None, I told myself, of my business. But I had nothing else to do, and the problem was bothering me, like a fibre of bacon caught between two back teeth.

  Well now, I thought. A woman, a female adept of all the impossible things, sets out from Idalia, a faraway country of which we know little, and comes all the way across the world to a hick town in the Ozidan peninsula. She says she doesn’t know what a prior is, and I believe her, but she kills one nonetheless. Not something you’d do lightly, or on a whim. There are people in this world who stab other people for fun, but they generally tend to do it out in the street, and their victims are close by and handy. To get inside the prior’s lodging, armed with a knife, would call for skill, ice in the veins and above all, patience; not characteristics you associate with street-stabbing crazies. Makes no sense—

  Except—

  Let’s suppose killing the prior wasn’t the reason she came here. Let’s suppose that the bloody purpose was part of someone else’s agenda, and she was co-opted—why? Because she’s from out of town, as far out of town as it’s possible to get. I thought about that. Still made no sense, except—

  Demonic possession. Put that into the mix, and potential sense comes gushing out. Maybe Idalians, or Idalian adepts, or Idalian females, or Idalian female adepts are really easy to possess; more likely, the fact that she could have no possible motive was the whole point. To make it really, really mysterious. Or to make sure that no interested party could hijack the murder to suit their own purposes—to make trouble, put the blame on some blameless faction, cause a riot, start a war. Neat as ninepence, and just the sort of clear, sensible thinking I’ve come to expect from the smarter elements of the Loyal Opposition. Let’s do this thing, because it’s necessary, but let’s try and make sure nobody else gets hurt. The sort of thinking I’ve stopped expecting from my side of the fence, because I don’t react well to disappointment.

  Except—

  If she’d been possessed when I met her the first time I’d have smelt it on her, sure as eggs (unless I couldn’t because she was Idalian, but for crying out loud let’s not overcomplicate matters). So she’d have had to have been nobbled at some point between parting from me and the murder. During that rather narrow timeframe, an agent of the opposite Orientation would have had to notice her, figure out the advantages in using her, draw up a plan of action, get it approved by Area Command and signed off by Division, then slid into her head without her noticing. A bit tight, but possible.

  Except that since the murder, I’d been in her head myself, and if one of Them had been in there at any point during the last two years, the smell would’ve been strong enough to bring me out in a rash. You can tell, believe me. Unless it’s different with Idalians, Idalian adepts, Idalian females, Idalian female adepts, Idalian female adepts during the third week after Ascension—

  If only the coaches were running, I’d be miles away by now and something else would be nagging away at me, eating into my brain like a beetle, instead of this; something I could eventually solve, quite likely. I think I already told you how much I loathe mysteries.

  Demonic possession. Just as well I know somebody who’s something of an authority on the subject.

  The corn-chandler from Obergallen was in the Corn Exchange, presumably chandling a spot of corn. I sidled up next to him and slithered in through his ear.

  “Now what?” said my old pal.

  “You were about to tell me something,” I said.

  I know him quite well. Like most of his kind, he’s hopeless at lying. The rule is, to bring us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths; fibbing is, strictly speaking, against the rules, or at least a misdemeanour violation of the code of conduct. When my pal lies he goes a rather garish shade of lemon. “No, I don’t think so,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “You were.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.” I put on my stern expression, designed to imply that even though we were pals, I was still an officer of the ecclesiastical court. It cuts no ice with him, goes without saying, but it does convey the fact that I seriously want to know. “Don’t make me give you a direct order.”

  “Idiot.” He sighed. “Why should I tell you what you know already?”

  “Come again?”

  “Oh please.” He scowled at me. “I can smell her on you.”

  Ah.

  “That bloody woman.” He doesn’t usually swear. Another code violation. “Keep her the hell away from me, you hear me?”

  “You’ve met her.”

  “Oh yes.”

  Made no sense. My pal already had a host. He’s not given to outbursts of initiative, and his superiors have a realistic opinion of his capabilities. Therefore he wouldn’t be chosen for anything difficult or complicated. “She’s Idalian,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “What’s she doing in Ozidan?”

  He shuddered. “Don’t mess me around, please,” he said. “I’ve had about as much as I can handle today, thank you ever so much. And any minute now I’m going to have those pinheads from Divisional Command down on me like a ton of bricks, and it’s not my fault.” He paused and took a deep breath. “Look, I know it’s not your fault either, you’re just a footslogger like me, but it really is too bad. I mean, what’s got into you people, letting something like that roam about loose in a public place? It’s bloody irresponsible, is what it is. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”

  Strong words. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Apparently I go green when I lie. He looked at me. I guess I wasn’t green. “Straight up?”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die in a cellarful of rats.”

  “You’re kidding me. You don’t know?”

  “Not unless you tell me.”

  “Oh for pity’s sake. You people—”

  “Tell me.”

  He blinked, took a deep breath and vanished.

  Which isn’t possible. They can’t just disappear. I’m not talking about invisibility. Inside someone’s head, you see with the inner eye, so conjuring tricks are completely beside the point. If I couldn’t see him, he was no longer there. I was alone with the slow, unimaginably mundane ruminations of the corn-chandler. What the hell?

  I left quickly, hung around the corn exchange for a few minutes to see if anybody there was acting oddly, then made my way back to the Transfigured by Joy, where they do a six-stuiver stockfish casserole that tastes remarkably like leaf mould.

  More to think about. Clearly my pal had encountered her, and equally clearly it hadn’t been a pleasant experience for him. Now, unless the inside of her head had seen more recent footfall than a beer tent on market day, one consequence of their encounter must have been a dead prior. I have to say that in my experience, my pal isn’t like that. He’s a conscientious officer and he obeys orders when absolutely necessary, but spectacular acts of violence aren’t his usual MO. It’s not that he’s squeamish exactly. He says that the toxins released into the host’s system by shock, rage and bloodlust give him indigestion. Besides, he’d said something about Division being down on him like a ton of bricks, so presumably he hadn’t been ordered to kill any priors. His lot are very careful not to do any unauthorised evil, for moral-high-ground purposes. Logical conclusion, therefore; he’d been inside her mind and together they’d murdered the prior, but he hadn’t wanted to—

  Made no sense.

  Unfortunately, it was starting to look annoyingly like my business after all. He was, after all, a contact, a business associate, I’d go so far as to say a colleague. Whatever it was she’d done to him had left him traumatised, and now he’d simply disappeared, something which is, of course, impossible. No actual harm could come to him. Could it? I realised I had no idea. You can’t kill them, in the same way you can’t kill Thursday or symmetry or an angle of forty-five degrees. You can hurt them. They have a pain threshold so low it’s practically a pain cellar. But you can’t damage them in any permanent way, any more than you can cut up water with scissors. At least, as far as we know. It was, of course, entirely possible that they knew how to kill them stone dead in Idalia.

  Screw it, I thought. In the normal course of events I’m as reluctant to get involved as a cat is to go outside in the rain, but I’m also a qualified practitioner, an officer of the ecclesiastical court, an honorary canon juridical and (nominally at least) one of the good guys. Nor could I plead a previous engagement, since I couldn’t get out of bloody Sabades unless I walked. Also the small matter of what might get said to me if it transpired that something very big and very bad had happened when I was right there on the spot and I’d done absolutely nothing about it. Nuts, I thought.

  So I went to the root cellar out back of the Flawless Diamonds. She wasn’t there.

  Deep breath. These things are sent to try us. Time for me to do my celebrated impression of a spaniel.

  Tracking someone by scent alone isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds. Quite apart from the funny looks you get, it’s tiring. All that sniffing gives me a headache, and I bump into things. It could have been worse, though. The scent was reasonably fresh and the trail didn’t take me too close to any tanneries, dye works, linen yards or other strongly-scented operations, so I managed not to lose it. Instead, I found myself standing in the middle of Horsefair looking at the main gate of the Watch house. Marvellous.

  Justice in Sabades Amar is many things, but it’s not long drawn out. The average turnaround time between the first hand on the collar and the swish of the headsman’s axe is twenty-four hours, and when they want to, they can really get a move on. I figured the murder of the prior would be fairly close to the top of their list of, no pun intended, priorities. There would, of course, be a trial. The Sabadois aren’t barbarians. But their idea of the burden of proof is a sworn affidavit from the district procurator. If I wanted to do anything, I’d have to do it quickly. I barged in through the door and asked for the duty officer.

  “I want to see the prisoner,” I said.

  He looked at me. “Which one? We’ve got a hundred and six.”

  “The girl who killed the prior.”

  He smiled at me. “In your dreams,” he said.

  Oh well. I’m not supposed to do that sort of thing, but what the hell. In through his nose, up the eustachian tube into his brain, a quick flick of the wrists to jerk his centre of volition through a hundred and eighty degrees. “In the circumstances,” he said, “you can have ten minutes.”

  “Thank you,” I said politely.

  They’d put her in my old cell. Years ago, a silly misunderstanding, I won’t bother you with the details, but the stone I’d loosened with the stub end of a spoon had been mortared back into place, going to show how sharp and on-the-ball they are in Sabades. It’s the very last cell at the end of a very long passageway leading nowhere, with loads of doors and guards to get past coming or going. Just the thought of it made my teeth ache.

  She lifted her head. “You,” she said.

  I waited till the door clanged shut. “They got you, then.”

  “Yes. Of all the stupid—”

  I raised my hand. “Let’s not go into all that now,” I said. “Would you like me to get you out of here?”

  She scowled at me. “You honestly think you can do that.”

  I nodded. “Given your abilities,” I said, “I’m surprised to find you still here.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  It occurred to me how little I knew about Idalian adepts. “Couldn’t you have just—well, you know?”

  “What?”

  “Nudged their minds? Just a little?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Idalia, I thought, a faraway place, et cetera. “Leave this to me,” I said, and banged on the door with my fist.

  Smugness, I’m told, doesn’t become me. I wouldn’t know. In the usual course of events, I have so very little to be smug about. This time, though; by the time we walked out of the Watch house, with the duty officer opening the door for us and apologising for any inconvenience, I felt as tight-chested as a bullfrog.

  “Back home,” she said to me, “if I did that, they’d cut me open and wind out my guts on a stick.”

  “Against the rules?”

  “It’d be unthinkable.”

  “And in about half an hour you’d have been dead. Must you whine about absolutely everything?”

  She gave me a look that should have scoured me down to the bone. Oddly enough, it didn’t. “If I’d known what you were going to do, I wouldn’t have let you.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Go back. I’m not stopping you.”

  I honestly believe she considered it, for about two seconds. A very long time, in context. “So that’s it, is it? I’m off the hook.”

  “Hardly,” I said. “In an hour or so they’ll snap out of it and wonder where in hell you can have got to. So that’s all right. You can appease your violated conscience by letting them catch you and everything will be just dandy. In the meantime, however, you can tell me what you did to my friend.”

  “What friend?”

  I realised I needed to choose my words carefully. “Not friend,” I said. “Associate. You see, for reasons I’m not authorised to disclose, I have a sort of a business relationship with the demon who was in your mind earlier today—”

  “The what?”

  We go way back, my pal and I. I first ran into him when I was still in third year. As part of the course, we had to do a certain amount of practical fieldwork—sounds good, doesn’t it? Get the kids away from their books for an afternoon, give them a taste of what’s waiting for them out there in the big, wide world, they’ll thank you for it in the long run. Great idea. What it meant in practice was a bunch of semi-trained, grass-green idiots roaming through the streets of a major city, scared out of their wits and looking for the worst possible sort of trouble.

  Some of them found it. My friend Maxentiolus, for example. His assignment was to locate and cast out an evil spirit. He passed the theory with flying colours, ninety-eight per cent, the highest grade ever recorded up to that time in a mid-term assessment. His tutors declared that he knew more about all that stuff than they did and he was equipped to deal with any situation he might happen to encounter out there on the street. So off he went, wrapped up in his woolly muffler because he had a weak chest and his mother worried about him, to do battle with the Prince of Darkness. Afterwards, at the memorial service in the Rose Chapel, I overheard two of our tutors speculating about what could have gone wrong, and the conclusion they arrived at was that poor little Maxentiolus had run into a problem comprised in the two per cent of the syllabus he hadn’t learned by heart. Moral: stuff happens.

  Mercifully, on the occasion of my first real-life encounter with the opposite Orientation, it didn’t happen to me. I’d been given exactly the same assignment as poor Max, and I’d seen what happened to him; in fact I was there when he jumped, and heard the unforgettable sound of a human body hitting a stone-flagged courtyard after falling from a hundred-foot tower. A week later, when I walked across the Old Flower Market and caught that faint but distinctive scent, I wasn’t at my chirpiest, oddly enough.

  I’d chosen the flower market because, in the mid-term practicals, failure is acceptable under certain circumstances. One of them is being sent to find a demon but there aren’t any demons about. Fair enough; everybody has a blank day sometimes, and as we know, there’s only a couple of hundred thousand of the critters in all of Creation. Just now I chose my words with care; faint but distinctive. You have to be quite close to pick up the scent. If, all things considered, you feel it’s not in your best interests to pick up a scent, there’s no better place in the city than the flower market, which stinks to high heaven of flowers to the point where you can hardly breathe.

  So what? I cheat. But I’m also fundamentally honest. I’d done my very best not to run across a demon, but if I did locate one, I couldn’t just walk on by as though it wasn’t there. And, sure enough, as I strolled past a stall selling roasted chestnuts, there it was, rank as a fox.

  The lecturers tell you—I give this lecture myself once a year, and I describe it this way. A demon smells like nothing else. I can’t be more specific than that, because it’s entirely subjective. The same demon will smell musty-puky-mouldy to me and oily-shitty-rotten to you and faintly of eglantine to someone else. But the smell will be literally indescribable and absolutely unlike anything else you’ve ever encountered. And that’s how you know.

  I stopped and looked round, and there was this woman, tying violets into bundles. She was the absolute Saloninan ideal of nondescript; not smart, not shabby, any age between thirty-five and seventy, small, clean, unbleached linen smock, pepper-and-salt hair, the sort of woman who gets run over by a cart in broad daylight because she’s so ordinary she’s invisible. I felt in my pocket and found a twenty-stuiver, the only coin I’d got. “A bunch of violets, please,” I said, and offered her the coin.

  She looked up at me, then at the money. “Sorry,” she said. “I haven’t got change for that.”

  I saw him behind her eyes. “Don’t worry about it,” I said, and sort of prodded towards her with the coin.

  These days I don’t need to bother with it, but the easiest way for novices is simultaneous physical touch and eye-contact. It practically makes the connection for you, and then in you go. She opened her mouth to say thank you or something like that, and I dived in between her parted lips like a rat up a drain. It’s a small miracle I didn’t give her the horrors, but somehow or other I got away with it; and there I was, inside a stranger’s mind for the first time ever.

  A stranger’s, mark you. I’d been inside my tutors so often I’d practically beaten a path, like cows to the barn. It suddenly occurred to me that here I was, on active service—no longer among friends, the swords don’t have buttons on the points, if you get in trouble you can’t call a halt and ask if you can start again from the beginning. Extraordinary feeling, that. It’s like coming out of a small, dark house into searingly bright sunshine. I imagine it’s how it feels hatching from an egg. The first thing you register is sheer terror; and then you remember that you’re not exactly naked and helpless, you do have certain skills and weapons; above all, you remember (though it’s hard to accept and get your head around) that you’re supposed to be a predator—

 

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