The big clock on the landing ticked the seconds away slowly. Miriam wandered into the kitchen, opened the door on the big cast-iron cooking range set against the interior wall, and shoveled coal into it. Then she turned the airflow up. It was going to be an extremely cold night, and even though she was warm inside her outdoor gear and flak jacket, Miriam felt the chill in her bones.

Two men, one of them Chinese-looking, in the wrong pubs. She shook her head, remembering a flowering of blood and a long, curved knife in the darkness. The feel of Roland’s hands on her bare skin, making her go hot and cold simultaneously. Iris looking at her with a guarded, startled expression, as unmotherly as Angbard’s supercillious crustiness. These are some of my favorite things, butter-pat sized lumps of soft metal glowing luminous in the twilight of a revolutionary quartermaster’s shop: Glock automatics and diamond rings…

Miriam shook herself. “Damn, if I wait here I’ll doze off for sure.” She stood up, raised the insulating lid on the range, and pushed the kettle onto the hot plate. A cup of coffee would get her going. She picked up her dictaphone and rewound, listening to notes she’d recorded earlier in the day.

“The family founder had six sons. Five of them had families and the Clan is the result. The sixth—what happened to him? Angbard said he went west and vanished. Suppose—suppose he did. Reached the western empire, that is, but did so poor, destitute, out of luck. Along the way he lost his talisman, the locket with the knotwork. If he had to re-create it from memory, so he could world-walk, would be succeed? Would I? I know what happens when I look at the knot, but can I remember exactly what shape it is, well enough to draw it? Let’s try.”

Whirr. Click. New memo. “Nope. I just spent ten minutes and what I’ve drawn does nothing for me. Hmm. So we know that it’s not that easy to recreate from memory, and I know that if you look at the other symbol you go here, not home. Hmm again.”

Whirr. Click. New memo. “I just looked at both lockets. Should have done it earlier, but it’s hard to see them without zoning out and crossing over to the other world. The knots—in the other one, there’s an arc near the top left that threads over the outer loop, not under it, like in the one Iris gave me. So it looks like the assassin’s one is, yeah, a corruption of the original design. So maybe the lost family hypothesis is correct.”

Whirr. Click. New memo. “Why didn’t they keep trying different knots until they found one that worked? One that let them make the rendezvous with the other families?”