I was no closer to convincing Christophor that he was pursuing the wrong person. Where I found compelling causality, he saw coincidence. Where I found information of interest, he saw the frivolous. We were both looking for evidence strong enough to convict someone of witchcraft, and I understood the severity of those charges and the punishments they brought. But I had to begin somewhere, did I not? Really, I was just following his example from over the years: cases of this kind did not fall from the sky, fully formed, into a man’s lap.

Christophor was once taken with a sculptor he happened across, in a remote village somewhere north of the capital. He stopped and watched the man work at the stone for an hour, maybe more. Chip by chip, with no obvious guide or plan – at least not that Christophor could discern – the sculptor revealed the beginnings of a face from the pale marble. My night-brother was entranced. For my part, I was most impressed that such a feat could be achieved in the dimness of candlelight. But for him it was a more significant experience, I might almost say it was spiritual. He didn’t understand why it held him with such fascination, of course, but I did. It was a metaphor for his own work, and a rather obvious and trite one at that.

But in spite of that triteness, I could not deny feeling something similar. I knew, in much the same way I knew the sun shone beyond my window and that winter was only months away, that Olesca was the source of all this horror. Olesca was the witch we were hunting. He was the calm demeanour waiting inside the stone, and every piece of information I could gather was simply one more blow of the sculptor’s chisel.

With that endeavour at the forefront of my mind, I began rifling through Christophor’s drawers. One contained only letters: those from the capital directly addressed to him, organised in no particular manner that I could tell, and those – fewer in number – from the citizens of Drekenford. There was also not an inconsiderable number of draft letters of his own. These were interesting.

My night-brother was not one to openly admit his failings, nor could he easily ask for assistance. I held the evidence of such in my hands. Letters begun in a clearly forced joviality turned abruptly to an awkward request for aid, and then ended just as abruptly. Even simple requests for books from the Reikovan library were torturously drafted again and again. Those drafted to the chief inspector were tragic. Perhaps a casual reader would not see the fidgeting, the distraction, the self-doubt that was as plain as day to me. Perhaps the chief inspector would not see it either. But if he knew Christophor half as well as I did, he would at least recognise the distress masquerading as functional correspondence.

I looked up from the letters to see my reflection in the room’s mirror.