“Basic, in the sense of avoiding overdesign. A direct equivalent to this land’s Yellow Atropal…?” Yao murmured as she turned the talisman paper back and forth, looking back and forth between them. Somehow, the Schwarzfaust puzzled her far more than the Wandrei Faust had. After deliberating for a short while and glancing Krahe’s way once or twice, Yao said: “Oh, I understand now.”

  She turned to Krahe, holding up the mass-production variant.

  “I have no reason to take issue with these being distributed. Your personal version seems, to me, as a decoy first and offensive theurgy second. The simplified version, without its role within your own arsenal, will be fairly unremarkable, but it will spread. I suspect you will enjoy watching it backfire when someone inevitably tries to use it against you. You used a clever, but simple way to hide the contingency — most won’t notice. Among those who do, most won’t know how to defuse it without rendering the pattern inert.”

  "As intended, then. I'll leave a few copies with you, feel free give them to anyone you think might do something interesting with them. Before I go, has a man named Garvesh contacted you?”

  “So he has, so he has. You’ve come at an opportune time, in fact, I have something to give him that ought to be delivered by trustworthy hands.”

  She brought out a simple package — a wooden, cylindrical container about five centimeters across and twice as long, and with a very thin talisman wrapped all the way around it lengthwise. There was no visible cap or lid. Were it not for its light weight and the rattling sound it made Krahe would have thought it a solid chunk of wood.

  “It’ll open for him. Instructions are inside. As we agreed.”

  Krahe didn’t think anything of it, and simply left the talisman mistress to her work. She didn’t feel the matter was urgent enough to rouse the old lizard and incur his wrath, so she left it for the morning and decided to visit the Lost Sun Society, knowing that someone would be there no matter the time of day. She was fairly certain at least two of the members did nothing but play tabletop and paint miniatures, day in and day out, even sleeping at the compound.

  The Society hosted exchange events every one in a while, but that didn’t mean one couldn’t do such things outside of those events. Krahe relied on this, offering up samples of her new, unique theurgic pattern in exchange for know-how that one might not find or even just interesting information. Her reputation sufficed to drum up the level of interest she was looking for. While she hadn’t come upon any single revolutionary revelation by the time she ran out of people to peddle her wares to, she didn’t mind. Before she left, she hid a number of leftover copies in various texts within the library, including three inside a copy of Secrets of the Atropal. She supposed that, after a fashion, the somewhat childish form of occultism that the Society partook in was infectious at times... Even if she couldn’t stomach it for long without getting the urge to lambast their theatrics.

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  From the perspective of the Society members to whom Krahe had sold copies of this novel theurgic pattern, it seemed nothing short of bizarre. You didn’t just do that, not without a secondary reason at least. About one-fifth of the recipients took the exchange at face value. Two-fifths assumed that the pattern obviously had to contain a puzzle of some kind. The remaining two fifths came closest to the truth, assuming that Krahe wanted to gather performance metrics and observe how it would spread — because this was how they themselves thought of their own unique theurgies.

  If one looked at the pure, objective metrics, the Schwarzfaust Zwei wasn’t particularly remarkable. As a craft-produced theurgic pattern, it could be considered solidly above-average, but not amazing. The theurgy shone in its utility, rather than raw power. If its carrier-construct was formed with digits, the theurgic pattern could facilitate grappling action. That alone was a standout feature. The projectile behaved in a manner combining the Wandrei Faust’s chase-and-kill pattern of first finding the target, then engaging the attack, followed by the Yellow Atropal’s direct strike with light homing. It would chase the target until it got to a set standoff range, then lash out with a kinetic strike. However, it could also engage in surprisingly effective evasive action, with maneuverability almost unrivaled for its tier, and its different “modes” were tied to simple triggers that any enterprising theurge could freely modify or connect to his own control methods to manipulate the projectile after launch.

  With all of these properties, plus the simple and direct novelty of a demonic arm rather than the bog-stadard and played-out yellow tendril, the theurgic pattern was doomed for local success, but spared from spreading outside Audunpoint.

  All of these were the facts.

  But there was something terrible about the pattern, and it wasn’t the killswitch that would turn it against the user if it were ever cast against Blackhand herself. Objective facts aside, all those who used the Schwarzfaust, and even moreso those who tried to make copies, would find it to be savage and foreboding in ways no mass-produced theurgic pattern was. There was no empirical basis, but the theurgy would quickly develop a reputation for having “something more” than others, a strange, almost lifelike savagery at times, yet at others, it would also refuse to go off properly for reasons other than the killswitch. A gang member — one of two muggers — witnessed as his partner’s own theurgy flew in a u-turn, grabbed his head, and smashed it into the cobbles. In this manner, Blackhand's grip would come to strangle the city's violently criminal elements even without the need for her direct presence.

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