Thraxas - The Complete Series Read Online Free PDF Page A

jail. Sabam, Sabap, Sabav. Three prayer calls a day. Gets me down. Still, we get off lightly in Turai. In Nioj they have six. I kneel down to pray in case some jailer is spying on me; there’s no sense in giving the authorities another excuse to hold me here. Perhaps it isn’t such a bad idea, because I’m released shortly afterwards. God may now be on my side. More likely the Princess pulled some strings. Captain Rallee is most displeased. He can’t understand how a guy like me can still have any influence in this town.
    “Who you working for, the Royal Family?” he grumbles, as a Sorcerer mutters the spell to let me out the front gates. “You watch yourself, Thraxas. The Prefect’s got his eye on you. You try putting anything over on him and he’ll be down on you like a bad spell.”
    I smile graciously in reply, and climb into a landus heading for Twelve Seas. I stop off at the public baths, wash off the stink of prison, grab a beer and food at the Avenging Axe and head off out.
    “Where have you been?” asks Makri as I’m leaving.
    “In prison.”
    “Oh,” says Makri. “I thought maybe you were hiding from the Brotherhood.”
    I glare at her. “And why did you think that?”
    “Because you can’t pay your gambling debts.”
    I am outraged to learn that Makri knows about this too.
    “Does everyone in Twelve Seas have to stick their noses into my personal affairs? It’s high time people around here started minding their own damned business.”
    With which I storm out into the street. A beggar sticks a withered hand in my direction.
    “Get a job,” I bark at him. It makes me feel slightly better.
    It’s dark by the time I reach Attilan’s house. It’s risky returning so soon but it has to be done. In the time between my discovery in the garden and my arrest, I threw the box under a bush and I need it back. No one seems to be around, apart from a young Pontifex hurrying home after a hard day’s praying. I wish I could make myself invisible but the invisibility spell is way too complicated for me. Trusting to luck, I haul myself over the fence, scramble through the garden and dive beneath the bush. The box isn’t there. Someone beat me to it. Two minutes later I’m back over the fence and hurrying south, not pleased at the way things are going.
    Horse traffic is banned in the city after dark. The night is still hot and it’s a tiring walk. When I reach Pashish I decide to drop in on Astrath Triple Moon. I’ve promised Makri I’ll ask him if he can help her. More to the point, I need a beer.
    Pashish, just north of Twelve Seas, is another poor suburb, though relatively crime-free. Its narrow tenemented streets comprise mainly the dwellings of harbour workers and other manual labourers. It’s an unlikely place to find a Sorcerer, but Astrath Triple Moon is somewhat of an outcast among his kind, thanks to certain allegations a few years back when he was the official Sorcerer at the Stadium Superbius, with responsibility for ensuring that all chariot races and suchlike were run fairly, without outside sorcerous interference. Certain powerful Senators felt that their chariots weren’t getting a fair deal, leading to a Praetor’s investigation accusing Astrath Triple Moon of taking bribes.
    Astrath employed me to dig up evidence on his behalf. He was, in fact, as guilty as hell but I managed to cloud the issue enough for him to escape prosecution or expulsion from the Sorcerers Guild. This allowed him to remain in the city—no Sorcerer expelled from the Guild is allowed to practise here—but the stigma attached to his name thereafter forced him to leave his high-class practice in Truth is Beauty Lane. He ended up in straitened circumstances with a small practice in Pashish ministering to the humble needs of the local population.
    Astrath is still a powerful Sorcerer. As always he is pleased to see me. Not many men of my learning and culture visit him these days. He pours me a beer and I down it in