The strongroom sits under the counting hall, cut into rock, with one door, four walls of laid stone, plus no relay signal anywhere inside it.
That last detail is why nothing said in that room on the afternoon of the second mantis went out live.
Vell had a garrison recorder in his coat, the pattern the weighing district uses for depositions.
It is wound by hand, it stores onto a wax drum, plus it does not transmit anything at all. Yenna had put it in his pocket four hours earlier without discussing the matter, which is in the log because she logged it herself.
Alder Vance is eighty-one years old and had been sitting on a settlement crate since the door dropped.
He had come back into the tower on the second morning against garrison advice, to move four boxes of guild paper out of a building with a hole in its western frontage. Nobody has established whether he knew the door mechanism would seal under a structural alarm.
