If you’ve started reading Chapter 9: “Delving Deep, or, The Macabre Misadventures of Misters Scrivener, Bellwether and Guess,” you’ve likely noticed that it does not pick up where Chapter 8 left off. When last we saw Mister Guess, he was sheltering the fugitives Palm and Timriel in his home in Government Hollow, and recovering from the horrors that he and Palm had recently faced in the home of the Thief Lord, Fortunado. Chapter 9 flashes back in time to the previous day to show those horrors in detail, while also continuing a story that we last left way back in Chapter 4 – Guess’ new gig breaking into a wizard’s crypt. This fracturing of the time-line is nothing new, of course. We leap twenty years between Chapters 1 and 2, Chapter 3 includes flashbacks to the end of the Quest of the Elect and other events within that same period, and Chapter 4 follows two parallel stories, one from each end of that twenty year span. After remaining in the present tense for Chapters 5 and 6, and the extended flashbacks of Chapters 7 and 8, we now return to the time-jumping storytelling that is the hallmark of chapters featuring Mister Guess.
