Now that we had our financial backers lined up, it was time to plan the score. I, of course, already knew about Ash’s plot to have a Reconciled possess the Inspector, and (after so much exposure to Faith) had grudgingly accepted it as a semi-reasonable way to control the official report. So when Ash convened the crew in the railcar common room, I thought I knew what he was going to say.

He opened with a predictable, “Murdering the Inspector will just bring more Inspectors down on us,” which was a conclusion I’d also drawn. But then he continued, “I strongly support Hollowing the Inspector and having Salia take over.” As he spoke, he looked expectantly at our Hollowing expert, who was slumped down so far in her chair that she was on the verge of sliding onto the floor.

Faith, on the other hand, was watching me very closely from under her eyelashes.

For her benefit, I maintained a neutral, level tone that would have done Father proud. “Do we need to Hollow her? It seems unnecessary – ” Since ethical arguments carried no weight with my crewmates, I tacked on the ending, “ -ly risky.”

Relieved that I hadn’t started screeching (yet) about how horrible Hollowing was and how it was not something our crew would ever do – in the face of all evidence to the contrary – Ash reminded me, “If she finds us, we will be burned at the stake or worse.”

“And you think Hollowing her will help?” Despite my best efforts, revulsion crept into my voice, but I thought that my point still stood: There was no scenario in which the Immortal Emperor calmly accepted that sometimes, in the line of duty, his servants would get ripped out of their own bodies.

Brightening at the prospect of a good fight, Faith bounced out of her chair, trotted over to the bar, returned with a bag of canal-weed chips, and popped one into her mouth. It made a very loud crunch, aided by the fact that she kept her lips ajar.

Ignoring her theatrically rapt attention, Ash informed me, “They won’t find out that she’s been Hollowed.”

And how did he expect the Reconciled to keep up that charade? “Do you think Salia will pretend to be this Inspector forever? Because eventually she’s going to have to wrap up the investigation and return to Imperial City.”

Ash waved a hand, dismissing such minor details as planning for the long run. “Oh, she can disappear along the way and return to her own body, or whatever she prefers.”

“And at that point, someone ‘murders’ the Inspector?”

Crunch. Faith’s head swiveled between Ash and me, like someone watching a badminton game.

“I guess I haven’t thought that far ahead,” he confessed. “I was thinking that Salia could stay the Inspector for a bit of time – we would benefit from having someone in that position and feeding us information.” Before I could remind him that the leader of the Reconciled had her own long-term projects, none of which involved playing mole for an assassins crew, Ash went off into a fit of histrionics. “Isha, I agree that loss of life is something we should avoid if we can – ” (really?) – “but the safety of Doskvol – of Iruvia –of practically everyone we know – depends on stopping Dunvil, and we will not succeed at stopping Dunvil if this Inspector puts us and our address and our allies into her report and says, ‘Oh, by the way, we need to eradicate them because they’re murdering members of the Church!’ That will not be good for our health. I agree that idle Hollowing isn’t something we should engage in, but you have to admit that we don’t exactly have the most peaceful of reputations.”

Which was both true and contradicted his statement about avoiding loss of life where possible. “Yes,” I stated, “and somewhere, we have to draw the line.”

He didn’t miss a beat. “I’m on the side of the line that keeps me alive,” he retorted, then counterattacked, “Isha, this is not a good time for you to go soft on us, when we have Imperial Inspectors beating down our – well, not yet beating down our doors, but soon.”

Crunch. Faith made a show of fishing around the bottom of her bag for more crisps.

“A lot of people know we killed Strangford,” Ash kept arguing. “Eventually, the Inspector will talk to our allies, and one of them will point her at us.”

Little pattering sounds. Faith had upended her bag over the table and was looking sadly at the crumbs. With a pout, she tossed the bag aside, propped her elbows in the middle of the crumbs, and leaned towards me. In the sober tone that always presaged truly preposterous advice, she said, “Look, Isha, I realize that you’re uncomfortable with the idea of Hollowing the Inspector, but we’re reasonable people here.” (Also anticipating one of her outrageous antics, Ash squelched a smirk.) “We can come to a compromise.”

I raised my eyebrows, inviting her to astound me with a reasonable compromise.

She opened her eyes wide, inviting me to share her astonishment at her own genius. “Instead of Hollowing her and destroying her soul, we can store it in a spirit bottle and torture it for the rest of our lives!”

“How is that better?” I snapped.

“It’s not,” replied Ash at once.

“It’s worse,” I said at the same time.

Faith’s eyes went even rounder. Her lips (tinged green from the chips) shaped a perfect O. “Is it?” she cried. “Oh, I’m surprised to hear you say that! So that’s worse than destroying her soul?” Like a student seeking clarification on an exam question, she asked slowly, “What if we just tortured her for a couple years, then? We could stick her in one of the orphans so she can experience growing up again – ”

“No!” shouted Ash, pounding his fist on the table. “No, no, no! None of these are options!”

Bored again now that she’d provoked a reaction, Faith slouched back down and shrugged. “My point is that there are lots of options – or no options, depending on whether you’re Ash.” In my general direction: “Would you prefer that we just murder her?”

“It would be….” I groped for the words to express why simple murder seemed, somehow, more pure.

“More traditional, I know,” Faith finished for me, which wasn’t at all what I was trying to say. “And you, Isha, are nothing if not a traditionalist.” Picking up the bag, she crumpled and uncrumpled it while feigning intense concentration. She even experimented with furrowing her brow in different ways. “Okay, okay. I really understand where you’re coming from. And I understand what tradition is.” (I would hope that a woman in her sixties did.) “So. I propose that we capture the Inspector, extract her soul from her body, and give it to Irimina to take to U’Duasha to throw into the well – because that’s how things are done where you come from, right?”

Ash barked out a startled laugh.

Weary, I sighed, “Faith, you’re really not helping.”

“I’m wounded!” She flounced over to the bar, excavated a second bag of crisps, and started crunching again.

Very deliberately turning back to Ash, I appealed, “Can’t we just possess the Inspector and then strip out those memories later?”

Now it was Ash’s turn to sigh. He massaged his temples as if this entire conversation were giving him a migraine. “I don’t know…. You’re the expert here, Faith. Can we put the soul in a bottle and not torture it? And then re-bind it to the body afterwards?”

A crisp halfway to her mouth, Faith retorted, “No. Why would you think that’s possible?”

“Because…you’re an extremely powerful and mysterious dark sorceress?” he flattered. (Which seemed like a comedown from the last time, when he’d described her as the “goddess of magic” who had only to wave her lightning hook for the supernatural to come worship her and do her bidding).

“Oh, no no no, extracting and then re-binding the soul isn’t the problem,” she reassured him. “It’s the not-torturing bit.” Popping the crisp into her mouth, she chewed thoughtfully, then mumbled around the greenish wad, “Also, she might notice that she lost a bunch of memories and want to, I don’t know, investigate it?”

That was, unfortunately, a valid concern, and I knew it.

In the tone of one resolved to stay calm and rational and mature, Ash proposed, “How about this, Isha? We’ll leave the soul in a bottle that you can keep and not torture – ”

I recoiled. “No! I don’t want her soul!”

“What!” yelped Faith, dropping her bag. “But I thought you liked having pets! You have that little dog that follows you around!” She craned her head around, searching for Sleipnir.

“You’re the one who keeps ghost pets.”

“Cricket is definitely not a pet. She’s more of an asset,” she replied. Raising her hands to make dramatic finger quotes, she spoke with heavy emphasis, “There is another solution, Isha. We will kidnap her, ‘temporarily’ remove her soul, and give her to the Reconciled for them to ‘put back in later,’ when they are done with her body.”

I glared at her until Ash came to my defense. “Let’s not mock Isha’s ability to understand what’s happening here, Faith.”

I kept glaring at Faith. “If you wanted that to happen,” I informed her, “you shouldn’t have put quotation marks around everything.”

“It will be ‘perfectly fine’,” she answered in that same tone, with the same finger quotes – and then giggled.

I’d had enough. Snatching the closest object on the table – which happened to be Ash’s open ink bottle – I flung it at her.

Her hand flashed up superhumanly fast and caught the bottle before it broke her nose, but blue ink splattered all over her front, running down her chin and soaking her bodice. For one split, blessed second, she was actually stunned into silence.

Not Ash, though. “I’m not a stylist,” he commented, “but blue and pink do not go together.” He pretended to ponder appropriate color pairings. “Maybe if it were reeeeeally dark blue….”

By then Faith had recovered her flippancy. “I like this blue, though,” she remarked, lifting a soggy ruffle for inspection. “It’s exactly the shade of souls as we rip them out of Inspectors’ bodies.”

I groaned and gave up.

From then on, Ash made sure to stopper his ink bottles whenever I was around.

Having to spend good money on replacement ink must have inspired him, though, because the next time I saw him, he was all prim and proper in a black suit and bowler hat. “What could be more prestigious than working for an Inspector?” he declared in passing. “I can think of nothing I would love more than to help see justice done!”

Although he was probably hoping to wrangle a clerkship with the Inspector, that turned out to be even harder than getting an accountant job at Gaddoc Rail. Once again, he had to turn to ye olde tavern. At a Charterhall pub where the lower-middle class drowned their woes in cheap ale before trudging home to their threadbare flats, Ash raved about how much he respected the Inspectors. While the clerks didn’t exactly share his enthusiasm for the “heroes of our time,” some of them were able to provide a character sketch of our personal Inspector.

Candra Sarnai was a small, quiet, tidy, and ruthlessly efficient Severosi woman who was utterly devoted to her work. Rather than waste time on commuting, she was bunking in the Brightstone precinct itself. As soon as she arrived, she had begun paying polite but pointed social calls to nobles and amassed an enormous number of interviews with normally inaccessible prominent figures within a few days. She took copious notes in a little notebook that she carried on her at all times and was accompanied everywhere by a protective detail of Bluecoats.

“She must be done with Brightstone,” one of the clerks told Ash. “I’ve seen her in Charterhall several times now, and I hear she’s widening her search to Nightmarket.”

“What does she do when she’s not working?” Ash asked, impressed despite himself. “Relax with colleagues, I suppose?”

Another clerk shook her head. “No, she keeps to herself. I hear the Bluecoats gave up inviting her to go drinking after work. She just cloisters herself in her room with a mug of tea.”

After some more digging, Ash uncovered that a clerk’s sister had glimpsed Sarnai entering a Nightmarket bookshop the other day – but that was the only lapse he uncovered.

After he reported back to us, Faith observed, “It’s really hard to prey on people’s vices if they don’t have any.”

“She probably reads trashy romance novels,” snapped Ash, who was in a snippy mood. “They’re probably very raunchy.”

“Can we pose as booksellers and sell her A Requiem for Aldric?” I suggested.

“I don’t think that counts as a raunchy romance novel – ” Ash began.

“Yes!” interrupted Faith. “We’ll find a cursed book! Re-bind it to look like a raunchy romance novel so when she opens it, it will steal her soul, leaving her ripe for the plucking by the Reconciled!”

A cursed book might be our only option to get close to this dismayingly vice-less Inspector. “Do those exist?”

“No,” Faith said, then burst into giggles at my scowl.

“Weeell,” said Ash a little doubtfully, “I was thinking more of tea as her weakness….”

“How about you investigate the tea sellers and I investigate the booksellers?”

“Sure,” Ash agreed. “Faith? How about you?”

There ensued a long silence as Faith slumped across as much of the table as she possibly could and feigned sound sleep. Putting a finger to his lips, Ash tiptoed out and returned with a hat whose azure hue matched his ink but clashed with her dress. He eased the hat onto her head, then waved at me to follow him out of the railcar. Faith never opened an eye – probably because the experience was novel and hence temporarily entertaining.

I was pretty sure that as soon as Ash and I left, she snuck off to teach at the orphanage.

Disguised as a Charterhall University student, I haunted the Nightmarket bookshops and chatted with their proprietors about book sales. As it turned out, the average Doskvolian had an insatiable appetite for penny dreadfuls, which dismayed booksellers who preferred not to fill their windows with such titles as Volette the Vampire, or the Banquet of Blood. Using that as a segue, I asked casually, “So what do Bluecoats and Inspectors read? Do they like crime fiction, or is that too close to work?”

One of the booksellers, a wizened old man with round glasses, chuckled in a grandfatherly way. “Some Bluecoats do, in fact, and the more lurid the better. But they’re humans like the rest of us. Their tastes vary wildly.”

After amassing a large number of textbooks and classic novels for the orphanage library – plus a copy of Volette the Vampire for Faith – I located the bookshop that Sarnai had visited. Unfortunately, its proprietor accorded patron purchases more confidentiality than Sawbones did patient records, but after multiple trips, I finally learned that the Inspector harbored a passion for intensely sentimental romance novels.

As I made the rounds of Nightmarket, I noticed a small band of orphans trailing after me like lost ducklings. Since I couldn’t imagine those specific individuals reading, much lessapproaching bookshops, Faith or Ash must have sent them – probably the latter, because the former was always scolding them for not studying harder.

Accordingly, I lured the children into a dead-end alley, blocked the exit, and scowled at them. “What are you doing here?”

They were peering into the shadows in confusion. At my words, they jumped and squeaked.

The boldest one essayed a tentative, “Uh…looking for information on…books, Miss Yara?”

“Mmmhmmm.” I planted my hands on my hips the way Doskvolian matrons did. “And does Miss Karstas know that you’re here instead of doing homework?”

They panicked. A chorus of “Mr. Slane said it was okay!” and “Mr. Slane said we should do it!” and “Mr. Slane said it was a good idea!” filled the alley.

Patiently, I inquired, “But did Miss Karstas say it was okay? Did you get her permission?”

“She didn’t…not say it was not okay….” From the way they drooped, they knew exactly how much that logic would impress Faith.

I stepped aside. “I suggest you go home before she notices you’re missing.”

“Yes, Miss Yara!”

They scampered off and crept back into the orphanage, only for Faith to catch them and remind them that the last orphan who wandered off alone got sacrificed by a demonic cult.

Crestfallen, the children then reported to Ash, “Mr. Slane, we tried, but no one believed we wanted books or tea.”

That revelation did not surprise him. “I have some ideas, but it is good to know your own limits,” he lectured.

“Yes, Mr. Slane,” they pouted.

“Here’s a good trick: Act timid and pretend to be buying presents for someone you like. Maybe a sister, but a crush is always convincing….”

Armed with the appropriate sob stories, the orphans headed back to Nightmarket and tried again. This time they returned with overpriced tea – but still no information.