And you know the sound of someone pleading for their life, don’t you? Kordas rubbed at his neck absently, frowning. No, now wasn’t the time to think of that. Really? Feels like any time is the right time. You know what you are. And you’re ready to take on more, aren’t you? You know that even in a tightly controlled operation, someone always dies. Accidents happen, but they wouldn’t happen at all if the operation hadn’t been ordered. So are they really accidents? You know the Plan is going to kill people. A lot of people. That’s the real pity in you—you decided you could live with killing a lot of people before you even figured out how many it would be. You know it, and you’re still not stopping.

As if to match his mood, the Copper Apartment shook and rumbled. Another earth-shaker, and even in the City, they never seemed to be very far away.

Help them through, whenever you can.

“All right. I need to think things through. I need to—to find out what all I have to work with. What’s next—Ah. After Court, will any suspicions be raised if I see how you—vrondi, I mean by that—are imprisoned?”

Star paused a long while. “There is a way. A Duke can walk freely in the Annexes, if a pass-token is worn. A pass-token is issued by someone of superior rank to whoever would scry or confront you. Such pass-tokens are held in a drawer of one of the administrative areas we can freely Gate to.”

“And if we aren’t being observed, I can just take one?”

“This one is not empowered to stop you, nor under obligation to alert anyone if you do. More accurately, this one should file an incident report, but the rules stipulate no immediacy, so this one can wait. Indefinitely.”

“So if I happened to pocket one of these pass-tokens—even if we’re scryed from the Palace, they wouldn’t make an issue of it, because a pass-token had to have been authorized by someone above the scryer.”

“Correct, my Lord. This one can tell you that scrying is a job populated by those of very low ambition, operating devices which do most of the work. Thus, in the interest of their own self-preservation, scryers prefer that their superiors never take note of them, unless they have certainty of a violation.”

“Which a Duke, with a pass-token, wouldn’t qualify as. I like it,” Kordas answered. “There is a lot I need to learn yet, about what happens and where. I want to see the Trap so I can disable it somehow, and free any vrondi caught in it right now. It makes sense to me that the Empire would keep a vrondi-trap close to where Dolls are produced.”