Before the sun went down, Thea had already gathered the materials and set Vera to laying out the Detect Hostility ritual.
It was an Oak-in-the-Earth working built around a pigeon. To prime the ritual, the bird had to be strangled; afterward, whenever someone approached the corpse carrying intent to kill, the ritualist would hear a phantom coo, coo, coo whispered against her ear. The warning fired exactly once.
The price was being haunted by the pigeon's grudge-soul: for the next two hundred and twelve hours, the little toe of her right foot would suffer the phantom pain of being savagely pecked. The duration depended on how much the pigeon had suffered as it died — the crueler the death, the shorter the curse.
Which was why the old Druids had simply called it the Pigeon Ritual.
For safety, Thea and Vera split the night into watches.
It was the small hours now, and Thea's turn. She sat on the edge of the bed, a silenced pistol resting in her hand, fully loaded.
The weapon had come with Sophia Salvia — the role she was playing. A small, silenced assassin's pistol, a six-round magazine and nothing more. Good enough for a quiet murder, perhaps, but in any ordinary fight its value was deterrence and intimidation far more than killing power.
— Smack!
Thea rose and brought her palm down hard across Vera's backside as the girl slept like the dead, drawing a yelp of pain. Pleasant heft to it, actually. A good ass.
Vera rubbed her eyes, sulking. "What was that for?"
"Listen. Carefully."
"Listen? Is someone here?"
The door's iron latch rattled. Behind it, someone was knocking — light, quick, urgent taps.
Vera went rigid, instantly dropping her voice to a hiss. "Is it the people hunting us? Did I sleep through it? I didn't hear the pigeon—"
"Of course it isn't. You think anyone coming to kill us would knock this politely?"
Thea crossed to the door and pulled it open without ceremony.
A black shape spilled in with a soft thud, collapsing against her chest and knocking her back half a step.
Sophia Salvia's body was genuinely small — twenty years old, but barely 1.5 meters — and whoever had just fallen into her arms was at least 1.7 meters. The breathing said it was a girl. Something hard pressed against Thea's chest. A badge, most likely.
The newcomer, draped in a black overcoat and reeking of blood, braced herself against Thea's shoulder and gasped out: "Alexei's dead. Blackwood's dead too."
"Scarlett?"
"It's me. Is — is Miss Thea here? I need the Blood of the Grail..."
Scarlett had never imagined the Advancement Ritual and the Nightmare could be this dangerous.
The identity she'd been assigned upon entering the Nightmare was that of a proper, fully-sworn officer at the Clocktower District precinct in Nuremport. A real officer at last; Clocktower almost never burned, the plague there was milder — compared to her actual life, the Nightmare was almost too lovely. Miss Scarlett had half wished she'd never have to leave it.
But Director Roman's task weighed on her, so she'd set about finding Thea at once. What she hadn't expected was that the act of searching would betray her assigned role — and that Alexei, playing a precinct captain, would see straight through it.
Had it ended there, it would have been a near miss and nothing worse.
The Imperial gentleman, Mister Alexei, was a stiff but genuinely upright noble. Merely unlucky.
That morning he'd been handed a field assignment: deal with a fugitive infected man on the streets straddling the border between North Harbor and Clocktower. It was a role-task too — worth only two hundred points.
But at noon, a letter from Alexei was sent back to the precinct, saying he had run into big trouble and asking Scarlett to come help.
Two hundred points. This shouldn't be a hard one, judging by the value... Thea was somewhat puzzled, and at the same time began preparing for the Blood of the Grail.
Her wound from her last Blood of the Grail working was still bleeding, so this time she elected to draw from Vera instead. One stroke of the knife opened the girl's palm, tears streaming down her face — but Vera's affinity with the Grail had to be wretched, because the Blood of the Grail failed to take at all.
Faithless little thing.
Thea's fingers itched to open a second cut, and Vera trembled at the look on her face.
Scarlett shrugged off the overcoat, baring a left arm slick with blood, and said weakly, "Let me. I've still got plenty of blood in me."
Scarlett, it turned out, possessed a true heart for devotion. With her blood the Blood of the Grail came together at last — using a ritual whose side effect was unending bleeding to heal an open wound did sound absurd, but not long after she drank, the pallor began to ebb from her face.
Thea bound the girl's arm in a quick dressing and pressed her. "So what happened? This task can't have been that hard."
She recalled that not one of her own tasks had come in under three hundred points.
"It should have been easy... The truth is, Mister Alexei had already caught the infected man. But seven or eight heavily armed gang gunmen killed him. The letter was theirs too — the whole thing was a trap. I was the one taken in by it. By the time I reached the scene — thank God I sensed something was wrong and hid."
"A gang? No wonder it went sideways. But they'd have to be mad — killing precinct men?"
A shudder of after-fear ran through Scarlett. "It wasn't just the gang. There were others too."
Thea's voice sharpened. "Who?"
"At least two. One in a black robe — I couldn't make out his face at all. Male. From the voice, a foreigner. The leader, by his bearing."
"And the other?"
"Iris-Blossom."
Something lit in Thea's mind, and her brow drew down at once. "The ritual participant in the top hat?"
"Yes. Mister Iris-Blossom was right behind that gang leader. I caught fragments — besides Mister Alexei, Mister Blackwood was his kill as well. There was more, but I couldn't hear it." Scarlett's face filled with apology. "I'm sorry. I'm badly hurt right now. My ears especially."
She touched her left ear. Only then did Thea notice the blood crusted in the shell of it, and the eyes shot through with red. "My left ear's gone deaf from the blast. And the smoke's left me unable to see anything at a distance...
"I don't think I can complete Director Roman's task. I'm so sorry, Sore—"
"Stop." Thea's voice didn't rise. "Scarlett. I'm your employer. Don't speak my name in the world. For now you may use my codename. Annelise."
She paused, a beat, then turned her full attention on the girl. "Nuremport Suppression Bureau trainee hunter, Great Harbor precinct reserve officer — Scarlett."
"Here!"
Even gravely wounded, Miss Scarlett curled her good right hand into a fist and struck it against her chest.
"From this moment, you follow my command from start to finish. You only obey. You don't question."
"This is where my duty lies. Use me as you please!"
The reserve officer pushed herself upright and stood. A long sword hung at her belt, alongside a service pistol with perhaps a dozen rounds left in it.
Thea was beginning to understand why Roman valued Scarlett so highly — enough to teach her Transcendent knowledge before she'd even formally joined.
Scarlett was practically the King's path made flesh. Deference to authority, devotion to duty, obedience to orders and instruction — all of it dead-on the way of the King. Nothing like Thea, a walking source of social instability who reached for grand schemes at the smallest provocation.
A Thea on the King's path would only ever become a tyrant.
A Vera on it would become a feckless one.
Scarlett's only shortcoming was that she still lacked a measure of strength. A king without strength was a king in name alone.
Thea's gaze on Scarlett turned grave. She flicked a glance at Vera and said, "Good. From here on, I am with you. As for the one over there — just call her Idiot."
"Who're you calling an idiot! My codename's Th— ugh, fine, just call me Idiot." Vera sounded faintly guilty.
After all, both of these two looked like Nuremport locals, and seemed tied to the authorities somehow — and if either of them happened to know that Thea Sorelle character, well, wouldn't that one come looking for trouble with an armful of explosives?
In fact, Vera needn't have bothered. Scarlett already knew her codename.
There were only six players this round, after all. With the other five surfaced, only Vera was left.
Still — it seemed Miss Idiot here was Thea's friend in the waking world? And from the look of their relationship... Scarlett's eye caught the creases in the bedsheet. This is a single bed, isn't it? They — they slept together?
The thought sent her heart racing.
Could it be Miss Annelise? Did they just exchange names as codenames? But the Miss Annelise I remember was so poised and graceful at the precinct. That doesn't match Miss Idiot at all.
And then the swaddled infant on the bed seized her attention completely.
They — they already have a ch-ch — a child?!
Not long after the sun came up, in the kitchen behind the ground-floor common room, a few plain dishes sat before Thea and Vera: fried apples, half a flagon of wine, a plate of dried meat and bread.
Little Vera, freshly woken, was nestled in Thea's arms. Thea had asked the innkeeper for a bowl of goat's milk and fed her — and while she was at it, had Vera lay a layer of Shared Senses over Scarlett as well.
Fifty gold pounds caught fire of their own accord and burned down to ash, the working begun with Scarlett as its ritualist.
It was another Oak-in-the-Earth ritual. Its boon was that the ritualist shared the five senses of any conscious participant. In the instant the working took, Scarlett found herself as if seated behind a bank of surveillance monitors — two screens before her showing Vera's view and her own. She could even catch the faint fragrance on Thea's skin, and the brush of Vera's hair-ends against a cheek.
At the same time, Thea and Vera gained Scarlett's senses too. The savage pain in her left arm and knee, the swollen ache behind her eyes, the ringing inside her ears — all of it divided and spread across the two of them.
The drawback was just as pronounced: for the ritual's duration, the ritualist — Scarlett — lost all five of her own senses, sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, and could rely only on the other two for judgment.
But it wasn't much of a loss. Scarlett's sight and hearing had been wrecked to begin with.
What did leave Scarlett faintly uncomfortable was this:
Miss Sorelle was rather too intimate with Miss Idiot — forever catching her by the wrist, leaning in close against her, even murmuring secrets with their faces a breath apart.
That sensation of warm breath against an ear came shared across to her too. Ticklish. But strange. Wondrous.
"Well? Getting used to it?"
It took Scarlett a sluggish moment to realize the words were aimed at her. She answered quickly. "A little hard to adjust to... but, I'm trying..."
"Try sitting down. You've lost touch, but you should still be able to find your sword and your pistol. Yes — that's it, you've got the sword now. Put some strength into it. Swing it forward.
"Good. Now find your pistol. Don't bother checking the rounds. I've loaded them all for you."
She sat in the middle of the inn room, the long sword gripped tight and laid flat across her knees. In truth she couldn't feel the bite of the hilt against her palm at all; she drew it from its sheath on instinct alone, and could only sense something blocking the closing of her fist around it.
Half an hour or so of practice, and she gradually came to master the senseless state. It was uncanny — she could feel the pulse beating through her veins, the workings of her own body, could even govern the output of her strength with ease, while remaining wholly blind to the world outside.
She'd heard that in the East there were monks skilled at meditation, who could reach a state of no-self through it. Probably something not unlike this.
Just as Thea was about to have Vera dismiss the ritual, Vera's expression shifted.
"The pigeon's calling."
Thea looked forward through Scarlett's eyes, then crossed to the second-floor window and looked out.
Sure enough, four uninvited guests in hooded jackets stood in the street below. One of them — a thin, aged little man — Thea actually recognized. She'd seen him in the district school's history books.
The infamous Grew Lawrence — "the Runt" — founder of Lawrence Security Company. Just last year his son, Lawrence Jr., had been named one of Nuremport's outstanding entrepreneurs.
"That'll be them, then. Quick work. Hunting Scarlett last night, and already on us today. Scarlett — can you fight?"
"Ready at any moment!"