“So,” Ash began as soon as we’d locked the conference room door and huddled in the opposite corner so the orphans couldn’t eavesdrop, “what do we know about Elder Rowan?”

The answer was: More than you’d expect for a Spirit Warden.

For all the organization’s vaunted secrecy, everyone in Doskvol knew that Agravaine Rowan was its Commander. Over the years, she’d been seen by so many people so many times in the vicinity of the Master Warden’s Whitecrown estate that she didn’t bother to dismiss them as coincidences.

Of course, she didn’t bother to confirm the obvious either.

I searched my memories for what the Reconciled had told us, the night they made Faith’s dreams come true. “Well, Salia said that Elder Rowan and Preceptor Dunvil are devoted colleagues who hate each other, right? So she must have been a member of the Church for a long time.”

Our own ex-long-time member of the Church was draped across a chair with her eyes half shut. “Ooooh, the poor things. So much friction between them. But they have the same goals, so they’re just stuck with each other.”

Stuck with an obnoxious colleague, huh? Ash and I looked at each other, then at her. We smirked.

“It would be poetic if Rowan were killed by those she trusts most,” Ash announced. “Presumably, if she’s the Commander of the Spirit Wardens, she’s put quite a lot of effort into them. So if they could be convinced that there is a conspiracy, perhaps a demonic one involving her, and if they could be leveraged against her, that would be quite delightful. It would be tricky, of course, because they’re very loyal. We’d have to push it over the edge and do the final execution ourselves, but if she felt betrayed by them in her last moments, that would be nice.”

While ghost control was the Spirit Wardens’ primary mandate, they certainly were in favor of curbing demonic activity and would not be, shall we say, pleased to learn that their own leader was part demon. I pointed this out, then suggested, “Can we somehow reveal it to them?”

“We certainly can,” Ash replied at once. “But can we do it in such a way that they will help us kill her?” He mulled it over and decided, “Probably help. I’d be greatly surprised if we could get them to kill her for us.” He looked over at Faith, who’d sunk all the way down in her chair with her hands clasped comfortably over her belly, like someone indulging in a peaceful after-dinner nap. “Isha and Faith, what do you know about her vices?”

Nothing, for my part.

Without opening her eyes, Faith mused, “If I were Agravaine, what would I do with my free time?” She stopped for so long that I thought she was pretending to have dozed back off. I was about to poke her when she spoke again. “Oh, maybe play around with techie-type things, because I have this silly belief that technology and spark-craft will help humanity tame the supernatural. Tinker around with the device for destroying ghosts at Mass. The current design is mine, after all.”

When she put it that way, did I really want to kill the inventor?

Ash objected, “If she wants to ‘tame the supernatural,’ why did she Ascend?” Before Faith could say something silly, he answered his own question, “I suppose Ascension is the logical next step if you believe in Church theology. Plus the demons are destroyed in the process.”

“Yes!” cried Faith, shooting to her feet so she could act out violent stabbing and twisting motions. “They are killing them, and grinding them up, and using their liquified flesh!”

I let her get that out of her system before saying, “Even if the Church doesn’t worship demons directly, it does seem to exalt the concept of being demonic….”

Ash continued my thought, “…So the Church and Spirit Wardens must be at odds. Slightly.”

“Probably not enough to help us,” I concluded regretfully.

After some more discussion punctuated by theatrical outbursts from Faith, we decided that the first order of business was tailing our target to get a better sense of her habits and personality.

Elder Agravaine Rowan, as one might expect from an Ascendent, turned out to be the prudent sort who had no intention of risking her immortal, half-demonic soul. Ever since we’d murdered Admiral Strangford, she’d holed up in Bellweather Crematorium behind all manner of human and arcane defenses. However, thanks to Faith, we did know her vice, and we even had a loyal Tinker to consult.

Despite her trepidation, Edwina provided us with a list of Tinker suppliers, most of whom operated in the less-nice parts of Nightmarket and in Coalridge, next to all the foundries. Disguising himself as a wealthy dilettante who dabbled in spark-craft, Ash struck up enthusiastic conversations with these suppliers and very, very delicately teased out the types of supplies that they delivered to the Crematorium. He then showed the list to Edwina, who frowned, chewed on the inside of her cheeks, and said, “All of it is the sort of materials that you need to build hulls.”

That lined up with what we knew of the Spirit Wardens, who used spirit-hunter hulls on their trickier operations and were rumored to have even more types stashed in the basement of the Crematorium. Personally, I thought that this use clashed with their explicit mission to destroy ghosts, but apparently the Spirit Wardens justified it by reasoning that the ghosts in the hulls were programmed to perform very specific, limited tasks, such as protecting or surveying, no longer had free will, and hence were okay. In fact, since hull creation was prohibitively complicated and expensive, practically all of the ones in Doskvol were owned by the Spirit Wardens. The stray rich lord might have one or two for bragging rights, but the Wardens frowned upon that sort of thing.

“Hmmm,” Ash mused, “the Ascendent will probably rise as insane ghosts if their bodies aren’t dissolved immediately….”

At his words, Faith perked up. “Well, hulls do come in all shapes and sizes. We could extract her ghost and put it into a hull.”

“You mean, a small hull, so you can keep it with all your spirit bottles?” I clarified in as neutral a tone as I could manage.

She wasn’t fooled. She flashed me a bright grin. “No, I was just going to leave it at the crime scene. Unless you wanted it? Did you want a pet Elder Rowan?”

“No.”

“A hull would be fascinating,” Ash pronounced, “but I would not want one infused with the ghost of one of my greater enemies.”

“Yes,” I agreed, seizing on his logic. “It seems too risky.”

After considering hiding ourselves inside human-sized hulls, or reprogramming one of Rowan’s bodyguard or lab assistant hulls to attack her, we conferred with Edwina. Although she hadn’t taken the hull creation lab class yet, she did explain the theory: The entire ghost was inserted into a soul vessel, a memento of the person’s life, so all of its memories, desires, and drives still existed; they were just suppressed by the programming runes on the outside of the vessel. To hack the hull, we’d have to modify those runes. Unfortunately, the soul vessel was both vulnerable and irreplaceable, so it tended to be buried deep in the core. Theoretically, the ghost could be freed from it, but the whole experience was so traumatic that it would be completely mad and require immediate destruction.

All this talk of souls reminded me of something that had been bothering me. “Do Ascendent souls look different from normal souls to attunement?” I asked my crewmates.

“Oh, definitely,” answered Ash.

That was what I’d thought. “So, in all these years, why hasn’t anyone noticed that something’s wrong with Rowan’s soul?”

“Because most people don’t go around staring at each other’s souls,” Faith replied sweetly. “Except for you, Isha.” She stared into my eyes, pretending to attune at me.

“Also,” Ash said more helpfully, “the difference is very subtle, so you’d need to look for it specifically. It’s like a….” He groped for an appropriate analogy and came up with, “It’s like a disease where one of the first symptoms is that your liver turns blue.” (What sorts of diseases were the Slanes treating at their infirmary? I didn’t even want to know.) “No one’s going to check for that until there’s a rash of corpses with blue livers.”

And the Spirit Wardens, as we all knew, had no interest in live souls. The closest they came was checking people for possession, but that was only a surface-level scan. Also, they themselves were warded so heavily against possession that they assumed they were immune, so none of them had even dreamed of attuning at their Commander’s soul. That happened to be perfect for us – because we could convince a Spirit Warden that the real Elder Rowan had been replaced by a demon, fled into hiding, and sent us to seek help.

But first, we had to find a Spirit Warden to convince.

That in itself wasn’t too hard, since all we had to do was wait for the death bells at Bellweather Crematorium to ring and then follow the deathseeker crow. Unsurprisingly, it led us to Crow’s Foot, where it circled over a dilapidated townhouse. Ash and I hid across the street and waited until the coroner’s wagon rumbled up, driven by two bronze-masked, red-robed Spirit Wardens. They went inside, came out with a cloth-covered body, loaded it into the wagon, and drove to a nondescript building that was probably their headquarters for the district. I climbed onto a nearby roof to survey its street-level exits, while Ash monitored the surrounding subterranean canals.

At the end of the workday, two men in clerk’s garb emerged from the building. As they stepped onto the street, something chimed in their pockets. They each pulled out a small brass device the size of a pocket watch, looked at it, exchanged a glance, and nodded at each other.

Below me, Ash popped out of a manhole and hastily signaled, Retreat. Retreat. Once we were a safe distance away, he explained that the Spirit Wardens had detected the essence of That Which Hungers in his soul, but that he’d suppressed it just in time. “They certainly have some fancy technology. I’d love to get my hands on one of those devices,” he remarked. “Now I’m curious what the Red Sashes may or may not have recovered from the Spirit Wardens whom they may or may not have killed.”

I asked Mylera about it the next time I saw her, but she informed me tartly, “They were not there for the purpose of stealing anything. They were just there for the purpose of slaying in darkness.”

I left before her irritation could blossom into full-scale anger.

Since we now knew the height and build of two Spirit Wardens, Ash and I returned to their headquarters to tail them around the city and build a picture of their routines. What we learned was that they both worked very long hours. In the evenings, they often went to restaurants for dinner, usually separately but occasionally together. One lived with his family in Nightmarket, while the other was single and stayed in the nicer part of Crow’s Foot, in a townhouse not too far from Bazso’s. Very pragmatically, Ash proposed that we target the latter, because his presence would be missed less if we got him killed.

“It’s probably best if Faith and I don’t approach him,” he said, looking straight at me. “At least your soul is mostly normal, right?”

Why would he even ask that? After all, I hadn’t bound myself to Ixis – and wasn’t planning to. My brother had made that choice for me. “There is nothing wrong with my soul,” I snapped.

“Well, it is demonically tethered, right?”

“No!”

Ash shrugged and let the matter drop.

That evening, I followed the Crow’s Foot Spirit Warden home after work. When he paused to open his mailbox, I ambled up like a neighbor on a stroll and hailed him, “Oh, hi! I think I’ve seen you around before! I live over that way.”

I waved cheerfully and vaguely in the direction of Bazso’s street while peeking at his mail. The top envelope was addressed to a Mr. Stavrul Grine.

“Oh, uh, good evening, miss.” Tucking his mail under one arm, Spirit Warden Grine tipped his hat and turned towards his front door.

By now I’d moved close to him, and I muttered out of the corner of my mouth, “Elder Rowan sent me. The real Elder Rowan.”

He stiffened.

I murmured, “She’s in hiding.”

His eyes narrowed. I smiled and leaned casually against the mailbox.

He smiled back, as if happy to befriend a neighbor. “Would you care for a cup of tea, miss?”

“Oh, I’d love to!” I chattered, following him up the steps. “Nasty night out, isn’t it?”

“That it is,” he agreed, unlocking his door and ushering me inside. “Puts a chill in your bones.”

As soon as he shut the door behind us, he stared at me intently, scanning me for anything arcane and abnormal. As I’d told Ash though, there was absolutely nothing wrong with my soul.

“What’s this about Elder Rowan?”

I dropped the friendly-neighbor act. “She’s in hiding. Have you checked the public Elder Rowan’s soul lately?”

“Noooo. Why would I check her soul?”

I pretended that I had to force out my answer: “She…was replaced by a demon.”

“That’s not possible.”

“I only know what she told me.” Since I knew no attunement, had no intention of learning any attunement, and hence had no chance whatsoever of passing myself off as a fellow Spirit Warden, I’d opted to pose as a loyal family retainer.

“Where is she? How did this happen?”

“I am under penalty of death not to reveal her true location. She believes that a demonic cult was involved, although she’s not sure which one, or how. But whoever it was, they were masterful.”

As a Spirit Warden, Grine knew better than I that the demonic cults of Doskvol (the Church excepted, of course) were too small and too fragmented to achieve anything on this scale. “Do you have any proof?”

“The proof is that you should attune to Elder Rowan’s soul the next time you go to the Crematorium.”

He filed that away for later consideration. “Why me?”

“She felt certain of your loyalty.”

He shook his head, but in a dazed sort of way. “I suppose I will look into this.”

“You suppose?” I demanded, drawing myself up to full height and glowering at him. “You were given an order by your Commander, relayed through me. You will look into this. This is your job. And you will tell no one. Absolutely no one. And then you will report back to me on how well this fake Elder Rowan has disguised itself.”

The show of authority did it. Grine snapped to attention. “I will look into it,” he promised. “How should I contact you?”

“I will find you again.”

He didn’t question that. “All right.”

On that note, I took my leave – and staked out his townhouse until he left for work at dawn as usual. Then I returned to the railcar to update my crewmates.

“That seemed to go well,” observed Ash. “As well as we could expect, given the circumstances.” Satisfied that we’d hooked our Spirit Warden, he turned to the next order of business. “So now we need to learn how to reprogram hulls. We also need to figure out what volatile compounds Rowan might be working with, so we can prepare convincing laboratory accidents of the appropriate magnitude to help us in the fight against her. And then we need to prepare for all the surprises that an Ascendent can throw at us. And try not to die.” After a moment’s consideration, he decided, “We should bring Edwina with us. We wouldn’t want her to think that we do boring things.”

Pretending to address the poor graduate student, Faith proposed, “I know we hired you to tutor orphans, buuuuuuut – do you want to help us assassinate the Commander of the Spirit Wardens?”

I could already imagine the answer to that. Partly to Faith, partly to the imaginary Edwina, I defended ourselves, “But Elder Rowan is a demon. That makes it okay.”

At that, Ash went off into a reverie about replacing her with a spirit the way we had Inspector Sarnai, but he quickly gave up on that scheme. Having the Spirit Wardens be leaderless and chaotic would help us when we moved against Preceptor Dunvil, anyway.

For the time being, I moved in with Bazso so I could establish a pattern of evening strolls around the neighborhood. After giving Grine a couple days, I arranged to bump into him again.

This time, he was ready. “Good evening, miss!” he called as soon as I rounded the corner.

“Good evening!” I called back with a cheery wave. “It’s not raining today. Isn’t it great?”

“It is! Speaking of which, I think you left your coat when you stopped by before. Want to come in and get it?”

“Oh, that’s where it went! I was wondering!”

I trotted into his townhouse, chattering about all the places I’d searched for my nonexistent coat. As soon as the door closed, my face went stern. “Report. What did you find?”

Slowly, he replied, “There’s certainly something wrong there. It’s not…human. I don’t think.”

I could tell he was perplexed by the hybrid nature of an Ascended soul, so I reassured him, “Of course the demon is hiding its true strength. We already know that whatever replaced Elder Rowan has great ability to masquerade as human, but rest assured, that is not Elder Rowan. It’s obviously a powerful demon, backed up by the best resources the Church has to offer.”

Grine’s eyes widened. His head snapped up. “The Church?”

“Yes.” I made my expression very somber. “Elder Rowan suspects that the Church is involved.”

Poor Grine looked confused and torn and inexpressibly distressed. “I don’t understand why the Church would be involved,” he said, almost in a plea. “Elder Rowan is essentially Preceptor Dunvil’s second-in-command. We have always worked closely with the Church.”

Mercilessly, I replied, “And who better to learn secrets that the Church prefers to keep? Who would be more critical to eliminate, if she learned these secrets and opposed them? Surely you’ve heard that Elder Rowan and Preceptor Dunvil have been at odds all along.”

“They have their differences, of course….” Grine trailed off, sifting through his memories of interactions between the two and reinterpreting them. His face hardened. “Who else can be trusted?”

I feigned grimness. “There are others in the Spirit Wardens, but we prefer for them to work in independent cells. The rot runs too deep.”

As part of an organization that was so secretive that not even its own members knew one another’s identities, Grine had no trouble accepting that. “All right. Tell me what needs to be done.”

Ash, Faith, and I had prepared for precisely this moment. Drawing a deep breath, I ordered, “Get us the imposter’s schedule. Elder Rowan wants to retrieve some of her experiments from her lab. The demon is turning them to the destruction of the Spirit Wardens.”