Qazkar kept its secrets the way an old woman kept recipes: folded into ordinary things, passed only to those who learned how to ask without looking greedy. Aminah moved through the lower quarter like someone who had been apprenticed to that craft. She wore no insignia that morning; the plain cloak let her be a body in the market rather than a headline. People said the city softened those who had to live in it; she thought it taught them manners instead — how to be honest without telling the whole truth.
The baker recognized her by the way she paused at a tray of flatbreads, not by a crest. He slid a warm piece into a scrap of paper and dropped it into her palm like a small, unpaid favor. "On you, Captain," he said, voice low as if the word itself might be taxed. His son watched from behind a sack of flour, eyes already learning to measure people.
"You're giving me credit," Aminah said, because manners were often performance.
"Everyone's generous before noon," the baker replied. "Afternoon's for bills."
She left him with a half-smile that cost nothing and walked farther into the market where voices braided into rumor. A group of dockhands argued over the proper way to lash a new kind of net; a widow sold strips of embroidered cloth, fingernails as black as a pen. That detail — the widow's hands — was the kind of thing she noticed because the city was a patchwork of small truths that added up to decisions.
Dzeko found her beside a stall that sold used tomes and secondhand maps. He leaned like a man balancing a secret in plain sight: easy grin, but eyes that lugged a worry. He had been a friend for a long time, the sort of friend whose presence felt like a commitment to punctual honesty.
"You look like you're trying to blend," he said. "Very dramatic. Should I be offended?"
"You're always offended," she countered. "What's your excuse for being here?"
He shrugged. "I go where people forget to be careful. You'd be surprised what slips when someone thinks no one's listening." He tapped a coin into a palm-sized scale and watched it tilt. "Someone's been asking about the ruins. Not the shrine we already warned about. The older one. The one the priests pretend doesn't exist."
Aminah's mouth tightened. "Which one."
Dzeko pointed with his chin toward the north stretch where the roofs grew older and the streets narrowed into alleys that remembered other empires' taxes. "Galen's hollow. The old foundation under the sixth stair. Men with ink on their fingers. Not temple-folk. Men who light little fires under their palms and call it salvage."
"You saw them?"
"No," Dzeko said. "I saw ash where there shouldn't be ash. It's the same pattern you keep hearing about, but worse — someone's trying to make the old write new."
She let that sit like a hot pebble in her mouth. Old places made people remember things that had reasons to be forgotten. People who dug up those places did not do it for stories. They did it for leverage, or power, or the profit of being the first to sell a dangerous tool.
"Good work," she said. "Tell Klixin we need a small sweep. Quiet. Meren takes a sample."
"Already on it," he said. He hesitated as if he had another thing on his tongue. "There's talk in the docks that a ship took an unusual cargo. Unmarked. Came at night. Left worse than it arrived."
Names slid out in the market like seeds. People put them into the soil and watched to see which would grow. Aminah kept collecting them.
They moved away from the bookseller and into a narrower lane where the apothecary Maer kept his wares. Maer knew how to arrange herbs so ordinary eyes read medicine and not war. He had a face like a man who slept in rooms that smelled of lemon and iron, a hand always stained with the color of things he crushed.
"You should stop taking market routes," Maer said when she stopped at his door. "The traders like to watch for trouble. Trouble likes to watch back."
"Then make trouble less watchful," she answered, which was a polite way of ordering him to do something without making him feel commanded. That was how she had learned to lead: the phrasing of orders like invitations.
Maer reached under the counter and produced a small strip of woven cloth. "This will keep smudges from spreading," he said. "Not that it's a cure for what's turning up."
"Not a cure," she agreed. "But it helps on the margins."
He didn't ask why she needed it; he knew better than to pry at habits that kept a city breathing. Instead he wrapped the cloth and tucked it into a satchel the way someone tucks a note into a hidden pocket.
They found Zarki leaning against a post by the tannery, watching men move hides like they were offering trophies. He grinned when he saw them and spat the usual salt of bravado.
"You look like a meal today," Zarki called. "Who are we hunting?"
"Not hunting," Aminah said. "Watching."
"Same thing until someone gets a head," he said. "You bringing me a fight or a map?"
"A map," she said. "For now."
He snorted and fell into step. "I'll take the map if it becomes a fight. You know that."
The quartet made a half-circle of competence that smelled of old habits and newer worries. They moved through the city the way a herd moves through a field: careful, protective, alert for the snap of any twig.
By afternoon, they were at Lowen's square where the ash circle had been found the day before. The circle was still there, faint and tidy, the edges brushed so someone had tried to keep it pretty. It read like a threat with good manners: tidy, polite, and meant to be noticed by people who cared about propriety.
Meren was already there, sleeves rolled, analyzing with the calm of a man who trusted objects more than gossip. He looked up when they arrived and handed Aminah a small shard of glass smeared with residue. "Not common ash," he said. "It's bound with something like old rite and something like—" he made a face "—iron waste. They're mixing craft with scrap."
"Amateurs," Zarki said with relish.
"Dangerous amateurs," Meren corrected. He handed the shard back into a small jar and sealed it. "The interesting bit is the pattern. Whoever did this wanted people to find it. That means they want a reaction."
"Or they want to bait someone into acting," Aminah said.
"And whoever acts first gives the next move away," Klixin added from the step, where he had been watching the small crowd try to behave like citizens and not witnesses.
A child kicked a loose stone and sent it skittering into the ash. The stone didn't stop. It crumbled into a fine powder that smelled faintly like the residue. People coughed and stepped back as if some part of the square had turned traitor.
Aminah thought of how the city kept its memory in ordinary objects — a scarf left on a balcony, a cup, a chair with a nick on the leg. Memory was not always in monuments. It was in what people forgot to pick up. Whoever made the ash had planted that memory deliberately. Whoever found it had to decide what to do with it.
She made the decision in the way she always did — practical and a little ruthless. "We cordon Lowen for tonight," she said. "No outside trades. Patrols in pairs. Nina and Leto take first sweep at dusk. Hasb, you make sure the watchmen don't overreact. If this is bait, we don't hand them the rope."
Hasb's face was a lesson in how pride learned patience. "Understood."
Dzeko lingered, watching her. "You trust them," he said. "You trust children and fools."
"I trust the city," she answered. "It has a better memory than any one man."
They left Lowen with the square under watch and people whispering about old rites the way one whispers about ghosts — polite, alarmed. A woman closed her shutters with hands that trembled and muttered a prayer to something that had not been named aloud in years.
When Aminah returned to the barracks that night, the city had folded itself into a dark that felt watchful rather than asleep. Lamps burned low and some of the alleys kept their own private hazards. She stood on the rampart for a long moment and listened to the rhythm of the place: distant laughter, the rattle of a cart, the sharp sound of a hawk. The residue of the day — ash, rumors, the small score of a broken stone — sat like a ledger entry on her tongue.
She thought, briefly, of the prequel's ghosts — the old seals and the names people said like taboos — and then she put the thought back where it belonged: in the file for the future. Qazkar needed attention now, not history. She rubbed the cloth Maer had given her between two fingers and felt its roughness settle like a small, private talisman.
In the dark, the city kept its breath even. The real work, she thought, was not in fighting what could be counted but in learning to recognize what would not be obvious until it was too late. The watchers would watch, the priests would pray, the fools would try to play craftsmen with old rites. And she would arrange her people between those impulses like a seamstress laying down stitches: careful, efficient, not sentimental.
When the watch changed, Nina slipped into the night like someone who preferred to flirt with trouble more than tame it. Hasb stood by the gate until the lamps burned thin and then went to his post. Aminah remained on the rampart until the smoke from Lowen's ovens had thinned and the city sighed into a sleep that was more pretending than rest.
There were more names to collect. There were more small fires to find. The ash had memory and someone had taught it to speak. Qazkar listened, and for now that was enough.