Eyes round with astonishment, Fitcher slowly raised his hands in what he hoped was a suitable agreeable manner. The fact that someone had lain in wait for him beside the door made itself blindingly obvious. Their intentions, however, were a little more unpleasantly obscure.

      "I, I don't suppose we could talk about this," he tried feebly.

      The weapon's tip prickled against his skin and he tried to squirm away from it as unobtrusively as possible. The blade snaked the motion and pressed forward in a silent warning. The thought of the laceration it could leave should his assailant chose to let her fingers even spasm left him sweating in horror and rigid compliance suddenly seemed a pretty good idea.

      "Oh," he breathed. "Oh, I didn't think so."

      "This is sickening," the unseen woman continued. There was a nearly inaudible rustle as she moved away from her place of concealment. To his dismay the blade, like a vigilant watchdog, didn't shift an inch. "Absolutely horrible. The dead are not even underground yet and already your kind moves in like vultures. Do you have any idea how many of these poor people you're currently defiling were children? Little children?"

      Although bits of his brain were currently trying to fuse themselves together out of fear, the question sparked some perverse synapse and he automatically replied, "Um, the last official count by Muse put the child/adult ratio of Toto somewhere around two-to-one, I thin-"

      Fitcher yelped and arched his back as the blade stabbed forward. "You miserable little tick!" the woman angrily snapped, cuffing him once heavily across the back of his head. "What an absolutely terrible thing to say! Although..." She paused and through the ringing in his ears the clerk could hear another whisper of clothing, as if she had shifted her weight. "Although I must admit that's the last sort of thing I would have expected to hear out of someone like you. I figured you people more indiscreet than that."

      It began to dawn on Fitcher that, seeing as his assailant was the only one really contributing to the conversation, bits and pieces of information vital to his final comprehension of the situation were being badly overlooked. Taking care to keep his hands well within in her line of sight and clearing his throat to signal that he wished to speak, Fitcher flagged down the first question that leapt to his erratically weaving mind.

      "Er, what?" he said wildly.

      "What?" she said.

      Desperately ignoring the ominous way the blade bit into his back he wrestled down the line of thought before it fled to the furthest recesses of his mind. "I, I mean, who are 'you people'? What are you talking about? These are the sorts of things a guy two minutes away from being run through sort of has a right to know..."

      He trailed off when he realised that the unpleasant itch of the weapon at his kidney had lessened by a degree, as if its wielder had stepped back in surprise. With hope flaring back into his system he turned his head the slightest fraction of an inch in order to catch even the merest glimpse of his unseen assailant from the corner of his eye-

      - and the blade clamped back into place with a vengeance. "You know exactly who you are and what vile act you were doing, so don't play the stupid idiot routine with me," the woman snarled.

      Fitcher sighed dismally. It figured that the one time he was being the honest intellectual he would be blamed as the lying fool. There was a sense of presence against his back and suddenly callused fingers - those of one long accustomed to handling a sword, he realised with dread - were prying the little brass clasp free from his wounded left hand. Fitcher mentally cursed himself for not palming it into his pocket earlier.

      "Still bloody," the woman growled, evidently inspecting her prize. The gravel of her voice made an angry rasp as she spoke. "Was this victim already dead or did you have to finish the job yourself?"

      He gawked, incredulous. Sticking a weapon into his back and smacking him around was one thing - business as usual - but accusing him of outright murder and theft was opening an entirely different can of worms. "Listen, lady, just how exactly do you get off-"

      "Shut up!" she interrupted. "I don't want to hear it, so save your miserable story for someone who cares. Just march - I think I know someone who'd like to meet you. We'll just see what he makes of all this."

      The sword made a pointed motion into his back and, still bristling angrily, Fitcher obediently plodded in the direction it indicated. As he was herded past the yawning doorway of a fire-gutted shack he eyed the blackness of the void inside appreciatively, mentally tallying up distances and velocities. He'd gotten the hang of sprinting explosively out of harms way over years of service for Lady Anabelle and Jess and the bit of ground between him and the invitingly charred entrance didn't really seem all that considerable. The door could be barred shut in a matter of seconds and any window inside easily smashed if he wrapped his good hand in his coat and then, past that, it was all thick woodland-

      "Think you'd make it?" said a now-familiar female voice.

      His shoulders slumped. "No, not really," he sighed.

      "Honestly, neither did I. Keep walking."

      Fitcher continued his unhappy one-man parade through the blasted roadway of Toto until a hand closed around the neck of his shirt like a claw and hauled him to an abrupt stop. So used to the sword's constant attendance at his back was he that he barely yipped when it dug smartly into his skin. Hands still resignedly aloft, he covertly ran his eyes over the empty bit of street they had stopped at. Aside from a big black crow perched on the splintered eaves of a nearby house, stabbing its heavy beak into the wood to clean it, the area was devoid of life.

      The emptiness of the street evidently puzzled his female tormentor; he could hear her boots shuffling through the baked earth in an uneasy, irritable fashion.

      "He was here," she murmured, half to herself. Aloud she added, "Just sit tight a second. And don't get any funny ideas, 'cause you'll be in eyesight the entire time. I'm in a very bad mood and can personally guarantee that I run a whole lot faster than you do, if you catch my drift."

      Fitcher certainly did. He was seconds away from innocently asking if he should leave his hands raised as well; the voice of reason quickly pointed out the sword and his current state of unarmedness. He snapped his mouth shut instead and, despite every instinct kicking and swearing at him to bolt for the woods, remained perfectly still as the weapon was removed from his back. He heard her edge away, with the hunter's caution, and after a moment of awkward silence heard the sharp crack of wood from the nearest dwelling. From the corner of his eye he saw the crow leap into flight in alarm at the sound. Heavy beats of its wings carried it ponderously across the Toto bridge; it banked sharply and disappeared up and over the treeline.

      He watched it bemusedly; his attention was suddenly caught by the faint sounds of conversation straying over from someplace behind him.

      "-here. There he is," his female assailant said triumphantly, her voice the first to drift into earshot. "I caught him rooting about one of the deserted houses and found this on him. I thought it best to turn him over to the Muse authorities - I want nothing to do with a dirty looter."

      "Fitcher, you unholy bastard," an amused voice loomed. "I never had you figured for the type."

      "Bram!" the clerk yelled, spinning on his heel and dropping his hands to his sides. "Would you please tell this lady that I'm no looter?"

      "He isn't, by the way," the big guard remarked conversationally to the woman standing warily at his side. "A bit of a pain in the arse, but nothing of the criminal type. He's with me. Or, rather, I'm with him. Muse sent us out to investigate Toto."

      "In that case, please accept my apologies," she said grudgingly, glaring at Fitcher across the space that divided them. It struck him that it was the first time he had caught a good look at the woman with the sword and Fitcher suddenly found himself extremely relieved that he hadn't chosen to run.

      Bloody sodding enormous was the first impression that leapt to mind. The second was that she really wasn't wearing all that much, but what she did she carried as if it were a suit of armour. Her attire seemed to be made up entirely of bits of cured leather and cloth tied in appropriate areas, lined with thick grey fur from an animal whose identity Fitcher didn't care to hazard an educated guess towards. A sword was buckled at her hip.

      She was a big woman, almost as tall as Lady Anabelle, and her bare arms, legs and midriff rippled with surplus muscle. Impassive agate eyes regarded him with predatory attentiveness from a weatherworn face framed with shoulder-length brown hair.

      "Ah, no worries," Fitcher replied weakly, fighting down the urge to stare.

      She narrowed her eyes at him but said nothing.

      "There we go, all friends now," Bram said as he slapped his hands over his stomach, cheerfully oblivious. "Fitcher, this is Hannah. I ran into her around the other side of town while you were, er, poking about here, and she agreed to help us out. Did you ever figure out what this is?" He held up the brass clasp in one hand.

      Fitcher shook his head. "I was hoping you could tell me."

      With a flick of his thumb the guard sent the clasp spinning towards Fitcher, who clapped it clumsily between his hands and then held it up into the light to study it closely. "It's a cloak-pin," Bram said. "Knights use them to attach their cloaks to their armour. They're pretty common. I don't recognise the marking, though."

      With a sick feeling gnawing though his gut Fitcher knew with the utmost certainty that he did. In the open sunlight the clasp because an accusation, a wordless traitor easily traced to unspeakable origins. He opened his mouth to voice the horribly inevitable reply - and was greatly surprised when Hannah broke her silence and beat him to it.

      "It's a Highland insignia," she said flatly.

      Bram stared at her openly, his mouth ajar in honest shock. "Are you bullshitting me?"

      "No, Bram, she's right," Fitcher said, shaking his head. "I've seen it before too. It definitely came from a Highland soldier. I don't think it was someone's souvenir."

      The redheaded guard swore once loudly and crossed his arms over his chest. "You know what this means, don't you?"

      "It's not conclusive proof, though..." Fitcher argued half-heartedly. Logically it wasn't, anyway.

      "Fitcher, you know damn well that Ruka Blight hates the Jowston City-State and has been itching to invade us for years. Neither Agares nor Anabelle's peace treaty was going to hold him back for long. And now here's Toto's burned to the ground not even a week after the rumoured "Unicorn Brigade" incident, thank you, and a pin with Highland markings is found in the rubble. You even said it had to have come from one of their soldiers. What the hell do you want me to think?"

      Before the clerk could reply Hannah cleared her throat once loudly. When both men turned to face her she quietly said, "Toto was destroyed by Highland soldiers. I saw them myself."

      "What?" Bram exclaimed, uncrossing his arms in surprise. "You never mentioned that to me when we found the bo- well, uh, were you here when it happened?"

      A pained look crossed the hunter's face and she ran the back of one hand across her forehead, leaving a smear of ash behind it. "No. I wish I had been, though. I was away from the village when it happened, but late last night, while returning, I passed several Highland encampments almost ten miles out from Toto. I managed to cross the fringe of them unseen, but I was close enough to notice that they were awfully worked up over something."

      "I'll bet," Bram said darkly. "Didn't it strike you as being a little out of place that Highland soldiers were in Jowston?"

      Hannah shrugged. "Maybe. I've never paid politics much mind."

      "You might have to now, because this almost certainly means war." He turned back to Fitcher and said, "You need to get back to Muse anytime soon?"

      "Er, sort of. Lord Jess seemed pretty insistent about getting a report back."

      Bram snorted. "Piss on him. Hannah and I have a job we have to finish here first."

      Fitcher eyed the big man curiously. "What sort of job?"

      The guard jerked his thumb over his shoulder, towards an alley running away from them. "We're, uh, burying some evidence before the crows get at it."

      The clerk frowned disapprovingly and started in the direction Bram had indicated, thus entirely missing the cold glance the female hunter shot at his larger companion. "I really don't think it's prudent to be disposing of anything before Muse officials have a chance to look at it."

      "I don't think they'd want to. I really, really don't."

      Fitcher shrugged and continued forward, charred wood snapping beneath his feet as he picked his way towards the alley. "Well then at least let me take a look. I can vouch for its legitimacy as evidence if they need me to, I guess."

      "Uh, wait a minute, Fitcher," Bram said, his face creasing with alarm as a thought suddenly struck him. "You still bad with the sight of blood?"

      Looking back, Fitcher flushed slightly when he saw that Hannah was regarding him with curiosity and shrugged his shoulders again with as much nonchalance as he could muster. He walked past Bram and around the corner of the building, replying, "Hate it. Why?"

      "Er, Fitcher-" the guard started wretched, holding out one hand in a feeble attempt to bar the clerk passage. "Then I really don't think you should-"

      When mere seconds are razed and then stretched into hours of agonising stillness, his warning came, in a sense, years too late. Fitcher strolled around the edge of the building and stopped dead in his tracks.

      Seconds later he was standing in the blessed shade of the nearest house, one hand outstretched and against the relative cool of the wall for support and the other pressed over his upper thigh. Bent nearly in half at the waist, his head hung somewhere around the level of his knees, which were already trembling unsteadily and threatening to give out at any opportune moment. The heat of the air suddenly felt like an open blast from hell, choking him with dry dust and ash and sweat and his vision was spinning in a dizzying circle, just spinning and spinning until his head felt so light that at any moment it might just float away...

      His stomach heaving, a detached part of his mind noted clinically that the chances were high that he was going to be copiously sick.

      "So much... blood..." he managed to gasp out weakly.

      "I did try to warn you, lad," Bram said, patting the distraught clerk's back in a sympathetic way. "You heard me warn him, didn't you Hannah?"

      "Yes, I did," she murmured. "A little to late, though."

      "I stumbled onto those poor bastards earlier," Bram continued. "The rest of the people here were killed in a small field just at the edge of town. Looks to be some sort of mass execution, although we're still finding separate cases around town like this one. The whole thing screams Ruka Blight, if you ask me."

      "I think... I think I saw bone...!"

      "He seems a little upset," Hannah noted, nodding. "Not that I blame him."

      Bram shrugged and, grasping Fitcher's upper arm, hauled him up into a violently swaying standing position, if it could be called that. "He's just not used to seeing this sort of thing. Government workers on the whole usually aren't. Fitcher." He gave the smaller man a shake and peered into his ashen face. "Get a hold of yourself. Hannah and I can finish burying the villagers on our own - why don't you go someplace far away and, uh, document something."

      He gave the clerk a gentle but meaningful shove out towards the opposite street. Having regained enough of his senses to allow for coherent thought again, Fitcher flashed him a grateful look and staggered off to find something solid to secure himself to.

      Once he was several blocks safely away from the horrific scene and the memory of its victims he allowed himself to sink down on the first available intact step. Stretching his legs out in front of him, he leaned back wearily against the doorframe and stared up absently into the broad blue sky, his mind clicking with activity but clear thought remaining elusive. It somehow seemed a shame that such a pleasant afternoon was being wasted on such a goddamned awful mother of a day.

      Seeing everything but taking in nothing, Fitcher ran his eyes over the street, his gaze arching downwards until it stopped at a familiar footprint resting placidly beside him on the step he was currently sitting on. He regarded it bemusedly; he must have unthinkingly retraced his original path back to the house he had first walked into.

      It was a very big, black footprint. Nice and clean. Anyone wanting to identify it would have an easy time for it was that distinct, like someone had carefully picked out the best patch of fresh ash on the step and set their foot down squarely into it, as if to say 'There you go. Here's where I've been. Now tell me where I am.'

      Fitcher shook his head. You knew you were having certain mental problems when footprints started talking to you.

      Look at me. I'm trying to tell you something. Your brain is starting to work properly again, so put it to good use.

      Taking care not to touch the footprint, Fitcher drew in his legs and bent far over to peer at it. Luckily the strip of cloth was still securely tied over his mouth and nose; even the barest of breath could disturb the fine sprinkling of ash and soot it was pressed into. As he had earlier suspected it was not made by any of the Toto victims - it pointed into the house, for one thing, and a man escaping certain death would not turn about and walk casually back into his burning home.

      What did puzzle Fitcher was that a soldier definitely hadn't made it either. For reasons he had never been able to fathom the armoured boots issued to the heavily armed man typically had remarkably little tread. A maze of ridges was carved into the dirt and cinders on the step - this print was clearly made by a man wearing a heavy workman's boot, the rugged type usually worn by those expecting to travel a great deal. Hannah hadn't made it either; an unobtrusive study of her footgear had shown him that she wore a soft-soled leather moccasin of sorts. Further inspection revealed that the edges of the print were slightly blurred and indistinct, and at least several hours' worth of ash drifting down ceaselessly from the sky had filled it like grey snow.

      Fitcher leaned back and pinched the bridge of his nose, eyes closing momentarily in thought. So, what did this evidence say?

      Well, for starters it said, quite loudly, that someone other than he and Bram had been to Toto no longer than twelve hours ago. Judging from the deterioration of the print he'd put it closer to eight. Someone knew about the massacre before he did. Someone had calmly and deliberately entered the ruins of the house, perhaps to poke around as he had. As far as he could tell the brass clasp had not been touched - whether that was because the mystery person had not noticed it or had desired for it to remain behind as evidence was yet to be determined.

      As evidence of what? Had it been planted there? Was someone deliberately leading him by the nose right up and into Highland territory?

      No, he wouldn't pursue that line of thought like a blind, inexperienced idiot. Second-guessing begot doubt and right now he needed solid answers over paranoid delusions.

      So, was the mystery man a looter, or did he have a purpose of his own to play? Would the brass clasp have been treasured as a prize and lifted if the man had had intentions of thievery? Fitcher had no idea if they were valuable or not; Bram had mentioned they were a commonplace item.

      Damn. That led him right into a dead end. The clerk backed his mind out of the mental alley he had driven himself into and tried another route.

      The idea of someone having knowledge of the massacre before Muse did submitted itself for inspection almost immediately. Who would benefit from this sort of information? Who would willing venture into the dying remains of a burnt-out town and prowl around its guts, especially considering the possible presence of Highland soldiers lurking nearby? For some reason it nagged at the back of his mind like a persistent child; he wasn't too certain on how much he liked the idea of someone knowing of an event of this magnitude before Lady Anabelle did.

      And there it was. Fitcher's eyes opened wide. It was as if a tiny mental insurance auditor had tallied up the evidences of a crime, evaluated the losses, and presented him with an orderly bill, upon which was printed a tidy sum. To be certain it was only a possible solution to what seemed an insoluble conundrum, but at the moment it made good, logical sense. Of course he'd be the one to benefit from the knowledge - the man coveted information as a greedy, grasping miser hoarded gold. And he had been pretty damned evasive when Fitcher had asked whether or not Lady Anabelle knew of the possible Toto situation.

      It was stretching a lot of circumstantial evidence in fifty different directions at once, but once the idea took root in Fitcher's mind the more irrationally determined he was to prove that, regardless of whom had actually left the print, Lord Jess was behind the whole thing.

      How exactly was an entirely different story, but Fitcher was more than willing to let Lady Anabelle divine that particular fun-fact herself. For now he was content to mentally damn the chamberlain's ambition based on his admittedly hasty conclusion. He hadn't a clue how Jess could further his influence from culling the information of Toto's demise first, or even if the entire roundabout attempt really was an orchestrated plot to save the redheaded mayor from a stressful situation. Hell, he didn't even know if he was on the right track to begin with. He just knew that Lady Anabelle didn't wear ignorance well.

      Fitcher grinned up tightly at the brilliant sky, his mind now hurtling itself down a well-worn avenue of thought. If Lord Jess was a rat, then he was definitely a roach. And it was a well-known and often lamented fact that roaches got into everything and then spoiled it.

      Unfortunately, it was also around that point that a hysterical housewife usually ground them into a fine paste. Fitcher had met this particular woman, and she was far from hysterical. Indomitable was perhaps more accurate.

      He scrambled to his feet. His head still felt oddly light but at least his mind was running along a clear train of thought again. It was becoming blatantly obvious that he needed to return to Muse, and quickly, to arrive there before Lord Jess could ever have expected him and directly report to Lady Anabelle instead. Maybe he couldn't prove that her chamberlain was deliberately withholding vital information from her, or even delaying its deliverance, but at least he could assure that the facts arrived at her desk from their most direct source.

      Namely, himself. Lady Anabelle deserved that much.

      Leaping down from the step, he set out on a determined path back towards the place he had last left Bram.

      City Hall was in almost the exact same state that Fitcher had left it: overcrowded, overanxious, and grossly understaffed. Even before he had officially set foot in the building he had felt the faint stirrings of what promised to be a massive headache, raised and gorged on the incessant buzz of talk and nervous motion. It throbbed angrily at the spot just between his eyes like a caged and restless animal.

      At least Toto had been quiet. It had been an unnerving silence, mind you, like that of an empty tomb. And his hair and clothes still stank of a cremation. And his left hand ached like the damned whenever he moved the fingers. And the gristly image he had unfortunately born witness to seemed to have imprinted itself on the back of his eyelids to flash across his vision whenever he closed his eyes and he just knew it would forever lurk in the hidden depths of his mind to stalk through his dreams while he slept...

      ... but at least it had been quiet.

      Pressing his back tightly against the corridor wall to let a group of arguing accountants sweep past him, he warily eyed Lord Jess's emphatically closed door and inched down the hall towards Lady Anabelle's office. So far he had seen not sign of either the chamberlain himself or of that black-haired pitbull he called a personal secretary, although he doubted that this unexpected streak of luck would last for long.

      There was, he noted morosely, very little that escaped the chamberlain's eye. Even Fitcher's lone appearance in Muse had likely already been spotted and reported and god only knew when Jess would stride out of his office and mildly remark upon Fitcher's unexpected arrival and, oh, wouldn't you please step this way and let me know exactly what you saw-

      The clerk shook his head in disgust and the vivid daydream dissolved back into the ether of his thoughts. His paranoia really was running away with him these days.

      Anabelle's door loomed invitingly ahead, the only safe port in this particular storm. His eyes firmly anchored on the welcome sight, Fitcher impatiently pushed his way around a pair of clerks chatting animatedly outside of the library. Jess' office was behind him now, and that was the last place he felt comfortable having it. All sorts of nasty things could spring at you from behind, and the chamberlain definitely ranked as one of them. Eager to put some space between himself and a verbal hamstringing, Fitcher shoved his way forward, past Lady Anabelle's personal guards, past secretaries and clerks and sullen scribes sipping coffee in the hall, each an obstacle separating him from the brown-haired official lurking somewhere behind that damnable dread portal-

      "Ah, Fitcher-"

      It was as if his brain was wired directly into his legs; Fitcher catapulted forward without sparing a glance back, hurled open Lady Anabelle's chamber door with a great deal of unnecessary violence, vaulted inside and slammed it shut behind him. He threw his back against the door, panting and grinning a maniac grin about the office at large and then, almost as an afterthought, twisted the handle until he heard the knob lock. Laughter bubbled up into his chest as he mentally played the scene he must have made back in the theatre of his mind.

      He'd done it. He's actually gotten away with it! All right, granted, maybe the voice in the corridor had not been Lord Jess' - but with Fitcher's luck of late it was almost a certainty that it was.

      In which case he'd just flagrantly disregarded the chamberlain's iron authority and escaped the flames of his wrath. Intact. Alive. The forth wall was stretching in all sorts of interesting ways today.

      Lady Anabelle, on the other hand, was staring him down in the manner usually reserved for the homeless insane. Beneath the frigid blast of her ice-blue eyes he felt some of his newfound elation freeze in his heart and his deranged grin slowly slipped away from the corners of his mouth. Fitcher was suddenly painfully aware of the fact that, with his back pressed against her door and his arms and legs crooked akimbo, he must look quite the part of the insane idiot.

      He grinned weakly and said, "Um, hello, Lady Anabelle."

      After a brief moment of silence, barely extending over the space of a second, Anabelle quietly replied, "Hello, Fitcher." Without removing her eyes from his face she added, quite calmly under the circumstances, "It appears there is an urgent matter I must attend to, sir. Would you be so good as to come back at a later time?"

      Fitcher blinked - and then realised that he and Anabelle weren't alone.

      The man seated across from her passed the clerk a vile glance and turned back to the Muse mayor. "But it took me two months to get an appointment!"

      The blue eyes snapped to his face, as if marking a target. "I assure you I will find time to fit you into my schedule. I give you my word."

      The man opened his mouth, as if to argue the validity of Anabelle's word alone, but one good look at the redheaded giantess' face seemed to quickly change his mind. The man shivered almost imperceptibly and all but leapt out of his chair instead, knocking it over carelessly as he did so. Fitcher found himself rudely shoved to the side as the man fumbled with the door, threw it open, and beat as hasty a retreat as his failing dignity would allow him.

      Fitcher glared at his back and, once the door had shut again, turned back to face Anabelle. The mayor had risen from her seat to right the chair; with a flip of her wrist she indicated for her clerk to sit in it.

      "Wine?" she asked, gesturing to a glass placed at the corner of her desk. Fitcher shook his head and slid across the room to claim a seat at the chair; Anabelle sat as well and folded her hands together as neatly as napkins. "All right. What happened?"

      He grimaced and shifted in the chair, suddenly uncomfortably aware of her close scrutiny. Once again he was sharply reminded of the fact that Anabelle could read his face as easily as a book; he must really appear a sorry spectacle for her to have guessed this early on that something was amiss. "I hate to be the one to tell you this, Lady Anabelle-"

      He hesitated and bit down hard on his lower lip. A furtive glance flicked his eyes from side to side. Spit out everything at once or try to cushion the blow? A thousand different ways to phrase the information presented themselves to him and each were almost immediately rejected.

       There really was no easy way to say this.

      "Yes?" Anabelle prompted. The woman had the patience of a glacier - slow to rise in anger, but nevertheless poised to move with the same unstoppable inevitability.

      Screw it. His day was already shot to hell as it was.

      "Toto's been burnt to the ground, and all evidence points straight to Highland," he blurted out. His hands seized convulsively over the arms of the chair. He could practically hear the wheels grinding down as the formidable juggernaut that was Lady Anabelle set slowly into motion.

      "Toto-"

      Internally, he was cringing. Externally he squirmed as well, the chair digging a new crimp into his back. Too slow, much too slow, as if she were thoughtfully weighing the word as one might a heavy rock. Or a brick poised to be thrown at a small, yappy dog.

      "Burnt to the ground," he supplied helpfully.

      "And the evidence points to Highland." It wasn't a question, couldn't be a question; he saw it right in her face in the way she stared him down as if daring him to answer it as one. It was a statement of fact and should be treated as such - therefore he strangled back a verbal reply and simply nodded instead. Her face tightened almost immediately, fine creases working around her eyes like fractures in plaster before her features hardened. Lips pursed, eyes narrowed, her jaw set together in a pensive manner; when she did speak again it sounded as if her voice was only just arriving from a faraway place.

      "Perhaps you would like to elaborate? Were there any survivors?"

      Fitcher marvelled at the smoothness of the tone; it was as if the woman was passing a casual remark about the weather. He slowly felt some of his tension ebb away and, gradually, by the slightest of increments, his fingers loosened their hold over the arms of the chair. A tiny, irritable voice from the back of his mind snapped a warning at the sudden laxness of attention, however, and sharply reminded him that the worst news had yet to come.

      It suddenly struck him that he really was one unlucky bastard. "Er," he said, "I- I'm afraid there were none that we could find, Lady Anabelle."

      When she remained stonily silent he pressed helplessly forward, a man so utterly resigned to his fate that he couldn't stop himself from walking those last few steps to the scaffold even if he had the courage to. The hangman awaited. "We found the bodies outside of town. It... it was an obvious execution."

      A moment of awkward silence followed. Fitcher waited for its end with great apprehension, eyes wide.

      "My god. He is truly a monster," Anabelle finally said, slowly shaking her head. A grimace crinkled her lips, as if she had tasted something distasteful. She needn't mention who "he" actually was; Fitcher could guess easily enough.

      "Fitcher, why were you in Toto?"

      The question caught him completely off guard. His head snapped up and he stared, startled, at the image of Lady Anabelle leaning over her desk, her hands folded beneath her chin and her blue eyes focused on his face so sharply it seemed her gaze would bore a hole into his brain.

      Fitcher was suddenly aware of his thoughts moving very quickly. He knew that Anabelle had recommended him for Jess' reconnaissance mission - but evidently the chamberlain hadn't mentioned to her the nature or the destination of the sortie. And if the footprint on the step really was from one of Jess' men - a long shot, but the only one he could logically conceive at the moment - then the brown-haired official had known of Toto's destruction long before Fitcher and Bram had arrived there.

      What the hell was Jess playing at? The headache stabbed forward with a vengeance and a spasm of pain creased his brow. It would be such a simple thing to just blurt out all of his suspicions, however unconfirmed, of Jess' intentions, of information withheld, of enigmatic footprints tracking serpentine trails through the snow falling across his mind...

      The words turned to ice in his throat. Lord Jess would know. The moment the Muse mayor accosted her chamberlain about concealing the Toto information the stony-faced youth would know exactly who to blame for the discovery.

      It certainly wouldn't be his beloved Anabelle.

      Fitcher was well aware of the fact that Jess usually treated him as if he were beneath his notice, and he damn well planned on keeping it that way. As long as Jess believed him a useful idiot he was safe, and the clerk was more than happy to trade face for security. Unexpected intelligence had become a liability in the public office, for intelligence led to insight, insight warranted attention, and attention dissolved into suspicion. The certain freedom Fitcher had weaselled out of the City's political system could not be maintained if the chamberlain's basilisk stare was turned in his direction.

      Fitcher worked best without an audience.

      He silently ground his teeth. Running straight to Anabelle like a tattling snitch was not one of his smarter ideas; Lord Jess' mistrust must have risen its head like a disturbed rattler by now. To voice his suspicions concerning the chamberlain would present himself as an open target to strike, on the serious grounds of withholding intelligence. Better to be cagey, to play it safe, to eyeball the world as an honest idiot rather than a disreputable intellect.

      He cleared his throat and said, lamely, "There were reports of trouble in Toto last night, and it just seemed a wise idea to check up on them."

      A poor truth and yet not entirely a lie either. Lady Anabelle was bound to put two and two together and come up with the answer that Jess was a fink without his help anyway. Had the chamberlain not asked for the use of Fitcher's services that very morning? His return from Toto was blatant enough evidence of his real reason for journeying to the town and just who had sent him, but at that moment was just to damned tired to come up with anything better.

      Sometimes an obvious lie said more than a vague truth, anyway.

      "Lord Jess informed me he'd required your services. However, since you've been away I was sure he'd found someone else to do whatever was needed. Still, you might want to speak with him on the matter. You may go, Fitcher. And I want a report on my desk tomorrow morning."

      He nodded dumbly. A certain glint in her eye told him all he needed to know; anything else she said was extraneous information. Anabelle had spotted the lie - or it's purpose. Whether or not she now confronted Jess about the matter, at least he could honestly claim that he had said nothing to further her suspicions. Either way, he supposed it was out of his hands; he would back away from it entirely to let Lord Jess and Lady Anabelle prowl wary circles about one another.

      At the moment he wanted nothing more than a couple hours of stress-free sleep. Lunch was out of the question; after Toto he didn't expect much of an appetite for the next several days. Pushing himself out of the chair he mumbled a vague apology about disrupting her day and quietly inched out of her office, his mind whirring nervously with scraps of half-finished thoughts.