Thea placed her order: one kilogram of holy wood.
Bishop Marshall's expression shifted — the faint, professional warmth of a church official softened into something genuinely pleased. He looked at the girl beside him the way a jeweler looks at an unexpected find.
Holy wood was a Church-allocated commodity, regulated through the tithe system installed during the Great Plague sixteen years ago and never revised since. The Cathedral of Our Lady received a standing distribution of ten kilograms per month. During the plague years that had barely been enough; now, in peacetime, it was nearly impossible to move. The material was too specialized — it fueled the rituals of Holy Grail Transcendents and the higher sacramental workings of the Church, meaning almost everyone who needed it was already inside the Church's own hierarchy.
Which created a problem. When the only buyers were employees, you had no market.
The surplus piled up in back rooms and gathered dust. Occasionally some Transcendent from another path would appear needing holy wood for a ritual configuration, and the Church would charge them handsomely for the privilege. But those were rare windfalls. The Cathedral's stockrooms held enough holy wood to build a small house, and more arrived every month.
So when Thea mentioned that she expected to be purchasing quite a lot of it going forward, the old bishop's expression went warm in a way that had less to do with pastoral charity and more to do with inventory management.
The Church was still a business. A reliable customer was worth cultivating.
Marshall led her out of the confession room and into the cathedral's main gallery, walking her through the nave with the unhurried pleasure of a man who genuinely loved his house. He pointed out the statues — their histories, their quirks, the particular light that hit the western clerestory at midafternoon. He named a handful of prominent scholars and faculty at St. Roland's College who would be worth paying respects to once Thea enrolled: senior professors, well-connected alumni with an interest in mentoring younger Transcendents.
Then, with the air of someone sharing a useful secret, he mentioned that if she ever needed holy wood in bulk while in Silverkeep, the great royal cathedral there was sitting on an equally impressive surplus and would be grateful for the business.
He was still talking when they turned into a side corridor and nearly walked into the noise.
Clang. Clang-clang. Clang.
Iron boots on stone flooring — heavy, deliberate, the sound carrying the full weight of someone armored. A figure came around the corner and resolved into a woman: white-gold hair cut close to the jaw, pale eyes sharp as a court summons. She wore light power armor over her habit, the chest plate dull silver, the joints hydraulic. At her hip hung a thermal-alloy blade, the kind whose edge ran hot enough to soften steel on contact.
She looked thirty-something. She carried herself like someone who had stopped counting.
The woman's gauntleted hand came up and struck her breastplate twice in greeting. Clang. Clang.
"Bishop."
"Ah, little Isa." Marshall brightened. "I was just about to introduce you — little Sorelle, this is Isabella, whom I've told you—"
"Bishop." Sister Isabella's voice was patient in the way of someone who had rehearsed this conversation before. "Vera is here and you call her 'little Vera.' I'm in my thirties. I will be forty before the decade is out. Little Isa is, in any number of ways, no longer appropriate."
Marshall chuckled. "Isa, that attitude of yours is really the problem. Even when the body is half in the grave, the spirit must stay young. That's the true danger — not physical decline, but the twilight of the soul. A young heart is—" He paused, as if having a pleasant thought. "On the subject of young things, you're of an age now where perhaps—"
"Stop." Isabella raised a hand. "You're absolutely right. Young heart. I take it back."
It was a tactical retreat. She moved on immediately.
"There's been another disappearance case in Great Harbor. Child laborers — three in the past month. Then North Harbor constables found remains in a cluster of abandoned factories near the docks. Ritual markers on the premises; they're calling it probable cult activity." A pause. "Given how recently the last mass sacrifice was, that's not an unreasonable assumption."
Marshall's easy expression settled into something heavier. "The Bureau passed it along?"
"Manpower. They have none." Isabella's tone was neutral — not bitter, just accurate. "And a cult operating openly in the city can't be ignored. I've already paid two informants in the factory districts."
"Any results?"
"Some." Isabella's chest rose slightly — the contained exhale of someone holding back genuine anger. "Nothing to do with cult activity. What we found—" Her voice went flat with the effort of keeping it level. "Multiple factories employing child laborers under sixteen in high-intensity conditions. The children typically don't survive to adulthood. We knew this. The city knows this."
She stopped.
"But those factories won't give the children a funeral. Not even a inadequate one. Instead, they sold the bodies to a Serpent Party operation in Great Harbor. That's where our disappearances originate."
The Serpent Party. Thea knew the name. In the taxonomy of Nuremport's underworld, it occupied a strange middle position — not a gang so much as a platform, a loose alliance of dozens of smaller crews and several hundred peripheral operators, all collaborating under a shared banner. The major syndicates handled the visible commerce; the peripheral outfits handled whatever the majors preferred to keep at arm's length. Anonymous contracts, deniable actors, mobile cells. Trying to dismantle a peripheral Serpent Party crew was like killing a cockroach in someone else's kitchen — you could manage one, but you were nowhere near done, and now they were running for the walls.
Bishop Marshall let out a long, tired breath. "No wonder Roman's been complaining about undermanning."
"Bishop." Isabella's voice had an edge now. "The Church has collected donated remains from our own clergy for three centuries — we maintain a proper record. If hospitals need cadavers for study, there are legal channels. There's no reason — none — for a factory to be selling dead children to criminals." She set her jaw. "The Serpent Party doesn't buy corpses without a buyer. Which means someone in the cult network has a use for them. If we move against the Party, we can clear these people out of the gutters—"
The Church was not a constabulary. Restraint and testimony were the constabulary's territory. The Church, when it moved, moved differently — and no one worried very much about what was left afterward.
"Are you certain this involves the Serpent Party?"
Isabella turned.
Thea had spoken without thinking — or rather, she'd thought very quickly and concluded the question needed asking. She'd been standing half a step behind Marshall, quiet enough that she'd nearly ceased to exist in Isabella's awareness.
That changed when Isabella looked at her directly.
Something shifted — a subtle thing, almost involuntary, like a compass needle finding north. It was the Light in the Blood: Thea's most recent trait modification, the one that made her blood luminous to spirit-creatures. In strict terms, Transcendents weren't spirit-creatures — they were human — but they were also halfway to something else. Enough to register. Enough to make the air around Thea feel, to anyone sensitive, like standing beside a low-burning fire on a cold night: warm, and indefinably pulling.
Isabella blinked. "Who is she?"
"Thea Sorelle." Thea kept her voice even. "Suppression Bureau hunter, licensed. Also a consultant to the Nuremport Constabulary."
"You're Thea Sorelle?" Isabella's surprise was genuine. "I've heard the name from the station side — Roman himself commissioned you, or so they said. Someone capable." She took a moment to recalibrate. "I assumed you were closer to my age. — Not a slight on your competence, Miss Sorelle. My apologies."
"No offense taken."
Thea looked at the woman steadily. "But if this case has a Serpent Party thread, I may be able to help."
Isabella's skepticism was professional, not personal. "This is complicated work. Genuinely complicated. Are you sure you can contribute?"
"I can deliver you a Serpent Party boss."
A beat.
"A boss." Isabella straightened. "That's sufficient. More than sufficient — boss-level members share operational intelligence across the alliance. If there's a transaction happening with the cult network, a boss will know the parameters."
Thea nodded once. "I can find you one. But I'll need something in return."
Isabella glanced at Marshall. The old bishop gave nothing away — he just looked mildly interested in the architecture.
"Tell me what you need," Isabella said.
"Ten kilograms of holy wood. No charge."
The Cathedral of Our Lady had ten kilograms of holy wood delivered twice over every month, and most of it went straight to storage.
Isabella agreed without hesitation.
The logistics were settled in minutes — Thea gave an address, and Isabella said she'd have it sent over. Then Thea asked a question that reoriented the conversation entirely.
"Walk me through the case. From the beginning."
So Isabella did.
The timeline stretched back three months. The disappearances were clustered in the fourteen-to-sixteen age range — children technically past the poorhouse's release threshold (fourteen was legally an adult in Avengarde, and the poorhouse released its charges accordingly), but still below the legal age of labor protections, which kicked in at sixteen. The factories occupied that gap without shame. Work them until they broke; when they broke, sell the remains and avoid the burial costs entirely.
Thea listened and asked questions in a sequence that seemed, to Isabella, strangely methodical for someone who called herself a consultant rather than an investigator.
But Thea wasn't working from detective's instinct. She was working from criminal experience.
Smuggling networks and human-trafficking networks had the same skeleton: a source, a handoff point, a buyer, and usually a middleman somewhere in between. The cargo didn't matter — illegal tinctures, contraband materials, corpses. The logic of the operation was identical. Find any one link in the chain clearly enough, and you could follow it both ways.
Thea had spent a year and a half being one of those links. She knew how the chain moved.
She asked about routes, timings, which factories had changed receiving patterns, whether any of the peripheral Serpent Party crews were known to work the district, whether there were workers at the factories who might have noticed something and had not yet been interviewed. She asked about the bodies' condition when found — whether there were markers suggesting the corpses had been processed before sale, or delivered raw.
Isabella answered each question with increasing focus, matching Thea's pace. The afternoon light moved across the cathedral floor. Shadows lengthened between the nave columns.
By the time Thea stood to leave, the bell in the Clocktower district had already rung three times since they'd started.
"I'll be in touch when I have something concrete," she said.
"I'll wait to hear from you." Isabella stood as well — and then, with the directness of someone who didn't waste words: "Thank you, Miss Sorelle. Seriously."
Thea's mouth curved. "Don't thank me yet."
She walked back through the cathedral, past the great statues and the filtered western light, and paused at the entrance, where a deacon was distributing the week's charitable allotments to any congregant who needed them.
Free bread. Free milk.
Thea collected both.
The sun was low over the harbor when Isabella found Marshall in the cloister, walking his usual evening circuit.
"That girl," Isabella said, falling into step beside him. "She's remarkable. I've worked with constables for fifteen years — she's more methodical than any of them. Whatever Roman is paying her, it isn't enough."
Marshall made a sound somewhere between agreement and amusement. "She's not methodical, precisely. She has experience. There's a difference. The constables aren't amateurs either — they're simply underfunded."
Isabella conceded the point. Roman had a reputation for running a tight unit despite chronic resource shortages; anyone he personally brought in was unlikely to be decorative.
She thought for a moment. "When she agreed to find us a boss — she said 'I.' Not 'we.' Is she going to ask the constabulary for manpower? That could tip someone off, if the operation leaks."
Marshall tapped his staff against the flagstones. Clang. Clang. "She won't involve the constabulary. She's too careful. Moving that many people through a delicate operation would give it away."
"Then she's working alone?"
"Alone, more or less." A pause. "One helper, if we're being generous. A child who hasn't finished her assessment period."
Isabella stopped walking.
"Two people."
"Approximately."
She turned on her heel and took three purposeful steps back toward the cathedral — already calculating which equipment she'd need, how quickly she could get a second suit of armor—
The staff tip came down.
Clang.
A sound like a cathedral bell in a small room — the resonance of it hit Isabella's boot soles and traveled upward, and her next step refused to happen. Her foot was on the flagstone. Her foot stayed on the flagstone. In the old bishop's milky eyes, something moved — faint and fluid, like light through river water, like text written in a language older than any seminary had taught.
It lasted two seconds.
"Sir Roman knows where the line is," Marshall said, pleasantly, as if the last few moments hadn't occurred. "Whatever else you might say about the man, he does not send untested children into genuine danger. And Miss Sorelle—" He tilted his head. "She's young. That's true. But she doesn't move unless she's already calculated the exit. You'd be doing her a disservice to assume otherwise."
He withdrew the staff.
Isabella stood still for a moment longer. Not from compulsion — just processing.
"The girl with the detonators," she said finally. It wasn't a question.
Marshall's expression didn't change. But somewhere behind those filmed, warm eyes — somewhere in the vision that only he could see — two figures stood pressed against a stone wall inside St. Vincent's Chapel. One pointed at a seam in the masonry. The other set the charge, quick and practiced, without a tremor in her hands.
He'd never told Isabella what he'd seen. He didn't tell her now.
Anyone bold enough to use explosives and detonators to take down a Transmutation Scholar face-to-face wouldn't be rattled by a Seer.