The handoff point Thea had agreed on with Canaan was a place called St. Vincent's Chapel, fifteen kilometers outside Nuremport.
It was a small chapel long since abandoned, split between an aboveground and a below. The aboveground portion was mostly rubble — what remained of the nave, and the graveyard beyond. In the half that still stood, six robed figures kept watch, costumed up like cultists in black hoods. Their footwork was loose and unsteady, as if they'd been chewing on something stronger than communion wafers.
Thea estimated their combined guarding capability to be inferior to a single goose.
The underground was the unknown. She'd only ever seen Canaan emerge from a hatch in the floor during their previous exchanges, so she had to assume the lower level served as some kind of base of operations.
She stopped the rented carriage several hundred meters out and waited for dusk. When the light began to thin, she lifted down the wooden crate of explosives and detonators and hid the lot of it inside the oak grove that fringed the cemetery.
Disguise mattered too. She drew on a head veil, then a face veil, and pulled a heavy robe over the rest of herself until nothing of Thea Sorelle remained visible.
"It's going to rain." She tasted the damp on the air and tilted her head back. Storm clouds had begun their slow, deliberate roll across the rim of the sky.
That meant she had to move fast.
She slipped through the graveyard at speed and reached the chapel's outer ring — a circle of rusted iron palings with a length of broken chain still looped through the gate, creaking in the wind. Inside, an orange firelight wavered. She could make out the silhouettes of several figures in concealing robes, hear the occasional bark of laughter drift across the still air.
Anyone with a chapel-detonation entry on their résumé would tell you the same thing: precise charges on the load-bearing walls would drop the entire structure in seconds. But if your name happened to be Cersei Lannister, you didn't have to be quite so finicky about it.
Thea's targets were those load-bearing walls. With most of the building already collapsed, the structure was unstable anyway. One good detonation and everyone still hiding inside would go skyward.
She had just begun to climb the railing when a crisp female voice spoke from somewhere ahead.
"You here for the Hand of Transmutation too? You're early."
Thea froze. She turned her head toward the source.
A few paces along the railing, leaning against the iron with her arms folded, stood a girl in a black hooded robe, wearing an expression that hovered somewhere between amused and unimpressed.
"What's with the look?" the girl said. "If you weren't here for the Hand, why bother wrapping yourself up like that? You're not here to kill someone, are you?"
Thea kept her left hand wrapped around the Angel rapid-fire pistol concealed in her sleeve. Her right held the bundle of explosives tight against her ribs. Her voice came out flat.
"I'm here to collect a debt."
"…Huh?"
The girl in the black robe blinked and gave Thea a more careful once-over, taking in her frame, her height, her general lack of professional menace.
"Then you'd better be careful," she said, sounding genuinely surprised. "The crowd inside isn't easy."
Thea had no idea what the Hand of Transmutation was. It sounded like the name of a cult faction lifted out of some game. She probed:
"Are you with the Hand of Transmutation?"
"Of course not!" the girl said, almost offended. "I'm here to do business with them. They're the only people in Avengarde who can get hold of an alchemical grimoire right now. You're new, aren't you?"
Thea said nothing. She just watched the girl with a wary, narrow gaze.
"The constables call them cultists, but they actually keep their commercial word, more or less. They're a major foreign Transcendent organization, after all. That's why I came here to buy a grimoire from them."
"Their word?" Thea felt the heat rise in her chest again. She remembered a particular month spent subsisting on pickled gherkins and black bread.
She steadied her voice. "I don't care about that. You said Transcendent organization. There's a Transcendent inside?"
She didn't understand a single one of the terms involved — Hand of Transmutation, Transcendent — but it seemed that if you simply behaved as if you understood while keeping your tone arctic, you came across as profoundly knowledgeable.
"That's right. A Sequence Eight alchemist. Why else would I bother coming all the way out here?"
"Canaan, correct? How strong?"
"Are you actually here to collect a debt?"
"Didn't I just say so?"
"Uh… he's not exceptionally strong, all things considered. He's still mostly mortal flesh and blood…"
"When does he come out?"
"When the underground sanctum opens. Right now…" The girl pushed back a sleeve, exposing a pale wrist, and produced a pocket watch from somewhere in her robes. It ticked steadily. Half past six in the evening. "About thirty minutes more. He's underground at the moment — only the spirits know what he's doing down there. Probably… probably standing roughly there."
She pointed to a clearing among the collapsed sections of the chapel, where two torches had been planted upright in the earth, evidently marking a spot.
"I see," Thea said.
"See what?"
"Where exactly to deliver the debt."
Click.
She raised the Angel pistol and pressed the muzzle against the girl's forehead.
"Mmph! Mmph!"
In the oak grove, Thea finished trussing the girl up. To prevent her shouting, Thea had stripped off one of her own stockings and stuffed it into the girl's mouth, leaving only a fringe of lace visible at the corners of her lips. Now she was looping rope around the tree to bind her in place.
"Wait — wait — wait!"
The girl had managed to spit the stocking partway free.
"I just came here for the grimoire! I don't care who you came here to collect from! If you want to kill the lot of them, kill them — I'll even help you do it!"
Thea paused. She tapped the barrel of the Angel pistol with one finger and asked, "Could I kill them all with this?"
"The ones aboveground, yes. The one underground, no. A Sequence Eight alchemist can transmute the four elements within three meters of himself — turn the floor under your feet into a swimming pool, build walls out of fire. The bore on that pistol's too small. It won't punch through whatever defense he raises."
"What about this?"
Thea produced one of her elephant revolvers and slid out a single round. The bullet was nearly as long as her finger. She held it up to the girl's face.
"An elephant gun?! That's for hunting mammoths! You're seriously planning to collect a debt with this?"
"I asked you a question. Will it work?"
"It'll work! Absolutely it'll work! But if you get close, he'll just transmute the gun in your hand into a heap of sand."
"What about this?"
Thea hauled the wooden crate over, her arms straining. With a thump, she flipped the lid open.
The light was failing, but she scooped up a handful of the contents and held it out where the girl could see.
The girl went very still.
This — this was explosive. And not just any explosive. This was high-purity smokeless powder of a grade that simply could not be obtained through any legal channel. Possession of one crate of this stuff alone was probably a more serious charge than whatever the Hand of Transmutation's alchemist was facing for illegal evangelism and unlawful entry into the country combined.
"With this added in," Thea said, "could I wipe out everyone in there in one go?"
The girl swallowed. She did not at all believe this was the kit a debt collector would be carrying. She asked, very carefully:
"What… exactly did the Hand of Transmutation do to you?"
"Don't ask things you shouldn't." Thea peeled off her second stocking and prepared to stuff it in alongside the first. If that still didn't shut her up, Thea was prepared to escalate to her entire foot.
The girl wriggled urgently.
"No! No! I can help! I just want their grimoire! I'm not particularly invested in whether they live or die!"
"Fine. Your name."
"Vera. My name is Vera!"
"Tell me what's inside. And what is the Hand of Transmutation?"
"My word — you didn't even know who they were, and you were just going to blow them all up?"
The muzzle of the pistol came to rest at her temple. Vera abandoned editorializing.
"I don't know all that much about the Hand of Transmutation either," she said quickly. "They're a large transnational organization made up of alchemists. They barely operate in Avengarde — this group here is an exception. I also heard that this particular alchemist is already on the Constabulary's wanted list…"
So that was the shape of it. Beyond self-organized Transcendent factions, there were also official Transcendent agencies. Transcendent power, then, wasn't necessarily common, but it certainly wasn't rare either.
Thea nodded slightly. "And the chapel itself?"
"Aboveground in the main hall, there are six of them. All ordinary humans. Probably hired thugs from the slums." She glanced at the Angel pistol and added, "You can kill them with that."
"You'll do that part."
"How?"
"Blow them up. It'll be easy."
Vera's expression flooded with disbelief. Six ordinary humans against twenty kilograms of smokeless powder was, yes, very easy — but —
"I can't help with that part! Your powder detonates too fast. If I light it, I'm going up with them. Couldn't you have used something else? Nitrocellulose, for instance?"
"Couldn't get any. But I have a backup."
"Fine. Keep going. What about the alchemist downstairs?"
"We clear the rabble outside first. You play decoy. Lure him to me."
"Why am I the decoy?"
Thea hefted the elephant revolver. This thing could punch through the skull of a mammoth, never mind a man.
"You're the decoy because I can kill Canaan from here," she said. "If I'm the decoy, can you kill him?"
As for the matter of his being a Transcendent — going on what Vera had said, and Thea's read on her honesty, the girl had no real reason to lie. Which meant Canaan, Transcendent or not, was still fundamentally flesh and blood. Not some mythic beast that couldn't die.
Vera surrendered. "Fine, fine. I'll do it. So what's this backup you mentioned?"
"Right here. Take it."
Thea's voice remained perfectly even as she rummaged through the crate and produced two music boxes — which were, in reality, clockwork detonators.
She had built both of them herself out of music boxes and blasting caps, abandoning the conventional ticking-timer aesthetic in favor of something wound by a spring. The detonation came accompanied by a lovely little melody.
"What is this? A music box?" Vera had seen one before. The shops in Nuremport sold them — though those were smaller and more delicate, and went for several gold pounds each. Vera had only ever dared to listen at the counter, never to buy.
Thea handed one over and gestured for Vera to wind the spring.
The music began at once, prettily and cleanly. It had never quite occurred to Vera that her first time actually handling one of these expensive little objects would be in a circumstance like this.
When Vera had finished winding, Thea remarked, with a calmness that bordered on cruel:
"It's a clockwork detonator. There's a blasting cap inside. Don't forget to set the safety pin, or the cap goes off when the song finishes. I'd suggest moving fast."
"…What?"
Vera nearly dropped the entire device.
Vera, clutching the clockwork detonator with visible terror, made her way to the outer wall of St. Vincent's Chapel. Thea followed at her own pace, six kilograms of explosive in each hand, and began packing them against the brickwork.
The poor little chapel was already most of the way to rubble. Once the wall went, the entire structure would dissolve in seconds.
Inside, the black-robed figures gathered around their fire — currently roasting something meaty — caught a thread of whispered conversation drifting in from outside.
"So… how do we get in? Just start shooting?"
"From the side."
"The side is all wall. How do we get through wall?"
"Thirty seconds."
"Is that some kind of Transcendent technique?"
"Nothing of the sort. Pull the pin on the music box."
"And then?"
"Stick it to the wall."
"…Done…" Vera, following directions, pressed the device against the brickwork. Thea moved alongside her, swiftly attaching the explosive packs, then straightened.
"Fall back eleven meters."
"What?"
"I said run."
"My legs are jelly!"
"Your jelly legs are outpacing me, Vera."
— BOOM!!
— BOOM!!!
— BOOM!!!!
The blasts went up in sequence, one after another, splitting the dusk wide open. The shockwave was an assault on the eardrums. The already half-collapsed chapel heaved, then surrendered. Bricks and stone rained down. A pall of dust and smoke unfurled over the entire site.
As for the six poor souls who had been inside — their wailing lasted barely a heartbeat before being swallowed whole. The night settled back into its uneasy quiet.
"Pfft! Pfft!"
The blast wave had flattened both of them. Vera scrambled upright, spat out a mouthful of mud and grass clippings, and rounded on Thea, ashen-faced.
"Shit! You couldn't have warned me you were going to blow the wall?!"
"We're not that close. Besides, I did tell you to fall back. And you outran me anyway."
"If I'd been any slower you would've cooked me alive!"
Thea brushed dust off her robe — then went abruptly still, lifting one hand.
"Stop. Something below."
She brought the elephant revolver up smoothly and gestured with her chin toward the extinguished torches and the hatch in the ground beneath them.
Vera shut her mouth and dropped her voice to a whisper. "Want me to go down? A Sequence Eight isn't an easy mark."
"His ability is elemental transmutation of the four elements. Weakness: only effective within three meters of himself. Anything to add?" Thea was reciting the intelligence Vera had given her earlier.
The four elements meant air, water, earth, and fire — alchemy basics. Thea had absorbed at least that much. Transmutation, in the alchemical sense, was the reaction itself — air into flame, mercury into gold.
"That's all I know. He might have some odd ritual work as well. But ritual magic is rarely useful for direct attack."
"Then take this down with you."
Thea tossed her the Angel pistol and two magazines. Vera caught them, lifting one eyebrow.
"Feeling generous?"
"I'd prefer you didn't die down there. Also — you owe me a gold pound in rental."
"Bitch."
Still, a gun beat no gun.
The hatch creaked open onto a vertical ladder, plunging straight down. Thea had expected something modest — a wine cellar, perhaps — but the underground space turned out to be substantial. Eighty square meters, by her rough estimate.
The first room was small and tight, the kind of place where a casual kick might catch on something. A crisp clatter answered her foot. She bent down and picked the thing up.
A bone. Thick, knobbed, suggesting some species of very large mammal.
Beyond the antechamber a narrow corridor ran inward. A few paces in, it opened onto an iron door, hanging not quite shut. The door was strange. It had no frame. It sat in the corridor as if it had simply been put there, conjured into being out of nothing, fitting awkwardly into the architecture around it.
"We go in?" Vera asked, tense.
"Yes. Don't worry. Nothing waiting behind the door." Thea kept the elephant revolver leveled. She added, conversationally: "I've strapped detonators and explosives to myself. Any ambush, and the next second buries everything in this room. Including us."
The remark was not, in fact, intended solely for Vera.
Behind the iron door, the alchemist Canaan Ogre — who had been busy clearing the surface of his alchemical worktable — paused mid-motion.
The alchemist was perhaps thirty, with a deeply carved face, slightly dark skin, and the sun-marks of someone who had spent years in the fields. If you ignored the crimson robe and the violet, web-like veining that traced across the exposed parts of his skin, you might easily have mistaken him for a peasant tilling soil for a living.
He raised a hand and released a transmutation incantation. The iron door dissolved into a fine veil of dust.
He looked at Thea, and his expression collapsed into resignation.
"All this time I've been assuming the Suppression Bureau had finally tracked me down here. I never imagined it would be you, Miss Thea Sorelle. You really have driven me into a corner, haven't you?"