We can negotiate something, surely.”

“I listen attentively,” Malden said, and leaned up against the wall.

Chapter Three

It was a long ride from the Golden Slope to the Ashes. Malden had a small wagon and an old, spavined horse to drive down the steep hill that took him from the houses of the wealthy through the district of workshops and manufactories called the Smoke. There he entered a maze of narrow streets that led farther downhill into the Stink, where the poor had their homes. It was just as he entered that zone of wattle-and-daub houses, where the streets and the alleys between them were hard to tell apart, that he heard the first groan from behind him.

The wagon appeared to be full of hay. If he were stopped, Malden could claim to be making a delivery to the stables of an inn nearby-it was close enough to dawn to make sense for such traffic-but if a watchman heard the hay moaning in pain, he might ask questions that Malden would find uncomfortable to answer.