Returning to his New Town lodgings, Dinios Kol is intercepted by a distressed porter boy and led to Immunis Ana Dolabra, who has turned the patio into a reeking mound of oyster shells. Ana is gleefully tasting local oysters to study the sea through them, showing the same obsessive pattern-hunger and sensory fixation that shape her work. Kol redirects her toward the investigation, and Ana quickly agrees to hear his report in private.

In Ana’s rooms, Kol brews tea and gives a full account of everything he has learned: Sujedo’s disappearance from the locked room, the blood in the bed, the condition of the remains, the strange missing patch of skin, the citrus smell on Sujedo’s clothes, his odd tapping habit, and the limited access to the Treasury delegation. After listening, Ana concludes that Sujedo was almost certainly murdered in Yarrow. Her key reasoning is that if the goal had merely been to kill a Treasury man, there were many easier, safer methods available, so the bizarre circumstances of the death must themselves be meaningful.

Ana then interrogates Kol for precise physical and situational details so she can reconstruct the crime. She focuses on the victim’s body, the vacant rooms in the leaning tower, the lack of any trace of an intruder, and the fact that Sujedo’s colleagues were lodged nearby but apparently did not meet him. These inconsistencies persuade her that the investigation has been asking the wrong question. Instead of assuming Sujedo stayed where everyone thinks he stayed, Ana suggests they should determine exactly which rooms Sujedo occupied and at what times.

The discussion widens into the political stakes surrounding the murder. Ana explains that Yarrowdale became indispensable to the Empire because its bay, canals, leviathan-processing works, and the Shroud support the Empire’s most valuable reagents. But an old agreement will soon transfer Yarrow fully to imperial control, and the king of Yarrow is now resisting that outcome and trying to extract new concessions. Because Sujedo was a Treasury negotiator involved in this tense arrangement, his abduction and death may have larger implications than a single murder.

Finally, Ana examines the small iron piece Kol found and discovers it is weak lodestone, meaning magnetized iron may have played a role in the locked-room mystery. She does not yet identify the killer, but she gives Kol clear next steps: interview the engraver at the Treasury bank for exact physical details about Sujedo, and arrange a meeting with Prificto Kardas and the Treasury delegation before the king occupies all their time. Before dismissing him, Ana briefly checks on Kol’s state of mind, then orders him to fetch her post and get some rest.