One possible interpretation of Ash’s notes presented itself shortly thereafter, when the author himself sought out Faith and me.

“It meant a lot to me that you helped with the Helene score,” he said earnestly. “I hope – ”

“Of course it does,” interjected Faith. “Who wouldn’t appreciate the help of a great Whisper like me?”

Ash waited her out, then continued, “I hope you’ll forgive me for going easy on Irimina instead of wringing every last coin out of her. She needs some money to grow her investments.” And continue to employ us, he implied.

I shrugged. Finance was his area of expertise, not mine, and anyway, crew coin had already overrun a motley assortment of iron chests and now threatened to commandeer an entire compartment. “That’s fine. I assume you ran the calculations.”

“I did,” he assured us, as if we required reassurance. “You know, with Tess funneling six coin to us every week, we should really invest in a vault….” His voice trailed off as he indulged in a reverie of bank vault doors and locks.

“Or a bigger closet.” Faith slashed through his daydream, eliciting a little jump and startled stare. She winked at him. “Then you wouldn’t have to dump your clothing on every available surface. Fabric wrinkles, you know, and ironing is such a pain. And while you’re at it, you should get a bookcase too. It’s slovenly to toss your books all over the floor like that. As your erudite, enlightened educator, I really must object to your poor study habits.”

I choked back a snicker, remembering the sight of said erudite, enlightened educator upside down in his trunk.

Looking from one of us to the other, Ash visibly suppressed a sigh before he veered determinedly onto a different topic. He mused, “There are many gods and they make good allies. I intend to go gloat over the Golden Stag – make it clear to him what I did and why. Did the two of you want to come?”

Flicking open my pocket knife and checking its blade, I feigned indifference. “Should be interesting.”

Faith, however, shook her head mournfully. “I’m afraid I have to decline. Gloating is bad for my complexion,” she explained with a woebegone expression. Whipping a hand mirror out of a pocket, she ostentatiously examined her cheeks, patting and smoothing the rosy skin.

After nearly two months of sharing a railcar with us, Ash looked entirely unsurprised by our respective reactions. Conversationally, he inquired, “Isha, have you met Ilacille? She’s the priestess at the Temple to the Forgotten Gods.”

Was this a test? I couldn’t read his body language, so with perfect honesty, I answered, “No.” After all, no one had ever introduced the two of us. I’d only ever spied on her.

“Ah.” Ash didn’t seem to care about my response one way or the other. “Well, you should.”

He soon remedied this deficiency by inviting both Ilacille and me to witness his sacrificial ritual at the former Silver Stag Casino, emblem of his greatest triumph on behalf of That Which Hungers. On the appointed day, he and I walked to Nightmarket together, Ash chatting with – or rather, at – me about theology while I eyed his bottle of golden motes and wondered why they made Faith so jumpy. All I could sense was a rich, warm glow.

Ash’s voice cut through my thoughts. “What do you think of the gods, Isha?”

With an effort, I dragged my attention away from the motes. “I haven’t thought about them.” Growing up in U’Duasha, I’d been much more concerned about demons, both the occult and human varieties – and particularly the ones within my own family.

“But don’t you think it’s weird that the gods aren’t here?” persisted Ash.

“Why would they be?” I pointed out. “Aren’t they busy with – ” What did gods do anyway? Presumably not what demons did, i.e. corrupt humankind via sweet, insidious lies. “God stuff?” I finished lamely.

“No, no, the gods derive power from human worship,” Ash explained. “If I were one, I would be here, among all my followers. So that begs the question: Why don’t we have a god emperor?”

At his words, so deceptively naïve, I suppressed a shudder. In U’Duasha, the Demon Princes issued commands from their black crystal spires, their supposed prisons doing little to contain or even filter their treachery. Perhaps – not being a demon – a god would do better, but that wasn’t something I wanted to test. “I don’t know,” I replied, humoring Ash. “That would make sense.”

When we arrived at the Orchid Salon, Ilacille was already waiting outside the front entrance, hands clasped serenely in front of her, inclining her head graciously to the bemused patrons who flowed in and out of the casino. Ash performed the requisite introductions and led us into the building, which – as Irimina had threatened – now resembled a cross between a scene from a lurid romance novel and a hallucination induced by Black Lotus abuse. Exotic flowers bloomed everywhere, painted onto doors, woven into rugs, erupting from Iruvian vases, and blazing on silk scroll paintings that unfurled down the height of the walls. Stylized orchids had been carved into the legs of Helene’s gambling tables and chairs, and floral mosaics blossomed on the panels of the bar. Ash, who’d helped supervise the remodeling (and hence bore part of the blame for the décor), led us over a particularly gaudy rug, whose clashing colors stabbed my eyeballs, and up a set of back stairs to the cupola, which had blessedly been left undefiled. Its arched windows offered an excellent view of the peeling paint on neighboring walls.

While Ash and Ilacille set up the ritual, I drifted around the small space, examining the locks on the windows and determining – as a theoretical exercise only – how to break in from the roof.

“Will you participate?” Ash was asking the priestess.

“I’m here to observe only,” she reminded him.

“Isha.” Ash called me to attention. “I’m about to start.”

I shut a window and latched it, noting the squeak of unoiled hinges. “What do you need me to do?”

“I’ll have you read something in a bit. For the first part, just stand beside Ilacille and witness.”

That I was very good at.

Positioning himself in the dead center of the cupola, Ash produced a crude porcelain stag from a sack. Raising it high above his head in both hands, he closed his eyes for a moment, then dashed it to the floor in one quick movement. The stag shattered, shards skittering everywhere. (I hastily backed up a step. Ilacille calmly swept her hem out of the way.) Over the sad little fragments, Ash poured the golden motes in a steady stream, and they flickered like fireflies before winking out and vanishing. A sense of vast, insatiable hunger began to rise in the cupola, devouring all available space and air.

“Read this.” Ash handed me a sheet of paper covered in his tidy handwriting.

Dragging air into my lungs, I forced myself to recite a list of assets that he had bequeathed to That Which Hungers. He had encoded the words and numbers in a cryptically occult way, and just shaping my lips to form the syllables took incredible effort. Sweat beaded on my forehead and the sheet of paper trembled in my hand, and I felt oppressed and somehow compressed.

Ash listened with his eyes closed, body swaying slightly to the rhythm of my words. At the end, he completed the litany: “Asset: Ashlyn Slane. Value: One life. Expected return on investment: Services.”

As soon as those words left his lips, his eyes rolled up and he collapsed.

As if she’d expected it, Ilacille caught him before he could topple face first into the porcelain shards and lowered him gently to a clear patch of floor. Looking up at me, she said, “I don’t know the precise nature of your relationship with Ashlyn Slane. It may be a while before he wakes. Either you or I can sit with him.”

“I’ll stay,” I said immediately. I wanted intelligence on his operations, he’d asked me to come and, well, it seemed only fair to repay him for all the times he’d stayed behind at the crime scene to cover for me and Faith.

The priestess floated downstairs, returned shortly with a tray of food and drink, and left again for good. Sitting cross-legged with Ash’s head cushioned in my lap, I witnessed and waited.

After a few minutes, his eyes began to roll agitatedly under his eyelids. A hollow, hungry voice boomed out of thin air: “So you offer yourself to me.”

Although Ash’s lips didn’t move, I heard his passionate reply. “Yes. There is so much power to be had in the city and the world. You are one of the paths to power.”

The ravenous voice mused, “Yes, I have noticed your efforts on my behalf of late. So you seek power.”

“I seek power in the city. There are so many wrongs. Things are not proceeding as they should. I want control.”

“And you offer yourself completely and wholly?”

Sounding more like himself, Ash hedged, “I align my will with you freely.”

A pause, a sense of tasting. “You will be devoured in the end – you do understand?”

In a stronger voice, Ash said, “Aren’t we all, in the end? Far better to be devoured by something powerful.”

“Good then. Open your mind.”

And Ash screamed.

His eyes flew open, staring sightlessly. For an eternity, his body convulsed and writhed while I fought to keep him from bashing his skull open on the floor.

Then, just as suddenly, he went limp as a rag doll. His eyelids fluttered but did not open, his breath came in shallow gasps, and he whimpered softly from time to time.

After several hours without change, I hired a cabbie to drive us back to the Old Rail Yard and, with Faith’s help, maneuvered him into his bunk bed. Two days later, he finally emerged from his compartment, shaky and pale, but with a new hungriness in his eyes.

Oh, and pink ribbons in his hair.

Catching sight of me reading in the common room, he lowered himself heavily into a chair. “Thank you, Isha. This means a lot to me.”

I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell him he was welcome. “It was certainly educational,” I said instead.

Heaving himself back to his feet, he said briskly, “Well, there are lots of things to do,” and, before I could stop him, staggered out of the railcar.

Somewhere in the middle of experimenting with hair ribbons of different shades of pink on Ash, Faith had made time for a trip to the Sensorium. There, she stunned Madame Keitel (and my archivist) by asking for a memory of a pleasant day at a spa.

Madame Keitel retrieved a memory of a perfectly normal spa trip with back massages, mud on the face, rose petals in the pool, the standard package. “I have more interesting ones if you’re bored to death,” she told Faith dubiously, who only smiled and took the memory to her private room.

She was back the next day.

“That memory was so booooooring!” she cried (so loudly that the archivist could hear her from the next room). “It was so boring that I want all memories of all spas purged from my mind! How could you let me suffer like that?”

Drily, Madame Keitel reminded her, “As I recall, I did warn you, old friend.”

Faith’s pout was practically audible. “Isn’t it your role to save me from my own vices?”

The proprietress of the Sensorium, one of Doskvol’s premier vice purveyors, didn’t even bother to answer that question. Matter of factly, she addressed the real issue. “I can remove all your memories of spas, but I’m beginning to worry. I’ve removed more memories from you than anyone alive. There may be consequences….” She paused for a moment, as if waiting for Faith’s response. When there was only silence, Madame Keitel sighed heavily. “Or we can damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead.”

Faith’s voice contained only sweetness and light. “Damn the torpedoes. I’m like no one you know.”

Fondly, Madame Keitel agreed. “You’re certainly like no one else I know.”

And she removed the memories. My archivist caught a glimpse of her slipping the vial into her pocket as she left for the day.

After two months of searching, I still hadn’t found him, and my increasing preoccupation was beginning to irritate Bazso and pique Mylera’s curiosity, neither of which spelled longevity or (good) health for me. I did seriously consider asking Bazso for help, but in the end I concluded regretfully that I couldn’t risk it, not when I was so close to brokering a truce between him and Mylera. I thought – I hoped – that he’d understand what I had done and why, but I couldn’t be sure.

In the end, I saw no other option but to confess to my crewmates.

“I’ve been looking for someone,” I began tentatively. “It occurs to me that you can help.”

Part of me expected Faith to demand how much I intended to pay for her time and services, which, as she’d told Irimina, didn’t come cheap. An even larger part of me expected Ash not to hear my request. Lately, he’d been poring over the financial ledgers of assorted government offices and, when he wasn’t, haranguing anyone who stood still long enough to listen about how the Church of Ecstasy was an even bigger drain on the city’s resources than he’d realized. (Sleipnir had proven a more satisfactory audience than either Faith or me.)

However, at my words, Ash immediately snapped shut his tome and pushed back his chair from the dining table. All business, he asked, “Who is it? Describe them, please.”

Faith merely tipped her head to a side, an expression of pure mischief on her face.

I was having second thoughts already. “He looks Skovlander – ” well, as much as I did, anyway – “and has blond hair and blue eyes. He’s tall and slender.” Which narrowed the hunt down to about half of the male population of Skovlan. Any number of Lampblacks answered to that description.

As testy as a schoolmaster, Ash prompted, “Is there anything more specific?”

Even more reluctantly, I divulged, “There’s something about the shape of his eyes and cheekbones that makes him look slightly Iruvian from certain angles.”

Faith’s own eyes lit up, and she made a production of scrutinizing my eyes and cheekbones.

“He’s looking for an Iruvian sword that he claims was stolen. Also, he’s good at disguises.” I thought that covered all the important points. He certainly wouldn’t travel under his real name, and I hadn’t exactly packed any photos when I fled.

In a flash, Ash’s face contorted with greed. Leaping to his feet, he slammed a hand on the table so hard that the legs creaked and shouted, “I want that sword! Tell me more about the sword!”

Caught off guard, I jumped. “That’s all I know,” I snapped, suppressing a guilty glance in the direction of my compartment.

Ash, of course, detected the blatant lie, and his eyes narrowed.

“My sources didn’t tell me anything else,” I said defensively (and truthfully). “The point is that the sword is lost.” Something – I didn’t know what – made me add acerbically, “And if he were supposed to have it, he wouldn’t have lost it in the first place.”

Ash calmed down ever so slightly, but then blazed anew with zeal. “We can kill him and sacrifice him to That Which Hungers!”

“No!” My reaction was instinctive and much too vehement. “No,” I repeated in a more measured tone. “Don’t kill him.”

He dismissed it with an unsatisfactory, “Well, fine, not immediately.”

“Not at all,” I wanted to say, but Faith was eyeing me with too curiosity for me to press the issue just then.

When she caught my glance, she winked. “I wouldn’t worry. He will wind up in our web.”

Somehow, it didn’t sound very reassuring uttered in that impish voice.

“Uh, thanks. I appreciate it.”

But she wasn’t done yet. “My wide-eyed watch will catch this wicked wrongdoer,” she declaimed, growing increasingly animated. Bouncing out of her chair, she flung wide her arms and struck a dramatic pose in the middle of the common room. “Neither wards nor wiles of that wight will wrest him from this witness!”

Wonderful.

Once I’d diverted Ash from the subject of swords and sacrifices, and scooted Faith away from her (admittedly impressive) mental dictionary, we divided up Brightstone and scoured it for signs of a tall, slender, blue-eyed, blond, part-Iruvian Skovlander in search of a stolen sword. With three of us searching, it was almost too easy.

He and his charm had been working overtime, it seemed, because in the trendy shops on Goldcrest Avenue, among the stalls of the Silver Market, along the brightly-lit walks of Unity Park – basically, in all the places where stylish young ladies congregated to flaunt their cutting-edge toilettes – people were buzzing about a newly-arrived Skovlander nobleman. He was handsome, oh my dear, haven’t you heard how handsome he is? Muscled, but in that lithe way of an upper-class sportsman – not bulging grotesquely like a docker or factory hand. And have you seen his hair? It shines like spun gold – no, no, like electrum, darling. Gold is too common, too yellow. And his eyes – his voice – his impeccable manners….

But no one seemed to know where he was staying. The best we could do, based on the density of discussion, was to narrow it down to the northwestern part of Brightstone, near Bowmore Bridge.

At least I was getting closer, even if it looked like I might have to fight Ash for him.