They rowed back like men who had been pulled through a sieve. The city slid under them in strips of lamplight and smoke and the Northstar burned away into the dark like an accusation. By the time they reached the quay, the tide had swallowed the last of the footprints and given back only wet wood and the faint smell of tar.
Aminah didn't bother with speech. She moved through the militia room with a single purpose: map, names, people. Her hands were steady. Inside, she felt a clock beating like a thing alive—twelve hours, the promise scrawled on the scrap that had snagged her boot. Twelve hours to find Nina, to find the woman who wore the half-knot, to cut the rope before the line became a trade.
Hasb set men to the wharf. Dzeko and two runners were sent to tail the ship's known men—merchant contacts, petty bosses, anyone who'd touched crate thirty-three. Meren and a scholar-runner were already burning after the token and the ash samples, trying to build a chemical argument that could be made into action. The kiln and north hold were sealed in a way meant to look casual to the public and surgical to the city's insiders.
"You're chasing a shadow," Hasb said, not as a complaint but as fact. They both understood that sometimes the right move was to chase the shadow and sometimes it was to cut the hand that cast it.
"If the shadow casts a woman with a braid," Aminah said, "we'll chase the shadow until it screams." She did not expect him to smile; the man withheld softness for good reasons. He didn't smile.
Word moved quicker than they did. By midmorning the market buzzed louder—not with jokes but with worry. People clutched their ribs like it meant something. Some of the minor guilds closed their doors. A small noble's coach rattled by with curtains drawn so tight it looked like a funeral procession pretending to be business. News made strange bedfellows: the kiln foreman volunteered information; the petty docksman who'd looked the other way came in with a face like a man who had been paid by fear and wanted a cleaner conscience.
They found small things: a cartman who'd taken a coin to be quiet had three names on his lips when they pressed him—names that meant little on their own until mapped: a ship broker near the outer quay, a small-time merchant in the north hold, and a woman known for mending ropes. The merchant's ledger had a line that burned when Meren read it: a restamp at sea, crate thirty-three, change of manifest at dusk. Someone had altered the visible chain.
"Someone wanted deniability," Meren said. "The restamp gives time. It gives distance."
Aminah nodded. "So they hid their hands in the tide."
They pushed on the personal side of the ledger—who knew what, who signed whose name and why. She ordered quiet arrests for two men who'd been at the north hold that night. Quiet for now; the city needed an image of order, not panic. But every arrest leaves a sting and every sting leaves blood in the wash.
By noon, a courier from the docks approached with a scrap of paper and eyes that wouldn't meet hers. He handed the paper like it was ash. It was a manifest—a copy someone had pilfered and left for them in a dead letter spot Dzeko preferred. The handwriting was crabbed, the seals smudged, but the names were legible enough.
Aminah skimmed it fast. Most of it was cargo—linen, salted fish, a crate of timber. Then, tucked between a list of spices and a line about a man's passage, she saw a passenger list.
One name made the breath stop in her chest like someone had folded it.
T. Fulgur — Passenger, cabin third starboard.
She read it twice before the room stopped moving.
"T. Fulgur?" Hasb's voice had the same hush. "As in—"
"As in Fulgur," Aminah said. She felt something like old paper rasp under her nails. The Fulgurs were not minor players. They were a name that opened doors and closed mouths. If a Fulgur was on a ship leaving for Moulm, that was a line drawn in ink, not in tar.
"Could be a false name," Dzeko said. He always did the useful thing—test alternatives before panic. "Plenty of folk travel under other names."
"Maybe," Meren said. He was watching her face like someone who liked to read weather. "Maybe. But the manifest shows a note: 'VIP—escort requested.' Someone put a stamp there."
The room narrowed. "Who put the stamp?" Hasb demanded.
Dzeko's eyes flicked. "The stamp's a broker's, but the stamp's been altered at sea. Whoever restamped crate thirty-three also restamped the manifest. The same hand."
A small, ugly sound crept out of Aminah—half laugh, half strangled thing. "So either a Fulgur paid for passage on a ship hauling black boxes," she said, "or someone used that name to rope us into answering for a noble when they want us to back down."
She thought of the noble cousin who'd praised quiet earlier. She thought of papers with family marks altered. She thought of the helpless look in Rell's eyes when he'd claimed he'd been fooled by seals. Every paper was a knife when the right hand turned it.
Meren leaned in with his own small discovery. "That token in the crate? The woodwork has a grain that matches bindings sold by a single artisan: Relan. He's documented as a maker of commemorative sigils—family tokens, for a price."
"He's small-time," Dzeko said. "Buys scraps, sells stories."
"Relan works for people who want private things that look old," Meren added. "He won't work for nobles openly. He works for men with weaker scruples."
"Find Relan," Aminah said. "Quietly."
They split their forces—Hasb to the docks to secure a line of men to watch any ship leaving, Dzeko to trace the broker and the restamped tags, Meren to Relan. Aminah kept a hand on the manifest like a talisman. T. Fulgur flicked at her vision and made everything else sharp. If the name was real, she had to be ready for politics folding over into a rescue.
At midafternoon, Meren returned with a calloused hand and face gone paper-white.
"Relan is missing," he said. "His workshop's empty. The door's latched from the outside. But there's a scrap—" He drew a folded slip and unfolded it on her table. "It's a note. No signature. Just two words."
She read it slowly.
Don't dig.
The two words were not a suggestion. They were a line drawn in the earth.
Aminah felt, for the first time that day, something she didn't name—fear mixing with the muscles, sharp, animal. Someone had been clever enough to plant marks, smart enough to use family names, watching enough to know the city's moves. They had left a scrap of warning in Relan's emptied shop.
"Who benefits if we stop?" Hasb asked.
"Whoever wanted the Fulgur name to mean we won't act," Aminah said. "Whoever benefits if we look the other way."
She had twelve hours. She stacked plans like stones: a small ship patrol, a courier sent to Moulm with questions that would wake the wrong beds, men to watch the noble cousin's movements, and one quiet, ugly piece—she would go to the list of every person who could sign for a Fulgur in Qazkar and burn them with inspection. She would make the city too hot to hide in.
Then the courier from the Northstar's broker—reliable type, the sort that likes coin more than questions—arrived with a small, folded thing, delivered with a face that had been asked to carry poison and had done it because the alternative was worse.
Inside the fold was a single photograph—rare, because photographs were expensive and private. It showed a small cabin interior, a woman with a dark scarf and a token in her hand, head bowed. The image was grainy but clear enough. On the table beside her, an envelope sat with a wax seal.
On that wax seal, in the dim image, a sigil had been impressed: a variation of the Fulgur mark. Not full. Not right.
A line of ink across the bottom read: Exchange. Tonight. Third starboard.
Aminah felt the clock in her head tick faster. Twelve hours had narrowed; minutes sharpened like the edge of a blade. If that photo was real—if the woman was in a cabin assigned to a named passenger that might be a Fulgur—then the problem was more than a kidnapping. It was a negotiation in motion.
She could hear the city breathe, slow and small. She had a dozen choices and none of them were clean. She took the photograph and pinned it to the manifest.
"Find the third starboard," she said. "Find who signed the cabin papers. Find out who would get a letter sealed with a Fulgur variation. And—" she looked at Hasb; he understood without flinching. "Make ready to sail. We go at midnight."
They moved like men bared for storm. But as the day narrowed, a small shape arrived—someone slipping in without the courtesy of warning. Dzeko frowned and pushed the door open, and in stepped a courier with plain clothes and a face that said he'd been at courts where people swallowed their pride to keep their throats full.
He walked straight to the table and laid out a single paper—a sealed imperial dispatch. The seal bored into the wax like a coin.
Aminah opened it with hands that did not shake but that felt like thunder. The text inside was short and surgical.
Prime Head Yuta Colin requests immediate halt to civilian pursuits. Imperial envoy aboard Northstar is under imperial protection. Any attempted boarding will be treated as aggression.
She read it twice. The paper smelled faintly of ink and threat.
Twelve hours, she'd had. Now the clock had hands that pointed toward an empire.
Outside, the city hummed and the tide moved. Inside, the room smelled like wet rope and paper. Aminah folded the dispatch and let the weight of it sit flat on the table.
She had two choices: obey and lose control, or defy and risk turning the whole city into a battlefield for honor none wanted to claim. She had twelve hours and now, an empire's name pinned on the other side of her decision.
She set a finger on T. Fulgur in the manifest, felt the paper's roughness, and thought of the woman's head bowed in the cabin. Then she stood and walked out to the quay, where a small group of militia waited, breath misting in the cold.
"Midnight," she said, simple. "We go to sea."
Hasb answered with nothing more complicated than a nod. The city watched them gather like a thing waiting for an example.
Somewhere, in a cabin she could not reach yet, a woman with a scarf closed her eyes and tightened a ribbon that looked, in the photograph, like a knot she knew by heart.