Materai's loyalty-ledger

A thin black book that Johanka Materai kept in the locked study of her estate in Haudh-Gwenn, shelved sideways among the others and rarely opened: a private accounting of every councilor on the Council (their dealings, their loyalties, and what each of them costs). She runs the city’s bank, resents owing Beltran Grayeras her seat, and has been buying noble favor with the city’s own money to wear his support away. The book is how she keeps count.

Lady Talia Salahaudhi, coordinating the resistance from inside Materai’s own household, named it to the Valiant Few as the thing worth taking. She would open a door and say where it was kept; they were to lift it quietly and then burn it, since an obvious burglary would bring an answer that spared nothing.

They took it at her soirée. Aldo worked out the evening’s order first, a toast and then the dancing, so that he would know the two stretches when the study would be least watched. Two guests blundered in while he was at the shelves, drank something they should not have and slept through the rest of the evening, which sealed the room and gave him a free run at it. The book went into his coat before the dancing was properly under way. It has not been burned. It has not been read, and not one name out of it has yet been spoken aloud. Her house has since burned to the ground with nothing left inside it that anyone wanted.