Chapter Ten
Late that night — very late, well past three in the morning at least — Konrad sat in shadow in a corner of Boryan Shults’s meagre house, silent and alert. He had chosen a spot from where he could see the majority of both rooms. Not with his natural eyes; the darkness was too complete for that. Nobody troubled to maintain working street lamps in so poor a part of town. But his spirit-vision, half veiling his sight, afforded him a stark but clear enough view of the shabby chambers. That and his serpents, coiled in an ethereal knot near the ceiling. When somebody arrived, Konrad would know at once.
And he fully expected that somebody would. He and Nanda had spent a long afternoon wearing out their welcome among Konrad’s social peers, collecting every scrap of gossip about the Ko
