The office had a brass nameplate, a swept floor, and a man behind the desk who was sweating before anyone spoke.
His name was Vess.
Lulune had walked them to the door and then gone up to the roof to watch the street, which left three of them in the warm little room: Rayleigh, Eleonora with her stack of ledgers, and Kaguya, who had not said a word since they came in and made the silence worse for it.
Vess stood up too fast when he saw the swords. "We're closed for the evening. If you want to book an appointment—"
"Sit down, Master Vess." Eleonora set her ledgers on his desk and opened the top one to a page she'd marked.
"We won't take long."
He sat, because a woman in a Guild uniform holding your own paperwork is hard to argue with.
But his eyes kept sliding to the door.
Rayleigh took the chair across from him and let him look.
'Two days of jumping at shadows, Lulune said. He's not afraid of us yet. He's afraid of something else, and we're just standing in front of it.'
"You've been busy this year," Eleonora said.
She turned the ledger so he could see it. "Access rights. Repair claims. Old properties along the canal. All of it filed correctly, all of it legal, and all of it pointed at buildings nobody's set foot in since the war." She tapped one line.
"This warehouse changed owners four times in twelve months. You handled the last three. Would you like to tell me who paid you, or should I read you the parts you left out of your own records?"
Vess wet his lips. "Property is a legal business. People buy old buildings all the time. There's nothing—"
"There's a dead clerk two streets over who'd disagree, if she could talk yet." Rayleigh kept his voice easy. "And a fishmonger who came apart in a market this morning. You've heard about that one. Everyone has."
The broker's hands went still on the desk.
"So here's where we are," Rayleigh went on. "The Guild has your ledgers. Ganesha has the warehouse. And I'm the one they send when a body stops behaving like a body."
He let that sit.
"You're not in trouble for buying old cellars. You're in trouble for who you bought them for. Give me a name and this stays a paperwork problem."
For a second Vess wavered.
Rayleigh watched it happen, watched the man weigh the Guild against whatever had him sitting up at night, and then watched him decide the Guild was the safer thing to lie to.
"I don't know any names," he said. "I get instructions. Money comes, I file the papers, I don't ask. That's the whole job."
"Instructions from who?"
"Letters or a drop box. I never see anyone."
'Lie.'
It wasn't even a good one.
Rayleigh had been about to say so when Kaguya finally moved.
She crossed the room without hurry and stopped beside the desk.
She didn't draw her sword.
She simply set one hand on the hilt, tilted her head, and looked at Vess the way you'd look at a stain on a good table.
"You met someone last night," she said.
Her voice was pleasant, which made it worse. "A shuttered wine shop off Daedalus Street. You did all the talking, and afterward you sat alone in the dark for twenty minutes because your legs wouldn't hold you." She smiled, small and cold.
"I've watched a great many people lie about a great many things. What I find interesting is that you're more frightened of a man you claim never to have seen than you are of three armed strangers in your office at night. That takes a special kind of employer."
Vess had gone the color of old paper.
"I—" His voice cracked. "You don't understand what you're asking."
"Then explain it," Kaguya said, "slowly, and only once."
The office was very quiet
Somewhere in the walls a clock ticked.
Rayleigh didn't push. Kaguya had the man now, and Kaguya was better at this than any of them, in a way he'd never once asked her to explain.
There was an old sharpness under all that court grace, something she'd learned long before she ever picked up a blade, and it only ever showed when she was standing in front of someone who deserved it.
Vess broke like a cheap plank.
"His name's Corvin," he said, fast, the words spilling now that they'd started. "That's all I have. Corvin. I don't know if it's real. He handles the ground work, the collections, the buildings. He's the one who tells me which properties to buy and when to hand the keys over."
He swallowed.
"But he's not the one paying. The money's older than him. Cleaner. He answers to somebody, same as I answer to him, and whoever that is has been funding this since before the reconstruction dust settled." He shook his head. "I never see them. I'm not sure Corvin does either. He's just as scared as I am."
Eleonora's pen was moving. "Scared of the person paying?"
"No." Vess looked at her, and for the first time he wasn't performing. "Scared of the thing they've got down there."
The word landed in the middle of the room and nobody touched it for a moment.
"What thing," Rayleigh said.
"I only saw it once. Last night. It came to the wine shop with Corvin, stood in the back where the light didn't reach." Vess's hands had started to shake again, and this time he didn't try to hide it.
"Tall.. too thin, one arm longer than the other. It had a hood, or a cloak, or — I couldn't tell where the cloth stopped and the rest of it started. It never spoke. It just stood there, and every so often it reached out and tapped the wall. Two knocks. A pause then three more."
Rayleigh felt Eleonora go still beside him.
"And when it tapped," Vess said, quieter now, "the wall answered. I heard the stone move somewhere behind the plaster. Corvin went white. He gave me my instructions like he couldn't get the words out fast enough, and then he took that thing and left, and I sat down and I couldn't get up."
He looked between the three of them, pleading now.
"Corvin uses it. He thinks it's his. But it isn't. It does what it wants, and half the time he's just trying to stay out of its way. I've heard him talk to it like a man praying he doesn't get noticed."
'A tool that scares the hand holding it.' Rayleigh had suspected as much since the market, but hearing it out loud made it colder.
Whatever the Knocker was, the people using it were riding something they didn't own, and men who ride things they don't own tend to get thrown.
"The handover," Eleonora said. "You said you file the papers and hand over the keys. When's the next one?"
Vess's mouth opened, then shut.
Kaguya's fingers shifted a bare inch on the hilt.
"Tonight," he whispered. "There's a warehouse on the old dye canal. The transfer went through this afternoon. Corvin's people take possession at moonrise. That's — that's an hour, maybe less."
He put his face in his hands. "I wasn't supposed to say. He'll know it was me!"
"He won't," Rayleigh said, standing. "Because you're not going to be here. Lulune!"
The beastwoman dropped in through the back window like she'd been waiting for her name, which she had.
She took one look at the broker's face and grinned. "He sang, then."
"He sang. Take him to Eina, quietly. Guild custody, protected, and no one gets told where." Rayleigh glanced back at Vess.
"You cooperate with the Guild and you keep breathing. That's a better deal than your employer would've given you, and we both know it."
Vess didn't argue. He looked almost grateful, in the sick way of a man who's finally been caught and can stop running.
Kaguya took her hand off her sword and stepped back, and the room felt like it could hold air again.
She caught Rayleigh's eye as she passed him.
"Corvin, a hidden buyer with old money, and a thing that opens walls by knocking," she said, low. "This was never a treasure hunt."
"No." He was already checking the blades at his hip. "It's a door somebody's been very patient about opening. And we've got an hour before they open the next one."
Eleonora gathered her ledgers and shoved them into her bag with quick hands. "The dye canal warehouse. I know the district. If there's a hidden entrance filed under any of these deeds, I can find it faster than they can walk to it."
"Then let's not keep them waiting." Rayleigh held the door for her, and past the frame the night sat dark and quiet over Daedalus Street, the moon not yet up.
Somewhere under all of it, a wall was waiting to be knocked on.
He had every intention of getting there first.