Varath smelled of salt and anxiety.

The salt was the natural consequence of the coast, the mineral weight of sea air that settled on everything in the city and gave its stonework a weathered, patient look, as though the buildings had been shaped not only by their architects but by the continuous attention of the weather. The anxiety was newer. It had been accumulating over six weeks of accelerating Fading, depositing itself in the population the way the sea deposited its minerals in stone: gradually, thoroughly, impossible to remove without taking something essential from the structure it had entered.

The carriage came in through the southern gate a little after the fourth bell and moved into the commercial quarter, where the buildings ran to three and four stories and the ground-floor windows displayed the goods of a rich trading town. Silks hung in the windows of the cloth merchants. Brass lamps and carved boxes crowded the shelves of the curiosity shops. Fish lay in glittering rows on beds of ice. And yet everything was wrong in the way things go wrong when something large has shifted in a people's understanding of themselves. Too many men stood still. Too many women stood at stalls with a purse in one hand and the other turned palm-up, held a little apart from the body, as if it might at any moment be found to have changed. The vendors were at their posts and the money was changing hands, but the transactions had a quality of distraction that ordinary commerce did not carry.

Naia watched a man at a fruit stand turn his left wrist over while he counted out coins. Checking. The woman behind the stand noticed, and looked quickly at her own wrist, and the two of them exchanged a brief glance that said everything neither of them wished to say aloud.

"The public knowledge is well ahead of the official statements," she said.

"It usually is." Daven had been watching the street from across the carriage with the same attention she was applying to it, and she had the strange feeling, not for the first time, that they were frequently looking at the same things and reaching compatible conclusions by completely different roads. "People feel a crisis before the language for it arrives."

"The language is three weeks behind the data. I submitted the revised figures a fortnight ago."

"Official language keeps a different schedule than data."

She did not argue, because it was true, and because she knew its truth from long experience: from years of submitting analyses that the court received, considered, and processed at the speed of institutions chiefly organized around the preservation of their own stability.

The regional Registry office was in the government quarter, a broad building of grey stone with carved lintels and the Registry seal over the door, a small courtyard visible through iron gates. A woman in her fifties waited in the courtyard with her hands folded in front of her. She was spare and upright, with a long face and steel-colored hair pinned in a severe knot, and she wore the plain blue robe of a senior scholar with the unselfconscious ease of someone who had worn it for thirty years.

She had the expression of a person who had been waiting for help for some time and had prepared herself to be disappointed by whatever form it took.

"Scholar Solven." She bowed, briefly and correctly. "Dara Sein. I wrote to you on the ninth."

"I read your letters," Naia said. "All seven of them."

"Seven? I sent five." Dara Sein paused. "The registrar in the old quarter must have written two on his own."

"He did. The last one was the most useful."

Something moved in the older woman's face, an adjustment that happened within the first minutes of conversation and that Naia had come to recognize in the field: a recalibration, the settling of expectation into something nearer to cautious investment. Dara Sein looked at the Commander, who had stepped down behind Naia and was standing a little way off, his hands behind his back, giving the courtyard its first inspection.

"And the Guard," she said.

"The Commander of the Veil Guard, Daven Kairu. He will be handling the administrative side of the investigation."

"I am to speak with the governor's office, the harbor master, and the municipal clerks," Daven said. "I would appreciate whatever introductions you can arrange."

Dara Sein looked at him for a moment longer than courtesy required. "You are younger than I expected," she said.

"People say that."

"I do not mean it as criticism. The last Guard officer who came here was sixty and wanted to know whether we had considered praying." She turned and led them toward the door. "I have already begun a note on whom to put you with."

The division of labor settled itself at once. Naia would work with Dara Sein and the regional scholars on the records: cross-referencing the local rolls against the central registry, mapping the distribution of the Fading within the city. Daven would work the administrative side, the officials and the institutions, learning what response had been attempted and what resources remained. There was no conversation about it. It simply emerged, the way a river finds its channel, and she noted with faint dissatisfaction that it felt natural, which in her experience meant it reflected an actual difference in competence rather than an imposed structure.

She was given a small office on the second floor, with a window that looked down on the harbor. The room was sparsely furnished, a desk and two chairs and a shelf of ledgers, and the sea was close enough that she could hear the ropes knocking against the masts. She set out her instruments. She opened her first file. She did not look at the water.

The morning's work produced three things she had not expected.

The first was a pattern within the city that did not show in the regional data. When she mapped the Fading cases street by street, they were not scattered at random across the districts. They were concentrated in two quarters, the old merchant quarter and the new port district, at rates far higher than anywhere else in Varath. The difference was large enough to demand an explanation, and none was visible in the demographic tables.

The second was a pattern inside the first. Among the affected Bonds, an unusually large proportion belonged to couples who had met through the Registry's active facilitation program, in which Registry staff helped people who had identified each other in the rolls to make contact. The facilitated couples were fading faster than the ones who had found each other on their own.

The third was a name. She had not been looking for it. It appeared in a file she had pulled for an unrelated purpose, in a list of confirmed Bond-holders resident in the coastal district, and she read it before she registered what she was reading.

Erev Solan. Resident three years. Bond intact as of the last confirmation.

She looked at it for the length of one breath.

Then she turned the page, and went on to the next entry, and found that she had read it without understanding a word. She went back and read it again. It was a grain merchant's widow with a mark in good standing. She wrote it down.

At the second bell of the afternoon, she went out.

She had planned the interview circuit with Dara Sein, a series of meetings with community leaders and affected households that would take her through the principal districts in a sensible order. It was the sort of ground-level observation that aggregate data could not supply, and she conducted it as she conducted everything: with specific questions, careful listening, and notation of each answer in exactly the form it was given, before interpretation could contaminate it.

A rope-maker in the old quarter told her that three of his apprentices had come to work with blank wrists in a single week and that the youngest had wept openly at the bench. A priestess at a harbor shrine described a procession of women who came each morning to place flowers before an empty niche, the niche where the Bond-lamps were kept, and who stood there silently for a long time and then went home. A grandfather, nearly blind, said he could not see the mark on his wrist anymore and had no way of knowing whether it was there, and that he had stopped asking his daughter because she always said yes and he could hear that it was a kindness.

She wrote it all down. Her hand did not shake. The rope-maker's apprentices, the priestess, the grandfather: each went into the notebook in the same neutral script, and each left behind a small cold weight that she did not enter in any column.

A community leader in the new port district mentioned a family on the far edge of the quarter whose Bond had gone in an unusual way, not in the course of a quarrel but in the course of a reconciliation, and she wrote the address down and followed it.

She did not tell anyone she was going.

It was a thing she had noted in her notebook as a deviation from the planned route and had not formally reported to anyone, because in the context of an investigation she had managed alone for months, the reflex of telling another party where she was going was simply not established. She knew the terms of the agreement they had not yet written. She would have been able to say so, had she been asked. No one asked. The afternoon was bright and mild, the quay was loud with gulls, and she went deeper into the port district than she had meant to, past warehouses and rope walks and a row of taverns with their shutters propped open to the sun.

The alley was narrow and ran between a chandler's yard and a salt warehouse. It was a shortcut. A boy had told her so.

There were four of them. They were sitting on upturned crates with a jug passing between them, large men in the loose canvas of dockworkers, and they had been drinking for some time. They looked up at the sound of her step. One of them, a heavy man with a scar through one eyebrow, rose to his feet.

"Scholar," he said. His voice was thick, friendly, and not at all friendly. "The Registry sends scholars. Is that not nice."

"I am passing through," Naia said. "I do not wish to disturb you."

"Passing through." He glanced at his companions, and one of them laughed. "Have you come to tell us about our wrists, Scholar? Have you come to look?"

"I have come to ask a family about their experience. If you will let me by, I will leave you to your afternoon."

"We had a wife," said another of them, from the crates, and he said it quite gently, not as a threat, and the gentleness was somehow worse. "Hers went last week. She is still in the house. She says nothing." He lifted the jug. "You people said it would be fine."

"I said nothing of the kind."

"You people said."

She was not frightened. It was an odd thing, to note it with such clarity. She was aware of her pulse, ordinary and slow, and of her feet, planted on the cobbles in the way she had been taught by a teacher long ago, and of the narrowness of the alley, which ran thirty paces to either end. She was aware of the heavy man's hand, which had come to rest on the wall beside her shoulder. She did not think he meant to hurt her. She thought he meant her to understand that someone was angry, and that she was the nearest person from the institution that had let him down.

And she thought, with a flash of something close to anger on her own account: he is right. She had no reply to that. It was the one thing she could not have said aloud.

She opened her mouth to say something that was not a defense.

"Scholar Solven."

He had spoken from the alley mouth, in a voice not raised, and the sound of it went through the narrow space the way a bell goes through a still room.

Daven stood at the entrance with his gloves in one hand. He did not touch his sword. He did not step forward. He looked at the four men with the quality of attention that soldiers developed, an attention that communicated without words a thorough assessment of the situation and complete confidence that it lay well within his powers to manage.

The heavy man looked at him. His hand left the wall.

"Commander," said the man on the crate. He sounded sober very suddenly. "We were only talking to the lady."

"I can see that." Daven did not move. "She has an appointment on the Weaver's Steps. She is late."

There was a silence in which four dock laborers considered, with the practicality of men who had spent their lives estimating the weight of things, whether this was a battle worth having. It lasted perhaps five seconds. The man with the jug set it down. The heavy man stepped back and made a rough gesture that was neither a bow nor an insult.

"Your wife," Daven said, to the one who had spoken. His voice had dropped, and it was the same voice, but there was something different in it. "I am sorry. Go home to her. If she will not speak, sit with her. That is all most people need."

The man looked at him. For a moment his face was very young. Then he nodded, once, and turned away, and the others followed him toward the far end of the alley, and the passage was empty.

Naia let out a breath she had not realized she was holding.

"Are you following me?" she said.

"My task is to see that the investigation is completed." He came forward, unhurried. "If the lead investigator enters an unplanned area without notice, completing the investigation requires knowing where she is."

"The terms are not agreed."

"They are not."

"Then I have not broken any."

"No." He looked at her notebook, held tightly against her chest in both arms, and then at her face. "Did you get what you needed from your contact?"

"I have not yet reached the house."

"Then we can proceed to it. I will walk with you."

It was not a request, but it was not an order, either. It had a shape she did not have a name for. She stood in the alley with the noise of the harbor falling away behind her, and found that she was angry with him, briefly and with no real conviction, because he had been right to come and she had been wrong not to say, and because the anger had nowhere to go.

"Thank you," she said. It came out stiffer than she meant.

"You are welcome."

They walked out into the light. The quay had resumed its noise, the gulls and the rope-knock and the cry of a fishwife selling the last of the morning's catch. Neither of them said anything for half a street, and then she became aware that he had placed himself on her right.

Not casually. Not in the way of a man who happened to be walking on the right side of a narrow lane. Directly on her right, half a pace forward, at an angle that put his body between her and the traffic of the quay and gave him an unobstructed line to the street ahead. She had read enough tactical literature to know what the position meant. She had spent enough time near soldiers to understand what it communicated about his assessment of the environment.

She said nothing. He offered no explanation. They walked through Varath in the mild afternoon with the sea smell all around them, and she did not look at him, and he did not look at her, and the pavement beneath their feet was warm.

The family in the port district had a tidy narrow house and a daughter with a broken arm in a sling. They told her, with great dignity, about the night their Bond had gone, and she wrote it down, and Daven stood by the window and asked a single question at the end, a quiet, ordinary question, that she had not thought to ask. The answer to it was the most useful fact of the day. She noted that, too.

They did not discuss the alley again.

That evening she sat in the office on the second floor, with the lamp low and the harbor lights beyond the glass, and wrote up the day's findings. The facilitated-couple pattern needed more investigation. The port-district concentration needed a demographic explanation. The merchant quarter's rate could not be accounted for by anything in the files. She had the shape of something but not yet the name.

She wrote until the building went quiet.

Then she sat for a while looking at the window. It was not the window of her office in Soleth. It did not show the Tower. She had not expected to be affected by this, and she was, a little, as if she had put her hand out for a rail that was not there.

She thought of the name in the file. Erev Solan. Three years in Varath, a Bond intact. He had been living in this city, she realized, under this same sea air, throughout her entire adult life, and some part of her had apparently imagined him at the far end of the world. He was in a house somewhere in the harbor quarter, she supposed. He had probably gone home that afternoon past the same shuttered taverns, and looked at his wrist, and found it whole.

She did not wish him harm. She had never wished him harm. It was only that she had not expected his name to feel like anything at all, and it had, for a moment, felt like a door she had closed so long ago that she had forgotten it was a door.

She closed her notebook. It was late, and the data would not rearrange itself before morning. She had learned, over a long career of nights, that the things you could not see when you were tired were often plain when you were rested, and that the belief that you could force them through by effort alone was the most seductive form of false economy.

She went to sleep listening to the sea. It was new to her, and it was entirely indifferent to the fact that it was new, and it helped, in the small inexplicable way of unfamiliar sounds, more than silence would have.