Six weeks I've been trying to identify V.A.
Six weeks of dead ends, burned contacts, and one very uncomfortable conversation with a records clerk who turns out to have more loyalty to his employer than to the extremely generous bribe I'm offering. Six weeks of a name sitting in Cassen's ledger like a splinter I can't reach. Just regular payments, significant amounts, no corresponding service, no paper trail that goes anywhere useful.
Whatever V.A. is being paid for, it isn't silk.
I spread the ledger copy across Mira's kitchen table at two in the morning and put my finger on the line.
"This one," I say.
Mira leans over my shoulder, squinting. She's my forger – the best in Varenthis, which means the best I've met, which means the best – and she has a gift for finding the thing that doesn't belong. Twenty years of making false documents has taught her exactly how real ones are supposed to look, which makes her extraordinarily good at spotting when something real has been made to look false.
She's quiet for longer than I like.
"Mira."
"I'm thinking."
"Think faster."
She straightens up and crosses her arms, which is never a good sign. "The payment structure. You see it?"
I look again. Monthly. Consistent. Not round numbers but specific, irregular amounts that vary slightly each time. "It's not a retainer."
"It's not a retainer," she agrees. "Retainers are round. This is reimbursement, plus a margin. Someone is being paid back for something they spent, with a percentage on top." She taps the column. "And it's been going for four years."
Four years. Cassen has been running this for four years and no one has noticed.
Or someone noticed, and that someone is currently missing their tongue.
"The initials," I say. "V.A. Cross-reference against every name in the Church registry, the merchant rolls, and the noble house records. Anyone with those initials who has any connection to Cassen, Voss, or the eastern warehouse district."
"That's a lot of names."
"Pick the ones that would ruin everything if they came out," I say. "That'll narrow it down."
She gives me the look she reserves for requests that are simultaneously reasonable and exhausting. "By when?"
"Yesterday," I say. "But I'll accept morning."
𖢒𖢒𖢒𖢒𖢒𖢒𖢒𖢒𖢒
I don't sleep.
Instead I do what I do when I need to think, which is walk. Varenthis at three in the morning is a different city. Quieter, the gilded surfaces gone grey in the dark, the canals black and still. The perfume factories are closed and the city finally smells like itself. Stone and water and old ambition.
I'm in the Archive District before I realize I've been heading there.
The Church of Purity maintains public reading rooms in six locations across Varenthis. The one in the Archive District is the oldest, having pre-empire construction, all heavy stone and narrow windows. It keeps records that the newer branches don't. Historical records. Founding documents. The kind of paperwork that accumulates over centuries and becomes invisible through familiarity.
It's also, technically, open all night for the use of Church scholars.
I am not a Church scholar. But the reading room attendant at three in the morning is always either asleep or deeply uninterested in his surroundings, and I have a very convincing scholar's credential courtesy of Mira's particular talents.
The attendant is asleep.
I go in.
The historical records occupy the back third of the ground floor. Shelves that haven't been reorganized in decades, dust thick enough to read like a calendar, the particular smell of paper that has been slowly becoming something else for a very long time. I have a specific section in mind: Church founding grants, two hundred years back, the period when the Purity doctrine was first being institutionalized.
If the Church has been engineering sins rather than discovering them – if Devotion is what people looked like before, as the fragments I've found suggest – then the mechanism had to have started somewhere. Some decision, some process, some moment when someone looked at human nature and decided to rewrite it.
I want to find that moment.
I'm on the third shelf when I hear footsteps.
Soft, deliberate, the careful placement of someone who knows how to move quietly and is doing it on purpose. I go still. Listen. One person, coming from the east reading room, not from the entrance.
Which means they were already inside when I got here.
I step back into the shadow between two shelves and wait.
She appears at the end of the row with a candle in one hand and a folder of documents tucked under her arm, and for one moment she doesn't see me and just stands there reading something with the focused expression of a person who has forgotten what time it is.
Then she looks up.
We stare at each other across ten feet of dusty historical archive at three in the morning.
"You're not a Church scholar," Sera says.
"Neither are you."
She looks at the shelf I've been searching. Back at me. Something shifts in her expression. Not surprise, more like a particularly unwelcome confirmation. "The founding grants," she says. "You're looking at the founding grants."
"I'm looking at everything," I say. "What are you looking at?"
She considers me for a moment. Then, with the air of someone making a calculated decision rather than a generous one, she holds out the folder.
I take it.
The top document is a personnel record. Old, formal script, the ink faded to brown. A name at the top: Vicar Aldous, with a posting date and a commission from the High Cardinal's office, dated four years ago.
V.A.
Vicar Aldous.
A Church vicar, quietly commissioned four years ago, being paid by Davor Cassen – a merchant with no Church affiliation – in carefully irregular installments that look like reimbursements.
"He's a Lector," Sera says quietly. "One of the Church's controlled ones. But someone's been paying him privately on the side for four years. I found a secondary ledger in the assessor's personal effects – the one who was killed. He'd been tracking these payments for months before he died." She pauses. "He was going to bring it to the High Cardinal."
"He didn't make it," I say.
"He didn't make it."
The archive is very quiet around us. Candlelight, old paper, the distant sound of water in the canal outside. I look at the personnel record and think about a Lector in Cassen's pocket, about four years of payments, about a dead assessor with no tongue.
About what Cassen might need a Lector for badly enough to pay him for four years.
Reading people. Screening people. Finding the ones who can't be trusted, the ones who are about to cause problems, the ones who know too much and need to be identified before they talk.
The assessor knew too much. Aldous identified him.
Which means Aldous has already been used to find at least one person who needed to disappear.
Which means Aldous can be used to find others.
Which means that if Cassen knows the ledger is in play and if he knows someone has it and is reading it and has found the V.A. line–
"We need to leave," I say.
Sera frowns. "I'm not finished–"
"The ledger copy Voss sent last night. How many people knew it was being delivered?"
A beat. "My investigation is contained. Three people total."
"One of those three people works for Cassen," I say. "Or one of Voss's people saw the delivery and reported it. Either way–" I'm already moving toward the exit, keeping my voice low. "Cassen has a Lector who can identify threats. If he knows the ledger is out, he already knows someone is reading it. Aldous would have been put to work by this morning identifying who."
Sera is right behind me, folder under her arm, candle out. "That's a significant assumption."
"Check your door when you get home tonight," I say. "You'll know if I'm wrong."
We come out into the Archive District's main street. Empty, cobblestones grey under a cloud-covered sky, the canal to our left black and still.
I see the man at the end of the street one second before Sera does.
He isn't doing anything conspicuous. Standing, hands in his coat pockets, facing a shop window. But the shop window is dark and he isn't looking at his reflection – he's watching it. Watching the street behind him.
Watching us.
"Don't look," I say quietly. "Walk left."
We walk left.
He follows.
"There'll be another one," I say. "There always is."
"You sound experienced."
"I sound like someone who has been on the wrong side of this before." I glance sideways at her. Still no brand. Still that faint trace of something that isn't sin, steady and unreadable in the dark. "The folder. Is that the only copy of Aldous's record?"
"Yes."
"Keep it on you." I turn us into a narrower street. There's older construction here, the buildings close together, overhanging upper floors turning the lane into something almost tunnel-like. Better. Less line of sight. "The man behind us isn't here to ask questions. Cassen doesn't ask questions at this stage."
"He kills people," Sera says. Flat, matter-of-fact. "I know how Cassen operates."
"Then you know we have tonight to do something with what we have, because after tonight it gets considerably harder." I stop at a junction and look at her directly. "I need Mira's findings on Aldous. You need what's in those ledgers. Neither of us gets out of this cleanly alone."
She meets my eyes. Steady, calculating, that particular stillness I'm starting to recognize – the recalculation, the weighing.
"You'll share everything," she says. "Not selectively. Not on a need-to-know basis. Everything."
"Everything relevant to bringing down Cassen's operation," I say. "Which is everything. Yes."
Another pause. The footsteps behind us are getting closer.
"Your forger," she says. "She's good?"
"Best in the city."
"We're going to need new identities before morning." She starts walking again, faster now, in the direction I've already clocked as the fastest route out of the Archive District. "Try to keep up."
I look back once. The man from the shop window has reached the junction. He's stopped – and now there are two of them, talking quietly, and even in the dark and the distance I can see the moment they make a decision.
They start moving.
I keep up.