"The source," I said, remembering the word he'd used back in the guild hall.
"The source," he agreed, and didn't say anything else about it for a long while after that, which from Namey was its own kind of confirmation that he'd frightened himself more than he wanted the rest of us to see.
We crested the last real ridge on the fourth afternoon, the road narrowing down to something barely wide enough for a single cart, stone walls rising close on either side thick with dark moss that hadn't seen much sun, and came out the other side into a long grey valley cupped between two mountain shoulders that still had snow sitting stubborn in their upper folds despite the season not yet properly demanding it.
Highhollow sat at the valley's low point, a huddle of dark-roofed buildings clustered close together against the cold the way small towns everywhere clustered against whatever they were afraid of most, wood smoke rising thin and straight from a dozen chimneys into an evening sky gone the color of old iron. Above the town, further up the valley's northern shoulder, the mine workings sprawled dark and angular against the mountainside, scaffolding and winch towers and the black open mouths of shaft entrances that looked, from this distance and in this light, uncomfortably like something breathing slow and even in its sleep.
A haze sat over the whole valley that wasn't quite fog and wasn't quite smoke, pale grey and faintly luminous where the last of the daylight caught it, and it took me a while standing there at the ridge's crest to realize why the color of it had settled into my chest the exact same way the seal on the note had, cold and immediate and entirely too familiar.
"Ash grey," Luxy said quietly, beside me, having clearly reached the same recognition at the same moment I had. "The whole valley's sitting under a color I've only seen once before, and it was pressed into wax on a threat with your name on it."
Aki dropped low over our heads, circled once, and landed heavy and tense at the edge of the ridge, folding his wings tight against his sides and staring down at the valley with the particular stillness of an animal deciding, all on his own instincts, that whatever waited down there deserved every bit of caution he had left in him.
"Well," Savage said, into the quiet that followed, in a voice gone flat and steady in the way it always did right before she committed fully to something she'd already half decided was going to hurt. "There it is."
Nobody answered her for a while. There didn't seem to be much worth saying that the valley itself hadn't already said more plainly than any of us could have managed, and after a long minute of simply standing there with the wind pulling cold and steady off the peaks behind us, we started down.
The road down into the valley proper ran alongside a stream that had gone the color of weak tea, cloudy and faintly grey no matter how the light hit it, and I found myself watching it more than I watched the town growing steadily larger ahead of us, some instinct in me refusing to trust water that color the same way I'd have refused to trust it if it had run any actual color at all.
"Tailings," Namey said, following my gaze. "Runoff from the mine workings. It's not natural, whatever color they'd have you believe it is. I'd avoid drinking from it, and I'd avoid letting Aki drink from it too, if he's inclined."
Aki, who had clearly been considering that very thing a moment earlier from the way his head had dipped low toward the bank, straightened back up with what I could have sworn was an offended little huff, and fell into step beside me instead, close enough that his wing brushed my leg with every third stride.
Highhollow up close looked worse than it had from the ridge, not in any single dramatic way but in the accumulation of a hundred small ones, roofs patched with whatever material had been closest to hand rather than whatever material actually matched, shutters closed tight on windows even at an hour when the cold hadn't yet fully set in for the evening, a general hunch to the shoulders of everyone we passed on the narrow main street that had nothing to do with the temperature and everything to do with something else entirely. Nobody met our eyes for longer than it took to register we were strangers and then decide, apparently in near unison, that strangers weren't worth the risk of further attention.
A large wooden sign hung near the town's central well, freshly painted in a way that stood out garishly against the weathered grey of everything around it, reading THRENODY TRADING COMPANY, NORTHERN CONTRACTS OFFICE, LICENSED AGENT OF THE CORVANE ADVENTURERS' GUILD, and below that, smaller, a list of current bounties posted on a board beside it, half of them phrased in the same clipped desperate language we'd seen back in Corvane, the other half phrased in something colder and more bureaucratic, contract numbers and payment schedules where a person's actual fear should have been.
Namey stopped in front of the board, reading, his jaw tightening a fraction with every line.
"CLEANUP CONTRACT, SUBLEVEL ACCESS TUNNELS, HAZARD RATING THREE," he read aloud, quiet. "Posted by Threnody Trading. Payment routed through Corvane Adventurers' Guild, standard cut applies." He looked up at me. "That's the exact structure from the manifest, Jon. Word for word, nearly. They're not even hiding it here. They don't have to. Nobody up here has anywhere else to sell their labor, so nobody up here's in any position to ask the questions we're asking."
"They knew we'd read it that way," I said. "Or they don't care if we do."
"Both, probably," Namey said. "A company confident enough in its own reach doesn't bother hiding the machinery. It just keeps running the machinery in plain sight and trusts that plain sight is exactly where nobody thinks to look properly."