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Lift, wearing stolen Azish robes and a cap, sits in a senior scribe's chair inside the Grand Indicium and tries to look important. The outfit is loose and silky — she likes soft clothes — and the patterns on it apparently mean something significant, because everyone in Azir always told her so. Across the desk sits a large, bespectacled scribe in layered shiquas, face still covered, tapping her pen and disbelieving every word. *You are from the palace in Azir.* *Yup,* Lift says. Friend of the emperor; she calls him Gawx, even though they've gone and given him a more dignified name now that he is emperor.

Around them, the Indicium thrums: scribes hurrying paper down windowless corridors, parshman porters carting boxes of reports, racks of spanreeds blinking on the walls, and an unfamiliar little spren above each desk — Wyndle tells her they're concentrationspren, rain-rings in the air without any rain. Lift got past the front by following Wyndle's advice and *not talking*, pressing a card whose vine-grown letters introduced her as someone too important to question. Now, in this windowless inner chamber with a yellowed paint-stain she can pretend is sunlight, she has to actually open her mouth.

She fails. She tells the scribe — Ghenna — that the emperor has someone whose only job is to pick his nose for him, and that her Voidbringer needs to sift through every paper in the building to find strange things. Ghenna stands. At that moment a thin, balding scribe in a yellow shiqua and an odd brown-yellow cap — the spindly-scribe — slips in and whispers in her ear. Ghenna stiffens, then asks Lift to name viziers she knows in the palace. Lift cheerfully provides her private nicknames — *Dalky*, *Big A*, *Daddy Sag-butt*, *Fat Lips* (she means Vizier Noura) — and Ghenna walks straight out, saying *wait here.*

With her ear to the door, Lift catches the corridor scribes saying that her description matches the one sent in by the immigration captain, who happens to be in the Indicium right now for her debriefing. *Damnation.* She crosses to the wall-rack of labelled spanreeds and asks Wyndle which is the palace's. He climbs up, reads the nameplates, points the third reed out. She scrambles onto the desk, slots it, twists its ruby — the palace scribes answer almost at once — then realises she has no idea how to use the thing. Wyndle grows the letters in vines on the table for her to copy. Her message is brief and unmistakeable: this is Lift. Tell Fat Lips. She is in trouble. Get Gawx.

The door bursts open before she can finish. Ghenna is back, and with her is a small army — five scribes, three guards, and the captain from the upper checkpoint, Hauka herself. Lift makes herself awesome and tries to squirt under their legs, but the door catches her. Her oversize coat tears away in her would-be captor's grip, leaving her in trousers, undershirt, and panic. The guards pile on her. She is squirming free, hands slipping through fingers like a fish, when one of the scribes whispers *Tashi, God of Gods,* and a ring of blue awespren smoke bursts around her head.

The spanreed on the desk is writing on its own. Wyndle reads it aloud as the room goes still: *To whom it may concern. It is decreed that I — Prime Aqasix Yanagawn the First, emperor of all Makabak — proclaim that the young woman known as Lift is to be shown every courtesy and measure of respect. You will obey her as you would myself, and bill to the imperial account any charges. If she is harmed or impeded in any way, you will know imperial wrath.* The note appends a description and two questions only she can answer, for authentication.

*Thanks, Gawx,* Lift says. She steps off the back of a kneeling guard, settles into Ghenna's chair, and informs the very large scribe that *that means you gotta do what I say.* When Ghenna asks what, exactly, she wants — Lift cocks her head and asks her what she was going to have for lunch today.