He kept his face bland. “Really.”

“They found several actually. A prominent churchman. The architect of the Cathedral. Two well known local merchants.”

“All dead?”

She looked at him cold-faced, tilted her head to one side as she judged him. “They were all beheaded. As neat as if the Council’s executioner had done it. As if they had been found guilty of some crime. Whoever killed them did everything but stick their heads on a spike over the gates for the peasants to gawp at.”

He would have done that too if he’d had the time. He kept his face bland. She paused for a second, took another drink. “Another merchant vanished, was never found. He left town in hurry, apparently very scared. The same night you left, actually.”

Kormak remembered that man all too well. His name had been Venn. He had dabbled in the darkest of sorceries. It had taken a month to catch him. A lot of people had died.

He pushed himself up from the bed and walked over to her. “Why are you telling me this?”

She turned half away from him, avoiding looking up into his face. “You did tell me you might have to leave town quickly. You never told me why.”

“The contract I was waiting for came through. There was war along the Valkyrian border.”

“Aye, there was,” she said, like someone who wanted very badly to believe. Her jaw quivered for a moment and then she took a step away from him. “The thing about those bodies was it was all so neat. There were no wounds on them. So they say.”

“Taking a man’s head off usually means you don’t need to stab him,” said Kormak.

“What sort of man can do that though?” she said. “Who could trap four armed men and behead them? And how—they were all big, powerful men. A couple of them had proved they could fight. Marcus had killed three men in duels.”

“Again, why are you telling me this? It’s interesting, I admit, but it’s old news.”

“It was a nine-day wonder,” she said. “Everybody talked about it.