As the red-head rummages through the drawers of the ancient desk that looks incongruously like one Steel's teachers sat behind during his interminable schooldays, Steel gets the feeling he made the wrong choice of where to search first.
Looking at the leather straps he pulled from the dead man's pockets, he has an idea. Removing the corpse's sandals, he finds tucked a small stained and folded scrap of parchment.
Still kneeling, he unfolds the parchment carefully.
It's a map with jagged lines and sinuous waves and delicate iconography delineating mountains, rivers and verdant valleys. A map drawn by a cartographer who loved his craft.
Steel whispers the single legible word inscribed on the scrap of parchment.
“Ravenscrag.”
Steel looks up to see the red-head looking at him with an unreadable expression.
“Maybe ...,” he begins, then feels the faintest touch against the back of his neck, just behind his ear.
An odd time and place for their Chinese companion to become amorous, he thinks.
He attempts to rise and turn, but finds he cannot.
The red-head seems to be retreating and the room darkening.
What ... ? he says, or thinks he says. But his words and the world alike are seized by a sharp pain and then lost in an all-consuming dense and velvety blackness.
