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darkness and then, as the silence extended itself, I abandoned speech altogether, focusing instead on my own anxieties, all of which seemed to be amplified by being in this curtained box, this cave, this pit of darkness on wheels. Still, it was likely to be a short journey, even if it was into the arms of the Empire’s leading torturer. How bad could things get?
    “Papers,” said an imperious voice outside, perhaps only a foot and a half from my head. With sudden insight I realized that things could get pretty bad.
    Something touched my knee and I jumped, striking my head on the roof. Then it came again, more insistent this time. Putting out my hand, I found myself holding the ambassador’s documents. Barely daring to breathe, I pushed them through the crack in the window blind, leaning back in my seat to avoid being seen. As I did so, I caught a glimpse of steel helms plumed with white. Then the papers were snatched from my grasp by the invisible sentry and I flinched again.
    “You have got to be joking,” growled the unseen soldier, inches from my right ear. I sat very still, muscles tight and bowels clenched.
    There was one of those half-decade pauses that actually lasts about three seconds. Then we heard the sibilant hiss of exasperation that can only come from an Empire sentry foiled by red tape. The papers were stuffed back through the window in a fist that didn’t care if it caught one of the passengers on the jaw. Then it was gone, and a voice commanded the driver to “Move on” in a tone that left us in no doubt as to what the speaker thought about diplomatic immunity.
    In a spasm of relieved joy I contemplated leaning out of the window and shouting something witty as the carriage rolled off. Something told me, however, that the one thing the guards would thank me for now would be the word or gesture that would lead to one of those unfortunate incidents which leaves huddles of troops standing over civilian corpses and muttering to their knowing superiors about how one of them had seemed to be brandishing some lethal, garrison-leveling weapon that had turned out to be a salt shaker. . . .
    I considered Mithos, who was sitting silent as the grave in the darkness opposite me, and wondered if the guards would have had the chance to finish me off. He probably had his sword point poised for a discreet lunge at my liver in case of precisely such an eventuality. I figured I’d stay where I was and keep my mouth shut for once. We rolled off, smooth as ever, and I swallowed hard. Behind us the voices faded and we headed north.
    “There now,” said the ambassador, as if he did this every weekend, “that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
    If it was a real question, no one treated it as such. There was another long silence and then the ambassador added, in the absent tone of one remarking on the chance of rain, “You gentlemen seem to find danger wherever you turn.”
    “Thus far our luck seems to have held out,” said Mithos. It wasone of his usual faintly grim but otherwise toneless remarks, but the impenetrable darkness of the carriage lent it a certain low hostility.
    “Indeed,” replied the elderly man, and his voice matched the other in its steely but otherwise unreadable quality. “Thus far.”
    It could have been just the oppressive and disorientating blackness of the carriage, but, for whatever reason, I realized that my body had not relaxed one iota since we left the Empire guards and territories behind us.

SCENE III

The Only Way to Travel
    We sat like that, silent and edgy, for about two miles. The darkness in the carriage was thick and liquid, giving the slightest rustle of clothing or creak of its steel spring suspension an immediate and unnerving resonance. I almost leaped out of my seat several times at the sound of someone shifting fractionally in theirs. Eventually, I mustered the courage to squint through the window blind, only to find that the land beyond it was almost as dark as the inside of