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looked as it had upon our arrival. The unnatural white fire spawned by Gen’s Djimbi magics had completely consumed the three Auditors it had made contact with; no bones, no ashes, no smoke to be seen. The only indication that something had recently burned was the lingering stench of charred hair and meat. The other corpses lay concealed beneath bed ding chaff in the feed loft, and would be disposed of under cover of deep night.
    We won’t get away with this. Even at high noon, with the bayen quarter asleep in the heat, people will have heard the shrieks.
    In our favor was the terror that Auditors inspired in all folk, bayen and rishi alike. Everyone knew that where Au ditors walked, interrogations and screams followed. Even Temple’s daronpuis were uneasy around the sacred hench men veiled in white. So perhaps questions wouldn’t be asked. Perhaps fear would keep mouths shut, would put a clamp over curiosity. After all, Malacarites are good at not seeing and hearing the visible and audible. When it suits them.
    The dragonmaster lay upon a bale of hay, the gap ing wound on his chest bleeding sluggishly. I was aching so badly that I no longer denied to myself that I craved venom. Ghepp had promised to send a healer; one had yet to appear.
    I didn’t like that I’d been left with no weapon with which to defend myself. Especially as I didn’t wholly trust Ghepp. No. The way he’d looked at me . . .
    Not just his look. The facts didn’t add up. If he and the Auditors had been about to mount up to verify the Clutch boundaries, why had some of Ghepp’s men carried bows and arrows? Strange choice of weapon, when soldiers were usually armed with swords. Unless a long-distance defense was required. As was the case against quoits.
    And what about those quoits?
Auditors were forbidden to carry ordinary arms, save for the decapitation axes used when performing a holy execu tion before a Temple tribunal. The only weapon Auditors were permitted to carry—and use in self-defense—were furgkri , spinning razor-rings. Quoits.
The Auditors wanted to make their attack look like selfdefense.
Had Ghepp known about the ambush, or had it been co incidence that they’d all been in the byre courtyard upon our arrival? What about Ghepp’s men . . . had the Auditors known that some of them were armed with bows, or had the bowmen appeared in the byre without the Auditors’ knowledge?
Again, I could speculate a thousand possibilities. I doubted I’d ever know the answers. The end result re mained the same, regardless: Even here, on my own Clutch, I wasn’t safe.
Well after high noon, an Auditor—one of Ghepp’s dis guised men—brought us a flagon of watered wine, a hand ful of plums, and a Djimbi woman. The woman wore the blank expression of someone on the brink of terror, and she carried a reed basket upon one hip. I was nonplussed by what she was wearing; it looked to be no more than a bolt of cloth, plum-colored and patterned with black fish bones, that had been artfully wrapped about her from bo som to thigh. Never would such exposure be publicly toler ated on Clutch Re. I wondered if her mode of dress marked her as a whore.
The Auditor gestured toward the dragonmaster, and the woman went to him, set her basket on the floor, and be gan tending to his wound with visibly trembling hands. He flailed; she murmured to him in Djimbi; he settled and per mitted her to continue.
The Auditor withdrew bundled brown cloth from one of his long sleeves and dropped it at my feet. “From the clo ven one.”
He meant Gen.
Moving stiffly from pain, I picked up the bundle. It was a bitoo, one of those ankle-length hooded gowns deemed ap propriate wear for a Malacarite woman. The style—brown, no tucks or pleats, made of serviceable byssus—was popu lar amongst rishi.
The bitoo had been wrapped about a tunic, which was in turn wrapped about a dowry-sword. In the manner of all dowry-swords, the object was two sticks tied together with red twine to