"Run!" Saphielle shouted, hauling Cassian hard around a sharp corner of the boxwood hedge as a heavy volley of blind, mechanical crossbow bolts clipped the topiary into flying emerald confetti."I am running!" Cassian gasped, his boots sliding wildly across the rain-slicked gravel paths of Lord Vance’s terraced gardens. "And for the record, this burgundy velvet suit was entirely unsuited for tactical retreat!""Stop complaining about your dry-cleanable fabrics or you'll be buried in them!" Saphielle snapped back, her silk gown hitched up brutally high over her thigh-sheath as she vaulted a low stone retaining wall with effortless, lethal grace.Elsinore scrambled over the stone right behind her, his milky eyes staring blindly into the pitch-black night while his long fingers clutched a stray leather ledger to his chest like a shield. "Calculated velocity of pursuers has dropped by seventy-two percent due to mechanical failure of their night-vision optics,"

"Quiet, Elsinore," Saphielle hissed, pressing her palm against Cassian’s burning forehead. "His breathing is too shallow. Cassian? Can you hear me?"Cassian couldn’t hear her. Or rather, her voice sounded like it was filtering up from the bottom of an empty well, muffled by miles of damp earth and centuries of accumulated administrative dust.Instead, the damp chill of the hollow oak vanished, replaced by an oppressive, suffocating heat that smelled of old parchment, melting tallow, and deep, stagnant water. The rough bark beneath his back morphed into a cold, smooth slab of black iron.“You have worked very hard, Cassian,” a voice rumbled. It didn’t come from the air; it vibrated directly inside his skull, heavy as a falling safe and cold as an uncollected debt. “So many columns. So many audits. And what has Oakhaven ever paid you in return? Damp clothes, frostbite, and a warrant for your arrest.”

"I wasn't yelling," Cassian panted, clutching his throbbing head as cold sweat dripped from his chin. "I was aggressively declining a hostile takeover bid from a subterranean entity with terrible credit management.""Your fever has clearly fried whatever was left of your administrative sanity," Saphielle muttered, pressing her palm back against his forehead with a frown. "The heat broke, at least. But if you start negotiating with ghosts again while we're walking, I'm tying you to Kaelen's pack-mule.""There is a forty-two percent chance he is simply delirious from the dampness of the bark," Elsinore chimed in, his milky eyes fixed on the gray dawn light filtering through the branches of the hollow oak. "And an eleven percent chance he actually spoke to the King of Trenches. Either way, our caloric intake is critically low, and the southern turnpike is blocked."Cassian forced himself upright, wincing as the ruined velvet of his coat protested every movement. "B

"You are going to get us all killed over a tariff dispute," Saphielle hissed, catching Cassian by the collar of his ruined velvet coat just as he stepped out from behind the granite boulder. "That is not a tax office down there. That is a collection of discharged mercenaries with heavy crossbows and entirely unearned enthusiasm for violence.""They are losing fifteen percent of their daily take to a dreadful currency exchange rate imposed by their own commander," Cassian retorted, gently peeling her hand away with the calm, chilling precision of a senior auditor addressing an incompetent junior clerk. "A man who does not understand the velocity of money is a man who will panic the second his ledgers stop balancing. Watch and learn, Saphielle. This is how you reclaim a province without breaking a fingernail.""Seventy-four percent probability they shoot you before you reach the second wagon," Elsinore observed mildly from the safety of a damp fern patch, his milky eyes

"Drop the hand, accountant, before I put a bolt through your collarbone," the scarred veteran barked, his finger tightening slightly on the heavy steel trigger of his crossbow. "We don't care about accounts. We care about coin, silver, and anything else rattling around in that waterlogged satchel of yours."Cassian did not flinch. Instead, he reached inside his ruined velvet coat with agonizing slowness, his fingers bypassing the cold metal of the bronze cylinder entirely to pull out a water-stained, dog-eared ledger book. "Coin is a temporary illusion of value, my good sir. What you are currently holding is a deficit of catastrophic proportions. Let us look at your daily seizure rates versus your maintenance overhead for those crossbows.""Maintenance?" The veteran blinked, his crossbow dipping a fraction of an inch as genuine confusion momentarily overrode his tactical hostility. "What are you talking about, you lunatic?""I am talking about fifteen percent of