The rooms and halls stood sadly empty, tapestries and paintings of his ancestors long gone, tables and chaises and bookshelves carried off to who knew where. Ammas wondered how much of it had been sold to the Kerrells, or now adorned Bluestead House up on the bluffs over the city. (Carala, who was quite familiar with the sort of stolen treasures that were stored in the Maathinhold, could have told him the fate of many of these things, but she held her tongue.) What they had come for was in the cellar, but when Ammas roamed toward the grand stairway to the second floor that dominated the entry hall, Carala did not object.

The airy spirit's light rose up those stairs in great glowing rays, dust wafting through their illumination like thin smoke. Dust lay thick over everything in the house, and the smell of mold was almost overwhelming. Ammas supposed if the place were ever to be habitable again it would require a monumental cleaning.

"Would you come upstairs with me?" He hadn't expected his voice to shake like this. "There's something I'd like to check."

That bitter aroma had intensified painfully. Carala nodded, lightly touching his elbow as she followed him into the gloom of the upper stories. Ammas said nothing, but he found himself immensely relieved at that simple gesture. The climb upward was long and laborious, though he remembered bounding up and down these stairs quite easily both as a child and a young man. By the time he reached the second floor he was soaked in sweat. The airy spirit's light wavered, and he realized his hands were trembling.

A thin laugh rose from his lips. He wondered how close he was to the verge of hysteria. Things, very unpleasant things, were rising in his memory and imagination the deeper he roamed into this place. Fumbling a little he shifted the caged spirit from one hand to the other, only to stop when Carala laid a slim hand on his.

"Are you sure you want me with you, Ammas?" she said softly. The wolf was heavy in her eyes, but beneath that he saw a well of concern he never expected to see in anyone named Deyn.

"I do," he said more firmly. "This shouldn't take long. Come."

Although Mourthia House stood three stories tall, at one time the second floor had also been the top floor, and so a ramshackle mansard roof remained over a considerable portion of these upper rooms. The largest room under that roof partly comprised his father's study, and it was here he found the only piece of furniture he had yet seen in the place.

"They built it right here in this room," he murmured to Carala as the light danced along its mahogany edges. "I suppose they couldn't get it out without destroying it."

The desk looked to Carala almost as big as a carriage, dozens of drawers tugged out and spilled on the floor in the vast space between its wings, all its various pigeonholes and cubbies laying open and revealed. Not so much as a scrap of paper or a single broken quill was to be seen on it. Ammas recalled it being piled high with ponderous legal texts and dozens of rolls of parchment detailing the numerous cases his father was overseeing at any given time.

Lightly he ran a hand along its edge, remembering the times he had spent in this room, being quizzed by Senrich on his lessons or taking lunch with his father when he was not busy at the Grand Curia. Renelle had been an infrequent visitor here, but always welcome, his father rising from his desk to sweep her into the room like a palace courtier whenever she deigned to set foot in his kingdom.

"It's such a large house," Carala murmured. "You really grew up here alone?"

Ammas nodded. "My mother was sickly in her youth, and she had trouble carrying a child to full growth. I might have had a few siblings, had they lived." A smile lit his face. "My cousin Jan loved this house, though he wasn't here much. But I had come of age by the time he was born. Uncle Gratham was too busy for children as a younger man, though I suppose if he had lived he would have made up for it. He liked to say so to my father, anyway. My mother was always thrilled to see Jan. I remember how sad she seemed whenever he went back to Shattercrown."

Carala, who remembered her own mother's struggles with childbirth after bearing a dozen of the Emperor's children, could imagine Renelle Mourthia's sorrow only too well. Lightly she stepped away from Ammas and toward the mullioned windows that dominated the far wall. Hangman's Harbor was visible from here, roiling and gray under a dismal sky. The vast arches that lined the harbor, from which dangled dozens of hanged men, were a stark reminder of just what sort of city this was.

"He liked being able to see them," Ammas said, startling her. "Well -- liked isn't the right word. But he told me many times it was important that he see them whenever he was in this room. The Harbor isn't visible from the High Bench, after all, and he said that if he was to sentence a man to death, then it was proper for him to be reminded of just how severe a fate that was."

He had joined her at the window now, gazing out past the low shapes of warehouses and taverns and innumerable other buildings toward the waters. Dozens of ships were scudding this way and that, to and from their docks and shipyards. "I wonder if it ever changed his mind. I never thought he was shy about sending someone to the hangman, but my uncle told me when I was older that the Emperor disapproved of many of his rulings. Too soft, too much of the time."

"That sounds very like him," Carala muttered, almost to herself, thinking of what her father had ordered done to Senrich.

"Yes, I suppose," Ammas said hastily. Drawing Carala into an argument over their fathers had not been his intent. "But the study isn't what I wanted to see. Through there." He pointed to a narrow wooden door tucked into a corner of the room.

Carala nodded and followed, giving one last look at Hangman's Harbor. Once it had been called Freehold Harbor, and the city itself Harrowport, both named after the vast farmstead that had originally stood here, its rich soil stretching right up to the shores of one of the most accessible natural harbors in all the Anointed Realms. But when it had become the preferred place of execution and imprisonment for the pirates who harried the Malachite Throne's sea routes, the nicknames quickly began to spread and stayed in place ever after. She knew these things from her lessons, but like Barthim she had never been here before, and like Barthim she disliked the place intensely.

The room beyond that narrow door exemplified the inconsistent nature of the many rooms of Mourthia House: it towered two stories over the more staid empty study to which it was adjoined, and was clearly a later addition, differing not only on its size but in its architectural style. It had been added by Senrich himself before Ammas was born, upon his appointment to the Grand Curia and several years before his ascension to Overseer. Long, narrow, constructed of deeply polished wooden walls and sensible plank floors, Carala knew what this place had been immediately upon setting foot in it, even though it was devoid of any accoutrement but dust.

"This was the library, wasn't it?" she said, staring about in amazement at the long-empty shelves that had been built right into the walls.

"Yes," Ammas said. "It was foolish to think there might be anything left, but I had to see for myself." The airy spirit was almost unnecessary here, for tall, narrow windows admitted great shafts of bleary Gallowsport light. Dust flitted through the sunlight in senseless patterns. "My father's library was impressive, though it was nothing compared to the archives under the Grand Curia. I imagine all the books from both of them ended up on the same fires as the ones taken from Nightgate."

Carala thought of the Maathinhold and the jumbled piles in the Curate's Tower. And a strange thought occurred to her. In all her visits to the Maathinhold, first as part of her lessons before she came of age then as a high courtier giving tours, not once had she observed any volumes from the Academies Arcane among its holdings. Other books, certainly, taken from fallen families such as the Mourthias. But none that would have been at home in Nightgate, or Senrich's private library. Ammas's notion that they had all been put to the torch was possible, but in all the myriad stories Silenio and her father liked to tell, never had they mentioned piles of burnt books. Perhaps they had not thought it worth mentioning. Then again, Ammas had lived through those days and she had not, so surely he simply knew more details than she did, as Vos had amply proved before they departed Vilais.

Ammas turned back toward the study, and headed down the grand stairway toward the lower floors, where the object of their journey here would be found. As she hastened to catch up with him, he posed a casual but portentous question. "Is it the same here as the rest of the city, do you feel?

"No," she said at once, though she drew a deep breath, sampling the house's air just to make sure. The dust in her nose elicited a burst of sneezes. "Pardon, Ammas," she said with a blush. Ammas only grinned.

Since they had arrived in Gallowsport, Carala had been intensely and uncomfortably aware of the scent of other werewolves. How many she could not possibly say, other than that she could distinguish both male and female aromas. Their carriage had rumbled over the Imperial Highway and through the city's main gates, and she had barely been aware of her new surroundings, so thick was the stench in her nose.

These were not freshly turned wolves such as herself (though how fresh she herself could be considered she was not sure), and they were certainly not the sort of wolves who had restricted their hunting to hares and deer. They were redolent of human flesh; steeped in human blood; and not only could she smell the presence of those things, she could sense the joy these wolves took in indulging those hungers. She had shifted across the carriage to sit beside Ammas, and so great was her terror -- not merely of the other wolves but of how the she-wolf inside her might respond to them -- that she had nearly wept as she related to the cursewright what she sensed.

"Where do you sense them?" Ammas had murmured in her ear, not wanting the others to know about this just yet. "In the gatehouse?" His eyes had scanned the throngs of milling people, glittering from the depths of his mendicant's hood.

"No, Ammas, you do not understand," she had said pleadingly. "They are everywhere."

Ammas had received this information silently, but the worry in his face was plain to see. "All right," he'd muttered after a long, thoughtful pause. "We'll deal with it as best we can. Stay close to me. Keep that charm on your neck." To this she had agreed without a whisper of argument.