Irimina’s message (with helpful addenda by Faith) caught up to me at Bazso’s townhouse the next morning. The stained, crumpled sheet of paper was delivered by one very grumpy Bug, who couldn’t understand why people wanted to see me at all, much less immediately, and if it were really so urgent, then why didn’t they hunt me down themselves instead of disrupting the daily activities, i.e. breakfast, of an entire network of runners? It was just plain inconsiderate, was what it was.

I had to sacrifice one of my favorite pastries in addition to the usual coppers before His Highness deigned to remove himself from the kitchen.

“That’s a smart kid,” Bazso chuckled, handing me a replacement pastry for the road. “Trying to steal him from the Lampblacks?”

“I would never!”

He only laughed and waved away my protests. “It was a joke, Isha.” At the door, he bade me farewell with a “Stay safe,” which seemed particularly apt given Faith’s extracurriculars.

And of course, since I’d been avoiding her as much as possible lately, Faith’s first act when she saw me on Irimina’s front step was to fling her arms around me in an enthusiastic hug.

I wrenched free.

“Don’t worry, your soul is saaaaafe in my hands!” she sang as Rutherford the butler opened the door.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I snapped, straightening my shirt.

“Ooooh, you say the sweetest things!”

Immaculate in his black coat and white gloves, the butler surveyed our little crew, decided our squabbles were none of his concern, and ushered us to the parlor.

The first oddity I noticed was that no teapot steamed tranquilly on the table. The second was that no Irimina draped bonelessly over the settee. In fact, it took me a second to recognize her: Face taunt, teeth gritted, shoulders stiff, she perched on the edge of the cushions as if ready to leap up and strangle someone with her embroidery threads.

We’d barely set foot on the shabby Iruvian rug when she snapped, “I have a job for you.” Then, belatedly remembering her manners, she asked in a clipped voice, “Would you like tea?”

“Yes,” chorused Ash and I.

“Rutherford, if you would?” Turning back to us, she didn’t even bother to wait for us to sit before she said, in a tone that was all the more terrifying for its controlled rage, “I recently discovered that Elstera Avrathi has called for her problem-fixer to come to Doskvol. I want her dead – not the Consul, I’m told I can’t do that – but I want the fixer dead. How much? Six coin? Eight? I want her soul in a bottle.” She slammed a spirit bottle onto the table so hard that the crystal nearly cracked.

I cast a quick glance at my crewmates. Ash appeared to be contemplating how he could use this other side of Irimina. Faith just looked plain fascinated. Calmly, I asked our patron, “What can you tell us about this fixer? What is her name?”

“Na’ava Diala,” she spat. “She usually works down south.” In that tone, “south” turned into an obscenity.

I disregarded the slur to my homeland. I recognized the name: My family had mentioned – had probably employed indirectly – an assassin named Na’ava Diala. Also known as Arrow, she was a member of the Hadrakin, a mystical blood cult that worshipped the land of Iruvia itself. Fanatic ultra-nationalists, they wanted to secede from the Imperium and purge “true Iruvia” of all corruption, including demonic influence. I might have supported them more if their definition of “corruption” didn’t also include all foreigners and “outsiders,” including impure half-bloods such as my brother and myself.

I hadn’t expected an Akorosian aristocrat to know or care about Iruvian cultists. “What is your interest in the matter?” I probed.

Irimina clenched her fists. “She killed someone I cared about.”

Ash spoke up at last. “How did she do it?” he inquired with professional detachment. “We want to make sure that justice is…poetic.”

“She cut Taji’s throat.” Irimina pinched her lips together so tightly that all the blood drained from them. Combined with her rigid pose, she resembled a mummified desert corpse, thin, papery skin stretched taut over ridges of bone.

Abruptly, Faith pronounced, “Eight coin – ”

Irimina didn’t bat an eye. “Fine.”

“ – and I can provide assistance with the soul. Torture and bottling cost a little extra, of course.”

“Fine,” repeated Irimina. “What’s your price?”

“For eternal torture…a kiss seems appropriate,” Faith suggested slyly.

As a measure of her focus, Irimina didn’t respond at all to the overture. “Fine,” she said a third time. “Whatever. But I want Na’ava Diala’s soul in a bottle and I want it now.”

“Weelll,” drawled Faith, “I need time to assemble the appropriate torture implements.”

“You don’t keep them around?” asked Ash ironically.

Faith pouted. “Why, I’m offended that you think I’d keep them on hand! It’s not a hobby, you know. It’s more of a vocation.”

Irimina’s harsh voice cut through their banter. “Then, by all means, do not let me keep you from your assemblage of appropriate torture implements.”

That was about as clear of a dismissal as we could receive, short of being thrown out of the Kinclaith mansion like burglars or beggars.

While Ash headed to the Bluecoat precinct to scour their records for any mention of a murdered woman named Taji, I contacted my agents in the Iruvian Consulate for information on new arrivals. One of the clerks reported that relatively recently, Elstera had hired a new assistant secretary, one Ruka, a “weird” character who didn’t mingle with the other staff and whose hard demeanor ensured that everyone gave her a wide berth. I wasn’t sure that it was connected, but the timing certainly raised suspicions. However, further investigation revealed that Ruka was far too young to be Arrow – she’d have had to have started her assassination career at age seven, which seemed a little ambitious even for a Hadrakin.

Stymied, I met Ash in a Charterhall café to exchange notes. The Bluecoats had no record of a murder of anyone named Taji, which suggested that it had occurred elsewhere, possibly in U’Duasha where the Hadrakin maintained a troublesome presence.

“We could break into the Consulate or Ruka’s place, if we can find it,” I suggested.

“Let’s wait outside the Consulate and follow her home,” he decided.

Unfortunately, our sharp-eyed Hadrakin candidate varied her commute every day, doubled back on her tracks, and ducked into shops frequently to lose any tails. It took more time than we – or Irimina – would have liked, but eventually we managed to locate her lodgings, a rickety boardinghouse in a corner of Charhallow inhabited by the respectable lower class.

Dressed innocuously as an apprentice, Ash waited until the middle of the day, when all the boarders were at work, to break in. Although the elderly owners were at home, the wife was puttering about the kitchen while the husband read the Doskvol Times by the fireplace, so Ash had no trouble at all strolling past them.

Ruka’s abode turned out to be one of those spartan “furnished” rooms, with a sturdy, battered bed and a chest of drawers that looked as if it had already survived one Cataclysm and was ready for the next. Tellingly, the new assistant secretary had done absolutely nothing to make the place look like home, apart from setting a small statue of She Who Slays in Darkness on her desk. She didn’t even possess any paper or pens, suggesting that she had other ways to report back to her people.

Although Ash had invited me to investigate Ruka’s room with him, I’d declined in favor of burgling Finnley Tyrconnell’s townhouse.

Are you sure this is wise? Grandfather surprised me by objecting. Are you ready to face him?

Of course not. I wasn’t even sure why I was doing it – nothing had indicated that he was connected to the Hadrakin. In fact, common sense dictated that a half-blood, demon-corrupted nobleman should stay as far away from the Hadrakin as possible, although that certainly wasn’t what I’d told Ash.

But there was no point in lying to Grandfather. I just want to get it over with, I replied.

It would be wiser to pick a time and place of your choosing, it observed.

I’m doing it now. Before I lost my nerve. Letting myself in the gate, I began to cross the courtyard towards the tradesmen’s entrance under the front steps.

I don’t want Na’ava killed, Grandfather cautioned. She’s a useful asset.

Too bad. I picked the lock on the door and prepared to step into the townhouse.

A sigh swept around the inside of my head. Foolish child, at least let me conceal you so you don’t get caught immediately.

That was acceptable. All right.

Instantly, a smoky shimmer settled around my shoulders like a cloak, and I slipped silently and invisibly past the maids to reconnoiter the residence of one Finnley Tyrconnell, self-professed lovelorn lord from Skovlan.

The layout was standard fare for these Akorosian terraced houses. The ground floor was taken up by the morning and dining rooms, and the entirety of the first floor by the drawing room. All of these spaces for public entertaining bore an exaggerated Skovlander stamp décor-wise, almost but not quite at the level of that ridiculous Moon’s Embrace Spa. (However else he’d changed, at least the Patriarch hadn’t crushed all good taste out of him yet.) Once I reached the bedrooms on the second floor, I began to catch glimpses of subtle Iruvian touches in the color scheme, the choice of rugs, the selection of furniture.

At last I came to his room – the master bedroom, obviously, connected to a dressing room that he’d converted into a study. His sword, which I’d seen at his side the other day, lay across his desk as if his current engagement forbade the bearing of arms. (Conspicuous arms, anyway. I had no doubt that he’d concealed various types of weaponry about his person. Unless you knew which parts of him to avoid, it made snuggling thoroughly unpleasant.) Behind a painting of a desert scene, I found a safe and cracked the combination easily. Inside lay tidy bundle after tidy bundle of letters, sorted by sender and tied with color-coded ribbons.

The gold-ribbon-bound ones on top formed part of his cover story. Pretending to be Skovlander aristocrats, Mother and Father wrote long, chatty missives about supposed family and friends in Arvaedh. They urged him to take good care of his health and not to stay out too late at parties, and, please, for the love of everything holy, don’t involve yourself in any more political activities! As far as I could tell, they were having a little too much fun playing warm, fuzzy, approachable parents. Rolling my eyes, I tossed those letters aside.

Black ribbon appeared correlated with the official House seal, so I carefully undid the knot – one of Father’s twisty contortions – and systematically read through the messages. The older ones were straightforward requests for updates from the Patriarch’s private secretary. In the beginning, his primary mission was to recover Grandfather and kill or capture me. (House leadership wasn’t picky about the latter point.) As the letters progressed, however, the Patriarch began to order him to take a more active role in Iruvian-Akorosian relations. Around the time we assassinated Ronia Helker, the Patriarch wrote in his own hand, commanding him to recover her battle plans.

Why’s everyone after these plans? I asked Grandfather. She was just a retired general. There’s no guarantee that the Immortal Emperor will even consider her ideas.

Typically, it didn’t bother to answer.

One last, smaller bundle of letters tied with red ribbon in a different type of tortuous knot consisted of his correspondence with Elstera Avrathi. She reported that she’d requested a couple agents from the Hadrakin to hunt for the battle plans. In the meantime, to distract the Imperium from the Iruvia situation, she and he would rile up the pro-Skovlander independence faction. That went a long way towards explaining their meetings with Brynna Skyrkallan, although I had to wonder how much the Skovlander Consul knew about their motives.

Satisfied with my reconnaissance, I retied the knots, returned the letters to the safe, and slipped out of the townhouse, leaving everything exactly as I’d found it.

Back at the railcar, Ash and I found Faith taunting Sleipnir with a bone. When she saw us, she let it drop from limp fingers (Sleipnir seized it and ducked under the railcar) and collapsed into her chair as if exhausted. If I didn’t know better, I might have assumed that she dozed off while Ash and I updated each other.

“If we find the battle plans, we can trade them to Ruka for Na’ava,” I finished.

With his extensive personal knowledge of crazy cultists, Ash disagreed. “It’s unlikely that Ruka would sell out Na’ava. Although I do agree that we should figure out what happened to the plans. If nothing else, we can deliver them to the Zayanas and collect that last coin.”

One of Faith’s eyes fluttered open. “Mmmmmm, provoking a war could be our legacy,” she sighed contentedly.

“That’s a good point,” remarked Ash.

No, no, it really wasn’t. “Uhhhh, this is my home we’re talking about.”

They exchanged glances that said they didn’t understand what the problem was.

Faith’s eyelids drooped shut again. “Oh well. In that case, we can plant rumors that Ronia kept important information on her at all times, so the best way to find the battle plans is to figure out how and where she died and what happened to her body. Then we make Na’ava waste preposterous amounts of time researching Ronia’s death. She’ll get more and more invested, and when she finally dives into a certain canal under a certain bridge in Six Towers, that water demon friend of Isha’s can eat her!”

Surprisingly for the source, it wasn’t a bad strategy. The three of us set to work concocting anecdotes about Ronia Helker’s extreme paranoia and distrust of safes and her conviction that any secret worth keeping was also worth taking to the death. Under the circumstances, it was entirely plausible that she toted her battle plans around with her and that they were still on her body. Faith visited Cricket and hinted at entire banquets of tasty, juicy electroplasm if the little ghost would stake out Rowan Bridge and watch for anyone investigating General Helker’s demise.

Not long thereafter, Cricket materialized in the railcar and reported, “There’s a boat full of people dragging a net through the river! I think they’re looking for something!”