Sonea sat bolt-upright in bed, instantly aware something had happened, but it took another assault on their door for her to actually grasp exactly what. It was the middle of the night, she had been fast asleep in Akkarin's arms, and someone urgently wanted to talk to them. So urgently, in fact, that they were apparently moments away from breaking down the door.

Akkarin stirred next to her. He usually slept more deeply than her, but the noise was loud enough to wake the dead. 'I'll go,' she told him, already reaching for the pile of black silk on the rug by the bed. She shrugged into what turned out to be the outer layer of Akkarin's robes and made her rather painful way across their sitting room, cursing under her breath the entire way. It was probably for the best that she had gotten it out of her system before she'd opened the door - neither Administrator Osen nor Lord Garrel would likely appreciate being called a pair of gorin-headed squimps.

'My lords,' Sonea said, taken aback. 'What brings you here at this time of night?' Instinctively, she drew Akkarin's robes closer around herself. She wished she had taken the time to get properly dressed.

'They've found a body in the Slums,' Osen said flatly. 'The Guard was alerted an hour ago.'

Sonea closed her eyes and exhaled slowly. 'And the circumstances are suspicious enough that you thought of us. Of course.' She cocked her head at Garrel. 'No squad of Warriors to take us into custody?'

The Warrior scoffed. 'Please. We know it cannot have been either of you.'

'Because we have been cooped up inside since just after noon. Of course.' So they were still being watched. They had suspected as much, but it was good to have confirmation.

Osen cleared his throat. 'We thought that, if there is a possibility of another Black Magician in the City, it would be prudent to be adequately prepared.'

Fear settled in Sonea's stomach like a block of ice. 'Very well,' she said. 'I'll go and get dressed.'

She was overly conscious of their eyes on her back as she returned to the bedroom. Over the past few weeks, Takan had helped her arrange some of their furniture in a way that she could use it as support as she moved around the room, which had made her life so much easier on bad days but now it felt like a sign of weakness. She had refused to take the foul-smelling tisane Vinara had given her because it was so strong it made her limbs heavy and her mind fuzzy, so after they had returned from Balkan's oath taking she had gone to bed with a hot compress and maintained a steady stream of healing magic. She had taken care not to exhaust her power, and sleep had restored some of her resources, but if she was to chase a murderer all across the city then she would fall sadly short.

Akkarin had evidently heard everything; he was already as dressed as he could without the part of his robes Sonea was wearing and his hair was tied back; he closed the door behind her and said: 'I'm going.'

'Don't be ridiculous,' Sonea replied, turning her own robes right side out so she could get her arms through the sleeves. 'If there really is a Black Magician out there, we stand a much better chance together than either of us by ourselves.' She squeezed his hands and pulled him down for a fierce kiss. 'Let's not keep them waiting.'

The carriage ride to the scene of the murder passed in terse silence. The night was pitch-black; none of them had created lights, preserving their power as if by mutual agreement. Sonea was bracing herself against the carriage wall to keep pressure off her legs as they jostled through the streets, first rattling over the cobblestones and then the uneven, dirt and mud roads of the slums. The driver had to slow the horses to a walk to navigate the haphazard corners and narrow passages until finally lurching to a halt in front of a squat, two-storey bolhouse.

Sonea took advantage of her slow climb out of the carriage to try and get her bearings; she had lost track of their direction on the way and didn't like not knowing. The bolhouse's windows were dark with only a small, flickering light in the taproom downstairs - the owner, she assumed. If the City Guard had been alerted, they must have cleared out the building immediately.

As they approached, a shadow detached itself from the wall and came to greet them. He wore a Guard uniform, grey in the meagre light of his shaded lamp, and his sword was loose in its scabbard. 'My lords,' he said, bowing at the waist. 'My lady. The body is on the second floor, we've kept everyone away.'

'Thank you,' Osen said, and stepped past the Guard into the darkness of the taproom, creating a spark of light.

Sonea asked: 'Is anyone going to tell us why we are here?' People were killed in the Slums all the time. Quarrels between gangs, fights caused by too much drink, not to mention the Thieves; the Guard rarely bothered to get involved, if they were even alerted.

'The room she was found in was barred from the inside,' the Guard said, his expression calm despite the quaver in his voice. 'There are no tracks below the window to show somebody climbed down from it, and apparently the man who paid for the room was not from around here.'

'That is barely enough to suspect magic was involved,' Akkarin said from behind Sonea. They had reached the foot of the rickety wooden stairs, and she felt the ghost of his touch on her back, offering support if she needed it.

The stairway opened onto an open balcony looking down into the taproom, with a half dozen doors leading to rooms for rent directly ahead. One of the doors was wide open, revealing a shape on the floor. Someone had stripped the cheap blankets from the pallet bed and draped them over the body, which absurdly made the view more, not less sinister.

Akkarin held her back when she would have bent to turn back the blankets. 'Let me,' he said softly. To say she was not relieved would have been a lie, so she held back and instead created her own globe light to investigate the rest of the room. Her eye caught on a half-loaf of bread on the small table next to an small leather purse; when she picked it up, it was empty.

'Well,' Akkarin said, straightening and dropping the corner of the blanket, 'she was not killed by magic. Strangled, I would say, but one of the Guard physickers would know more about that.'

Sonea tried not to show just how relieved she was. She weighed the purse in her hands, idly twisting the drawstrings through her fingers. 'Do we know who she was?'

The Guardsman cleared his throat and rifled through his pockets to find a scrap of paper. 'Some whore,' he said dismissively. 'The owner - Kellin - says a man paid for the room for the night and then took a girl upstairs. Someone walking by heard a scream so they broke down the door.'

Sonea nodded to herself. Then, as if suddenly making a decision, she walked over to the small window and ran her hands along the rough wooden frame. Satisfied, she turned to face the men. 'Excuse me for a moment,' she told Osen and Garrel, and raised her eyebrow at Akkarin in a manner that hopefully suggested she knew what she was doing.

She poked her head out of the door and called out: 'Hai, Kellin, come up here a minute.'

The man's heavy footsteps came up the shaky stairs, and Sonea wondered briefly if she would have to levitate back down to the ground. Then the darkskinned, thickset Kellin turned the corner and tilted his head at her in the manner of barmen everywhere who were trying to decide whether you would make trouble if they tried to shortchange you. Sonea would have none of that; she might be in the company of magicians who didn't know a knife from a punt, but she was a dwell born and raised and she wouldn't start taking cheek now.

'Who's territory are we on?' she asked, looking him straight in the eye.

The barman squinted and crossed his arms. 'Don't know what you're talking about.'

Behind her, she heard Lord Garrel splutter. She raised a hand to cut him off. 'It's all right,' she told Kellin. 'I'm no squimp. I'm right-sided, I swear.' She flashed him a quick hand-signal too, one that was probably years out of date but apparently still registered, because something lit up behind the man's eyes and his expression softened a little - not quite with recognition yet, but almost.

He leaned in close to murmur a name into her ear. Sonea nodded. Gorin wouldn't like hearing that someone was murdering working girls in his territory. She would figure out a way to get a message to him later; for now, she had another theory to test.

There was no way she would manage to pull herself out of the window by herself. Drawing Akkarin along by his sleeve, she positioned herself with her back facing the window, looking up to try and get the measure of the climb. 'Help me up here, will you?' she said lightly, ignoring the way her heart stuttered at the prospect. It had been a while since Cery had taken her clambering all over rooftops to escape magicians and she hadn't liked it much then, either.

Akkarin raised an eyebrow at her, but obediently grasped her by the waist and hoisted her up to sit on the narrow sill, legs dangling. 'Are you sure about this?' he asked quietly so Garrel and Osen wouldn't hear.

'None of you will fit,' she said. It was a tight fit for her, too, so she had had to angle her upper body out of the window. 'I just want to make sure.'

Sonea skimmed her fingers along the edges of the window frame until she had found a secure grip, then nodded at Akkarin and pulled herself to stand, precariously, on the windowsill, with his hands wrapped firmly around her calves to hold her steady. A more experienced sneak probably would have known instinctively where the handholds were but Sonea had never made the effort to really learn, because each time she had fervently hoped that she would never have to do it again. With a deep breath and a spark of magic, she reached up and braced her foot on the first ledge, moved her hands to the next rung, and somehow - inelegantly - managed to scramble up the side of the building. The sun was just coming up, illuminating the horizon far beyond the city and somehow deepening the shadows even further. Perching precariously on the roof of a bolhouse in the slums, Sonea took her first deep breath in months.

She stayed only long enough to confirm that the Thieves' Road led away from the bolhouse via the neighbouring roofs, in two different directions. That would be an inconvenience for the City Guard, should they decide to risk their lives by encroaching so boldly on the Thieves' territory, but Sonea was fairly sure that it wouldn't come to that. The way back down was somehow more daunting than the way up had been, so she gave up quite quickly and simply stepped away from the wall, forming a solid disk of magic under her feet and briefly stopping on the way down to let the men know she would meet them by the carriage.

'Your murderer escaped via the roof,' she told the Guard. 'He was probably at the other end of the Slums before anybody even saw him but there was no magic involved in that, either.'

Akkarin gave her a look - she raised an eyebrow at him and hoped that he understood what she meant. She was too tired for his concern.

Thankfully, Osen at least seemed satisfied by their findings, and suggested they return to the Guild and their beds without further ado. Sonea sat by the window, idly watching huts and houses go by, until suddenly something caught her eye and she cried out, rapping on the carriage roof to get the driver to stop the horses. 'I'll only be a moment,' she pleaded when she saw Garrel's glare, 'and I'll be within earshot the entire time.' She had already slipped out of the carriage, her fatigue forgotten; there, in the window of a ramshackle boarding house, she had spotted her aunt's beloved paper screens.

It was too early for even Aunt Jonna to be awake, but Sonea used a globe light and called until her uncle's face appeared, blinking and confused. He brightened immediately when he recognised her and went to wake Jonna, who barely paused to wrap a quilt around herself before she ran out of the house to embrace her niece tightly enough to take her breath away.

'We were so worried,' she said, both her palms cradling Sonea's face. 'I told Ranel I was going to march up to the Guild and sit at the gates until they let you out if you didn't come visit soon.'

'I'm sorry.' Sonea hung her head with suitable guilt. She had been trying to wait until things calmed down so her requesting an escort to see her family would not be received with too much scrutiny, but she should have been more honest about the situation with her aunt and uncle. 'I'll try to come again soon.'

Ranel reappeared at the window, their little daughter in his arms. 'I'll take it you didn't run away,' he said, nodding at the carriage in the narrow street.

'Something came up we had to look at,' Sonea explained, rolling her eyes to indicate that it wasn't serious. 'We just happened to pass by and I'll have to get back so they don't come to drag me, but I promise I'll come visit properly as soon as I can. I just wanted to -' To see their faces, to convince herself that they were safe. She squeezed her aunt's hands, suddenly blinking away tears. 'Take care.'

'You too, girl,' Ranel said gruffly, patting Hania's back. She had grown so much and still looked tiny, her fists clenched in the fabric of Ranel's shirt. Something about it made Sonea's heart hurt. She leaned through the narrow window opening to kiss her uncle's cheek and hugged Jonna again before she returned to the carriage, trying to keep her expression neutral.

'Thank you for waiting,' she said when she took her seat, then pointedly turned her face away to discourage questions. In the darkness of the carriage, Akkarin held her hand.