Once Valerius had left to attend to his magistrate's duties presiding over hearings, accepting bribes, and consolidating his power Catherine found herself alone in the luxurious suite that had become her prison and her throne.
The morning sun filtered through the windows, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air. For anyone else, it would have been a peaceful morning.
For Catherine, it was the start of a new day of silent war.
She sat cross-legged on the Persian rug, closed her eyes, and cast her consciousness across the city. The effort was considerable, like looking through a telescope from the bottom of the ocean, but her will, sharpened by necessity, was stronger than the distance.
She ignored the myriad threads of the populace to focus on a single energy signature, a single knot of threads she knew intimately: Mathieu's.
She found him, a small beacon of anxiety and hope in the immense and dusty Scriptorium building. He was sitting at his desk, pretending to collate ledgers, but his threads betrayed his agitation. He was waiting. He was hoping.
Every opening of the door made him jump.
Then, Catherine sensed the arrival of another familiar signature: Gregor, Valerius's servant. She observed the scene like a distant god.
Gregor, with his stone face and his out-of-place air in this temple of bureaucracy, approached Mathieu's desk.
The exchange was brief, almost nonexistent.
The folded message was placed on the desk. Gregor turned and left, his mission accomplished.
Catherine focused entirely on Mathieu.
She saw his thread of curiosity ignite as he picked up the paper, his hands trembling slightly.
He opened it. His first thread was one of confusion, a murky gray. A drawing? No words, no instructions? He stared at the symbol, the clumsily drawn chess tower sketched in charcoal.
And then, the connection was made.
A flash of understanding shot through his mind, so powerful that Catherine felt it like a jolt. The Rook.
The emblem.
The power behind all others, the one that even Valerius feared. This was not a simple message. It was an order. A change of target. Stop looking for trivialities on Valerius's rivals. Aim higher. Aim for the heart.
A new thread was born in Mathieu, a thread she had never seen in him before. It was thin, but seemed to be made of dark steel, a thread of pure resolve, tinged with the black of terror and the scarlet of a devouring ambition.
He was no longer a simple, frightened clerk. She had knighted him. He was her agent, her secret knight in this impossible quest.
He looked around, his face pale but his eyes shining with a new intensity.
He hid the note in his tunic, stood up, and instead of heading toward the commercial archives or the land registries, he crossed the great hall toward a section of the Scriptorium most employees avoided: a black iron door leading to the Dead Archives.
It was where the files deemed too sensitive, too old, or too dangerous for public viewing were kept. The records of old purges, the city watch's investigations into unsolved crimes involving nobles, the forgotten pacts with vanished guilds. It was the city's subconscious, a place where secrets went to die.
Catherine followed him with her mind's eye.
She saw him present a requisition order to a toothless old archivist, a document he had no doubt brilliantly forged. His audacity was new, born from the conviction that he served a higher power.
He entered the silent, dusty aisles.
He didn't know what he was looking for. Neither did Catherine, not precisely.
But she guided him by pure intention, sending him waves of focus toward concepts: "docks," "foundations," "fire," "shadow guild."
Mathieu, without realizing it, felt himself drawn to a particular section.
The registries of great disasters. He spent hours leafing through old volumes, the smell of paper and decay filling his nostrils. And finally, he found it.
A file on the Great Dock Fire, thirty years prior
. A disaster that had reshaped the waterfront and ruined several merchant houses.
The official report spoke of an accident. But stapled inside, sealed with a ribbon that no one had likely touched in decades, was a secret addendum from the city watch investigator of the time.
With trembling fingers, Mathieu broke the seal.
The secret report spoke of witnesses who had "disappeared," of evidence "lost," and of substantial payments made to victims' families to buy their silence.
It was a criminal act, a massacre disguised as an accident. And at the very bottom of the document, there was no signature.
Just a wax seal, perfectly preserved in the dry air of the archives. A seal he had never seen in his life.
The clean, ruthless impression of a chess rook.
Leagues away, in her velvet room, Catherine gasped.
She felt the shock of Mathieu's discovery as if it were her own, a golden explosion of pure information in the canvas of her vision.
She saw the image of the seal in her mind, as clearly as if she were holding it in her hand.
She opened her eyes.
A slow, predatory smile spread across her face. The ghost had just left a fingerprint.
The hunt could truly begin.
The sun had begun its decline.