Senna's route into the capital was a drainage channel.
Not a metaphor. An actual drainage channel — a stone passage running under the eastern wall, wide enough for one person at a time, built three hundred years ago to carry rainwater out of the lower city and never properly sealed because the men responsible for sealing it had accepted money from traders who found official gate fees inconvenient. This was the kind of information that lived in Imperial Records and that nobody in the Imperial Records Hall was supposed to use for personal navigation.
She moved through it without hesitating, without a torch, one hand trailing the wall, stepping over the ankle-deep water with the practiced economy of someone who had done this many times. I followed. Oryn drifted through the wall beside us, which he did without comment, as if walking through solid stone was simply a minor convenience of his condition that he had long since stopped finding remarkable.
"How often do you use this," I said.
"Whenever I need to not be seen entering or leaving." She didn't look back. "Which has been often, the last four months."
"Since you found whatever you found in the records."
A pause. One beat too long.
"Yes," she said.
I noted the pause. Filed it. Said nothing.
The lower city of Valdris's capital was called the Greyrows, which was accurate — row after row of narrow buildings pressed together like people trying to keep warm, the stone the same flat grey as the sky, the streets between them barely wide enough for two people to pass without turning sideways. It was the part of the city that the empire used for labour it needed close and didn't want to look at. Tanners. Bone-renderers. The workers who did the things that kept the upper city comfortable and clean and were never invited to see the results of their work.
Nulls lived in the Greyrows when they lived anywhere at all.
Senna moved through it like she knew every corner, which she apparently did, cutting through alleys and under archways and across a yard full of drying laundry without slowing. I kept pace. The morning was fully arrived now — grey sky, thin light, the city beginning its working noise around us. Carts. Voices. Somewhere above us, in the upper city that climbed the hill at the centre of Valdris, a bell counted the sixth hour.
"You said there was someone else we needed to find," I said.
"Yes."
"Before you tell me what you found in the records."
"Yes."
"Why."
She stopped at the corner of a narrow street and looked back at me properly for the first time since the milestone. In the daylight her face was clearer — sharp features, dark eyes with something careful living in them, the kind of careful that isn't born in a person but gets put there by experience. She was young and she looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
"Because what I found in the records will change how you understand everything," she said. "And I need you thinking clearly when I tell you. And right now you've been awake all night and you haven't eaten and you're running on whatever chemical a body produces when it should be dead and isn't." She turned back to the street. "Food first. Then the person we need. Then the records."
"Who is the person."
"Someone who wants to kill you."
I stopped walking.
She kept walking.
"That's not a reassuring answer," I said.
"She wants to kill you," Senna said, without turning around. "Past tense by about three hours. Wants is the wrong word now. She's in a position where she needs you alive, which is almost the same as an ally, if you don't look at it too carefully."
I looked at Oryn.
Oryn looked at the rooftops with the expression of a man who had strong opinions he was choosing not to share.
"You knew about this too," I said.
"I knew she was in the city."
"The person who wants to kill me."
"Wanted. Senna was precise about the tense."
"That's a distinction I find less comforting than you seem to."
"Most things worth doing are uncomfortable," he said. "That's not a reason to avoid them."
I followed Senna around the corner.
She was sitting at a table outside a food stall on a street broad enough to be a small market, eating something from a clay bowl with the focused attention of a person who had decided that whatever chaos was coming could wait until she had finished her meal. She was nineteen, maybe twenty, with the kind of face that the word striking applied to more than beautiful — something angular and decided about it, all the features arranged with confidence. Her dark hair was pulled back and her clothes were the practical dark of someone who moved fast and didn't want to stand out.
There was a short blade on the table beside the bowl. Not hidden. Not threatening. Just present, the way a craftsman keeps tools near their hand.
She looked up when we approached, looked at me specifically, and her expression moved through several things in fast succession — recognition, assessment, and then a particular quality of frustration that suggested she had hoped the morning would go differently.
"You're earlier than the estimate," she said.
"I walk fast," I said.
She looked at Senna. "You brought him directly here."
"We have limited time," Senna said. She sat down at the table without being invited, picked up a piece of bread from the basket in the centre, and began eating. "Talk to him. Explain your situation. He's more reasonable than he looks."
The woman with the blade looked at me for a long moment. The assessment in her eyes was thorough and professional and entirely unself-conscious — she was cataloguing me the way someone catalogues a problem, identifying the relevant variables. I let her. I was doing the same to her.
"Cassia Maren," she said finally. Not introducing herself — more like placing a piece on a table.
"Kael Dren."
"I know." She picked up the bowl again. "Sit down. You look like you're about to fall over."
I sat.
"Three days ago," she said, eating while she talked, with the ease of someone for whom eating and planning were not separate activities, "I was contracted to find you and confirm your location for a client I'm not going to name yet because you'd do something reactive and we don't have time for reactive. The contract was alive until about four hours ago, when news arrived from the eastern camp." She looked at me over the bowl. "You're aware of what that news was."
"I was there."
"Yes." She set the bowl down. "The moment that news arrived, my contract became a problem. Because the person who issued it is now significantly more dangerous than a crime lord's assassination fee, and if I complete the contract, I inherit that danger. And if I don't complete it — " she glanced at the blade on the table " — my family pays for my failure."
"You want to cancel the contract," I said.
"I can't cancel it. I can only complete it, or make completing it impossible, or make the person who issued it no longer capable of enforcing the consequences." She looked at me steadily. "The first option kills you and destroys me. The second option is temporary. The third option requires information about who issued it and why, which I don't have." A pause. "Which is where you become relevant."
"You think I know who wants me dead."
"I think the Void erasing forty soldiers and kneeling at your feet is not a small event, and small events don't generate the kind of contract that was put on you." She leaned forward slightly. "Someone knew what you were before last night. Someone knew it was worth paying serious money to locate you before you figured it out yourself. I want to know who that someone is, and I think you're the fastest route to finding out."
I looked at the blade on the table. Then at her.
"You're asking me to help you," I said.
"I'm telling you that we have aligned interests and that I'm offering my skills in exchange for access to whatever you find out." She sat back. "I'm very good at the things I'm good at. You look like someone who's been surviving on intelligence and stubbornness for seventeen years, which is impressive but limited. You're going to need more than impressive and limited in about twelve hours."
"What happens in twelve hours."
"The gate guards get your description." She picked up the blade and put it away somewhere inside her jacket. "Before that happens, I can get you cleaned up, give you different clothes, and walk you through the upper city without anyone looking twice. After that, you're on your own, and on your own means caught by tonight."
I thought about the twenty hours Senna had estimated. Cassia's twelve was tighter. I wasn't sure which was more accurate and I didn't want to discover by experiment.
I looked at Senna, who was eating bread and watching us with an expression of someone observing an expected outcome.
"You knew her before this morning," I said to Senna.
"We've crossed paths," Senna said. Which wasn't a yes but wasn't a no.
"You've been planning this since before I arrived."
"I've been planning since four months ago, when I found what I found. The pieces have been arranging themselves." She looked at me directly. "You're the last piece. You arriving last night instead of dying in that cell is the reason any of this is possible."
I sat with that for a moment.
Around us the market street continued its morning — vendors calling out, people moving with the particular hurry of people who had work waiting, a city that had not yet heard what happened at its eastern camp and would be a different city by evening when it did. Normal. Ordinary. The kind of morning that had no idea it was the last quiet one for a while.
"What did you find in the records," I said to Senna.
She looked at Cassia. Cassia looked back at her with an expression that suggested they'd had this conversation already, in the time before I arrived.
"Not here," Senna said. "Somewhere without open street on four sides." She stood. "There's a place I use in the upper city. We can reach it before the seventh bell if we move now."
She started walking.
Cassia stood, looked at me, and made a small gesture with her head that managed to convey both after you and I'll be watching your back in the same motion.
I stood.
My legs were tired. My eyes were tired. Every part of me had been awake for twenty-two hours and had spent most of them in conditions that the word stressful did not adequately cover. But Oryn was right that I had stopped planning to die somewhere in the last six hours, and whatever Senna had found in those records had frightened her badly enough to change her entire life around it, and the person who wanted me dead had done it quietly enough that I hadn't known I was worth killing until this morning.
I wanted to know why.
I had always wanted to know why.
Now the why had an address.
I followed Senna into the upper city, and Cassia followed me, and somewhere above us the seventh bell was beginning to ring, and the streets were filling with people who didn't know yet that everything was about to change, and I moved through them like something that had no business still being alive.
Which, by every law of this empire, I didn't.