Tick, tick, tick. The hour hand of her pocket watch crept toward eleven.
The sky had gone dark long ago. Only a single full moon hung in the emptiness above, alone.
Eleven o'clock carried weight in the Arcane. By the old reckonings it was the hour when spiritual activity ran thickest — the hour of intuition, of revelation, of waking from sleep into something larger. The ideal moment to work a ritual.
In the bedroom, Thea lit the four candles the Suppression Bureau had sent over, one after another, and laid out the Diving Ritual first.
This time everything held. No drift, no pull, no Inverted Sanctum dragging her down into its bound and hanging dark.
When the air had thickened with the scent of evaporating oils, she dragged out the Advancement Ritual materials she'd prepared in advance.
Since she'd already laid her cards on the table with Roman, Thea had simply milked the Bureau for a backup set of advancement materials while she was at it.
The list ran: one mirror, whole and unmarred; one live serpent; one whetstone; one nestling pigeon, struggling to take wing; one copper-shod cat's-eye staff; one dried wolf's head; one rust-pitted dagger; one hourglass; and one glass of wine, twenty years kept.
The wine had been the hard part. Sir Roman, that afternoon, had invented an excuse to dine at Earl Mercurie's house and quietly walked a bottle off the table for her.
That alone saved a tidy sum.
Thea took up the silver-plated knife and scored a crude six-pointed star into the floorboards. She produced a fresh ox heart, its vessels tied off, still moist — and drove the blade through it in a single stroke, letting the blood pour down into the incised grooves of the array.
Then, in their proper order, she set each material at one of the nine positions of the star.
Last, she adjusted the angle of the mirror until it caught the moonlight through the window and threw it cleanly across the ritual array.
The preparations were done.
Thea circled the Diving Ritual three times, then circled the Advancement Ritual three times, murmuring under her breath: "Three for light. Three for dark."
Then, in the wavering glow of the four candles, she began.
She inverted the hourglass and let the sand run. She took up a cord and strangled the pigeon. She raised the staff, wet its tip in the bird's blood, and ran it through the serpent's body.
She lifted a small hammer and brought it down on the mirror in one strike — glass shattered, and moonlight scattered across the floor. With a shard she opened the back of her hand, where the turmeric oil still glistened, and let the blood drip into the wolf's left eye. Then she drove the freshly sharpened dagger into the wolf's right eye with the hammer.
"Six are lost."
"Three remain."
She lifted the hourglass clear. The strangled pigeon's wings beat suddenly to life; the pierced serpent hissed and coiled its way up the length of the staff.
Thea sat, leaning on the staff, and drank the wine. When she spoke again her voice carried an odd open resonance, as though it rose from the floor of some deep valley.
"We beseech the oak in the earth, the god of the hunting stag in the wood."
"We beseech alchemy, the god whose inner and outer faces mirror each other."
"We beseech the Ouroboros, the god who falls into the Nightmare."
Three paths, named aloud.
This was the part of the rite where the practitioner asked for shelter. The Ouroboros held the authority of the fall into the Nightmare — and so, when diving, one had no choice but to carry his name. Alchemy was the path Thea sought to advance along; its name had to be spoken too. And the oak in the earth was the gentlest and least harmful of the nine paths, an emblem of growth, of fertility, of mother and nature both. No harm in bringing it along.
The blood-flooded six-pointed star shimmered silver-white with moonlight, and a soft drowsiness came drifting in.
She closed her eyes. A gentle pressure settled over her shoulders, pressing down, drawing her slowly into some deeper layer.
— The ritual is a success.
"You're awake? You're the best of this batch, you know that?"
The instant Thea opened her eyes, she half-thought she'd transmigrated all over again.
There was a pressure on her shoulders, very like the water-weight of a dive — but far weaker than what she'd felt sinking down to the shrine.
— Around twenty-six hundred meters, give or take?
She rubbed her eyes, and only then realized the space around her wasn't deep sea at all. It was a dark, dark expanse, as if she were floating in the void of space — except that directly in front of her stood a long stone table, with a candelabrum atop it burning with golden flame.
One stone table. Seven chairs. Three down each side, and one more at the head.
The voice from a moment ago had come from the head seat — or rather, from the thing occupying it, because person wasn't quite the word.
It was a dragon-girl. Perhaps 150 cm tall, silver-haired and red-eyed, two sharp horns curling back from her brow. She wore no clothing; only thick scales covered the parts that needed covering, and her tail was looped around the chair beneath her.
Seeing Thea's gaze turn her way, the dragon-girl lifted a finger and shushed her. "One moment. Not everyone for this advancement ritual has arrived yet. I'll lay out the rules for all of you shortly."
The words had barely faded when figures began to appear, one by one, in the remaining five seats — every face a smudge, impossible to make out, no telling who any of them were.
You could only guess at their identities from dress and bearing.
The first three to arrive sat across from Thea.
The first was a middle-aged man in a plain dark-grey suit, his necktie left to dangle loose at one side. Heavyset overall, with a generous paunch; the suit did nothing to slim him down and only made the bulge of his belly the more obvious.
The second, having arrived, said nothing at all and only studied a pocket watch. A silver-plated cane rested at his hand, and the hat set on the table was a striking thing — a formal banquet topper, three peacock feathers pinned to it.
The third was a young woman cradling a broad-brimmed hat against her chest, dressed in a blue-and-white uniform. Thea found it oddly familiar, and on a closer look she had it: Avengarde constabulary issue.
The Kingdom of Avengarde's officers wore a standard blue-and-white that gave a bright, smart impression — not like the Kingdom of the Iris's officers, who paraded about town swaddled in tailcoats.
Before long, the two seats flanking Thea filled as well.
By their builds, one was a young man in civilian clothes who nonetheless sat ramrod straight, not a hair out of place. The other was a girl in a black ecclesiastical robe, doing her best to look composed.
When this last girl arrived, something flickered across Thea's face. She was, frankly, a little startled.
For one simple reason — she had spotted, running off this girl, a thread of milky white.
The very same milky-white thread that tethered the Inverted Sanctum.
And that robe — if she remembered right, the last time she saw Vera at the Inverted Sanctum, she'd been wearing a black church robe much like this one.
It wouldn't be her, would it?
But something was strange. Neither the dragon-girl nor any of the others seemed to register the white thread at all.
Smack! Smack-smack!
The dragon-girl at the head of the table rapped the surface, signaling everyone to look her way.
"All right! Everyone for this round has arrived. Good evening, all. I'm the host overseeing this ritual — Lilith, the Silver-Frost Dragon, who follows the way of the Ouroboros."
"Given that this is a Sequence Nine advancement ritual, there are bound to be some greenhorns who've only just set foot on the Transcendent path. So, as tradition dictates, I'll walk you through the rules of the advancement ritual — possibly the last walkthrough some of you will ever get."
As the words landed, Lilith's voice seemed to plug into some hidden amplifier, suddenly pouring in from every direction at once, ringing through the whole expanse.
"First — there's no need for any of you to panic. Every advancement ritual must be undertaken by six to nine people at once. Seeing one another here is perfectly normal.
"Second — in this ritual there are two Transcendents who possess multiple paths. Take note: in this ritual you may only use the abilities of the path you are advancing along. Rituals with a threshold below Sequence Nine, however, may still be used.
"Third — you are about to enter a Nightmare to complete your advancement. These Nightmares are projections of history, not history as it truly was. Within them, you will play the role of some figure in an event, and complete the corresponding task, and by this earn points. Your conduct within the historical fragment — that is, your final score — will be inscribed into the three roots you have petitioned, and so shape the Transcendent abilities you receive once you advance in Sequence.
"If you die within the ritual, or your score fails to reach eighty-five percent of the average, your advancement is declared a failure. Death in a first ritual carries no penalty. But take care not to die a second time, and not to undertake another ritual within a month of a first death — or the consequences are your own to bear.
"Last — as host, we are responsible only for opening the Nightmare within the deep sea and explaining the rules. We will not interfere, and we will not observe your conduct within. Therefore, once you enter the Nightmare, all events that occur, all consequences that follow, all problems that arise have nothing whatsoever to do with the host — myself, that is, Lilith the Silver-Frost Dragon.
"You now have three minutes of free conversation. Note well: even though your faces have been obscured here and your voices specially altered, you would still do well to guard your privacy."
Lilith dumped the entire rulebook into their ears in one breath, with no apparent concern for whether any of it had landed — and even when the girl with the broad-brimmed hat tried to raise her hand like a schoolchild, Lilith only slumped further into her chair, hugging her tail, and didn't budge.
In the silence that followed, with nobody willing to break the ice, the middle-aged man in the dark-grey wool coat cleared his throat twice and spoke. "A Sequence Nine advancement ritual is fairly simple, fairly safe. I'm a Druid — oak in the earth, Sequence Eight. My advice is that we talk a little before we go in, introduce ourselves. Who knows, we might even cooperate."
The man had barely finished.
And the girl in the blue-and-white uniform raised her hand and said, guilelessly, "My name's Scarlett—"
She didn't get to finish. A faint, barely perceptible ripple of laughter went around the table.
Even Lilith, gnawing on the very tip of her tail at the head seat, broke into a grin.
Trainee Officer Miss Scarlett had just reported her own true name. Just like that.
Of course, "Scarlett" might well have been a codename too — but that artless, guileless tone of hers gave her away completely. The girl simply didn't have the cunning for it.
Thea couldn't help it — her eyes went wide, and she stared at Scarlett in disbelief. She'd never imagined Scarlett could be quite this slow. How on earth had this girl landed a constabulary internship?
Thankfully, everyone's face was blurred out. No one saw the exaggerated expression on hers.
"Wait! Wait!"
The middle-aged man cut in hastily. "Don't give your real name — I mean we can pick a codename. Take me, for instance: I'm Blackwood. Path is oak in the earth, Druid, Sequence Eight. The path I'm advancing this time is the Holy Grail."
"I've got no quarrel with any of you."
"My codename is Iris-Blossom." The hatted gentleman who'd kept his silence spoke up at last, turning toward Blackwood as he did. "May I ask what you mean, no quarrel?"
Blackwood said, "I'm a little different from the rest of you — I'm not here to advance. I've opened an apothecary's workshop in Silverkeep, just got it off the ground recently, over in St. Nyx's Township in Silverkeep... If any of you have need, feel free to look me up anytime. Twenty percent off your first order."
And here's one who came to do marketing... Thea hadn't expected her first advancement ritual to be quite this lively. She'd assumed it would be a genuinely dangerous affair, and instead she'd walked in to find something more like a market day — a gathering of the great and the good, young and old alike, all in one place.
Scarlett, with considerable slowness, finally caught up. She crossed herself over her chest and said, "I'm... codename Night-Iris."
The young man sitting bolt upright gave a nod. "Imperial. King's path, Sequence Nine, Inquisitor. Alfred Alexei. Here to advance."
Scarlett let out a small breath of relief. Good — she wasn't the only one who'd given a real name after all.
Of course, she was the only one who thought it was a real name.
Still, the young man was unexpectedly self-assured. Even Lilith, the host, spared him a second glance.
"Miss Scarlett, I'm Annelise ." Thea offered up a codename of her own, then turned to the silent, secretive girl in the church robe and let a smile surface. "And what might this young lady be called?"
Every voice in the room had been processed, made markedly different from its original — and yet the girl in the church robe went cold all over. She couldn't shake the feeling that "Annelise 's" voice was somehow familiar.
But codenames — nobody had said a single word to her about codenames!
Oh, hell.
The girl lifted her head slowly. A whole carousel of names spun through her skull, and at the last, as though some unseen hand were guiding her, she said:
"My name's Thea."
Thea: "...???"
It really is her — Vera!
And — you absolute idiot, if you're Thea, then who the hell does that make me?