“Emmer! I’m not like that!” A shout now. “I’m—” I remembered my knife and started to hunt it.

“Oh, shush.” Much softer tones, close to my face. “Just behave.”

“But—”

“It’s Emma.”

“What?”

“Emma, not Emmer.” An iron grip encircled my wrist as my fingertips found the hilt of my dagger. The body pinning me now stretched out on mine, hard with muscle but shorter than me, and at such close quarters, quite possibly female. “Emma,” she said again. “But let that slip outside this room, pretty boy, and I’ll cut your tongue out and eat it.”

“But—”

“Just relax. I’ve saved you half a silver ducet.”

So I did.

SEVENTEEN

“Mired in sin!” The annoyingly judgmental voice rang behind my ears and sent shards of white pain into my head. “Deeper in deed than in thought! I hadn’t considered it possible.”

“Oh God!” Someone had turned my stomach inside out and filled it with eels. I was sure of it.

“How dare you call upon him!” Baraqel’s anger carried a hint of delight, as if nothing pleased him more than finding good fresh sin to condemn.

“Just kill me!” I rolled over. All of me hurt. I must have slept with my mouth open because by the taste of it the rats had been using it as a latrine all night.

“How a creature such as you came to the light . . .” Baraqel’s imagination or eloquence failed him.

I cracked one eye open. Daylight streamed in like razors, slivers of it reaching through heavy shutters to illuminate a filthy chamber. I ran a hand across my chest, remembering somebody pushing me. Naked? My locket! I lurched up, my stomach lurched faster, and for a moment I struggled not to decorate the headboard. My clothes lay strewn over the floorboards, and an ill-advised lunge placed my hand over the comforting lump that the locket made in the shirt that I’d been wearing since Oppen. This time my struggle was in vain and I threw up what appeared to be everything I’d eaten the night before, along with a couple of other people’s meals and a bag of diced carrots I’d no memory of consuming.

“Cover yourself, man! There’s a lady present.” I winced at the angel’s voice, roaring like nails down the chalkboard of my soul.

“Uuuurgod,” proved to be my snappiest response. I wiped my mouth and hauled myself up so my head rose above the edge of the bed.

On the far side, across a wrinkled sea of soiled linen and grey wool, Emma was pulling herself back into a pair of worn leather trousers. Even in my delicate state I managed to admire the hard, if grimy, lines of her body before they were entirely hidden away. She turned, buttoning her jerkin over tight-wrapped breasts, her expression a mix of amusement and mild disgust. I took her to be somewhere in her thirties, towards the end of them perhaps. Even with her short hair and broken nose, I couldn’t understand how I’d not seen her for what she was before.

“My secret.” She grabbed herself between the legs, all traces of amusement dropping from her face. “Speak of it and I’ll cut you to look the same.” Suddenly I couldn’t see any trace of a woman in her at all.

“There’s no secret, Brother Emmer,” I said.

“That’s right.” She flipped a copper crown at me, pulled her knife from where it had been wedging the door shut, and left the room.

Alone in the unsavoury mess, I took a moment to reflect. “A helluva woman!” I crawled back onto the bed.

“Naked as the devil and clothed in sin!” Baraqel howled—or at least it felt as if he howled it. “Find a priest, Prince Jalan, and—” Somewhere the sun parted company with the horizon and shut him up. The daylight lanced ever more pointedly through the shutters and I pulled the blanket over my pounding head. The pounding got worse. After a few confused minutes of rolling about in misery, holding my temples, I figured out that a fair portion of the pounding was actually coming through the wall as a headboard struck against it repeatedly. I buried my head under my arms, then decided against it; the mattress was a long way from wholesome, several national boundaries away from it probably. Instead I just plugged my ears and hoped for the world in general to go away, and for whoever was having such a good time in the next room to run out of energy. Or die.

An indeterminate amount of time later the stink of the place drove me to stagger to the door, still reeling, half-drunk from the night before, wrapped in a thin blanket and clutching most of my clothes, my boots, my sword. I took Emma’s copper too. Waste not, want not. The shirt I left as a gift for the next occupant—minus Mother’s locket, of course.