remember just how he had found the Arcanum to begin with. The shadows confused and redirected his memory, making certain shops appear where he had not seen them before, and losing the prominence of other landmarks in their long crawl across the city. Cheyne began to feel the edges of panic. He was a stranger with no name and no standing, and now no money, caught in a city where those were the only things that could pry you out of trouble. And trouble, he had been told by Muni time and again, always came out at dark in Sumifa.
Thoughts of favin's distress at his absence rattled through his mind as well-in all the times Javin had taken him to help crew the digs, Cheyne had never so directly ignored Javin's warnings. The trip hadn't even been worth the expense of Madame Hifrata's information, much less Javin's trust. His concentration caught up in this whirl of guilt and angst, he did not notice the beggar he tripped over until it was too late.
It was a fortunate fall. Had Cheyne's head not dropped as he rolled over the oddly familiar vagrant, the well-aimed throwing disk that sailed over them both would have taken it from his shoulders. The discus bounced hard off a basalt wall, brass blade ringing sweetly as it spun into the sand.
"Stay low!" the beggar growled, listening intently to the tone of the disk. "And follow me."
He drew his short dagger and rolled around the corner of a bungalow, dragging Cheyne along with him. They pressed themselves against the hot brick walls for a moment, then when the footsteps passed by, the vagrant motioned to Cheyne to follow him up a rope ladder. Cheyne had little choice. He could already hear the soft footfalls of the assassin heading back toward them, the man no doubt having figured out their trickery.
Cheyne hauled himself up the rope to the flat roof of the building, its surface baking his feet through his boots with the lambent heat of the desert day. It wouldn't take the assassin long to figure this out, either. Cheyne was about to raise that point, but the beggar