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small men, the kind of rage that flares up before fading away just as quickly.
    After a moment he finished his verse, and the tiny audience responded with muted applause. He laughed off their lack of enthusiasm, then looked up at me. “If it ain’t the Warden himself—finally managed a visit to your friend Yancey, I see.” His voice was thick and mellifluous.
    “I got caught up in something.”
    “I heard.” He shook his head regretfully. “Bad business. You going to the funeral?”
    “No.”
    “Well I am, so help me pack this up.” He began breaking downhis set, wrapping each of the tiny hide drums in a collection of cotton sacks. I took the smallest of his pieces and did the same, slipping in his fistful of product as I did so. As a rule, Yancey was apt to injure any man foolish enough to touch his instruments, but he knew what I was up to and let it pass without comment. “The noble folk were disappointed you didn’t show last night.”
    “And their sorrow weighs heavy on my soul.”
    “I’m sure you lost sleep. You want to make up for it, you can come by the Duke of Illador’s estate Tuesday evening round ten.”
    “You know how important the opinion of the peerage is to me. I suppose you’ll be expecting your usual cut?”
    “Unless you feel like upping it.”
    I did not. We continued in silence until the onlookers were out of earshot. “They say you found her,” Yancey said.
    “They say things.”
    “You steady on it?”
    “As a top.”
    He nodded sympathetically. “Bad business.” He finished packing up his set in a thick canvas bag, then slung it over his shoulder. “We’ll talk more later. I want to get a decent spot in the square.” He bumped my fist and walked off. “Stay loose.”
    The docks were virtually deserted, the usual mass of workers, merchants, and customers long departed for the funeral, like Yancey happy to set aside a few hours of work to take part in a spectacle of public mourning. In their absence a dull quiet had settled over the area, a distinct contrast to the usual bustle of commerce. Making certain no one was watching I reached into my satchel for a hit of breath. My headache eased and the pain in my ankle receded. I watched the gray sky reflect off the water, thinking back to the day I had stood on the docks with five thousand other youths, preparing to board a troop ship to Gallia. My uniform had looked very fine, I’d thought, and my steel helm had glittered in the sun.
    I contemplated lighting a joint of dreamvine but decided against it. It’s never a good idea to get faded in a maudlin mood—the vine tends to heighten your anxieties instead of blunting them. Solitude was proving an ill fit, and my feet found themselves shuffling north toward the church. It seemed I was attending the funeral after all.
    By the time I got there the service had started and the Square of Benevolence was packed so tight you could barely see the dais. I skirted the crowd and sneaked into an alleyway off the main plaza, taking a seat on a stack of packing crates. It was too far back to hear what the high priest of Prachetas was saying, but I was confident it was very pretty—you don’t get to a point in life where people put gold on your outerwear unless you can say very pretty things at opportune moments. And anyway the wind had picked up, so most of the crowd couldn’t hear the speech either. At first they pushed closer, straining their ears to make him out. When that didn’t work, they got anxious, children pulling at their parents, day laborers shuffling their feet to keep warm.
    Sitting on the stage, a respectful ten paces behind the priest, was the girl’s mother, recognizable even at this distance by the look on her face. It was one I had seen during the war on the faces of boys who had lost limbs, the look of someone who suffered a wound that should have been mortal but wasn’t. It tends to settle like wet plaster, grafting itself permanently to the skin. I suspected