Lucien did not run from the alley.
Running drew eyes. Running made noise. Running told the city that something worth chasing had escaped from somewhere worth inspecting. So he walked, steady and measured, his cloak pulled just enough around his front to hide the worst of the blood while leaving enough visible to make people think twice before stepping close.
Prav noticed him anyway.
The city always noticed blood.
A woman carrying a basket of folded laundry glanced at him once, saw the dark stains along his sleeve and the side of his coat, then immediately turned her eyes to the opposite wall. Two men arguing beneath a cracked lantern went quiet as he passed, their gazes dropping to his sword before moving to the purse at his waist, then away from both. A drunk staggered from a doorway, opened his mouth as if to say something stupid, then caught sight of Lucien's expression and reconsidered the value of silence.
Fancy clothes and blood told a simple story in Prav.
Someone rich, someone dangerous, or someone protected by both.
A small noble youth walking alone with a bloodied coat should have looked like prey. Instead, the blood made him harder to understand. Either he had killed someone himself, which meant trouble, or someone else had bled on him and failed to remain close enough to explain why, which meant worse trouble. In a city like Prav, most people survived by not investigating either possibility.
Lucien preferred them wise.
He found an inn three streets away from the lower market, tucked between a shuttered pawnshop and a gaming den whose sign had been repainted so many times that none of the old names had fully vanished. The current name was The Broken Saint, though the saint painted above the door looked more drunk than broken. Warm light spilled through dirty windows. Voices rumbled inside, low and rough, with the occasional bark of laughter cutting through.
It was exactly the kind of place he needed.
An inn that asked for coin before questions and usually forgot the questions if the coin was good enough.
The common room quieted slightly when Lucien entered.
Not completely. That would have meant fear, and fear was more attention than he wanted. Conversations only lowered by a notch. A pair of card players looked up from their table. A serving girl paused with a tray of chipped cups. The innkeeper, a wide man with a shaved head and a nose broken flat across his face, gave Lucien a slow examination from behind the counter.
His eyes stopped on the blood.
Then the sword.
Then the purse.
Then Lucien's face.
"Room?" the innkeeper asked.
"One night."
"Food?"
"Later."
"Bath?"
Lucien glanced down at his coat. "Do you offer one?"
"Not for blood."
"Then no."
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The innkeeper grunted. "Three silvers. Four if you want the room no one listens beside."
Lucien placed four silvers on the counter.
That earned him another look, but this one carried something almost like approval. The innkeeper took the coins and reached beneath the counter for a key tied to a strip of red cloth.
"Second floor. End of the hall. Window sticks. Don't force it unless you want to pay for the frame."
"Noted."
"If anyone comes asking?"
"No one will."
"That's what people say before someone comes asking."
Lucien looked at him.
The innkeeper stared back for a heartbeat, then shrugged. "No one will."
Lucien took the key and crossed the common room.
The glances followed him, but none lingered. The blood on his coat did its work well. A noble without blood invited theft. A noble with blood invited calculation. A noble boy with blood and no visible panic suggested an answer no sane man wished to test over ale.
He climbed the stairs and reached the room at the end of the hall.
It was small, cheap, and better than sleeping beside a ditch. A narrow bed stood against the wall, its blanket washed often enough to be gray instead of brown. A cracked basin sat on a side table. There was a stool, a candle, a warped mirror, and a window with one shutter hanging crooked. The air smelled of old smoke, damp wood, and whatever meal had been cooked below three days ago.
Lucien locked the door.
Then he dragged the stool under the handle.
After that, he stood still and listened.
The room had its noises. The muffled roar of the common room beneath. A cough through the wall. Footsteps passing once in the hall, then fading. Somewhere outside, a cart rolled over loose stones. No one paused at his door. No one whispered too near the window. No breath waited where it should not.
Only then did Lucien exhale.
The breath shook more than he liked.
He crossed to the basin and washed his hands first. The water darkened immediately. He scrubbed until the blood loosened from between his fingers, then wiped the cheap sword with the edge of a cloth torn from one dead thief's sleeve. The blade had held. Not gracefully, but it had held. That was more than he could ask from a weapon bought in Prav after dusk.
His coat was another matter.
Blood had soaked into the side and sleeve, and some of it was his own only in the distant philosophical sense that he had caused it to be spilled. He removed the coat, folded it inside out, and set it near the window. He would need new clothes before approaching the burial hill. That was easy enough. Prav sold everything to anyone if the price was right and the question wrong.
The satchel came next.
He placed Renn's poisons and the treatment on the table one by one, checking each seal. Clear vial. Dark powder. Black-resin ampoule. Green-glass treatment bound in copper wire. Enough to make a healthy man die quickly if used without care. Enough to make Lucien look like a corpse crawling toward a grave if used with precision.
He hoped.
That was the part he hated.
Cards were unreliable. People were worse. Poison, at least, obeyed mixtures, doses, and bodies. Unfortunately, Lucien's plan required all three to behave at the edge of disaster without tipping fully into it.
He left the poisons on the table and sat on the bed.
For a moment, he did nothing.
Then he reached inward.
It was difficult to describe the place where the cards waited. Not his pocket. Not his sleeve. Not a space inside his chest, though it felt close to the ribs. In his first life, the Tarot had appeared when drawn and vanished when finished, as if insulted by the idea of being handled like ordinary paper. Now, after the evolution, the deck felt more complete, more physical, but still hidden in a place that belonged to neither cloth nor flesh.
Lucien extended his hand.
The deck appeared in his palm.
It was thin.
Too thin.
A handful of cards, black-edged and cold, bound by no ribbon and yet held together by some unseen pressure. Their backs were dark, almost metallic, with faint silver lines forming a crown of bones around a skull in the middle. There were not many of them. Carrion Before the Snare. Death Jester: The Last Laugh. Dirge of Blades: The Funeral March. Inspector. Perhaps the old shape of his deck existed somewhere beneath them, but if so, it remained sealed away.
He could look.
He could not draw.
That distinction came naturally now. The cards could be examined whenever he wished, but to Draw was to activate fate, to pull one card out of possibility and force it to answer the world. He had spent today's true exertion already. Dirge of Blades had manifested in the alley and left four bodies crushed into stone.
Past midnight, the Black Arcana had said.
Until then, he could only study.
Lucien separated the first card.
Inspector.
It looked different from the others. Its edge was not jagged black, but glassy and pale, with faint blue-white lines running through it like veins of light. On its face was an eye held inside a magnifying lens. The hand gripping the lens was skeletal, but every bone was covered in tiny writing too small to read. The eye moved when he looked at it.
Lucien disliked that almost as much the second time.
A blue window appeared.