The warehouse district at night, with the watch posts empty, had the feel of something stuck in the throat. It wasn't real silence, because the city never gave him that, but a specific lack in the places where voices should have been and where the illegal network had usually kept a low, constant watch across these streets for decades.
The militia had cleared the route without alerting the building ahead, which was the point. A lamp burned in the second-floor window of the warehouse, and the glow felt odd for a storage facility at this hour. Someone had put it there so it would show from the street.
Eadric moved at a pace that was too composed to be casual. He knew the route the way he knew every unofficial contract in the city, thoroughly and professionally, in a way that separated knowing from choosing.
He had the signs and the passwords. He had made himself useful in both directions for as long as both directions had existed in Ashmark, and tonight he was the door between them.
