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would be exposed to the air. Canin Mise would be easy enough to find until the magistrate had time to review his situation. By taking the man into cus tody for breaking a private contract, the governor had tacitly purchased the debt at a tenth of its price. Whatever value the law was able to squeeze out of the man now was no concern of Marcus or Cithrin bel Sarcour or the Medean bank.
    Dragons had built this square in millennia past, and the sun had risen on it every day since. Rain and snow and hail had battered or caressed it. Porte Oliva itself was an artifact grown over the remnants of a fallen age. None of these buildings had been where they now stood when the races of humanity had been made. Empires had risen and fallen, and while Porte Oliva itself had never been stormed by an invading host, it had been home to riots and slaughter and death just as any city. It had suffered its fevers and loss. It had become complex, pulling its history around it like a knit shawl. The square hadn’t been meant to house the suffering and the guilty, but it served the purpose.
    A pigeon took wing, grey in the grey, flying out over the square to alight on the top of the gallows post. Marcus had the sudden and profound sense of living in a ruin. Generations of Firstblood and Kurtadam and Cinnae had risen and fallen, lived and loved and died within the walls of the city. And so had the pigeons and rats, the salt lizards and the feral dogs. He couldn’t say that there was a great difference between the walls and roofs and passageways that humanity had built and the birds’ nests that huddled in their eaves. Except that birds didn’t have thumbs. None of them were dragons.
    He considered Canin Mise’s lost sword. It was a nice piece, well forged and well cared for. The letters SRB were worked into the pommel, but what they meant was anyone’s guess. Perhaps the blade had been a gift from a lover or a commander. Or Canin Mise might have taken it from its owner before him. Regardless, the letters had meant something once, and they didn’t now.
    “All right,” Marcus said. “I need food and sleep. I’m getting maudlin.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    But when they reached the bank office, Pyk Usterhall was waiting for them. The grey slate still hung on the wall, an artifact of the building’s history as a gambler’s stall. Where the day’s odds had been posted, the duty roster now stood. The three names for the standing guard—Corisen Mout, Roach, and Enen—were listed in Yardem’s block letters, but none of them were present. Marcus had noticed before now that when the Yemmu notary was in the front room, there always seemed to be pressing work in the back.
    She sat at a low desk, leaning on one massive elbow. The papers on the doomed Canin Mise loan were spread out before her. Her lips sagged in where her tusks should have been, the gap between front and back teeth giving her face a horsey look. She could almost have been a fantastically ugly, obese Firstblood woman. Almost, but not quite.
    “You’re back,” she said.
    “Yes, ma’am,” Marcus said.
    “She’s still sleeping.”
    “Sorry?”
    “I saw you looking around for the girl. She’s not here. She’s still sleeping. What happened?”
    Marcus put the sword on the desk. Pyk looked down at it, then up at him, scowling.
    “He was where we thought, and he knew we were looking for him. When I talked to him, he tried to cut me down.”
    “And?”
    “He didn’t manage.”
    Pyk nodded curtly.
    “You’ve handed him to the magistrates?” she asked.
    “Saw him in the box before we came back.”
    Pyk sucked at her teeth, plucked the pen from its inkwell, and wrote a line in the margin of the original contract. For a woman with such huge hands, her writing was tiny and precise. Putting the pen back in place, she sighed prodigiously.
    “I need you to fire half your guards,” Pyk said. “Whichever ones you like. Use your best judgment.”
    Marcus laughed before he saw she