On their way out, Kaldalis and Garyung made a quick agreement about what to do with the Lataxinan abilities while they remained in Baimer. The agreement could mostly simply be summed up with a single word: don’t.

In the absence of any other clues or leads, the only thing that made sense for them to do was return to the scene of the crime.

They made their way through the streets of Baimer to return to the spot where they were attacked. Obviously all the witnesses to the assassination attempt were long gone - either moved on with their day, or possibly taken elsewhere by the Glorious Chapel for questioning about the “evil magic” Kaldalis had used. But there was still a hope for further investigation, even if Kaldalis didn’t know what to even begin to look for.

The best the pair of them could do was confirm that this was the place they’d fought, from a few drops of dried blood where Garyung remembered spitting after being struck in the face. But there wasn’t anything they could use to identify the would-be killer, or where they’d come from.

“I guess the only option is to try and pick up the trail,” Garyung said, giving Kaldalis an expectant look.

Kaldalis didn’t know what the Bhogad was looking at him for, until he remembered his sudden flash of insight in the woods when they were trailing Onirioago. To Garyung’s eyes, it probably had looked like Kaldalis was secretly a master tracker the whole time, and now was the time to pull out the secret weapon. Unfortunately, following obvious signs in the wilderness was an entirely different skillset than tracking someone over pavement and cobblestone. One was a skill that only took a couple of tips and tricks to develop. The other was just shy of physical impossibility, more reliant on psychology and luck than on senses and skills.

But he couldn’t exactly argue it being the only way to go, and so he started to pick his way through the alleys to get back to where the Chapel’s forces had cornered him and let the assassin escape. Their investigation was gradually drying up, and their options were getting more and more desperate.

He tried to tell himself that their attackers were too good to be caught, but it increasingly seemed that they were really bad at this. An assassin dropped into their lap almost perfectly, missed the kill, got run down on foot before lucking into an escape, and they still had nothing.

“I’m not optimistic,” Kaldalis said at last when they found the dead end, “but this is where I caught up to him. He went out this way when the guards stopped me. That’s… really all I have.”

“So let’s see what we’ve got,” Garyung said, moving in the direction Kaldalis indicated. “We just pick over the alley this way and see what we find.”

“I don’t know what you think I’m going to do,” Kaldalis said, though he followed Garyung all the same. “This guy was fast and smart. I only caught him because he went into a dead end before breaking line of sight. He’s not going to leave a trail.”

“It’s what we’ve got,” Garyung said calmly. “So we play it out. You take that side, I’ll take this side. Anything unusual that might be a clue, we’ll come together and fully investigate, alright?”

It took Kaldalis one grumbling minute of searching the alleyways to figure out what Garyung was doing. He was using Kaldalis’s own tricks against him. When Kaldalis had first started working with Garyung, the first - and only - tool in his kit to help him with his anxiety was to calmly and clearly give the man something to do. Executive dysfunction or no, the man was a quick study.

Just the same, it didn’t make him feel that much better to be poking around back here. The alley was clean enough that they weren’t sorting through piles of garbage, but that only made it more apparent that there wasn’t anything to find. There were a few back doors into the buildings, but none of them showed any signs of anything unusual. There was no way of telling if a door had been used recently, let alone if the use was by their assassin.

“I don’t know that we’re going to find anything,” Kaldalis said. After a few minutes, he was almost actively looking for a reason to quit. “This guy also had some ability to scramble up the walls, too. He might not even have come this far. He might have just…”

Kaldalis looked up. There was a drainpipe here that crawled crookedly up a brick wall to the rooftop. About halfway up there was a discolored part of the brick next to it. It took a second for his eyes to trail straight down from the spot, where on the ground there was a little metal bracket.

“Uh,” Kaldalis said, “I hate to disagree with myself, but I think I found something.”

Garyung rushed over as Kaldalis knelt down next to the bracket, carefully examining it. The outer part of the metal band was darkened by age and the elements, slightly pitted from the faint waft of sea air that reached this far into the city. It matched the drainpipe on the wall. The inside, though, was pale, looking near-new.

“What is this?” Garyung asked.

“Sign,” Kaldalis said after a moment. “This just got here. Hard to say how recently, but since the last rain at least.” He pointed up at the little spot of slightly-brighter brick on the wall by the drainpipe. “It just fell from here. It hasn’t been swept or kicked away, and these surfaces are newly exposed.”

“You think it was our guy?” Garyung asked.

“Maybe,” Kaldalis said. “He scrambled up a building on his first escape. He might have done the same once it was obvious I wasn’t hopping after him.”

“Is there any way to be sure?” Garyung asked.

“Not really,” Kaldalis said, standing up straight and looking up onto the roof. “But then, I don’t know what clue we could find that would confirm it was him. Someone painting him into a landscape of this scenic alleyway? A ripped bit of a journal entry?”

“Maybe an audio log,” Garyung offered with a grin. “Something that plays the pronoun game about his employer to entice us to keep digging.”

“I was enticed enough by the threat of imminent death,” Kaldalis grumbled. He drew his spear and looked up at the rooftop. “Nothing to it but to do it.”

The Jump ability got him up to the roof quickly. Garyung didn’t appear to have a similar option, and so waited anxiously on the ground as Kaldalis surveyed the rooftop. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but it didn’t take that long for him to find it. There were a few scraps of wadded up tissue paper scattered around the rooftop. They looked dark, blending into the shadows, until Kaldalis realized that they had been white once. The corners were still white, and he could see that the rest of the tissue was coated in black grime. A moment’s examination confirmed his initial suspicion.

“This was our guy,” Kaldalis called down to Garyung. “Once he was up here, he wiped the disguise gunk off of his horns. If we can set eyes on him again, we could at least have a clue.”

“Any sign of where he went?” Garyung called up. “Or a way for me to get up there?”

Kaldalis looked around for any sign that might tell what direction he went. There wasn’t anything obvious. No sooty footsteps or giant arrows. All he could do was look around and hope for the best. Combing the place carefully, he wasn’t sure what to do next. Nor was there any way for Garyung to get up easily.

“Well, my options are trial and error, or giving up,” Kaldalis said. “Your options are to git gud, I guess.”

“No, really,” Garyung said, crossing his arms and glaring at Kaldalis.

“Okay, I’ll look for clues up here,” Kaldalis said, trying not to smirk. “I guess you could go around the front and start asking at shopfronts. Maybe someone saw a shady Vathon drop out of the sky.”

“Just make sure if you drop down you don’t look shady,” Garyung said, moving around the building. “I don’t want a false positive.”

Kaldalis left him to it and started combing the rooftop. He found himself a little more engaged with this hunt than the search of the alleyway. Something about finding the trail gave him a lot of confidence. He didn’t necessarily feel certain he would find something, but the odds seemed a little bit higher than casting about wildly and praying for a miracle.

There was no further sign on that rooftop, and so he hopped across to the roof on the left side. After finding nothing there, he moved back to the original rooftop to check the one on the other side. When there was nothing there, he checked the next rooftop over. And then circled back to do the same on the other side, working his way outwards, radiating out from the rooftop with the smudged tissues. He used his Jump cooldown when he needed the extra oomph, and just kept looking.

It was nearly thirty minutes until he found his next sign. He found a bakery with a large chimney to carry smoke out from the oven, along with the enticing smell of baking bread. Wedged into the chimney was a little brown bundle. For a moment, he almost ignored it, but the desire to be diligent drove him closer.

He grabbed the bundle, and as he picked it up, it unfurled into a familiar-looking cloak.

A quick examination confirmed that it was a cosmetic piece of gear, occupying the head slot, and that it had a special property to hide the wearer’s face in shadows.

“There goes the hunt,” Kaldalis said. If the Assassin had ditched the cloak, they didn’t really have any way to identify the man on sight. Just the same, there was only one loose end left to tie up.

Kaldalis put the cloak into his inventory and jumped down to the street. This was a relatively quiet street corner, without a lot of traffic. Kaldalis presumed that the bakery was probably busier in the morning, with people seeking the freshest bread, or in the evening, for those who just needed to grab a loaf on the way home. In the middle of the day it was probably quietest. It had likely been similarly calm when the assassin dropped down. So the only one likely to have any information was the baker.

Not that he minded stepping into the bakery. From the ground level, it smelled more like pastries than bread, and he was not disappointed when he got inside. There were racks of fresh bread, but there were cases and cases of meticulously decorated pastries as well. Kaldalis almost went to the cases to peruse the selection, but he was here on business. Perusal would come later.

“Can I help you?” asked the woman behind the counter. “Yesterday's bread is half-off.” She was a relatively slim Bhogad woman, her fur dusted with flour. Her powder-blue apron was absolutely coated in smudges of every possible ingredient that would go into dough.

“Maybe in a moment,” Kaldalis said, offering his best winning smile. “I was hoping you could help me out with a little information.”

Despite his best attempts, her eyes narrowed at him in suspicion. “Of course,” she said carefully, “information is always free.”

“Thank you,” Kaldalis said, feeling a little uncertain about her tone.

“Although, perhaps you should buy something first,” the baker offered, gesturing at a nearby case of pastries. “So that you don’t feel like you’re taking advantage of my generosity, when you ask your questions.”

“Sure,” Kaldalis said, getting a vague sense of deja vu. He peered into the case and pointed to an oblong pastry, glazed and decorated at one end with a little green bit of spun sugar shaped like a leaf. “How about that one?”

“Of course,” the baker said with a smile, fetching the pastry with a pair of tongs and bagging it up. “One lemon pocket. That will be three doubloons.”

Kaldalis wanted to be surprised, but he found that he wasn’t. As much as he knew he was being bled dry, he reached for his purse and slid across a pile of coins totalling twelve crescents.

“Great. Now I won’t feel guilty about all the free information I’m about to get,” Kaldalis said, leaning over the counter, trying to keep his genial smile in place. “Have you seen any suspicious-looking Vathons in this area? Specifically, any jumping down off your roof?”

“Is that a trick question?” she asked, sweeping the coins off the counter. Only a couple of crescents went into the till, while the rest went right into her pocket. “A man drops off my roof, pays a mint for a lemon pocket, and then asks if I’ve seen anyone matching his own description?”

“Any other suspicious-looking Vathons,” Kaldalis clarified with a strained smile.

“About an hour ago,” she said. She seemed uncomfortable to be answering, despite the pile of cash he’d forked over for the information. “A woman, I think, in a heavy cloak. She dropped down right there and skulked away in a hurry.” She pointed to one of the nearby windows, right where Kaldalis had dropped a moment ago.

“A woman?” Kaldalis asked. “Are you sure?” The person she described couldn’t be their assassin. The assassin had ditched his cloak on this very roof. But it was possible he had swapped it out instead of simply abandoning it.

She grimaced. “Okay, maybe a woman. I think they were a woman. I’m sorry, it’s just… I don’t want to be racist, but it’s hard to tell with Vathon.”

“No, I’ll give you that,” Kaldalis said, trying to maintain his sense of good humor, hoping to keep her calm. “Sometimes when I walk by a mirror, I’m not sure who that girl is or why she’s in the bathroom with me.” He got a weak chuckle out of her from that, and so he pressed on. “I was looking for a man, though. No cloak. Leather armor. Maybe carrying a particularly unpleasant-looking staff?”

“I’m sorry,” she said with a frown. “No one like that.”

“Damn,” Kaldalis cursed, looking out the window as if he could will the assassin to blunder into his line of sight.

Unfortunately, like so many things today, luck was not on Kaldalis’s side.