I FOUND ARISTAN’S NEIGHBORHOOD just as the rain receded, the stone streets bright and shining wetly as the last light of sunset drained from the sky. It wasn’t as fine as the gentry neighborhoods I’d glimpsed this morning, but it was nice enough, fretvine frames and white fernpaper walls. Aristan’s house was nestled in the back. I knocked on the door and waited.

Silence. I knocked again, got nothing. Then a third time. Still nothing.

I stepped back from the house and studied it again. All quiet and dark, no light within at all, not even a single mai-lantern. I read the mud in the yard about her house, but I could see no footprints. No one had trodden here at all during this wet day save myself.

I heard the first curfew bells echoing through the city, then scanned the landscape about me. I picked out a half-hidden area that would grant the widest view of the street and took up station there, my coat collar pulled high against the rain. When Aristan returned for curfew, I figured, I’d pounce.

I waited throughout the second warning bells, then the third. Studied the crowds trickling past and engraved their faces, their bearings, their clothes. I did not recognize them, and none came to Aristan’s door.

Finally the fourth bells rang. I studied Aristan’s house again, frowning. Wherever Commander Blas’s secretary was now, she was about to get herself locked up for violating curfew. As was I, probably.

If she was coming home, that was. Or maybe she was home but wouldn’t or couldn’t answer the door.

My eye lingered on her front door. An idea occurred to me—but a forbidden one. A disadvantage to being an engraver was you remembered every rule you ever heard, along with all the punishments for each violation. But I was bothered now and had to see.

I slipped around to the back of the house, knelt at the back door, and reached up into the sleeve of my coat. Sewn into the lining there were three small, slender lengths of iron I’d bent into different shapes. I hadn’t used them in months, but I slid them out now, then eyed the lock in the back door.

I did not really know how to pick locks. Rather, I had memorized the movements required to pick three specific locks I’d experimented with months ago, during my Sublime training. This was very different from knowing how locks actually worked, and how to pick them, but I hoped it was worth the gamble here. Perhaps the lock of this door was similar to the ones I’d worked with before.

I delicately slid my wrench into the lock, followed by the pin. I set my pin, then felt a fluttering in my eyes as I let the memories return to me, and the movements came alive in my fingers.

I turned the pin, then dipped the wrench up and down, the slightest wiggle. With a click, the lock turned.

I glanced around to confirm I was unwatched, and opened the door.

The stench of rot struck me in a thick, staggering wave. I stepped back, coughing with my arm to my nose, then took a deep breath of clear air and returned to the open door, peering inside.

The house within was a wreck. Cupboards all shoved open, their contents poured out onto the floor. Chairs and tables flipped upside down. Cushions slashed to pieces, their moss stuffing ripped out in clumps. Piles of paper lay everywhere, having been torn from many books. The only thing that hadn’t been dashed to pieces was the small spyglass set on a stand in the corner—a fancy possession for so modest a home.

Someone, it seemed, had come here looking for something. I wondered if they’d found it.

I looked back at the street, confirming I was unwatched. Then I stepped inside and shut the door behind me.

---

—

I MOVED CAREFULLY throughout the reeking house, studying all the refuse on the floor, shattered reagents vials or bowls of tinctures or shredded books. Finally I came to the bedroom, where the stench of rot was so intense I was nearly sick. Clothes had been hauled from the wardrobes and shredded to pieces. The whole of the room was like a stinking rat’s nest.

I looked to the mossbed in the corner. There on the floor, peeking just past the drape of the sheets, were the tips of two bare feet, the toes curled and discolored.

I hesitated. Then I walked over and looked at her.

The body was female, somewhat elderly, and had been lying here for some days, her skin darkening in patches from the pooling of her blood within her. She had putrefied so much it was difficult to tell her race, yet she seemed a skinny, frail woman, with a thick shock of gray hair. A pool of black, old blood lay on the floor just beside her head, though I could not see a wound.

I cracked the bedroom shutter, allowing a blade of evening light to cut through the gloom. Then I calmed my mutinous stomach and leaned forward to look at her head. At the base of her skull, hidden among the gray tufts of her hair, was a dark, perfect little hole, about half the width of my little finger. A crackling rill of old dried blood wove away from it down her scalp. I had never seen such a wound in all my life and could not imagine what had felled her.

I stood back, studying the body. Rona Aristan, I guessed. Someone had come calling, looking for something, but she either had not given it to them, or could not.

I glanced around the bedroom, listening to the echoes of the curfew bells. My eye fell on a painting, undamaged but askew. Rendered in thick oil paints on its surface was the somewhat familiar face of a man: only somewhat, however, because the last time I’d seen that face, it’d been shot through with shoots of dappleglass.

I moved to the painting of Commander Taqtasa Blas. It was the first time I’d seen an image of the man whole. His eyes were steely but warm, nose proud with a slight bend from some childhood break. Dark Kurmini complexion overcast with the familiar gray. A handsome, haughty creature, I thought him.

I cocked my head, leaning closer. There was a bruise in the wood, at the frame’s corner. Then I saw there were more: another bruise above it, and one more on the bottom. Like this painting had been moved a great deal in its time, and bumped and rubbed up against something.

I thought for a moment. Then I lifted the painting off its nail and turned it around.

A piece of thick parchment had been glued to the canvas’s back; yet there, at the top right corner, it had been carefully torn away.

I shook the painting. Something rattled within. I tipped it over, turning its open corner to my palm.

Something small and twinkling slid out from behind the canvas and dropped in my hand: a key.

I held the key up to the fading light in the window. It was a simple thing, made of bright, rosy bronze. A key to a common lock, or a common door. I turned it over in my hand, thinking.

Why hide this key in such a fashion? Was this what the intruder had been looking for?

I looked back at Aristan’s corpse, frowning. Then my eye returned to the shuttered bedroom window.

An idea slowly began to congeal in my mind.

I returned to the main room, to where the spyglass was mounted on a stand pointing out the shuttered window there. I pushed open the shutters—pausing to peer out in case I was being watched—then put my eye to the spyglass.

The spyglass had been trained on a set of little houses about a half league up the hill, much smaller than this one. Bland little things that were hardly more than fernpaper, all the shutters of their windows clamped shut.

But one set of shutters—the one in the exact center of the spyglass’s lens—was different: a bright blue cloth was wedged in the shutters’ crack, dangling down the wall. None of the other houses featured such an adornment.

I drew back from the spyglass and peered at the little house, and the blot of blue hanging from the window.

A signal of some kind, perhaps? One Rona Aristan had once observed, from this very window?

I looked down at the little bronze key in my hand. Then I peered back through the spyglass, moving it a little to study the door of the house.

I spied a wink of rosy bronze there on the door—perhaps the same as the metal of the key now in my hand.

---

—

I SLIPPED OUT the back door and returned to the drizzling rain, key clutched in my fingers and the curfew bells still ringing in the distance. I approached the bland little house slowly, eyeing the alleys and windows.

No movement. All was still.

I approached the front door—the make of the knob and lock was indeed the same as the key—and pressed an ear to it to listen. I heard no sound within, so I slid the little bronze key in the lock and turned it. With a click, the door fell open.

Inside it was a stark, miserable little place, barely more than a floor, a ceiling, a wardrobe, and a table and a set of chairs. I shut the door behind me and quietly stepped in, glancing about, wary of any intruders.

Yet there was nothing to see, except perhaps a handful of colored cloths hanging from a hook beside the shuttered window, some red, some blue, some green. My hunch was right, I reckoned: many colors, for many signals, should anyone be watching. Just like the flares of the sea walls, perhaps.

I looked around the bare, empty house. There was no bed—so not a place for living, I guessed. As to what could have happened here that was worth signaling anyone over, I had no idea.

I walked across the floorboards, tapping them with my toe and waiting for a creak or a hollow thump. Nothing. Nor was there anything in the cupboards. Then I looked in the wardrobe.

A small chest sat at the bottom, finely made of pale wood with a bronze top. I tried to open it and found it locked. I reached into my sleeve to produce my lockpicks again, hoping I would get lucky a second time tonight.

My first attempt failed, as did my second. But upon trying the third technique I’d memorized I heard another satisfying click, and slowly lifted the top of the box.

I looked inside.

I stared. Then I shut the box.

I glanced around the tiny house again, confirming I was alone. Then I swallowed, reopened the box, and peered within, struggling to believe I was seeing aright.

Placed in the bottom was a small leather bag, tied shut; and there, beside that, was a stack of oblong, thick silver plates, each bright and shiny and about the size of my palm—and each was carved with the herald of the Iyalet of the Treasury.

I picked one plate up and studied it in the weak light. Its tiny lettering read ONE THOUSAND TALINTS OF THE GREAT AND HEAVENLY EMPIRE OF KHANUM.

I set the silver plate down, feeling faint. I had only ever heard of thousand-talint coins but had never seen one. I’d certainly never expected to touch one.

I turned the coin over, thinking. Then I took out my small knife and ran the point along its face, gouging it. The interior was silver as well. A true imperial talint, then.

I took the remainder of the coins out and stacked them on the floor before me. If I was seeing correctly, there were now seven thousand imperial talints here, which was surely more money than I’d ever see in all my days.

I sat on the floor, now weak in the knees, my heart fluttering in my chest. What was this strange little house? And what in hell was going on?

I returned to the box and took out the little leather bag. I untied it gently, worried what improbable thing it might contain. Perhaps a piece of titan bone, I thought, or the keys to the emperor’s Sanctum.

But the first item that tumbled out was not nearly so interesting: it was an imperial wall pass, a little leather booklet containing a metal symbol indicating the bearer possessed the right to pass through the third wall of the Empire and to travel from the Outer Rim to the third ring. Written within the front cover in official blue inks was the name Rona Aristan. I flipped through the pages, reading the seals from the third-ring cantons she had visited; the third ring was far more rigorous about contagion than the Outer Rim, and tracked all visitors carefully.

Rona Aristan, it seemed, had visited four cantons within the third ring again and again: the Qabirga, Juldiz, Bekinis, and Mitral cantons. She must have traveled to each one at least once per year over the past nine years.

I grunted in surprise and summoned the map of the Empire in my mind. These four cantons were mostly plains country, devoted to growing grain and reagents behind the safety of the walls. What a Talagray Engineering secretary was doing traveling to such places was beyond me. But then, neither could I comprehend how she’d died, nor why she’d hidden seven thousand-talint coins in an empty house mere streets away from where she’d lived.

I set the wall pass down on the table, then reached back into the little leather bag and pulled out the final item within. I paused as I saw it, for this one was more familiar than the rest.

I held it up to the dim light: a small, bronze disc with a little glass vial set in the center, sloshing with black fluid.

A reagents key. Another one, a third one, after the two Miljin and I had found. But this key was far less ornate than the one the ten dead Engineers had possessed, and featured only one vial, suggesting it was intended for a much less protected portal.

I studied the three very different valuables placed on the floor before me: the reagents key, the wall pass, and the seven thousand talints.

“Hum,” I said aloud.

Not knowing what else to do, I opened up my engraver’s satchel and carefully placed them all inside, using a kerchief to cover the silver coins and prevent them from clinking and clanking. Then I buckled my satchel tight, exited and locked the door behind me, and slipped away into the drizzle, sprinting back to the Trinity as the final curfew bells began to ring.