I fear that I do not believe what I am about to write myself, but I must persist. I, Ad Dakhla, scribe and chronicler to the court of the Sultan of the City of Bronze, do here set down what I was told by the Sultan’s cousin Lady Ries Ib Reshi and the events that followed. Not long after our last encounter, she returned to her home in the Outer Districts. A letter arrived not long after, informing me that she had found a third sword, identical to the others, inside a long loaf of bread she had ordered for a feast. The baker insisted that there had been no such sword when the bread was cooked, roightly pointing out that the dough would have failed to properly rise and form around such an obstruction.

The Sultan, to whom I read the letter, believed that his cousin was on the edge of madness and feingning the discoveries. Lady Ries insisted that she was being targeted for assassination. Perhaps we will never know, because she vanished not long after the letter was sent. Four more swords like the ones she had discovered were found in her things, for a total of seven, but each was unlikely to have been put in place by her. One was baked into hundred-year-old walls, another was braided into a rope in a well, the third was inside a fattened cow slain for food, and the fourth was delicately woven into a silk cloth in the wardrobe of Lady Ries.

The Sultan has ordered my investigations to stop, for now, in light of these developments, so for now I close.

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