Kalam was silent. Then he asked, in a growl, «How long do I wait?»

«Dawn,» Quick Ben replied. «You understand I would only ask this of my closest friend.»

«I understand. Now, get on with it, dammit.»

Quick Ben gestured. A ring of fire sprang from the earth, surrounding the wizard. He closed his eyes.

To Kalam, his friend seemed to deflate slightly, as if something essential to life had disappeared. Quick Ben's neck creaked as his chin sank down to his chest, his shoulders slumped, and a long breath escaped with a slow hiss. The ring of fire flared, then dimmed to a lapping glimmer on the earth.

Kalam shifted position, stretching out his legs and crossing his arms.

In the gathering silence, he waited.

A pale Murillio returned to the table and sat down. «Someone's disposing of the body,» he said, then shook his head. «Whoever killed Chert was a professional with a real nasty streak. Right through the eye-»

«Enough!» Kruppe cried out, raising his hands. «Kruppe happens to be eating, dear Murillio, and Kruppe also happens to have a delicate stomach.»

«Chert was a fool,» Murillio continued, ignoring Kruppe, «but hardly the type to attract such viciousness.»

Crokus said nothing. He'd seen the blood on that dark-haired woman's dagger.

«Who can say?» Kruppe waggled his eyebrows. «Perhaps he was witness to some horrific horror. Perhaps he was stamped out as a man crushes a cute mouse underfoot.»

Crokus glanced around. His eyes returned to the woman standing with Meese at the bar. Dressed in leather armour with a plain duelling sword strapped to her hip, she reminded him of the time he'd watched, as a young boy, a troop of mercenaries ride through the city. They had been the Crimson Guard, he recalled: five hundred men and women without a shiny buckle among them.

His gaze remained on the woman. Like a mercenary, a killer for whom killing had long since lost its horror. What had Chert done to earn a knife in the eye?

Crokus looked away, in time to see Rallick Nom enter the bar. The assassin approached the table, seemingly unconscious of the locals moving from his path.

Coll intercepted him, before he reached the table. The burly man slapped Rallick's back and leaned drunkenly against him. «Nom, you old bastard!»

Rallick threw an arm around Coll's round shoulders and together they came to the table.

Kruppe looked up. «Ho, my dear comrades! Kruppe invites you to join our familiar gathering.» Waving his arms at the two empty chairs, he rocked back in his seat. «To bring you up to date on our dramatic doings, the lad Crokus has been staring dreamily into space while Murillio and Kruppe have discussed the latest natterings of the street rats.»

Coll remained standing, weaving unsteadily, a frown knitting his brows. Rallick sat down and reached for the pitcher of beer. «What natterings are those?» the assassin asked casually.

«The rurnour that we're now allied with Moon's Spawn,» Murillio said.

«Nonsense, of course,» Kruppe said. «Have you seen anything to suggest such a thing?»

Murillio grinned. «The Moon hasn't moved away, has it? Not only that, there's that Council tent stationed directly under it.»

Crokus spoke up. «I heard from Uncle Mammot that the councilmen haven't had any luck getting a message to whoever's in Moon's Spawn.»

«Typical,» Murillio commented, his eyes narrowing briefly on Rallick.

«Who lives in there?» Crokus asked.

Coll tottered and threw both hands down on the table to steady himself. He thrust his red face at Crokus and bellowed, «Five black dragons!»

Within the Warren of Chaos, Quick Ben knew of the innumerable shifting pathways that led to doors. Though he called them doors they were in fact barriers created where Warrens touched, an accretion of energy as solid as basalt. Chaos touched on all realms with gnarled fingertips bleeding power, the doors hardened wounds in the flesh of other worlds, other avenues of magic.

The wizard had focused his talents on such doors. While within the Warren of Chaos, he had learned the ways of shaping their energy. He'd found means of altering the barriers, of sensing what lay beyond them.

Each Warren of magic possessed a smell, each realm a texture, and though the pathways he took were never the same as those he'd taken before, he had mastered the means of finding those he sought.

He travelled now down one of those paths, a track of nothingness enclosed by the Warren's own accretions, twisting and fraught with contradictions. On one trail he'd will himself forward yet find himself moving back; he'd come to a sharp right turn, followed by another, then another, then yet another-all in the same direction.

He knew it was the power of his mind that opened the pathways, but they had their own laws-or perhaps they were his, yet unknown to him.

Whatever the source of the shaping, it was madness defined.

He came at last to the door he sought. The barrier showed as nothing more than a dull, slate-grey. stone. Hovering before it, Quick Ben whispered a command, and his spirit took the form of his own body. He stood a moment, mastering the disconnected tremble of his ghost-body, then stepped forward and laid hands on the door.

Its edges were hard and warm. Towards the centre it grew hot and soft to the touch. The surface slowly lost its opaqueness beneath the wizard's hands, becoming glassy like obsidian. Quick Ben closed his eyes.

He'd never before sought to pass through such a door. He was not even certain that it was possible. And if he survived into the beyond, was there any way to return? Past the mechanics of the one thing loomed his final, most difficult worry: he was about to attempt entry into a realm where he wasn't welcome.

Quick Ben opened his eyes. «I am direction,» he said quietly. He leaned against the barrier. «I am the power of will in a place that respects this, and only this.» He leaned harder. «I am the Warren's touch. To chaos nothing is immune, nowhere is immune.» He felt the door begin to yield.

He lashed out one hand behind him, fending off a growing pressure.

«Only I shall pass!» he hissed. Abruptly, with a strange thumping sound, he slipped through, energy flaring around his body.

The wizard staggered over rough, parched earth. He regained his balance and looked around. He stood on a barren plain, the horizon off to his left humped with low hills. Overhead spanned a sky the colour of quicksilver, a scatter of long, stringy clouds moving in unison and black as ink directly above.

Quick Ben sat down, folding his legs and clasping his hands in his lap.

«Shadowthrone,» he said, «Lord of Shadows, I am come to your realm. Will you receive my presence as befits a peaceful visitor?»

From the hills came an answer: the howling of Hounds.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Walk with me on Thieves» Road hear its song underfoot how clear its tone in misstep as it sings you in two

Apsalar's Cant Drisbin (b.1135)

Ing his brow, kruppe sat reading in mammot's study-

: and in the Calling Down to earth the God was Crippled, and so Chained in its place. In the Calling Down many lands were sundered by the God's Fists, and things were born and things were released.

Chained and Crippled was this God Kruppe glanced up from the ancient tome and rolled his eyes. «Brevity, Kruppe prays for brevity!» He returned to the faded handwritten script.

and it bred caution in the unveiling of its powers. The Crippled God bred caution but not well enough, for the powers of the earth came to it in the end. Chained was the Crippled God, and so Chained was it destroyed. And upon this barren plain that imprisoned the Crippled God many gathered to the deed. Hood, grey wanderer of Death, was among the gathering, as was Dessembrae, then Hood's Warrior-