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wall—“others may hold forceblades. Northerners, they tell me, have many such. With whom does your service lie, tegeus-Cromis?” He twitched the baan so it sparked and spat. “ Tell me! Your evasions weary me—”
    Cromis felt perspiration trickling under his armpits. He was no coward, but he had been long away from violence; and though the baan was in poor condition, the energies that formed its blade running low, it would still slice steel, make play of bone and butter of flesh.
    “I would remind you, Ronoan Mor,” he said quietly, “that you are ill. Your arm. Fever makes you hasty. I have given you succour—”
    “This to your succour!” shouted Mor, and spat. “Tell me, or I’ll open you from crutch to collarbone.”
    The baan flickered like an electric snake.
    “You are a fool, Ronoan Mor. Only a fool insults a man’s queen under that man’s hospitable roof.”
    Mor flung his head back and howled like a beast.
    He lunged blindly.
    Cromis whirled, tangled his cloak about hand and baan . As the blade cut free, he crouched, rolled, changed direction, rolled again, so that his body became a blur of motion on the stone-flagged floor. The nameless sword slid from its sheath, and he was tegeus-Cromis the Northkiller once again, Companion of the Order of Methven and Bane of Carlemaker.
    Confused, Mor backed up against the head of the bed, his slitted eyes fixed on the crouching swordsman. He was breathing heavily.
    “Forget it, man!” said Cromis. “I will accept your apologies. Your illness wears you. I have no use for this foolishness. The Methven do not slaughter merchants.”
    Mor threw the forceblade at him.
    tegeus-Cromis, who had thought never to fight again, laughed .
    As the baan buried itself in the trophy wall, he sprang forward, so that his whole long body followed the line of the nameless sword.
    A choked cry, and Ronoan Mor was dead.
    tegeus-Cromis, who fancied himself a better poet than armsman, stood over the corpse, watched sadly the blood well onto the blue silk bed, and cursed himself for lack of mercy.
    “I stand for Queen Jane, merchant,” he said. “As I stood for her father. It is that simple.”
    He wiped the blade of the sword with no name and went to prepare himself for a journey to the Pastel City, no longer plagued by dreams of a quiet life.
    Before he left, another thing happened, a welcome thing.
    He did not expect to see his tower again. In his skull, there was a premonition: Canna Moidart and her true kinsmen burned down from the voracious North with wild eyes and the old weapons, come to extract vengeance from the city and empire that had ousted them a century since. The savage blood ran true: though Canna Moidart was of Methven’s line, being the daughter of his brother Methvel, old quarrels ran in her veins from her mother Balquhider’s side, and she had expected the sovereignty on the death of her uncle. Viriconium had grown fat and mercantile while Methven grew old and Moidart fermented discontent in kingdom and city. And the wolves of the North had sharpened their teeth on their grievances.
    He did not expect to see Balmacara again: so he stood in his topmost room and chose an instrument to take with him. Though the land go down into death and misrule, and tegeus-Cromis of the nameless sword with it, there should be some poetry before the end.
    The fire in the rowan wood had died. Of the crystal launch, nothing remained but a charred glade an acre across. The road wound away to Viriconium. Some measure of order had prevailed there, for the smoke haze had left the horizon and the foundations of the tower no longer trembled. He hoped fervently that Queen Jane still prevailed, and that the calm was not that of a spent city, close to death.
    Along the road, grey dust billowing about them, rode some thirty or forty horsemen, heading for Balmacara.
    He could not see their standard, but he put down the gourd-shaped instrument from the East and went to welcome them; whether