"Look, Huspara, you aren't in trouble." Hassani leaned on the packed table belonging to the terrified, frazzled young scribe huddled in her creaking chair. "If you lie to an Inviolate though..."

She let the unspoken threat hang in the air, but the woman shrank further into herself, her face slackening. This wasn't working.

As a last gambit, she chunked her Inviolate Vial onto the desk. The woman cowered.

Hassani pounded the desk and twisted away, pacing the two steps of open space in the tiny, cramped closet of an office. Scroll nooks covered every available handsbreath of wall, most packed to overflowing.

"Change tactics," she muttered. Digging deep, she found a smile and wore it for a heartbeat before turning it on Huspara.

"Look, I have a lot going on and this-" she waved the forged receipt from Sunset "-may lead to thousands of deaths, rebellion, civil war, who knows? Heard of the Sixth Tier Rebellion on Ziggurat when half the legions rose up? That's best-case."

A blank, slack-jawed stare. Hassani wanted to slap the woman to see if she still was in there. "Look, this doesn't have to be all downside. I carry the power to make the lives of people in my way miserable as I'm sure you know. That spear points two ways, though."

She sat on the corner of Huspara's desk; a friend stopping in for a moment to chat. "What do you want, Huspara? Promotion? Bigger office? Travel? Want to work in an Annalis sub-office in Heaven's Tread? Stacks? See the ice islands of Wades? The red-sand beaches of Azure?"

Hassani gritted her teeth and waved her hand in the woman's face. "Hello?"

The woman sucked in her breath, pulled back like a turtle retreating to its shell.

Hassani chewed her lip. Rising from the desk she scanned the room for something, anything she might use to get this woman to talk. She debated drawing the knife concealed in her boot, but worried that would break the woman completely.

Hoping to defray tension, she messed about on the woman's desk, lifting a small wooden diptych lying face-down and half-covered by skewed papers from Hassani's clearly too-aggressive initial approach.

The crude painting showed a young man beside a small child. Hassani found herself talking.

"I should have one of these made. I'm married you know, have a young one about this age." Hassani leaned against the desk, pointed at the kid in the picture, then pulled back her sleeve and rubbed Avani's braille. "Avani. We named her early, at three. She has the Pale, but I think it makes her all the more precious. So fragile yet so tough. Any time she's outside we have to bundle her up to keep the sun off or she turns red as raw meat. Yet I've seen her trip and fall a few stairs, brush herself off, and be running again before I can even ask if she's okay."

Hassani smiled even though someone grabbed her heart and squeezed it. "By the Ascen, I miss her! Yet every time I go back I feel more distant, more disconnected. I don't know the person she's becoming and worry she'll grow up with a stranger for a mother."

She ran a finger across the child's portrait, wiping tears against her sleeve. "I'm good at what I do. Really, really good. But the better I get, the more it pulls me away from her and that tears me up inside. I'm upholding the Dynasty, protecting the Book, and scraping at the corruption caked about the workings at every level, yet I only get to hold her a few times a year, can't protect her even from a few stairs, and sometimes I don't even think what I'm doing even makes a difference. The sheer power and reach of the people, the system I'm up against is unbelievable, you know?"

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She stood and set the diptych down facing Huspara, tears pattering on paper. After taking a deep breath, she shook her head. "Look, I get that-"

"They told me to write it." The woman's surprisingly-deep alto quavered.

Tear-streaks ran down the woman's face, the young scribe gripping the edge of her desk as though it held her up.

"Who did?"

"I don't know, he had one of those." She pointed at Hassani's amulet.

"This?" Hassani raised it. "An Inviolate ordered you to falsify a document?"

"Yes," Huspara whispered. "And told me to bury the other dispatches."

"Dispatches? Multiple?"

"Yes." Huspara found the strength to stand. "I sent one to Dirt and the other I kept after I realized someone might notice that. No one else would ever find it in all this."

She gestured at the dusty cubbies, then dug around in one packed top to bottom with wadded papers. From its depths, she produced a crumpled black sheet and handed it to Hassani.

Hassani snatched it and almost ripped it in her haste to unfold it. Her fingers raced over it. "Dynast Inro demands... where are weapons? Need reinforcements... send now or Sunset is lost... Aj..."

The word lodged in her throat. "... awakened."

"They told me to rip the transmission times off just in case. Not destroy them since that would be even more suspicious." Huspara babbled now. "I didn't know what else to do. I need this job. My husband's sight is gone. Can't work the nets anymore, drinks away whatever I make. My daughter barely-"

"Your daughter?" Hassani thrust the dispatch at the women like a knife. "What about my daughter? What about everyone in Sunset, in Libriam, in the Book? What about their daughters?"

Huspara shrank back, but Hassani pushed on. "By the ever-roaming gods, you're a damned scribe. Remember the Kiss? You had to know what this means. Do you even get what this means? Aj. Is. Awake."

"The other Inviolate already made the Skeiner that took it down disappear and he said he'd cut Issana into pieces and... and eat her!" The woman's voice shrank to a terrified whisper. She hugged herself, rocking, tears and snot streaming down her face. "Said he'd make my husband swallow his own useless eyes. Said he'd give him useless hands too, use his fingers as fish bait! Said if we ran he would sniff us out, if I talked he'd... he'd-"

"I understand." Hassani shrugged. "Better to let Aj kill everyone instead."

"I thought it was a myth!" Huspara wailed, throwing her hands up. "Besides, Ghulen said Inro lied, he's lurked for centuries in Sunset, waiting, using Aj as an excuse. With the weapons he'd overthrow the Dynasty-"

"He said Inro did this? We're talking about the same Inro, right? Inro the Immovable, Inro the Incorruptible?" Hassani turned away, unable to stomach the woman. "I grew up on stories of Inro's battles in the Reconquest, the horrible choices made to contain the Kiss. The entire verses he killed to stop its spread."

She took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. "Avani's favorite story after 'The Adventures of Bubo' is 'Emperor of Everything', makes me tell it practically every time I'm home. I know it by heart from when I was her age. Remember that one, Inro's Nine Negations? When they kept trying to make him Emperor of the Book and he turned them down again and again, then crushed the Dynast they tried to elevate instead and annihilated everyone involved? That Inro?"

She finally relented when she'd reduced the woman to a sobbing mess. Snarling, she stormed out, slamming into Goboro in the hall outside.

"What?" she snapped, then saw his expression.

"Dispatches... you need... know about," Goboro said, breathless and sweating as if he'd been running. A chill ran down Hassani's spine as he handed a moist wad of dispatches to her. In the years she'd known him, she'd never seen Goboro so much as jog.

She smoothed out the first. "Is it Aj?"

"What! Aj? Why would... think that?" Goboro's eyes widened. He shook his head, beads of perspiration flying. "No.. the last one though... its..."

"Last one?" Hassani stopped skimming and looked up. "Just tell me."

"Inoculists on Heaven's Tread... can't stop it... chants not working... maybe Monopolis... worries about here too... spreading..."

"What? Innoculists? Take a breath man."

"Last is... worst. From Denault."

"Denault?"

The others fluttered to the ground as she ran her fingers across the bottom braille, heart racing. She shook so badly she could barely read it.

"Oh no." Hassani staggered back. If Goboro hadn't caught her she would have fallen. "Avani."

"I know... have your things." Goboro turned and lifted her pack from where he dropped it when they'd collided. She slung it on her back and sprinted away, barely catching his last words as any scribe or bureaucrat in her path caught one look at her face and fell over each other to get out of her way.

"There's... ConMach courier leaving... end of the hour! If you hurry you might-"

By then Goboro passed from earshot as she sprinted all-out for the ConMach dockyard, running with every bit of speed she possessed.

Her daughter's life depended on it.