Dawn found the search no further along than it had been at midnight, every gate watchman questioned and every alley within a mile of the palace searched twice over. There was still no sign of Niken or the two who had taken her beyond the single dropped scrap of cloth and the device Rama had knocked loose on the rooftop.
Wirasena had not slept, would not eat, and sat hunched over that same device in a borrowed council chamber with red rimmed eyes and hands that had finally stopped shaking only because exhaustion had burned the tremor out of them. Ki Branggah worked beside him, comparing the device's markings against every rubbing of the archive symbol they still possessed, and it was the merchant who found the detail that finally cracked something open.
