The Guild Embassy in Bellwether stood on the High Terrace, overlooking the muddy curve of the river basin where the coal barges unloaded. It was a palace of polished white granite and copper-trimmed roofs. It was surrounded by a wrought-iron wooden wall topped with gold-trimmed spearheads. For three hundred years, this building had represented the unquestioned majesty of the Grand Adventurers’ Guild in the southern province. The place where kings sent ambassadors and merchant princes begged for mercenary escorts.
On the eighth morning of the audit, Grand Envoy Castor of Crown-Reach walked into the Office of Unfinished Claims on North Market Lane. He didn’t come with an escort of steel-clad adventurers. He came with four senior solicitors in velvet robes, two liveried footmen carrying iron-banded deed boxes. The cold, perfumed air of the royal capital.
Castor was a man of fifty with sleek, silver-frosted hair, a heavy damask doublet stitched with gold thread. The unblinking, hungry eyes of a falcon that had never seen a cage. He stood in the middle of the drafty office. His gloved fingers held a perfumed handkerchief to his nose to ward off the smell of wet wool and drying ink.
“Which one of you is Tomas Reed?” Castor asked, his voice ringing with the smooth, melodic power of the High Court.
