Ammas was an early riser, despite his frequent late night card games with Barthim the Beast. Those games had become less frequent of late. Since Casimir had begun playing with them as well, Ammas insisted the boy go to bed no later than midnight on most days. Now that he was assaying a proper trade, Barthim had no qualms teaching him the rules of Whistling Jack, though he still thought Casimir should focus his energies on chess until he came of age. Ammas, who was a wretched chess player, didn't force the issue.

Now the boy was sleeping in the comfortable alcove Ammas had prepared for him in one of the second floor chapels, surrounded by the haphazard collection of books that had survived from the time of Ammas's own apprenticeship and a few more recent acquisitions he had found while combing the junkshops and secondhand book dealers in Munazyr's market districts. The temple portico, looking cleaner than it had in ages since Casimir had taken to sweeping and washing it as part of his weekly chores, gleamed in the rising sun. Under one arm Ammas carried a sheaf of parchment; in the other hand a steaming cup of seretto tea. After taking a moment to examine the shingle advertising his fees -- a new one, freshly painted and lettered in Casimir's workmanlike hand -- he seated himself at the little table where he often conducted his initial interviews with prospective clients.

Shuffling through the parchment rolls the boy had written for his latest assignment, sipping at his tea, the cursewright found himself reflecting that, poorer district of the city or not, the Old Godsway looked rather beautiful in the morning, when the brothels and taverns and music halls and gaming dens had closed for the night and before the more respectable businesses opened for the day. A cozy silence drifted along the wide avenue lined with crumbling temples, most abandoned like his and some still in full flower, all elegant and reverent, some somber and mourning in dark stone, some joyful in tarnished silver and polished marble. Far off in the distance, the waters of Brightmoon Bay glittered like flaming sapphires, the silence occasionally pierced by a gull's cry. It would be a full hour before the fishwives toward the Bay began hawking their wares, and a trifle longer before the shipyards and the dockworkers reached the full fury of their operation. And in the lovely roseate dawn, tinted at the edges with gold, Ammas could see why, centuries ago, the people who built Munazyr considered this street to be a place fit for the divine.

Then from the Lioness next door, he heard the outraged and slurred protestations by some drunk who hadn't paid his full fee and who was now being forcibly removed from the establishment by Barthim the Beast, and whose face would go on the bouncer's wall of undesirables. The enormous Barthim carried the howling inebriate by the scruff of the neck and the seat of his pants, hurling him from the brothel's porch into the street. The man, who was dressed in the fashion of one of the larger caravan companies, began to choke on road dust. After a few minutes he managed to get to his feet, summon up what remained of his dignity, and make a pointed argument against the thunderously scowling Barthim's position by vomiting on his own shoes.

Ammas sighed and took a larger sip of his tea as the drunk muttered dark if unintelligible imprecations, staggering off to wherever drunks go on a bleary Graceday morning. The illusion was shattered.

For a change, it was Barthim who wandered over to Ammas instead of the other way around, padding from the Lioness's veranda porch to the temple's shady portico with a grace that belied his enormous size. The red lamp continued to flicker, nearly invisible. The Lioness stayed open during the daylight hours on Gracedays and Weektides. Barthim said nothing as he mounted the temple's broad stairs of and remained silent as he maneuvered his bulk into the chair across from the cursewright's. He did, however, look pointedly at Ammas's teacup until Ammas rolled his eyes, rose from the table, and slipped back into the temple, returning a few minutes later with the full kettle and a second cup.

"You are kind for a criminal," Barthim said, his smile visible beneath the fringe of his enormous waxed mustache as he noisily slurped his tea. The first year or so he had kept business next to the Lioness, Ammas had some difficulty understanding Barthim's Siraneshi accent, but now it sounded as natural in his ears as his own voice. "I suppose it will be my turn to buy the seretto leaves next month."

"It was your turn this month. And the month before that."

"Ah, this I remember now. I am also remembering you did not ante up the last three games of Knights' Bluff. This tea is not so expensive as that, I am sure." Barthim drained his cup and lightly skated it across the table toward the kettle.

Ammas sighed and poured Barthim a fresh cup. Barthim's smile widened. The cursewright wondered if the bouncer ever smiled like that at the Prideful Lioness's customers, for whom Barthim barely even bothered to conceal his bottomless contempt. He found it doubtful, imagining the Beast relied instead on his massive physique and the dizzying array of tattoos inked from the nape of his neck all the way down to the tops of his feet to intimidate the unruly or the contentious. Whether it was the silent glower or the sunny, open smile that was the act, Ammas was never sure. The growing sunlight gleamed mellowly off the Beast's shaven head as he tucked into his fresh tea, and as the cursewright studied this man who had somehow become his friend, he found himself as grateful for Barthim's presence as the girls of the Lioness were for his own.

"Do you ever sleep, Barthim? That place runs all night, and I never see the customers get kicked out before noon."

"I get my sleep, just as you do. After this tea I go to my rooms on Clocktower Street."

Ammas couldn't conceal his surprise. "How do you afford rooms there?"

Barthim chuckled, drained his cup, and poured himself another, the kettle now considerably lighter. "This is no cheap whorehouse, Ammas, and I am well paid. I thought you knew this."

"I was never the best judge of brothels, Barthim. The girls are very pretty."

"And most can make a man laugh. This counts for much."

"Can I say something without insulting you?"

"How am I to know? You can say something without me beating you senseless, I suppose."

Ammas paused, considered, plunged ahead anyway. Barthim was less violent than his reputation suggested, at least when there wasn't an unpaid bill to be disputed or a Lioness girl being threatened. "I would have thought you weren't always paid in coin."

Barthim the Beast threw his head back and bellowed such a roaring laugh that a brood of sleeping pigeons flapped angrily away from the pediment over the temple's portico and took to the sky, warbling and squawking. "Paid in flesh, you mean? From these girls? Ammas, you are mad."

Ammas shifted in his seat, feeling a trifle foolish. "Maybe I don't understand how brothels work, then. I just thought -- "

"What, that I tumble them as a side benefit? That they want to put their mouths on my cock because I beat drunks and wastrels? Nothing is so easy in life, my good friend."

The cursewright nodded slowly. "That's probably true."

"Besides," Barthim murmured, straightening in his chair. The bouncer undid the upper buttons of his simple vest, his thick fingers moving with a delicacy the cursewright found fascinating. The vest fell open, exposing a veritable tapestry of inked flesh and an enormous belly. The deadbeat customer who failed to realize that giant gut was merely a sheath of fat over muscles strong as iron only made such an error once, usually to his everlasting misery. Proudly Barthim pointed both index fingers to a tattoo nested between his heavy pectorals that Ammas had never seen before (but then, he couldn't recall a time he had ever seen the bouncer's unclad body): a pair of crossed swords against a shattered mountain. "I am of the Hethmar. I am a Blade of the first knight. I am here to protect these girls, not use them. A thing like that, I save for my wife."

"I didn't know you were married."

"I was once, and I will be again someday."

Ammas stirred his tea thoughtfully as Barthim redid the buttons of his vest. "I'm very sorry. I had no idea you were a widower."

Barthim scowled and slurped back the dregs of his tea, waving one hand disgustedly. "I am no widower. She left me to run off with some gypsy theatre troupe. To the pit with her, she is a worse whore than any of the girls at the Lioness."

The Beast looked so murderous at the thought of his wife that Ammas immediately decided to change the subject. "So, before you go home, I need your advice with something about Casimir."

"Ah! The boy is working out well, is he not? I was very happy to see you get him out of the Lioness. A whorehouse is no place for a boy." Barthim's moods changed as swiftly as a stormy sky at sea, from outrage at his wife and whatever her missteps had been to pride in Casimir and now to an almost schoolmarmish disapproval. "Some of these girls forget how young he is. Some things they did were most inappropriate. You are a much safer person for him to be with, Ammas."

Ammas thought of the demon in Orson's garret. The old man was now a semi-regular visitor to the temple, limping all the way from Hawser Street on his crutch, sharing a drink or two with the cursewright a good deal stronger than seretto tea. Casimir was always polite to him, but he had never quite lost his fear of the old man, or his memory of what he had been like while in the demon's grip. That was something he would have to get past if he was to assume Ammas's trade, but there was plenty of time for that. "I think you're being much too kind to me, Barthim."

"Do not contradict me."

"Of course."

"What is this advice you need?"

"I need to engage someone to tutor Casimir in numbers."

Barthim cocked his head, one black eyebrowk crooked up. "I thought you were teaching him only your trade? For what does he need numbers? 'Your wife is no werecat prowling alleys anymore, she will not be slutting off to be with some pack of idiot jesters and jugglers, that will be five hundred talents.' I did not know your business required more numbers than that."

"There is a little more to it."

"Like what?"

"Measurements for potions and unguents. Assessments of physical and spiritual humors. But that isn't the point. Those things I can teach him, but not more abstract ideas. I barely passed my own courses of studies when I was older than he is now, and most of them I've forgotten."

"Again I am puzzled, Ammas. Why does he need such things?"

Ammas frowned, leaning back in his chair and trying to marshal his defense of his chosen course of Casimir's education. Even back in the old days, which he wasn't sure Barthim was old enough to remember, the bouncer would have struck him as an unlikely person to find much sense in the philosophies of the Academies Arcane. Still, he had learned a long time ago not to underestimate the depths of thought behind that smiling, scarred face. "Because I want to teach him to be ready for more than just my trade. He needs a broad base of knowledge. His circumstances are very different from how I was trained. Where I studied, one didn't merely learn from a single mentor. A cursewright might learn from an astrologer, who might learn from a seer-magistrate, who might learn from a healer or archivist or forgewright. Do you see?" Barthim nodded, his eyes bright and curious. "It may well be that Casimir isn't suited to be a cursewright at all, but is suited for some other arcane trade."

"You wish him to be a man of learning. This is no bad thing, Ammas." Barthim scowled in the direction of the Lioness, where the painted feline woman giving a come-hither gaze and coquettishly perking out her tail lounged on her wooden sign. "Laurette ought have done it. She knows the boy has a good brain. But it is foolish to expect her to look out for him more than she does her girls." Cursing in his native Siraneshi, he spat on the ground, then flushed, apologizing for staining Ammas's floor.

Ammas held back a laugh. Even with Barthim's contribution of spittle, the portico was still cleaner than it must have been in decades. "Yes. She did mention he mastered his letters very young."

"Of course he did. I used to take him to the Othillic Libraries when he was younger and things in the Lioness were even less fit for a boy than usual. Things were . . . pah, gods, things were rougher before you set up shop next door. I did what I could, but still it was not enough, not always. He still goes there on his own from time to time."

"The deacons didn't object to that?"

"Not when I was with him, they did not." Barthim scratched the back of his head thoughtfully. "Now I am thinking of it, there are a couple of deacons who are regular patrons. I could offer them a discount in exchange for lessons, though I am not sure either knows his numbers well. You could interview them, if you like."

"Should I trust a deacon who breaks his vows in a brothel?"

"At least you would know he craves women and not boys."

Barthim the Beast was often possessed of a certain logic Ammas found irrefutable. "Fair enough."