“Well, it might be because sitting in a stuffy room and listening to people complain is the opposite of discovery.”

“No!” Steris said. “Every meeting is a mystery, Lord Waxillium. What are their motives? What quiet lies are they telling, and what truths can you discover?” She tossed his sphere back to him, then took her suitcase and set it on the small cocktail table in the center of the cabin. “House finances are the same.”

“House finances,” he said, flatly.

“Yes!” Steris said. She fished in the suitcase, getting out a ledger. “See, look.” She flipped it open and pointed at an account.

He looked at the page, then up at her. Such excitement, he thought. But… ledgers?

“Three clips,” he said. “The tables are different by three clips. I’m sorry, Steris, it’s a meaningless amount. I don’t see—”

“It’s not meaningless,” she said, scooting over to sit beside him. “Don’t you see? The answer is here somewhere, in this book. Aren’t you even curious? The mystery of where they went?” She nodded to him, excited.

“Well, I suppose you could show me how to look,” he said. He dreaded the idea, but then, she looked so happy.

“Here,” she said, handing him a ledger, then fishing out another. “Look at goods received. Compare the dates and the payouts to the ledger! I’m going to study maintenance.”

He glanced toward the window in their door, half expecting Wayne to be out there in the hallway, snickering himself senseless at the prank. But Wayne was not there. This was no prank. Steris grabbed her own ledgers and attacked them with as much ferocity as a hungry man might a good steak.

Wax sighed, sat back, and started looking through the numbers.

6

Marasi stopped on the image of the monster.

It was evening; people chatted softly around her in the dining car, and the train rolled around a picturesque bend, but for a moment she was transfixed by that image. A sketch of violent, rough lines that somehow conveyed a terrible dread. Most of the pages in the stack VenDell had delivered contained transcripts of questions answered—or, more often, not answered—by the wounded kandra.

This was different. A wild sketch using two colors of pencil to depict a terrible visage. A burning red face, a distorted mouth, horns and spikes streaking out along the rim. But black eyes, drawn like voids on the red skin. It looked like a childhood terror ripped right out of a nightmare.

The bottom of the page had a caption. ReLuur’s sketch of the creature described on 8/7/342. Yesterday.

The next page was an interview.

VenDell: Describe to us again the thing you saw.

ReLuur: The beast.

VenDell: Yes, the beast. It guarded the bracers?

ReLuur: No. No! It was before. Fallen from the sky.

VenDell: The sky?

ReLuur: The darkness above. It is of the void. It has no eyes. It looks at me! It’s looking at me now!