Angus Lok left his room in the Crater, taking his very few possessions with him. He hadn’t yet decided whether or not he would return, but his policy was the same either way. Be ready.

The room was acceptable to him in all essential ways. It was in a private lodging house, not an inn, located at the front of the building with a window looking down on the street. It had a bed, a washstand and a chamber pot, nothing else. Its landlord catered discreetly to men and women who were taking the Holy Cure; a middle-aged, hopeful, soft-bodied clientele with just enough money to finance a trip to the city for the required twenty-nine days of the cure. Angus could imagine the Phage looking for him in many, many places, but in a house filled with mildly religious, gout-ridden invalids stinking of sulfur he felt relatively safe.

If they found him they would strike him down.

You never left the Phage.

You never killed the Phage.

And you never interfered with their plans.

That was three and counting. For a certainty they were on his trail. He knew how they operated. He had lived this life from the other side. He had been the tracker, the one quietly making inquiries at inns and alehouses, blacksmiths and feed stores, slipping into stables at night and checking the boxes, swapping stories with local whores. When necessary he had done more than track. Stay alive in the Phage long enough and sooner or later you’d find blood on your hands.

They dressed it up, of course, wrapped themselves in cloth-of-gold. They were the Brotherhood of the Long Watch and they pushed back against the darkness, taking the long view, identifying threats, consolidating strengths, moving in ways subtle and unsubtle to remake and prepare the world.

The question was, who watched the Phage?

Angus wished them harm, every one of them. And they wished him that harm right back.

He was careful as he made his way north through the Crater. It was God’s Day and the streets were quiet. In Morning Star any copper coins exposed to daylight today were God’s due. It meant business went inside and candles and lamps were lit early so that coins could be exchanged in man’s light, not daylight, and God could be denied his piece. The barter market was open by the river but Angus avoided that particular noisy busyness and instead took a route that followed the city’s west wall.

Chapel houses were open and the low and monotonous bellow of horns urged people to come and pray. It was still early and the light was golden as it cut along the streets. Apart from a brief excursion for food Angus had not left the lodging house in three days and he experienced the morning and the city as separate from him. Waiting was not a thing he did well, but in this he had little choice. All normal avenues were closed in this city. People he would typically use for information could not be trusted. The Phage was one conversation away from them all.

His best chance of finding the Maiden was through her hands. This was her city and she had lived, secreted within it, for many years. Angus could only imagine what duplicities she practiced to keep herself hidden in plain sight. She was the Crouching Maiden and that was what she was known for: staying still, keeping low, letting the shadows gather around her mutable female form. Describing her to strangers was impossible: no two people looking straight at her saw the same thing. That was why the hands were so important. She could not work her magic on the imperfect substance of burned flesh.

And she was hurting. Somewhere the Maiden was hurting and in pain and somewhere a doctor was treating her. Her hands were the tools of her trade and she would not entrust them to some backstreet drunken healer. Mobility could not be lost. Lose her grip on a knife and she was dead. She would have no choice but to seek out a fine surgeon, and Angus’ instincts told him she would do so in Morning Star. This was a city with hundreds of doctors to choose from. This was her home.

Even on God’s Day, Spice Gate broadcast its location for all to detect and Angus turned east, away from the wall, when he smelled the odors of pepper and garlic. His intention was to approach the surgeon’s street from a different direction than his last visit. Caution ruled the game this morning. He could not dismiss the possibility that the woman in the moneylender’s had passed along word of his arrival to the Phage. Nor could he dismiss the fact that by simply inquiring about a woman with burned hands, the surgeon’s apprentice had drawn the attention of Magdalena Crouch herself. Burned or unburned the Maiden was the most dangerous assassin in the North.

Angus Lok moved through the city’s northwestern corner like a specter, gray-coated, toeing the shadows, avoiding open spaces. He scribed a quarter-league circle around the surgeon’s house and moved no closer until he had circumvented it. A six-story building with a dovecote open to the sky was the tallest structure in the area and he looked at it closely, but kept walking. He rejected the second tallest structure—a tower manse with a roof of domed copper—and settled on the third tallest, a four-storied timbered house with windows looking across to the surgeon’s building and street. Angus entered the building’s back courtyard and tried the door.

It opened into a kitchen. A pretty maid with blond hair barely contained by a white cap turned to face him. “They all out?” he asked, not giving her time to think.

“They’re at chapel, yes.”

“I’d better wait then.”

The girl looked uncertain. Her slender fingers danced across the surface of her apron.

“Very well, I’ll go,” Angus told her, “but you’ll have to tell the master that I’m not sure when I can return.” He turned, put his hand on the door.

“Wait. Stay.”

Angus completed a full spin. “I’ll wait upstairs. I know the way.”

She followed him nervously as he crossed the kitchen to the interior door.

“What time do you expect them back?”

“They just left.”

Two hours then. Good. “Fetch me a cup of hot broth to the solar. Quick now, girl. I’ve had a long journey.”

The maid reversed her course, heading back toward the stove, and Angus took the doorway, looked around, and then made his way through the house. Young maids were a knowable commodity. Give them orders and they had a tendency to obey.

She found him ten minutes later, nodding off in a padded chair in the house’s large and comfortable primary common room, the solar. All houses of a certain size and prosperity possessed such a chamber.

“Leave me now,” Angus told the maid, accepting a cup of hot fragrant liquid from her delicately shaking hands. “Wake me when the master returns.”

The maid bobbed a curtsy and left.

Angus listened to her footsteps descend the stairs, set the cup down on the floor, and then exited the room. A hallway led to stairs which led to the third and fourth stories. He climbed both flights of stairs, took a moment to orient himself within the geography of the house, and then selected a door which opened onto space at the front of the house.

It was an attic room with a sharply slanted ceiling and unplastered wood walls. A stained mattress and a handful of wicker boxes, piled unevenly against the interior wall, were the only contents. A single window faced south. Its shutters were tightly closed.

Angus opened one of the shutters gradually over minutes, easing it back, keeping in the shadow behind the second shutter. The rear of the surgeon’s house, its walled yard, kitchen door and window, were clearly visible. Beyond that the south end of the street and a small bar-shaped section at the north end could be viewed through the spaces between houses. Angus spread his weight evenly between his feet, settling in for a long wait.

An hour passed. The surgeon’s kitchen door opened and a man with gray hair—probably the surgeon himself—came out and pissed against the wall. The street was quiet. People walked its length, either alone or in groups of two or three, with purpose. No one loitered. An old man with a cane took his own good time reaching a house at the street’s north end, but Angus found nothing in the man’s appearance or behavior to raise alarm.

In the second hour two children, boys of about eight or nine, ran into the center of the street and began playing a game that involved hurling a sealed waterskin at one another. Angus didn’t like this. When people stayed in place he got worried. And the Phage were not above using children.

He watched the boys, increasingly aware that time was running out. Go, he told them silently.

They stayed. He could hear their excited laughter and the crude oneupmanship of their taunts. The taller of the boys was dark-skinned and black-haired with a dusty tunic and no cloak. The other boy was smaller but perhaps older with red hair and pink skin. He was wearing the kind of roughly pieced deerhide favored by bush hunters.

Angus closed the shutter. Time to go.

Swiftly and quietly he made his way down through the house. The maid was in the kitchen—he could hear her clacking pots—so he took the front door and slipped out into the street. The sun was still shining but a smoky haze rising from the city stopped it from being bright. Angus walked to the corner, cut a turn, headed for the south end of the surgeon’s street.

Years of training did not prevent the acceleration of his heartbeat. This could be simple. Or not. Making the turn onto the surgeon’s street, he deliberately slowed his pace. The arrangement with the apprentice was that the young man would walk out to meet Angus at midday. It was a minute before midday. Angus wanted to give the apprentice plenty of time to see him, to observe him perhaps for a moment or two, to set his young mind at ease.

The boys were still playing. They were engaged in an unheated argument over the rules of the game. “Possession’s mine,” claimed the taller, younger boy. “You dropped it.”

Angus tracked all the movements on the street. The boys, a woman walking with a cane, a girl leading a horse laden with milk pails. Two crows were pecking through dirt that had accumulated in a wheel rut. Angus’ gaze jumped from the birds to the surgeon’s door as light streaked across the varnished wood. The door was opening.

He did not reach for one of his knives, though the instinct was there. He continued walking, easily, almost jauntily, toward the house and its door. A figure was emerging from the dimness of the entryway and every nerve in Angus’ spine was trained upon it. Size was right… shape was right. The figure stepped into the light.

It was the apprentice, looking younger and softer than Angus remembered. The young man had shaved and donned stiff-looking formal clothes, probably his best. Angus peered into the dim interior behind the apprentice. He saw nothing, but knew better than to allow himself the luxury of relief.

The apprentice raised his gaze and made eye contact. Angus returned it. The apprentice closed the door. Angus adjusted his pace, timing it so that he and the apprentice would fall into step as they met. You could tell a lot from a man’s neck, see what muscles were working in his throat and jaw. Angus could tell the apprentice had information. You could see it weighing down the muscles in his tongue.

They fell into step, walking north. The apprentice was the first to speak. “How’s the arm?”

Angus made a seesaw motion with his head. “Been worse.” Moving his hand against his coat, he made the silver coins stored there jingle softly. “Have you found her?”

The apprentice kept his gaze ahead. His eyes were still bloodshot from lack of sleep. “Money first.”

He was learning. Angus took out the cloth bag and tamped it into the apprentice’s cupped hand. More money than he would earn in five years. Maybe ten.

The apprentice slid the bag under his good half-cloak. A second passed while he seated it.

Angus said, “Where is she?”

He wanted to talk, that was the thing about information. Once you had it, it was a pleasure akin to relief to pass it on. “She’s calling herself Anna Roach and she’s—”

Angus slammed into the apprentice as the word ‘she’ left his mouth. The red-haired pink-skinned boy had hurled the waterskin directly at the apprentice, and as Angus and the apprentice slammed into the ground the waterskin burst right by the apprentice’s face.

It was not filled with water.

The two boys tore off down the street.

Angus rolled onto his knees and dragged the apprentice away from the lye. He could smell it burning the young man’s face. He felt pinprick sizzles on his own face and hands where the splash had caught him.

“Who’s treating her?” Angus said.

The apprentice looked at him. His just-shaved face was beginning to singe as if it were being held to a flame.

“Who?”

“Sarcosa.”

Angus heard the tht of a crossbolt lever being released. Grabbing the apprentice by the back of his cloak, Angus hauled the young man’s torso against his own, using the apprentice as a shield. A crossbolt lanced into the apprentice’s shoulder with such force that Angus’ teeth smashed together.

Rising, he threw away the young man.

The crossbolt had come from the tower manse with the copper roof. Angus knew exactly how long it took to crank and cock a crossbow and as he sprinted away from the apprentice he worked out the bowman’s angle of sight. Reaching the first alley between houses he darted into the gap. As long as he was close to a building on an east-west axis he was safe.

He ran east toward the river, scrambling over walls, jumping fences, tearing through courtyards and private spaces. He had been a fool. He knew the two boys hadn’t been right. Someone had paid them to play there. Someone had given them a waterskin lined with God-knew-what so that it could hold lye, and instructed them to throw it at the two men meeting outside the house. It had been a diversion, something to slow down the mark. Once he, Angus Lok, was on the ground he was a sitting target.

Of course they weren’t interested in the apprentice. He was just the means, the lure.

This had the Phage written all over it. The Crouching Maiden would not have set such a clumsy trap. Crossbolts at distance weren’t her style. She played with superior odds.

Out of breath, Angus slowed to a walk. He calculated he had put half a league between himself and the manse tower and as there was no sign of pursuit he felt safe. Lungs pumping, he headed for the riverbank.

The big black maw of the Burned Fortress swallowed the Eclipse two hundred yards upstream. Angus watched the water swirl above the drop. He jumped the floodwall and hiked down the bank. Kneeling in the mud, he splashed water on his hands and face. It cooled the burned specks on his skin. He rested for a while, not thinking.

He wasn’t young anymore. How much longer could he outrun threats?

Not for the first time he wondered if he was doing this in the right order. If Cassy was alive, if the lack of her body at the gravesite meant that she hadn’t died that night, then wouldn’t it be better to track her first?

It had seemed clear: Take down the Maiden at all cost. Anyone who knew anything about the Maiden would tell you that she never failed to kill a mark. Once she took a commission with your name on it you were dead. Sooner or later you were dead. That meant Cassy was in grave danger.

He was a father; he had to take that danger away.

Abruptly, he stood. He could not think of his daughter, of the possibility of her being alive.

It was too much for a man to hope for. It would drive him insane.

Angus peeled along from the river, heading south. He needed to wash, and mend and launder his clothes. There were wormholes in his coat where lye had burned through the fabric. He considered returning to the lodging house—he had paid for ten days—but he knew from being a tracker that it was a mistake to follow patterns. Once someone identified a pattern in your behavior they could anticipate your next move. And there was no doubt in his mind: The Phage were on him.

It was not worth worrying about how they had come to learn of his arrival in the city. Anyone—gate guard, market stall holder, drunk in the street—could have identified him and passed along the information to the Phage. They watched for their enemies. The important question was: Did the Phage know what the apprentice knew? Did they possess the Maiden’s latest alias and the name of her doctor?

Angus Lok knew and didn’t care for the answer. He had to proceed as if the Phage knew everything. They had known enough to lay a trap at exactly the right place and time. And although their traps left something wanting their intelligence rarely did. That meant they were likely ahead of him. Even aware of that fact, what choice did he have but to continue? He would not, could not, stop looking for the Maiden. Angus Lok and Magdalena Crouch could not exist in the same world. It would not continue to happen.

Finally he was getting close to tracking her down.

Anna Roach.

Sarcosa.

She was here. Somewhere in this city she was rubbing ointment into her burned hands, sipping tea to slake her thirst, speaking to people who could not see the truth of what she was. She would be cautious, but it was too late. She had already made the fatal mistake. She had followed a pattern. She had returned home.

Angus Lok took the Turret Bridge and crossed to the east side of the city. It was God’s Day and the bridgekeeper could not charge a toll for passage so the fact that Angus had no money made no difference. He had abandoned the purse containing his savings at the exact same place and time he’d abandoned the apprentice.

He did not care about the money… and he could no longer remember the young man’s name.