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bash’ ponces around the Sanctum Sanctorum you can waltz in here and improve on my security?”
    I don’t believe Martin had ever before heard his bash’mates’ positions in the Masonic Hive’s most honored Guard used as an insult. He managed not to flinch. “Are you Member Ockham Saneer?”
    â€œI am.” Ockham pronounced with relish, as if, with all the lives in history laid out before him, he would have chosen this one.
    Martin gave a suitably respectful nod. “This isn’t a simple security breach. You’ve been framed for grand theft. We have your tracker ID logged entering the crime scene in Tokyo late last night, and five million euros appeared in your bank account this morning. I know it’s absurd to suggest that anyone in your bash’ would commit a theft for profit, but I need your cooperation to find out why someone would set up something so implausible. The fact that there was also a break-in here last night can’t be coincidence.”
    The door relented at last, revealing a man of dark Indian stock to match his sister Thisbe, and a physique beyond common athleticism. His shirt and pants, once plain, were now a labyrinth of doodles: black spirals, cross-hatching, and hypnotic swirls, though he wore them as indifferently as if the cloth had never tasted ink. Only his Humanist boots mattered: veins of knife-bright steel framing a surface of pale, ice-gray leather, real leather which had once guarded the taut flanks of a living deer that Ockham slew himself. Like Martin, Ockham wore no sign of hobby or of nation-strat, nothing but his Hive boots and the overpowering self-confidence of a man who guards something so vital that the law will let him kill for it. Ancient civilizations, East and West, knew the special breath of power granted by the right to kill. That’s what made sword and fasces marks of dominion, lord over peasant, male over female, magistrate over petitioner. Our centuries of peace have so perfected nonlethal force that even police serve content without the right to kill. But we are not fools. To those who protect the commonwealth entire, the guards around the Olenek Virus Lab, the Sanctum Sanctorum, and to Ockham here we grant ‘any means necessary,’ a knife, a branch, even that deadly instrument the fist, to guard a million lives. Even if they never exercise this rarest right, still somehow every glance and gesture of such guardians still breathes the ancient force of knighthood. “I am Ockham Saneer. What is it that I’m supposed to have stolen?”
    Martin nodded respect. “The unpublished Black Sakura Seven-Ten list.”
    Scorn deepened on Ockham’s face. “Who’d pay five million for a vacuous editorial that goes to press in two days?”
    â€œI could give you a nice long list. But I don’t know who’d pay five million to frame you. Did you visit the Black Sakura office yesterday? Have you ever dealt with them at all?”
    Ockham still blocked the doorway, stubborn as a sculpture in its niche. “If I cared about newspapers I’d pick The Olympian or El País .”
    â€œThe paper’s absence was reported at seven o’clock P.M . Tokyo time, six A.M. your time. Any chance you might have taken your tracker off in the hours shortly before that?”
    â€œPaper?”
    â€œYes. The stolen list was a handwritten manuscript on paper. Black Sakura is antiquarian that way.”
    Ockham’s face grew harder. “That’s what my breach was, an intruder left a piece of paper in the house, with Japanese writing on it.”
    Martin swallowed. “May I see it? I do have jurisdiction.” He let the warrant flicker across Ockham’s lenses.
    The Humanist drew back with a mastiff’s reluctance. “Don’t touch anything without asking.”
    â€œUnderstood.” The Mason crossed the threshold with the tiptoe reverence he usually reserves for his