Thea cracked the cover open, and the characters waiting inside were at once foreign and intimately familiar.
The strokes had a strange, almost painted quality to them — slightly distorted, as if someone had brushed them onto the page rather than written them — but they were, without question, the same characters she had spent half a year of her Earth-life prying open one by one. She knew them the way one knows the shape of a childhood room. The sensation that hit her was something close to reunion: a quiet, disorienting déjà vu, as though some half-buried part of her had been waiting in the dark for exactly this moment.
The volume was a full ten centimeters thick. There was no author. No publisher. No imprint of any kind. It was, properly speaking, a handwritten transcription — a copy of a copy, perhaps, of something older still.
On the first page, in careful, deliberate script, sat the title:
The Book of the Furnace.
The table of contents listed three great divisions. The first treated the casting and use of crucibles and alchemical furnaces — craft and metallurgy. The second concerned what was called the secret fire within the furnace, along with techniques of purification and transmutation. The third dealt with the calcination of the three primal essences and the working of the Philosopher's Stone — and appended to the back of the volume, like an afterthought to anyone who couldn't read it, was the full advancement ritual for Sequence Six of the alchemical path.
A complete alchemical textbook. By any measure, the thing in her hands was almost obscenely valuable.
"This one's mine," Thea said.
She lifted the book out of the shelf without a flicker of hesitation.
Vera scratched the back of her head. She had no objection — she couldn't read a word of it anyway, and on the open market it would fetch antiquarian prices at best, assuming any fool could be found to buy a tome written in a language no living mouth had ever spoken. Out of something that vaguely resembled goodwill, she offered: "Nobody can crack a Hidden Tongue. If you really want to translate this thing you'll burn through a fortune — you'd need to hire a whole battalion of philologists, and there's no guarantee they'd get anywhere. The only other way is dumb luck. Some Transcendent who happens to dive into the Nightmare and pick the language up by accident."
"Unnecessary," Thea said flatly. She tapped the book with one fingernail. "I'm copying The Compendium of Alchemy by hand. You can take the original. And the Iris-Kingdom Sequence Nine ritual scroll — I'll be taking a copy of that as well."
"So you—" Vera began, then stopped.
It dawned on her, with the slow clarity of someone watching a confidence trick land in real time, that the black-haired girl in front of her was not, in fact, choosing. She intended to have all of it.
The brazen shamelessness of it stunned Vera into momentary silence.
Copying wasn't difficult. Sketching diagrams was a skill Thea had mastered long ago in another life entirely, and the work moved quickly under her hand. The Compendium of Alchemy, despite its thickness, contained barely thirty alchemical recipes worth the ink — most of them functional duplicates of one another, and half of what remained were herbal infusions Thea had already perfected on her own kitchen worktop. The transcription was done before she'd fully warmed to it.
When she set down her pen, she allowed herself a slow, quiet inventory of what now belonged to her:
One — a complete transcription of The Compendium of Alchemy.
Two — The Book of the Furnace.
Three — two advancement ritual scrolls for Sequence Nine of the alchemical path, one from the Kingdom of the Iris, one from the Eastern temple-order.
Four — the spirit-purification ritual scroll, the serpent-runed sacrificial knife of unknown specific function, and a fossilized equine femur.
The alchemical tinctures needed no defense. Healing, sedation, augmentation, the small daily magics of staying alive — useful, all of it.
The Book of the Furnace was an order of magnitude beyond that. It touched the bones of alchemy itself, and carried a Sequence Six ritual in its appendix. The thought of how much that single volume was worth made her pulse tighten in a way that had nothing to do with fear.
Two Sequence Nine ritual scrolls. The Arcane was an interest of hers — partly self-preservation, partly, in the cool back rooms of her mind, a method of collecting from anyone unwise enough to owe her money in the future.
The spirit-purification ritual, the sacrificial knife, the horse bone — these had no immediate use. She took them anyway. She had no intention of leaving anything she could carry.
There were other tinctures in the cellar she did not take. Heaven only knew what was actually inside those vials, and she had no desire to empty her purse to a physician by way of celebrating a successful robbery.
When she had finished combing through every crate and cabinet, Thea packed her spoils carefully into a chest, fastened the latch, and produced something Vera had not been expecting at all: a folded canvas sleeping bag.
A sleeping bag exactly large enough for one person.
A sleeping bag uncomfortably small for two.
Vera stared at it. "You're sleeping here?"
Thea unrolled it across the flagstones in the corner of the chamber. "It's past ten. There's a thunderstorm overhead. I have insufficient confidence in my own driving to gamble both our necks on a midnight return to Nuremport."
While Vera curled herself against the wall, recovering, Thea had gone up the ladder to check the conditions herself. The sky had broken open. Thunder cracked through the cloud-belly in long white seams, and the rain came down in sheets, drumming the ruined chapel above them like a hand on a tin roof. She'd run the length of the path to the carriage and back through it, soaked to the bone, the sleeping bag clutched against her chest.
The dirt track outside was already a churn of mud. Avengarde was still a kingdom of brass and coal-smoke, lit by gas lamps that ended at the city limits — out here, beyond the last cobblestones, there were no streetlights, no macadamized roads, no consolation at all once the sun went down.
"Can't you sleep in the carriage?"
Thea peeled off her drenched shirt. The long line of her arm, slick with rainwater and a fine sheen of sweat, came free of the sodden linen. She gestured, without looking up, at the stack of crates.
"I sleep with my winnings."
"Mercenary," Vera muttered. Then, with a thinning attempt at dignity: "Is there a spare?"
"No."
"Could I — share?"
"No."
"One gold pound." Vera produced a single banknote with the air of a woman parting from a tooth. King Charles's bared incisors grinned up from the obverse.
Thea didn't even glance at her. She kept undressing. Her breasts, when bared, were smaller than Vera's but high and firm, and her attention was on getting dry — wet skin in a stone cellar in autumn was the fastest way she knew to wake up with a fever.
When the offer received no reply, Vera grew anxious. "One pound fifteen! Three pounds!"
Thea remained absorbed in her own toweling. By now she was bare to the air, her full hundred-and-seventy-five centimeters of height drawn out into a long, pale line. She worked the cloth down each leg in turn, down to the arch of each foot, then crossed to the corner, spread the sleeping bag in the dry angle of the wall, and slid herself inside.
Vera was left standing in the middle of the chamber with seawater dripping out of her hair onto the flagstones, neither dressed nor undressed, with no idea what to do with her arms.
After a long moment, Thea lifted her head and looked at the sodden, wretched little creature in front of her. She patted the open seam of the bag once.
"It's warm now. You can come in."
"…What?"
"I said get out of those clothes and get in here."
Vera moved as though someone had tripped a wire. She stripped, toweled herself raw, and slid down through the gap Thea held open for her.
"Oh — warm."
"Cold."
Thea flinched as Vera's frigid skin met hers, then immediately wrapped both arms around the other girl, drawing her in close. Vera's soft, full breasts pressed flush against her ribs, almost seemed to melt into her own body.
Vera tucked her head into the warm hollow of Thea's neck, like a half-drowned kitten lifted from a gutter. The scent of Thea's skin was, somehow, faintly familiar — and then memory caught up to her.
"Oh — wait. You stuffed your stocking in my mouth this afternoon."
"Quiet. Sleep."
Thea gave the breast against her ribs a single, deliberate squeeze by way of warning.
Vera yelped softly. Realization hit her with the same delayed quality. "So that's why my chest was aching — that was you — "
Thea's patience finally guttered. She caught Vera's chin and tilted her face up, holding her eye to eye.
Vera's heart rate, traitor that it was, spiked. She let her eyelids fall, parted her lips by some small reflexive degree, and waited for some surprise that her body had clearly already decided on.
"Mmph!"
Thea's damp, balled-up stocking — different from the one of the afternoon, this one soaked through with rain and sweat, the scent of Thea on it heavier and more concentrated than before — went neatly into her open mouth.
Before Vera could so much as register protest, Thea had pulled her down against her chest again, closed her eyes, and gone to sleep.
Six in the morning.
Ringgggg—!
Vera came clawing up out of sleep so violently she almost tore through the canvas. Her first, dazed thought was that a detonator had gone off in the chamber with them — until her ears caught up and she recognized the brassy chatter of an ordinary alarm clock.
Heart still hammering, she squirmed out of the sleeping bag.
Thea was gone.
The chest was gone. The chamber was bare. The stocking, she realized as she ran her tongue along her teeth, had been gently — almost tenderly — removed from her mouth at some point during the night, and the corner of her lip wiped clean of drool.
The girl had vanished as crisply as she had appeared, and Vera was left with almost nothing. A name — Thea Sorelle. A gender — female. And a body — taut, slim, faintly scented with something that had been very pleasant to fall asleep against, because it had been bitterly cold the night before and she had, in the end, slept with the girl wrapped around her like a fur stole.
"…Interesting," Vera murmured to the empty room, sitting back on her heels. "A Transcendent who springs up out of nowhere. Carrying a grudge against the Hand of Transmutation. And who can read a Hidden Tongue. If she studied something like archaeology, in Nuremport the only place that teaches it is St. Quentin's University — and you don't get into St. Quentin's unless you're noble blood. Or… out-of-towner?"
She slapped both her cheeks lightly. Regret was already setting in.
If she'd woken even a little earlier, she could have trailed the girl, picked up some breadcrumb of a path, learned something.
Too late. She had slept too well.
Nine hours later.
Five hundred meters from St. Vincent's Chapel, four carriages rolled slowly to a halt at the side of the rutted road.
More than twenty Nuremport constabulary officers dismounted in full kit. Every one of them wore mail under their longcoats, every one carried a saber at the hip and a service pistol at the belt.
From a separate carriage stepped two clerics.
And from the lead carriage — a senior inspector and a superintendent, both with medals winking on their chests.
A superintendent commanded an entire precinct district. An inspector ran a single station house under him — a notch below, formally speaking.
Among the four men's exchanges, two names surfaced. The inspector was called Roman. The superintendent went by Field.
Yet the inspector, Roman, kept his pipe clenched between his teeth and addressed Field with absolutely no trace of deference. It was Superintendent Field, on the contrary, who kept his tone careful and conciliatory, audibly trying to smooth the air between them.
Roman spoke without inflection. "This cult cell has been operating in Nuremport for four months. Silverkeep is unhappy. The Cathedral is unhappier still."
A bead of sweat slid down behind Field's collar. He hurried to answer.
"The Hand of Transmutation has shifted base twice in those four months. Silverkeep recalled the Suppression Bureau's monitor from Nuremport for the Queen's Jubilee, and that — that's what stretched our timeline out to —"
"You're telling me this is Her Majesty's doing."
"No — no, sir, of course not — "
"And what's the state of the interior?"
Field bent slightly at the waist, half apology, half bow. "I had three of my inspectors sweep ahead, sir. With this many men on site now, there isn't a cultist alive in there who'll grow wings and fly out."
The words were barely out of his mouth when one of the constabulary officers came back from the chapel at a stiff, fast walk, his face the gray of damp ash. He leaned in to Field and whispered urgently in his ear.
Field's color drained.
When his voice came out, it was high and thin and almost cracked.
"What? They're — they're all dead?"