Din returns to the nearly deserted King’s Hall with Malo and Sabudara, where Prince Camak admits that Darhi has fled with much of the treasury and many guards. Camak secretly provides Darhi’s abandoned clothes, hoping the wardens can use them to track the satrap before he escapes farther. Malo and Sabudara distill Darhi’s scent from the garments with a warden device, then hurry out because they know the trail will weaken with time.

Outside the High City, the wardens take Darhi’s scent and track it across the countryside on all fours, using their noses to follow traces on earth, trees, and clay. They confirm that horses carried Darhi’s party and take kinephage to gain the speed and endurance needed to catch him. After hours of running through the Elder West, Malo concludes that Darhi is heading toward one of the old estate roads near the River Kanda, likely to a prepared refuge where he can change horses and gather more protection.

As the group approaches a remote estate at night, Malo scouts the site and estimates roughly thirty well-armed Yarrow soldiers guarding Darhi’s litter and supplies. She plans a lethal ambush because disabling armored soldiers would be too risky. Before the wardens can strike cleanly, a guard dog detects Din and Malo, forcing the attack to begin; the wardens loose arrows from the trees, Din joins the fighting at close range, and the estate’s naukari servants suddenly rise against their masters as well, turning the battle into a chaotic massacre.

Din secures the litter while Malo and the wardens finish the fighting. Among the treasure, Din finds imperial reagent crates marked with the Apoths’ sigil and realizes Darhi has been transporting stolen reagents along with the gold. Sabudara later reports that the Yarrow soldiers are dead or dying and the wardens survived, but Darhi himself is missing. When Malo finally searches the buildings, she finds that a young naukari girl cut Darhi’s throat before being killed herself, which means Darhi dies before Din can question him about Pyktis.

Although Darhi’s death destroys their best direct lead, Din and Malo search the crates and identify all six missing boxes of the black fertilizer-like reagent that Pyktis needed, a major strategic recovery. Then Malo notices the smell of older rot inside a treasure chest. Din and the wardens open it and discover a dead, starved Rathras man with a white warden helm, a face matching the drawing of the man who accessed the Apoth box, and blotley welts across his chest and belly. Malo concludes Darhi may have killed Sunus Pyktis, but Din, shaken by the implications, does not answer.