The city kept its small betrayals quiet in the morning. People pretended to barter and trade while listening for news with the same furtive attention they used to count coins. Aminah moved through those noises like someone who had learned to read ledger lines inside footfalls: every pause, every cough, every hurried laugh was a sentence. She liked mornings because in mornings people were still willing to lie to themselves. Plans were pliable then.
She met with Klixin at the war table before breakfast. The map glittered like a cold promise; the red pips had not moved, but the air in the hall had changed. Men and women who had practiced calm for a lifetime kept blinking as if the world had learned a new, unpleasant trick. Klixin folded his fingers, looked at the map as if staring hard enough could tell him what to do, and then looked at her.
"We've got two reports in from the eastern patrols," he said. "Small things. Strange glows. A shepherd said his sheep gave blood-colored milk and then all died within the week in a pasture outside Harsen. A watchman—" he spat the name as if it were a pebble "—says the stones around the old shrine are warm at night."
Aminah heard the list and saw the pattern before the conclusion formed: things that felt wrong and small enough that people would try to hide them. "Masks," she said. "Someone doesn't want panic until they decide how to use it."
"Or someone wants us to think they don't want panic," Klixin answered. He had a grit in his voice today that didn't belong to tiredness. "Either way, we don't get to act like it's not serious. We sound the patrols, but we don't make grand movements. Imperial eyes are on us."
The word imperial took the edge off the plan like a blade through fabric. They could move troops and draw attention, or they could act without grandeur and risk being outmaneuvered by enemies who liked subtlety. Aminah chose a third option: do what had to be done with as little announcement as possible.
"Hasb takes the second watch. Small teams, nothing that screams expedition. Nina runs recon with Leto and the field scouts. Put Meren on analysis — he's good with residues." She gave names in that tone she used for giving orders and leaving space for people to feel responsible. Command worked better when people thought it was their idea.
Klixin nodded, his face unreadable. "And Faiq?"
She did not tell him what she felt when she thought of the man in the imperial suite. Instead she said, "He's hunting his own ghosts. If he finds something, he'll tell us in his own way."
The way he told things was never direct. Faiq's usefulness had always been the shape of the thing he did: he made puzzles look plain so they could be moved. It made people trust him and distrust him in the same breath. Trusting a man like that meant accepting his absences as currency.
*
Hasb's boots were quieter than his fists, which was a problem when someone expected bravado and found careful work instead. He liked moving men like chess pieces and thought of patrols as sets of options you kept in the back of your head. Today he wore a short cloak, practical leather at the shoulders, and a look that suggested he'd been given a responsibility he intended to keep.
"Nina's been testing a new kind of bait," he said as they walked the eastern path. His jaw worked when he smiled; it was a small, cramped thing of someone still learning how to make room for gentleness and duty in the same face. "Tried it last night with a false fire and two scouts hiding in the pines. Drew a group of smugglers like bees."
"And?" Aminah asked. They'd traveled light; news moved faster than bodies, and she liked it that way. Being fleet meant problems could be trimmed before they grew teeth.
"They fell into a routine," Hasb said. "They're careful, but not careful enough. They always assume the easy pick is worth it. That tells me they're being pressed. People pressed by something don't think big."
"So they're not professional raiders," Aminah said, which was a small, useful conclusion. Professional raiders left patterns that were hard to misread. These people made mistakes that smelled like desperation.
They rounded a ridge and the land opened to the plain where shepherds tried to keep a miserable life under indifferent skies. The pasture near Harsen seemed contented at first glance — a sweep of grass and the low bleat of livestock — until they smelled it: the metallic thread that always meant blood. Hasb's hand was on the hilt of his blade before they saw the first body.
A shepherd, his face slack with frozen surprise, lay half-buried in mud. Sheep clustered nearby looked at them with glassy eyes and did not move. Meren squatted beside the nearest carcass with that clinical hunger of a man who loved the language of evidence.
"It's residue," Meren said. "Not natural. Not a toxin like we've catalogued. It binds with blood in a way that's… corrosive in the small, like ash mixed with acid."
Nina crouched and touched the animal's flank with two fingers, then drew them back as if surprised by the sensation. "It sang," she said. It was the kind of half-poetic thing that made people roll their eyes until they remembered she was right. "Like a note that makes your bones keep time."
Hasb grunted. "Mage-muck?"
Aminah watched them. The way they talked was the way people tried to keep fear tidy. "Not exactly," she said. "But close enough to be dangerous."
They searched the perimeter and found the stones around an old shrine warm to the touch. The shrine was a ruin from before anyone could remember without making it sound like myth. Someone had marked the stone with a crude sigil lately, and the lines were blackened. It looked like a ritual the wrong sort of clerics would try in the dark.
Meren took a small scraping and sealed it in a vial like hunters did with trophies. "I'll send this to the lab," he said. "If it's mana residue, we call the scholars. If it's not, we call the healers."
Aminah kept her face even. "We call nothing to the Empire unless we have to. Understood?"
"Yes, captain." Hasb's answer was clipped but obedient. He didn't like the idea of hiding things from Moulm, but he understood why she preferred secrets. Standing too honest in a room with imperial eyes made you vulnerable. The choice to hide was the choice to keep a city.
They left the pasture with a silence pulled tight around them. The dead shepherd and the dead sheep were small tragedies; someone would grieve and then tomorrow the next crisis would take stage. That was how war teaching worked — grief was a rhythm not a peak.
*
Meanwhile, Faiq worked through his own set of small, private calculations in Moulm. The vial the sanctum-woman had given him sat on the table between his hands like a question. He had contacts who kept little museums of the strange; he had men who could test things and speak honest when the smell of power got too sweet.
He met an old apprentice of Radliyan's who now taught in a college no one fully trusted. The man looked like a professor who'd forgotten to sell his curiosity for a pension. He set the vial under blown glass, muttered a few ritual phrases that were more habit than magic now, and watched the residue react.
"It's not pure sealing residue," the man said finally. "It's… a bastardization. They've mixed old rite with something crude. Like someone who read one page of a book and tried to recite the whole chapter."
Faiq listened without show. "A crude duplication will fracture," he said. "It won't hold. It's dangerous because it doesn't break the same way a proper seal does. It splinters."
The apprentice drummed his finger on the edge of the desk. "Who'd do this?"
"Someone with access to old rites and no patience for the slow, respectful way of true practice," Faiq said. "Someone who wants action and not legacy."
That phrase settled into the room like a stone. There were always people who wanted power and not the patience to earn it. They were the most dangerous because impatience made them reckless and recklessness made for accidents people could not ignore.
He sent a message, precise and unsigned, to Aminah: a scrap of coordinates and a line — "Not the same burn." It meant less to the casual reader than the men in the field and more to the woman who understood the economy of absences. He could have sent more. He did not.
The day narrowed into evening like a blade folding. As Aminah returned to the barracks, she felt the itch of something unresolved at her nape. The night smelled like rain again, but beneath it a thin thread of smoke wove that did not belong to the city. It wound through alleys and into the squares and carried with it a small, deliberate message.
A watchman found the town of Lowen with its outer ovens still warm and a single, tidy circle of ash in the square. The circle had been tracked with runes and the ash was not like the other ash; it had a cold undercurrent to it, a way of making your hands feel like someone had touched them and left them unsteady.
They found a note pinned to a door with a shard of glass.
We are learning to make old things new again.
It was not signed.
Aminah read it and felt a pulse in her temples that had nothing to do with exertion. The words were small and smug and meant to be a promise. Someone was experimenting. Someone wanted to show that they could make magic that belonged to older, dead things and bend it to use.
She looked up at the stars and did not pray. She thought of Faiq in his Moulm room, of the vial under glass, of the way his messages came like small knives. She thought of Hasb and Nina, their brave, inadequate selves. She thought of the Emperor's shadow and the way empires liked to move like glaciers—slow, heavy, inevitable.
Then she lit a cigarette, breathed the smoke like a map, and walked back into the city that was trying to learn how to be dangerous again. The threads were thin, but someone was pulling. And when threads were pulled, even gently, fabric began to change.