Din Kol explains to Ana Dolabra how Imperial alterations work, focusing on permanent “suffusions” that create the indispensable Sublimes, including Din’s own engraver memory. Using that enhancement, Din delivers a near-verbatim account of the Haza estate investigation that lasts almost four hours.

Afterward, Ana tests Din’s recall with odd but pointed questions—steps across the house, which hand Gennadios favors, scars on Uxos’s hands, and whether soil near the wall was disturbed—collecting details Din did not realize might matter. Ana then warns Din that the Haza are powerful gentry whose land wealth makes them difficult for the Iudex to pressure, but she praises Din’s steadiness in questioning them.

Ana pivots to the core clue: the sweet, sickly bloom Din described. She identifies it as dappleglass, a fast-growing suffused weed from the destroyed canton of Oypat, known for white flowers with yellow-and-purple interiors and for blackening fernpaper when nearby. Ana notes that the version Din saw seems even more aggressive—capable of catastrophic growth that destroys ceilings and walls—implying a deadlier strain.

From the blackened fernpaper, rotted kirpis shroom, and unnatural heat in the house, Ana concludes Commander Taqtasa Blas was intentionally exposed: an assassination, likely enabled by someone inside the household. She orders Din to serve a writ summoning three staff members—the oldest servant girl, the housekeeper, and the groundskeeper—to her quarters, and instructs Din to listen closely as the investigation’s “living legal embodiment,” bringing engraver’s bonds and a weapon.

As Din prepares to leave with his monthly pay form, he challenges Ana’s dismissive remarks about advancement and receives a grudging apology. Their conversation is interrupted by an eerie chiming: Ana’s improvised quake instrument is working, detecting tremors Din cannot feel. Ana reveals the source—seafloor quakes from a leviathan two hundred leagues away moving toward the coast—raising the looming threat beyond the murder.