She came out with a teapot and two cups on a tray. Set it down on the table between them. Poured him a cup.

“You sure you want this?” she asked. Skeptical.

“Yes.” Took the tea gladly. His head still hurt. The tea tasted different. Better. Drove out the lingering taste of the memory bulb.

“I haven’t looked at the lists,” she said, sitting opposite him in a low wooden chair with a green blanket atop it.

“Didn’t expect you to yet,” Finch replied. “What about the symbol?”

“Now, that I did get around to,” she said. “If only because it was easy.”

“I’ve seen it, I’ve just never known what it meant.”

“You’re not alone. We know more about what the symbol is associated with than what it means.”

A broken version was scrawled by the gray caps as a warning, Rathven told him. At the beginning of the city’s history, when the gray caps sent back the eyes of Ambergris’s founder, the whaling captain John Manzikert, on the old altar now drowned by the bay. Manzikert, who had slaughtered so many gray caps and driven them underground.

“It looked like this,” she said, drawing it for him:

It had figured prominently in the recovered journals of the monk Samuel Tonsure, Manzikert’s fellow traveler underground. Had appeared in unbroken forms at various times since, at crucial moments in history.

“Give me an example,” Finch said.

“The Silence,” Rathven said. “That symbol, according to the accounts I have, appeared everywhere, all across the city.”

Finch gave her a sharp look. “I never heard that.” But an intense feeling overtook him, telling him that he had known. Just forgotten.

Rathven shrugged. “I’m just telling you what’s in the histories. Half the books down here mention the Silence, so it’s not hard to track down.”

The Silence. Seven hundred years ago, twenty-five thousand people had vanished from the city. The only survivors had been aboard the ruler’s vast fleet of fishing ships, fifty miles downriver at the time. Many a horror story had been written about the Silence. It had shaped Ambergrisian life ever since. Especially attitudes toward the gray caps. Everyone had believed the gray caps had done it. When they’d Risen, some people said it was because of Manzikert’s genocide against them, and because of something they hadn’t finished during the Silence. Revenge, after waiting patiently for centuries. Of course, who could confirm that? The gray caps said less now that they were aboveground than when they’d been below.

“A broken symbol means a broken pact, some believe,” Rathven said.

“I found it on the back of a scrap of paper used to scribble a note. Torn from a book. It probably isn’t connected to the case.” Wanted to move on for reasons he couldn’t identify.

“Probably.” In a tone that said, Why waste my time asking me to research it then?

Took the photo out of his pocket. “I want you to have this while you research the list.”