Kael had been a vampire for three hundred and fourteen years.
In that time he had learned — with the specific thoroughness of someone who had three centuries to refine the lesson — the difference between information that changed the present and information that changed the past. Most intelligence changed the present: a new development, a new actor, a new threat that required a new response. The strategic landscape shifted and you shifted with it, the way water adjusted to the shape of whatever it was poured into.
Information that changed the past was rarer.
And far more dangerous.
He had found Rowan's research record in the eastern network at three in the morning, two days ago. A dead scholar's estate in the northern ranges — an archivist named Cade who had died of old age eighteen mon
