Calderon’s office was in the east cloister, and Lambert walked towards it through the south nave with his hands quiet at his sides.
The cathedral was unsettled: too much movement, too many conversations happening just below audible. Acolytes crossing the transept at pace; each one had apparently been asked to be somewhere else. A cluster of priests near the chapter house door, not arguing, which was worse.
He had put on his heaviest cassock this morning and it was not enough. Notre Reine held cold with indifference to the braziers lit along the nave. His breath came visible in the half-dark between them.
He let his eyes go to the south lancets as he passed: eleven windows, and the gap was in the seventh position. There now stood plain white winter light where the Aeloria glass had been. A thin crust of ice had formed along the bottom of the empty frame where the wind came through.
Lambert walked on.
Calderon was at his desk when Lambert entered. He looked up, and his expression seemed to flicker between calculation and resignation, until it settled into neutrality.
“Inquisitor.” Not Lambert. Not Monsignor.
Lambert closed the door and did not sit. “Legate.”
He let the silence run for a moment and watched Calderon decide what to do with it.
“The city,” Calderon said eventually, “is in a state.”
“It is.”
“Notre Reine has been—steady. Under the circumstances.” His hands moved to the correspondence at his elbow and back. “His Holiness Esteban has been accommodating.”
Lambert looked at the correspondence. The seal on the topmost letter was local, but not Aurilienne. He looked at it long enough for Calderon to know he had looked, then moved his gaze to the window.
“How are you finding it,” Lambert said, “working under a new arrangement?”
Calderon’s hands stilled. “Continuity of function is in everyone’s interest.”
Continuity of function. That was a phrase with no sides.
He has nothing. Whatever channels Calderon had once maintained into Aurilienne had gone quiet, or been cut.
Lambert looked at him for a moment and then he pulled out the chair and sat down.
Calderon blinked in surprise.
“Let me level with you, because I think you could do with some candour,” Lambert said. “You’ve been here eight days, and you’ve watched the clergy choose sides. You know which parish priests are reading the Aurilienne decrees with conviction and which ones are reading it because the paper arrived and they didn’t know what else to do with it.”
He let that sit. “It’s clear to me that you have no deep intelligence, and so Vaziri’s faction does not trust you. I have no reason to either. You are in an office nobody is watching because nobody considers you worth watching. That is almost useful.”
Calderon’s expression soured.
“What you can give me is atmosphere. Which way the clergy’s mood is leaning and how fast it’s moving. You can be a weather report, instead of intelligence.”
“And in return?” Calderon asked.
“In return, you are inside something again.” Lambert’s voice was even. “I suspect that is what you require.”
Calderon held his gaze for a long time, until his composure cracked. What was left was a man with nothing to bargain with.
“Lambert.” His voice had dropped. “Whatever you’re planning—be measured. There are people watching this building who are not watching it the way your people are.”
That was almost genuine.
“Good,” Lambert said. “Then you’ll have things to tell me.”
The Rogues’ Gallery was near the docks, which explained the smell: salt and coal smoke and the sourness of working water at low tide. Laila had been told where to look for the sign, and she found it: a faint scrawl on weathered brick that was doing its best to be nothing at all.
The door had a man on it. He was not large, not visibly armed, and making a thorough job of standing there. He turned her away without raising his voice or his eyes, which she found professionally admirable.
She stepped back into the shadow of the opposite wall and uncapped the umber. A slow line across the inside of her wrist, and the world’s attention slid off her like water.
The man in the doorway felt nothing. His gaze moved past her to the street beyond, and she walked through.
The Gallery’s interior was warm and low, filled with quiet menace: booths and alcoves, pipe smoke, the scratch of a ledger being amended in the far corner.
? Criminal enterprises, it turned out, generated as much paperwork as legitimate ones. More, in some respects: legitimate businesses were not required to maintain separate ledgers for transactions that had technically not occurred.
De Hiver was at the back, seated in light she had clearly chosen. She looked to be alone, but Laila knew better.
In twenty years, time had only seemed to sharpen her.
Madeleine looked up as Laila approached, and her eyes went still.
“Laila.” Her voice had not changed either. “I wondered when you’d find your way to me.”
“You look well,” Laila said, and took that to be an invitation.
Madeleine watched her sit without concern. “You didn’t come here to tell me that.”
“No.” Laila set her hands flat on the table. “I came to talk about a number of things, one of them being Phaedra.”
Madeleine went very still. “Phaedra Drakon. Your spymaster.” A precise pause. “I heard she was dismissed.”
“You heard nothing of the sort. I know you are more than aware of the incident at our estate only the other week; Phaedra was in the middle of that. She attempted to abduct my granddaughter, and for all that she was in service to me for fourteen years, I still haven’t forgotten that you introduced her to me.”
“I introduce a great many people to a great many people. It’s rather the nature of my work.”
Then she looked past Laila’s shoulder and made a very small gesture with two fingers.
Three figures stepped from alcoves and doorways. A dwarf whose blade pulsed at her hip with a light that had no interest in being decorative; an orc in dark chainmail who took up his position the way walls take up positions; and a scarred human who had spent a long time making himself hard to remember.
Laila knew those faces, at least from a distance. They had come through the walls of her home.
Madeleine had not merely known. Madeleine had sent them.
“Now,” Madeleine said pleasantly. “What is it you actually want?”
Laila looked at the three of them, then back at Madeleine.
“I recognise them,” she said. “I hadn’t realised, until now, that they were yours.”
Madeleine said nothing.
“You placed Phaedra in my household. You knew what she was.” She kept her voice level. “I came here because you have a habit of knowing who hires whom in this city.”
“And now you have.” Madeleine’s tone was mild. “I believe you know where the door is.”
“You’re going to have me removed.”
“I’m going to give you the opportunity to leave.” A small gesture with two fingers.
“I happen to have an army,” Madeleine said.
“The de Vaillant household is not without their guards.”
“Yes, but you are here and they are not. Open conflict would be quite wasteful for both of us, given what’s happening outside.”
Something moved in Madeleine’s expression: the faintest recalibration.
“But you’re a dragon cultist,” Laila said.
“Let me cut you off just there.” Madeleine’s voice carried no heat. “You may infer what you wish of my allegiances, but I think cultist as an appellation is rather too gauche.”
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“But you work for Aeloria.”
“I work for myself. I simply happen to be more aware of the machinations behind the scene—some of which, I believe, you’ve recently become acquainted with.” She folded her hands. “Aeloria’s designs have worked their way through this nation for generations, Madame. When one cultivates people as she does, and over such lengths of time, one tends to have fingers in an awfully large number of areas of influence. There is barely a part of Gallia that doesn’t bear some measure of her touch.”
“Then why meet with me at all?” Laila glanced at the three figures, then back. “Given the welcome, I have to imagine I was anticipated.”
“You were.” Madeleine’s gaze settled on her. “I wanted to see you for myself. And to make a decision for myself.”
A silence.
“Then I need to know where I stand,” Laila said. “And why we’re meeting.”
“Laila. You recently returned from a long voyage at sea. I am able to make a great many inferences on that alone. Much of my other intelligence helps corroborate the picture.” Madeleine’s eyes didn’t move from her face. “I think you know what I’m referring to.”
“You want to bargain for it.” The shape of it was assembling itself as she spoke. “The cult is fracturing, and you’re looking for a way out—but not without securing something first. We have the one thing that would give anyone proper leverage over Aeloria. Enough to place a favoured candidate as the next dragonborn.”
Madeleine studied her.
“Good,” she said. “You’ve done your research, which means I don’t have to explain myself.”
She turned her ring once.
“I don’t trust you,” Laila said. “I want to be clear about that.”
“You don’t need to trust me. You need only know that we are aligned on a number of things, and that it is in our mutual interest to act accordingly.”
“Such as what?”
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend—and if you’re willing to help me take down Lydia, you can count on me.”
“Lydia.” Laila paused. “Does that mean you’re siding with Valère? Is this an attempt to curry favour with his preferred noble family?”
“There is some truth to that, I will acknowledge. But my quarrel with Lydia is much closer to home.”
"Lambert and Wylan were right. She is a—a loyalist."
"And not just any loyalist. The first among equals. Who else but Aeloria's favoured to lead the reformed Church that Valère sought to build in her image?"
"And it would be awfully convenient for you if the line of succession were cleared of one figure."
"I like to keep my options open."
"I cannot promise you the egg. And I cannot promise to help you directly with whatever plans you have regarding a dragonborn. But I can agree with you on preventing Primate Vaziri from regaining control of the Church." A pause. "That doesn't make us allies, though."
"An interesting business relationship, then. I prefer to work from a position of strength—and for a while, that seemed to be with Aeloria. Now I'm not so certain."
"How do I know you won't betray me as you seem to be betraying your long-term allies?"
"Unless you have a falling out with Valère, or he fails to consolidate his power, you'll find my support available." A slight pause. "And if he doesn't—well. You'll have far greater problems to worry about than whether my support is still there."
"If you are going to move against Primate Vaziri," Madeleine said, "you will need the right kind of leverage."
"And what are you proposing?"
"The best kind." She reached to her right without looking; the man there placed an envelope on the table. "Information."
Laila opened it: names, addresses, affiliations, two dozen entries or more.
"Every loyalist still operating in this city who answers to Vaziri," Madeleine said. "The ones worth worrying about."
Laila read through it.
"Phaedra isn't on this list."
Madeleine said nothing.
"Add her," Laila said, "or the deal is off."
A silence. Then Madeleine held out her hand; the man placed a pen in it. She leaned forward, wrote a single line at the bottom of the list, and set the pen down. Folded her hands.
"Consider it a gesture of good faith," she said.
She walked back through the Gallery at the same pace she had entered. The booths and alcoves, the pipe smoke, the ledger-keeper in the far corner ignored her just as they had on her way in.
Phaedra was alive. She supposed her usefulness to Madame de Hiver had found its end.
Outside, the docks smelled of salt and cold and working water. She stood for a moment in the dark.
Laila pulled her coat closed and walked back towards the city.
Wylan studied the lantern in the middle of his workshop bench. He’d simply set it down in the middle of everything else and not moved it since. That was three hours ago, by the clock.
He had made coffee and done very little else except make notes.
He looked down at where his notes were open, revealing a relatively detailed sketch of the lantern. On the facing page stood two columns, which he had started on the Nautilus and not finished. He added the headings now, which he had been putting off.
The Blood Pearl. Malothar’s divine essence in a vessel, pressed against a living thing (the kraken) which became something other than what it had been. He wrote the sequence out: essence, vessel, contact, transformation.
The dragon egg. Aeloria’s draconic essence in a crucible, able to transform a mortal into an immortal dragonborn. It bore a similar sequence: essence, vessel, contact, transformation.
Then he drew another column, a third one, and labelled it Valère/R?zvan. Wrote down his observations. Two immortals (or at least undying) who held aspirations to godhood over decades, and perhaps centuries in Valère’s case. Now R?zvan seemed to be echoing this process.
He looked at that column for a while, then in that column added: Caliburn and Sang-greal respectively.
Off to the side he wrote Blood Pearl and drew a line towards the dragon egg with a question mark.
The connections were there. Every line he drew between two elements turned, on closer inspection, into a line between two versions of the same element.
He set down the pen.
This doesn’t read like a mechanism. “But that is a pattern!”
He looked up from his notes to stare out through the workshop window. The city sky had turned quiet and grey. I’m burning the hours away.
He sighed and stood up to make himself a coffee. Half-way through, he found a small and growing collection of half-drunk, now cold cups of coffee waiting for him. This would make this his fourth this afternoon.
He decided against this one and instead sat to stare at the warm light Hyperion’s flame gave out.
Maybe the problem was that he was trying to solve this like a scientist. Lambert had, after all, arrived at a schema that matched the pattern exactly: his own theory of dual apotheosis, now coming to pass.
When threads converge this neatly, it’s rarely accident. It has story written all over it.
Wylan looked at the two columns on the bench: the same sequence, written twice.
He put Lambert’s note down next to the diagram and looked at them together for a while.
In the margin of the second sheet, he wrote: location.
He drew a small circle and wrote egg inside it. Drew another: pearl. Drew a third, larger, around both of them, and wrote kraken along its edge.
Captain Navarro had chosen the kraken’s nest because the kraken was dangerous. He hadn’t known that it was also the location where Lampetia had chosen to leave the Blood Pearl. Another ‘coincidence’.
Wylan turned his thoughts to stories and tried to put himself in Lambert’s headspace.
“I’m a stuffy, stiff-necked priest with a real Death wish.” He smiled at himself.
? It was not the first time Wylan had attempted to think like Lambert. The exercise was useful: Lambert’s reasoning tended to arrive at the same conclusions, only without the false starts, the tangents, or the cold coffee.
This whole thing was being engineered by Fate and was dragging them towards a climax.
Everything being drawn together and moving towards a conclusion, he wrote. Fate also wants resolution.
That meant a confrontation.
He sat with that. Then he turned the page.
The lantern was still on the bench.
The window had gone the colour of cold iron. Somewhere in the house, a clock marked the hour. He had been looking at the lantern peripherally all afternoon. Now he looked at it properly: Hyperion’s last remnant of divine fire.
He recalled how it manifested in Aurora’s nursery, drawn across the house by her brand.
Wylan had never felt a premonition before, but here, unmistakably, was one.
Something tapped politely at the window.
Wylan turned.
Augustine was on the other side, with one hand braced against the frame. Yesterday’s note had seemed like a promise, but he hadn’t expected it to be fulfilled so soon.
Wylan took a moment to pull a cover over the lantern and wished for it to glow softly; the lantern obliged.
He crossed to the window and opened it. The cold came in at once, sharp and immediate, carrying the smell of frost and the city.
As he stood at the sill the only things between them were caution and chill. Augustine remained on the other side of it.
“You look terrible,” Wylan said.
“I’ve had a difficult night and a worse day.” Augustine’s voice was composed, but strained. He watched Augustine’s eyes move across the workshop behind him, and then back. “You’ve been busy.”
“I’ve been sitting here all day failing to solve a problem.”
“I’ve heard if you talk your problems out to someone new, it can lighten the load.”
Wylan looked at him for a moment. “Fair enough, but just in case you forget, you asked for this.” He turned back to the bench, picked up the nearest sheet, and began to explain.
While he hadn’t meant to go into detail, he found Augustine asking pointed questions at every angle, soft and probing, genuinely interested. It was, Wylan discovered, exactly what he’d needed.
He started gathering steam after the fourth question and no longer needed guidance by the tenth. By the end of it he was on his feet, talking about Fate’s interest in resolution, about the patterns repeating, about the way the cult’s two factions mapped onto each other like a palimpsest.
“The egg’s somewhere safe for now,” he said, turning a page. “We’ve put the Triplets to guard it, ‘cause if we bring it back here Aeloria might know that it’s in Pharelle—that’s when it gets complicated.”
Augustine, from the other side of the window, listened with full attention: present and asking nothing.
“Why did your family wish me harm?” Augustine asked, when Wylan paused. “I was compliant the whole trip on that marvellous vessel that went underwater. I even stayed tied up.”
“But if you could have escaped from those bonds at any time, why didn’t you?”
“Well for one, I didn’t exactly have anywhere to go. For another, why would I want to go anywhere? And it didn’t seem like I was using up any of the air in there.”
“But the restraints weren’t actually doing anything?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that did nothing. They might not have been effective, but they had an effect.”
Like before, Wylan blushed. It was a biological function he still hadn’t mastered.
The cold came in steadily, and Wylan had no desire to close the window.
“Come in,” he said.
Augustine stepped over the sill in one fluid movement. He straightened and catalogued the workshop; Wylan recognised the habit of it.
Wylan held his gaze. The workshop was now illuminated by the dim glow of the covered lantern and the paraphernalia scattered around the bench.
It was, he considered, rather odd, and he wished the lighting were more suitable for the moment.
The lantern obliged. From the corner, a rose-tinted glow filled the space, overtaking the other lights.
In that moment of distraction, Augustine moved and suddenly occupied the space beside him. He took Wylan’s wrist and turned it over, deliberate. Wylan could see the hunger in those eyes. His own anticipation was rising to meet it.
You know exactly what you’re doing.
With his free hand, he popped a bottle and downed a reagent quickly for blood production. Then he turned and nodded.
Augustine pressed his mouth to Wylan’s wrist and then, gently, bit down.
The room was very quiet after.
Wylan looked down at his wrist, then up. Augustine was watching him with that same careful attention he had given the workshop.
“Do you ever wonder what this is?” Wylan asked.
Augustine’s gaze met his. There was something there that might have been genuine. “I think this is whatever we decide it to be.”
The lantern was still casting its rose-tinted glow. It had been doing that for some time now, and showed no signs of stopping.
“Not here,” Wylan said. “I know a place.”
He took Augustine’s hand and led him out of the workshop, through the manor’s back corridors and down a spiralling staircase to the repurposed boudoir that had once been a wine cellar. The air grew cooler as they descended, tinged with damp stone and the ghost of old vintages.
Wylan hesitated on the threshold. The room had been Alexisoix’ at one point; now it lay abandoned with half-forgotten velvet drapes. At least it hadn’t really used much.
? The de Vaillant estate had, over the years, accumulated several rooms whose original purpose had become a matter of some delicacy. This was one of them.
While Wylan hesitated, Augustine did not.
“Well,” Augustine said, his eyes moving across the room with that cataloguing habit, “there’s not much of interest here.”
“Should we find somewhere else?”
“It’s never stopped me before.”
The next moment, Wylan found himself pinned to the wall on the receiving end of affection. He had just enough presence of mind to pull the door shut with his foot.