Thud!
The last candle had only just sputtered to life when Vera collapsed sideways onto the floor, clutching her skull.
"Augh—"
Isabella was already moving. Power-armored hand to Vera's shoulder, the other coming up to feel her forehead — the gauntlet's plating retracting just enough to let bare fingertips through. Her brow furrowed.
"What happened. You were upright a second ago."
"I don't — I don't know," Vera croaked, palm pressed flat against her temple as she fought her way back to her feet. "I really don't know..."
Inside her skull, a riot. Strange, intricate knowledge was caroming around in there like loose ball bearings — some of it she could almost grasp, the way one grasps a name on the tip of the tongue, but the rest of it was just — symbols. Lines and curves and squiggles. Stacks of them. Page after page after page, and she had no idea what any of it meant.
Isabella's voice went hard. "Vera. Tell me exactly what happened in there."
"I — I was reciting the Ouroboros's sacred number. To finish the diving ritual. But somehow — somehow I dragged something else up. Something from the alchemy path. And it... it made a trade with me."
"A trade?”
Isabella had performed the warding rite herself, meticulously, before Vera ever began. No drift-target should have been able to wander in. And even if one had — even if some loose thing from the deep had stumbled into the array — she would have felt it. She always felt it. The only thing she would not have felt, the only thing that could pass under a Tactical Sister's wards unnoticed, was —
Some Great One.
Vera shrank a little under her aunt's stare. "It... it was a trade. Aunt Isabella. I gave it the Unceasing Holy Seal you gave me—"
"That’s alright. How are you now?"
Isabella had seen people make deals with the alchemy path's predators before. Equivalent exchange was the rule, yes, in theory — but in practice, the other party chose how to measure the equivalence, and the other party did not always have your interests in mind.
Trade them a hundred ounces of gold? Fine. They might hand back a hundred ounces of cursed gold. You'd pocket it, smile, walk three paces, drop dead. And then they'd come collect.
"Well — technically," Vera said, vague and wobbling, "the other side gave me the knowledge. Um. It's hard to explain."
The mere act of trying to think about the symbols set her temples throbbing again.
It wasn't just the symbols, either. There had been test problems in that book. A whole catalog of test problems. And now those were sloshing around in her head too. Vera prided herself, with some justification, on having been a decent student at the church school. But those problems — she'd squinted at them and her vision had gone swimmy. Forget solving them. She couldn't even understand the answers.
Hearing that the trade had been knowledge, Isabella exhaled a fraction.
Knowledge had thresholds.
That wasn't a metaphor — not the way it was for working-class girls priced out of grammar school, not the way it was for the gulf between gentry libraries and tenement shelves. It was structural. The ability to recognize a piece of true knowledge, to parse it, to use it — that ability was gated by Sequence.
The Church's Nine Holy Seals, for instance, were written in plain language across the ordination oaths, sewn through every prayer, recited at every vesper. And yet a layman could memorize the entire breviary front to back and never see them. A low-Sequence Transcendent, untaught, would walk straight past them. They were there, in the open, and they were invisible.
So too with the Silverkeep Crown's Suppression Bureau, the Iris-Kingdom's Alchemical Guild, the dozens of other Transcendent orders scattered across the continent. The highest-tier artifacts they hoarded — the ones whispered about in classified registers — could stop a war of a million men mid-stroke, turn afternoon into starless midnight, accelerate time, or run it backwards.
But to so much as comprehend what those artifacts were required a Sequence higher than most Transcendents would ever reach. And the wielder paid — paid in ways the human nervous system was not designed to absorb.
The threshold was a wall. It was also a wall protecting anyone who hadn't earned the right to stand behind it.
Power had a price. The nine known pathways laid down nine immutable principles, and the alchemy path's principle — sacred number Seven — was equivalent exchange. From which two corollaries followed, plain as catechism:
One: the greater the Transcendent power claimed, the greater the price exacted.
Two: the deeper one dove down the path, the more closely the curse and contamination of the Nightmare followed at one's heels.
Isabella ran a hand over the girl's hair. Her voice softened by a notch. Not by much.
"The knowledge you received — what kind. You needn't name the content. And you needn't name Them."
"...It's a little dangerous."
"Dangerous."
The word triggered Isabella like a snare-wire. In the next breath her hand had closed on Vera's wrist, and the gauntlet's reinforcement-spell was already unfolding in her aura — she was about to strip Vera down and examine every inch of her for taint—
"No no no!" Vera squawked, flailing. "Aunt Isabella, not that kind of dangerous! I mean — I mean — I think — I think the knowledge I got is sort of... mathematics?"
Thea opened her eyes.
She rose from the armchair. In front of her, the four candles guttered out at precisely the same instant, as if they had been waiting for her permission.
She still didn't entirely understand what, exactly, the inverted shrine was — that thing she now hung suspended in, every time she dove. But she had it on a leash. It moved when she told it to move.
It was a kind of ghost-place, she had decided. A drifting fold in the deep. Some unlucky soul who happened to be diving at the same moment, in the same metaphysical vicinity, could simply blunder into it.
She had taken to calling it the Inverted Sanctum.
The Sanctum's outward appearance she could change at will — she could dress it up as a coaching inn, a castle, a country estate, even, if she felt like it, something towering and steel-ribbed like the Empire State Building. The only thing she could not change was herself. She, in the Sanctum, was always strung up like a sacrifice. Wrists bound. Ankles bound. Hanging upside down in the middle of nothing.
Anyone diving in her general direction stood a chance of brushing against the place.
Vera, frankly, had had the worst luck of any diver Thea could imagine. They'd laid out their arrays at exactly the same hour. Vera had gone down, and the first thing she'd seen was Thea, dangling.
The collision shouldn't recur on the rebuild. Thank the four elements that the diving ritual's material list was cheap. Otherwise this drifting little dollhouse of hers would have bankrupted her by the end of the month.
The Unceasing Holy Seal she'd skimmed off Vera, however — that was a beautiful thing. The kind of insurance policy a girl in her line of work paid in blood for. Of course, she couldn't actually cast it yet.
So. Reset the diving ritual.
Four candles in four colors—
Knock knock.
Knock knock.
The sound rapped through the parlor door and Thea was in motion before she'd consciously registered it. Candles, ritual materials, the half-arranged array — all of it swept off the floor in one fluid armful and into the trunk. Trunk locked. Trunk shoved under the bed. She rose, smoothed her skirt, smoothed her hair, smoothed her face into something tea-shop polite.
Then, unhurried, she walked to the door and opened it a crack.
A hand came through first. A leather wallet. A badge folded out — a crowned shield blazing in the morning light.
"Apologies for the intrusion. Grand Constabulary, Silverkeep. A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Miss Thea Sorelle. I am the Grand Constabulary's directly-appointed Suppression Bureau commissioner, and Director of the Nuremport Suppression Bureau. Roman."
Roman crossed her parlor with the dignified, slightly bored cadence. Deep-blue tailcoat. Grey leather boots. Spotless white trousers, ox-hide belt, and at his hip a slender cane of polished wood — a gentleman's walking-stick, more drawing-room ornament than weapon.
He chose a chair. He sat.
Thea was, by this point, more or less inured to police officers. Two months of constabulary visits — every other week, sometimes every week — had stripped them of all mystique. Especially that walking misfortune Scarlett, the trainee. She hoped, idly, that the girl still had a shot at her commission.
"Director Roman — are you here to arrest me?"
"In principle, yes." He smiled without warmth. "Your black-market intermediary — the gentleman who brokered your potion sales — is currently in our custody. He turns out to have been brokering rather more than potions. Firearms. Ammunition. And bulk ritual materials supplied to one Canaan Ogre, illegal immigrant, for the refinement of spiritual essence into Transcendent artifacts. Unfortunately, the broker above him slipped the net. Otherwise we'd have rolled up the entire chain in one afternoon."
"I'm afraid I don't follow."
"Given Miss Sorelle's relationship with Miss Annelise, I imagine you can indeed afford not to follow."
"I don't know what you mean." Thea was already at the sideboard, calmly pouring. "Cocoa?"
"Most kind." Roman accepted the cup, smile widening fractionally. "In Canaan Ogre's subterranean alchemy chamber, Miss Sorelle, we recovered a large-bore elephant revolver. And in the course of the Nuremport constabulary's investigation into forty-odd vagrant disappearances within the district, we found traces of your calming tincture at multiple scenes."
"Anyone can brew a calming tincture. You can't convict a girl on cough-syrup alone."
"And the revolver and powder you purchased through the same broker — for what purpose, exactly?"
"Self-defense. And blasting open graves."
"...Blasting open graves."
"Quite so. I'd identified a rather promising plot in the cemetery district. I intended to use the explosives to crack it open and recover a modest share of the grave-goods to subsidize my household expenses. One could, of course, excavate from the topsoil downward — sink a test pit through the ash layer, then trench in by degrees — but you'll appreciate, Director, that I'm only a defenseless little orphan girl. That sort of physical labor is rather beyond me. Don't you agree?"
Roman, against his own professional interests, became genuinely curious. "And how much was the gentleman in the grave worth?"
"One I cracked open," Thea said, unhurried. "Three hundred and change. In gold pounds."
The simplest way to lie to a constable, she had found, was to tell the truth — an incomplete truth was still a truth. After Canaan was dead, she really had taken an afternoon to detonate a tomb. The powder had still been on hand; it would have been wasteful to let it sit.
Unfortunately the noble gentleman inside that particular plot had turned out to be poorer than she was. Out of something approaching pity, she'd left two slices of bread and a small phial of calming tincture in the coffin before she left.
Three hundred gold pounds visibly impressed Roman. His eyes narrowed into a slow smile.
"That much. If it didn't constitute the offenses of unlawful possession of explosives and desecration of human remains, I might be tempted to ask Miss Sorelle for technical pointers."
"My possession is perfectly lawful. Earl Mercurie wrote me an attestation."
"Your preparations are, as ever, immaculate. No seam, no slack. And you do, as it happens, possess an alibi — there is nothing of yours at the crime scene proper."
Thea smiled sweetly. "Not at all. By all means investigate me for the desecration charge. I will swear on anything you like that the gentleman in that particular plot was left in perfect condition."
"I take Miss Sorelle entirely at her word. There's no need for any such investigation — particularly when the young Miss Mercurie, were she to hear of it, would summon up rather more wrath than the Bureau could comfortably absorb. I have no quarrel with you, Miss Sorelle. Nor with — you all."
He tapped the table once with the back of his fingernail. Eyes still hooded.
"But I have a feeling. A feeling that Miss Sorelle and the late Canaan Ogre are not unconnected."
"And yet without evidence, you can't arrest me."
"No. My superior has instructed me to terminate inquiries against incidental parties. There is something larger behind Canaan Ogre. Something next to which his own value — and his own death — are quite small. The Silverkeep Suppression Bureau has accordingly instructed me to abandon the question of who killed him."
"Behind him?"
"Classified, I'm afraid. Forgive me."
Thea tilted her head an inquiring inch. The picture of bafflement.
Roman held her gaze, and his manner became, all at once, scrupulously courteous.
"Our inquiries are at present rather pressing, and the Nuremport branch of the Suppression Bureau is — unfortunately — desperately understaffed. The case is large. The clock is short. Therefore—"
The director rose. He bowed. A short, deliberate bow, neither shallow enough to mock nor deep enough to flatter.
"Whatever Miss Sorelle's origins may be — as a herbalist in command of an extraordinary catalog of pharmaceutical recipes, and as an expert in archaeological excavation and demolition — you are a talent the realm cannot afford to misplace. Accordingly, I extend a sincere invitation: join the Nuremport Suppression Bureau. Should the offer interest you, present yourself at the Great Harbor District precinct at your convenience. You may collect your reward at the same time."
His angle was transparent. If he could not catch her, he could co-opt her. Tucked under the Bureau's eye she would at least be observable. Better than letting whatever-this-was bloom unsupervised in some North Harbor flat.
The girl — newly eighteen and already operating on this scale — was, frankly, not going to spend her future tending her garden. Better in than out.
And in any case: the Nuremport Bureau really was desperately short-handed.
A respectable job. And a reward? Was it money? Better still, was it gold?
She allowed herself a flicker of interest. "There's a reward for me?"
"Indeed. You are, after all, a good citizen who, having discovered a cabal of heretics performing a forbidden rite, single-handedly destroyed their stronghold — the Hero of Nuremport. Today's conversation, of course, will never have occurred."
Tch. A title. Only a title. And one she really couldn't accept.
Accepting it amounted to a signed confession that she'd been at the scene; and the devil would believe Roman if he claimed today's chat was strictly between them. But add a small parcel of gold to it — even a handful of gold pounds — and dangerous as it was, she'd put on the laurel wreath and smile for the etching.
She let the silence sit. She smiled. She said nothing.
Clever girl. Roman noted it privately, with something close to admiration. He took up his cane， and walked to the door. Before he stepped out he paused.
"Oh — and Miss Sorelle. Next time you're acquiring ritual materials, you might consider purchasing them in segments, from different districts, at staggered intervals. Avoids attracting the sort of attention one prefers not to attract."
— But not quite clever enough.
Downstairs and out into White Oak Street. Roman descended the building's stoop, leaned on his cane, and stepped up into the waiting carriage.
Inside, on the bench opposite, sat the current Bishop of the Nuremport Holy Church — His Grace Marshall — robed in unblemished white shot through with gold thread, a double coronet seated on his crown. His eyes were closed in a light doze.
Marshall was very old. His skin had the slack, papery quality of a fruit gone past, his eyes were filmed and milky behind the lids, and every gesture he made carried the slow, considered care of a man who had stopped expecting his next year. He had served thirty-odd years in the impoverished mountain dioceses of the northwest. Sixteen years ago, when Nuremport's previous bishop perished in a great plague, Marshall had been reassigned here.
He heard Roman settle into the carriage. He spoke without opening his eyes.
"The girl. How is she."
"Promising. Wants guidance."
"Sir, that was not my question. Has she been — taken? Hollowed? Worn like a coat?"
Roman lifted the pipe from the bench beside him, struck it, drew, and let a slow grey ribbon roll out before answering.
"No. All in order. She's attempting the alchemist's advancement. Tied, almost certainly, to a Transcendent organization other than ours. Trading with it. Influenced by it. Possibly inducted into it outright."
He drew on the pipe again.
"Your Grace — the alchemical grimoire. That one. It's almost certainly been moved out long ago. Knowledge has thresholds. That book's threshold is Sequence Nine. An ordinary person could not so much as parse a paragraph of it. How a back-alley quack and grave-robber decoded it — well. Someone, somewhere, is making trades with her that we know nothing about."
Marshall nodded — a fractional, brittle nod — and closed his eyes again.
"I have heard of those two sisters. Children of the Deepwater Village orphanage. The matron there spoke very well of them. I met the elder, Aveline, once in Silverkeep. A fine girl, that one."
He drew a long, slow breath.
"They were dealt a bad hand. To live at the edge of the law — to deal, by necessity, with unsavoury people — that is the natural course of a life like theirs. We cannot, in the same breath, allow children to be left destitute and beyond the reach of charity, allow the law to fail to protect them and the criminal element to flourish unchecked — and then condemn those same children for breaking laws and bending morals. That failure is ours. By every reckoning, in feeling and in reason both, we have no right to come down hard on them."
A pause. The old bishop sighed, deep, and let his eyelids fall shut.
Roman exhaled a smoke-ring and watched it dissolve against the carriage roof. His voice carried genuine respect.
"You are a worthy bishop, Your Grace. But — set that aside for the moment. There's something I'd like to ask you. Concerning sixteen years ago."
A beat.
"Concerning the great plague of Nuremport."