By the time they started back, the sky over Castibury had gone fully dark.
The day's heat still had not lifted off the flagstones, and the shops along both sides of the street had begun lighting their oil lamps one after another. Dim yellow light came out through the glass and fell on the people passing in front of the doors.
Some of the more fashionable shops had gone over to the new electric lights, though those took up a very large share of a shop's costs.
The cost of installing them, the cost of running the wiring, the cost of the lamps themselves and then the bill for the electricity — for an ordinary person it all came to a considerable outlay.
In the Lower City the workers had just finished their day and were coming out of the workshops in twos and threes. Some had their sweat-soaked shirts slung over a shoulder. Some, having just been handed the day's wages, went straight into a tavern on the street and ordered a grey ale cut with cool water, or with ice in it.
The roadside stalls selling snacks and odds and ends were far livelier than they had been in daylight. Steam rolled out of the iron pans, and a few children stood around clutching copper coins, their eyes following the stallholder's wooden ladle.
Only once the carriage moved into the Middle City did the surroundings gradually quieten.
Brightly coloured lamp shades hung along both sides of the broad road, and several ornately decorated carriages stood in front of the restaurants. Young ladies in thin dresses came out of a confectioner's in a group, carrying some new sort of drink.
The same city, a few streets apart, and its nights were two entirely different things.
The carriage finally stopped near Astraea's lodgings.
Viola took Elaine round to the back of the building and used the silver needle to restore the seal at the window to what it had been. Before leaving she gave Elaine the needle, and reminded her that she would have to go back to the Red Vein Relief Society in three days.
Once Viola had gone, the room quickly went quiet again.
Elaine set the temporary certificate on the table, then stood in front of the mirror and slowly pulled her collar open.
The skin of her shoulders and chest was still pale and smooth.
The white lines that had been there had left no trace at all.
She looked into the mirror for a while, and the white mirror in the cellar of the White manor surfaced in her mind again.
The change to her body, the vanishing lines, the explosion that had come out of nowhere, and the holes that explosion had left in her memory.
If there was anywhere left that held answers, it was probably only there.
Elaine looked towards the window.
She ought to wait for Astraea to come back and tell her all of it then. But the manor had been sealed off for days now, and anything inside it could be carried away by the Judgment Tribunal or by somebody else at any moment.
Wait any longer and there might not be so much as a last thread left.
Elaine picked up the needle Viola had left and set it against the edge of the seal the way Viola had shown her.
The pale gold light wavered slightly. Her hand paused, then drew carefully off to the side. The pattern of the seal dimmed by degrees until a gap opened wide enough to push the window out.
Night air came in from outside, still carrying a little of the heat that hadn't cleared.
After weighing it carefully, Elaine put the cloak on after all and climbed out through the window.
The White manor was in the Upper City, but it was not far from here, ten or fifteen minutes on foot. By the time she came close, the street she had known all her life had been cut off with temporary fencing. More than half the manor's outer wall had come down, blackened stone lay scattered across the courtyard, and several seal-strips bearing the Judgment Tribunal's mark were pasted across what remained of the front gate.
Compared with the other districts, the Upper City had finished its electrification long ago, and the whole street was lit by electric lamps.
It was the invention of the electric lamp that had so thoroughly enriched the night life of the upper classes of Castibury, capital of the Kingdom of Loren.
Looking at the near-destroyed manor, Elaine could hardly credit that she had survived an explosion that size.
She kept to the shadow at the corner and did not go closer at once, only played the passer-by, stealing a few glances at the White manor as she went.
Because of the haunting stories there was hardly anyone walking near the White manor at all. And since Elaine's own incident, property prices had fallen off a cliff, radiating outward with the manor at the centre.
A black carriage with no family crest on it stood across the street, no lamp lit inside, the driver's seat empty.
The little tavern not far off was nearly ready to close, and two people in plain long coats were still sitting by the window. The grey ale on the table had barely been touched, and every so often one of them raised his head and looked towards the White manor.
Elaine had been a young master once, but the turmoil in the family had trained a sharp instinct into her long ago, and the moment she set foot on the manor's street she could feel that the house was being watched.
There were a scattering of pedestrians on the road, and rather more strangers who looked plainly menacing. At a junction further off a man in an old hat leaned against the wall. The cigarette in his hand had burned out long ago and he had still not moved on.
Elaine's steps slowed to a stop. These people were not ordinary citizens.
Knowing now that the manor was under observation, she was about to withdraw into the shadows when a familiar heat rose in her chest.
Under the cloak, the white lines that had vanished were surfacing out of the depths of her skin, a little at a time.
At the same moment the man leaning at the mouth of the alley seemed to notice something and lifted his head towards where Elaine stood.
His gaze stayed on the street for several seconds.
Elaine didn't look back, only kept walking with the thin flow of people. The lines under the cloak were still faintly hot, but they had not come out fully as they had before. They brightened and dimmed instead, and drew no attention at all.
The man at the junction took a black disc the size of a palm out of his coat and glanced down at it.
A very faint spectral glow rose across the disc's surface, and before he could fix a direction that glow scattered rapidly, pointing at several different people on the street.
A few young married women who seemed to be trading gossip about whose lord and lady and young master and young miss had done what. A woman leading a child home. Even the so-called "adventurers" some of the man's colleagues had picked up, who had presumably meant to slip into the ruins of the White manor and find something worth money.
The man frowned and shook his head at his companions in the tavern.
Evidently they had put the brief reading down to a slight fluctuation carried in by a passer-by.
Elaine walked as far as the next junction before turning into a narrow lane with no street lamp.
The heat in her chest still had not gone. She leaned against the wall to recover for a moment, and it struck her that when she woke from the manor explosion she had not been lying anywhere near the house. Water had washed her into the old drainage channel.
Since she had been washed out from underground, somewhere between the drainage channel and the manor's cellar there might still be a passage that had not collapsed completely.
Elaine did not go back to the front gate. She went round to the rear of the manor instead and worked along the foot of the wall, looking for a drain outlet.
Fortunately she was not spotted by any of the people watching the manor.
The White manor had been built a very long time ago, and its underground drainage still kept the old stone-built structure. As a child Elaine had heard the old butler complain that every rainy season the channel behind the kitchen backed up. It had never once occurred to her then that she would one day come home by way of such a place.
A rusted iron grating was wedged behind a patch of weeds. Elaine crouched and struck it a few times with a stone she picked up at the roadside, and the grating went over inwards with a harsh scraping.
A damp, rotting smell came up into her face. There was no light in the sewer, only the little that fell in from the street some way off. Dark green moss covered the stone walls, standing water came over the soles of her shoes, and every step left an unusually clear echo in the narrow passage.
Elaine had to keep a hand on the wall as she went.
The stone under her fingertips was cold and slick, and now and then she felt a few long thin scratches left by she did not know what.
The closer she came to the manor, the quieter it grew.
At first she could still hear carriages on the street. After a while there was only dripping water, and her own breathing, held down as small as she could make it.
In the dark, every sound of water was like something walking behind her, and before she noticed it Elaine had started thinking of every urban horror story Castibury told about its sewers.
While she was working herself up, on nothing but instinct, she found an opening ahead of her that led upward.
She squeezed up through the collapsed stonework, and the first thing she saw was a stretch of fire-blackened ceiling.
This was House White's underground vault.
The iron racks that had held the collection were all down, twisted metal buried under rubble. The explosion had torn the walls open to show blackened brick underneath. Broken glass and charred splinters of wood lay everywhere across the floor, some of them still holding the shapes they had melted into.
Standing in the wreckage, Elaine found for a moment that she could not call up what the cellar had looked like in her memory.
Publicly Disclosable Information #1
Catalogue No.: D-0194 Silver Flame Seal-Strip
A basic standard-issue Sacred Object distributed in bulk by the Judgment Tribunal, taking the form of a thin silver-white plate engraved with the Tribunal's crest. Once affixed to a door, a window or a wall it forms an invisible barrier, and silver flame surfaces on it when it is touched.
Stable in structure, mature in manufacture, almost no contamination risk, will not actively harm its user.
May be used to seal off a site and keep outsiders from entering, and can also restrict one designated subject from leaving. Anyone who forces through is not injured, but is left with a brief burning sensation, and a warning goes to the holder.
The seal-strip is stable and safe, with no obvious side effects, but it cannot hold back a high-ranking Seal-Bearer for long, nor seal away the capabilities of a high-risk Relic.
First appearance: Raea used an enhanced version to keep Elaine from going out.