Three days after he wrote the name down nothing had come of it.

  Not because he had stopped looking. Because Hedral Stillson was not the kind of name that showed up in the places Zelig had access to yet. Not in the Pale Accord’s secondhand texts. Not through Reva’s information contact. Not in anything the Hollow Hand had touched. The name sat in his notebook clean and unanswered the way some names did when the person they belonged to was careful about where they left traces.

  Careful people were interesting. Careful people had something worth being careful about.

  He kept looking.

  The Row on Wednesday was the same as it always was except for the weather which had turned grey and close, the kind of grey that sat on the Underlayers like a decision that had not been made yet. The glow lanterns were doing more work than usual. The fish stall woman had put up a canvas overhang that she only used when she thought the rain was coming but was not sure when.

  Zelig set up in his usual spot and ran the con four times before the weather made the foot traffic thin enough that it stopped being worth it. Thirty one marks. Decent for a grey morning.

  He packed up the handkerchief and the wand and stood at the edge of the Row for a moment before heading home, the way he sometimes stood and just looked at the street, not for any reason, just the habit of watching.

  That was when he saw the man.

  He was standing at the far end of the Row near the junction where Canner’s met the side street that ran toward the east docks. Not running a con, not buying anything, not waiting for anyone as far as Zelig could tell. Just standing and looking at the Row the way Zelig looked at the Row, which was to say with the specific quality of attention that was not casual.

  He was tall. Not unusually so but tall enough that he was easy to find in a crowd. Well dressed for the Underlayers, not Middling Ring well, but the clothes fit in a way that suggested they had been chosen deliberately for this particular environment, which meant he was not from here and knew he was not from here and had thought about what that meant before leaving wherever he had come from this morning.

  That last part was the thing that made Zelig keep watching.

  Most people who came into the Underlayers from outside wore the wrong thing without knowing it. Too clean, too fitted, the specific visible discomfort of someone who had not thought about where they were going until they were already there. This man had thought about it. The clothes were right. The worn quality of them was right. But the way he wore them was not quite right, the way an accent is not quite right when someone has learned a language very well but not from birth.

  He was looking at the buildings.

  Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

  Specifically he was looking at the buildings on the north side of the Row, the older ones, the ones that had been there since before most of the current Underlayers existed around them. Looking at them the way you look at things when you are trying to find something specific and are not sure yet which building it is in.

  Zelig watched him for four minutes.

  The man moved slowly along the north side, not going into any building, just looking. He stopped outside the boarded shopfront, the one that had been boarded since Zelig was twelve. Looked at it longer than he had looked at the others.

  Then he moved on.

  At the junction he stopped and looked back down the Row, a single slow sweep of his eyes from one end to the other. The sweep passed over Zelig without stopping.

  Then he turned and walked toward the east docks and was gone.

  Zelig stood where he was for a moment.

  Then he walked to the boarded shopfront.

  He stood in front of it and looked at it the way the man had looked at it. Old wood on the boards, weathered past grey into something closer to silver. The building behind was three floors, the same stone as everything else on the Row, nothing distinctive about it except its age and the fact that it had been closed for as long as he could remember and nobody had ever said why.

  He had walked past this building his entire life.

  He had never once thought about what was inside it.

  He thought about it now.

  He looked at the boards more carefully. The nails were old, the same age as the boards, the rust on them the accumulated rust of years. But at the bottom left corner of the lowest board there was a nail that was slightly less rusted than the others. Not new. But newer. Put in more recently than the rest.

  Someone had opened this board and closed it again. Not recently. But more recently than when it was first boarded.

  Zelig stood back and looked at the building as a whole.

  He filed everything. The height, the windows, the gap between this building and the one beside it, the way the alley ran behind it.

  He did not go in.

  Not today. Today he did not know enough and going in without knowing enough was how people got into situations they could not get out of cleanly.

  He turned and walked home.

  He did not tell Ervan.

  He did not tell Flint, though he came close twice in the following days, the information sitting close to the surface when they talked, pressing slightly.

  He told no one.

  He went back to his notebook and looked at the name.

  Hedral Stillson.

  He added a line beneath it. A description. Tall. Deliberate. Looking for something on the Row. The boarded shopfront.

  He looked at what he had written.

  A name from a vision in the Metarealm connected to an artifact moving from the deep East to a Middling Ring merchant’s private vault. And now a careful man who did not belong in the Underlayers spending a Wednesday morning looking at old buildings on Canner’s Row.

  He did not know yet if the name and the man were the same.

  He thought they probably were.

  He thought that because careful people looking for things in places they did not belong were usually looking for things that other careful people had put there. And the name in his notebook was the name of someone who had made a very careful arrangement across a very long distance.

  He closed the notebook.

  Outside the grey had finally made its decision and the rain had started, light and steady, the sound of it on the alley wall coming through the window.

  He sat at the table and listened to it and thought about the boarded shopfront and the slightly newer nail and what was inside a building that someone careful had wanted to find on a grey Wednesday morning in the Underlayers.

  He did not have an answer yet.

  But he had the question, which was always where everything started.