The sequel to Shadow of a Dead God.
In the city of Agatos, nothing stays buried forever.
Only an idiot would ignore his debt to a high mage, and Mennik Thorn is not an idiot, no matter what anyone might say. He’s just been … distracted. But now he’s left it too late, and if he doesn’t obey the high mage’s commands within the day, his best friends’ lives will be forfeit. So it’s hardly the time to take on an impossible case: proving a woman who murdered a stranger in full view is innocent.
Unfortunately, Mennik can’t resist doing the right thing – and now he’s caught in a deadly rivalry between warring high mages, his witnesses are dying, and something ancient has turned its eyes upon him.
The fate of the city is once again in the hands of a second-rate mage. Mennik Thorn should have stayed in hiding.
Opening
At half past seven, on the morning of the ninth day of the month of Eppos, Etta Mirian walked into a bakery on Long Step Avenue. She bought two loaves of bread and an almond and honey pastry. She asked after the proprietor’s grandchildren (he had three, the oldest of whom had recently been apprenticed to a potter not far from the university district), remarked on the good weather (it had, until today, been an uncharacteristically cloudy and wet Eppos), and shared her hopes and aspirations for the expansion of the drapers’ business she and her husband ran.
With a smile and a nod to the other customers, Etta Mirian left the bakery, crossed Long Step Avenue, and stabbed Peyt Jyston Cord three times in the neck. She then turned the knife on herself and, still smiling all the time, opened her throat from side to side. Both died before help could arrive.
The City Watch, who always liked a good murder to cheer up an otherwise boring day, were soon on the scene. There they put into play the full range of procedures and techniques they were renowned for – mainly gawping at the body and asking some desultory questions – before concluding that neither Cord nor Mirian knew each other, and Cord had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were unable to track down exactly where Etta Mirian got the knife she had used. It didn’t belong to her, the victim, or the bakery, and no one had seen Mirian carrying it prior to the attack.
At that point, as far as I could tell, there had been a lot of generally uninterested shrugging from the upstanding women and men of the City Watch before they decided that, yes, it was absolutely terrible what people got up to, and no, there really wasn’t anything they could do about it, what with the victim and perpetrator both being dead.
And then they had moved on.
NECTAR FOR THE GOD and book 3, STRANGE CARGO, are out now. The final book, LEGACY OF A HATED GOD, will be published in 2023.
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