The return to Valerius's manor was a silent walk through a shaken internal landscape.
Madame Lin's words echoed in Catherine's mind, more unsettling than any physical threat.
The last one also wanted to set the world on fire. Be careful you don't become what you hunt.
Who was this last one?
Another girl from the slums with a strange power?
A rival she did not yet know?
Or was it simply the rambling of an old woman who had seen too many ambitious young women break themselves against the walls of this city?
Whatever the truth, the words had struck a nerve.
The strongest cages are the ones we build for ourselves.
Her quest for absolute power, her future dimension... was it not precisely that? A gilded cage, yes, but a cage nonetheless, designed to isolate her from the world that had hurt her.
She chased these thoughts away.
Doubt was a poison, and she had no time for pity or philosophy. Vengeance was a dish that demanded total focus.
Back in her glacial library, she forced herself to analyze.
Doubt was a luxury.
Fear was a tool.
But philosophical contemplation was a weakness she could not afford. She had a war to wage. She pushed the old woman's words into a corner of her mind, filing them away as a variable to consider later, much later. For now, she needed results.
She needed to find Jun-Ho Park.
The days that followed were an exercise in forced patience.
Every morning, she awoke in the luxury of her suite. Every evening, she played her role of Oracle and lover for Valerius, keeping him docile and satisfied, ensuring her newfound freedom of movement would not be questioned.
She continued to complain about the manor's teas, and twice a week, young Leo was sent to the herbalist's shop near the Silk Pillow, his shopping bag serving as a dead drop.
It was a slow, agonizing, terribly human system.
She, who could probe souls with a glance, was reduced to waiting for rumors reported by prostitutes and written on scraps of paper hidden in spice sachets. It was humiliating. And it was necessary.
For nearly a week, the messages contained only noise.
Gossip, stories of unfaithful husbands, merchants' complaints.
Catherine read everything, analyzed everything, searching for connections, names, opportunities. She was building a map of the city's misery and secrets, a map far more detailed than the one spread across her table.
Then, finally, the message she was waiting for arrived, concealed in the bottom of a bag of dried mint leaves that Leo deposited in her library.
Her heart pounding, Catherine deciphered the note. It was a coded message, as she had requested of Lin, a mixture of prostitutes' slang and commercial terms.
Most of the information was dross: a merchant cheating on his wife, a city watch sergeant with gambling debts, a minor noble with a taste for violent pleasures. Potential levers for the future, which she memorized and filed away mentally.
But in the midst of this stream of ordinary misery, there were two nuggets of pure gold.
The first was reported by a girl named Jin, whose regular client was a city guard who patrolled the Rook's Nest.
The man, after too much plum wine, had boasted about being called for backup on a strange affair a few nights ago. A raid by the Inquisition on the house of a reclusive old miser, a certain Park.
The guard had laughed while recounting that the old man, in the midst of the chaos, had managed to escape.
Since then, he said, the district was buzzing.
Men from The Rook and ghosts in gray robes from the Church were discreetly searching the area, looking for the fugitive.
And the old man himself, according to another rumor, had been spotted, looking like a madman, trying to buy passage on a merchant vessel, but no one would have him.
This information was vital. Jun-Ho Park was still alive and in the city.
The race to find him was still on.
The second nugget was more personal. It was a succinct report, almost a footnote. Another girl had heard a captain of the guard complaining about paperwork.
He had had to file the report on the resolution of a threat against the Magistrate's house.
A young good-for-nothing, an orphan named Rick, had been found dead in an alley, his skull crushed.
"Case closed quickly," the guard had said.
"A shame, he was a sharp kid."
Catherine read these lines, and the cold void within her intensified.
The trail was erased.
The sparrow had been sacrificed.
She folded the note, her face a marble canvas.
No sadness.
No guilt.
Just the cold confirmation of a successful calculation.
But it was the third piece of information, the last one, that changed her.
It was hidden in the gossip from the business world.
A wealthy wool merchant, a client of the Silk Pillow, was lamenting having lost a fortune.
He had invested heavily in a new import venture led by one of his peers, a man renowned for his ambition, Baron Armand de Courville.
And then, last week, the news had fallen like a guillotine: Baron de Courville had been spectacularly arrested by the Inquisitors, accused of heresy, demonology, and occult practices.
His assets had been seized by the Church, and all his investors were ruined.
The plan had worked beyond her wildest expectations.
The scapegoat had been accepted.
The false trail had been followed.
The attention of the most powerful faction was now entirely focused on the downfall of a nobleman, a trial that would last for months and consume all their resources.
She had bought herself peace.
A feeling of pure, intoxicating power washed over her.
This was not the raw power of the Echo. It was something else. It was the power of the architect, of the puppeteer who sees her pieces move exactly as she planned, on overlapping chessboards.
She had successfully manipulated every major faction The Rook, the Church, and the Magistracy and was now getting reports on the consequences through her own, new network.
She was truly becoming the Mistress of the Game.
She turned back to the map.
She now had Park's location.
She knew he was terrified and alone, his guard Milo having been recalled. But how to approach him? A bureaucrat like Mathieu, even with the best pretext, had failed.
A paranoid man would not open his door to a stranger.
She thought about her resources.
Her pawns.
Valerius was too conspicuous.
Mathieu, too fragile. Kenji, too loyal to his master.
And then, the name came to her, an obvious choice.
Aris Thorne.
A terrified man, who screams at shadows and barricades himself in his home, does not need a bureaucrat or a soldier.
He needs a doctor.
A doctor who specializes in ailments of the mind and… unusual afflictions.
Her plan took shape, clear and ruthless.
She would not send a spy to force the door. She would send a healer, offering a cure for the illness that was eating away at Jun-Ho Park.
And what better way to gain the trust of a man haunted by a secret than to offer to free him from it?