"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.