During lunch, Ram Odin kept them entertained with lies about life on the road. Maybe some of the stories were from Ram Odin’s earlier life, or maybe they were well-known tales from Earth. They were all new to Rigg, but he also didn’t care, because he was tracing all Jobo’s movements.

In the old days, he could only see paths, until Umbo slowed down time—or sped up his perceptions, they had never really decided about that. But “seeing paths” wasn’t the right term, because he could do it with his eyes closed, and could examine the paths behind him, or beyond walls.

Now, with the facemask, he could speed up his own perceptions, with more precision than was possible with Umbo’s help. The paths were never truly paths now, if he looked at them aright, but a continuous blurred shape of the person moving about. And if he sped himself up more, the blurs became the person clearly doing whatever it was he did at that hour, of that day, in that place.

So he knew that as soon as the hamlet was emptied out, Jobo slipped along behind the houses till she came to the ­mayor’s house, and went in through the back door. She found the mayor waiting for her in his own upstairs bedroom—she seemed to know the way—and that was where all her buttons popped off in his eagerness. Afterward, she stayed to sew them all back on again, but there were only four. The mayor was all over that room, trying to find where the fifth button had bounced.

Rigg closed his eyes and slowed things down—or sped himself up—even more. Now they barely moved, but he could see the buttons pop off one by one. The ones they found easily. And that fifth one. It took a bounce under the wardrobe and must have lodged on some slat or in some corner because it didn’t hit the floor again. Looking under the wardrobe wouldn’t help. Even sliding it out, unless you tipped it or hit it to dislodge the button.

Well, Bak’s worst suspicions were certainly confirmed, and if Rigg found the button in the mayor’s house—well, that would only be possible if the mayor let him in.

But if I make for his house, he’ll bar me from it. That won’t help—Bak will only be all the more certain that his wife and the mayor were up to something.

Ram Odin must have guessed as much as Rigg now knew, because he was telling the story of a woman caught in adultery who had to wear a red letter on her clothing, always, the first letter of “adultery” in the language of the place, only when she died, the letter was also a scar on her chest, as if the letter had burned its way into her heart.