Dawn came grey and unwilling to the capital, and by the time Rama and Sekar reached the scholar's archive themselves, guards had already roped off the corridor and Ki Branggah stood waiting beside the broken shelf with the stillness of a man who had spent the last several hours refusing to touch anything before someone with more expertise arrived.
The symbol scratched into the plaster was small, no larger than a spread hand, and looked at first glance like nothing more than an idle scrawl, three curved lines meeting at a center point that had been gouged deep enough to crumble the wall's surface. Wirasena crouched before it for a long time without speaking, tracing its shape in the air an inch above the stone without daring to touch it directly.
