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Prologue

THE FAT MONK ran through the garbage-strewn alleys of Vermstadt, knowing that death was at his heels. Sweat soaked Frater Ambrose’s robes. His limbs were lead and his stomach was on fire. His dinner fought its way up his throat.

He cursed himself just to keep from weeping. Why had he given in so often to so many temptations of the flesh? Why had he broken his vows? He had sworn temperance and chastity and restraint in all things. Well, it looked as if the Holy Sun had finally got round to punishing him.

He stopped for a moment and heard his hunters’ steps echo through the alleys. The noise was barely audible over his laboured breathing and the drumbeat of his heart. He wiped his brow and looked around. The full moon gleamed out of the unseasonably clear autumn sky, giving just enough light for him to see there was no place he could hide in these alleys, unless he wanted to try and burrow deep into one of those midden heaps, to crawl like a worm through a mulch of rotting vegetables, old food, ashes and excrement.

He shook his head. If he thought it might work he would have done so, but large as the trash-heaps were, they were not big enough to hide his corpulent form. He would need to find another way. He fumbled for the leather-bound leaden bludgeon he always carried to protect himself when he walked through the Maze. He knew how to use it. The slum district was the sort of place that not even a monk was safe in. It was also where many of his agents dwelled.

Or they used to. He had not been able to make contact with any of them over the last few months. One by one, they had ceased to report. Shiera, the streetwalker, had been the latest to go. After she had not been seen at her patch for three nights Ambrose had begun to investigate. He found her lying on a slab in the city morgue with her throat slit, waiting for a pauper’s burning. It was not an uncommon fate for a woman in her profession in a city like Vermstadt but coming on top of the disappearance of his other spies it had made Ambrose suspicious.

His network had been in place for years. He had spent decades building it in secret. His agents were his eyes and ears in the city, reporting back scraps of rumour, alerting him to the latest intrigues of the great patrician families and the monastic brotherhoods. They kept him abreast of the schemes of the merchant houses so that he could report in turn to his distant master on Mount Aethelas about the events in Taurea’s wealthiest city-state. He did not think it was a coincidence that his people had started to vanish as the Prelate lay on his deathbed and the two greatest merchant clans in the kingdom, the Oldbergs and the Krugmans, were dragging the city to the verge of civil war.

And he strongly suspected that there was something far worse bubbling away beneath the surface. The disappearing corpses, the seemingly unkillable enforcer the Krugmans’ had somehow acquired, the stink of sorcery rising over the city every full moon, all of those things pointed to it. Now cats had started to vanish and the city’s rat population was multiplying and there were stories of monsters in the Maze. It had set more alarms ringing in Ambrose’s mind.

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CONTENTS

CITY OF STRIFE

Prologue

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