The alley had gone quiet in the way that only follows a great deal of noise. Dust hung in the slanting light, unhurried, settling on everything at its leisure. The Gnoll Shaman lay trussed at the foot of a wall, breathing hard through his teeth, and somewhere out in the ruin a hydra was digesting its lunch.

Tyrion crouched over the prisoner and set the point of his dagger somewhere that would make a point of its own.

"Where is the egg?"

"I tell you." The words came out fast and high. "I tell you, I will!"

"Speak."

"It is safe. It is here somewhere."

The dagger did not move, which was considerably worse than if it had.

"Where?"

"Make deal." The terror went off the Shaman's face the way weather turns on a coast, and something sly came in behind it. "Have to make deal. Make deal, I tell. You kill, I take to grave."

"I don't have to kill."

"I don't have to tell human." He spat, and it landed near Tyrion's boot.

What followed did not involve much in the way of deliberation. Tyrion's free hand found the gnoll's throat and closed on it, and the dagger stayed exactly where it was, and the question came again through his teeth.

The gnoll coughed. Then, past the hand at his windpipe, he rolled his eyes sideways toward Halla and found the thing he had been hunting for.

"Queen knows where it is. She saw the queen."

A hand clamped over the muzzle. Tyrion looked up.

Halla was frowning at the prisoner the way one frowns at a word in a foreign tongue that sounds almost like something in your own. "I am not sure," she said, before he had finished asking.

The Shaman wrenched his face out from under Tyrion's palm and aimed everything he had left at her. "You know the queen. You saw the fox, and she saw the fox. The Obsidian Queen. My queen!"

She came and stood over him, all six and a half feet of her, the silver of her braid gone dull with a day's worth of dust. "So the egg is no longer here. The queen took it?"

"No." He was pleased with himself now, in the manner of a creature who has found the one card in his hand worth playing. "Egg still in town. But queen knows where it is."

"Do you know what he's talking about?"