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mentally exhausted and in pain, Lucius raised a hand and the threads of magic came to his mind's eye. He reached out for what he knew to be the most destructive of them, a source of magical energy that he had only before used in small measure. Now, he grasped the thread in its entirety.
    The magic bending under his control, he gasped at the effort it took to fashion it into shape. It felt like hammering steel with his bare hands, and he cried out with the raw effort as he felt the energy begin to burn into his flesh. Sweat erupted all over his body, and he clenched his fist as he felt the magic begin to build up to its critical point, fingers digging deep into his palm until it began to bleed.
    With a roar, Lucius released the magic.
    The force of the arcane blast drove Lucius a step back. An invisible fist drove through the air with the speed of a cracking whip and impacted against the wall.
    Bricks and mortar flew high into the evening sky as the wall folded under the attack with a thunderous crash, debris raining down to bounce off the roof of de Lille's neighbour.
    Swinherd looked up at Lucius, stunned.
    "I had no idea..." he began.
    "There's no time for that," Lucius said, hauling Swinherd to his feet and ignoring the man's sharp cry of pain as he placed weight on his injured foot. Slinging Swinherd's arm across his shoulders, Lucius half ran and half staggered through the gap in the wall. Behind them, he heard mercenaries running for the gap as well, and this drove him to move faster, becoming oblivious to Swinherd's agony and his own exhaustion. Once in the dark of the alleys, he knew they would be safe.

Chapter Three
     
    Stretching his full length, Lucius groaned in contentment as he languished under the soft cotton sheets, and then yelped as the movement twisted the wound in his side, the lance of pain causing him to grab his side, trying to ameliorate the pain.
    Elaine laid her head on his bare chest. "That will teach you to move quicker when an angry merchant comes at you with his sword."
    He grunted in reply, not rising to the bait. Casting a glance around Elaine's tiny room, he saw how much the guildmistress had changed it since the old master's time. The desk was still there, but it had been shunted to one side along the wall, and papers were neatly stacked along one edge, rather than scattered in loosely organised piles. It was not that Elaine ran a tighter ship than Magnus, Lucius knew, just that she brought only the most sensitive documents into this, the guildmaster's office. The majority of her work was conducted elsewhere in the guildhouse.
    The rest of the room was strewn with her belongings. Books - lots and lots of books - sat on shelves or were otherwise stacked in tall towers. Two chests contained Elaine's clothes, another her personal weaponry and tools of the thief's trade. It was amazing that she had managed to fit the wide bed into the room at all, and Lucius had never worked out how she had managed to get it up the narrow stairs.
    A cloud shifted, and sunlight streamed through both the skylight and the tiny round window set opposite the door, its rays picking out the motes of dust that floated in the air. Movement from Elaine caught his attention, and Lucius stared in half-amazement as she reached under the sheets and produced the Torc of Vocator Majoris. Holding it up, she stared at it, turning it slowly.
    "Shouldn't that have gone into the vault?" he asked.
    Elaine shrugged. "Perk of being guildmistress. Do you think it really works?"
    "Protection from assassins? I don't see how."
    She continued to look at it intently, and Lucius supposed she viewed the Pontaine artefact as some sort of challenge. After all, before adopting the mantle of guildmistress, she had been Magnus' master of assassins, and that was an area of guild business she still took a deep interest in. That had been Lucius' greatest source of unease, reconciling the teasing, reflective and indefatigable woman he slept with, to