Chapter One
A knock came at the door of Bakar House.
Konrad, ensconced in the best parlour with Nanda, did not move so much as a muscle. He had a butler for a reason. Hopefully the caller would prove inconsequential, and easily fobbed off; Gorev was good at that kind of thing. At three in the afternoon on so foul a day, sleet driving down from the skies in great torrents, and the streets awash with the half-melted snows of early spring, he rather wondered that anybody had troubled to travel to his door at all.
‘It seems our reverie is at an end,’ said Nanda. Resonant footsteps were indeed approaching the parlour; Konrad heard them as clearly as she, though he toyed briefly with denial.
‘Come in,’ he sighed, when his butler’s discreet tap sounded at the half-closed door.
Gorev entered,
