It was another fifteen minutes of hurrying through the narrow, winding streets before Kyungsoo and Yoorae reached their next destination.  They were both out of breath, the last few hundred metres having been steeply uphill in one of the oldest parts of the city.  It was a nice area, too, since it was on the fringes of the sprawling university that had grown up around the ancient city library, and had long been considered the hub of the cultural and intellectual quarter, which now wasn’t so much one specific part of the city but manifested itself in pockets of various different sizes all over the place.

They stopped in front of a large, very old mansion that had stood the test of time extraordinarily well, and Yoorae rapped sharply on the door with the brass knocker.  It was freezing to the touch, and she had long since ceased to gawp at the exquisite workmanship of the dolphin it was shaped as, but she was a bit too miserable from the cold to want to do that anyway.  She and Kyungsoo huddled in the portico as they waited for the door to be answered, standing and shivering close to each other for a little extra warmth.  Yoorae was on the brink of trying to find her stylus to conjure up a little heat for them both when the door swung inwards, a familiar figure silhouetted by soft firelight beyond.

Yoorae straightened up.  “Name us,” she offered as the password.

“A name is precious,” the man responded, peering past her to check who her companion was, and then he stepped back to admit them.  “You’re late.”

“I know, Junmyeon, I know.  Sorry.”

At twenty-six, Junmyeon was four years older than both Yoorae and Kyungsoo and also painfully young to be in full possession of the family fortune.  Like so many others in the city, he’d lost both of his parents to the plague that had devastated the islands for a full seven years when they were children, and Yoorae sometimes pitied him because he’d actually known his parents.  She’d been left at one of the many orphanages in the city as a baby, the signs of plague upon her, but by some miracle had managed to survive.  The matrons who had looked after and raised her suspected that she’d actually contracted the plague before she was born, since there had been a small but noticeable trend of such babies living when the plague killed everybody else.  They’d also assumed for a number of years that Kyungsoo was her brother, since he had been left at the same time, bundled up a few feet away on the orphanage steps in almost exactly the same manner and materials.  While Yoorae and Kyungsoo had never managed to establish whether they were related, they had grown to doubt it with each passing year.  They looked nothing like each other, and Yoorae had a much keener sense of magic than most, while Kyungsoo, like a high proportion of the populace, could neither use or sense its use in the slightest.  The ability to use magic didn’t necessarily run in families, but Yoorae knew from extensive research that it was almost unheard of for somebody with such powerful magic to be closely related to somebody who couldn’t use it at all.  If Kyungsoo truly was her brother, he wouldn’t necessarily have been as powerful as she was, but he ought to have been manifesting some inkling of affinity with it.

They followed Junmyeon through the mansion, past the heirlooms that had been in his family for centuries, and down some stairs into a basement parlour that had been fashioned out of a disused wine cellar.  He must have been somewhere near the front of the house listening for them, because there was no way that anybody could have heard the knocker from this distance.

The others were already waiting.  Including herself and Kyungsoo, there were fourteen of them in total, some of whom Yoorae knew relatively well and others of whom she only knew by name.  Three worked with Junmyeon at the university, two as historians like Junmyeon himself and one who was an astronomer.  Junmyeon’s sweetheart, whom he’d met while he was a student, worked in the royal archives and went by the name of Mijin.  Yixing, a junior physician from Korelli Island, sat to her right.  Next to him were three men from the city watch – the only one that Yoorae knew at all well was Yongguk, who had useful connections with the city prisons.  To Yongguk’s right was the daughter of the man who ran Alta Wharf, the biggest and busiest harbour on the island.  On her other side was Yook Jaesung, a venerable old man who never raised his voice and was both one of the highest ranking nobles throughout Saurellis and one of the most accomplished sigil mages, and beyond him, High Magistrata Kang Seulgi, the imperious woman who had introduced Yoorae to the group.

They had all been talking amongst themselves when Yoorae and Kyungsoo followed Junmyeon in, but they quietened down now that the group was complete and several of them sent friendly nods and waves in their direction.  Junmyeon settled at the head of the table between Yook Jaesung and Kang Seulgi, and Kyungsoo and Yoorae slid into the last remaining seats, which had thoughtfully been left right next to each other.  Kyungsoo instantly reached for a stack of parchment that was on the table and dragged the ink pot and quill beside it towards him.

Kang Seulgi immediately took charge.

“We were discussing before you came,” she told Kyungsoo and Yoorae, “a recent arrest of somebody using naming magic.”

Kyungsoo’s quill was scratching over the papyrus at once.  Yoorae nodded, accepting a glass of water from a tray that Mijin slid across to her and taking another one off for Kyungsoo, though he probably wouldn’t notice until his hand started cramping from the rapid pace at which he was taking notes and he needed to take a break.

“What was this person doing?” she asked.

“Currently, we don’t know,” replied Jaesung.  “But we do know that it wasn’t a tip-off, because Seulgi’s supposed to be sitting on the case and the prosecution records mention that this man was tracked, not that there are any eyewitnesses.”

Junmyeon reached across to the tray and took the last glass of water.  “Surely that means the prosecution’s case is too weak for it to be forwarded to the high court and hope to win?”

One of the professors slumped in his chair with a sigh.  “My colleagues at the Faculty for Magical Forensics and Development have been getting excited over a new top secret discovery recently and I have a nasty feeling it’s connected.”

Everybody looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to expand.  He twisted a wedding ring around his finger – a nervous habit – before doing so.

“I don’t know much,” he admitted, “but what I overheard leads me to suspect they’ve created a sigil sequence they’ve managed to imbue into some substance or other that detects non-sigil magic.”

“Imbue