"Oi! You! Yes, You!"
The City Guard mean business. They're having another one of their crackdowns, and this one is a crackdown with knobs on.
If you don't appear to have important work to do, the Guard have important work for you to do. It's more important than anything else you might have wanted to do instead. There doesn't seem to be a choice; anyone who protests gets beaten.
Across almost every wall across the upper end of the city, a team of agitators have been at work. In blood-red letters reads the message:
"Tanala was First. Who will be Next? The Right Hand of Vandrak".
The city guard want these messages removed, and to that end a large number of sponges, buckets and pots of paint have been requisitioned. As have a large number of able but not necessarily willing bodies. One of whom is Zul.
Zul has heard of Tanala, everyone has. One of the Wizards from the tower, and reputedly powerful and dangerous. Rumour has it that she was recruited by The Guard to interrogate a prisoner, and she made his brain come out of his ears. Literally.
Now it appears that someone, possibly the Right Hand of Vandrak, has done her in.
Zul has heard of the Right Hand of Vandrak; a bunch of would-be revolutionaries who get blamed (or take credit) for just about every violent death in the city.
Zul doesn't have much choice about working as graffiti cleaner, but she is able to use her feminine charms to get herself assigned to the area in which the assassination is supposed to have taken place, one of the narrow streets of stone steps leading from one level to another, forming the shortest route from the Temple of Valarna to Wizard's Tower.