“Run.”
Isabella was already moving when she realised no one was following, which was the central problem with the word as a rallying cry.
Wylan was checking his satchel. Laila was retrieving her pigment pouches from the floor; she had survived enough catastrophes to know that leaving your tools behind only made the next one harder. Lambert stood watching Seraphina, who floated in the elemental’s sphere, conserving her opinions for later.
“Leave her.”
“No.” Wylan didn’t look up.
“We don’t have time—”
“I’m making time. Mother.”
Laila found the right pouch, stood, and flung a burst of umber pigment into the water. The angry captive slumped and went still.
Isabella grabbed Laila by the arm and pulled.
“Seraphina and that damned elemental can stay here for all I care. We’re going.”
She nocked and fired blind into the dark behind them. At each junction she took a breath: stone, cold, bone, ice, and once, faintly, snow. She went toward the snow.
That way.
The walls were close enough to touch. She kept one hand trailing the skulls and counted footsteps behind her: three, plus the wet drag of the elemental, which had no opinion about its circumstances and therefore no complaints about them.
“Isabella.” Laila’s voice came back strange off the stone. “Do you know where you’re going?”
“This is what I do, Laila.”
The cold sharpened. The dark thinned. A window of pale light opened ahead and they ran through it into open air and night.
The sky was wrong in a way that went beyond the merely astronomical. The Pendulum was gone, having apparently decided this was someone else’s problem. The moon had reached similar conclusions. The street below had reached its own conclusions about the situation and was acting on all of them simultaneously.
People ran. A City Guard cordon attempted, with the particular optimism of the professionally obligated, to impose order on a crowd that had stopped believing in order as a concept. A woman stood perfectly still in the middle of the road, looking up at where the sun used to be, while the panic organised itself around her like water around a stone.
From the direction of the Bassin-de-Marne came a sound that didn’t have a name yet, though it was working on acquiring one.
The driver of their carriage had abandoned his post, which was understandable if professionally questionable. Isabella climbed up and took the reins.
“Everybody in. We’re going home.”
This time, they didn’t argue.
Isabella drove.
The city presented itself in pieces.
A Watch cordon at the Rue des Marronniers, holding a line against a cluster of netherborn fiends; she recognised the movement, the way they folded around obstacles rather than avoiding them.
A family in nightclothes, having drastically revised their evening plans.
A chandler’s shop blazing with every candle lit, as though the proprietor had decided that if this was the end, it would at least be well-illuminated.
Twice she took a longer route. Once a figure crossed the street ahead with a wound across its chest that nothing living had survived. She took the longer route. There were worse things happening in this city tonight that she could not stop either.
Behind her: voices, or shouting. She kept her eyes on the road.
The noble quarter offered fewer people and a more considered variety of panic: shuttered windows, carriages departing with suspicious haste, the quiet dignity of people trying very hard not to run.
Then the manor gates. The forecourt beyond was lit and populated by staff who had gathered, apparently, to demonstrate that uncertainty could be expressed through stillness as effectively as through motion.
Cedric was at the entrance, composed despite everything. In the middle of the forecourt stood a gold-and-white carriage she had only seen once before: when Valère had visited.
“Valère is waiting for you in the audience chamber,” Cedric said.
Wylan was already looking at the elemental. Seraphina hung suspended in the sphere, unconscious, the water moving slowly around her in the cold. It bore an air of responsibility and intended to honour it.
“She can’t be in there with us,” he said. “The shed at the far end of the property. It’s been empty for years.” He directed the elemental with a gesture. It moved immediately, carrying its cargo across the forecourt toward the garden. Ice was forming at the edges of the sphere, a thin crust spreading inward; if the sun was gone, the world might as well get on with freezing things.
“I wouldn’t be surprised to find her frozen solid when we return,” Wylan said.
“Good thing she doesn’t need heat or air then.” Laila was already moving toward the entrance. “Come on. We have another would-be god to attend to.”
Wylan watched the sphere until it rounded the corner of the garden wall. Then he went inside.
The estate was loud: voices from the upper floor, a door closing twice in quick succession, someone issuing instructions that weren’t being followed. He cut through the east corridor and let himself into the workshop.
“The flame,” he said. “We need it—”
He stopped.
The lantern on its hook was almost dark, the flame of Hyperion reduced to a philosophical position on the subject of illumination. Divina was at the bench, working by candlelight, and did not look up.
“Twenty minutes ago,” she said. “When I heard Valère was here.”
Wylan looked at the lantern. The flame stirred, very slightly, in a room with no draught.
“The interesting thing,” Divina said, setting down a lens mount and picking up a different tool, “is that it understood immediately. I didn’t have to ask twice.”
The flame was so low it was more warmth than light: patient, contained; it had already outlasted one god and was in no particular hurry.
“Right,” he said. “Good.”
“Yes,” said Divina. “Now go. You’re blocking my light, and Valère has been kept waiting.”
Wylan went.
The east corridor was quieter than the rest of the house. He could hear voices ahead: not distressed, which told him nothing useful. He came through the side door of the audience chamber and stopped.
Valère stood at the centre of the room, gold and white, the sunburst insignia at his lapel catching the candlelight. He was dressed as though for a ceremony, which was accurate. He had been waiting a reasonable amount of time, and considered patience one of his lesser virtues.
Maximilian was in his ducal chair, his broken arm in its cast across his lap, his good hand on the armrest; Elariana stood at his shoulder, Greta off to the side with Aurora, very still. A few household staff ranged along the walls, present at history and not entirely sure how they felt about it.
Lambert, Laila, and Isabella were already there.
Valère glanced at the side door as Wylan entered, and returned his attention to the room.
“Good,” he said. “Now we are all present.”
“I want to begin,” Valère said, “by thanking you.”
He let that sit for a moment.
“The new Republic owes you a considerable debt. You may not have intended what occurred tonight, but intention is rarely the measure of consequence.” He looked at each of them in turn. “You have cleared the way for something that could not otherwise have been achieved. I thought it only courteous to tell you so in person.”
“You’ll have to help me understand what we’ve done,” Laila said. “I’m lost.”
“Are you?” Valère’s tone was genuinely curious. “You retrieved the Sang-Gréal from the Dungeon. You resurrected R?zvan. Your family’s hand has been present at every step of this.” He paused. “Every thread has been drawn by your hands. There is now a vacancy where a god used to be, and I intend to fill it.”
“R?zvan destroyed the sun,” Laila said. “Not us.”
“Correction,” Valère said. “R?zvan killed Invictus. But there is otherwise a vacancy in the House of Agony.”
“How could you know?” Lambert said. “How could you know R?zvan would do what he did?”
“Because I know how he thinks,” Valère said. “Better than anyone living. We share the same nature, he and I. His ambitions were not difficult to read because they were mine to begin with. He is first and foremost my shadow.”
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“Then why not intervene?” Lambert said. “If you knew what he intended—why let any of this happen?”
“Because it needed to happen,” Valère said. “Every thread has been necessary. Including yours.”
“And the experiments,” Lambert said. “Seraphina’s work on our bloodlines. Was that yours?”
“No,” Valère said. “That was R?zvan’s design. And Seraphina’s.” He considered for a moment. “Though I understand the logic of it. It is precisely what I would have done in his position.” A pause. “I did not need to. I was already immortal when I began.”
Lambert was quiet for a moment.
“I watched Invictus die tonight,” he said. “I watched R?zvan take a star from the sky with his bare hand. And you are telling me this was preparation.”
“I am telling you it was inevitable,” Valère said. “The difference matters.”
“Your god is dead, Monsignor Lambert,” Valère continued. “The order you pledged yourself to is in ruins. What comes after will not resemble what came before. If you cling to the old systems, you will drown with them.”
Lambert looked at him. “If this is your Republic,” he said, “I want no part of it.”
“Fortunately,” Valère said, “what you want is irrelevant.”
Maximilian spoke from his chair. “What happens to Pharelle?”
Valère turned to him. “The city will endure.”
“There are creatures in the streets,” Maximilian said. “People are dying tonight. I need more than that.”
“My agents are in the field. The Inquisitorial forces are holding what lines they can.” Valère paused. “But if you are asking whether I can promise every citizen survives the night — no. I cannot make that promise.”
“Then what can you promise?”
Valère considered this as the room waited.
“Order,” he said. “Reason. A republic built on something more durable than the whims of gods.”
“Gods are not interchangeable,” Lambert said. “They do not all share a domain. Libera is of the moon. She is, if anything, your impending counterpart — what is Reason without Rhyme?”
“Reason is unconquered,” Valère said. “Libera is, by her very nature, irrational. She will be the first to go.”
Lambert stared at him. “Go where?”
“You might ask Hyperion. He would know better than I.”
“You want to destroy another god.”
“I mean to destroy all of them.” Valère’s tone remained pleasant. “Gods demand faith. Faith is revelation dressed as knowledge — the suspension of inquiry in the presence of the unknowable. I find that unsatisfying. A republic of Reason cannot be built beneath a sky full of things that ask to be believed in.”
The room was very still.
“You are describing the abolition of the divine,” Lambert said.
“I am describing its conclusion,” Valère said. “There is a difference. Even gods must have their twilight.”
Maximilian’s voice cut across the room. “I don’t care about your war in the heavens. I don’t believe you would succeed in any case.” He leaned forward in the ducal chair, the cast arm braced across his lap. “Do you care nothing for the people in this city? The people I am trusted to protect? The very people whose faith you are riding to your own vainglorious ascension?”
“Every dawn requires a night,” Valère said. “This one simply asks more of us than most.”
Maximilian looked at him. “That is a very pretty way of saying nothing.”
Isabella’s hand moved, barely: the beginning of a reach, checked before it became one. Valère noticed. He turned to her.
“Oppose me,” he said, “and I will cast you into the abyss. Think on it carefully.”
Isabella held his gaze. Her hand was still.
Valère straightened and addressed the room. “The night is no longer young, and neither am I. I have a pressing appointment to keep.”
“At this hour?” Laila said.
“Before the break of day,” Valère said. “You might say it is something of a deadline.”
He offered the room a gesture too precise for a bow, turned, and walked to the door at his own pace. The gold-and-white carriage would be waiting. He was not a man who kept things waiting long.
? The theological literature on the subject of divine ascension was extensive and almost entirely retrospective, which was, historians noted, rather its defining characteristic as a field.
The door closed behind him. A moment later, through the window, they heard the carriage move.
The family was already moving. Isabella’s hand was on her sword. Wylan was pulling his satchel closed. Lambert was already looking at the door.
“And where do you think you’re going?”
Maximilian hadn’t raised his voice. He didn’t need to.
“Out there,” Laila said. “People are dying.”
“Yes,” Maximilian said. “They are.” He didn’t move from where he stood. “We could go out and be useful. We would save lives, certainly, in the short term. A creature here, a barricade there.” He looked at each of them in turn. “What we have on our hands tonight is an existential threat. We are some of the only people who can be marshalled against it. Possibly the only.” A pause. “As much as I would wish to waylay creatures in my own city’s streets, this has become war. In a war, the question is not where you are most useful tonight. It is whether you survive to be useful at all.”
The room was quiet.
Laila looked at him. “War,” she said. “You have the city garrison. What army do you have?”
Maximilian picked up his coat from the back of the chair, one-handed, and settled it across his shoulders.
“Come with me.” He turned to Elariana. “Please bring my sword.”
She was already moving.
The corridor smelled of lamp oil and old paper. At the end of it, a door stood open and light spilled through. Voices, low and purposeful, cut off as they entered.
The council room had been built for oak-panelled deliberation and the quiet authority of old money. The oak panelling remained. Everything else had changed. Maps covered the long table, pinned over correspondence that would not be answered tonight. All twelve chairs were occupied, and not by anyone who had ever attended a committee meeting.
Laila looked at the faces and stopped counting.
Gawain stood at the far end of the table, which explained one thing and raised several others.
Soraya had positioned herself near the door as she always did, with clear sightlines to the room and its exits. Genevieve d’Amboise sat by the fire, posture immaculate, as though the situation beyond the walls was a problem she had already delegated. Guillaume Beaumont was near the window with Saffron beside him, both very still; they had waited in enough rooms like this to have stopped fidgeting about it. Nikolaos caught Laila’s eye across the table and gave a small, tired nod. Sadriel of the Order of Thistle was conferring with him in low tones that stopped when the family entered.
Divina had claimed a corner of the table for her instruments and showed no sign of relinquishing it. Elizabeth Willow sat somewhat apart from the others, needles moving steadily through what appeared to be a sock.
? Elizabeth Willow had attended enough war councils to know that most of the urgent decisions would take at least an hour to reach, and that a warm pair of socks was a more reliable comfort than strategic clarity.
“I believe you know everyone,” Maximilian said. He gestured toward the figure near the maps. “This is Viktor Brassard. Captain of the Gendarmerie.”
Brassard inclined his head. He was carefully blank; he had not entirely succeeded.
Elariana arrived at Maximilian’s shoulder and placed his sword in his hand. He took it without ceremony.
“The city garrison is fully mobilised,” he said. “The king’s army — still encamped outside the walls — has moved to engage. The creatures are contained within the city. For now, the perimeter holds.”
“That’s something,” Wylan said.
“It is,” Maximilian said. “It is also a cage.”
“When,” Laila said, “did you do all this?”
“While you were out having adventures,” Maximilian said. “Someone had to.”
Nobody spoke; the room knew a family moment when it saw one.
“Gawain did a lot of the work,” Maximilian said, clearly pleased. “Keeping me informed, mobilising allies, getting word to people who are difficult to reach.”
“Since when have you and Gawain been—” Wylan began.
His eyes found Percival, standing at the edge of the room where he had been standing inconspicuously, which was something Percival was very good at.
“Oh,” Wylan said.
Maximilian looked toward the far end of the table. “Gawain.”
It was not quite a handover. It was the acknowledgement of one, which was as much as a twenty-one-year-old duke with a broken arm was going to give a man twice his age in front of an audience.
Gawain accepted it in the same spirit. He moved to the maps without ceremony.
“Assets first,” he said. “The Rogue’s Guild is at your disposal — Madame de Hiver has put them under this household’s command for the duration.” A nod toward Elizabeth Willow, whose needles did not pause. “The Order of Thistle is in the field. Sadriel arranged for his most capable fighters to be present; they are doing what they can to hold the worst of it back.” He glanced at Viktor Brassard. “The Gendarmerie is stretched, but holding the inner districts. The garrison is doing the same on the perimeter.”
He let that settle.
The room was quiet. Outside, very faintly, something that was not thunder.
“The complications. Valère has the city’s faith, deeply and not by accident. Whatever move you make against him will be made against a man half of Pharelle considers their liberator. The noble houses are another matter: d’Aubigne and Ankara have been vocal about recent deaths in their families. They are not your friends tonight.” He paused. “Esteban and the Chantry are playing their own hand. They are neither with you nor against you, which in practice means you cannot rely on them.”
“I think Valère is playing a dangerous game,” Wylan said. “His power is largely theurgic — and right now, Agony is empty.” He looked at Lambert. “You know the mechanism better than I do.”
Lambert was quiet for a moment. “Without a god to draw from, the channel runs dry.” A pause. “Or nearly.”
“And he is dragonborn,” Wylan continued. “That bond with Aeloria doesn’t disappear — but it may be diminished tonight, for the same reason.” He looked around the table. “He said daybreak. I don’t think that was theatre. That is when he expects to ascend: when the night ends and his power returns. As long as it remains dark, Valère is as weak as he is ever going to be.”
Divina appeared at Laila’s elbow before the briefing had fully settled.
“Madame. I was hoping to borrow a moment.”
“One moment,” Laila said. “I must speak to someone first.”
She crossed the room to Elizabeth Willow.
Elizabeth looked up from her knitting. The needles did not stop.
They regarded each other. Neither of them mentioned the last time. Some histories are most useful when left folded.
“One task,” Laila said. “Reach Theodora Voltari. Tell her the de Vaillants are ready to talk.”
“And if she already knows?”
“Then tell her we are ready to say it out loud.”
Elizabeth’s needles paused, briefly, which in the economy of Elizabeth Willow’s expressions constituted a formal agreement in triplicate.
“It will be done.”
Laila moved back across the room. “Now. What did you want?”
Divina produced the mirror from beneath the table. Bronze, polished to an uncanny smoothness, its surface catching the lamplight and throwing it back wrong: too still, too deep, the way water looks when it is thinking about something.
“I had an idea on the Nautilus,” Divina said, setting it on the table. “Sympathetic runes, a focused surface. I have been building toward this for some time. I was hoping you could help with your enchantment — illusion and light, between us, I think we can see what the city looks like right now.”
Laila looked at the mirror, then at Divina.
“Show me what you need.”
She opened her hand over the surface and let a breath of violet pigment drift across the bronze. She spoke quietly. The surface shimmered, deepened, and an image formed.
The room moved closer without meaning to.
A street, seen from above. The Rue des Marronniers, or what remained of it: the barricade had fallen, its timbers scattered, and creatures from the rift were moving through the gap; the situation had been assessed and found satisfactory. Further along, figures that had been citizens walked with a purpose they had not chosen. The walking dead moved in loose formation. Something was directing them.
“The eastern district,” Viktor Brassard said quietly. “That barricade was holding an hour ago.”
Laila adjusted the enchantment. The image shifted: the noble quarter, fires small and managed for now, the streets emptied of everyone except those with nowhere to go. The Bassin-de-Marne, dark and still in a way that had nothing to do with calm.
The room was silent.
Lambert’s hand had closed around his prayer beads. Maximilian looked at the map on the table, then at the mirror, then at the map again.
It was Wylan who broke it. He had been watching the mirror with the expression he reserved for theories he had hoped were wrong. Now he looked up and found Divina’s eye across the table.
Something passed between them: brief, precise; they had arrived at the same conclusion by separate roads.
“Come with me.” He looked at Maximilian. “There is something I need to show you. I believe it may be our last line of defence.”
He led them up.
The staircase to the roof was narrow and cold and Wylan took it without slowing. The family followed, then Gawain, then the rest of the room in ones and twos, the war council climbing in silence through the upper floors of the manor until the last door opened and the night came in all at once: vast and wrong, the sky overhead empty where the Pendulum should have been, the city spread below them in fire and darkness.
The device stood at the roof’s edge, and it had clearly been there for some time.
Mirrors locked into alignment, angled with precision. Lenses ground and set into a bronze frame still faintly warm from the workshop.
A runic array etched into the metal, the symbols dense and deliberate: the work of someone who had not delegated the difficult parts.
At its centre, cradled in the apparatus like a heart in a chest, sat the lantern. Hyperion’s flame burned inside it, patient, more warmth than light, waiting for someone to ask it something.
The room took it in.
Below them, the city burned on, indifferent to what was being planned on its behalf.
“What is it?” Maximilian said.
Wylan considered the question with the seriousness it deserved.
“First there was Persuasion,” he said. “Then Diplomacy.” He looked at the device. “This one I call Justice.”