What the party knows. Read aloud, or read alone.

How the mansion ended

Read in beats. Pause between them.

The Twins died in a service corridor of the Verdigris mansion with lamplight coming off eight hundred pieces of certified glass, and neither of them said a word about who paid them. Not one. Not at the end.

Nobody came running. That was the first strange thing. A house that size, that hour, and no shout, no bell, no boots on the stair. You left the way you came in and the city outside was exactly as loud as it had been an hour before.

The Crow took the glasses. He said it plainly and none of you argued — he was the one with a contract, the one who'd been hired to look, and evidence goes to the man doing the looking. He put them in an inside pocket and he said he'd send word.

He didn't.

Why there was never a knock at the door

No charges. No inquest. No notice in the Burnt Quill, and the Burnt Quill prints everything.

Because to bring the Watch into it, the Verdigris would have had to explain why two of their own employees died in their own house, and why those employees had been meeting a Fog Warden every week for a year, and why there was an enchanted thing in that house that appears in no ledger, no registry, and no commission book anywhere in the city.

A family that certifies mirrors showing what is does not want anyone asking whether they privately make mirrors showing what will be. The entire worth of their name rests on one idea: a true mirror cannot lie.

So there was no reckoning. There was no forgiveness either. There was a silence, held by people who are very good at waiting.

The forty-two days

Nothing happened. That is the part that got under your skin.

And then things that were not nothing, each of them small enough to be a coincidence, each one landing precisely where you are thinnest.

A query arrives at a guild about a member's paperwork, unsigned, unexplained, and quietly dropped. A patrol rotation changes with no reason given. A polite letter reaches a Master about an apprentice's conduct, with nothing specific in it. A registration is pulled for routine review by an office that has never reviewed anything routinely.

Every one of them deniable. Every one of them aimed at the exact thing you would least like looked at. A mirror guild does not come for you with knives. It holds up a mirror and lets you look.

What it cost, and who paid

The Crow's contract with the Fog Wardens is still on file at the Overlook. Dated three weeks before Maruk Grommarg walked into the fog. Signed by an officer, countersigned, filed correctly.

His last entry is six weeks old.

His rooms are paid through the season. His notes are not in them. Nobody has reported him missing, because the only party who hired him is the same party that would have to explain why.

And the Verdigris are certain you have the glasses. You know you don't. You cannot prove it. The only man who could is the reason you can't.

And then the cards came

Four weeks before the Autumn Masquerade, each of you received a card.

Heavy stock. Engraved. Correct in every particular of form, the way only a very old house is correct.

The Verdigris are holding a Masquerade party, and you are invited by name.

Including the ones among you who do not use the name it's written under.