For the first seventeen minutes, the recording agreed with the report.
Kell's party entered the Hall of Teeth in good order. A palm-sized camera of black glass was clipped to the front of his shield. A blue rune glowed as it stored half an hour of silent images in a removable memory crystal. It showed the hall, the three figures who rushed them with blades, the flash of Kell's smoke charge. It showed Davin falling. As the party retreated, a blade caught its clip. The camera struck the floor facing back down the hall.
The report ended there. The camera kept recording.
Irel paused the recording. Sixty guild members sat in the meeting room, their faces turned toward the pale light of the guild’s viewing glass. Beside Irel, Guildmaster Harrow gripped the back of an empty chair.
"Davin was your brother," he said quietly. "You don't have to do this."
"I know what happens next." Irel touched the viewing glass. The images moved again.
The party's boots disappeared from the frame. Smoke held in the corridor. For nearly a minute, nothing moved except its slow drift toward the camera. Someone in the second row coughed.
A low door opened in the wall the party had passed. One of the hall's inhabitants came out on hands and knees, dragging a smaller figure by its clothing. Another followed with a blanket over its head. They went back through the door, and more came out: some upright, some carried. They had hidden there while the party fought the three with blades. The smoke had reached them anyway.
Irel had watched this part six times. She still looked for the small one with the striped sleeve. A larger inhabitant lifted it, held its face close, then laid it down and folded the sleeve over its still hand. The larger one sat beside it until two others came to help move the bodies.
A boot entered the frame. Davin's. He lay just beyond the camera's view, where Irel could see only the sole she had mended last winter. The inhabitant who had stabbed him came forward with one arm hanging uselessly. It knelt, pulled Davin's cloak over his face, and stayed long enough to make sure it would not blow away.
Irel paused the recording before its last image.
"He still killed him," said Kell from the table's far end. His cheek bore a pale seam from the same fight.
"Yes," Irel said.
She had wanted Kell to say it. She did not want Davin made innocent by turning his killer into a saint, or his killer made a beast because Davin was dead.
Harrow looked around the room. "What was behind that door?"
"We thought it was stone," Kell said. "The three came at us. We threw smoke so they couldn't come through the hall together."
"The smoke is in the guild manual," someone said. "It keeps a party alive in a narrow passage."
"It did," Irel said. "And it went under the door."
A few chairs shifted. Nobody disputed what the camera had shown. Several disputed what it meant. Perhaps the hidden ones were young fighters. Perhaps the blanket concealed weapons. Perhaps the one with the striped sleeve had been sick already. Irel had made each argument herself in the first hour after she found the recording. None changed the smoke entering that room.
The guild had bought twelve cameras at spring's end to settle arguments about kills and reward shares. A collection party recovered Kell's with Davin's body the next morning; by then the corridor was empty. Irel played the entire crystal because she wanted to know whether his companions had come back for him. When she asked the chapters for every recording that had kept running after an expedition left the frame, they sent five more. In each case, the expedition had been paid before anyone watched the end.
She slid a second memory crystal into the viewing glass.
A chamber of red stone appeared. An adventurer held a trophy horn up to the lens, grinning. The party departed. When the last torch vanished, the chamber's inhabitants came from cracks too small for the adventurers to have noticed. They bound a wounded one's leg with strips torn from their own bedding. A third recording, which Irel had watched that morning, showed people at the foot of a stair carrying smaller bodies away from a collapsed barricade. They were not the same kind of people as those in the Hall of Teeth. Irel could not tell what any of them called themselves.
"How many?" Harrow asked.
"Five recordings show survivors. Four are from rooms we reported as cleared. Four show people who never held a weapon on the recording."
"And the sixth?"
"The lens broke."
Across the table the contracts steward shut his account book. "Survivors don't prove they won't attack the next party."
"No," Irel said. "They prove we don't know what we're clearing."
Harrow rubbed the bridge of his nose. Above him hung Davin's sword. The guild had put it there after his funeral, before Irel had seen the recording. He had died trying to pull Kell back out of the smoke. That part of the report was true as well.
"There are three clearance contracts leaving tonight," the steward said. "The deposits are paid. One village has been waiting all winter for the road through the lower vault to open."
"They may have real dangers below them," Kell said. He pointed at the frozen image of the red chamber. "Those three at Teeth didn't ask us to leave. They came at us. If you make my people stand in a doorway and take a blade while they decide whether the next room is a nursery, I'll bring you more dead members."
Irel turned toward him. "Then don't enter the next room. Get clear. Watch it. Speak if you can. Defend yourselves if you're attacked. But don't put smoke through a wall because the people on the other side might have knives."
"And if they won't speak?"
"Then we still don't know."
That answer displeased nearly everyone. Irel was glad of it. For years the guild had treated not knowing as permission to write cleared.
Harrow reached for the manual on the table. The section marked Party Safety opened beneath his hand: smoke first in a narrow chamber; collect trophies as proof; count a site clear when armed resistance ends. Each rule had kept a sword-bearer from walking blind into danger. Each rule had also permitted the guild to stop looking when the sword-bearers left.
He took a pen. The steward said, "You can't cancel three contracts on a recording."
"I can hold them," Harrow said. "The deposits can be returned. The road can stay closed another month."
He wrote slowly enough that Irel could see where his hand hesitated. No use of smoke, fire, or collapse against anyone not attacking, or in any unexamined space. No tally of a clearance based only on the departure of an armed party. No bounty approved until every recording had been watched to the end. Defense against attack remained permitted. New contracts waited for a way to approach inhabitants without making them prove their innocence under a blade.
It was an emergency order, not a peace treaty. Nothing in it told Kell how to speak across an unknown language, or brought the striped sleeve back to its wearer. Irel watched Harrow sign anyway.
The second recording had reached its last moments. On the wall, a small red-stone inhabitant noticed the abandoned lens. It came close enough that its face filled the frame. It looked at the machine for a moment, then drew a piece of bedding over it. The wall went dark. A blue mark in its corner kept counting seconds.
Harrow gave the signed order to a runner. Two of the three parties had not yet passed the city gate. The third was already on the road.
Irel took her coat from the chair.
"Where are you going?" Kell asked.
"The east road," she said. "I issued that party a camera."
"A runner can catch them."
"The runner can give them the order. I can tell them what happened after we left."
She went out beneath Davin's sword. Behind her, the blue counter kept moving through the dark while the guild began arguing over which words in the new regulations would be hardest to obey.