Smelling of death.

Murmured greetings and bowed heads as Bugg entered, his eyes settling on the motionless form lying on a bloody blanket in the room’s centre. After a moment’s study, he glanced up and sought out the gaze of the eldest of the children, a girl of about ten or eleven years of age – though possibly older and stunted by malnutrition, or younger and prematurely aged by the same. Large, hard eyes met his.

‘Where did you find her?’

‘She made it home,’ the girl replied, her tone wooden.

Bugg looked down at the dead grandmother once more. ‘From how far away?’

‘Buried Round, she said.’

‘She spoke, then, before life left her.’ Bugg’s jaw muscles bunched. Buried Round was two, three hundred paces distant. An extraordinary will, in the old woman, to have walked all that distance with two mortal sword-thrusts in her chest. ‘She knew great need, I think.’

‘To tell us who killed her, yes.’

And not to simply disappear, as so many of the destitute do, thus raising the spectre of abandonment – a scar these children could do without.

‘Who, then?’

‘She was crossing the Round, and found herself in the path of an entourage. Seven men and their master, all armed. The master was raging, something about all his spies disappearing. Our grandmother begged for coin. The master lost his mind with anger and ordered his guards to kill her. And so they did.’

‘And is the identity of this master known?’

‘You will find his face on newly minted docks.’

Ah.

Bugg knelt beside the old woman. He laid a hand on her cold, lined forehead, and sought the remnants of her life. ‘Urusan of the Clan known as the Owl. Her strength was born of love. For her grandchildren. She is gone, but she has not gone far.’ He raised his head and met the eyes of each of the six children. ‘I hear the shifting of vast stones, the grinding surrender of a long closed portal. There is cold clay, but it did not embrace her.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘I will prepare this flesh for Nerek interment-’

‘We would have your blessing,’ the girl said.

Bugg’s brows lifted. ‘Mine? I am not Nerek, nor even a priest-’

‘We would have your blessing.’

The manservant hesitated, then sighed. ‘As you will. But tell me, how will you live now?’

As if in answer there was a commotion at the doorway, then a huge figure lumbered into the small room, seeming to fill it entirely. He was young, his size and features evincing Tarthenal and Nerek blood both. Small eyes fixed upon Urusan’s corpse, and the whole face darkened.

‘And who is this?’ Bugg asked. A shifting of vast stones – now this… this shoving aside of entire mountains. What begins here ?

‘Our cousin,’ the girl said, her eyes wide and adoring and full of pleading as she looked up at the young man. ‘He works on the harbour front. Unn is his name. Unn, this is the man known as Bugg. A dresser of the dead.’

Unn’s voice was so low-pitched it could barely be heard. ‘Who did this?’

Oh, Finadd Gerun Eberict, to your senseless feast of blood you shall have an uninvited guest, and something tells me you will come to regret it.

Selush of the Stinking House was tall and amply proportioned, yet her most notable feature was her hair. Twenty-seven short braids of the thick black hair, projecting in all directions, each wrapped round an antler tine, which meant that the braids curved and twisted in peculiar fashion. She was somewhere between thirty-five and fifty years of age, the obscurity the product of her formidable talent as a disguiser of flaws. Violet eyes, produced by an unusual ink collected from segmented worms that lived deep in the sand of the south island beaches, and lips kept full and red by a mildly toxic snake venom that she painted on every morning.

As she stood before Tehol and Shurq Elalle at the threshold of her modest and unfortunately named abode, she was dressed in skin-tight silks, inviting Tehol against his own sense of decorum to examine her nipples beneath the gilt sheen – and so it was a long moment before he looked up to see the alarm in her eyes.

‘You’re early! I wasn’t expecting you. Oh! Now I’m all nervous. Really, Tehol, you should know better than to do the unexpected! Is this the dead woman?’

‘If not,’ Shurq Elalle replied, ‘then I’m in even deeper trouble, wouldn’t you say?’

Selush stepped closer. ‘This is the worst embalming I’ve ever seen.’

‘I wasn’t embalmed.’

‘Oh! An outrage! How did you die?’