The village of Teshun sat at the bend of a river too shallow to carry trade goods, which was likely the only reason it had survived long enough to be marked at all rather than abandoned generations ago. Smoke still rose from two of its houses when the party crested the final ridge, though the fires had been out for weeks. Nobody had bothered pulling down the charred frames.
An old woman met them at the village's edge, a hoe still gripped in one hand as though she intended to use it if the ten armed riders proved to be a second visitation rather than the first.
"We've nothing left to take," she said, before Numanfung had even dismounted.
"We're not here to take anything." Numanfung's voice carried none of the diplomatic polish she'd used at the estate gate. "I'm Numanfung, of the Subba clan. I want to know what happened here."
The old woman's grip on the hoe didn't loosen. "You're the one they were asking about."
Shree Yan's attention sharpened. "Who was asking?"
"The ones who came." The woman's eyes moved over him, flat and unimpressed, the way she might size up a merchant's cart before deciding whether the goods were worth her time. "You're just a boy. Why does a boy get to ask questions about my dead grandson?"
"Because I intend to find whoever did this," Shree Yan said.
"Everyone intends that," the woman said, and turned to lead them into the village without waiting to see if the answer had satisfied her.
They found perhaps thirty survivors gathered in what remained of the village hall, most of them elderly or very young, the middle generation notably thin on the ground. Numanfung knelt beside a child clutching a wooden toy shaped like a bird and spoke to her for several minutes in a low, patient voice before the girl finally answered.
"Men in grey came at night," the child said, so quietly Shree Yan had to lean in to catch it. "They didn't want money. They took Auntie Sora and left."
"Just her? Nobody else?"
The girl nodded. "They said her name before they came in. Like they already knew it."
Shree Yan filed that detail away and turned to the old woman with the hoe.
"Sora," he said. "That's the name I need. Where is she now?"
"Dead," the woman said flatly. "They brought her back three days later and left her at the well. Nothing wrong with her that we could see. Her heart had simply stopped."
Numanfung rose from beside the child, something tight in her jaw. "Did Sora carry any unusual traits? Eyes, dreams, anything passed down through her mother's line?"
The old woman's suspicion sharpened into something closer to alarm. "How would a clan princess know to ask that?"
"Because I share the trait she may have carried," Numanfung said. "And because six villages like this one have already lost someone to it."
The woman was quiet a long moment, weighing whether the honesty was worth trusting.
"Sora dreamed," she said finally. "Since she was small. Names that weren't hers. A voice that called across water she'd never seen. Her mother had the same dreams before her, and her mother's mother before that. We thought it a family curse, nothing more."
Shree Yan crouched beside the old woman now, matching her level rather than standing over her.
"Did Sora ever mention the names she dreamed?"
"Once. She said the voice called her Aama." The woman's brow furrowed. "Strange word. Not one I'd heard before."
Something in Shree Yan's chest went very still.
Not Miima. Not Rimi. A third name.
"Did she say anything else? Anything about who spoke it, or why?"
"Only that it felt old," the woman said. "Older than anything ought to feel, coming from a girl barely twenty years alive."
Numanfung caught Shree Yan's eye across the hall, and he could see the same recognition settling into her that had settled into him.
They left the hall an hour later, having gathered what little else the villagers could offer, and Shree Yan found himself walking apart from the group, turning the name over with a care that had nothing to do with strategy.
"You went too fast in there," Numanfung said, catching up to him near the village's edge.
"I asked the questions we needed answered."
"You asked them like an interrogation. That woman just lost her grandson and a woman she'd raised since childhood. She needed grief acknowledged before she needed a stranger crouching in front of her demanding names."
"I acknowledged nothing false. I asked what mattered."
"That's not the same as caring how it landed." Numanfung's voice had an edge now that hadn't been there in the estate garden. "You extracted information from her the same way you'd extract it from an enemy. She isn't one."
"I don't treat everyone as an enemy."
"You treat everyone as a source," she said. "Some days I can't tell if that's different."
Shree Yan said nothing, and the silence between them carried more weight than either of their earlier arguments had.
"I got what we needed," he said finally.
"You did," Numanfung agreed. "That doesn't mean it was the only way to get it."
She walked ahead without waiting for a response, and Shree Yan remained a moment longer, watching the smoke still rising faintly from the two ruined houses, the word Aama settling into him alongside everything else this village had cost to learn.
Wu Yan fell into step beside him as the party regrouped near the horses.
"She's not wrong, you know," he said.
"I didn't ask."
"No," Wu Yan agreed, something wry in his tone despite the grim setting. "You rarely do."
They rode out within the hour, the marked village shrinking behind them, and Shree Yan spent the remainder of the day's travel in a silence that had nothing to do with exhaustion and everything to do with a single unfamiliar word turning over and over in his mind, refusing to settle into any shape he could yet make sense of.
That evening, camped a half day's ride from the second marked settlement, Fen Lu found him apart from the fire, staring at nothing in particular.
"Aama," she said, having heard the account secondhand from Numanfung. "I've never encountered that word in any of the recovered fragments."
"Neither have I."
"Then it isn't part of the ritual language we've already catalogued." Fen Lu settled onto a nearby rock, her expression thoughtful rather than alarmed. "Which means either the Architects' vocabulary was larger than what survived in the valley, or this word comes from somewhere else entirely."
"Somewhere older than the Architects."
"Possibly." Fen Lu didn't offer false certainty, and Shree Yan found himself grateful for that more than he'd expected to be. "I don't know, Shree Yan. I'll say that plainly rather than guess and call it knowledge."
He nodded, the honesty settling easier than any confident theory would have.
Numanfung joined them a while later, having apparently decided the earlier argument didn't need to follow them into the evening. She sat without invitation, close enough that her shoulder nearly brushed his.
"I meant what I said," she told him. "About the village."
"I know."
"I'm not asking you to become someone else. I'm asking you to notice there's a cost to the way you get things done, even when it works."
Shree Yan considered this longer than he might have a week earlier.
"I'll consider it," he said, which was the most honest answer he had, and Numanfung, apparently satisfied with honesty over promise, let the matter rest.
The fire burned low between them as the camp settled into an uneasy quiet, the word Aama still sitting unresolved in Shree Yan's mind, and somewhere beyond the ridge ahead, the second marked village waited with whatever answers, or further questions, it still had left to give.