Losa shook her head in disgust. “There you go. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going, all this has me in such a muddle. I heard him crying—moaning, that’s the word I meant. Here, go down this passage.”

“But you said he was in the old countinghouse tower—isn’t it that way?”

“You see? I can’t think straight at all.” Losa pointed a dirty finger at the low bulk of the almshouse where it hugged the inside of the seawall, the arched doorway of its single squat tower showing dark among the vines like a missing tooth in a bearded mouth. “Not the countinghouse tower but the almshouse tower, the old almshouse. There. He’s there, I promise you.”

Losa guided her into the shadowed antechamber of the building, which had been abandoned and all its poor relocated a few years before the siege. The mosaics on the floor were chipped and scratched so that other than the hammer-shaped object in one’s hands, it was impossible to tell which of the Trigon brothers was which. Qinnitan suddenly had the awful feeling that the old woman had tricked her for some reason, but then she saw Pigeon staring back at her from the shadows of the stairwell with his eyes wide. Her heart seemed to swell and grow light again. She rushed toward him but he did not move, although she saw his jaw pumping as though he would have much to say if given his tongue back.

“Pigeon?” Something was wrong, or at least odd: she couldn’t see his arms. As she moved closer she saw that they were behind him, as though he had something hidden for her there. A few more steps and she could see that they were tied at the wrists, and the cord looped through the latch of the heavy stairwell door. She reached him, felt him trembling with terror beneath her hands, and turned toward Losa. “What…?”

The old woman was pulling off her face.

As Qinnitan stared in terror, Losa scraped the skin off her cheeks, peeling it away in long, knubbled strips. She had straightened up, and now seemed a head taller and a great deal more solid. She wasn’t old. She wasn’t even a woman.

Qinnitan was so shocked that she lost control of her bladder; a trickle of urine ran down her legs. “Who…what…?”

“Who doesn’t matter,” the man said in perfect Xixian. Underneath the waxy remnants of false flesh his skin was nearly as pale as King Olin’s had been, but unlike Olin, this man had not a flicker of kindness in his eyes, nor a flicker of anything else: for all the expression he wore, his face might have been carved on a statue. “The autarch sent me.” He straightened up, shredding the shapeless dress he had worn to reveal man’s clothing beneath. “Don’t scream or I’ll slit the child’s throat. By the way, if you decide to sacrifice the boy and make a run for it, you should know that I can hit a rabbit with this,”—he lifted his hand and a long, sharp dagger appeared in it like a conjuror’s trick—“from a hundred paces away. I can put it in the back of your knee and you’ll never walk without a crutch, or I can put it between two of your chines and you’ll never walk again at all. But I would prefer not to carry you all the way to the Golden One, so if you do as I ask, you’ll keep your health.” He kicked away the remnants of the dress, then used the knife blade to cut away a sack he had tied to his waist with rags to give him an old woman’s sagging belly.