Kingsley slid over a roof and coiled himself in the gathering speed. As he reached the edge of the roof, he leaped, landing with a smooth roll on the flat roof of the building. There was a start from the alley below, but traders were always too busy to pursue and he was hardly the only person dashing along the eaves. He cleared the low wall on the far side of the roof and landed on a newly-installed fire escape, jumped the edge and caught the railing on the opposite rail. He hauled himself up, and poked his head over the sparse roof behind. Carefully now he stole through the garden on his toes, backing carefully through the light foliage. A dog barked and sent Kingsley hurtling across the roof, over the flat top of a water tower, down a ladder on the far side. He picked up speed now, over the saw teeth of Mme Lei's laboratory, and with a final vault he catapulted himself to the ledge of the open window, crawled inside, and closed the window behind him. He sat for a moment on a beam under the high peaked roof. Gently, he dropped to the floor, and slumped on the rope bed in the corner.

"Mr. Singe! Where are you?" Master Veldt hurtled into the room like a thunderstorm. He was that boisterous type of academic, the sort who learned about the mating rituals of alligators by wrestling them, and held an extremely similar feeling for the hired help. He never rang for them and Kingsley suspected he whispered the orders so that he'd have an excuse to stomp around the house later and bellow them at people. "Well man? Where've been all day?"

Kingsley paused, hands in pockets to prevent thrashed knuckles and began desperately searching for an excuse. It would be silly to admit the truth but sillier to pretend he'd been ignoring a summons. His hand fell upon the nails in his pocket. "Collecting, sir!" He said, presenting a single nail, its head painted red.

"Coll--" The Master stopped midword and seized the nail. "Where did you find it?"
"Near the Upper Walks. I knew you've been looking for an opportunity and I happened to be in the area, sir." Here he paused, looking for a plausible lie.
"Placing an order for Mme Lie. You know how she doesn't trust the post office, sir, so she sent me to do it." He smiled comfortably at the lie. Rooster Veldt refused to speak to his neighbors but somewhere in his brain a rumpled and grouchy gentleman occasionally shook free his bonds and managed to persuade him to behave chivalrously.

"Magnificent..." He murmured, and his frown relaxed into a serene smile. "Why was I up here again?" Kingsley opened his mouth to respond but there was no time; the mouth snapped back into a rugged grimace and Kingsley nearly choked as he tried to avoid interrupting what was to come next.

"Pack your things, we've been contracted."
Kingsley leveraged the word against his internal dictionary. The deadpan humor that comes naturally to hired men muscled its way onto his tongue. "Contracted what, sir? Are we off to quarantine again?"
Veldt never accused his servants of having a sense of humor. "No, we've been contracted. Some blasted idiot in dungarees found a ruin in the Eastern Spineback, and now all the jackals are eager to lay claim. The University is hiring me out to the Fraternity of Sawbones so I can verify their findings and legitimize their claim." He scowled. "They say it shouldn't take more than a month, but it's a three days ride just to get there."

Kingsley frowned. The continent was sparingly settled, home to just over a two hundred thousand citizens of the empire. More than twelve thousand souls populated the land west of Kinsbourne, between the two major port cities and the extremely amenable countryside nearby. Kinsbourne itself was the largest population center east of the coast and marked the edge of polite civilization. Villages reached deeper into the interior, it was true, and trappers and Society archeologists ranged further than that, but three days? That had to be three hundred miles depending on the quality of the roads. Something else was bothering him, though.