The Last Witness by K. J. Parker Page B

wasn’t busy . . . A month later, I’d moved to Cerauno, which is the third largest city in Scheria, and was playing indoors, to people who’d come specially to hear me, and who handed in their coins at the door rather than dropping them on the ground. Three months later, I was rich. Again.
    I seem to have this knack of hauling myself up by my bootstraps, usually when my mind is on other things.
    * * *
    Practically every night in Cerauno I dreamed about the skinny girl. Sometimes she was in the dark looking for me, with a knife; sometimes I met her in the street or beside the river. Sometimes she had a knife, other times it would be a rope or an axe. The one constant was that she wanted to kill me.
    I heard the news of the coup back home from the ambassador himself, no less, at a reception. He confessed that he was terrified at the thought of being recalled, since he was clearly identified with the old regime. I asked him who was behind it all; he looked round to make sure nobody was listening, and whispered a few names. Two of them (father and son) I recognised.
    I reminded myself that I was a professional, and my clients’ secrets were sacrosanct, even if the clients in question had sent assassins to murder me. If I were you, I told the ambassador, I’d stay here where it’s safe. Those clowns won’t last long, sooner or later they’ll cut each others’ throats and everything will go back to normal. Don’t go back, whatever you do. He gave me a sad smile. My wife and daughter are still there, he said, in the City.
    I thought about that while pretending to sip my tea, though the bowl was empty. If he refused to go back, they’d kill his family. If he went back, they’d kill him and his family as well, because now they were in power they could afford to be particular about loose ends. I know; it was only my opinion, and what do I know about high-level politics? But I’d come to like the ambassador; he’d fallen asleep in the front row of one of my recitals, on a night when I was particularly uninspired—he clearly had taste, and I like that in a man.
    He turned away to grab one of those rice-cakes-filled-with-pureed-seaweed that the Scherians fondly imagine are edible. I stared at the side of his head, and then he turned back. He was frowning.
    Tell me, ambassador, I said. Are you married?
    He looked at me as if I’d just asked him for the square root of seven. No, he said.
    I smiled at him. If I were you, I said, I’d stay here in Scheria where it’s safe. He nodded. I might just do that, he said.
    As soon as I could, I left the reception, went home to my comfortable lodgings in fashionable Peace Square, and was violently sick. I can only assume it was the pureed seaweed.
    * * *
    I’d been in Scheria for about six months when I started hearing rumours. News from the Old Country was hard to come by; my only reliable source was my friend the ambassador (Scheria didn’t recognise the new regime, so he stayed on; he was invited to receptions, but had to borrow money to live on) and all he knew came from refugees and exiles. Apart from what he told me, I heard the usual wild and improbable stuff, a mixture of impossible atrocity stories and political gossip, scurrilous in tone and often biologically impossible. But just occasionally I heard something that rang true. For instance: I heard that the society charlatan who used to claim he could read minds had mysteriously disappeared just before the coup, but lately there was a new mind-reader who’d taken over his old practice; she was in favour with the regime, who made no secret of her supposed powers. They used her for interrogations and to administer a particularly terrifying form of punishment—artificially induced amnesia. The victim, so the rumour went, was left with no memories whatsoever, not even his name. It was the proverbial fate worse than death, and apparently the new government kept her extremely busy. Her? Oh, yes, my informants assured me, this