There was another law in Rahasabahst, an older law than that of kings or guardsmen. When the Sarangbaus came out of the Singing Woods and seized the city, the Sortition Courts didn’t so much go away as go underground. It used to work like this. When someone did harm to someone else, a court was called. The fine citizenry of the city lined up, and names were drawn, and a jury was assembled. The criminal was tried, and if found guilty, their punishment was decided by whoever had won the lottery and become the judge. All very above board and fair. There’s a fresco depicting a meeting of a Sortition Court in the scribal chambers of the palace. The jury is posed under sanmatra trees, and they all look quite upright and judicial. There aren’t many sanmatra trees left in the city.

  The Sarangbaus, of course, insisted that they themselves were the law, and they abolished the Sortition Courts. But how do you abolish ancient custom? Within a few years, there was a rumor that a secret court was still meeting, and Ahtraeyed the First tasked the city guard with rooting it out. At the time the guard was made up of Ahtraeyed’s gang of bandits, and they went about terrorizing people in all the old familiar ways. The rumored court seemed to disappear, but it had just gone further underground. As a guardsman myself, I am supposed to regard the people it hanged as its victims. Perhaps they were. Legends sprang up. The court had a secret death chamber, with rotating columns that sliced the guilty into pieces, and a trapdoor in the floor that dropped the pieces into an underground channel. The court had initiation rites that included eating the flesh of a noble child, preferably a girl. The court had its own, secret guard, who patrolled the city and noted down malfeasance, so that no one ever knew if their crimes had gone unobserved. You didn’t have to appear before the court to be tried. They were perfectly happy to hold your trial without you knowing about it. If you were found guilty every member of the court was charged with your execution and had to hunt you down. If they caught you, they would hang you with a burlap sack over your head. For all of these reasons, and more, it was no longer called the Sortition Court. It was called the Dreamer’s Court, short for The Court of Endless Dreams.

  Did the court still exist? I mulled this over as we walked away from the corpses of Boebdan and the White Cat. Two hanged bodies had been found in the past year. One was the body of a notorious pimp and grifter. The other was the body of a little boy. Both with burlap sacks over their heads. But both bodies had been found in Viepahrik District, which made me suspect that someone else was using the signature of the Dreamer’s Court to dispose of victims. After all, if the court was still meting out justice, their first victim should have been Gaetisma, Captain of the Viepahrik Guard.

  There was someone I could ask, and I called Vaenahma to a halt and felt in my robes for a piece of paper. It was starting to rain again, so we huddled beneath a balcony as I wrote, the paper pressed to the hard stucco of the wall. My little writing brush was quite old, and the splayed hairs made the rough letters look furred. That, and the fact that my ink pot was almost dry, turned the note into a fine example of illegibility. But Thaeto would know my handwriting and would be able to puzzle it out.

  I led us through a few tangled streets to the quay, and there we found Cloehen seated atop his elephant. It was a good piece of luck, as he could have been anywhere along the tow path. He was eating a hand pie and there was a smear of gravy on his cheek. The elephant’s wound had a clean white bandage, and its many trunks drooped down like thick mustaches. Cloehen slid down its side, swinging on a harness and as agile as a tree snake.

  “I’m very glad you’re still alive,” I said. He gave me a quiet, inquisitive look, so I expanded on my comments. “You were charging up the road into a formation of mounted rangers when we parted.”

  He nodded. “They moved aside for the elephant.”

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  I nodded in return. “Wise of them. Why are you sitting idle?”

  He shrugged. “No trade. And my master was killed in the fighting.”

  “Well, that’s something,” I said. “How would you like to join the Guard of the Courtly Palaces?”

  He squinted up at me. “Why do you need an elephant?”

  “Right now I need you. The elephant can prove its usefulness at some other time.”

  “I’m a slave.”

  “I’ll give you your freedom.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Who can stop me?”

  He glanced up at the elephant. “Free her, too.”

  It was a childish request, which meant that I had to take it seriously. “I will. You’re both in the guard.”

  He nodded. “What do you need me to do?”

  I handed him the note. “Deliver this to the House of Song.”

  He took it, turned it over in his hands, and pretended to study it. It was obvious that he couldn’t read. He was holding it upside down. But he shimmied back up onto the elephant’s back and turned it north, towards the house.

  “Do you think that the elephant will help?” I asked Vaenahma.

  They shrugged. “It can’t hurt.”

  “It might deter the White Cats. If he sits on it outside the door.”

  “It might. It’s too big to enter the house. What are we doing, Captain?”

  I glanced up at the sky. The rain had withdrawn into the clouds, as if they had decided to stockpile it. “We need to visit Yahtem Ahneth.” I smiled at the confusion on Vaenahma’s face. “Two years ago,” I said. “Her grandson was killed by Harloen the Sot.”

  Understanding grew in their eyes. “The one we chased through the Sunken Rooms.”

  “One and the same. She pelted him with feces at his beheading. You remember. She was very fastidious about it. She wore smelter’s gloves, and when she was done she threw the gloves at his corpse as well.”

  “Why do we need to see her?”

  “Her family goes back to the free city. And there have always been rumors about their connections.”

  “Captain, what are you planning?”

  “Listen, this is a fairly simple problem. Uesayna’s father has friends, and they come with him to harass the House of Song. Would they have any reason to go there if he was dead?”

  Vaenahma shrugged. “So we kill him.”

  “Not us. We’re sworn to enforce the law.”

  “Captain, I already said that the law is gone. If the White Cats rule, the city is lawless.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “There is an older law. We’re going to go find it.”