Prince Thief

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As meetings to decide the fate of a city went, this one was looking a lot like the prelude to a riot.

Of the gathered audience, only a few were paying attention to the stage where I’d somehow found myself; the rest were turned to bawl at a neighbour, or to spew invectives at the rows behind them. Half a dozen self-contained arguments had broken out along the length and breadth of the room, any of which might explode into violence at the slightest provocation.

Then again, perhaps it was all that could be expected of a seating plan that placed bankers besides extortionists, veteran warriors between crime bosses and cloth magnates.

“Settle down!” bellowed Alvantes from the front of the stage. He was gripping the lectern with the whitened knuckles of his one hand, while trying to keep the stump of his recently injured other arm from view.

I doubted it was improving Alvantes’s mood that the only venue he’d been able to find for this meeting was the hall Castilio Mounteban had so recently used for the same purpose: Mounteban, the self-same scheming crook that Alvantes had fought to roust from power hardly a day before; the man who had somehow united the disparate factions before us, had then held them together with little more than threats and promises; Mounteban who, in short, was a hundred times better at this sort of thing than Alvantes himself.

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