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constant shadow, forever damp, the unruly settlement festered like an untreated wound, rife with disease and every kind of unsavory activity. Cicerons ruled here.
    Cicerons plagued every Navron town and highroad like wandering packs of wild dogs. Skin as dusky as purebloods, bedecked with arm bracelets, earrings, and necklaces of false gold, they bred thieves, smugglers, fortune-tellers, and artists at picking pockets, knife juggling, and sleight of hand. Their knives found human targets, as well, especially any who crossed them. It was hard to tell one of them from another, and when constables ran one band of thieves to ground, they would find another in its place, their quarry long moved on.
    We threaded the shadowy labyrinth for half a quellé, dodging diseased cats, racing ragamuffins, and ropes hung with rags. The wheedling gamblers fixed their eyes on their dice cups. The simpering procurer fell silent and looked away. None showed fear or awe. Even the women wore knowing, secretive expressions, and I could not shake the sense that they believed that someday I would walk this path alone and matters might be different.
    My escorts kept hands on their swords and raised green magefire around us. In honor of the occasion, my father’s ruby ring hung from my neck on a slender chain. I folded my hand over it, the only object of value we had retrieved from the ashes at Pontia.
    Too much to hope that my contract included provision for a daily escort. The Registry came down hard on any who interfered with purebloods, but Registry guards, too, were stretched thin with the city so unsettled. My own sword training was scarce more than dabbling, and I’d spent so much time pursuing the two bents that my stock of common spells, including anything useful in combat, was pitifully thin.
    The narrow path arced around a pigless sty at the far end of the hirudo, where the land kicked up sharply. A steep, tortuous ascent, including a last series of some fifty steps half a boot wide and almost vertical, brought usto a narrow slot in Caedmon’s Wall, laced with iron bars. Neither horse nor armored knight nor even a person particularly well fed would be able to squeeze through. We emerged atop a broad plateau.
    The prospect astonished me. Beyond a lumpy field of ice-crusted mud, like a phantasm behind the haze of swirling snow, sprawled a walled compound of stone spires, shed roofs, and chimneys. Atop the gatehouse arch, the twinned images of Deunor Lightbringer and his half brother Magrog, Lord of the Underworld, held pause in their never-ending battle for human souls. A necropolis . . . a city of the dead.
    Warnings skittered through my skin like spider feet. Not since my days at the university had I ventured so far from the familiar. Was it that disastrous experience had my gut clenching in such dangerous fashion or was it that the air reeked so foully of endings?
    We tramped through the snow-pale emptiness as the temple bells from the city heights called eighth hour. In the distance, a party of villeins dug in the frosty ground and loaded handcarts, their shovels crunching in the quiet. Shivering in my fur-lined cloak, I couldn’t imagine what might be worth harvesting so deep in such a winter.
    A tarnished brass plate was embedded in the brick above the gateway arch. Etched into it were the words NECROPOLIS CATON . My new master had not taken his name from some scrabbling village or crossroads, but from a burial ground. What kind of man named himself after a graveyard?
    Leander rang the gate bell.
    Back straight, I composed every expressive aspect of my body with pride.
Capatronn, Patronn, may my service and my life bring honor to our family name.
Great Deunor, Lord of Fire and Magic, let my gift not falter
.
    The iron gates swung inward. A pale, willowy young woman in unsullied white robes stood in the arch of light beyond the gatehouse tunnel, arms spread, head bowed, as graceful and still as sculpted marble.
    “Welc— Oh!” Her