The Keepers Hall was less imposing than I had thought it would be, and more mercurial, with windows at oddly staggered intervals and riotous façades, rippling balconies that must have been made of stone yet looked as fluid as water. Turrets sprang from odd places and were jewel boxes of stained glass. The sun was hot on my head. My vision dazzled. The snakelike edges of the building seemed to bend, and when I glanced again, the windows appeared to have reordered themselves and were now shaped like stars where before they had been melting circles, the tops round and the bottoms deformed. Sometimes I saw the present and sometimes the past.

I slipped a hand into my dress pocket, where I ran a finger along the packet of poison Aden had given me. It rested against Sid’s letter, which I could not read yet could not leave behind. The poison was the only weapon I had. I didn’t know if it would be of any use, but it reassured me to have it, perhaps like Sid’s dagger might reassure her, wherever she was now. I remembered how difficult it was to unstrap the belt, and how amused she was at my fumbling. She had slid it undone so that it fell heavily to the bed.

At the entrance, whose open double doors were slick with red paint as shiny as a mirror, dour militiamen stood. They barred my way.

“This building is reserved for councilmen,” one of them said.

“Go prepare for your party,” another said, his voice just careful enough not to be a sneer. I had always feared the militia and resented the power they had over me, but now knew that they were just Middlings who had been hired as all Middlings were to do work the High Kith disdained. I saw that they must have had wishes and fears and resentments of their own.

“But I am a councilman,” I said calmly.

Their brows wrinkled. They stared, then laughed.

“I will show you.” I produced my High-Kith passport. One of them accepted it, sliding a look his partner’s way, wondering where the joke was. I felt power prickle along my skin. It felt like panic, or pleasure. It felt the way the dark sky looks when lightning illuminates the clouds, giving the flat black sky sudden dimension.

“The last page in the booklet,” I told the man. “The one you just saw held the necessary document for entrance.”

“Oh,” he said, flipping back to it. “I see.”

“The person you saw,” I said to both of them, “the one who just walked up to you. You might have thought, because of a trick of the light, that you saw a woman, but he was a young man from a good family, well known, well liked, dressed as he should have been in his red robe.”

“Why, so it was,” one of the men said to the other.