Black monstrous blood soaked the hems of Princess Alita's dress, but Falis was unscathed. Milano bent, hands shaking, over Young Orlan and Jon Corsson. They were knocked unconscious but left alive by this monster—by this dead monster. Dead by the Princess' hands. And the young soldiers looked up at Alita in awe. Milano laid down her improvised bandages on Orlan's bloodied upper arm. She tried to keep herself steady, and saw the paleness in her skin as she continued to shake.

"This was..." Milano began. "A quieter approach. Stealth. It slashed at you but left them, Princess. And me."

I failed. I could do nothing and Akamashi escapes again.

There were grass stains on the hem of her dress and she knew that she had done nothing but fall back. She had not screamed, her mouth open in a frozen rictus but no sound from her squeezed throat. The smell of blood was like that time at the castle.

Falis' friends had rushed to her, but the Frankenstein was already destroyed. (Milano was sure they were called that, in the legends. She and Alita were both trained to recite the history for hours.) A patchwork thing, seven feet tall, scrawny and inhumanly thin and sewn together at wrists and ankles and trying to regrow its silvery flesh for minutes and agonising minutes after the Princess-of-the-Cranes had pierced it many times.

"We should...allow few people to know of this. Though my grandfather Jodo will give the best advice." Consequencs and conditions rushed through Milano's mind. She lifted her head and gave the most reasoned suggestions that she could think of. "They all think it is amazing that the Princess is a strong warrior. But the people will think it unstable that there have been so many attacks. Since the target is the Princess, the citizens will not be in danger." A coup requires supporters. They have already killed everyone. "We must be in a position to concentrate all our resources upon the enemy—though the Princess defeated the enemy today."

"Damn right, ginger. So I'll send Pete and Dominikov to patrol the town instead of letting them sit around being lazy-asses."

That impulse was wonderful in her, Milano thought: the Princess of Forland wanted to protect the people, and had the power to achieve it. But Milano also believed that she herself knew what was best. "No," Milano said, "the castle guard will search the capital. Then, when they signal, you and Pete and Dominikov will come and fight."

"That's not protecting the kingdom. That's protecting someone who doesn't need it." Falis pouted.

"I leave you the most difficult part," Milano protested, "you will learn how to behave at table with my grandfather. And when I go into town I hope to return with a target for your sword, Princess."

"Aww, crap," Falis sighed, looking far more frightened than she had done against the Frankenstein. "Not the old gnome..."

Milano walked through Green-Artifice Street, her soft grey hood pulled across her hair to protect her from the damp afternoon and the purple clouds gathered above—and to cover her face from too obvious inspection. A stranger might have guessed her an upper servant in a mistress' cast-off clothing, or a girl of respectable family fallen to some need. Her dress was sober grey and maroon, smooth and neat though old. Doctor Akamashi had lived here in more respectable days, and though he would not have deliberately left anything here to incriminate himself, there was more than one method of gathering information.

Knowledge of intrigue is more precious than diamonds, tiny Milano, Grandfather would say, sagely tapping the right side of his nose.

There had been a fire. The walls were blackened and still damp with the neighbours' efforts to quench it. Since then, no one had seen anything of Akamashi. Parts of the roof had fallen in, with dark girders bent and twisted like daisy stems into what had been the kitchen. What was left of the doors swung back and forth in the wind as if they had no more substance than bedsheets drying on a line. Milano peeked inside and saw paper ash blown back and forth into empty corners, cupboards buckled with heat and bare. She slipped through the deserted house like a cloaked ghost.

Milano stopped a moment to look at the flooring pattern and its old marks: heavy equipment had been stored in Akamashi's cellars. She stepped over shards of green glass. The deserted house felt like walking over a grave. The man who owned it created far too many graves. She needed to visit Saul, Rodorim, Lydian, Trinpano... Where they lay in one grave for all of them; where Milano needed to visit Ceto's old mother and give her dried mutton and jars of apricot preserves, for she was a widow and she had always been a family friend; where— So many things to do and left undone.

There were a few scraps of torn paper burnt nearly to ashes and blown about the room. And then Milano reached into the very back of a burned chest-of-drawers, whose contents seemed to have been removed or tumbled over the floor before the fire. By a stroke of luck preserved papers lay wedged into the crack. She hurriedly smoothed them out. The writing was as if Akamashi dipped two spiders into his inkpot and let them scatter across his papers; the pages were creased and crumpled as if hastily thrust away, and already beginning to yellow and flake away like the cheap, thin sheets they were.

...tried the third experimental protocol once more with improvements but yet again a failure. I have reached a wall and it is only foolish ruler's whim that stops my success...

...I dream of the figures within my grasp. The mathematics, the cells, the shapes. I am a man without family and yet I could make a family. Frogs and bats and clockwork toys are small things. Wonders and marvels so near and yet so far...

...Success! I have friends who are worth more than an overstubborn King at last! Friends I shall not describe even in notes. An enlightened power must develop science! Cecilia...

...I will write and I will design. Prove that I am truly a man of science. She visits today. She shows me the way. Noble woman! Promising a more noble master! Let not tyrannous boundaries prevent...

There the last paper stopped, full of diagrams Milano barely understood. She thought that she saw disjointed humanoid body parts like a garden of severed limbs—and she would not think about that comparison. There was no more.

Cecilia.

"I have a f-friend," she explained, deliberately shy and hesitant, to the baker down the street, "her name is Cecilia, and s-she...well, she owes money I must pay. She was sometimes here...she k-knew Akamashi, though she is just a woman and not a traitor to our King and Princess..."

Milano saw that claiming the woman as a friend severely downgraded his estimate of her own respectability. There was no lady called by the exotic name Cecilia in court circles; Akamashi was unmarried and lived as a bachelor; therefore a female visitor would have to be seen as disreputable, and in the interests of her own treachery this lady would keep herself explained only by mean rumour.

"It was a scandal," the baker said with freezing decent-minded scorn, "he was a traitor to the country and he had the cloaked woman calling on him at strange hours—in day and night. All decent people felt it a scandal before we knew of the other. Now this is a decent home also, girl, and without any business here you'd best be out."

A poor strategy. Milano tried to salvage herself—

"Pardon me, sir! It's fine sewing my mam and I take in at Lilac-square—ask any if they've heard of us, and they'll tell we're virtuous folk! Cecilia took us in with pretty words—as if she were the fiancée of a rich scientist—and now she is gone. But do not assume us..." Genuine shame and outrage made Milano's cheeks hectic, and she thought the baker might believe her.

"Soon my wife will be in with my dinner, girl, and you and your carryings-on with traitors had best be gone," he said. "It's half-sure I am I'll be doing duty to the Princess to tell the guards."

"Do so, I beg you—do your duty to Princess Alita. She is Forland's hope and saviour. But tell me if Cecilia ever visited your shop...and if there was word of where she lived..."

The baker gave her nothing. The cloaked woman was barely even known by sight to any of the people around. Street sweepers, the water-closet man, the chestnut-vendor, the market-gardener's daughter: the cloaked woman bought nothing and asked of no one in all her visits. A lamplighter thought she had light-coloured hair and fair skin below the cloak, but he couldn't tell certainly. Milano sighed, and felt for the precious scraps of paper in her pockets. Grandfather would read these.

The two human-shaped things who were metal and sadistic bloodthirst on the inside: Akamashi's creation, obscenities. She remembered too much, and pressed a hand against her forehead in pain.

The doctor says, this is not a rebellion. This is a coup d'etat.

A cloaked woman. Cecilia. She never even let anyone see her face.

Are you so sure that you do not know, Milano?