Chapter 45

By the third morning Song was falling apart.

The occasional hour of sleep she stole was no longer enough and she could barely tell left from right. It did not go unnoticed. When Prefect Nestor, commander of the palace lictors, suggested she be made to wear a spice-cap and drink extract of Izcalli coca to prevent her falling asleep he was interrupted by Captain Wen politely putting down his pistol on the table facing the man.

“That,” the bespectacled man mildly said, “would be drugging a watchwoman out on contract. A breach of the Iscariot Accords.”

“Are you threatening me?” Nestor coldly asked.

He was a big man, heavyset and with jowls like a bulldog, but past his prime.

“Yes,” Wen frowned. “Obviously.”

Though the prefect seemed about ready to send for the lictors and put them all under arrest, calm prevailed at the behest of Majordomo Timon – the other half of the regime running the palace while the Lord Rector remained locked away under heavy guard. Prefect Nestor remained viciously angry that a pistol had been pointed in his direction even though it had been empty, so Song stepped in before the increasingly hard-eyed Wen made things worse.

“I am awake enough for one last audit,” she said. “I can retire afterwards.”

Majordomo Timon, a white-haired man so perfectly groomed it made even his soft features somehow look severe, offered her a small bow of thanks and a smile.

“We are thankful for your services, Captain Song,” he said. “The favor done today will not be forgotten.”

“I expect not,” Wen said, “as we will be billing the palace for the standard rates in employing a first-class Watch sniffer for three days.”

The white-haired man winced, so it must not be a small sum.

“Surely we could-”

“We could use the hourly rates, if you prefer,” Wen blandly offered.

The man’s face turned almost as pale as his hair.

“Given circumstances,” Song interrupted with a quelling look at her patron, “I am sure a discount can be arranged. I am coming into a great deal of private information regarding the court of the Lord Rector of Asphodel.”

Majordomo Timon hurried to pile on his approval to that argument, while the pleased gleam in Wen’s eyes told Song they’d been played: he had been aiming for her to play peacemaker from the start. The two palace grandees departed to arrange the audit, Prefect Nestor stomping on the way out of the small salon, and she was left alone with Wen Duan for what she knew would not be more than a few minutes.

“What is a spice-cap, anyway?” she asked.

“A cap with cephalic spices quilted in,” Wen replied. “Basil, ginger and such.”

Song blinked.

“That does not seem…”

“It’s Trebian nonsense,” Wen said. “Physicians in these parts insist it treats ‘distempers’, though, and apparently chronic lack of sleep is now one of those.”

Well, she thought, the magic cap was still better than Izcalli coca leaf. That was what they fed serfs so they could work themselves to death. She cleared her throat.

“What is the hourly rate for a first-rate Watch sniffer, if I may ask?”

He raised four fingers.

“Arboles?” she mused. “That’s not too-”

“Ramas,” Wen grinned. “There’s a reason courts pick up their own sniffers.”

Song choked. That was a lot of gold.

“And the price for a day?”

“Twenty-eight is the usual standard,” he replied. “They’re Blancaflor signatories, though, so they might have a better rate.”

Well now, Song thought. Even throwing in a discount, it seemed she was about to come into a not inconsiderable amount of money. That happy prospect was almost enough to keep her from nodding off in her chair – Wen gently shook her awake when the lictors came back. Swallowing a groan, she rose and stretched as discreetly as she could. This time the lictors did not take her to one of the dining halls with galleries above but to a small nook by a hallway, a cushioned seat already waiting for her.

A pair of lictors stood guard by the alcove, while two servants with Cathayan looks and a maidservant dress like Song currently wore sat in seats identical to the one left empty for her. She’d not even had to ask for the precaution obscuring her identity, as Prefect Nestor was intent on keeping that well under wrap.

Blinking away the returning pull of sleep, Song realized she recognized one of the lictors standing guard. Sergeant Arturo, a short man with rugged good looks who smiled at her as she sat down in her seat.

“Servants this time, my lady,” he told her. “Enough lictors have been cleared to cover all the chokepoints.”

Song nodded back with a wan smile. She’d heard that one before. Immediately after the attempt was made on Lord Rector Evander’s life, it had only seemed reasonable for her to stay with him as someone with the proven capacity to see through the assassin’s contract. Only even after lictors flooded the halls and a tightly packed wall of flesh and steel escorted Evander to sealed room, Song was ‘asked’ to remain at the disposal of the palace guards.

First they made her clear Prefect Nestor and the lictors that were to guard the Lord Rector’s door, which was fair enough. Then servants that were to take care of Asphodel’s ruler in his containment, which again was fair to request. But by morning they’d gotten increasingly ambitious, making her check not only on their own sniffers – ten-year-old twins and a crone of sixty – but on an ever-increasing crowd as the plan became to lock down an entire section of the rector’s palace, no one in and out, then methodically comb through the rest looking for the assassin.

Which meant Song had been made to look at maids, cooks, launderers and even a man whose entire job was to empty the chamber pot of the Lord Rector. Everyone who might be needed for a palace within the palace to function smoothly.

Even when news came from Black House that Tristan and Maryam had somehow crossed back down into Tratheke in pursuit of the assassin, who should be away hiding in the city, the only thing that’d changed was that Song was made to clear lictors that were to stand guard on the spot in the garden where there might be a hidden path.

Aid she had offered freely came to feel like a rope around her neck as the prefect and majordomo kept asking for more. She hadn’t even had time to sit with her brigade since the attempt, the only blackcloak she had seen was Captain Wen. You’d think that the Asphodelian sniffers being cleared would have split the burden, but Prefect Nestor insisted she was the only proven quantity so she must be used for all crucial personnel.

Which was all of them, it felt like.

The only silver lining was that she’d laid eyes on the majority of the staff at the rector’s palace and found no trace of a Golden Ram contract, which was useful information for the contract she was actually on.

“It is starting, my lady,” Sergeant Arturo whispered.

Song straightened out of the slump forward she’d been falling in, breathing in sharply. The procession of servants going down the hall began as advertised, men and women in the red-and-white servant livery walking past them slowly. They were under orders to keep their stare forward, though some snuck peeks before getting elbowed by escorting lictors.

The fourteenth proved to have a contract, one that let the man swap one smell for another at a time. She gestured and he was taken aside by the lictors at the end of the hall. None of the other thirty had either a contract or a boon, and it turned out the one contract she’d seen was a known quantity. The servant in question worked in the palace sewers, which how he’d drawn the attention of the vermin god he contracted with in the first place.

She was soon dragged back before Prefect Nestor and Majordomo Timon. Wen had also forced his way into the room, though he was busy tearing through a bowl of peanuts. No prisoner was taken in that fearsome process, to the majordomo’s visible discomfort.

“Your room has been prepared, Captain Song,” Timon said. “We thank you, once more, for the service you have rendered House Palliades.”

“If that feels unsafe, a bunk has also been set aside for you in the lictor barracks,” Prefect Nestor idly added.

“That will not be necessary,” Song flatly replied.

She was not going to put herself in this man’s power. That was a recipe for having that stupid hat forced onto her head if she’d ever heard one. She fled that room so quickly she almost left her lictor escort behind, and might have stumbled if Wen did not catch up and swing an arm around her shoulder.

“Easy now,” he said. “We’ll get you there.”

“The Thirteenth,” she said. “What has been-”

“No one’s in any danger,” he said. “They are continuing the investigation without you, and you’ll have a report when you wake. You need to sleep, Song.”

Much as she would have liked to argue that, things had gotten bad enough she could not remember how she had arrived to the corridor they were now limping down. Pushing down the urge to insist on an immediate report, she let herself be guided to her room.

What happened after Wen opened the door she had no idea, but Song woke up buried in pillows.

With the taste of sleep still in her mouth she slid out of the covers, lighting one of the lamps even though she did not need it to see. Moments later there was a soft knock at the door and a servant entered when bid, asking what temperature she would prefer her bath and if she had any request for supper.

She had slept the whole day away, she realized with a wince.

A warm bath and a three-course meal of Asphodelian staples later, Song was yet sitting in her private dining room sipping at good Mazu black leaf when Captain Wen made his entrance. He immediately complained that she had not set any dessert aside for him, but though she smiled Song could see from his eyes that his heart was not in it. It was a distraction, meant to soften the blow of whatever bad news he carried. Song set down her tea.

“Tell me,” she asked.

Gods, let it not be someone in the Thirteenth having been hurt while she was playing sniffer for overreaching yiwu.

“Though the Thirteenth’s already on contract, a formal request has been made for your services in providing protection for the Lord Rector,” Wen said. “It came from Evander Palliades himself.”

She frowned. Lord Rector Evander had been pleasant enough, but she was not here for the man.

“So refuse,” Song said. “Or must it come from me directly?”

“They did not make it to me, I was merely informed,” Wen said. “It was kicked much higher up. See, as of yesterday the leading Watch officer in Tratheke is Brigadier Chilaca.”

It took a moment for her to follow – the commanding officer at Stheno’s Peak should be a colonel. Certainly not a brigadier, a rank reserved only for the officer that commanded the fortress seat of a Watch administrative region directly under a marshal.

“The head of the diplomatic delegation,” she said. “The one come to negotiate over the cache and shipyard.”

He nodded.

“And to them I am an inexpensive way to accrue goodwill with the other side of the negotiating table,” Song grimaced. “He is sure to say yes.”

“Jurisdiction will get tricky,” Wen said. “You’re Scholomance, which means in theory we answer only to the Obscure Committee.”

He hesitated a moment.

“Don’t coddle me,” Song grunted.

“In practice, it just means Chilaca will have to make accommodations to leave you time to work on your test,” the bespectacled man said. “I’ll fight so that instead of your services being ‘on tap’, so to speak, you can only be requested for specific events and in advance. But I can’t push it much farther than that.”

He grimaced.

“If I try to buck him off entirely it’ll become a game of who knows who, and I won’t be winning that against a brigadier.”

The admission, she saw, left a bad taste in his mouth.

“Doing what you can is all I ask,” Song quietly said.

He rolled his eyes at her.

“Now who’s coddling who?” Wen sneered. “Finish that tea, Ren. If you’re going to be used by Chilaca as negotiation prop, let’s see if we can at least wheedle double pay out of him for it. You’ll be doing the Watch a service as well.”

—

Tredegar objected to being called the muscle, not on general principle but because as she had yet to recover she claimed she would not make an effective thug.

“You’re still more muscle than I’d be bringing,” Tristan reminded her, and that was that.

They did not use the coach all the way, and not the Watch’s coach either: that would have been announcing who they were with a trumpet. Instead Tristan paid one of the Asphodel’s army of street coachmen to let them off ten minutes away from their destination, Angharad limping out after him. Though neither wore the black, they kept their pistols obvious as a warning to the overly enterprising – of which there would be many, around here.

They were at the edge of the northeast square, past the pretty part of that town that hugged the side of the Collegium glass and near a couple of streets he’d learned the locals called the ‘Reeking Rows’. One of the old Lord Rectors had decreed the better part of a century ago that all the foul-smelling trades of the city should be confined to a series of streets around some Antediluvian contraption whose brass blades stirred the wind, to prevent the smells spreading.

It’d worked in the sense that the rest of Tratheke must have enjoyed the lack of foulness in the air, but it’d also killed the neighborhood. Even those who worked at the tanning shops, the dye pits and slaughterhouses, they preferred living in nicer corners of the city. Only those who could not afford better had stayed when the Reeking Rows rolled in.

“The streets and walls are fine as any other in this city,” Angharad quietly said. “But there is something…”

“It’s not a neighborhood,” Tristan agreed. “It’s just a place people live.”

Slowly she nodded, keeping up to his pace with little visible effort. It helped that the thief was not rushing and she was longer legged to start with. To his disappointment his discreet investigation back at Black House had revealed that her walking stick was only a stick, too light for there to be a hidden blade inside, but the cane was still fine wood with a steel head.

He wouldn’t want arms as strong as the noblewoman’s swinging that anywhere near his skull.

“A shame it has come to this,” Tredegar said. “The local lords should have stepped in and provided aid.”

“Lords can’t make the air smell better,” Tristan snorted, then paused as he recognized the half-slumped noodle shop at the corner. “Scarf on, we are about to cross the bad part of the Rows.”

He pulled on his own, barely more than a stripe of beige cloth, while Angharad pulled up a proper green scarf almost matching the shade of her belted tunic. Though there was nothing as visible as the green noxious smoke one might have imagined, the moment they turned the corner Tristan’s eyes began to sting. He hurried forward, blinking away tears, and felt fervently grateful that this time he had cloth to cover his mouth when he breathed.

He’d nearly emptied his stomach when carrying Maryam through here on the night of the assassination attempt, and his throat had been sore most of the day after.

It was an unpleasant street and a half, cutting straight through the worst of the Rows to get at their destination quicker, but at least it was the work of but a few minutes. Angharad was no more eager than he to linger in there. They kept their mouth and nose covered for another block even when the eyes stopped stinging, only sucking in relieved breaths once they were well clear.

“You took Maryam through this without a mask?” she asked, expression hard to place.

He passed a hand through his hair.

“Had to,” Tristan said. “She was feverish and babbling after the fit of mania. It was either pushing through or risking some Gloam fever turning on her.”

Signifiers were supposed to be better off than hedge witches peddling curses, but the one time Tristan had seen a Gloam fit turn on someone it’d not been pretty – as in scratch out your own eyes ugly. No matter how much safer Signs were, the black arts were poison.

“It was brave, to take that path at night,” Angharad said.

Tristan snorted.

“Oh, I know a thing or two about taking to the streets after dark,” he teased. “Worry not for that.”

She rolled her eyes at him, but he was hardly lying. Unless you stepped on some coterie’s feet by crossing their territory uninvited, going around unmolested when the lights dimmed was mostly a question of making yourself not worth hassling. Make it plain you were poor, that you were armed and then keep moving so the boys working themselves up to it never got the chance to pull the trigger.

Though it had been two days now, Tristan remembered the area well enough. The boarded-up tea parlor he and Maryam had stumbled out next to waited at the end of a street that was a row of stone-and-brass shells, long ago stripped clean of any sign of life.

“Is this the place, then?” Angharad asked.

“That’s the one,” Tristan agreed. “Come on, I’ll show you what I found last time.”

The parlor was a single-story building, though one with a high and curved ceiling. The windows were bereft of the green glass so common to Tratheke, instead closed with one might generously call shutters but in practice were large wooden planks wedged inside in a broad X shape. There were eight windows, four on each of the tea parlor walls facing a street, and he led Angharad to the third window from the left on the south side.

It wasn’t obvious, but the wooden planks there were a trick: they’d been sawed through on each support, sanded down and put back in place to maintain the appearance that the window was still boarded up. Tristan demonstrated as much by pulling it out, carefully lowering the wooden frame on the floor inside by leaning past the edge.

“You noticed this in the dark?” Angharad asked, cocking her head to the side.

“The street lanterns were lit,” he reminded her. “And they were put back the wrong side then, the planks looked off. It’s why I think it was the assassin in the first place.”

It was the mark of someone who both would have had reason to be there and be in a hurry to leave. A look inside revealed the same dark, dusty floor he had glimpsed last time before deciding he was not going to risk a fight with an assassin that’d already slapped him around once while Maryam was in a bad enough state to babble about his livery ‘tasting gray’.

The thief climbed the window and dropped inside in a small cloud of dust, extending a hand so Angharad would pass him their lantern. He cracked a match and lit it, letting out a little hum of satisfaction.

“What is it?”

“Footsteps,” he said. “And somewhat recent.”

He made room for her, setting down the lantern to help drag her past the windowsill after she passed him the walking stick. Gods but being tall and muscled made people heavy, not that he was fool enough to ever say so out loud. Angharad straightened her clothes after, wrinkling a nose at the dust.

Good thing Song was still stuck playing nice with the Lord Rector, she’d have a fit at the sight of such an unkempt tea parlor – offended to the core as both a Tianxi and a woman who could and did use a knife to get small impurities out of pans.

“Several trails,” Angharad observed, hoisting up the lantern.

The inside of the once tea parlor was mostly a large open space framed by four brass counters, any furniture not literally part of the floor removed. There were three brass doors on the back wall and gas lamps on the walls every few feet, though none were lit and Tristan would not bet on there being gas inside. Most important of all, there were three trails of footsteps in the dust.

One going straight to the middle of the room, ending abruptly there. It must be where there’d been a way to access the realm of passages. A second started at the middle of the room and headed straight for the trick window, with the footsteps more widely spaced. Running instead of walking, the assassin leaving this place worrying of someone following after her.

“I understand those leading to the center of the room,” Angharad mused, “but why this one?”

Her walking stick was pointed at the standout: a path going around the right side, past the brass counter, and passing in front of every of the three doors out back before returning to the window.

“Checking on the doors,” Tristan guessed. “Making sure the place is secure.”

“Then why not go in?” Angharad asked.

It was a fair question, and they sought out an answer by circling along the same path. Tristan was not sure what one needed to do to access that strange, bleak labyrinth of hallways that had spat him out on the street but despite Maryam’s assurances that it was unlikely the place could be accessed without a key he was disinclined to pass through the middle of the room.

It cost nothing to be careful.

The doors were not locked, they soon found out. Tristan pressed the handles and the mechanism clicked. It was more methodical than that: they’d been welded. Frowning, the thief trailed a finger against the once-molten metal and found the texture as expected.

“That explains our assassin’s confidence,” Angharad said.

Tristan hummed.

“Why?”

“Why the welding?” she said. “Presumably to keep the doors shut.”

“Yes, but why do they need to be shut so thoroughly?” he asked, moving to feel out the edges of the second door. “It is expensive, welding a door. Someone must have felt it a necessary expense, and that has me curious.”

“Because it would mean coin,” Angharad slowly said, “and you said coin fled this neighborhood when the Reeking Rows were instituted.”

“The Ancients didn’t build a tea parlor,” Tristan said. “Someone ran that business here, and odds are they went out of business when the Rows rolled in. Which means…”

“Someone thought those doors worth welding shut after the parlor was abandoned,” Angharad finished.

He nodded.

“And that,” Tristan mused as he passed to the third door, “is interesting to me.”

Like the others, it had the aftermath of the welding on the edges and – huh.

“Bring the lantern closer,” he asked.

Pressing his cheek against the door’s surface, he squinted at the edge. Angharad angled the lantern so it would not blind him and the thief idly reached for his knife. He pressed the tip against the edge of the welding and let out a quiet laugh.

“Well now, would you look at that?”

“I do not see anything out of the ordinary,” Angharad told him, sounding like she was frowning.

“This one’s not welded,” he said. “Someone put up thin plates that look like they were melted on top of the door edges, but I can slide my knife in between the plate and the door.”

He withdrew, sliding the knife back into its sheath. Kneeling, he drew his kit out his bag and unfolded the lockpicking kit across the floor. The door was a simple tumble lock, but after a minute of fiddling with it he realized it wasn’t really locked at all – it was barred on the other side, no amount of lockpicking would help.

“Barred,” he told a patient Angharad, putting away his tools. “We will have to find another way in.”

He slid back the last lockpick into the sheath, rolled his should and then his head whipped to the door. The sheer surprise of it being yanked open cost him a precious second – the mace almost took his head off, and even throwing himself back he took a glancing blow.

A broad silhouette came bursting out of the door, kicking him back down as he reached for his pistol, but he had not come alone.

Tristan didn’t see what happened, though a woman grunted in pain – not Angharad – and he rolled away pawing at his side for his gun. He got a glimpse of Angharad striking the side of the attacker’s knee with her cane before half-stepping out of a wild swing’s way. Aiming his pistol, Tristan cocked it and had his mouth opened for a threat when their attacker’s mace was thrown at him.

He yelped, trying to duck away, but the length of wood hit him in the forehead and he dropped the pistol. Cursing, he scrabbled for it in time to hear the stranger fall with a hoarse shout of pain. Angharad, legs slightly trembling, was standing over her with her saber resting on the woman’s throat.

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“Move,” Angharad Tredegar mildly said, “and you die.”

There was no doubt at all in Tristan’s mind that she would follow through with the threat, and by the way the stranger swallowed none in hers either. Snatching up his pistol with mild embarrassment, the thief rose – and picked up Angharad’s walking stick, fetching it for her so he might be said to have contributed to the situation in some manner.

“What’s your name?” Tristan asked, rubbing his forehead.

That better not bruise, Maryam would make sport of him again. The stranger spat, or at least tried to – as she leaned forward Angharad pushed the point into her throat ever so slightly, so she let out a panicked choking sound and drew back instead.

“My tolerance for poor manners is remarkably thin,” Angharad informed her. “Beware.”

The woman, who Tristan only now noticed might have been broad-shouldered but by her face must be barely seventeen – gods, just a girl – cleared her throat awkwardly.

“Chara,” she said. “My name’s Chara.”

Tristan nodded.

“Stay put, Chara,” he said. “I need to make sure we are alone before the three of us have a polite conversation.”

He inclined his head at Angharad in question, flicking his eyes at the saber, but she shook hers. She would be fine keeping her sword up for a while still, then. He had time to check the back. Tristan checked the angles on either side before crossing the threshold, for though it would have been unusual for a second fighter not to get involved it was not impossible. Nothing, though, so in he went.

What must have been the kitchen and backroom of the tea parlor was empty, save for a door that should lead back to the street and had also been welded shut. More interesting was the hole in the floor, where old masonry had been taken out and left in piles. A look in there revealed an unlit lantern sitting on steps that went down into the dark. He put a finger on the glass and found it cold.

Not freshly snuffed, then.

“All right, Chara,” he said. “What’s down there that was worth attacking us?”

“I’m not telling you anything,” she grunted. “You’re the ones not supposed to be here.”

Tristan smiled, reached inside his pocket and produced his silver brigade seal.

“Do you know what that is?” he asked.

She squinted at the seal.

“Unluckies,” the girl said, then coughed. “Unlucky, I mean. Why would you put that number in silver?”

“Because the Watch only cares so much for superstitions,” Tristan replied.

Her face went white as chalk.

“You’re rooks,” she said, biting her lip. “Shit. I didn’t know, you have to believe me.”

“I do,” Tristan admitted. “But I still have questions to ask you.”

“I’m,” Chara started, then hesitated. “You should talk to Delian, I can’t say anything. I’ll take you, if you let me.”

Oh, the thief thought. So that’s what this is. A hidden stash, a street big street girl guarding it and now a boss she was afraid of?

“You are from a basilea,” he stated. “Which one?”

Chara looked unsure whether to be afraid or proud.

“The Brass Chariot,” she finally said.

“And if I were to venture down those stairs I would find…” he invited.

“Property of our basilea,” she stiffly said.

Gods, the irony. They had not stumbled into a conspiracy, it was the conspiracy that’d accidentally set up shop next to a coterie stash house.

“Goods,” he mildly said, “or people?”

She scoffed.

“We don’t trade in flesh, we’re not southside rippers,” Chara said. “It’s bottles, you can go look. We’ve been emptying it out, it’s almost empty anyways.”

Explaining why there was only a single guard, and so young.

“We’ll have to, to establish you are telling the truth,” Tristan said, “but we have no interest in a smuggling operation. That is for the lictors to chase down.”

He leaned forward.

“But why have you been emptying the stash?” he asked. “What made the Brass Chariot start?”

Chara looked uncomfortable.

“I heard someone came sniffing around,” she said. “That keeping our property there was looking risky.”

Tristan’s smiled grew, for those were the words he had been hoping for.

“And that someone,” he said. “What do you know about her?”

“I don’t know nothing,” Chara said, “but Delian might. There’s got to be something, if it’s just one person, we would usually cut her throat instead of moving on.”

Tristan dragged himself up. A lead, then. The ‘Brass Chariot’ was not on Hage’s list of basileias that were open to working with the Watch, but neither was it on the list of those to avoid. There was potential there.

“It sounds to me like we need to have a chat with Delian,” Tristan agreed. “Why don’t you go tell him that.”

“You’ll release me?” Chara said, hopeful.

He nodded.

“Tell him to send a time and place to Black House,” Tristan said. “He’s to bring no more than two people with him and we will do the same.”

She nodded eagerly. Tristan rolled his shoulder.

“Go on, then,” he said. “And try not to attack anymore blackcloaks, they’re not all as nice as we are.”

Angharad, face hard to read, put away her blade.

“Of course not, sir,” Chara said, pushing herself to her feet. “I’ll, uh, take care of it right away.”

First she made for the backdoor – his guess was that the room below had a passage to some other edifice – but he clicked his tongue and gestured at the trick window. Chara took a single look at Angharad and decided not argue, fleeing out of the parlor as if afraid they’d change their minds. She forgot her mace in her hurry.

A beat passed, the two blackcloaks alone in the room.

“Was that wise?” Angharad quietly asked.

“We won’t be getting anything useful out of her, she’s too low a rung in the ladder,” Tristan grunted. “And I’d rather have two pairs of eyes when we go down there.”

Tredegar hummed, eventually nodding. The thief judged their own lantern to be enough, moving aside the coterie’s as they went down the stairs. Not so long a flight, a mere ten steps, but the basement it led down to was startlingly large. Mostly empty, as the girl had said, leaving only half a dozen crates of what looked like rum behind.

“What was this room for, do you think?” Angharad wondered. “It looks like nothing in particular.”

It was a square of bare stone, interesting only in that the walls looked about the same height and length. As he’d expected there was a second set of stairs in the left wall, leading up to what must be another house on the block. But it was only when the lantern light reached the wall in the back he drew in a sharp breath. Angharad cleared her throat.

“It only looks like stone to me,” she said. “Though of different kind than the other walls.”

“I’ve seen stones likes those before,” Tristan said.

His fingers clenched.

“It was used for the paths in that strange empty layer Maryam and I crossed to exit the palace,” he said.

Angharad’s brow rose.

“That seems unlikely to be a coincidence.”

“Agreed,” Tristan said, then worried his lip. “But there’s nothing the likes of you and I are going to be getting out of that wall.”