The Blind Quarter

There was one place in Greel the tracing magic had never worked. The locals called it the Blind Quarter. Halvard had been avoiding it, professionally, his entire career. It was not large. A dozen streets, down by the old river wall, where any bound object went silent the instant it crossed in. Thief-takers did not work the Blind Quarter. You could not. The whole trade rested on the pull, and in those dozen streets there was no pull, only a flat dead quiet, like a room with the windows bricked up. Nobody knew why. There were stories — there are always stories — but Halvard had spent thirty years not caring, because the Blind Quarter had never once been his problem. Now a woman in an expensive coat had made it his problem. The object she would not name pulled toward nowhere, and there was only one nowhere in Greel, and Halvard stood at the edge of the Blind Quarter in the grey afternoon and looked down its first silent street and felt every one of his thirty careful years asking him, quietly, to turn around.