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This was the doom Stefan had warned Ulrika of – the wholesale exposure of the Lahmian sisterhood that his Sylvanian masters had engineered in order to create a rising tide of hysteria that would throw the Empire into chaos and make it ripe for a Sylvanian invasion. And it was working. In every town and at every coaching inn, Ulrika had heard whispers of conflict and conflagration – Carroburg in flames, Kurt Helborg and his Reiksguard sent to quell riots in Middenheim, the River Aver running red from Sauerapfel to Streissen. There were even rumours that Emperor Karl Franz had been turned into a vampire and was going to war against the Elector Counts.
For Ulrika, the weeks on the road had been an agony of unknowing. Would
Gabriella be alive when she at last returned to Nuln? Or had the Sylvanian spies, who had failed in their first attempt to kill and expose the countess, succeeded at last?
Stefan had spoken of a ‘decapitating stroke’. Would Ulrika find Gabriella and Hermione and Famke headless? Would there be no Lahmian leadership at all in Nuln?
To make the torture worse, Ulrika had travelled most of the way at a crawl. The towns and cities were filled with roving mobs of torch-wielding fanatics, and the roads between the towns patrolled by citizen militias who stopped anyone travelling alone at night. Ulrika had been forced to abandon the coach Galiana had given her when she’d come to a road block just north of Averheim, and after that her speed was cut in half, for while she had been able to travel days as well as nights within the enclosed carriage, on horseback she’d only been free to move at night, and cautiously at that.
This last day had been the most maddening of all, for she had come within two
hours of Nuln just as dawn was breaking, and had to stop. She’d spent the day wedged inside the cramped cellar of a recently burned shack on the edges of the Stirwood, kept awake by fears that only a few miles away, Gabriella might be facing her doom while the tyranny of the sun kept Ulrika from her side. At last, when the light through the cracks in the cellar door finally faded, she sprang out and rode off in a frenzy, desperate to reach Nuln’s gates before they were closed at full dark.
Now that she had arrived, however, Ulrika had no idea where to go. She knew that Lady Hermione, Gabriella’s superior in the Lahmian sisterhood, had given her the running of a brothel from which to gather pillow-whispered secrets – fuel for the Lahmians’ never-ending political intrigues. Unfortunately, Hermione had shut down the old brothel, the Silver Lily, when the witch hunters had discovered its madam was a Lahmian, and Ulrika had never been to the new one. She didn’t know where it was. She didn’t know its name. All she could be certain of was that it wouldn’t be in the same location – if it existed at all.