“This is Orgos,” he said, indicating the black man, who took his big hand away from my mouth and extended it, smiling.

I stared at them in stunned silence as the introductions were concluded and my brain boiled softly. The pale savage who was no more than twenty was called Garnet, as I had already gathered, and the girl, who still hadn’t quite forgotten my look of distrust, Renthrette. I gave her a friendly smile and kind of wished I’d been more impressive during the fight. Kind of.

“We do not use the names we were born with anymore, so I am taking no unnecessary risks,” their swarthy leader went on. “I am Mithos, and I-”

“Mithos!” I bawled. “The Mithos! Oh God! Mithos the thief, bandit, cutthroat, and wholesale murderer?”

“You should know better than to trust the Empire’s propaganda,” he remarked grimly.

“All right,” I backpedaled, knowing the terms these psychopaths preferred to be known by, “Mithos the rebel and adventurer?”

“The same,” he said.

SCENE V Things Can Always Get Worse

Adventurers” hired themselves out as investigators, guards, explorers, and specialists of various kinds, particularly if the assignment involved a balancing act between risk and profit. In effect they were burglars, thugs, murderers, and grave robbers. The Empire, in a rare moment of insight, had made the profession illegal. Adventurers were untrustworthy, and if they obeyed any laws at all, they were those of their own personal and erratic honor code. This made them dangerous people to have around and clearly a threat to the “peace” and solidity of the Diamond Empire. The Empire, moreover, had learnt that the likes of my dangerous saviors had organized much of the opposition during the initial invasion of Thrusia and continued to lead uprisings when the mood took them. “Adventurers” were rebels by any other name.