They had the enthusiasm but not the lineage. The faith rested on the standard religious pillars of mob incitement and misogyny to get its enforcement done, but so far it seemed there’d been either no time or no need for a warrior class to emerge. They were amateurs.

So far.

I started with the cheaper hotels on the Expanse-side waterfront. It seemed a safe bet that the priest had tracked me to a sighting at Dzurinda Tudjman Sklep before we left for Millsport. Then, when the trail went cold, he’d have just sat it out. Patience is a sterling virtue in assassins, you’ve got to know when to move but you’ve also got to be prepared to wait. Those who are paying you will understand this, or can be made to.

You wait and you cast about for clues. A daily trip down to Sunshine Fun Jetties would feature, a careful check of traffic, especially traffic out of the ordinary. Like matt, low-profile pirate skimmers amidst the bright and bloated tourist boats that habitually used the moorage. The only thing that didn’t fit the pro-killer profile was the open approach to the pilot and that I put down to faith-based arrogance.

Faint, pervasive reek of rotting belaweed, poorly-kept façades and grumpy staff. Narrow streets, sliced with angles of hot sunlight. Damp, debris strewn corners that only ever dried out in the hours around noon.

A desultory coming and going of tourists who already looked miserable and exhausted with their cut-rate attempts at fun in the sun. I wandered through it all, trying to let the Envoy sense do the work, trying to suppress my headache and the pounding hatred that surged for release underneath.

I found him well before evening.

It wasn’t a hard trace to make. Kossuth was still relatively unplagued by the New Revelation, and people noticed them the way you’d notice a Millsport accent in Watanabe’s. I asked the same simple questions in every place. Fake surfer speak, lifted in easily replayed chunks from the conversations around me over the last few weeks, got me inside the defences of enough low-paid workers to trace the priest’s appearances. A judicial seasoning of low-value credit chips and a certain amount of cold-eyed bullying did the rest. By the time the heat started to leach out of the afternoon, I was standing in the cramped lobby of a combined hostel and boat-and-board hire place called The Palace of Waves. Rather inappropriately, it was built out over the sluggish waters of the Expanse on ancient mirrorwood pilings, and the smell of the belaweed rotting beneath came up through the floor.