They said the Ashfen Market closed at dusk.
Eira Voss had known this for all of her nineteen years. She had grown up on the eastern edge of Calveth, in the cramped cluster of houses that pressed against the old city wall like children seeking warmth, and the rule had been the same since before her birth: when the lanterns along the market row flickered to amber, you went home. You bolted your shutters. You did not look out your window until morning.
The shadow lords had not always been a presence in the human territories. Her grandmother could still remember a time before them — a time when dusk meant nothing more threatening than dinner. But that world existed only in old women's memories now, and the world Eira had inherited was one shaped by the careful arithmetic of survival. Stay inside. Keep quiet. Do not wander.
She had not intended to wander.
The afternoon had started ordinarily enough. She'd been running her usual route — picking up her neighbor Maret's medicine from the apothecary on Silt Lane, delivering two mended shirts to the cobbler on Wren Street, collecting a small payment for her mother's seamstress work from a woman called Hadris who lived above the chandler's shop. Small tasks. The kind of tasks that kept the Voss household from falling behind on rent.
It was the shortcut that undid her.
She had taken the narrow passage behind the tannery a hundred times before, but she had never taken it this late — had never miscalculated the hours so badly. The conversation with Hadris had stretched longer than expected; the woman was lonely and loquacious and Eira had never been able to simply leave a lonely person without listening a little. By the time she emerged from the passage with coin in her pocket and good intentions in her heart, the lanterns on the market row had already shifted from white to amber.
She walked faster. That was the first mistake.
The second mistake was the fog.
It came in off the river the way fog always did in Calveth — suddenly, silently, filling the low places first and then rising until the familiar shapes of doorways and signboards became suggestions. Eira knew this city. She knew every corner of its lower districts. But fog was fog, and amber lanterns gave no real light, and somewhere between Wren Street and the bridge she took a wrong turn she had never taken before.
She realized it when the cobblestones changed.
The streets in her district were old and uneven, worn smooth by generations of ordinary feet. These cobblestones were different — larger, more deliberate, set in a pattern she didn't recognize. The buildings on either side were taller and darker, with no lanterns at all, and the fog hung differently here, thicker, with a quality that seemed less like weather and more like intention.
She stopped walking.
The smart thing — the only sensible thing — was to turn around, retrace her steps to recognizable ground, and get home before full dark fell. She knew this. She told her feet to turn.
They did not turn.
What stopped her was the sound.
It came from behind an iron door set deep into the wall on her left — massive, black, without a handle on this side, the kind of door that was not meant for ordinary use. She would have walked past it. She should have walked past it. But the sound that leaked from its edges was wrong in a way she couldn't name: not a human sound, not an animal sound, but something between the two, a low vibration that seemed to settle into her bones and ask them questions they didn't know how to answer.
Then, beneath that sound, a voice.
She pressed herself against the wall beside the door — later she would not be able to explain why, would not be able to account for the instinct that said *listen* instead of *run* — and the voice resolved into words.
"...done cleanly. No witnesses, no traceable signature. The other lords will believe it was inter-house conflict."
Another voice, smoother and colder: "And Lord Vayne's household?"
"Disbanded. Scattered. By morning there will be nothing left to investigate."
A pause. Then a third voice — this one different from the others in a way that made the hair on Eira's arms rise. It was too still, too measured, carrying the particular quality of something that had learned to approximate human speech a very long time ago and had not quite forgotten that it was performing.
"The vote will swing. The council will have no choice but to authorize the expansion. The eastern territories will fall within the year."
"And the girl? Vayne had a daughter."
"No longer your concern."
Eira's breath was too loud. She could hear it. She pressed her back harder against the stone and thought, with a clarity that surprised her: *I should not be here. I am not here. I heard nothing.*
The iron door opened.
She had no time to run. No time even to think about running. The door swung outward with a silence that was itself unnatural — no creak, no groan, just a terrible weightless swing — and the light that spilled through was not torchlight. It was colder than torchlight, a flat silver illumination that caught her face and left her nowhere to hide.
The figure in the doorway was tall. That was the first thing she registered. Tall in the way of things that had not been designed around human proportions, with a stillness that reminded her less of a person standing and more of a stone monument pretending. He was dressed in black, which was hardly remarkable, but the darkness seemed to gather around him in a way that made the distinction between fabric and shadow uncertain. His eyes, when they found her — and they found her immediately, without searching — were not the eyes of anything she had a word for.
Behind him, in a corridor that stretched back into silver light, she could see other figures. Could see, on the floor, a shape covered with a cloth that had the particular stillness of something that would never move again.
She had seen enough.
She had seen far, far too much.
The figure in the doorway looked at her for a long moment. She looked back. Her body had ceased to be under her command — her feet were rooted, her lungs had forgotten their purpose, her hands were fists at her sides doing nothing useful.
"Well," said a voice from inside — not the figure in the doorway, but someone beyond him, somewhere in the silver corridor. A voice that carried the same inhuman stillness as the third voice she had heard, but layered over it was something even older, something that made the others sound almost warm by comparison. "It appears we have a witness."
The figure in the doorway did not move. He continued to look at her with those eyes that were not eyes in any sense she understood, and she had the terrible feeling that he was deciding something — running calculations she couldn't see, arriving at conclusions she couldn't predict.
"Come inside," he said.
It was not a request.
Eira Voss, who was ordinary and quietly resilient and had never in her life done anything worth remarking upon, took one step forward into the silver light and thought very clearly: *I am going to die in here.*
She was wrong about that.
She was wrong about a great many things, that night.
But she was right about one: nothing that came after would ever be ordinary again.