dozen or so shelves with scraps of documents, a large table and several cupboards. At the far end of the room, to the right of the stairs, one of the bookcases had been moved aside, revealing the mouth of a dark tunnel behind it.
‘Where does that passage lead?’ Darius pointed to the underground tunnel.
‘Two of our men went to check it out, Colonel,’ replied one of the Guardsmen searching the place.
‘Did you find anything of note?’ Earl had no intention of staying there a second longer than necessary.
‘Just one thing.’ The soldier picked up a book from one of the shelves and handed it to Bleist. ‘It was lying on the floor next to the body. Please check the last entry.’
Without a word, Darius opened the manuscript, written on very thin, delicate paper. Bleist recognised it, perhaps all too well. It was a type of writing material frequently used by agents to record important information because of how easily it could be destroyed: throwing a stack of such pages into water caused them to dissolve completely. The colonel merely glanced at the pages written in code and opened it at the last entry. Unlike the other pages, this one was filled with brown-red ink. Darius shuddered and looked at the patch of dried blood on the floor. He returned to reading. He did not recognise the cipher, but this did not surprise him, as depending on the territorial unit to which they belonged, the Azure Guard used separate systems for securing messages.
The last sentence written down was interesting. It was not encrypted and contained a single, simple instruction:
If you are reading this, deliver the logbook to the Azure Guard headquarters immediately.
