The Object With No Direction

She would not tell him what the object was. That, in itself, told Halvard a great deal — none of it good, all of it interesting. "You're hiring me to find a thing," he said, slowly, "and you won't describe the thing." "I'll tell you its weight. Its size. The metal of it." The woman's coat was worth more than Halvard's flat. "Not its nature. Its nature is not your concern. Your concern is the pull." "The pull is the same as the nature. In my trade. The pull is how a thing tells you what it is." He leaned back. "You said it pulls toward nowhere. There's no nowhere. Every bound object pulls toward its owner. If it pulls toward nowhere, that means one of three things, and you're going to dislike all three." She waited. "Either the owner is dead," Halvard said, "and gone past where the binding can reach. Or the owner has never lived at all. Or —" and here he watched her face very carefully — "the object is in a place that the magic of this city has been specifically, deliberately, expensively built not to see."