Huras eeled his way through the crowd to join them, then Gan, Pe-atep, and Kalen let the crowd follow Lord Ya-tiren and his caravan of refugees, and separated themselves by the simple expedient of standing still while the crowd moved off.

“Hu!” Gan said, scratching his head and looking after them. “I knew my lord was ranked, and highly so, but I never knew that household was so cursed big.” But his kohl-rimmed eyes were bright with interest as two of Lord Ya-tiren’s pretty servants looked back over their shoulders at him, whispered something to each other, and giggled. He didn’t see Oset-re behind him, making doe eyes at both of them.

“There’s more of it than he brought with him if you count all the people on all the estates he owns,” Menet-ka observed wistfully. “He just brought the people he couldn’t leave on his most remote estates, I suspect, and those the Magi would think to use as hostages.”

Kiron tried, for a moment, to think like one of the Magi, then like Lord Ya-tiren, to work out what the Lord might himself have done. “The Magi wouldn’t look at anyone without rank,” he said, after a moment. “So anyone like servants or slaves—less than an Overseer, say—is probably safe enough, even if they’re in my Lord’s household and kinship line. They don’t trust their servants or underlings with anything, so they wouldn’t think Lord Ya-tiren would either.”

“Speaking from personal experience, to those of a certain mind, anyone less than an Overseer is invisible,” Gan observed. “Simply not worth troubling your mind about.”

Oset-re nodded. “Scarcely more than a living abshati, if it comes down to it.”

Gan shrugged. “And if I were Lord Ya-tiren, I’d feel safe enough in leaving some of those behind so long as I got them out of Alta City. Out of sight, and out of immediate reach, is pretty much out of mind.”

“Something about the Magi is worth thinking about,” Menet-ka added after a moment. “They don’t travel outside the Third Ring. Ever. I’m not sure the remote estates really exist to them, except as an abstract concept. So . . . if we needed to, we might be able to use those estates to help funnel people out of the city, or to hide people on, because the Magi might not think to look there.”

They walked on in silence under a sky blossoming with stars. And something else odd occurred to Kiron in that moment. In Alta and in Mefis, both, people had been afraid of the night, afraid of the hungry ghosts that haunted it, the spirits of those who could not cross the Star Bridge into the afterlife. Sanctuary of all places should have been awash with haunts.

So why was it that no one feared to walk in the night here?