Anthony stood with his back to the room, studying the stained glass window and the story of Saint Babel rendered across it in deep reds and blues.
The artist had made him tall and broad-shouldered, with a long mane of grey hair swept back from a strong face. Anthony knew better. Babel had been short, nearly bald, his skin uneven and marked from a childhood illness that had taken three of his brothers and left him looking, as he'd once put it himself, like something the fever had forgotten to finish.
The staff in his right hand, however — that part was accurate. Babel had been very good with a staff.
Behind him, the room was quiet enough that he could hear the Monsignor's quill moving across parchment in slow, deliberate strokes, broken now and then by the faint click of the old man's tongue as he worked through a thought. Anthony didn't turn. He let the silence stretch, giving him time to finish.
Paper folded. Set aside.
Only then did Anthony turn.
Monsignor Julius sat behind the desk, his body folded in on itself beneath heavy robes, his face a map of fine lines and deeper creases, the skin thin enough in places that the bones beneath showed through. Age had taken what it usually took. His mind had not followed.
"Will you take the case?" the old man asked.
"I already have."
Julius studied him in silence, his eyes narrowing slightly as if testing the weight of the answer rather than the words themselves. "You prayed on it?"
"I received clarity."
A faint click of the tongue. Not quite approval. Julius leaned back a fraction, fingers resting lightly against the desk. "Clarity," he said. "A useful thing, provided it arrives in the correct manner." He didn't wait for a response. "Then tell me what you think you've found."
Anthony had already drawn breath to answer when the Monsignor shifted, pushing himself slowly to his feet with the careful deliberateness of a man who had learned not to trust his body to do what he asked of it without negotiation.
"It's a pleasant day," he said. "Let's walk instead."
Anthony crossed the room without hesitation and offered his arm. The old man took it, leaning just enough to suggest need rather than weakness, and together they moved out into the long stone corridor beyond, their footsteps echoing softly in the half-lit space where only every second torch had been lit, leaving long stretches of shadow between islands of amber light.
"Proceed," said Julius.
"The princess is concerned," Anthony said. "Her favoured handmaid has been missing for two days. By all accounts she was well liked - quiet, kept her personal life to herself." A brief pause. "She was raised in the north side slums."
Julius made a faint sound at that.
"No signs of departure," Anthony continued. "No indication she intended to leave, no disruption, no argument anyone will admit to. No one saw her go."
The Monsignor turned his head slightly. "That, in itself, is unusual."
"Yes."
"What are your initial thoughts?"
"I'm withholding judgment until I have more."
Julius gave a faint smile at that, the lines deepening around his eyes. "You always do." They walked a few steps in silence before he spoke again. "She has a sister. South of the canal, near the bridge."
"Slope Street," Anthony said.
Julius glanced at him. "You've already been?"
"Not yet."
"Then that would seem the next place to go."
Dark clouds had begun to drift across the sun while they walked, the light shifting from pale gold to grey, and the Monsignor indicated quietly that he was ready to return to his chambers. Anthony guided him back without comment, his mind already moving ahead to Slope Street, to the sister, to whatever shape the truth was going to take when he found it.
***
Outside, the rain had already started. Anthony drew up the hood of his cloak as he left the Abbey, feeling the first drops cold against his hands, and turned toward the canal.
The Abbey stood apart from Temple Square on its own sizeable plot, its high functional walls a remnant of an older time - built when the followers of the One True God had needed protection from more than just the weather.
Those days were long past. Anthony could walk the streets of New Calver without fear of persecution, not for his faith at least. The streets themselves were another matter. It was not called the City of Knives for nothing.
He followed the line of the Duke's Canal, where the city showed its two faces with the frankness of something that had long since stopped pretending. On one side, stone held its shape - clean edges, maintained walls, windows with glass in them. On the other, the buildings seemed to sag under their own weight, leaning into one another for support, the mortar crumbling between stones that had been laid without much faith in the future. Anthony walked between the two without slowing, his gaze moving across the details most people had learned not to see - the chalk marks on doorframes that meant different things depending on their shape, the particular way a shutter had been left open at a certain angle, the absence of children on a stretch of street where children were usually everywhere.
Below the canal wall, the eels moved in restless patterns beneath the dark surface, their pale bodies twisting and doubling back on themselves. More agitated than usual. Anthony glanced upward and found the answer - the red moon was already beginning to rise, faint against the grey afternoon sky, and the eels had always been sensitive to it in ways that no one had ever adequately explained.
He walked on.
The people around him moved out of his path before they were fully aware they were doing it, their eyes sliding away as he passed with the practiced inattention of those who had learned that direct contact with the Hands rarely improved their afternoon. Everyone had something to hide. Most for good reason.
One set of eyes didn't move away.
A boy sat at the canal's edge, thin and ragged, one hand extended toward the passing crowd with the mechanical persistence of someone who had been doing it long enough to stop hoping and simply continue. The most he received was the swing of a boot. He didn't flinch. His gaze drifted back to the water, tracking the slow movement of debris along the surface with the distant focus of someone occupying themselves with something small because the larger things weren't worth thinking about.
When Anthony stopped beside him, the boy looked up without surprise, his expression carrying that particular blankness that wasn't stupidity or vacancy. A face that had already half given up.
Anthony had seen it before, more times than he cared to count.
He placed a coin into the boy's hand and held his gaze. "Move on," he said quietly. "Find food. Find shelter. Not here."
The fingers closed around the coin instantly - not grateful, not relieved, just quick - and then the boy was gone, slipping sideways into a narrow alley and swallowed almost immediately by shadow.
Anthony watched the space where he'd been for a moment, then turned back to the canal and continued south.
Two days missing. No witnesses. That didn't happen by accident.
***
From the top of Slope Street, the city spread itself out below him - the buildings clinging to the incline as though the hill were actively trying to shed them, leaning inward against one another, the whole street holding itself back from sliding into the rot below with an effort that didn't quite convince.
Anthony let his gaze move across it slowly, not searching for anything yet, only watching - the movement and the stillness, where people chose to stand, where they chose not to.
One building drew his attention. A metal door where wood should have been, windows boarded with salvaged crate timber. Pressed along the wall beside it a line of twenty or more people shuffling forward in near silence, shoulders hunched against the damp, heads down, each waiting for the door to open just wide enough to admit one more before closing again. Near the front, a woman in a grey coat stood swaying slightly, a baby pressed against her chest with one arm while the fingers of her other hand moved in small, repetitive twitches at her side. The man behind her scratched at a raw patch on his forearm with focused determination.
Two men leaned against the wall nearby, watching the line with the relaxed attention of people who weren't expecting trouble and wouldn't have been particularly troubled by it if it arrived.
Anthony looked at it for a moment longer, then let his attention move on.
He had found the building he needed.
Four storeys of weathered stone and failing timber, a single arched entrance where a gate had once hung and now listed broken from one hinge. People passed in and out without challenge or acknowledgment, the courtyard beyond visible from the street - open, overlooked from multiple angles, the low constant grinding of a water mill filling the air with a sound that would swallow smaller noises without difficulty.
Anthony watched the entrance for several minutes, cataloguing arrivals and departures with the patience of someone who understood that pattern revealed itself in its own time and not before. Nothing declared itself. He moved forward.
Inside, the smell arrived before anything else - damp timber, old cooking oil, something beneath both that he couldn't immediately identify. The mill sound was closer here, vibrating faintly through the floor. People moved through the courtyard with the awareness of those accustomed to being observed, doors easing shut as he passed, conversations dropping half a register and then stopping.
One man didn't adjust. He leaned against the wall just inside the entrance with his arms folded and the comfortable stillness of someone who considered the space his own, watching the flow of people with loose attention that sharpened when it reached Anthony and stayed there.
"Looking for someone?"
"A young woman," Anthony said. "She has not been seen for two days."
The man looked him over - the robes, the staff, the way he stood. Not Watch. Something else.
"People come and go," he said.
Anthony let the silence sit between them.
"She has a sister. Her name is Kate."
Something moved in the man's expression, small and quickly controlled. He shifted his weight, made his decision. "Third floor. Blue door."
Anthony nodded once and moved past him, and as their shoulders drew level the man said quietly, without looking at him: "Watch your step. Left stairs are gone."
Anthony paused just long enough to take in the courtyard in a single unhurried sweep.
"One way in," he said.
The man's mouth pulled slightly at the corner. "One way out, too."
***
The staircase held his weight with complaint but without yielding, each step placed with the careful habit of someone who trusted surfaces only after testing them. The first landing opened into a dim corridor strung with washing lines, damp clothes hanging low enough that he had to angle his shoulders to pass between them, water tapping steadily from the fabric onto the floorboards below.
The second floor was narrower, the walls pressing closer, the mill sound louder and more immediate, as though the machinery ran just behind the plaster.
Three doors, all with traces of the same flaked blue paint.
The first stood slightly ajar, and through the gap the floor had given way entirely at the far end - boards collapsed into darkness, a section of the rear wall gone with them, rain drifting in through the jagged opening.
He knocked at the second door and waited, then knocked again. Movement, then the scrape of a chain, and the door opened a fraction to reveal an old woman with her hair tied back and her clothes layered against the cold, the smell of fish clinging to her with the persistence of a lifetime's work.
Her eyes moved over him with suspicion rather than fear, which told him something.
"I'm looking for a young woman" he said.
"Aren't we all" she replied with a toothless grin and a wink
"She has not been seen for two days."
"Maybe you're not looking in the right places."
"She has a sister, Kate. Is she here?"
The woman's mouth tightened. "No."
"You're certain?"
"I might be old," she said, her voice sharpening, "but I can still remember who lives in my own rooms."
Anthony held her gaze for a moment, then inclined his head slightly. She was telling the truth. He thanked her and she closed the door without replying.
One door remained, and it was open.
He stopped.
The sound of the mill seemed louder here. Or perhaps everything else had quietened.
Something dark marked the threshold.
Blood.
Anthony’s grip tightened slightly on the staff.
He stepped forward, slower now.
Careful.
***
He took it in as he always did - not reacting, not moving toward any single thing, simply allowing the room to assemble itself before him.
The girl was dead, a single wound to the chest, clean in the way that spoke of someone who knew exactly where to put a blade and had done it before. She was being held by a boy of perhaps fifteen - the same one he had noticed in the archway below, moving with that direct, focused energy - his hands moving slowly through her hair in the same small repeated motion.
Anthony's gaze moved through the rest of the room without rushing - the drawers pulled open and emptied, the scattered contents, the smear of blood across the floor that had been dragged and then stopped, the splintered window frame with a few dark drops clinging to the wood where something had struck it from the inside.
Then his gaze returned to the boy and the girl in his arms.
The boy looked up, as if only now registering that he was no longer alone.
"I didn't -"
Anthony lowered his staff.
"Don't move."