WHEN I FINISHED MY report to Ana, I was slightly pleased when she just sat there on the edge of her bed, boggled. She opened her mouth to speak; then paused, rethinking her words; and then she did so again, and again, like she had so many questions for me she wasn’t able to get any one of them past her lips.

Finally, she managed to say, “Let me see one of those talints.”

I slipped out one of the huge silver coins and handed it over to her. She turned it about in her hands. “So…let me get this straight, Din,” she said. “You have…just been walking around the city…with seven thousand talints in your bag? Like they were cabbages for the cooking pot?”

“Ah…yes, ma’am?”

“By Sanctum,” she said. “And people think I’m fucking mad! And you didn’t slip an extra one in your boot or something, did you?”

“Ah…no, ma’am. That seems a good way to invite more hell into my life, when I already have hell aplenty.”

“How encouraging it is to see you show wisdom! But…but this has been nothing short of an utter vomit of revelations! Secret meetings! A missing survivor! Murdered secretaries making secret journeys across the Empire! And not only a sack containing a goddamn fortune, but three reagents keys discovered in one day?” She fumed for a moment. “Well. Well! I shall need to do some deep immersion to make sense of all this.”

She stood.

“Deep what now?” I asked.

“It’s been awhile since I was driven to such means,” she grumbled. She walked to one of her enormous trunks full of books, stooped, and began dumping them out by the armload. “But if any situation calls for it, it’s this one.” She did a double take, glaring at me. “Don’t just watch me toil here, boy. Help me!”

I did so, scooping out the books until the trunk was empty. It was one of Ana’s few personal possessions, a massive, battered old thing she’d insisted on bringing with her; though now that it was empty, I saw that the interior bottom was not made of wood, but appeared to be cushioned, almost like a bed for some animal.

“Shan’t be a moment,” said Ana. She slipped on her blindfold. “I just need to meditate on this for a bit before deciding the course of action. The solitude helps me ponder.” She climbed into the massive trunk and sat down. “You can wait here. Just don’t touch too much of my damned stuff. I will know what’s been moved!”

“But, ma’am,” I said. “What are you going t—”

She snapped the trunk door shut on herself. I stared at it, bewildered. Then came a soft thump from within, as if she was making herself comfortable, and all fell to silence.

I looked around, unsure what to do. The silence stretched on.

My eye fell on the sack of talints at my feet, and I reflected that now I really could just walk away with them, if I liked. Yet I decided that the odds of a solitary young criminal with a huge fortune on his person making it through a highly patrolled road that was often pestered with murderous deserters would either be slim to none or none at all. So instead of committing robbery, I made tea.

I opened Ana’s window and sat beside it, sipping my tea and drinking in the nightscape of Talagray again. After all I’d discovered today, being in the city felt hardly safer than any of my idle fantasies of theft and escape. This place was meant to be the keystone of all the Empire; and yet, in one day, I’d found it rotten to the core.

Then, with a snap, Ana’s trunk popped open, and she sat up like a cursed soul from the grave. She paused as she felt the slight breeze in the room. “Shut that damned window!” she barked. “What are you trying to do to me, child? I’m attempting to think!”

I fumbled to do so, spilling tea on my Iudex coat, then slammed the shutters closed like there was a torrential rain outside, rather than a peaceful evening. “Apologies, ma’am. Didn’t mean t—”

“One needs isolation for the mind to focus,” she snapped at me. “If you want to get no work done, get an office with a beautiful view. But if you want to parse all your problems, yo—fuck.” She slipped on one of her piles of papers as she stepped out, and barely caught herself on the side of the trunk. She then finished climbing out and grumbled for a moment. “Well. Did you make tea, Din?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then I’ll have a cup.”

She sat down on the bed as I poured her one.

“First…I have a question.” She fixed me in a fearsome glare. “I want answers about something you did.”

“Ah. Y-yes, ma’am? Did I do something wrong?”

“Yes! Very wrong! Why the hell didn’t you tell me you knew how to pick locks?”

“Oh,” I said sheepishly. “Well. I don’t really know how, ma’am. I just memorized the movements to unlock three basic types of locks.”

She stared at me, outraged. “That…that is basically the goddamn definition of ‘knows how to pick locks,’ boy! What an absurd thing! What the hell else do you know how to do?”

I handed her the cup. “I do seem to be developing a talent for tolerating verbal abuse and mad questions, ma’am.”

She glared at me again. “I wish to know more of your lockpicking, Din…But for now, let’s start dissecting all this, beginning with this Captain Kiz Jolgalgan. For she is of great interest to me.”

“Since she might be our only witness for the poisoning?” I asked.

A long slurp of tea. “No. Because I rather like her for being our murderer.”

I stared at her as she dabbed her lips on her cloak.

“Beg pardon?” I asked.

“I mean, who’s more experienced than anyone with contagions?” Ana mused. “Apoths. And now you’re telling me an Apoth was going to all these secret meetings with the Engineers? And is now possibly the lone survivor?”

“You…you really think this Jolgalgan might be our poisoner, ma’am?”

“Possibly!” said Ana. “I don’t have all the answers yet, of course. Dunno why she’d want to kill all her friends, or why she chose the maddest fucking method ever to do it. Or, indeed, if she also intended to bring down the sea wall and imperil the whole of the goddamn Empire, too! But…it hangs! Though it is but a scrap of information, it hangs together, a bit. Captain Miljin has surely notified the Legion to keep an eye out for this Jolgalgan by now. But please get ahold of Nusis tomorrow, Din, and see what the Apoths can dig up on her. They must have files on the woman’s alterations. I want to know what Jolgalgan can do, where she’s been, what capacities she’s served in, and anyone and everyone who might have served alongside her. Let us see if my hunch is right.”

“Understood,” I said.

“Good. Next—the reagents keys! Show them to me, please.”

I slid them both out—the one Miljin and I had found in Jilki’s quarters, and the one I’d found in the empty house near Aristan’s residence—and gave them to her.

“What an odd thing, to find three in one day…” Ana held Jilki’s key to her eye. “But Miljin wasn’t wrong. This key is for a highly warded portal. I believe only Imperial Treasury banks require five or more reagents…Fascinating. But this other one…” She did the same to the second one, peering through it like a tiny spyglass. “It’s not the same at all. So plain, and so simple…Sanctum knows what portal it’s for.” She chewed her lip for a moment, then held up the advanced one I’d found in Jilki’s quarters. “But I actually think I know what this one goes to—for surely it must unlock the place where all our Engineers were poisoned.”

I nodded. “Whatever room or building or chamber where they were all meeting secretly.”

“Exactly. Which is quite a find! Good work. If all is going aright, Captain Strovi should be out in Talagray now, collecting all the fernpaper orders for all the millers for the past four weeks. If we find one place that suddenly had to replace all their fernpaper…and if that place also happens to have a reagents portal, and if this key successfully opens it…”

My blood began to tick inside my ears. “Then that has to be the place of the poisoning.”

“Yes! And you’ve also gotten us a timeline for all this, dear Din—eight nights before the breach, the sixth of this month. If that all lines up, we can then see if this missing Jolgalgan was present at that place, at that time—and what she did there, and where she’s gone. And, perhaps, how she connects to Commander Blas’s murder, over two weeks ago now.”

My eye wandered back to the sack of talints. “I…don’t suppose all that money has something to do with it, ma’am?”

“Though it feels obvious, I…am unsure,” she sighed. “In fact, your discoveries about Blas are so great, they almost make my head a little heavy…For suddenly he’s not just somewhat corrupt, allowing the Hazas to treat him to lewd holidays at their houses—but is in fact possibly the most corrupt Imperial officer in recent memory! And I worry…What if this corruption doesn’t stop at Blas?” She turned her blindfolded head toward the closed window. “What if other officials are just as complicit as he is?”

There was a tense silence.

I felt my skin crawl as I realized what she meant. “You mean…the investigation team? You’re worried about our own colleagues?”

“I am,” she said quietly. “The investigation thus far does not seem to have been well managed here. Blas should have been looked at. Aristan’s body should have been discovered before now. But I am reluctant to assume maliciousness when incompetence is a better explanation…Hm. Let me see the wall pass.”

I handed it over to her as well. She flipped through it rapidly, fingers dancing across the pages. “What a dirty bunch of business! Business that apparently required Blas to store money in a place far less official than, say, a box at an Imperial Treasury bank, where a commander wielding such sums would be noticed. And if Madam Aristan was traveling back and forth between Talagray and these four distant cantons—Qabirga, Juldiz, Bekinis, and Mitral…Well.” She shut the wall pass with the snap. “She must’ve been the bag man.”

“The…the what, ma’am?”

“The courier, the person who carries the money. Blas must have been sending her to the third ring to either pay people off or take payments from them. A better courier you’d never find—for who’d look twice at an elderly Iyalet secretary? Yet—what was Blas paying or getting paid for? What the hell was the bastard doing? We don’t know yet. But it eats at me.”

She rocked back and forth for a moment, head cocked, yellow eyes thin. I stayed silent, letting her ponder.

“Well, Din,” she said. “I now have another question for you.”

“Y-yes, ma’am?”

She pushed up her blindfold until one yellow eye peered at me from beneath it. “What do you think the odds are that Rona Aristan and Commander Blas were killed by the same person?”

I considered it, my eyes fluttering as I summoned all my memories. I thought about it for a long while.

“I think…I think very low, ma’am?” I said finally.

She nodded, satisfied. “And why is that?”

“One murder was…well, more efficient. More typical. They broke in and…and did something to the victim’s head. Stabbed it, perhaps. And no one even knew anything had happened. But the other was more elaborate and required far more work. Planning well in advance. And a method of murder most unusual. They seem too different.”

“Erupting from within due to a sudden vegetal growth is, I concede, pretty fucking unusual,” Ana said acidly. “But I think you are right. We now have two murderers, Din. Two murderers with two different methods, and two very different sets of interests. The most obvious conclusion for this new murderer is that they are here to clean up. Blas is dead, but his connections to all this dirtiness still exist. Thus, they are here to eliminate anything that could connect Blas with this greater corruption…including any human beings who are inconveniently alive.”

“But…we have no idea who this new murderer could be—correct, ma’am?”

Ana went very, very still, her head bowed. “A hole in her head, you told me…” she said softly. “Tell me—was it very small?” She held up her fingers about a quarter smallspan across. “This big, say?”

“Yes, ma’am. Thereabout.”

“And there were no other bruises or wounding to the body?”

“None that I could see, ma’am.”

“How peculiar,” she whispered. “Do…do you know how difficult it is to pierce the human skull, Din?”

“I, ah, have never attempted it myself, ma’am.”

“It is quite difficult. It takes abnormal strength and speed to do so. Especially speed. The velocity required, and the proper tools…It’s all rather stunning, you see.”

There was another silence, like she’d fallen into a reverie.

“Have you seen deaths like this before, ma’am?” I asked slowly. “Or rather, murders?”

She did not answer for some time. When she spoke again, her voice was low and soft: “Here is what we shall do. First, you’re going to take this to Nusis tomorrow.” She held up the simple reagents key I’d found in Aristan’s safehouse.

I took it from her. “What will she want with this?”

“Well, while I have a good idea what the other key opens, I’ve no idea for this one at all. And Apoths have arts that can reverse engineer many reagents. We can’t learn which exact portal this key opens, but Nusis will be able to tell us what kind of portal it opens. The make of the portal, the breed—that may help us narrow the search.”

“All right. And the money, ma’am?”

“The money and the wall pass we shall…use,” she said slowly. “We shall use it to determine if our colleagues on this investigation are true and faithful servants of the Empire. For I still worry, Din—why did they not look into Blas? Why did they not seek out Aristan? These are very common procedural tasks! Did someone on the team know Aristan had been murdered? Did they know Blas was so wildly corrupt?” She cocked her head. “Could Kalista be false? She seems to have a taste for things rich and fine. Or perhaps it is Nusis? For she worked alongside Blas on the Preservationist Boards. Or is Uhad, so old and feeble, willing to be paid for some comfort in his later days? Or perhaps Miljin? Or is none of it malfeasance, and all of it is simple ineptitude? I do not know.”

A tense silence. I felt a terrible sense of dread brewing in me.

“And…how shall we use the money to answer any of those questions, ma’am?” I asked.

“Oh, well, Din.” She smiled wearily. “You’re going to take that money and that wall pass…and you’re going to stick it with Aristan’s corpse. Someplace where it is easily found. Then I shall ask Uhad to investigate…and we shall see how much of that money makes it back to us.”

I gaped at her in horror. “First you want me to run off on our own investigation—now you want me to fabricate a murder scene?”

“Oh, it’s not too much fabrication,” she said, waving a hand. “I’m not asking you to fucking kill someone, or something! Consider it simply a very unusual method of submitting evidence to the investigation.”

“But…I mean…we’ve barely been here a day, ma’am,” I protested. “And you’re already investigating the investigators?”

“Well, yes,” she snapped. “Because we’re the fucking Iudex, Din! We’re the ones who watch the Empire on behalf of the Empire! And something here feels dreadfully wrong! Perhaps it is the breach, perhaps it is incompetence, or…perhaps it is something else. But I must know, if we are to move forward.”

“And what am I doing for this performance, ma’am?” I asked. “Should I just accompany Miljin to Aristan’s house and act surprised at all we see?”

She thought about it. “Good point. You’re a bit of a shit liar, Din. Here—I shall tell them I’ve sent you to see Nusis, have them send Miljin to investigate, and I shall just personally stick close to Uhad and the others to see what happens. It’ll be very taxing for me—all that small conversation—but this is rather important…”

“And if I get caught manipulating a crime scene?” I said angrily. “And am clapped in irons, and stripped of my rank and position?”

“Then I will speak to Vashta,” she said simply. “And make my position known.”

I stared at her, incredulous, but she seemed quite serious. “You’re going to, what, talk down the seneschal? Tell her your mind?”

Ana went very still then. She seemed to turn these words over within her mind, testing how they fit. Then she grinned horribly and leaned forward; and I saw a strange, unsettling light in her eyes that I had not seen before: one I did not wish to look at, let alone challenge.

“I would!” she said cheerily. “I would tell her all I knew. And she would come to agree with our deeds. For who would not, Din? We are here to review the foundations of the Empire’s defenses—and that, of course, begins with testing the resolve of its most important officers. Now go, boy, and sleep. If you can.”