The nobles' quarters in the east wing of the palace were her looting ground. A dark and chilly place. A closed-door, silk-carpeted, rat-rustling sort of place, where fortunes lay around for the taking. King Kylock-Borc bless his dark little soul was having so many of the old nobles impaled, beheaded, and poisoned that it was impossible to keep track of the deaths. Unless one kept a little notebook, of course. Mistress Greal patted her bony bodice, where a softly bound book served to cushion her carcass. "Keep records, " her father always said, "you never know when they might come in handy. " Death was a great liberator of wealth. And messy, furtive assassinations made that wealth much easier to purloin. A lot of times wives couldn't be sure that their husbands were dead-one beheaded corpse floating belly-up on a lake looks much like another. When there was no body to speak of, children preferred to believe that their fathers were imprisoned, not dead, and when all one had to go on was a few bloodstained sheets, it was easy to assume one's errant brother had taken yet another virgin to bed.
