Before the altar of the Inverted Sanctum stood a candelabrum of white gold, three candles burning atop it.
What came next was even less expected.
Throughout the whole of the Sanctum, the walls bristled with holy candles set in dense rows — dozens of them — and each candle was the spirit of a Transcendent.
Thea did a rough count. There had to be forty-odd of them.
Five at Sequence Seven, twenty-six at Sequence Eight, and another fifteen at Sequence Nine.
These candles stood alone, each apart from the rest — not like the three before the altar, set together in a single holder.
At a flick of Thea's thought, every candle along the walls went dark.
Hwoosh! Hwoosh!
A book surfaced in front of her: thick, bound in brass corner-rams and black-iron covers, wrapped about with chains. It drifted open of its own accord, no wind to move it — and every page lay blank.
As the candles guttered out, their flames resolved into orbs of light that one by one flew into the empty space of the first page.
A luminous screen bloomed before her.
【Current Forbidden Codex capacity 1/Arcane Codex capacity 1. Cannot bear further rituals. Do you wish to fuse the collected rites before recording?】
"What's a Forbidden Codex? And what's an Arcane Codex?"
【The Forbidden Codex records rituals concerning Transcendent power. The Arcane Codex records treatises concerning Transcendent power. Present capacity for each is 1.】
The Sanctum could answer Thea's questions of its own accord, but the responses were mechanical — taken all together, less clever than Siri.
"And if I perform the fusion?"
【The collected spirits derive from the Nightmare; the rituals are therefore one-time only. But the quantity is vast. One ritual among them may be converted into a Transcendent trait.】
A Transcendent trait...
Thea thought at once of the Sequence Five Hammer of Judgment she'd come away with.
A magnificent ritual — attacks against Sequence Five and below ignored every protective working and suit of armor — but the price was just as staggering. Each strike saddled her with a Sequence Five Searing Curse.
A Sequence Five curse. As she was now, she couldn't bear even one.
So, next...
Thea turned her gaze to the three candles upon the altar.
The flames burned bright, and the screen surfaced again.
Offering: Divinity
Source: Lexius (Nightmare)
Path: Ouroboros / Oak in the Earth
Rank: Sequence Seven / Sequence Seven
The offering is given. Choose one of three.
— Light in the Blood (one-time / Ouroboros 6)
Price: You will fall into the Nightmare. Your body will hold a singular allure for spirit-creatures.
Effect: A faint light will bloom in your blood and flow thick within you; it will spare you suffering and calamity. Lasts 72 hours.
Note: You may draw holy light by burning holy wood, gold, or gold pounds, and hasten your blood's absorption of it by lying in the sun. While there is light in your blood, so long as you are bleeding, your actions are unaffected by wounds / disease / weakness / poison and the like; you gain Sequence Six rapid healing, immunity to curses, swift recovery from non-lethal injury, and immunity to Sequence Six and lower curse-rituals.
— Twin Serpent (one-time / Ouroboros 6)
Price: None.
Effect: You will gain a reflection in the mirror. When the ritual completes, she will possess your Transcendent abilities and memories, her flesh and soul as strong as yours at the moment of completion. Lasts 72 hours.
Note: She is not under your control. Her temperament will match your own.
— Father of the Oak (one-time / Oak in the Earth 6)
Price: You will be unable to move.
Effect: While you stand upon soil where plants may grow, you gain Sequence Five rapid healing and recover from non-lethal injury at once. Lasts 72 hours.
In the Great Harbor District, the light of dawn was strengthening.
Outside the precinct house, Scarlett squeezed her way clear of the crowd, then sprinted, gasping, into the station lobby and rushed to clock in at the sign-in desk.
This blasted sign-in system — God only knew which scoundrel had dreamed it up. Time was, even being ten or twenty minutes late hadn't caused much trouble; but ever since the station had set up a dedicated sign-in desk, Scarlett had been forced to cram herself onto the most packed steam-rail carriage every single morning just to get to work.
And even so, she was still late more often than not.
"Oh, Scarlett's arrived? Four minutes earlier than yesterday. Perhaps you ought to consider renting a place in the Great Harbor District?"
In the Director's office, Roman was sipping black tea, reading the paper through his spectacles, lobbing out the topic with an idle, teasing air.
Scarlett said hurriedly, "No — no, that won't be necessary..."
"Coming all the way from North Harbor must eat up a good deal of time. As I recall, you're from Silverkeep — the rent here ought to be well within your means." Roman gave a soft chuckle. "Or is it that you can't quite bring yourself to leave those children at the poorhouse?"
Scarlett's hand flew at once to a nervous grip on her hem. The truth was she could have moved near the station ages ago.
But back when she'd gone to investigate Miss Thea Sorelle, she'd stumbled, quite by accident, into a band of children from an orphanage. Those children were already fourteen — which, under Avengarde law, made them "legal adults."
And being adults, the orphanage had no further reason to keep them.
On that account — and to turn a tidy profit besides — the orphanage would strike a deal with a poorhouse, one of those sweatshops cooked up between city hall and the entrepreneurs, and send the children off to sign labor contracts and work.
It was a notorious supply chain. A fourteen-year-old "adult laborer" went for somewhere between fifteen and forty gold pounds. The blacker-hearted orphanages would go so far as to groom the handsome boys and pretty girls, then sell them off to the pleasure dens, where their worth climbed higher still.
A child freshly turned out of an orphanage might — if clever — decline the contract and seek out work alone. But they'd run straight into a wall: the factory owners would offer them a wage so low it scarcely deserved the name.
Because while they were "adults," they had not reached "the legal age of labor." Employment law wouldn't begin protecting them until they were sixteen; before that, they were deemed child laborers.
Child labor was illegal — a fine of half a gold pound for every one discovered.
It was only because Scarlett had gone to ask the way to Thea's house that day that she'd happened to meet such a band — children just cast out of the orphanage.
And now she was trying to find them something honest, or at least something that would keep them fed.
Having heard the whole tangled tale, Sir Roman pressed a hand to his brow. "That Sorelle troublemaker again... never mind. Let's not get into it."
"How did the advancement ritual go? Settling in all right within the Nightmare?"
"Well enough, Director. There were some hair-raising moments, but in the end it all came right — I found Miss Sorelle and her friend safely. By her score, she's surely passed the ritual."
"Good. By your meaning, there were others you knew within the Nightmare?"
Scarlett hesitated. "People Miss Sorelle knew — though I couldn't quite tell. Only, the two of them were terribly close... Thea took the codename Annelise. I suspect her friend was the real Miss Annelise."
Sir Roman's brows rose in surprise. "That young lady from House Mercurie? The Earl's daughter?"
"Yes. But it's only a suspicion. That young lady called herself Thea — so I rather think they'd swapped names."
Roman couldn't help rubbing his brow, brushed with a touch of worry. Thea Sorelle! You incorrigible girl — advancing yourself is one thing, but to drag in the Earl's daughter as well!
If Earl Mercurie ever caught wind of this, he'd likely come knocking with a sword, demanding satisfaction in a duel!
Sir Roman said, helpless, "Scarlett — go round to the Earl's estate in a little while. Take the pigeon's-blood ring I keep in the records room and present it to Earl Mercurie. Tell him Miss Annelise's birthday is coming, and call it an early gift from me."
"Yes, sir!"
"All right, all right — no need to be so tense. First, tell me what sort of things you found in the Nightmare this time. Ah — and seeing as you were piloting someone else's body, no trouble adjusting once you came back?"
"Eh?!"
Sir Roman laughed. "I'm told certain gentlemen are particularly fond of stepping into the Nightmare, because there they occasionally get to play the part of a lady — which satisfies certain quirks of theirs. There's even a Nightmare reserved for it, at the 2,600-meter mark. An entire Nightmare of dolls, where you can customize your own body however you please. A friend of mine frequents that one, a whole crowd of them gathering together to— ahem."
The Director only then realized he'd said too much, and stopped himself in a hurry.
Scarlett asked, curious, "Gathering together to do what?"
"Play a few games, hold a party, that sort of thing... Never mind all that."
"But surely one could do such things in reality as well? Why—"
"That's enough, Scarlett! Not another word!"
In the Director's office, Scarlett had only just left.
Sir Roman sat at his desk awash in worry. It had not crossed his mind in the least that the ritual Scarlett and Thea had entered would turn out to be the Great Plague of Nuremport, sixteen years past — and that it might have swept the Earl's daughter up in it besides.
That plague was nothing so simple as the official documents brushed it off to be. Behind it lay the very thing the Holy Church and the Crown had charged him to run down: a secret, ancient temple-order that had stirred in the shadows — none knew how many centuries.
Sixteen years ago, the Hand of Transmutation had dispatched two alchemists, their purpose to make a handoff with that order. In the wake of the plague, the Hand of Transmutation had been blacklisted outright by the Avengarde authorities — branded a heretical cult barred from entry, its alchemical path declared illegal along with it.
So when "Canaan Ogre" of the Hand of Transmutation had slipped into the country, the Grand Constabulary had thought it worth pulling him out for pursuit even amid the Queen's Jubilee.
This advancement ritual's grade was, by his reckoning, Sequence Four — perhaps even Sequence Three. So how in the world had a band of raw initiates been randomly matched into a Nightmare like that? And how had all three of them cleared it?
More absurd still — within that total of two thousand five hundred points, there had to be one "fiendishly difficult task" worth a thousand. The sort of task that even a seasoned, weathered Transcendent might not be able to handle; the sort that usually demanded every Transcendent present straining together to complete. And yet, in this ritual, someone had pulled it off — not just one of them, but two, all at once.
One was Thea. The other was Scarlett.
Scarlett's final task had been Slay Lexius, the Son of God Who Brought Down Divinity, and Destroy the Great Plague Ritual. She'd meant to give it up — but then Thea had set the whole factory ablaze and blown it to ash. Lexius, the entire heretical order — scarcely a soul left alive.
Riding to victory flat on her back, the lot of it handed to her.
Sir Roman rose and paced before his desk, the pipe clamped in his teeth trailing a long ribbon of smoke. He weighed it carefully. Just this moment in time. Just the Great Plague of Nuremport. Just when a figure from the Hand of Transmutation came to stir up trouble.
The Nightmare an advancement ritual delivered one into was not without its traces. The Nightmare had to bear some tie to at least one of the ritual's participants.
Click.
His leather boot struck the floor and Roman halted mid-stride. He took up at once the dossier he'd fetched the night before from the Cathedral of Our Lady — the diary of the late Bishop Canthus. On its final pages, a few lines had been left in a hand grown decidedly hurried.
They were not written for himself. They were left for those who came after:
"May 25th. The Hand of Transmutation has fashioned for them a vessel of flesh — those madmen! I must find her."
"May 27th. The flesh — the flesh has been found. I have contrived to remove the curse from this child, but the ritual upon her is too obstinate. Antonio must be killed."
"May 28th. Keep the flesh safe. Reveal nothing of her existence; do not expose her; guard her well; let it spread to no one. This is part of the sealing rite."
"May 29th. I have sealed the ritual within her, for now. But the rite is not ended. The plague will rise again."
Roman drew over the dossier folder and murmured, "Scarlett and Annelise are both from Silverkeep — sixteen years ago, they could not possibly have been in Nuremport. Alexei is a foreigner. That leaves only the merchant, Mister Iris-Blossom, and Thea..."
The Director fixed his gaze hard on Bishop Canthus's choice of words.
The pronoun he'd used was her. And he'd used the word child besides.
The Hand of Transmutation. Flesh. A ritual. A vessel.
Which meant:
Canaan Ogre's purpose in setting foot on Avengarde soil had not been to steal the esoterica of the Crown's great cathedral, nor merely to gather spirits — it should have been that "manufactured" vessel of flesh he was after.
That he'd gone so far as to organize a mass sacrifice — that, too, should have been for the sake of that body?
Scratch, scratch, scratch...
Roman swiftly chalked several names onto the little blackboard, ringing each, marking them off one by one, setting down everyone with whom Canaan Ogre had ever had contact.
And the one who satisfied all three conditions at once — "was still a child sixteen years ago," "female," "had contact with Canaan Ogre" — there remained only one:
Thea Sorelle.