The night was nearly spent when Constance climbed down the steps of a deserted butcher’s shop in the lower town, heading out onto the road. She breathed deep behind her brass grille, turning the wheel on the mask to bring the physical world into focus again. She’d searched the farthest reaches of the crypts—the rat-infested warren of humble passages filled with the bodies of the poor. Space was at a premium in the lower town’s tombs, and a number of families could not afford the full services of the morticians. The result had been … unpleasant. Constance was longing for a bath. She started to climb the steep path up to the castle, her boots sliding occasionally on the damp cobblestones speckled with moss. Somewhere in the tangle of streets she heard a man shout in anger, a woman sobbing. She quickened her pace. A better person might have helped, she reflected.

I am not such a person. She had made her peace with that long ago.

In fact, she was so relieved to be on her way back to her rooms that she almost didn’t care that she had found nothing. Almost.

Another network of caves filled with the dead—and only the dead. No magic but the spell itself. No beating heart of a storm cloud close to maturity. She suspected it had hidden itself somewhere it thought it would never be found. But she’d hoped, for once, for a little luck. She’d now searched the crypts under the castle and the upper town and the lower town. She could search the crypts forever—they were vast and many-leveled, and impossibly complex—but something was telling her that if the spell’s heart were still down there, she’d have found it already. She had to change her approach.

But how? Her spirits sank at her own lack of inspiration. What if I never find it? a small, bitter voice inside her mind whispered.

Then all this has been for nothing, said a stronger voice. Your betrayal. Your deceit. Your theft. The sacrifice of the life you built. You must find it.

As she approached the upper town, her and Winton’s conversation with Captain Trudan played over in her mind, mixed up with fears and misgivings—the Justice, his barbaric and disappearing men, the men he had squirreled away somewhere, perhaps plotting on his behalf. The unrest in the lower town was a threat in itself. What was she to do about that? Was there anything she could do—or should she follow her instincts and focus on finding the spell’s heart, even to the neglect of everything else?

Now in the upper town, Constance stopped for a second, listening for noises in the gloom: nothing, except the low grumble of the eternal storm. Even so, she felt half-certain somebody was following her as she continued up the slope.