Kol, Ana, and Malo return to the Treasury tower and are brought to Prificto Umerus Kardas, the head of the Imperial Treasury delegation. Kardas receives them warmly, accompanied by his assistant, Signum Gorthaus, another engraver. Ana quickly notices Kardas’s unusual social deftness and deduces that he is an emitias, a revelation Kardas reluctantly confirms.

In private, Kardas explains the broader dispute with King Lalaca. The Treasury is auditing Yarrow before it becomes a full imperial canton and begins paying Imperial taxes, but Lalaca, as the realm’s largest landholder, has strong reason to resist. Kardas says negotiations have recently stalled, and he admits the delegation has already suffered one attack, which makes him consider the possibility that Sujedo’s death was politically motivated, though he notes that killing Sujedo would not have halted the Treasury’s work.

Kardas then answers the standard questions about Sujedo’s arrival and disappearance. He confirms that Sujedo arrived late, sent word that he was ill, and was gone by morning, but Kardas adds that the behavior reported by others does not match the man he knew. Sujedo was capable with ledgers but not especially observant, charming, or hardy, which conflicts with the descriptions given by the Apoth guard and other witnesses.

Ana tests a theory by asking Gorthaus, who had known Sujedo before, to use an engraver’s memory to indicate Sujedo’s height. Kol reproduces the bank engraver Tufwa’s remembered height for the man who visited the Treasury bank, and the two measurements differ by four smallspan. Combining that discrepancy with the mismatched reports of Sujedo’s personality, Ana concludes that the simplest answer is that the man who came to Yarrow posing as Mineti Sujedo was not Sujedo at all. If that is true, then the victim never vanished from the locked room, because the real Sujedo may never have occupied it in the first place.