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friend was a wizard.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œThe Red Masks.”
    â€œShe was taken by Red Masks, she and another man I met, another wizard. If they were made Red Mask by the time I freed you, then they were already dead, Ahj. You didn’t kill them.” He added, because Ahjvar kept looking at him, “I couldn’t go after them. I had to follow you.”
    In silence, Ahjvar rolled the book up and returned it to its case, handed it back.
    â€œIt’s old,” he said. “It’s valuable, yes, but not uncommon. Something every Nabbani wizard would have a copy of, but this is a fine one, beautiful calligraphy, worth a decent price for that alone. And it’s stolen. It has the seal of the imperial palace library stamped on its first sheet.”
    Ghu shrugged. “Better to sell it before we come to the Golden City, then.”
    If they did. He had not thought about where they would go in Nabban, but . . . there must be destination. A time and an ending. A place. A chill touch on his spine. He had kept Dernang and the castle of the lord of Choa ever in his mind, never looking beyond. But that was the half-wit boy again. He could not wander blind and trust to the winds of chance. Not now.

CHAPTER IV
    The sound of the wheeling gulls was loud overhead, and the crows clamoured . . .
    The man whined like a miserable dog. They were tearing his dirty loincloth from him, leaving not a rag for his modesty, shaving his head.
    That a human being should come to this. His bruised and bloody face, his raw back, turned her stomach. It was wrong. Whatever the treason, the heresy, he had committed, it was wrong. He could have been a monster, a cannibal, a tormentor of children, and yet such a death as this would have been wrong. Of course the empire would execute those who worked against it, the spies, the rebels, which this man had been; one expected that; one knew it one’s doom when one took on such a task, but a headsman’s axe made a sufficient end. He had been taken by prophecy in his agonies, they said. When the gods of the land moved a man to speak and their words were met with this . . .
    The man’s entire body was blackened and swollen in broken lumps; blood seeped down his legs; his hands were crusted black with it. Why the magistrates bothered with torture, when they had every right to send at once for an imperially-licensed diviner . . . but that was not how things were done in the Nabban Bloody Yao had made.
    Kill him and have done with. It had been this Emperor Otono’s father who instituted the death of disembowelling. His brother had rebelled against him, and Yao had made certain his death taught his lords and generals a lesson of loyalty, and perhaps his own children too, though it did not seem they had learnt it well. There was one prince dead by suicide while still a youth and a daughter who had fled, pursued by assassins for the defiance of fleeing. Rumour was, whispered most warily, that she, wizard-talented and permitted only the most minor of studies, in accordance with Min-Jan’s law forbidding imperial daughters and sisters to wield any power, had secretly achieved the rank of Bamboo Badge, the highest tier under the Pine Lord. Or perhaps rumour exaggerated and lost Princess An-Chaq had been only Plum or Palm. No matter. No second Yeh-Lin, Min-Jan her son had declared. Imperial women were also forbidden holding any minor office, or undertaking any scholarship even of a non-wizardly bent, or having lovers, male or female. Might as well smother them at birth, in Rat’s opinion.
    Most recently Dan, the youngest prince, had risen in rebellion, fleeing the palace for his maternal Dwei-Clan cousins in Shihpan Province in the northwest the night after his father’s death. Yao had died of an apoplexy this past spring, falling dead from the Peony Throne in the act of condemning to death his Minister of Festivals in a