“Sir,” the secretary said, with a strained smile, “while we strive to be helpful, our commercial records fill quite a large part of this building. I can’t have them all brought to you. Is there something particular you’re interested in?”

“I’ll know it when I see it,” Marcus said.

“I’ll be assisting the colonel,” Raesinia said. The secretary raised an eyebrow at the sight of her, but no more than that—female couriers weren’t common, but they were hardly unheard of. “Just point us in the direction of this year’s local shipping records and we’ll be out of your hair.”

The secretary sighed and indicated a door. “Make sure he doesn’t disturb anything,” he said to Raesinia. “It’s your job’s worth if you leave a mess in there.”

“Of course.” Raesinia looked up at Marcus. “Come along, sir.”

The guard standing beside the door unlocked it with a key from his belt, and closed it again once they’d passed. They found themselves in a wooden-floored corridor leading to a rear staircase, with no one else in sight.

“That’s it?” Marcus said. “I can’t believe that worked.”

“Uniforms.” Raesinia plucked at one of her buttons. “It’s something I learned from Sothe. Get the uniform right and you’re most of the way there. A little bit of bluster usually does the rest. Come on.”

The staircase led straight to the third floor, which was, as the secretary had implied, mostly full of records. Bookshelf after bookshelf of heavy tomes with cheap linen covers stretched to the walls, but Raesinia led Marcus past them without a glance.

“These are all old,” she said. “The Exchange has them copied out and bound after a couple of years. What we want is further on.” She was only repeating things Cora had told her, of course, but it was hard to resist the opportunity to look like an expert. Marcus seemed suitably impressed, and Raesinia grinned to herself.

There was apparently not a great deal of demand for commercial records, since the floor seemed almost abandoned. At the back of the large room of bookshelves, there was a set of corridors leading back into a maze of smaller rooms, each behind a cryptically labeled door. Raesinia, experimentally, tried one with a tacked paper scrap that read GNS0708 and found it full of mountains of ledgers, bound up with twine and adorned with more cryptic messages. The next two doors she tried were solidly locked, and the one after that led to an empty room.

Cora had told her approximately what to look for, but the girl had never been in here herself, and she’d obviously not been versed in the Exchange’s arcane filing system. Raesinia looked around at the rows of identical doors, frustrated.

“What now?” Marcus said, stepping forward to look both ways down a cross-corridor.

“I’m thinking.”

“Think quickly.”