It seemed colder out, the passageway retaining a dankness Netherton hoped had nothing to do with urine, ersatz or otherwise. He saw Lowbeer draw something vaguely familiar from a topcoat pocket, gold and ivory glinting in her hand, reflecting candlelight in the instant before Fearing closed the door behind them. Her tipstaff, he remembered, in the sudden dark, a nastily mutable badge of authority, a cologne atomizer one moment and a handgun the next, but always of ivory, trimmed with gold, with somewhere, invariably, a small symbolic coronet. He hadn’t seen her produce it since shortly after he’d first met her, but associated it with trouble of a very immediate sort. "Why do you have that out?" he asked.