Laila had been standing at the window for the past hour, watching the Pendulum catch the last of Ecstasy’s cold silver light as it reached the eastward mark. She had been counting the days since returning from sea. Everything set in motion would happen tonight.
She heard Cedric’s polite knock, and wondered what it was at this hour. Upon opening the door, the butler stood with a tray holding a folded paper, clearly marked with Freight Expectations’ stationery.
“Madame, a runner arrived at the estate not ten minutes ago. Said the message was urgent.”
The letter was Guillaume’s handwriting, containing only two words.
Empty Nest.
She stared at it only for a moment.
“Cedric, please wake the family with speed, but not haste.”
He paused. “Madame?”
“Except his Grace. He needs to sleep.” She folded the letter. “If he wakes, let him know where we are.”
“At once, Madame.”
She was dressed and in the entry hall before the first footsteps sounded on the stairs.
The hall was cold, the phlogiston chandelier burning at full illumination for an occasion that hadn’t required it. Laila stood at the front door and did not pace.
Lambert came down first. He was already dressed, his cassock straight, his expression the one he wore when he had been awake since before the problem arrived.
“I know,” she said, before he could speak.
He nodded and came to stand beside her.
Isabella was next: boots laced, coat on, already accounting for exits.
Wylan arrived last, trailing a flask of something amber, having negotiated a ceasefire with consciousness. He took a long pull from the flask, blinked once, and focused.
“Right,” he said. “Let’s go.”
The carriage was quiet. Pharelle at this hour was almost unrecognisable: the streets nearly empty, the usual press of the city pulled back into itself, the cold holding the dark in place. Laila watched the windows. Here and there a light burned in an upper room. The walls had been papered again overnight, new broadsheets over the old, the city’s argument with itself continuing in her absence.
Wylan had his lenses on and was watching the sky. “There’s a storm coming,” he said. “Larger than the season should produce. Moving fast.” He paused. “It’s coming from the northwest.”
Laila looked. The horizon over the rooftops was the wrong dark, the stillness of the winter night holding a disturbance as the stars at the edge of the sky winked out in its wake.
Isabella looked up from the window opposite. “Isn’t that the direction of Havralis?”
Guillaume was waiting outside Freight Expectations when the carriage pulled up, his coin turning between his fingers.
He brought them through without pleasantries into his private office. Saffron was already there, wreathed in cigar smoke and orange silk. She merely nodded by way of greeting.
Guillaume crossed to the tall mirror on the far wall and turned the key; the surface rippled once, twice, and resolved into the mirrored office in Havralis.
“After you,” he said.
Saffron went first.
The smell came through the mirror before they did.
It was brine cut through with rot: dead fish and deep water and something that had no name but made the back of the throat close. Laila stepped through into the Havralis office.
The window faced the water. The harbour was visible below: bare mooring posts rising from dark water, the quay stones glistening with something that was not rain. The berths were empty. The running lights were gone. Where the men had been there was nothing either, except for what had been left on the stone and the glass and the walls of the lower building, dark and already cold.
Wylan stopped walking.
Isabella looked at the window and said nothing at all.
“Guillaume—” Lambert began.
“Vault first,” Guillaume said. He was already at the door to the stairwell. “Come.”
They went down. The spiral stair curved through the rock, and the smell deepened as they descended, salt and cold and the rot underneath, the one that had come from somewhere far below the harbour floor. The quay opened out below them at the bottom: the Nautilus still berthed in its channel, undisturbed, the one piece of the harbour that had been spared. Around it, the quay told the rest of the story. Wylan stopped on the last step and looked. Laila put a hand briefly on his arm without looking at him, and kept walking.
The vault door was iron-banded, heavy, set into what looked like solid rock until you knew where to find the seam. Guillaume found it. The door groaned and swung open.
Inside, the air was stale and metallic. The Triplets stood motionless in their alcoves, arms at their sides, eyes closed: present, undamaged, and entirely useless.
The pedestal was bare.
Lambert crossed to the nearest alcove and looked at the Triplets more closely, his hand hovering but not touching.
“They haven’t been damaged,” he said. “They were simply... stopped.”
Wylan was crouched at the base of the pedestal, examining the stone. He did not touch it either.
“Whatever took the egg didn’t force the door,” he said. “There’s no damage. Nothing was broken to get in here.”
Saffron stood in the centre of the vault with her eyes half-closed, her cigar gone out between her fingers.
“Two presences,” she said. “Both vampiric. They are difficult to separate—they came through together.”
“Can you distinguish them at all?” Lambert asked.
“Somewhat.” She turned slowly. “One is ancient. Older than anything I have encountered.” A pause. “The other is newly turned. Days old, perhaps.”
“Days old,” Wylan said.
“Yes. But the scale of it—” Saffron stopped. “I have never read anything that size.”
Wylan looked at the empty pedestal, then at the vault door, still intact on its hinges. “Something that large came through here like mist,” he said. “Took the egg and left without forcing a single lock.”
Lambert looked at the door. He said nothing.
Saffron had moved back to the centre of the vault.
“The ancient one,” she said. “When it passed through here—it wasn’t searching. It went directly to the pedestal.” She opened her eyes. “It knew exactly where to look.”
They came back up through the quay. When they reached the office again, Lambert closed the door to the stairwell and turned to Guillaume.
“Tell us what happened.”
Guillaume set his coin on the desk, flat.
“It came in off the water last night at first darkness,” he said. “It seemed like mist, but behaved like something alive. It poured in from the ocean and flowed over the quay whole. I saw running lights go down, one by one.”
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He paused and took a swig from a flask.
“There were shapes inside it. Large ones, moving through it like they knew the way.”
He looked at the splatter on the window.
“My men were on the docks when it arrived. I could see them for perhaps ten seconds. Then something in the mist started grabbing them, and I couldn’t see them anymore. But I could still hear them.”
He took another swig.
“Eleven minutes later it withdrew, and then started heading southeast.”
Wylan was at the window, looking northwest. Laila watched him for a moment, and then looked at Guillaume take another swig.
“We need to go back now,” she said.
“I hope you’ll understand if I remain here,” said Guillaume.
The mirror deposited them back into the Freight Expectations office: the smell of ink, the dark windows, the ledgers undisturbed on Guillaume’s desk. The mundanity of it was briefly offensive. Saffron crossed to her chair and sat.
None of them spoke for a moment. Outside, Pharelle was going about its morning as though nothing had happened, because nothing had happened here. The quay at Havralis was eleven minutes by mirror from a city that did not yet know.
? Mirror networks of this kind did not officially exist. This was not a secret so much as a professional courtesy extended by everyone involved, including, on at least three documented occasions, the people who were supposed to be looking for them.
The cloud over Pharelle was low and vast, pressing down over the rooftops, purposeful and still. It was the wrong colour: bruised purple-black, catching no light and giving none back.
“That’s what came through Havralis,” Wylan said.
Lambert said nothing.
“If it comes down like it did on the harbour—” Isabella began.
“Stay inside,” Laila said. “Everyone stays inside.”
“Max and Aurora are on the other side of the city.” Isabella looked at her.
Laila was already at her satchel. She found the scarlet pigment, drew the mark on her palm, and pushed: not words, not images, just the raw shape of alarm, the feeling of something wrong arriving. She held it until her hand ached, then let it go.
“Did it work?” Isabella asked.
“I tried to send him a sense of urgency,” Laila said. “Whether it affects him from this distance, I can’t say.”
Thunder rolled overhead, but the cloud did not descend. Instead, snow began to fall: white against the streetlamps for half a second, then dark, and in the low silver light of Ecstasy it looked like ash coming down over the city.
Where it touched the cobblestones it did not settle but liquefied, pooling between the stones and running in thin dark rivulets that thickened.
Then the snow became rain, heavy and warm, impossible in the cold. It began to sheet down, hitting the window in long red streaks.
The rivulets on the cobblestones began to move against the gradient. Wylan watched one thin stream find the gutter and follow it: not downhill but sideways, joining others, thickening as it went. As the rivulets moved on, they left only clean stone. Every part of the blood was gathering.
“It’s running towards the harbour,” he said.
They watched it together: every surface in sight shedding rain in the same direction. All of the streets and gutters gave up their slick of rain, and ran towards the harbour.
By degrees and minutes, the waters of the Bassin-de-Marne darkened.
The Pendulum reached its eastward mark in silence, beginning the final swing of the year. The Bassin had gone the colour of old blood in that new light. There was a hiss of steam, and then in a dreadful flash, the surface froze over.
“It’s here,” Lambert said quietly. “The kraken is in the city.”
No one moved from the window.
The mist thinned at the centre of the ice, and Wylan saw her before he understood what he was seeing: a figure on the frozen surface, pale and enormous, standing on a harbour that had been open water thirty seconds ago. Impossible — and then not, because nothing about the last hour had been possible and he was running low on the reflex.
She was holding the egg.
Wylan took off his lenses.
Lampetia stood on the frozen Bassin with the egg in the crook of her arm and did not look up. Did not gesture. Simply stood there and let the morning find her, pale and still, while the rest of them watched from the window above.
Then the mist rose from the ice around her feet, climbing, thickening, and she softened into it, outline blurring, features dissolving, until the mist lifted on the wind and carried her away, and there was only the frozen harbour and the red light of the coming dawn.
Lambert turned from the window and stood there for a moment, his back to them, looking at the frozen Bassin, and then he turned around.
“All right,” he said. “So we have the kraken in the harbour. Lampetia has the egg.” He looked at each of them in turn. “And tonight is the longest night of the year.”
No one disagreed with any of this.
“She was at sea,” Isabella said slowly. “When we placed it—she was still at sea. She hadn’t been anywhere near Pharelle.” She looked at the harbour. “How does she know where to look?”
“I think I did it,” Wylan said.
“A lucky guess?” Laila said. “They simply happened upon the one vault in the city where it was hidden?”
“Someone must have told her,” Lambert said.
“Yes,” Laila said. “Someone must have.”
“I did it,” Wylan shouted.
Lambert stopped.
“I wasn’t careful enough. With Augustine.” He looked at his hands. “About the vault, the Triplets, where the egg was. I wasn’t—I didn’t mean to. But I think I gave him enough.”
Isabella had turned from the harbour.
Laila said nothing for a moment. “Augustine isn’t Lampetia.”
“No,” Wylan said. “But you saw it on the Nautilus. He spoke for her. His voice, her words.” He looked up. “Whatever he knew, she could reach. She would have had everything the moment I gave it to him.”
Isabella looked at the empty harbour. “Weeks, then.”
“Probably.” He looked at the harbour. “Yes.”
Wylan was quiet for a moment, still looking at where the mist had been.
“The scroll is Umbral,” he said, half to himself. “Start to finish. The pylons, the Sang-gréal, the caul — all of it is darkness, all of it is timed to the longest night.” He turned from the window. “Why does she have the egg.”
Lambert looked up.
“Aeloria’s egg. Concentrated solar essence.” Wylan set his lenses on the sill. “That doesn’t belong in this ritual. It doesn’t fit the architecture at all.”
“Unless,” Lambert said slowly, “the solar element isn’t incidental. Unless it’s—” He stopped. His hands found each other behind his back. “What if there’s a place for something of solar power within a ritual that ends in a vampire ascending to godhood?”
“You know that sounds insane.”
“I’m very open to alternate theories.”
“Maybe she’s not delivering it to him at all,” Isabella said. She hadn’t moved from the window.
Laila had turned back to the harbour. “Not to mention the blood or the kraken. Is this part of the caul, or is it something else entirely?”
“I don’t know,” Wylan said. “It could be a reservoir—vampirically touched blood in the heart of the city, something both of them could draw from. Or it’s entirely separate and I’m wasting time trying to connect them.” He frowned at the Bassin. “I keep running into the edges of what I actually know.”
Lambert looked at him. “Then let’s find the edges. What do you know.”
Wylan picked up his lenses. “The scroll. Pylons at the ley convergences, the Sang-gréal as the lens, a caul of Umbra over the city. All of it timed to the Pendulum’s lowest swing.” He turned them in his fingers. “Midwinter. Tonight.”
“And R?zvan’s end of it.”
“The Sepulchre.” Wylan paused. “Lampetia told us herself. Outside the mausoleum. ‘R?zvan is in the depths of the Sepulchre. Preparing.’”
“Why the Sepulchre?”
Wylan frowned. “He wants to become a god of death,” he said slowly. “And he’s chosen to do it in the one place Death can’t go.” He turned the lenses in his fingers. “That’s either a contradiction or it’s the whole point.”
“A Dungeon is a closed system,” Lambert said. “The overlord doesn’t age. The heart keeps beating without an incumbent. Things that should die, don’t.” He looked at the harbour. “Death has no reach inside one.”
“So if you wanted to step into a seat that was occupied—”
“You’d need somewhere it wasn’t,” Lambert said.
They looked at each other.
Wylan had gone very still. He was staring at the lenses in his hand.
“The offering,” he said quietly. Not to anyone.
Isabella looked at him.
“We’ve been asking why a solar instrument belongs in an Umbral ritual.” He set the lenses down carefully. “It doesn’t belong in the ritual. It’s not infrastructure. It’s — the egg is what gets destroyed. That’s what the night is. The Pendulum at its lowest, the sun at its most diminished, and a vampire burning concentrated solar essence at the moment of maximum dark.” He looked at Lambert. “That’s what eternal means. That’s what no morning looks like.”
“What if ‘the night Agony dies’ isn’t a metaphor this time,” Lambert said. “We know they need to clear divine space.”
No one spoke. Outside, the frozen Bassin caught the red light and held it.
Laila looked at it. “Then we need to move.”
“House de Vaillant.” The voice came from nowhere and everywhere at once, golden and precise. “I would have words with you before you commit to your course of action.”
Wylan turned around very slowly.
“Have you been listening the whole time?” Laila asked.
“On occasion I listen in,” Theodora said, “when my attention is free.”
“Then show yourself. I won’t speak to a ghost.”
The projection resolved: Theodora, golden and exact, standing at the edge of the room. She had been there throughout; she simply had not been visible.
For a moment she said nothing. She looked at the frozen harbour.
“You’ve worked it out,” she said.
“How long have you been listening?” Lambert asked.
“Long enough.” She turned to face them. “The army moves today. Vaziri’s forces are already in position. Whatever you intend to do tonight, you should know that before you decide.”
“Valère has helped this family,” Laila said. “More than once.”
“I know.” Theodora’s tone made clear she found this inconvenient rather than surprising. “And yet. Do you want him to be a god?”
Lambert looked at the harbour. “I’m not sure,” he said, after a moment, “that we could stop him even if we wanted to. At this point.”
Theodora was quiet. Then: “I can open a portal into his immediate vicinity. He trusts your family. You could get close enough to take Caliburn.”
“Then why doesn’t Aeloria step in,” Wylan said. “She is as close to a godlike being as any of us.”
Theodora said nothing for a moment.
“Because she’s not sure she’d win,” Lambert said. “Is Valère already truly that powerful?”
“It is not my purpose here to describe what my mistress can or cannot do,” Theodora said. “Only what you might do.”
Lambert looked at her. “And what happens to Valère if we do it?”
“I cannot give you an answer to that.”
Wylan smiled. “I’m sure her majesty doesn’t want state secrets falling into the wrong hands.”
Theodora looked at him. “The offer stands regardless.”
Lambert shook his head. “We are not Aeloria’s instruments. We have never been Aeloria’s instruments.” His voice was quiet and entirely without heat. “Whatever she believes about this family, that has not changed.”
Laila turned away from Theodora’s projection and back to the window. “We have our own work tonight. I suggest you attend to yours.”
Theodora held the room for a moment longer.
“Then I hope,” she said, “that it is enough.”
The projection dissolved. For a moment the room was very quiet, the frozen harbour below, the red light on the ice, the smell of blood still faint on the cold air coming through the glass. Then the cannon fire started.