Chasing Nothing

The rain found Leon Darves on Crane Street, and by then he had counted the dead so many times over that they had stopped being a list and become a kind of weather he walked through. The weaver. The widow. The lighterman, the washerwoman, the copy-clerk, the rope-walker, the cook with too much pepper. And the white-haired man whose stumble only a flagstone now remembered. Nine, by the time Pell’s careful hand had set them down the evening before. Nine that they knew of.

He had not so much risen that morning as conceded the night, and he had come out into the wet with the flat grim cheer of a man who has run clean out of better ideas and lit on the worst one left him: he would go and tell someone. It was, he would reflect later, the single most reasonable thing he did all day, and it went worse than anything else.

The watch-house had the particular smell of all such places the world over: cold iron, wet wool, yesterday’s tea stewed into something closer to tar, and underneath it the faint civic reek of a room where people are mostly brought against their will. Leon knew it well. He had spent a good part of fifteen years walking in and out of rooms like this, handing the city’s law its own answers tied up with string, and being thanked for it with the warm, slightly wounded gratitude of men who would much rather have found the answer themselves.

He knew the man behind the duty-desk, too, which was why he had come here and not somewhere grander. Hallen had a face like a well-worn boot — broad, creased, and entirely without malice — and he looked up at Leon’s shadow falling across his ledger with the honest pleasure of a man whose morning has just been improved.

“Darves.” He set down his pen. “Now there’s a sight before noon. Don’t tell me — somebody’s pinched the Mayor’s good spoons and only the great Leon Darves can find them.” He grinned. “Sit down, sit down. You look like you’ve been keelhauled.”

“I want to report a crime, Hallen.” Leon stayed standing. He had thought about this on the wet walk over, how to begin, and had decided that the only way through a mad-sounding thing was to walk straight into it with his chin up. “Several crimes. The same crime, nine times over, and likely more.”

Hallen’s grin held, but his eyebrows came up to meet it halfway. “Nine, is it. Busy fellow.” He reached for a fresh sheet, dipped the pen, all good-natured efficiency. “Right. Names of the wronged parties, and we’ll start there.”

“That’s the difficulty.” Leon drew a slow breath. “There are no wronged parties. Not — not that anyone will admit to. The people who were wronged are gone, and no one remembers they ever existed. I’m the only one who does.”

The pen stopped.

It did not clatter, or fly from Hallen’s hand, or do any of the dramatic things a pen might do in a story. It simply stopped, hovering a hair above the paper, while the good humor drained slowly out of the constable’s face and was replaced by something far worse — not anger, not suspicion, but a deep and dawning kindness, the gentleness a man reaches for when he has just realized his friend is not well.

“Leon,” Hallen said carefully, and the dropped surname was its own small bell tolling. “Sit down. Please.”

“I don’t need to sit—”

“Sit down, and tell me proper. Slow.” He came round the desk, which was worse, far worse, than if he had shouted. He pulled a stool over with his foot and set a broad hand on Leon’s shoulder and pressed him gently down onto it, the way you’d settle a horse that had taken a fright. “There you are. Now. These people who’re gone. When did they go missing? We’ll want dates, descriptions, last seen—”

“You don’t understand. There are no descriptions to take, because the moment you write one down and walk to the next house, the next house will tell you that man never lived there. The records have been changed, Hallen. I’ve seen them. Up at the Hall of Ledgers, sums that don’t reconcile, names laid over names — a weaver paying rates on a loom the assessor says doesn’t exist, a widow’s relief drawn for a house the census swears is empty—”

“Clerks’ errors.” Hallen said it kindly, helpfully, the very words Pell had used the day before, and Leon felt the cold close another inch. “Happens all the time, that. You know how those scribblers are.”

“It is not clerks’ errors, it is the same shape every time, it falls on the same kind of person every time — the alone, the friendless, the ones with no one to ask after them—”

And there he heard his own voice go up, and stopped, because he had heard that particular climbing edge in other men’s voices, across a great many desks like this one, and had always known it for what it was: the sound of a man losing the room. He shut his mouth. He made himself breathe.

Hallen crouched down in front of him so their eyes were level, and that was the worst thing yet, because it was done with such genuine care. “Leon. Listen to me, because I’m your friend and I’ll say it as a friend. There’s not a man on this river I’d sooner have on a hard case than you. You’ve a gift, everybody knows it — you’ve found things I’d have walked past blind. But.” He paused, choosing it. “A gift like that’s a heavy thing to carry about all day. You see deep, lad. Maybe — and I say this gentle — maybe just now you’ve seen a bit too deep, into a hole that isn’t there. You’ve been alone with this in your head, whatever it is, and a thing left alone in the dark gets bigger.” He squeezed the shoulder again. “When did you last eat a proper supper? Sleep a whole night? Sit with friends?”

There it was. Sit with friends. Hallen meant it tenderly, and it went into Leon like a thin blade between the ribs, because the honest answer — that there were no friends to sit with, that the very emptiness Hallen was prescribing as a cure was the precise shape of the thing the killer went hunting for — was an answer Leon could not give. He swallowed it.

“You think I’m cracked,” he said, flatly.

“I think,” said Hallen, standing with a grunt and a creak of knees, “that the great Leon Darves is chasing a ghost. An empty chair, lad. There’s no body, there’s no name, there’s no soul in all Dalengard but you who’ll say a crime’s been done. What d’you want me to put on the sheet? Person or persons unknown have failed to exist?” He said it gently, even as a small sad joke, the way you’d jolly along a man you’d half decided to send home. “I can’t take that to the magistrate. He’d have my boots.”

“No,” Leon agreed quietly. “I don’t suppose you can.”

He stood. The stool scraped. He felt the eyes of the other watchmen on him — not unkind, just curious, two of them having drifted close enough to hear, and he understood with a cold falling certainty that by tomorrow the whole house would have it: the great Darves came in raving about ghosts, poor devil, cracked at last, and him so clever too. He had spent fifteen years building a name in rooms like this. He had just spent it, all of it, in the space of a single conversation, and bought nothing with it but a stool and a hand on his shoulder and the soft awful pity of a decent man.

“Thank you, Hallen,” he said, and meant it, which was the galling part. “You’ve been more patient than I’d any right to.”

“Go home, Leon.” Hallen had already taken up his pen again, the matter settled in his mind, filed under sad. “Eat something hot. Come back when you’ve a thief I can actually catch, eh? I’ll stand you the first ale.”

Leon went out into the gray street, and the door of the watch-house swung shut behind him with a sound that was not loud at all, and he stood on the step for a moment in the thin morning and let himself feel, just once, how alone he was.

Then he turned up his collar, and went looking anyway.

Because there was one road still open to him, and it was the road he trusted most, for the plain reason that it did not run through any other man’s belief. It ran through his own nose.

A cold, clean, mineral nothing, like the air of a deep cellar, like stone with the life gone out of it. He had breathed it at the vegetable stall the day before, threaded through the honest reek of turned earth, the print of a person who had stood square and still and said a thing once and watched it land. It was not a smell the world could talk him out of. The world could swear blind that no white-haired fiddler had ever drawn a bow in that square — but it could not reach into Leon Darves’s nose and tell it that it had smelled nothing.

So he went back to the triangular market, and he stood where the still print had been, and — without closing his eyes, as he never did — he went still, stiller than he ever let himself be, and let the morning come to him through the one sense in him that had never yet been lied to.

The square was a broth of smells. Cabbage going over. Wet stone. A baker two streets off. The brown animal warmth of a dray-horse standing patient in its traces. And under all of it, faint, fading, but unmistakably there — a thread of that lifeless cold, leading away from the stall the way a scent leads a hound, east, toward the river and the low sun.

He followed it.

He followed it the way he imagined a dog must, which was a thought that would have made him smile on a better morning — Leon Darves, the city’s cleverest man, nose down in the gutters like a stray after a sausage. The thread thinned and thickened. It pooled where the man had paused, in a doorway here, at the mouth of an alley there, the patient stations of someone who had walked this way without hurry and stopped, now and then, to look at things. It guttered out entirely over the cobbles where the wind had scoured the street clean, and Leon stood baffled and casting about until he caught it again, fainter, clinging low to a wall out of the weather, and went on.

And as he went, the city began, very quietly, to change its grain.

He had lived his whole life in the bright warm heart of Dalengard, where the streets ran broad and the windows were glass and the morning came down generous and gold. He did not often come this way. The streets here narrowed and bent. They turned their shoulders to the sun. The houses leaned a little closer overhead, so that the light came down in thin gray ribbons, and the windows — he marked it before he knew he had — the windows here were small, and high, and shuttered against the day even now, at mid-morning, when every other quarter in the city threw its shutters wide to dry the night’s damp out of its rooms.

The sounds changed, too. The clamor of the central markets fell away behind him, the shouting and the cart-wheels and the river-bells, and into its place came something quieter and stranger: a low music he could not at first place, threads of it from behind the close shutters, voices pitched soft and even, somewhere a string instrument he did not know turning a slow figure over and over, and underneath all of it a kind of hush, a held quality to the air, as though the whole quarter were listening to something Leon could not hear.

He had walked, without ever quite deciding to, to the edge of where the Eshkin lived.

The Hollows, the city called it, with the careless cruelty that names a place for the shape of its streets and never thinks twice — a district of deep lanes and shuttered windows down by the eastern water, where the night-folk kept their narrow houses and rose late and worked, so the stories went, by lamp and by dark. Leon had passed its edges a hundred times and never once gone in, not from any fear, simply because no case had ever sent him there and a man does not wander into another man’s quiet without a reason. He had a reason now. The thread of cold, lifeless nothing led him down a sloping lane between the leaning houses, into the gray, listening hush, deeper than he had ever gone.

And it was here, where the light failed and the silence thickened, that he first began to hear the other thing.

It was nothing, at first. Less than nothing. It was the kind of thing a man’s ear catches and discards a dozen times a day without ever troubling his thinking mind.

Two women at a pump, their water-jars filling, their heads close. One of them said something low, and the other glanced down the lane — toward the shuttered Eshkin houses, toward the deep quarter — and made a small quick gesture with two fingers, an old gesture, the kind grandmothers make at a spilled saltcellar or a black cat, warding. Then they took up their jars and went, and the thing was gone, and Leon walked on.

But his nose was not the only sense in him that forgot nothing, and his ear had filed the gesture the way it filed everything, and a little further on it filed the next thing, and the next.

A knot of men outside a cooper’s, not working, talking — and falling silent, in the particular way men fall silent, as he passed, then taking it up again behind him, lower. He caught only fragments on the turning air. “—not natural, the hours they keep—” “—my sister’s boy, gone a fortnight, and the watch won’t—” “—I’m only saying what’s said, that’s all, I’m only saying—”

An old woman on a step, watching the lane-mouth with her arms folded and her mouth set, the way you watch a weather you mistrust.

A shopkeeper, sweeping, who paused in his sweeping as a tall hooded figure came up the lane from the deep quarter — an Eshkin, unmistakable, moving with that smooth quiet economy and keeping to the lee of the wall away from the light — and who did not say anything, did nothing at all, only stopped his broom and watched the figure the whole length of the street with a flat unblinking wariness, and then spat, once, into the gutter, and went back to his sweeping.

Leon slowed.

He stood at the edge of a little square where three lanes met, and he listened, properly now, the way he had not let himself listen at the watch-house because there had been nothing there worth hearing. And what he heard, gathered up out of a dozen scraps and glances and small warding gestures, was not a shout. It was not a mob. It was nothing so loud or so honest as that.

It was a murmur. A low uneasy undertone running through the ordinary streets at the edge of the Hollows like a draft under a door — the night-folk are restless lately. People go missing, you know. My cousin says. I’m only saying what’s said. No one was carrying a torch. No one had named a crime. It was only that the air at the edge of the Eshkin quarter had gone faintly, formlessly wrong, the way milk goes before it sours, a wrongness with no shape yet and no name, drifting from mouth to mouth on the morning.

And Leon Darves, who had spent fifteen years learning to mistrust just this kind of weather, felt the small hairs lift on his arms — because he had heard it said, often enough, that fear came up out of a frightened crowd like steam off a horse, by itself, from nothing.

He no longer believed that fear came from nothing.

He had seen, the day before, a frightened woman whose terror had been put there, planted square and patient by someone with a face and a voice and a body that cast a shadow. And standing now in the gray listening hush at the edge of the night-folk’s quarter, with a murmur rising soft around him about restless neighbors and missing kin, he found himself thinking a thought he could not yet prove and could not shake: that this, too, reeked of a patient hand. That a murmur this shapeless, this convenient, arriving just now, just here — pointing the whole uneasy weight of an uneasy city at the one quarter that kept to itself and rose by dark and could not easily speak in its own defense — was the kind of thing a patient hand might plant, and stand back, and watch land.

He did not know who. He did not know why. He filed it, in the untidy drawer at the back of him, under a heading he did not have words for and marked, for now, simply: someone is pointing.

Then the thread of cold caught at his nose again, sharp and sudden and close, and he turned to follow it down the last sloping lane — and walked straight into trouble, the way he always did, the trouble having found him first.

She came out of a doorway he had not known was a doorway.

One moment the lane was empty, gray and close and shuttered, the cold thread leading him on; the next there was a woman between him and the way ahead, and Leon — who prided himself, justly, on knowing the truth of a street off the back of his own neck — had not heard her come. That, more than anything, brought him up short. People did not appear in front of Leon Darves. He heard them coming the way other men felt rain. This one had simply arrived, square in his path, with her arms loose at her sides and her weight set even, and the easy stillness of someone who might have been standing there an hour — or might have crossed forty feet of cobbles in the time it took him to blink.

She was Eshkin. He would have known it even in full dark. There was the pallor of a people who kept from the sun, and the eyes — large, dark, fixed on him with a still and total attention that was somehow more unsettling than any glare, as though she were not so much looking at him as listening to him with her whole face. She wore gray and dun, plainly, a hood pushed back off dark hair, and she stood in the thin light with the particular wariness of someone on her own ground watching a stranger walk in off the bright streets — and not, her stance said clearly, a welcome one.

“You’re a long way from the lamps,” she said.

Her voice was low and even and gave nothing away. There was the faintest burr to it, the accent of a people who shaped their words for carrying in the dark.

“I’m following a smell,” Leon said, which was true, and which sounded, even to him, just as mad as everything else he had said that morning.

“Are you.” It was not a question. Her eyes moved over him, once, head to foot and back — the coat, the steady hands, the careful way he held himself — and he watched her reach a conclusion, and did not much like the conclusion. “You walk like the watch. You stop where the watch stops. You stand in a lane writing it all down behind your eyes.” Her chin came up a fraction. “We’ve had your sort through here twice this month already. Asking questions. Who lives where. Who keeps what hours. Who’s been seen, and where, and when.” The flat way she said it told him she had answered those questions before and trusted no one who asked them. “So. Which office sent you, and what is it you think you’ll find?”

And Leon, tired and sleepless and freshly mad in the eyes of the law, looked at this wary woman blocking his lane and felt a thing he had not expected, which was a kind of bleak fellow-feeling. Because he knew that voice. It was the voice of someone who had also learned, recently and hard, that the world did not believe her, and had stopped expecting it to.

“No office sent me,” he said. “No office will have me. I went to the watch this very morning with the truth, and they sat me on a stool and asked when I’d last had a hot supper.” He saw the smallest flicker cross her face at that — surprise, quickly shuttered — and pressed it, gently. “I’m not here for your neighbors. I don’t care who keeps what hours. I’m here because something has been hunting people in this city — taking them, clean, so that no one remembers they were ever born — and the trail of it led me down here, to the edge of your quarter, and I would dearly love to know why.”

It was, of course, far too much truth to hand a stranger. He knew it the instant it was out. But he was very tired, and he had spent the morning being soothed and pitied by a kind man who thought him cracked, and there was something in the still attention of this woman — the way she listened with her whole self, weighing not just his words but the manner of them — that made him want, just once, to be heard by someone instead of managed.

She went very still.

It was a different stillness than before. Before, she had been a watchful body in his path. Now something behind the watchfulness had snagged on his words and gone quiet and intent, and for one strange moment Leon had the sensation of being listened to more closely than he was used to — as though she weighed not merely his words but the truth of them, the way a person tests a coin by the ring of it on stone. Whatever she made of it, she had no intention of letting him see.

“That’s a strange thing to come looking for,” she said at last, and her voice had changed, very slightly — gone careful, where before it had only been hard. “A crime no one remembers. A victim with no name.” Her dark eyes held his. “Where I come from, we have a word for the man who chases what isn’t there. It isn’t a kind word.”

“They’ve a word for it here, too,” Leon said, with the ghost of his old dry humor. “I heard it about a dozen times this morning, behind my back. I’m getting used to it.”

Something moved at the corner of her mouth — not a smile, nothing so warm, but the brief involuntary acknowledgement of one cornered creature recognizing another. It was gone at once. She glanced, quickly, back over her shoulder, down the deep lane behind her, and Leon understood that whatever she was guarding, it lay that way, and that he had come close enough to it to bring her out of her doorway to stand in his path.

“Go back to the lamps,” she said. The hardness was back, settled and final. “There’s nothing for you down here. Whatever you smell” — and she let just a breath of scorn touch the word — “you’re better off losing the trail of it. People who come asking too closely after this quarter have a way of bringing trouble down on it. We’ve trouble enough coming, I think, without your help.”

“What trouble?” Leon said sharply, because he had heard the murmur too, and her saying it landed with a weight he didn’t like.

But she had already stepped back into the dark of her doorway, smooth and soundless, the way she had come — and the lane was empty again, gray and close and shuttered, and the cold mineral thread he had been following was gone, scattered, lost somewhere in the press of their meeting, and he could not for the life of him pick it up again.

Leon stood alone in the listening hush for a long moment.

“Well,” he said, to the shuttered windows, to no one the lane would admit was there. “That went about as well as the rest of it.”

He came back up out of the Hollows into the bright streets a little after noon, blinking like a man coming out of a theater into daylight, with the trail lost and the watch against him and a wary stranger’s warning ringing in his ear, and nothing to show for any of it but a deepening conviction that he was the only sane man in a city gone gently, smilingly mad.

He was very nearly home, and contemplating the grim comedy of the cold tea still waiting on his table, when the boy found him.

A clerk’s runner, neat and breathless, who fell into step at Leon’s elbow with the practiced ease of someone who delivered things for a living. “Master Darves? Master Leon Darves?” And, at Leon’s wary nod: “Compliments of Councillor Mos, sir. He’d be glad of a word, at your convenience.” A small pause, and then, because the boy had clearly been told to add it: “He said to say — at your convenience, sir, not his. He was most particular on that.”

Leon stopped walking.

He knew the name, as everyone in Dalengard knew it. Haben Mos sat on the city’s council, one of the lesser benches, a man with a reputation that was almost a joke among the powerful precisely because it was so unfashionable: Mos who actually read the petitions. Mos who asked tiresome questions in chamber. Mos who, it was muttered, took the whole dreary business of governance as though the people governed were real. Leon had never met him. He could not imagine why such a man should want a word with a private inquiry agent who had, that very morning, been declared mad by the city watch.

“Did he say what about?” Leon asked.

The boy shook his head. “Only that it concerned” — he frowned, getting the words just right — “a matter you’ve been looking into that no one else will hear.”

The street went quiet around Leon, or seemed to, the way it had outside the Hall of Ledgers the day before.

Haben Mos received him not in any grand chamber but in a small cluttered study above a quiet court, a room that smelled of beeswax and old books and a banked fire, with papers in drifts on every surface and a half-eaten apple forgotten on the windowsill. The man who rose to meet him was past fifty, soft about the middle, with thinning gray hair and a tired, clever, careworn face — the face, Leon thought, of someone who lay awake over things that were not his fault and could not quite be fixed. He had ink on the side of his hand. He looked far more like a harassed schoolmaster than a man of power, and Leon, who mistrusted power the way other men mistrust dogs that smile, felt some wary knot in him loosen by a single notch.

“Master Darves. Good of you. Sit — no, not there, that one’s got my dinner under it somewhere. Here.” Mos cleared a chair by simply moving the papers from it to the floor, and folded himself back into his own with the sigh of a man whose body had stopped enjoying chairs some years ago. He studied Leon for a moment with frank, unhurried curiosity. “You look,” he said, “like a man who’s had a perfectly dreadful morning and expects this to be the worst part of it.”

It was so exactly true, and so exactly not the unctuous thing Leon had braced for, that a startled bark of something almost like laughter got out of him before he could stop it.

“Councillor, you’ve no idea.”

“Oh, I might.” Mos laced his ink-stained fingers over his waistcoat. “Let me save us both some fencing, Master Darves, because I haven’t the gift for it and you haven’t the patience — I can see it on you. I am going to tell you why I sent for you, and you are going to decide I’m either the first sensible man you’ve met all day or one more lunatic to add to your collection.”

“That,” said Leon, “is a wider collection than it was yesterday.”

“I don’t doubt it.” The tiredness in Mos’s face sharpened into something more deliberate. “Some weeks ago a constituent of mine came to me about her brother. A lighterman, down on the eastern wharves. Lived alone.” He let that sit. “She was certain — certain, Master Darves, in the way that makes a busy man want to show her the door — that she’d had a brother, that she could feel the shape of him in her life like a tooth gone from a jaw, and that the world had somehow mislaid not only the man but every record and every memory of him but hers.”

Leon had gone very still.

“The watch had sent her away,” Mos went on. “Her own mother had sent her away, gently, frightened for her. She came to me because I was the last door left, and I am, God help me, constitutionally unable to shut a door in a frightened person’s face.”

“And you found nothing,” Leon said quietly. It was not a question. He knew the shape of that nothing intimately.

“I found nothing. Which I told myself was the end of it.” Mos spread his ink-stained hands. “But it sat wrong with me. It has sat wrong with me for weeks. And then, three days running, I begin to hear a curious thing — that the great Leon Darves, whom I’m told does not chase phantoms, has been turning the Hall of Ledgers upside down after sums that don’t add up, and asking after a man no record will admit existed, and this morning walked into the Crane Street watch-house and tried to report nine crimes with no victims and was sent home to lie down.” He leaned forward. “Now. I am a tedious and literal man. I do not believe in ghosts. But I have learned, in thirty years of reading petitions no one else will read, that when two people who have never met arrive, by quite different roads, at the very same impossible thing — a person scrubbed clean out of the world, mourned by one soul and forgotten by all the rest — then it becomes a good deal harder to call them both mad. It becomes, instead, the most interesting question in the city.”

For a moment Leon could not say anything at all.

He had walked into this room with his guard up and his name in ruins, braced for flattery or fishing or the soft handling of a politician who wanted something. He had not been braced for this: a tired, untidy, unimportant man on a back bench, with ink on his hand and his dinner under a chair, looking at him steadily and saying, in so many words, I believe there is a question here, and I do not think you are mad.

“So I have not asked you here to soothe you,” Mos finished, “or to sit you on a stool. I’ve asked because I should very much like to know what you know. And because, unless I’m a worse judge of a face than I think, you have spent your whole morning learning that you are entirely alone in this — and you are not. Not quite. Not any more.”

“You’ll forgive me, Councillor,” Leon said, when he trusted his voice. “It’s only — I’d grown rather used, these last two days, to no one believing a word I said.”

“Yes,” said Haben Mos gently. “I rather thought you might have.”

It was full afternoon by the time Leon walked home, and the city had thrown off its morning fog and lay bright and ordinary and warm around him, the bread-smell on the air and the barrows going by and somewhere a child laughing — the whole smiling machinery of Dalengard turning over exactly as it always did, blind and kind and certain that nothing in the world was wrong.

And for the first time in three days, Leon Darves was not entirely alone inside it.

One man, on a high warm bench, had looked at the impossible thing and not flinched from it. You are not alone. Not quite. Not any more. He turned the words over as he walked, and found they had a warmth in them he did not dare lean on yet — the way you do not at once put your weight on a plank you have only just laid across a gap — but a plank, all the same, where this morning there had been only the gap.

And yet.

He turned up his collar, though the afternoon was mild, an old habit of the body for when the mind has gone uneasy. Because the day had handed him two faces, and he could not make them lie flat together.

One face above, on a council bench, that had chosen — freely, against all the smiling evidence — to believe him.

And one face below, in a gray shuttered lane, that had stood square in his path and warned him off, and whose dark wary eyes he could not, try as he might, get out of his head. We’ve trouble enough coming, I think, without your help. A people keeping to themselves at the eastern edge, while up in the bright streets a shapeless murmur rose against them out of nowhere — a murmur that smelled, to a man who no longer believed fear came from nothing, exactly as though some patient hand had planted it there and stepped back to watch it grow.

And behind both faces, behind everything, the thing he could not forget for an hour together: that patient unhurried regard at the back of his neck, the watcher who had looked up from its work and met his eye across the smiling city and was, even now, somewhere in it, hunting him back.

He let himself into his cold rooms, and stood a moment in the dim, and did not light the lamp.

The clue had led him east. That was the bare fact of it, and he made himself hold it, the way he made himself hold all the things he did not like. The cold mineral trail of the thing that took people had run, this morning, straight down into the quarter where the Eshkin kept their narrow shuttered houses and rose by dark. And up above, just as the trail pointed down, a city had begun — out of nowhere, out of nothing — to murmur that the night-folk stole people away.

For one long, ugly, treacherous moment, standing alone in the dark of his own rooms, Leon let himself think the thought the whole city seemed to want him to think.

What if it really is them?

And then, hard on its heels, colder and surer and far more frightening, came the second thought, the one that had been waiting underneath all day, the one that turned the first inside out:

Or what if someone wants me — wants all of us — to look exactly that way?

He could not tell which of the two he believed. And he understood, with a slow descending certainty, that whichever it was, somebody had spent the whole day taking great care to make sure he would have to choose.