Author: Cari Z.
Date: 2020-05-12 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: M M Romance; Mystery; Romance; Fantasy; Historical; Magic
Description: All Anton Seiber, newly-minted Master Thaumaturge, wants is to use his training to support himself out in the world. Well, that and to see the man he loves, Imperial Investigator Camille Lumière, more than once every six months. What he gets instead is an invitation to visit L’Institut D’Ingénierie Technologique in Paris, the foremost research institution for thaumaturgy and the arts of war in the world. It’s an offer he can’t turn down…quite literally. Getting to the Institute is a mess that Anton barely survives, and that’s just the beginning of his troubles. Drawn into a web of lies and bet

The Tank

The Spell Saga: Book Three

Cari Z

Warning: this book contains adult language and themes, including graphic descriptions of violence. It is intended for mature readers only, of legal age to possess such material in their area.

This book is a work of fiction. All characters, companies, events, and locations are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, places, or events is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author and publisher.

The Tank: The Spell Saga: Book Three

Copyright 2022 by Cari Z.

Cover art by Black Bird Book Covers

Editing by No Stone Unturned Editing

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

About This Book

All Anton Seiber, newly-minted Master Thaumaturge, wants is to use his training to support himself out in the world. Well, that and to see the man he loves, Imperial Investigator Camille Lumière, more than once every six months.

What he gets instead is an invitation to visit L’Institut D’Ingénierie Technologique in Paris, the foremost research institution for thaumaturgy and the arts of war in the world. It’s an offer he can’t turn down…quite literally.

Getting to the Institute is a mess that Anton barely survives, and that’s just the beginning of his troubles. Drawn into a web of lies and betrayals, Anton will have to use every trick he can conjure to survive—and perhaps hand over the most diabolical spell in the world in exchange for saving the life of someone he loves.

Prologue

The closer they got to the cave, the worse the weather became. Weather thaumaturgy was mostly a myth, impossible on a large scale, but perhaps Gerald Montgomery, formerly a nobleman of England and a student at the Universität Zürich, had found the time to bespell his hideout in the foothills of the Apuseni mountains. Whatever the cause, they could not stay in the driving snow much longer, or even Camille’s alpine-hardened troops would freeze to death.

Fifteen men, he had left. Fifteen, of the forty he’d started his hunt with. They were the best of soldiers, loyal and skilled, but six months of chasing Montgomery had taught them all to be wary.

Camille’s second, Lieutenant Romilly, caught the edge of his sleeve. “Shall we follow your protocol and make for shelter, my lord?” he asked in the manner every good underling had, that of suggesting what they considered to be right in such a way as to make it seem like their superior’s idea.

And it was a good idea. It simply wasn’t feasible. “There’s no time, Lieutenant.”

“Lord Lumière, I fear we must make time.” The lieutenant gestured around them with a grimace. “This damned snow won’t let us move with any sort of speed, and Montgomery won’t be able to go anywhere in it either. Best for us to wait it out.”

“No.” Waiting was the one thing they couldn’t afford to do. “I will not have another Vienna, Lieutenant.” Or Sopron, or Ocna Dejului. Following Montgomery hadn’t been challenging, not at first—but catching him was another matter. Camille had underestimated the amount of support the nebulous shadow society of the Dévoué had dedicated to their English turncoat. Montgomery had escaped them at every turn, sometimes narrowly, always bloodily. The number of innocent people caught in the crossfire between their factions was far too high, their blood staining Camille’s hands as surely as they stained Montgomery’s.

The difference was, Montgomery didn’t care.

“My lord—”

“We press on,” Camille interrupted with a slash of his hand. “We will go up this slope and into that cave and take down Gerald Montgomery, Lieutenant Romilly, and we will do it now, before he flees too far east for us to follow. Do you understand me?”

The lieutenant, to his credit, nodded. “The light will fail soon,” he said. “If we are to make it up the slope without breaking our necks, we must go now.”

“So we must.” Camille turned toward the cave, a faint dark hole in the blinding white of the mountainside. “Get me Deschamps.”

Romilly left him, and a minute later Master Thaumaturge Martin Deschamps pulled up beside him, puffing and rubbing his hands together against the cold. Deschamps was Camille’s third thaumaturge since beginning this chase, and no better than any of the others had been.

Uncharitable, he chided himself. Just because none of them had the skill and determination of Anton didn’t make them bad at their trade, just…less effective than he would have wished them. The first had died at Vienna, while the second had broken his leg a month ago after falling off his horse.

Anton wouldn’t have fallen from his bloody horse.

“My lord?”

Camille bit back his sigh and looked at his thaumaturge. “What cover can you give us as we march up the slope?”

Deschamps worried his lower lip between his teeth. “Lord Lumière, I have already cast an obfuscation spell on you and the soldiers.”

“And that won’t do us a bit of good if Montgomery has translated the targeting palimpsest.” It was an open question at this point. Camille had lost some of his best men to impossible shots over the past few months, but they had also quite effectively harried Montgomery into constant movement. Without the time to sit and study the magical booklet containing the details of the deadly spell—cast on a gun, it would ensure every shot hit home—it seemed unlikely he could make use of it yet. Still. “I need something better than blurred silhouettes.”

“Now?” Deschamps squawked. “In this weather? My lord, there is nothing more to be done! Any spell I cast will simply blow away on the wind. It can’t be done, not without more time to work on it, perhaps a day.”

“Insufficient.” Camille looked the shivering thaumaturge up and down. “You have a number of defensive spells on your own person, do you not? Within the amulet and rings that you wear?” He recognized the silver protection triquetra at the man’s throat.

Deschamps’ face took on a hunted expression. “Yes, but these are—these spells are specifically attuned to me, my lord. I can’t simply hand them out to you and your men.”

That was the worst thing about Deschamps—he still didn’t count himself as one of Camille’s men. He had been a late arrival, a solitary source of reinforcement who clearly thought their mission was pointless, and acted as such. But he was Camille’s to use, and by God, he would use him. Camille set a heavy hand on the thaumaturge’s shoulder.

“The time has come for you to step forward and prove your fealty with the strength of your own abilities. You shall lead us up the slope, Specialist Deschamps.”

The man’s hunted expression turned sickened. “My…my lord, I cannot…surely, I’m not…I have not had time to—”

“You sit with your alembics and concoctions each night, layering more and more spells on yourself. You perform mighty exertions on your own behalf, Deschamps. It’s time for the rest of us to benefit from that.” Camille pushed the thaumaturge forward. “And I’ll be right behind you the whole time.”

“My lord, I—I—”

“Move. Now.”

With Camille’s hand exerting steady pressure on his back, Deschamps began to trip up the side of the mountain toward the cave. He had one hand on his pendant, the other frantically drawing glyphs in the air in front of him. The driving snow that had been pummeling their faces vanished.

A sudden crack rent the air, and the shield that Deschamps was maintaining dented in the center. Deschamps squeaked, but the shot didn’t penetrate.

“Good,” Camille said grimly. “Continue.”

“My lord, I beg of you—”

“Keep your focus and work your craft if you want to live, man!”

They made it ten feet. Twenty. Thirty. The mouth of the cave was clear now, but the men within it were still obscured. More shots were fired down the slope, all of them impacting the shield. None of them made it through, but Deschamps was beginning to moan.

“My stores of energy are nearly exhausted,” he whimpered. “I can’t maintain the protection much longer!”

“Fifteen more feet.” They were almost there.

“I can’t possibly—”

The next shot hit the shield, but this one didn’t fall to the snow. It ricocheted into the rocky mountainside, bypassing their protection, and slammed into the line three men back. Its victim died immediately.

Montgomery was making himself known at last. Apparently he’d translated the spell, but only treated his own weapon. Paranoid bastard, but it also meant they still had a chance. “Faster!” Camille shouted, shoving Deschamps ahead of him like a cringing battering ram. “We can’t let him have the chance to reload!” If he was using a pistol, if he had but six shots—

Crack. Crack. Crack! Three more men went down by the time Camille and Deschamps crested the cave entrance. The scene within was far from inspiring—half a dozen men hunkered down behind rocks, the tops of their heads and the barrels of their guns showing.

“Fan out!” Camille shouted, keeping Deschamps right where he was. If his men moved fast, they could find cover of their own and pick their targets.

“Fire on the tall one!” Montgomery shouted from his perch in the back of the cave. Bullets spat at Camille, no longer bouncing off of Deschamps’s shield but sticking in it, like flecks of fruit in a wobbly pudding. Deschamps was hyperventilating so hard he could barely keep his hand moving as Camille pushed him toward Montgomery.

“We won’t make it within five feet of him!” Deschamps cried. “He’s too heavily warded!”

Now wasn’t the time to explain why that wouldn’t matter in a moment. “Press on!”

Camille might have been down to twelve men, but they still outnumbered Montgomery’s force. Dug-in fighters who would have focused on Camille were distracted, then taken down, by the grim-faced Lieutenant Romilly and his brigade. Montgomery raised his magical weapon and fired, but despite the weakening of the shield the bullet still ricocheted, this time striking one of his own remaining men in the neck. The fur-covered gunman collapsed, blood spurting like a faucet from beneath his jaw, and Deschamps shrieked as he saw it, his spell dissolving.

Camille pushed Deschamps out of the way and lunged for Montgomery, who was already starting to squeeze his trigger. Camille caught his foe by the hand and slammed it into the rock wall, dislodging the gun just as it fired a final bullet. Again there was ricochet, a new arc of certain death streaking into the air—

A bat, its tiny body practically obliterated by the round, fell to the ground with a splat. Camille smashed his elbow across Montgomery’s face, stunning him, then rolled him onto his stomach. “Resist me and I’ll break your arm,” he told him.

“Forgot about your little parlor trick,” Montgomery croaked, his voice a parody of laughter. “Can’t damn a man to hell who’s already damned, eh? I should have brought a cannon to use on you.”

“Yes, you should have,” Camille agreed. He looked back at his party. All twelve of his remaining men were alive, and mostly undamaged. His thaumaturge was slumped onto his back, staring at Camille with uncomprehending eyes. Montgomery’s supporters were all dead.

And high fucking time. Once Camille delivered Montgomery to the emperor, perhaps then, finally—finally—he could see Anton again.

It could not come soon enough.

Chapter One

Anton Seiber disrobed mechanically, working the heavy graduation gown up and over his head before setting it aside on top of his workbench. His hat lay flat on its mortarboard, slightly crushed beneath the thick blue and white sash indicating Anton’s new status as a graduated Master of Thaumaturgy. The sight ought to have filled him with joy—two years ago, this accomplishment had been all he’d ever wanted.

Now it barely lapped at the edges of his ocean full of dreams.

Anton knew better than to indulge in flights of fancy at this stage in his life. As a younger man he had been overconfident, assured of his place and purpose, and the abrupt drop in prestige and fortune following his father’s death had felt like getting his lungs ripped from his chest. He had survived it—there had been no choice—and recovered his mental equilibrium, but he’d never quite reached those heights of hopefulness again.

Getting to the Universität Zürich to begin his graduate training had been a whole new lesson in expecting the worst—he’d been robbed, beaten, missed his train, and ended up involved in the murder investigation of a member of Napoleon III’s family, led by a mysterious, calculating, and surprisingly dashing lumière. Anton looked back on that incident with a sense of…appreciation. It had been hideous in many ways, and he’d almost been killed several times, but he would never regret meeting Camille.

Even contemplating such a thing felt impossible to him.

Things had gotten better at the university for a while, before becoming much, much worse—a fellow English student aligned himself with the Dévoué, local nationalists bent on rising up against the French Empire. He’d murdered four other Englishmen in Zürich in his quest to find a magical palimpsest that contained a dangerous spell he wanted to acquire. It just so happened that Anton had been the one who had the palimpsest, something he’d taken possession of during his romp on the train, and a puzzle he’d promised Camille he would find the solution to.

Gerald Montgomery took it from Anton, nearly killing him in the process, and it was by the skin of his teeth and Camille’s fortuitous appearance that Anton hadn’t ended as a stain on the university’s cobblestone grounds over a year ago.

The palimpsest was gone, but Camille hadn’t blamed Anton for it. It had necessitated his departure, though, which Anton regretted with a passion. Over the intervening months, Camille had managed to stop by only twice, each time for a single night.

It was not enough. Not nearly enough.

Anton sighed as he finally freed himself from the last few trappings of the ceremony he’d endured. The heavy robe had felt like it was strangling him. Or perhaps he was choking on the realization that, despite his best intentions, he had had a few hopes for his graduation. He’d sent his mother an official invitation along with his last letter home, as well as the money she would need to make the journey from London.

Her response had arrived three days ago, full of regret that she couldn’t make it. Her health wasn’t very good at the moment, and she had an appointment with her solicitor that couldn’t be rescheduled. Anton hoped she’d put the money toward a doctor—his mother had neglected herself far too frequently after her husband’s death, doing her utmost to provide for her son while fending off the creditors who seemed to come out of the woodwork like deathwatch beetles.

As cutthroat as any highwayman, and twice as determined.

As much as he wished to see his mother, there was someone else he wanted to see even more, but there was no way to get a letter to Camille. Anton didn’t even know his real last name. As a lumière, Camille was one of the foremost investigators in the entire empire, a man whom no one could refuse to cooperate with, or they would risk bringing down the heavy hand of the emperor himself. Camille was also in constant demand, searching out those who plotted against the emperor, and there was no shortage of Dévoué these days. The last time Camille had stopped by, nearly three months ago, he’d looked exhausted.

Anton closed his eyes, picturing his lover’s visage in his mind as easily as he could picture his own. A long, handsome face, accented with a well-groomed moustache. Piercing eyes, dark and somehow glittering, as if they held the glare of a dozen candles within them. A surprisingly soft, supple mouth, capable of worship of the most secret, intimate kind…

It does you no good to pine over what you cannot change, Anton reminded himself, forcing his eyes open. He knew he’d never be able to find Camille on his own; even the latest, groundbreaking thaumaturgical tracking methods wouldn’t work on him. Camille had an intellect with few equals, but he had a great disability as well, one that prevented even the simplest spells from working on his person. He could observe them as long as he didn’t interfere in any way, but they would dissipate at his barest touch.

Perhaps if Camille had given Anton the time to experiment, Anton could have come up with a way that would allow them to speak over a distance, but there hadn’t been the chance. Camille was practically unique, and it had been more important for Anton to spend the few moments they had together in mutual comfort than anything else.

I miss him. Anton had never missed anyone quite this much. It didn’t help that he had no one else to turn to, not even as a friend. His mother couldn’t be with him. Caroline, his oldest companion and a fellow thaumaturge, was in London with her husband, last he’d heard. The few acquaintances he’d made at the university had scattered in the aftermath of Montgomery’s reign of terror.

All you need is a position. Find a generous position that will give you both time and funds, and you can travel back to London to see your mother and ensure her comfort, and visit Caroline to boot. As a newly minted Master of Thaumaturgy, a profession in high demand across both the continent and back in Britain, Anton should have been up to his ears in offers at this point.

He wasn’t. His association with Montgomery, brief though it was, had proved to be poisonous. No one in the Empire wanted to hire him because he was an Englishman, the same as “that murderous bastard,” and no one back in Britain wanted to hire him because the Montgomeries and everything that they had ever touched was blacklisted. The Dévoué might flourish on the continent, but not in Her Majesty’s realm, not if the royal family had anything to do about it.

Perhaps Professor Grable would allow him to stay on here as a researcher, or an assistant professor. Anton grimaced. Teaching wasn’t his strong suit, but he would do what he had to do in order to support himself. And if he stayed, perhaps it would be easier for Camille to come back to him.

“Stop it,” he told himself. “You’re being utterly moony.”

“Are you really?” a familiar voice asked from behind him. Anton spun around, his mouth hanging agape. What…it couldn’t be. How…when… “Why is that, darling?”

It took a moment for Anton to muster his ability to speak, his surprise was so strong. “Caroline!” He moved toward her without thinking, his body overcome by old instincts. She stepped toward him at the same time, and a moment later they were wrapped in each other’s arms.

“Caroline,” he said again, softer, and she hummed and hugged him more tightly. The S-bend corset beneath her blouse dug into his abdomen, but Anton didn’t care. If she could take it for a day, he could take it for a minute.

She looked beautiful, like she always had. A bit older, perhaps, but the time had served to enhance her appearance. Her dark blonde hair peeked out from beneath the brim of her very broad, ornately decorated hat, and her figure was as sleek as ever, despite giving birth to a baby boy only eight months ago. Perhaps the corset has something to do with that. Anton didn’t know, and he didn’t care. In a world of change, a world of ever-increasing political fear and uncertainty, he was so grateful to be with someone whom he could rely on again. He knew Caroline, knew her like he knew himself, and loved her far more than that.

“Anton,” she murmured. “Darling, I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to see you again, at last. Two years.” She pulled back and pressed her hands to his face. “Two years! How is it even possible? We haven’t been apart for so long in our entire lives! And in your last letter you didn’t even hint that you were coming back, and that’s just—Anton, I thought you never meant to stay away permanently! London is your home!”

The words hit him like rain, drenching him in her welcome care. It didn’t matter that they weren’t entirely positive—Anton basked in knowing that he was with someone who loved him enough to chide him again. “London will always be special to me, you know that,” he said. “But I can’t live on air, and I can’t support my mother with it either. London is not interested in hiring me for what I am worth.”

Caroline disengaged one of her hands to discreetly wipe her eyes. “No one could pay you what you’re worth, darling, but surely someone there must be able to tempt you to return. Heavens, I would pay you to come and work in my lab if it was possible.” Caroline was spearheading a massive research initiative for the University of Edinburgh—a compendium of arcane ingredients and their various uses across the entire body of work that would revolutionize spell symbology for thaumaturges. The key to her funding, however, was that she employ only those thaumaturges who could get approval from the Board of Masters. Anton was not one of those practitioners, and likely never would be.

Anton shook his head. “It’s all right, truly. I may return someday, but for now I’m contemplating several different options here on the continent.”

“Anton…” Caroline looked at him closely. “It isn’t like you to dissemble. When you say ‘options’ do you mean that you have offers in hand, or that you’re going to hunt about for an employer the same way you hunted for a school that would accept you?”

Anton pulled back, stung. “Forgive me for not being born into a class that allowed me to step into any university I wanted and get a position there.”

That wasn’t fair—Caroline had fought, and was still fighting, against significant and ingrained social bias against the fairer sex. That she had her own laboratory, her own staff and a project of such magnitude, was a testament to her incredible skill.

“I’m sorry, I—” Even as he began to apologize, Caroline was already waving it off.

“No, I know better than to simplify things in such a silly way. Of course you did everything you could to stay, I realize that.” She sighed. “It’s just frustrating, not having you close. You’re one of the best people in my life, and I hate that you’re so far out of reach.”

Her words both touched and saddened him. “But you’ve got your work, and your husband,” he reminded her. “Not to mention your little Sean. How is he these days?”

Caroline beamed. “He is delightful, thank you. Quite a handful, and probably giving his grandmother fits right now, but I couldn’t be happier with him. It’s a relief to have provided an heir as well, honestly, for both Daniel and myself. He is free to spend his time hunting and riding, and I am free to focus on my work.”

“And that makes you…happy?” Anton ventured. It wasn’t his place to say anything, but the fact Caroline was settling for “relieved” with reference to her husband spending little to no time with her or their son was upsetting to him.

“It’s my preference,” she said. “Daniel and I are a better match on paper than we are in person. He is a good man in many respects, and he offers me a degree of independence that many husbands would balk at, so I’ve nothing to complain about there. But we have little in common on an intellectual level. It’s better for both of us that we allow each other our own occupations without reservation.” She tilted her head a bit as she eyed him. “And you? Have you found a good match for yourself?”

Caroline knew Anton’s predilections, and it was only for the sake of their habitual discretion that she refrained from being more blunt. Anton was a bit surprised at himself—had he really kept Camille a secret from his dearest friend for two years now? Not in every respect, but he certainly hadn’t divulged their more intimate connection. “Not one to marry, I’m afraid,” he said at last.

“Hmm.” Caroline looped her arm through his, passed him his jacket from where he’d abandoned it earlier, and turned them both toward the door. “I think you should allow me to take you out for a meal, as a graduation gift, and speak to me about someone you would not marry for a while. It might do you some good to share.”

Anton smiled and tipped his top hat onto his head. “I think that sounds perfect.”

Chapter Two

They stopped at one of Anton’s favorite little restaurants, on the ground floor of a nearby inn. It wasn’t that the food was more spectacular here, or even much cheaper than other places, but he had some very fond memories of the rooms above, and it was close to the university.

“Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?” Anton asked once they were seated in a quiet corner, a pot of tea steeping between them on the table. “I would have done more to be ready for you.”

“I did send a letter,” Caroline said tartly. “Several, in fact. I don’t know if you’ve kept up to date with the doings back at home, but we’ve lost several ferries traveling back and forth to the continent to revolutionary activity, and numerous merchantmen as well. The navy has increased its patrols of the Channel, but the pace of communications is slowed dramatically. You might get my letters in a few weeks.”

“Revolutionaries? Are you referring to the Dévoué?” Anton was startled when Caroline nodded. “I had no idea they’d made such an impact on Britain.”

Caroline poured some milk into her cup, her expression thoughtful. “They might not be out in force among the populace, but they are an ever-present fear. I think the powers that be are quite pleased to have a scapegoat on which they can heap their blame now, actually,” she said with a sigh. “Everything from the high price of cheese to the monitoring and censorship of some of London’s most noteworthy newspapers is thanks to the Dévoué. It’s getting more restrictive by the day back home, and I for one am getting sick of it.

“Part of the reason the Order sent me here, actually, is to form an assessment of the empire’s thaumaturgical response to the increased challenges of aiding a population whose own ruler doesn’t trust it. Britain’s thaumaturgical society is carefully considering what it wants its own position to be as we batten down our hatches and try to ride out the storm.”

Anton was startled. “The Order sent you in an official capacity?”

“What, do you think I can’t be official simply because I’m a woman?” she asked.

“No, not at all, just…I had no idea you had risen so high in their ranks.”

“Mmm. I’ve avoided writing about it, because you never know who will read such things, but yes, I’ve managed some very interesting bits of spellwork over the past several years.” Caroline dimpled a smile at him. “I’ll tell you more about it later, perhaps. For now, my mind is full of the problem at hand—what Britain’s response should be to the coming continental unrest.”

“While the idea is appealing, this is unlikely to be the sort of conflict that one simply sits through,” Anton said. “The queen might not have any love of Bonaparte, but she must love the revolutionaries even less.”

“And you?” Caroline asked, sipping her tea in a genteel manner. “How do you feel about revolutionaries?”

“I dislike their penchant for indiscriminate violence,” Anton replied. “I dislike that they’re willing to use great thaumaturgical inventions and advancements as a means of killing those who get in their way.”

“You must be particularly sensitive to that, after what happened here at the school.”

Oh, if only she knew the heart of it. Anton had told Caroline he’d been targeted by Montgomery in a case of mistaken identity, but he hadn’t told her that he was, in fact, the former owner of the palimpsest Montgomery had been after in the first place. “It was an unfortunate time,” he managed after a moment.

“Unfortunate indeed. I feel that the continent hasn’t been as kind to you as you deserve.” She paused, rubbing absently at the corner of her napkin before clearing her throat. “I wasn’t entirely honest with you earlier, Anton. I gave you the impression that I wasn’t going to offer you a job.”

“Wait…are you—”

She held up her hand. “One moment. This place looks secure enough, but I cannot take any risks.” She reached into the little purse at her side and pulled out a piece of thick gray chalk. She moved the teapot out of the way and drew a circle in the middle of the wooden table, marking out a triangle filled with three more circles within it. If the slow way she moved it was any indication, the chalk was abnormally heavy.

After a moment she put it away, then pulled out a box of matches. She lit one, waited for the fire to settle, then touched it to the symbol. It burst into flame and blew out just as fast, filling the air with particles of acrid smoke. “A new little spell of mine,” she explained. “The smoke will swallow the soundwaves beyond a few feet until the particles are too heavy with our words to stay aloft.”

“Brilliant,” Anton breathed.

Caroline smiled. “Thank you. The effect won’t last forever, though, so let me come to the point. I can’t offer you a job that directly associates you with Britain’s Order of Thaumaturgy. It’s beyond the scope of the responsibilities they’ve allotted me. But—” She held up a finger. “If you were to acquire a position on the continent that offered you access to the inner workings of the Empire’s plans for the Dévoué, and if you were then to pass some of that information along to me—in a very quiet way—the Order would pay you for the privilege. It would go a long way toward reassuring them of the scope of your loyalties as well.”

Anton couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. “Caroline, are you asking me to become a spy for you?”

“Not for me,” she said quickly. “With me. I would never ask you to do something that I was unwilling to do myself, Anton, you know that.”

“And you’re willing to work as a spy? If you’re discovered, it’s a hanging offense, you know that!” Despite her spell, Anton kept his voice down. The surge of fear in his veins felt very close to anger. “Britain and the French Empire are not enemies, but they are not allies either! You here as an invited observer is one thing, but you know damn well it won’t include access to their most powerful projects.”

“Which is where you come in!” she said, with matching intensity. “I don’t want to steal spells from the empire, Anton. We have our own very brilliant thaumaturges for spellwork. My mandate is simply to assess whether or not they’re doing enough to keep their house in order, or whether Britain should be preparing more rigorously for potential conflict.”

“You just said you were getting sick of the restrictions put in place back home!” Anton pointed out. The spell cloud between them fell into ash faster and faster. “Preparations for war would only increase them!”

“It’s premature to assume war is forthcoming!”

“You’re a fool if you believe that.”

Caroline drew back, her earnest expression gone stony. “I am no fool. I and those like me are perhaps all that is standing between our country and war, and I’ll do everything in my power to prevent that escalation. Everything, Anton. Do you understand me?”

“Including committing acts that could get you killed by the imperial state,” he said bitterly. “No, I’m afraid your logic truly escapes me this time.”

“Rich words from a man who commits acts that could get him executed every time he meets with his lover.”

Anton froze. Everything from his breath to his blood seemed to go still for a moment, grappling with hearing something so awful from someone he cared for so much. Caroline, who seemed to see that she’d gone too far, abandoned her coldness.

“Anton, I’m sorry.” She reached out and put one of her hands on his. “I did not mean to use your love as a bludgeon against you, that was wrong of me. I simply…this is important, do you see that? For all of Britain, for its future and its children’s futures. If Napoleon falls, we must know why. We must understand what we can do better in order to keep such travails from affecting Britain as well. Do you see?”

“I do.”

Caroline huffed. “Say something else, something more than just that. Tell me that you forgive me.”

“I forgive you.” He did, for that at least.

“And tell me you will at least think on my offer. Please?”

Anton sighed. “I will think on it, but don’t hold your breath.”

Caroline hesitated, then let go of him and brushed the symbol on the table away with her palm. The rest of the smoke evaporated. “I suppose that will have to do.” She glanced at the menu. “What do you recommend for dinner?”

It was a heavy-handed way of resetting, but Anton allowed it. They dined together, keeping their topics light, and he never let a single word of Camille cross his lips. After his first redirect, Caroline stopped asking after him.

“I have a meeting with your Dr. Grable tomorrow,” Caroline said as they strolled together toward her hotel. It was cool out now, the sun already set over the mountains surrounding Zürich, and she walked close enough that their shoulders brushed. “Do you have any advice for me?”

Anton thought about it. Regardless of how he felt about Caroline’s mission, he didn’t want to obstruct her. “He is a straightforward man who sees more than most. Do not try to dissemble with him. Be as honest as you can.”

“Always good advice, I think.” They stopped outside her hotel, one of the nicer ones in town, and she leaned in and kissed his cheek. “I’d love to see you again tomorrow as well. Just as friends, Anton. No complications.”

“I’ll send a message to you if I have time.”

Her smile was a bit sad. “I understand. Have a good evening, then.” She greeted the doorman as she entered the hotel, and a moment later he lost sight of her.

It was the first time Anton could ever remember being relieved to see her go.

Chapter Three

Anton headed back toward the university by way of the river, which truthfully wasn’t a detour so much as pure diversion. He felt like the ground beneath his feet had shifted in a slight yet nevertheless dramatic way, and he couldn’t quite get his balance now. Every rock he’d established in his life, every person and relationship upon whom his foundation of wellbeing was supported, was wavering.

His mother was ill, Caroline was working as a spy, and he hadn’t seen Camille in months. He had no serious job prospects yet, and if something didn’t come along fast, he was going to be out of a place to live. Dr. Grable had been rather generous ever since the battle on school grounds with Montgomery, but there was a limit to everyone’s charity, and Anton had no interest in testing his mentor’s.

Even if he got a position as a teaching assistant, he would have to live off campus and give up his laboratory to a new graduate student. He’d just gotten everything organized to his satisfaction, and his latest experiment was showing so much promise, it seemed a shame to have to take it all down. And if he moved, how would Camille find him again?

Then again, Camille seemed to manage everything he tried his hand at with remarkable dexterity, especially considering his disadvantage.

Anton ambled along, not paying much attention to where he was going as he churned everything over in his head. Why bother fretting about his feet’s path; it wasn’t as though it was easy to get lost this close to the university. Its tallest tower, the one that held his own lab, was visible for almost a mile in any direction. As long as he could still see it, he didn’t care precisely where he was.

That turned out to be an oversight of some significance, because as he wandered into the less savory portions of the red-light district, the tenor of the cat-calls lobbed his way turned from good-natured exhortations to fuck into a darker, more menacing variety of interview.

“Lost, are you lad?”

“Should know better than to wander in these streets this time of night.”

“You’ve a decent pair of shoes there, boy. I want them.”

It wasn’t until a heavy hand descended on his shoulder and spun him around that Anton realized his translation device, a thaumaturgical wonder of his father’s invention consisting of an earring and a mouthpiece to translate both hearing and speech, had been rendering threats. Bugger me, he thought with resignation.

The man holding onto his shoulder was taller than Anton by half a head, wearing a long leather coat over a grimy maroon vest and brown shirt. He sported a grey-speckled beard, and held a hunting knife in his free hand. The light from the torches in front of the nearest brothel made the curved edge gleam orange.

Anton, very atypically for him, didn’t well up with worry and fear. It seemed that he had hit his limit for what he could take in one day with Caroline, and staring now into the face of a man who was clearly ready to do him harm, he felt mostly irritation at letting himself ramble into a place so unsafe.

Such a thought would have felt liberating if he wasn’t concerned about his sanity.

“I would be happy to give you my shoes, sir,” Anton said levelly, holding his hands still at his sides. “Just give me a moment to get them off without waving that knife in my face, please.”

The big man shook his head. “Ah, that’s not how this works, boy. You hand over what I ask for, and you do it however I make you. Maybe I’ll make you bend down while this knife rests at your throat, eh?” His eyes gleamed a little in the wavering light. “Or maybe I’ll make you bend over in that alley over there, and we can deal with the shoes once I’m done with you.”

Well, then. That was that. He’d have to give his newest device a try. Anton was actually a bit excited—in a place such as this, he was bound to activate a residual miasma. “I’ve plenty of money on me, sir,” he said, now reaching for his inner jacket pocket. “You can afford to buy someone to sport with, not waste your time on me.”

His attacker grimaced and shook Anton roughly. “I’m getting mighty tired of you telling me how to—"

Before he could finish, Anton pulled a little wooden globe from his pocket. He twisted it to break the seal in the center and begin the chemical heating reaction that would set the whole thing on fire, then threw it to the ground. Alchemical symbols etched in silver along the wood flared momentarily, before the whole thing expanded and then crumbled into ash in a vaguely circular pattern. The scent of burnt herbs and hot metal wafted into the air, along with an undertone of something darker. Not just hot metal—iron. Blood.

For a moment, nothing happened, and Anton bunched his shoulders and prepared to fight, because he’d be damned if he was going along with this without a battle. But then…

It started as nearly indistinguishable from the smoke, seeping up from the cobblestones themselves: the face of a beautiful, wailing woman. As she rose and resolved, Anton could make out the rope around her neck. She wasn’t hanging, though. Someone had bound her, and was pulling her along.

His attacker was startled into letting go, and Anton instantly drew back out of the most potent range of the spirit’s miasma. The last time he’d stayed within one of these, it had left him sobbing for half an hour.

“That’s Gaily Gertrude,” one of the men nearby exclaimed. “That’s—ah, no—” The ghost was ripped off her feet onto the ground, right through Anton’s attacker’s legs. She tugged desperately on the rope, trying to stop the pulling, or perhaps get herself to her feet, but a moment later her head exploded in a mess of blood and brain matter as something rolled right over it.

“Her man shoulda dropped the rope, not left her lying in the street like that,” someone said.

“He never shoulda been allowed to rope her up in the first place! It’s the madame’s fault, she—”

All conversation came to an abrupt halt as Anton’s attacker suddenly dropped his knife, raised his hands to his head, and began to scream. His voice was pitched high, almost as high as a woman’s, and even as the miasma had dissolved he kept screaming and screaming. If the man hadn’t just threatened to rape him, Anton almost might have felt guilty.

Instead, he ran.

Oh God, what have I done?

It was a despicable quirk of nature that Anton was able to recriminate himself even as he ran for his life. It would have been a kindness for him to fill with panic as he fled, unable to think on the situation he’d left behind and what he might have just done to the man who had so recently menaced him.

It didn’t help much that the man had been menacing him either, as it might have if Anton were a little less inclined to overthink things. He’d been threatened with rape, but he’d retaliated by forcing the man to relive the pain of a brutal death.

Anton swore at himself as his feet began to slow—he shouldn’t go back, he absolutely shouldn’t go back, there was nothing he could do now but let it play out.

On the other hand, the only other person he’d ever worked this spell on was himself. One data point was hardly enough for Anton to draw any sort of conclusions from. Perhaps he could watch from a distance to ascertain the man’s condition, see if he’d come through all right, and if not…well, then, perhaps Anton could—

A hand gripped his dangling left wrist and jerked him sideways, pulling him into the shadow of a deep doorway. Anton squawked and lashed out with his elbow, riding the surge of adrenaline to help him fight back. He’d been followed, one of those men had caught him, they were going to try to—

“Anton!” Another hand caught his elbow and pressed it down and out of the way, but nothing about it hurt. Even the grip around his wrist was merely tight enough to restrain, not to injure or bruise. “It’s all right,” his gentle captor said. “It’s just me.”

“Camille!” Anton felt like he should have seen this coming, after the day he’d had—unexpected visitors seemed to be in fashion. On the other hand, he’d learned better than to expect what he wanted to happen to actually occur, and he had wanted Camille for months now.

Yet it was Camille. He looked haggard, even more so than the last time he’d visited, and there were a few worrying strands of gray in his moustache that hadn’t been there before, but it was him. There was nothing but warmth and concern on his face.

“I’m sorry I pulled you like—” That was as far as Camille got before Anton pressed in against him, his arms still trapped but not even caring about that, turning his face into the side of Camille’s neck and just breathing.

“Anton,” Camille said again, softer this time. He let go of Anton’s arms and wrapped him in an embrace, which Anton was pleased to be able to return. “It’s all right,” he murmured. “You escaped.”

“You saw?” Anton mumbled. “You saw what I did?”

“After what he almost did to you, don’t forget. Not that I would have let him. I’d caught up to you a block earlier, but I didn’t want to approach you in that part of town if I could help it—it would give people the wrong impression.”

“I wouldn’t have cared.” The whole world could have thought Anton a catamite and he would have endured it, if it meant meeting up with Camille a moment sooner.

“I know, so I had to care for you.” Camille paused, then said, “I’ve never seen a death miasma resurface like that before.”

“It’s not a—well, it’s a…” Anton sighed. “I would love nothing more than to tell you all about it, but I can’t right now, I just can’t—the words are right there on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t speak them. I just—I might have killed that man. I could have killed myself the first time around, and I was only experiencing a suicide, not a—” His voice cut off as Camille’s grip became terribly tight for a moment. “Can’t…breathe…” he squeaked out.

“Damn, I’m sorry.” Camille pulled his arms away all at once, leaving Anton with nothing to hold him up but his own shaking legs. “But what do you mean, you experienced a suicide?” He looked manic around the eyes. “You were suicidal?”

“No—no, I wasn’t at all!” Anton insisted. He could see now how what he’d said might have been misinterpreted, and lord, wasn’t he doing a wonderful job of cocking everything up today? “The first time I cast the spell, it was actually an accident—I was trying out ingredients that would result in a resurrected miasma, yes, but nothing so powerful as what I created. I meant it to be a spell that could be used to help investigate older cases, but I dropped the wrong thing in at the right time and got a bit of mercury mixed in that shouldn’t have been in there, not to mention the—well, regardless, it ended up producing much what you saw back there.”

He exhaled slowly, determined to maintain his composure. “Only in my case, the dead man had been in the act of committing suicide, hanging himself from the rafter of my laboratory. He didn’t die easily. He suffocated, and the whole time it was going on I felt what he felt. He was so filled with regret, and he was desperate to reach the chair he’d just kicked away, wanted to stop what he’d put into motion, but there was no way out. It took him nearly three minutes to die, and I lived the entire thing with him. I…lost most of that afternoon to disassociation, honestly.”

“That sounds hideous,” Camille said, his skin taking on a ghostly pallor.

“Oh, it was utterly incapacitating,” Anton agreed. “But so interesting too, don’t you think? I knew I was onto something, so I kept working at the spell in my spare time. I filled the wooden ball up with all the right ingredients some time ago, but I confess I was too afraid to drop it for the longest time. I’ve been carrying it around for over a month now, trying to find an area to set it off where I was least likely to be debilitated.”

Camille held up a hand between them, the other one squeezing the bridge of his nose. “Stop. Just…don’t speak, for a moment.”

Anton stopped. He felt a bit sick to his stomach, all the impulse to fight or flee fully drained from his body, leaving him tired and a bit desperate-feeling. “I’m sorry,” he offered after what he hoped was an acceptable interpretation of a “moment.” “I’m not sure what I said that upset you, but I’m sorry I did.”

“It’s not you,” Camille assured him, lowering his hands. “It’s simply that…I’ve been hoping, for quite some time now, that you were safe here. I have not been particularly safe myself, and one of the few things that has given me any sense of comfort was the idea that you were perfectly well and taking care of yourself.

“Now I find out that you’ve invented a spell that can force a person to relive whatever violent deaths may have occurred in the vicinity it is cast, and in doing so leave them as helpless as babes. It’s a mental contradiction, and it’s taking me a moment to come to terms with it.”

“Oh.” Anton felt very small, but also warm as well. “I really am very careful,” he said. “Please tell me you know that. I wouldn’t deliberately put myself in danger.”

“I know,” Camille agreed. “And I respect your expertise. I just…” He blew out a breath. “Will you stay with me tonight? I have a room not far from here, and I know that you’ve just graduated and you probably have parties to attend and people to see, but—"

“Absolutely,” Anton said before Camille could finish talking about silly things like Anton preferring someone else’s company. “Let’s go there now.”

Chapter Four

They went to a different inn than the one Anton had been to with Camille before—a closer one, thank God. They walked there together, mouths silent but bodies speaking volumes. Their shoulders touched, hands bumping from time to time as they stepped in perfect sync. Anton had to work not to shiver, and couldn’t help biting his lip as they reached Camille’s inn.

They entered through a side door and climbed up a small, dark set of stairs that was likely the purview of servants. Camille’s room was the first on the right as they exited, and he withdrew the key from his pocket and unlocked the door in tight, quick movements.

The moment Anton was through inside, it was as though his skin had caught fire. He felt like he might burn down to a cinder any second, but then Camille was there, and the fast, fiery heat coursing through him found an outlet in lips and hands. Anton knew he had to be quiet, he knew it, but it was so hard when all he wanted to do was shout his lover’s name to the heavens with every beat of his heart. It shouldn’t have been possible to feel so good from nothing but a kiss to his lips, Camille’s hands bared and trembling against his throat as he undid Anton’s four-in-hand and threw his tie aside.

Anton knocked off Camille’s tall black hat as he dug his fingers into his hair, moaning into their kiss. He knew more skin bared was desirable—for all they had done together, gone through together, they had yet to be naked together. Right now, Anton felt wonderfully desperate. Every inch of skin he was able to touch made his nerves thrill with pleasure, and as Camille pressed close enough for Anton to feel his member straining against the fabric of his trousers, the sensation was almost enough by itself to make Anton come.

How could he get so much from so little? How would he ever survive having more?

Camille seemed in a similarly disheveled mental state, thank heavens. “Academics and their bloody buttons,” he muttered as he broke the kiss, glaring down at the waistcoat giving his nimble fingers pause. “I would tear them clean off if I did not know you would be the one to sew them all back on.”

Anton grinned. “You’re so thoughtful, love,” he said affectionately, then froze. Oh damn. He hadn’t meant for that to slip out. Hell, he wasn’t sure what he meant by it himself, even though he was the one saying it—was it love love, or “love” as a convenient epithet, like “dear” or “darling?” Perhaps he could pass it off as an English eccentricity, or a—

“Anton.” Camille sank to his knees in front of him, his breaths harsh. He ripped open the fastening to Anton’s trousers, jerked them and the pants beneath them down to his knees, and—

“G-nngh!” Anton bit the knuckles of his right hand to muffle his cry, his left hand still twined in Camille’s hair as he engulfed the head of his cock in his shockingly hot mouth. “You—oh—you—”

He couldn’t speak, his body barely knew to keep him breathing if the stars shooting across his vision were anything to go by. He had only been touched this way once before, and back then he had been drunk, he and the other boy both. There had been choking, spitting—it had ended with them slinking off in separate directions, never to speak of it, or to each other, ever again.

This was nothing like that. Camille was fervent, mobile, and vocal, his low hums and heat and the wetness of his tongue working together to create a perilous symphony in Anton’s body. Camille leaned into the act with every part of himself, from the tight grip he kept on Anton’s hips, stroking his pelvic ridges with broad thumbs, to the half-lidded looks of pure enticement he threw from time to time, as though he wanted to check to make sure Anton was enjoying this.

As though he could do anything else—as though there was any way he didn’t want Camille to touch him.

Anton had done nothing to earn this delight, he was sure of it, but Camille wanted to do this for him anyway. He wanted
Anton, wanted his pleasure and worried over his pain and fell to his knees like a supplicant in a church, and god—

He couldn’t stop the tide within him, any more than he could call back a spell once it was cast. His body was the spell now, all his symbols lit with power, and there was just one way for that power to express itself. He came hard, lungs squeezing like bellows, back curling because how could he possibly stand straight when lightning itself was shooting down his spine?

Anton breathed only when his body forced it, drawing out the pleasure, and when he opened his eyes again he was staring at Camille, who looked straight back, mouth slack, his own eyes dark and wanting. Anton stretched out a hand to him and in an instant, Camille was back on his feet, leaning into Anton’s body and taking his hand, sliding it beneath fabric and down until he—touched him, he was touching the hardness of his need, stroking him as best he could within the restrictions of the position, and it couldn’t have been good but it had to be because Camille came fast, so fast, and the secondhand satisfaction Anton got from it was almost enough to make him fall over, his knees went so weak.

Eventually their heads cleared enough to get them to the bed, to get them out of their top layers of costume and into each other’s arms. Anton’s heartbeat began to slow, but from his position against Camille’s chest, he could feel that something was still making his lover tense.

“What is it?” he asked. “What aren’t you saying?”

Camille sighed. “It is almost a certainty that your Professor Grable is going to be invited to Paris, to spend the summer term working to shore up the Emperor’s mechanisms of war. It is likewise nearly a certainty that you will be invited to join him there. He’ll need an assistant, you’re available, the pay is more than adequate, and he likes you.”

Anton lifted his head in shock. “Is that why you’re here? To ask Grable to go work for Napoleon?”

“No.” Camille shook his head, seeming irritated. “I was in fact expressly barred from being part of the committee the emperor sent. However, I was owed a great deal of time after a particularly long case earlier this year, so I decided to come of my own accord. I wanted to see you before you were blown into the storm.

“Anton.” Camille looked into his eyes. “If you want to avoid the specter of war on the continent, now is the time to leave. Refuse Grable’s offer, go back to London, find another way to get by. There must be work for someone as talented as you there.”

“My own efforts to find it have been fruitless,” Anton replied. “And…” Should he tell Camille about Caroline? Something held his tongue. Things might not all come together the way Camille predicted, after all. There was no need to out her as a spy to a man who, while Anton cared immensely for him, was also one of the emperor’s most powerful secret agents. “And I have the feeling that if war is coming, Britain won’t escape it either. I would rather stay somewhere I can be close to you.”

That got him a reluctant smile. “I can’t pretend not to be pleased by the prospect of your continued presence. But Anton, just…if you do go to Paris, don’t show anyone else that new spell of yours. I fear what ideas it may foster.”

“I won’t,” Anton promised. Why would he even need to? He was no battle thaumaturge; his craft was nothing compared to a practitioner of Grable’s reputation. “I swear.”

Chapter Five

For the first time in months, the campus was quiet. The university had let out for the year, and while there would always be some people about—the staff who maintained the facilities, certain teachers and students who had experiments that couldn’t be put on hold for holiday, and the occasional tourist—the bustling crowds of dark-robed students were gone now.

By all rights Anton should have been one of them, new graduate that he was. At the very least, he should have been in the process of packing his laboratory, settling his paperwork, and moving on to a new and exciting position back out in the world. The last, of course, hadn’t happened, and because it hadn’t happened none of the rest of it was going to until he couldn’t put it off any longer.

He wouldn’t have squatted on campus, of course. Anton had his pride, after all—he would never have pushed his welcome so far that he was forced out. But if he’d had to be reminded to leave more than once, well, he was absent-minded at times, wasn’t he? It was a caveat of the trade—thaumaturges tended to focus so deeply on their work that much of the rest of life passed them by, including the need to sleep and eat. It was a bit of a miracle Anton’s parents had ever found each other, given how many thaumaturgical advances his father had wrought and how much bloody time they’d all taken.

Besides, Anton now had an actual, official reason to stay here—at least until he was called in to meet with Dr. Grable. He’d received a message from the man’s secretary not an hour ago, requesting his presence at four. That was right after Grable was scheduled to meet with the emperor’s delegation, according to a passing comment by Camille that morning.

That morning…mmm, that had been nice. Camille had gone out early, and returned not long after with hot chocolate, ham and gruyere croissants, and in case Anton couldn’t cope without it, a little cup of espresso as well. “You are a god among men,” Anton had slurred from where he still lay in bed, his arms wrapped around Camille’s pillow.

“I hope not,” Camille had said, gently setting the tray of food down before joining Anton on the bed again. He didn’t lay down, just sat across from Anton’s head and smoothed a hand across his shoulder and upper back. “There’s too much expected of gods, and I have more than enough people to worry about as it is.”

Anton had craned his head around until he could kiss Camille’s palm. “I wish you didn’t have to worry about me.” He knew better than to suggest that Camille didn’t ever need to worry about him—last night had made the opposite abundantly clear.

“You wouldn’t be yourself if you didn’t occasionally become involved in things that normal men shy away from.”

“I am normal,” Anton had protested.

“No,” Camille had replied with a faint smile. “You’re really not.”

Anton stopped in front of his laboratory’s window. It was late May, the height of spring now arcing toward summer, and the temperature outside was as lovely as Zürich could possibly be. There was no logical reason for him to keep the window closed. None of his experiments were so sensitive they would be disrupted by a bit of breeze or a few raindrops, and that was all the weather had offered up lately beyond pure sunshine.

In truth, the laboratory could use some airing out after the last round of experiments involving powdered sulfur. That was what a normal man in this situation would do, and Anton was still of the opinion, despite Camille’s easy teasing, he was quite normal.

None of this logic had much of an impact on Anton’s peace of mind, though.

He touched the stone lintel beneath the window, cool and dark, shaped long ago by a stonemason’s chisel and worn a bit more by the hands of dozens, scores of students who had done their work here. It had a bit of a shine to it, this stone. Humanity had literally pressed its grease into the cutter’s marks until the surface was nearly smooth.

Once, Anton wouldn’t have hesitated to lean his weight there, to throw open the window and stare down at the square far below with nothing more than a bit of bemusement. Now the thought of it made him shudder.

Oh, get a hold of yourself, he thought. You’re not a child. There’s no need to let the past rule you like this. He was lucky he hadn’t had a nightmare last night—he would have hated to wake Camille up with his shouting.

Sometimes—rarely, never more than once a week—Anton relived the sensation of being pushed from this window. In those dreams, unlike in real life, he didn’t catch himself on a bit of gothic ornamentation as he fell, and Camille didn’t haul him back into his laboratory at the last second. In the dreams he fell straight to the cobblestones and dashed his brains out, yet somehow lived to see his own disfigured corpse despite that. Or Camille found him, but their hands slipped apart.

The worst ones were where Camille saw him, but never bothered to reach for him at all, and Anton had to see his lover’s indifferent expression as he fell to his non-death and wonder what he had done wrong.

They were wrenching, but they were just dreams. “Just dreams,” he told himself. “Now get a move on.”

It made sense to at least start packing now, especially if Camille was right and Dr. Grable was going to offer Anton a place as his assistant for the summer. In Paris, nonetheless. Paris! Anton had always wanted to go to Paris. Some of the greatest technological innovations of the nineteenth century had been made there, courtesy of L’Institut D’Ingénierie Technologique. The Institute was to the development of engineering what Oxford was to British thaumaturgy—the best of the best. Anton was greatly looking forward to visiting it, if he got the chance.

Which he wouldn’t get if he couldn’t even pack up his bloody laboratory.

Anton began with his notebooks, organizing and triaging the most important ones versus those that could be left in his—safe and securely spelled—trunk for the time being. He needed to keep his greatest works at hand, of course, just in case. Just in case you’re offered a job down there, perhaps, and Caroline sees it and goes into conniptions and tattles on you to the Board and your citizenship is revoked and you never see your mother again.

No. Caroline wouldn’t do that to him. She might hurt him verbally and emotionally, deliberately and not, but she would never do something to put him in physical danger. And she would never cause any harm to his mother. Caroline was like a daughter to her.

Moving right along, then.

Anton packed up his most specific and irreplaceable spell components next, things he needed for his masterpieces or that were less essential, but that he doubted he’d be able to afford if he had to repurchase them. Next came the spell housings—little balls like the one he’d deployed yesterday, carved from resinous pine and balsam, light and easily lit. Last, he added in a few basic alembics and firestarters, in case he had to make things on the go.

“That’s all the important stuff,” he murmured. Except…it really wasn’t. There was still the palimpsest.

It was a copy of the palimpsest, actually, one Anton had made before the original was stolen. He’d very nearly decoded it and he wanted to finish the job, even though it seemed like a waste of time now the spell was out there in the world. Wasn’t it? Even if it was, there was no excuse for leaving something like that where any old thaumaturge could discover it.

Anton reached beneath his long wooden desk, brushing a few spiderwebs out of the way as he felt around for—ah. The false panel he’d wedged in place fell out, and the copy of the palimpsest dropped into his hand. There. He brushed it off and tucked it into his holdall. Now he was ready.

The bell tower chimed quarter to four. Anton put on his jacket and hat, straightened his tie, and headed for the stairs.

Dr. Benedict Grable, master of thaumaturgy and feared head of the thaumaturgical department of the university, whose reputation preceded him across three continents, was sitting in the tall-backed chair behind his massive oak desk when Anton was ushered into his office. With his hands clasped over the front of his black robes and his elbows propped low on the armrests, he might have looked relaxed to a casual observer. To Anton, who had never known the man to approach a state of relaxation over his entire two years here, it merited a double-take.

Ah. This was not relaxation. This was a brood.

Dr. Grable, for all his honors and achievements in thaumaturgical theory and teaching, was most well-known for his rare abilities as a practical thaumaturge—not just practical, but battle-tested. He’d fought for the Empire in the last major conflict, that terrible mess with Russia—fought so hard and so well that after five years in the front ranks, he achieved the rank of colonel and could have gone higher if he hadn’t declined furthering his military career for a teaching position. His transition had been seen, Anton understood, as a demotion by many of his peers, but Anton thought he knew it for what it really was—an escape.

Dr. Grable had gone on to live as normal a life as a man who had killed hundreds, if not thousands of people with his spellwork could. He’d married, raised three children, and worked his way up the ladder at the university, which now had a reputation as one of the finest thaumaturgical institutes on the continent. It had been a safe place, a place of pure learning and research…until Gerald Montgomery’s possession of two of his fellow students, at least.

What Gerald had done to them was arguably worse than what he’d done to Anton. Anton had nearly died, but at least he hadn’t been forced to murder other people first.

And it had all gone on under Dr. Grable’s nose.

Montgomery’s actions weren’t Dr. Grable’s fault, any more than they were Anton’s for having the palimpsest Montgomery wanted with him in the first place. It was something of a cold comfort, though.

Anton stopped in front of his teacher’s desk and inclined his head.

“Sit.” Dr. Grable pointed at the chair next to Anton, who pulled it out and sat down.

“Good.” The doctor pulled a bottle of what appeared to be a thick, syrupy port out of his desk, along with two small blue cups. He poured them each a dram, then pushed Anton’s across the desk. “Now drink.” He grimaced. “Trust me, you’ll need it.”

Anton took a ginger sip, then relaxed a bit as the sweet fire of it hit his tongue. It was a port, but spicier than what he was used to, with a hint of a cinnamon aftertaste. It was exquisite, and probably very expensive.

“My wife died two years ago,” Dr. Grable said out of nowhere. He wasn’t looking at Anton now; he stared sideways out of the tall, stained-glass window instead. “A few months before you arrived here. It was a sudden thing, a case of cerebral apoplexy. She died very fast, and the physician told me it was a relatively painless end. It was the way many people would choose to go. Hell, I would choose to go that way. But Leonora?” He shook his head. “I have no doubt she blistered Saint Peter with the sharp side of her tongue when she got to the pearly gates, because he had denied her one last chance to fight. If it meant getting to say goodbye to me, to the boys, to our grandchildren…she would have withstood any pain, to get that opportunity. That would be a fight worth having, to her.”

He gestured toward the door. “Those men the emperor sent here whom I met with? They don’t think like my Leonora.” His sneer rearranged the craggy lines of his face, drawing his lips back from his long white teeth. “They want any fight that will let them test their might. Or, in this case, our might.”

“‘Our might’?” Anton asked―somewhat redundantly, but surely he could be excused, having learned more personal information from his mentor in the last few seconds than he had over the entire course of their previous relationship.

“Thaumaturgical might, that is. The power of magic.” He waved a hand through the air as though he was waving a wand. “The last great war was a proving ground for thaumaturgy, a chance to show that it could be an effective weapon in combat. I regret being a part of that,” he said, surprising Anton, “but it’s done, and would have been done with or without my participation. Nowadays, the question isn’t if, so much as how. How much and how many and how often, it all goes on and on. They have plans, those gentlemen. And they want to drag me into them, damn their hides.”

“Well,” Anton offered after a tense moment of silence, “it makes sense for them to want you involved. You said it yourself, sir. You were an integral, and successful, part of the last conflict.”

Dr. Grable shook his head. “They don’t want me to spell their rifle barrels or cannons, Seiber. They want me for my other talent.”

“Your…” It took a moment for Anton to remember it. Dr. Grable was famed not only for his spell construction, but also for his ability to— “They want you to look at the spells that are already being used?” That didn’t make any sense.

“To, as they put it, ‘detect and interpret the thaumaturgical signatures under development and certify that they do as their caster intends.’” Dr. Grable took another drink. “They don’t trust the people under their command. They want to make sure someone is holding their feet to the fire, which likely means that at least one thaumaturge has tried a double-cross already. They mean for me to be their judge and jury.

“At least they won’t need me for the role of executioner,” he added dryly. “I’ve no doubt there are plenty of competent neck-cutters where we’re going.”

“We, sir?” It wasn’t unexpected, but Anton had also been hoping that Dr. Grable would broach the subject a little differently. Perhaps by starting with a “Congratulations on graduating, you’re going to do great things, and if you like, you can start with this.”

In retrospect, it seemed like a foolish hope given how well Anton knew the man.

“Oh, yes. One man might keep a secret but two never can—the emperor is hedging his bets in case I turn out to be a backstabber or am otherwise disappointing.” Dr. Grable’s expression softened. “It helps that your skillset is perfectly suited to the task. You make the dead walk again, Seiber, after a fashion. You find truths that other people like to keep hidden, and you’re a survivor. Damn good at that last part,” he added. “And I’m going to need an assistant who can watch both of our backs where we’re going.

“You’ll be paid,” he went on, straightening up a bit. “Double your current teaching stipend, plus expenses for travel and meals and the like. You’ll get a hell of a recommendation out of it at the end, if all goes well. Not the type of thing that will make you friends in Oxford, perhaps, but why would you return to that stuffy, theory-drunk puddle anyhow? I told the representative committee that continuing my work here was nonnegotiable, and so it would only be a three-month term including travel, but a lot can happen in that amount of time.

“What do you say, Seiber?” Dr. Grable arched one thick gray brow. “Care to run off to Paris with me?”

Lord, when he put it that way… Anton down the rest of his port in one long, intoxicating draught. He set the glass down, gasping a little, and said, “Ready when you are, sir.”

Chapter Six

It was just as well that Anton had packed when he did, because before the sun had set he, Grable, the three principal representatives of the emperor, and their entourage were on their way to Paris via a private train car.

Not an entirely private train, thankfully—Anton didn’t think he could have taken that. The private car was stressful enough, for a variety of reasons.

The men sent by the Emperor to coerce—er, persuade—Dr. Grable to Paris were a disparate lot. One of them was a clergyman, a cardinal in fact, his blood-red robes making him stand out like his avian namesake among the dark crow-like garb the rest of them wore. He was an older man, with a severe face but a surprisingly approachable demeanor. Anton, who was disinclined toward religion on moral grounds, nevertheless found His Eminence Cardinal Proulx to be a thoughtful, pleasant person who was more curious about his thaumaturgy than condemning. The relationship between God and magic played out in fraught ways at times, both politically and philosophically, but the cardinal was nothing but polite. Anton intended to corner him for a discussion of the church’s position on supporting the empire’s violence against its own indigenous populations when they had a moment.

The thaumaturge who accompanied the party wasn’t much of a conversationalist. Monsieur Deschamps appeared to be a ritualist type—“Lit up like a cathedral at Christmas, he’s got so many magical devices on him,” Dr. Grable had remarked—and while that methodology was interesting to Anton, the man didn’t seem very inclined to discuss the craft.

“I prefer not to speak about them,” was all Deschamps said when Anton tried to bring his devices up in conversation once they were settled in their car. “As long as I’m the only one who knows what they are, no one will be able to counter them all.”

Anton had chuckled. “Are you worried about an assassination attempt, then?” he asked.

Deschamps had scowled in return. “You have no idea what I’ve been through,” he declared, gripping the silver triquetra pendant dangling around his neck so hard his knuckles turned white. “I won’t have my protections dismissed by someone who’s never put his life on the line for the greater good before! Good day, sir!” He had retreated, leaving Anton completely nonplussed. Whatever had happened to the man, it had left him rather on edge.

The final imperial representative was a vicomte, because of course he was. There was no escaping the reach of the aristocracy when the emperor himself had sent the delegation. Vicomte Wilhelm Piotr Swartzman Voclain had an estate outside Strasbourg, hence a very strong motive to keep the empire whole—Strasbourg was technically still in the “heart” of the French Empire, but it would be one of the first places chipped away in real unrest, a means for dissenters to strike at Napoleon’s most powerful allies.

Vicomte Voclain was charming, personable, and about as genuine as a fish sporting fur. He was handsome, a bit taller than Anton and broad through the shoulders and chest, very fit, and also very industrious when it came to picking and choosing his company. He had looked at Anton and immediately deduced they had nothing to talk about, and apart from a brief and genteel greeting hadn’t remembered him since. He seemed wary of Dr. Grable, for all that he had been sent to Zurich to persuade the man to his cause, and he was very clearly uninterested in moralizing with the cardinal or putting up with Deschamps’ fluttering nerves. So he’d found another person to keep him company.

“That is too clever!” Caroline exclaimed from the other side of the car, a glass of wine in one hand, the other resting on the vicomte’s arm.

Anton glanced her way and grimaced. Her prediction that she could find a way to finagle herself down to the capitol had come true. Apparently she had been staying in the same hotel as the vicomte—a happy accident no doubt—and had probably taken one look at Voclain, determined him to be her ideal target, and persuaded him into doing exactly what she wanted in less than an hour.

Her retinue had been dismissed to another car, with the exception of an older woman who was her “travel companion,” sitting back and knitting quietly. The presence of the other lady was meant to encourage a chaste demeanor between the married Caroline and the decidedly rakish Voclain, but her presence didn’t seem to be deterring the vicomte a whit.

Voclain smiled a bright white smile. “You would have thought it twice as clever if you could have seen it for yourself, my lady.”

“I have no doubt of that at all. It’s so rare to find a gentlemen such as yourself paying such close attention to the comings and goings of his own estate, sir.”

“I’ve never understood the English need to reduce all important labor to the realm of servants,” Voclain declared. “If I am to be the lord of my manor, then I must know every aspect of its workings. How else will I know if I am squeezing enough blood from my stones, no?”

“How indeed!”

This sort of entitled prig is exactly why the empire is careening toward an uprising, Anton thought uncharitably to himself. If he’d been alone with Caroline, it was the sort of observation he’d have enjoyed sharing with her, but she’d been very careful not to give away their connection. He appreciated that. Having given her a “no” to being a part of her spy network, she was handling it well. He only hoped she wouldn’t get too ambitious with her intelligence-gathering.

What a joke. That woman only knows how to be ambitious.

In that case, he wished her much joy of it, because he wouldn’t be assisting her.

The sole bright spot in the entire process so far, apart from having an assured income for a time, was the glimpse Anton had gotten of a man getting onto the public part of the train when he’d boarded earlier—a man who looked, at least from behind, very much like Camille. Was he returning to Paris already? Was he doing it because he wanted to be close to Anton, or because he had already been summoned home by his masters? Or did he have another destination in mind, one that would have him leaving the train well before the three-day journey to Paris was over?

Anton didn’t know, but if he had to be satisfied with so little of Camille, after he had just had so, so much of him, he would do his best.

Chapter Seven

The change between sedate sitting and utter pandemonium happened so fast Anton didn’t have a chance to stop himself from falling. One moment the train was chugging along, heading southwest on a decline as it passed through a narrow valley in the Bernese Oberland, and the next…

The noise was bad enough, a sharp crack followed by a rattling boom penetrating down to Anton’s back teeth, but it was accompanied by a sudden lift that sent everyone in their car into the air for a moment. Anton hung for a breathless second, with just enough time to turn his eyes away from the window he was hurtling toward before he impacted it.

Glass shattered against his shoulder before his back took the brunt of his painful escape. Even as the window fell apart, the train rolled.

That shouldn’t be possible, Anton thought before he realized that he was airborne yet again. Only this time, he was outside the train. He’d passed right through the window frame, and flew through the air until he hit—a tree? A needle-covered rock? Something that broke his fall and nearly broke his spine as well.

Anton crashed to the ground, the air gone from his lungs, and watched as the train, all eight passenger cars, completed a second roll to the left. The engine was a smoldering mess, completely destroyed—but by what?

Magic? An explosive? Anton struggled to push up onto his hands and knees. The way his back screamed at him for it was reassuring—at least he could still feel things, and his vital organs didn’t seem compromised.

He tried to get to his feet and failed. Or maybe it’s too soon to know if they’re compromised. It didn’t matter—he could wallow in his own pain later. Caroline was on that train. Camille was on that train!

Anton staggered a few steps forward, one hand cradling his ribcage, then stopped. There was a shadow ahead of him that shouldn’t be there.

It was an odd thing to notice, but ever since he’d begun deciphering truth from pictures little better than smoke and spirit, Anton had learned to pay attention to the way light moved. Things might be muddled in a building, with artificial light to confuse things, but out here there was nothing but the setting sun to cast a shadow, and all of those should be facing the other way. So it wasn’t a shadow, then. It was a…

“Look at you.”

A person. The man peeled away from the tree he squatted behind, taking a few small steps toward Anton. He was swathed in dark clothes, baggy and indistinct, and his face was covered in ash. “Never seen a fellow fly like that before,” he said. His French was accented—an Alsatian dialect, perhaps? “The fact that you can move, much less stand, is proof that God loves you.” He pulled a knife out from beneath his shirt. “But not enough to save you from my eyes, or my blade.” He took another two steps forward, his knife glinting menacingly in the red light of the sunset. “Now you—”

Anton pulled out the tiny derringer that Camille had given him as a safeguard during their last meeting, cocked the hammer, and fired his shot into the man’s face. It was a small caliber bullet, and if his attacker was wearing armor of some sort beneath his camouflage the round might not penetrate, but there was no shield protecting his gaping mouth, now dripping blood like rain. Brains spattered the trees behind him, and after a moment he slumped to the ground.

“Apparently God’s still on my side,” Anton muttered. He took a deep breath, winced, and tried not to look at the ruin of the back of the man’s head as he stumbled past the body, desperate to make it to the train. Was this an ambush by the Dévoué? Were there more grey-garbed men stalking the wreckage for passengers to murder even now?

Anton had some of his spell equipment on him, but none of them would be much good offensively, unless he counted the wooden ball in his left vest pocket…but how useful would that be up here, in a remote mountain pass with no villages? He needed to—

A second explosion rocked the ground, only this one sounded more like a swarm of metallic bees being jettisoned from their hive at high speed. Glinting orange sparks shot high above the train before crashing down again, trailing their light like spears of fire. As soon as they hit the ground, they sped out in all directions. Anton heard screams, expected to scream himself—he was standing, he was moving toward the wreck, how would the magic distinguish him from an attacker?—but the light passed right through him, harmless.

That amount of deadly precision had to be the work of Dr. Grable. He, at least, was still functioning. It was a tremendous relief to Anton—he wouldn’t yet be called to use his talents to kill. He gulped and thought of the man behind him. To kill again, at least, and that hadn’t been talent, that had been pure luck.

He pressed on over the rocks, past small shrubs, and straight toward the smell of gunpowder. Orsini bombs, perhaps? Whatever had managed to roll the train, it had been powerful. He stumbled to a halt against the private car, now a twisted ruin.

“Caroline!” he shouted, his anxiety seething within his chest. She had to be all right. “Caroline!”

It wasn’t until he saw her crawl out of another broken window, coughing but managing to get herself to her feet, that Anton realized he’d just given himself away. Why should he care about her in particular, other than because she was one of the few women in their party? Why should he be so forward as to address her by her first name? Idiot, idiot…

The odds were good that no one had even heard him, so surrounded were they with cries and tears and shouts. Caroline heard, though. She met his eyes for a moment, and her free hand clenched over her heart as she saw him, her eyes closing briefly. Thank God, he saw her mouth move.

“Fucking hell,” a familiar voice groused from above. Anton saw Dr. Grable standing on the toppled train, a silver wand glowing like a brand in one hand, the other one clutching the wooden leg of an elongated cocktail table. It seemed to be all that was keeping him on his feet—he was listing heavily to one side, as though his left leg couldn’t support him. How had he even gotten up there?

“Sheer bloody-mindedness,” Dr. Grable said, and Anton realized he’d spoken the last part out loud. “You survived, then. Excellent. Get into the cabin of our car and check on the others while the young lady and I do a little protective thaumaturgy on what’s left of this rubble.”

“I’ve got plenty of materials for the basics,” Caroline chimed in. She had dragged her holdall with her.

“I—yes, I can do that.” It helped to have an order to follow, now he knew Caroline was unhurt. It was the tether he needed to keep from running off to the other passenger cars, searching for Camille. There were plenty of people in a muddle over there already, and Anton was no healer—he would only get in the way. He crawled in through the same window Caroline had exited and looked around, marking where their company lay, then moved to each of them in turn.

Cardinal Proulx was unconscious, and judging from the size of the knot on his skull he’d have a terrible headache when he awoke, but he was breathing and no limbs seemed to be contorted. Monsieur Deschamps had also been knocked unconscious, although he seemed to be coming around if the way he was mumbling was any indicator.

On the other side of the car, the news was less good. Caroline’s companion was dead, her neck very clearly broken. She’d probably died in the initial explosion, as the twist of the train had thrown them all about the cabin. And Voclain…

Well. He was dead, that was evident. But Anton doubted it was the crash that had killed him.

It was far more likely the bullet lodged in his chest that had done that.

Chapter Eight

The chaos that ensued was almost ferocious in its subtlety.

Questions were asked of and by everyone in the car—too many questions. Had anyone noticed when the vicomte was shot? Had they detected any other shots, or was it just the one? How had the bullet hit so accurately? Was it luck? Had the original target been someone else, or anyone at all? What had really happened inside the car after the explosion rocked it off its tracks?

Anton could have answered some of these questions, but his offer to cast a spell on Voclain’s body and its surroundings to discover when exactly he’d died was met by his party with cries of, “It’s useless, all you’ll see is a bullet strike him in the chest!” and “I would rather not watch my companion break her neck, thank you,” and a particularly pitiful one from Deschamps that was the word “no” repeated over and over, interspersed with “I cannot bear such a thing again.”

The other thing Anton knew that these others didn’t, and that he had no intention of bringing up with anyone, including Dr. Grable, was the fact that there was a spell out there that could give bullets this kind of accuracy. Anton didn’t know how far the magic in the palimpsest had been spread, but he wasn’t going to be party to informing ignorant people of it if he didn’t have to.

It was late, and getting quite cold in the mountains. People from some of the other cars, those better accustomed to the environment, set out walking in both directions to bring help and warn incoming trains the track was unusable. Most others took shelter in the twisted wreck of the train, and those with a modicum of a talent for easing pain worked among them: setting a bone here, bandaging a wound there, and hunting down enough laudanum to dull the intense discomfort of those who were damaged inside. There wasn’t enough of it, though. Not nearly.

The train had been carrying a hundred and fifty-seven passengers. Only a hundred and twenty-two of them had survived the initial roll, and every hour seemed to bring a new moment of tragedy.

Citing a bit of experience with healing—although Anton had no good spells for serving the living, just the dead—he left his august party and headed for the common section of the train. He did what he could, which wasn’t enough, not nearly enough. Still, his bag at least came in useful—one of the travelers he met with was a priest and thaumaturge, whose skillset revolved around the relief of suffering in body, mind, and spirit. Anton handed over his stores of silver shavings, iron pellets, gold dust, and powdered sulfur so that another person managed to avoid the horrible, all-consuming agony of lying there suffering as their bodies gave in to death.

He resolutely didn’t think about Camille. It was therefore a complete and utter surprise when he found the man. Or was found by him, rather, like last time.

“Anton.”

The hand on his shoulder made Anton spin around where he knelt, awkwardly attempting to shield the priest’s thurible from the wind as he doused the latest sufferer in incense. When he saw who it was, his mouth went dry and his feet fell out from under him.

“Camille…” Anton could barely speak his name. He was here, he was alive. After everything that had happened over the past hour, it seemed impossible.

“Feel free to take your rest, my son,” the priest murmured. He was hardly older than Anton, but he had the same calm aura about him that Cardinal Proulx did. “I’ll be engaged here for some time yet. Comméndo te omnipoténti Deo, caríssime frater, et ei, cuius es creatúra, commítto…”

Camille helped him off the ground, and a moment later Anton was in his arms. He closed his eyes and held on tight, pressing his face to the crook of Camille’s neck and just breathing, breathing. He felt the rush of his lover’s blood beneath his sensitive lips, heard the strong beat of his heart, and for a moment, he let himself be weak. Thank god you’re here.

“Why are you here?” he asked once he had enough control of his vocal cords to do so.

“Because I need to get back to Paris,” Camille said. “And because you were on this train, and I preferred to remain as close to you as possible for as long as I could.”

The sense of well-being he felt from hearing that was almost enough to melt the shard of question that suddenly speared Anton’s mind like shrapnel.

“Do you know the members of my party?” he asked quietly, pulling back a bit so he could look at Camille’s face.

Camille nodded. “I know of them all, although I’ve only met two of them in person.” He grimaced. “I’m afraid I’ll have to make myself known to them at this point, although I greatly prefer not to.”

“Why is that?”

“Revealing myself to those who have some influence around the Imperial Court is something I try to avoid if at all possible. The less they know of me, the less they’ll be able to presume they can control me if I end up having to investigate them.”

Anton took a bracing breath. “Is one of the men you knew Vicomte Voclain?”

“He is, very informally though. Why?”

“Because…he’s dead.”

“Is he now.” Camille paused, then asked, “How?”

“He was shot. Was it…”

Anton didn’t have to say anything else. Camille was clever, much cleverer than he, better at putting the pieces of a criminal puzzle together. That such a shot was, in all likelihood, magically assisted was one of those pieces. Another was that of everyone on the train, the only two people who had come into contact with such weapons, that Anton knew of at least, were himself and Camille.

That Camille had no qualms about killing, if he needed to, even a member of the aristocracy.

That in the confusion of an event like this, it would have been difficult but not impossible for someone on board the train to fire that gun at the vicomte without being seen.

Camille stepped back from Anton. “I would never allow that”—he pointed at the man the priest was speaking prayers over—“to result from a mandate or investigation of mine. Nor any of these pointless deaths.”

Anton had hurt him. How deeply, he didn’t know, but he already regretted it. Of course Camille wouldn’t let innocents be hurt if he could help it, much less ally himself with the Dévoué in anything. “I know that, I do, I’m so—” he began, but Camille shook his head.

“Let us return to your party,” he said, his voice as cold as the rising wind. “For I have several things of which to inform them.”

This was the second time Anton had seen Camille march into a perilous situation and take it over completely, and to say the man had a knack for it would be ludicrously minimalist. He presented himself to Anton’s party—Dr. Grable, at least, had met him during the incident at the university and therefore didn’t put up the fuss he otherwise might have—and showed them all his credentials.

“While my presence among you is purely coincidental, I was aware of your group’s presence on the train and have already taken the liberty of supplying a new mode of transportation that should be here within the hour,” he continued, looking at everyone but Anton. “I understand you’re headed for L’Institut D’Ingénierie Technologique.”

“How did you come to understand that, young man?” Cardinal Proulx asked, his voice somehow thunderous and mild at the same time.

“Your Eminence, I am a lumière working under the aegis of the emperor himself,” Camille replied dryly. “There is very little that goes on in this Empire that I do not come to understand eventually.”

“This is a nightmare,” Monsieur Deschamps whimpered, one hand clutching the amulet around his neck as he stared at Camille. “It must be a nightmare. I’ve fallen into a dream I can’t wake up from.”

“You should consider yourself lucky to have convinced the late Lord Voclain that you were qualified for whatever it was he asked of you.” Anton had never heard that particular tone from Camille before, something so cold and contemptuous it made him want to shiver secondhand. “I suggest you take the time between now and our vessel’s arrival to quiet your nerves.

“Dr. Grable,” he continued, dismissing Monsieur Deschamps, “the rest of this journey is going to be somewhat trying for a man with a broken leg. Would you prefer to be carried to the nearest village with the rest of the train’s passengers and continue after you’ve recovered a bit?”

“Whatever happens next can’t be more trying than an ambush by a lot of blasted cowards in the middle of the mountains,” Dr. Grable replied with a grimace. “I’ll manage.”

“Very well. I suggest you have your assistant”—and even now he didn’t turn to Anton, just spoke of him in the third person as though he were an abstract concept instead of a living being—“retrieve your belongings and place them to the side of that clearing over there. When our transport does arrive, speed will be of the essence.” Now he did glance over, but it was the same look he might have given any porter. “Perhaps you can do the same for the rest of your party as well, since you seem to be the only hale young man of the bunch.”

It felt like a dismissal—hell, it was a dismissal—but that didn’t mean that Camille wasn’t correct. Between Caroline and the now-deceased Voclain alone, there was probably half a ton of baggage. The vicomte hadn’t believed in traveling light. “Of course,” Anton said, feeling quite subdued, and walked toward their overturned car in a bit of a daze.

It was getting colder by the minute. Thankfully, a relief crew had arrived a few minutes earlier, and the survivors were either walking toward the closest village or being carried there by hardy volunteers. The dead were left behind, held inside one of the overturned cars. It was cold enough that they would last the night, at least.

Anton was grateful to have something to do that kept his hands busy and his brain occupied, however briefly. It kept him from thinking too much about Camille. He had made a mistake, voicing his half-formed concerns the way he had, but was it too much to ask for a hint of understanding? He’d just been thrown from a train car and nearly shot by a man in black—a bit of rattled thinking was a clear and unavoidable consequence of that. But now his lover was giving him the cold shoulder, it was more important than ever that Caroline keep her distance from him, and his mentor—and, indeed, his direct employer—Dr. Grable had a broken leg.

What would that mean for their work in Paris? Would Anton be expected to step up in the doctor’s place? Given the disparity in their skill sets, the outcome of that would be utter disaster.

He lifted, stepped, and stacked, over and over again, ignoring the pain in his ribs and face and the occasional furtive glances from the rest of the company in his direction as he moved every case, trunk, and carton to the clearing some yards away from the wreck. By the time he was done inside the train car, where there were fortunately no bodies to deal with, thanks to the Cardinal’s efforts to get them blessed and removed, Anton felt incapable of thought, much less speech. The whole of his world had narrowed down to basic movements, and it was only the silvery glint of the buttons on the leather strap of the tiny holster that led him to notice it at all. He crawled toward the gleam, reached around the seat that nearly obscured it, and pulled out the holster.

What kind of gun goes into this? It was tiny—whatever weapon it belonged to couldn’t hold more than five shots, at best. The leather holster had delicate silver scrollwork on it, in addition to the brilliance of the buttons. Anton lifted it to his nose and sniffed—fresh oil, and a hint of gunpowder. This was no ornamental keepsake, then.

Could it be… Such a holster was dainty enough to hold a gun that would perfectly fit a lady’s hand. Had Caroline or her companion been the ones to carry it? If so, where was the gun? And could it have been the gun that had fired the fatal round into the vicomte’s chest?

Oh, God. More clues, more secrets, more things that Anton wanted nothing to do with and yet was dragged headlong into regardless. He stiffly placed the little thing inside his vest and sat there, his mind whirring even as his body broke out in shivers he scarcely felt.

What the hell was Caroline playing at? Or was this even hers? A gun this small could be stored inside a set of robes as ornate as the cardinal’s, for example.

Oh, don’t be an idiot. Why would a man of the church turn to murder? Then again, why did anyone turn to murder? Anton ought to give the holster to Camille, but…now it was even more imperative that he do his utmost to guard Caroline against additional scrutiny from the Lord Lumière. Camille was devilishly insightful—he didn’t need any more ammunition than he already had.

But then Anton was potentially obstructing an official Imperial investigation. If he was found to be withholding evidence, if—

“Anton.” A quiet voice in his ear pulled him out of his daze. He turned blearily to see Camille on his knees in the wreckage beside him. Anton was shaking so hard he could barely stay upright.

“God, look at you.” Camille pinched the bridge of his nose as he closed his eyes for a moment. “You’re but a minute away from shock. What did you injure in the crash?”

“Nothing,” Anton protested. “Nothing serious.”

“Nothing serious, he says.” Camille shook his head. “You’re done in here,” he declared. “I’ll have Deschamps gather the rest, I need a respite from his bellyaching. Come outside and sit down. Our transport should nearly be here.”

“You must know him,” Anton said, turning awkwardly in preparation to crawl out of the car again. Oh, ouch—perhaps the tree he’d hit had done a little more damage than he’d thought.

“Know who?” Camille reached out to steady him but didn’t quite make contact.

“Monsieur Deschamps. You’d never speak of him so—” contemptuously “—familiarly if you didn’t.”

“I have the dubious honor of a prior knowledge of the man, yes.”

“God, I hope he wasn’t a friend before you decided to hate him.” It fell out of Anton’s mouth before he could take it back.

Camille looked at him sharply. “He wasn’t,” he said, quiet but firm. “And nothing about Deschamps can compare in any way at all to our own situation. Now.” He extended his hand. “You need to get up and get ready. Our new transport has arrived.”

Anton took Camille’s hand and let him pull him up to his feet, then forced himself to let go as he gazed around outside. “Where? I don’t see any horses, or…”

“Not on the ground,” Camille corrected. “Look up.”

Anton did so, and saw a silver speck growing larger and larger as it sailed through the sky at breakneck speed over the nearest mountain range. “What is that?” he asked, gaping.

Camille seemed pleased. “Our ride.”

Chapter Nine

“Oh my goodness,” Caroline exclaimed under her breath as she caught sight of the silver dirigible flying their way, already canting down for a landing. “How can such a thing be possible?”

It was a good question, and one Anton would have given a limb to have answered. Airships in and of themselves were nothing new—hot air balloons had been introduced to the skies almost a century ago, first as little more than curiosities, becoming something that could be used for surveying, emergency transport, or in the case of nearly every government on the continent, a weapon of war. They were too slow to be truly effective as more than a lookout, though, and too vulnerable to being punctured. Modern airships were faster, better armored, and light enough that they had a bit more utility, but they were still better in theory than practice.

At least, that had been the case, before Anton had cast his eyes on this.

The airship descended until it was within twenty feet of the ground, then threw out a line. A young man—probably still a lad, given his slightness—shimmied down it, took something out of his pocket and stuck it through the loop on the end of the line, then jammed that into the ground. The connection point glowed white for a moment.

“We’re stuck tight!” the boy shouted up toward the cabin of the airship—which was another point of amazement to Anton. The entire device was miraculously quiet. Where was the flame? Did it run on electricity in some way? Even if the French had somehow perfected the art of lightning capture and storage, there would still be a hum about the entire business. But it was almost silent.

“Good work!” a voice called in reply. The ship sank the rest of the way to the ground, coming to rest exactly on top of the anchor holding it down. It should have wobbled—there was no real basket, no struts to catch it, just a smooth, curving ship-like belly—but instead it stuck like a tongue in a groove. As soon as it was settled, a handsome, dark-haired man in an Imperial army uniform, with a silver airship medal on his chest, lowered a walkway and stepped briskly over to them. He saluted Camille.

“We came up as swift as we could, milord.”

“Excellent, Captain, thank you for your diligence,” Camille said, sounding every bit as haughty as Anton knew he could be, and yet…there was something warm lurking beneath the surface of his voice. “I hope I didn’t send you and your shipmate too far out of your way.”

The man smiled. “Not at all, milord. Nowhere’s out of the way for our beauty.” He glanced over Camille’s shoulder and winced sympathetically. “Shall we load your cargo, then? People should wait until the last moment, I reckon—it won’t be a comfortable ride, not at this time of night.”

“That would be acceptable.” Camille waited for the captain and the lad who evidently worked with him on the airship to begin grabbing the luggage Anton had so painstakingly assembled before he turned back to the party. “Sirs and lady,” he said. “The rest of our trip to Paris will be facilitated by the latest in Imperial airship design, the Fleur D’Argent. We should be there before midnight tonight.”

“Before midnight?”

“So soon?”

“That seems impossible.”

“What’s the catch?” Dr. Grable asked with a grunt, silencing the amazement of their fellows with his stern tone. “If it was that easy, nobles would be demanding rides all over the continent, not subjecting themselves to trains.”

“Indeed,” Camille agreed. “This ship is one of only three of its kind, a proof-of-concept prototype created by the Institute. One of the side-effects of its use is the fact that, to be most effective, it must be used in a lighter atmosphere. This means that it goes very high, and the ship itself becomes quite cold.”

“Warming spells can take care of that.”

Camille shook his head. “Not in this case. The…” He cast a glance in Caroline’s direction, and folded his hands behind his back. “The thaumaturgical equivalencies at work are, from what I understand, quite delicate. The device which powers the ship is quite fragile, and a random spell at the wrong time could cause fluctuations in its magical matrix.”

Dr. Grable shook his head. “Not ideal for a weapon.”

“No,” Camille agreed. “But it could become an effective transport, once the other issues are worked out.”

“‘Issues’?” Monsieur Deschamps asked, looking ill.

“Turbulence. Occasionally monumental turbulence. You shall all have to be strapped in rather tight. Even you, sir,” he added with a regretful gesture toward Dr. Grable’s leg.

“Indignity before death, I s’pose.” Dr. Grable sighed, then held out an arm to Anton. “Come on, then, help me up and into there.”

Anton went to him at once, pleased to have a task that would take him out from under Camille’s gaze. He resolutely didn’t check in on Caroline, just gritted his teeth as Dr. Grable leaned his considerable weight onto Anton’s shoulder as he stood. “Bloody God-damn hell,” the older man gritted out through clenched teeth. He kept his leg—splinted now—airborne, and making it up the ramp was a slow process.

“This way, sirs!” the lad called out, appearing beside them once they reached the top of the ramp like a Jack-In-The-Box. He led them over the smooth wooden flooring to a little passenger’s berth, one set of stairs down from the captain’s station. “There’s room for six,” the boy pointed out, rather proud. “Good thing you lost a few, eh? The bodies’ll go in the hold below. They’ll be right safe there,” he added, crossing himself for good measure. “Promise.”

“Thank you,” Anton said. There was something about this boy… “Can you show me how to work the harness?”

“Oh, right!”

The contraption designed to hold them in place was labyrinthine in design, built to withstand forces coming at passengers from all directions. Once Dr. Grable was strapped in tight, the boy began adding blankets and padding. “You’re close to the engine down here, so it gets even colder than it do outside,” he said apologetically.

What sort of engine gets cold when it’s working, instead of hot? Admittedly, Anton was no great engineer, but from the little he knew of modern machinery, that seemed counter-intuitive to him. He’d have to see if he could glean anything once they touched down in Paris and circumstances were less urgent.

“Let me give you a hand, sir,” the boy said, leaning in to help Anton adjust the straps around his torso. As he buckled Anton’s shoulder in, he said, “Don’t remember me then, sir?”

“Remember you…oh!” Oh, of course! It was the boy from the train, Bert, whose father had been killed in the Dévoué plot and who had helped save the day in the end. “My word, Bert, you’ve grown so much I hardly recognized you! How on earth did you come into this position?”

Bert leaned back a bit, pleased. “Lord Lumière got me into the corps as a powder monkey,” he said. “He told me he’d find a place for me, an’ he did. Boats was fine and all, but when a chance to fly in one of these came along, I wanted it. He came to visit, I told him, and—poof!” He snapped his fingers. “Look at me now!”

“Look at you indeed,” Anton said. “I’m so pleased for you, Bert, you’ve no idea.”

The young man blushed. “Thanks. If I had to lose my dad, at least I got this out of it, right? A word for you, sir, for your kindness.” He leaned in. “It’ll hurt, but keep your eyes open a little bit you can during the flight. Sometimes residue from the Nothing seeps out, and it’s right beautiful.”

He was upright before Anton could ask for clarification, clapping a wool-lined leather cap down onto his head. “Tie it tight over your ears, sir,” he said with a grin. “And don’t forget the top flap to cover your face.” He bounded away, leaving Anton to stare after him, wondering what the hell kind of residue nothing could leave behind.

Interlude: Camille

It was curious, this ability of Camille’s to be surrounded by magic and yet untouched by it. As a child it had been something he regretted, quite apart from the stigma that came from not having a soul. There was magic aplenty in the Imperial Court, much of it geared toward entertainment for la noblesse and their families. Camille could watch a play acted out in light and shadow, but he couldn’t feel the prickle of twilight stars against his skin as they fell from the air onto the watchers. He could observe the other children running through a magical maze, but Heaven forfend he try to enter it himself—the magic would simply cease to be wherever he encountered it, and all the other children would cry and rail as he ruined their fun. He still had a tiny scar just beneath his left eye from where the daughter of a marquis, quite put out with him for spoiling a game, had thrown a blue crystal vase at him. It had shattered against the doorframe beside his head, but a shard of the glass had still pierced his skin.

The first time he’d seen this flying contraption, Camille had refused to go onto it. At least with the tanks, if he fouled up the thaumaturgy the worst that would happen was that he and the crew manning it would have a walk ahead of them. If he obviated the spells powering an airship, he would fall from the sky. While Camille was resigned to the likely prospect of a violent death, he refused to bring it upon himself if at all possible.

It was interesting, then, to be assured by the thaumaturge behind the airship that Camille could fly in it with no problem. “This model’s ability to fly is based in physics, not spellcraft,” he’d assured Camille. “The materials that create the vacuum that expands the negative space within its sphere are all perfectly mundane. The spells simply act as stabilizers and improve the rate of speed.”

“Negative space?” Camille had asked. “What exactly do you mean?”

The man had grinned. “I’m so glad you asked!” Then he proceeded to go on at length about gases that were lighter than air, and how he had determined that if he could create a material that could be expanded from a perfectly empty state, the subsequent expansion would be filled with Nothing, which would necessarily be lighter than air and provide lift.

Camille considered himself a fair hand at most of the sciences, but the physics of this explanation had been quite beyond him. Nevertheless, the thaumaturge was right—the ship had lifted off with no difficulties with him in the cabin, well away from the expanding sphere of Nothingness above. Getting rid of any of the existing magic wouldn’t cause any sort of problem.

Adding to it was a different story. The device would lock into place if the stabilizing spells failed, maintaining their lift, but if the spells were altered by another thaumaturge, things would begin to unravel. It was best not to risk it.

Camille wondered what Anton thought of it all.

I can ask…but no, perhaps he couldn’t. Perhaps he was nothing more than a brute in the eyes of his lover. Former lover?

He is exhausted and injured and aggrieved, and perhaps you are so quick to take offense because you know there is more truth to his question than you’re comfortable with. Camille knew that he was capable of great violence, but he hoped to hold that aspect of himself away from Anton. I would keep him in the dark about my own darkness, for as long as possible.

Unless it was forever, it wouldn’t be long enough.

The whistle sounded. All the passengers but himself had boarded. Camille squared his shoulders and marched onto the airship. They would have more time to talk in Paris. He would right things between them there.

Chapter Ten

Anton considered himself to be well-versed in the art of thaumaturgy. Yes, his specialty had nothing to do with massive moving contraptions such as this airship, but he’d taken all the basic classes of spellwork and had a decent understanding of both engineering and design, thanks to his father’s abilities as an inventor. He wore a translation device that tuned the ear and the tongue to expertise in seven different languages, for heaven’s sake. This airship, while impressive, didn’t immediately stun him.

What stunned him was the look on Caroline’s face as she was escorted inside and settled down, along with plenty of extra padding, to strap in. She seemed rapturous, her gaze darting all over the place, her mouth agape as she took it all in. Caroline was better at pure equational thaumaturgy than Anton by a long shot. She wasn’t the greatest at putting her creations into practice, but as theoreticians went she was one of the best in all of England. The fact she appeared so intrigued was interesting, and also alarming. If Camille caught sight of her now, he would know something was going on.

Monsieur Deschamps and Cardinal Proulx were settled in a few minutes later, with Camille completing their sextet on the far end. Anton couldn’t see him from where he was sitting, and he was all right with that—he had more than enough to worry about without staring into the face of his lover and wondering if the man meant to give him the cold shoulder for the rest of their time together. He thought about the bodies in the hold below, Caroline’s poor lady-in-waiting and Voclain, who was a bastard but who still shouldn’t have died that way. He thought of the fine holster tucked inside his own vest, and of the too-numerous possibilities for the true identity of the vicomte’s murderer.

Anton took one self-indulgent minute to close his eyes and wish that he hadn’t accepted Dr. Grable’s invitation to join him in Paris, to try and imagine the arc of his life if he’d refused to go along with it.

Poverty. Disgrace. Personal and professional dead ends. Perhaps jumping both feet first into a potential murderous conspiracy was worth avoiding those fates.

A low whirring, so faint that for a minute Anton didn’t even realize what he was hearing, finally registered in his ears. The ship wasn’t moving yet, but the engines seemed to be warming up. Somewhere beneath him, a horrendous creak emerged as a disconcerting counterpoint to the whirr.

“What the bloody hell is that?” Deschamps shrieked. Anton was glad someone else had said it, because the same words were on the tip of his tongue.

“Something in the engine room!” Caroline shouted back, looking excited. “Probably linked to their method of lift!” She stared about their little cabin, entranced. “Look at the auras!”

Auras? Aura-viewing was the basest level of thaumaturgy, something even hedge-witches could do. Nevertheless, Anton took a deep breath and centered himself as best he could, ignoring his aches and pains and the horrible noise and clearing his mind of everything but the thought of magic. When he opened his eyes—

“Oh.” Oh. My. God. Spellwork spiraled all around them, equations pounded into the actual fabric of the metal at their backs and beneath their seats. It glowed a bright, silvery blue, and crossed its own path over and over again, a near-infinite loop of powerful symbology made flesh—so to speak—in the ship. “Sir.” Anton turned to Dr. Grable, but the older man had managed to fall asleep. It was probably for the best, what with the pain he had to be in, but Anton was disappointed for his sake. This was a wondrous thing to see.

“The beauty of the holy design of the Lord our Father,” Anton heard the cardinal murmur. Despite not being much of a religious man, he had to agree with the sentiment.

The ship was practically in the air before Anton registered it, he was so absorbed in the movement of the spells. The groan got louder, the whirr intensified, and then Anton could tell from the way his stomach swooped into his throat that they had achieved lift. Incredible. They were flying!

I wish I could see it, even though there is nothing to see outside but the dark of night. Flying!

The ship gradually grew colder as they gained altitude. Interestingly, the colder it became, the softer the groan, until by the time Anton could no longer feel his fingers and toes, the only thing making noise was the whirr. That was when he looked beyond the auras of the spells and saw the first hint of the Nothing’s residue seep into the room.

It rose through the floor and down through the walls in a ghostly shimmer, almost ectoplasmic—not the result of spells, not this. Monsieur Deschamps whimpered and shut his eyes tight, and the cardinal began to speak a simple prayer, but Anton watched the glittering waves pass through the cabin, through them, and knew that by being in this ship, he was living in the mind of a genius. Whoever had invented it was brilliant, perhaps even more brilliant than Anton’s father. If France had practitioners of this caliber on their side, then the rest of the world had better be on its guard.

It seemed as though Caroline might be thinking the same thing, if the thoughtful grimace on her face was any indicator.

Please don’t do anything to risk yourself. Anton could commiserate with her situation, and the fact she was being flown to the heart of the empire’s intellectual war machine in a cutting-edge piece of thaumaturgy and engineering had to be tempting, but the risks were so high if she was caught.

It wouldn’t be your problem to solve, Anton reminded himself, but even as he thought it he knew it for a lie. Caroline had helped him through some of the darkest times in his life, and he couldn’t abandon her just because she’d chosen country over common sense.

Another lurch in his stomach and throat told him that the airship was changing its angle. They were heading down now—back toward the earth from whatever height they had soared to. Next time—if there ever was a next time—he would ask to be released near the end so he could at least watch as they came in for a landing.

The groan came back with a vengeance, and the strange sheets of plasma vanished as the noise rose. Finally the ship set down, and the auras of the thaumaturgical equations faded into the background until they disappeared.

“Here at last,” Camille said from over to the left. “On behalf of his Imperial Majesty Napoleon the Third, welcome to Paris.”

Chapter Eleven

The airship had set down in a cobblestone plaza surrounded on three sides by tall, multi-story buildings made of stark, pale stone. Torches ringed the plaza, and one of the buildings was lit from the inside. The travelers clustered at the base of the airship, waiting to be given direction as the captain and Bert stayed aboard and Camille took his time to appear. The air was thick with smoke, too strong and too acrid to come from the torch fires. Anton wrinkled his nose as he looked around, searching for the source of the scent.

“Petrol,” Dr. Grable muttered. “It’s a new type of fuel, a derivative of tar, I believe.”

Of course the doctor had already known what Anton was keying into. “I thought the airship ran on magic and…and Nothing,” he whispered back, keeping a weather eye toward the approach. A man in a long, scholarly black robe was walking out to meet them, flanked by servants displaying matching imperial regalia—white and blue coats embroidered with the golden fleur des lis.

“There’s far more going on in this place than can be accounted for by an airship, lad,” Dr. Grable replied just as the newcomer reached them.

“Welcome, honored guests, welcome.” He inclined his head. “What a terrible business, these difficulties you’ve faced. I’m quite pleased that most of you have made it to the Institute whole and healthy. I’m Lord Jourdain, and I’ll be responsible for your welfare until tomorrow, when the duke, our Chancellor, can greet you himself.” Camille finally descended from the airship, and the look on Lord Jourdain’s face tightened.

“You’re as gracious a host as you ever were,” Camille said with perfect, icy politeness. “Has the vicomte’s brother been contacted?”

“It is late,” Lord Jourdain demurred. “Not everyone sits up by their communicators into the night, waiting for trouble to find them. We will speak with him tomorrow. For now, I have been instructed to show you to your rooms and provide any assistance, be it personal—” he nodded respectfully at Caroline “—or medical.”

Next he addressed Dr. Grable, and Anton was surprised at how genuinely gracious he seemed. “I have procured a litter for you that will bring you to the infirmary, sir.” An odd device Anton had never seen before—not a regular human-borne litter, but a table set on broad wheels that looked more like a rolling bed than a simple, serviceable hospital item—appeared, drawn by a single servant.

“What good is an assistant if I can’t make him carry me around?” Dr. Grable asked, but the tension in him eased as he settled onto the litter.

“Your aide will be escorted to his rooms, sir. I will ensure a servant is available to direct him to you as needed.” Lord Jourdain made a gesture, and Dr. Grable was taken away. Anton felt an urge to run after him—he was his mentor, after all, and Anton was as much responsible for his well-being as the other way around.

Monsieur Deschamps was already stepping up to fill the void of Dr. Grable’s exit. “I just want to leave,” he insisted. “I did what I was sent to do, and nothing about this whole affair went right, not from the very beginning. I just want to go back to my home in the city. Will you arrange a coach for me?”

Lord Jourdain’s expression cooled again. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Because two members of your party are dead.” His voice was implacable—Anton wondered whether he and Camille had been educated by the same people, to end up with such a perfect mimicry of each other.

Ridiculous. Camille had been separated from other children due to his state of soullessness, Anton knew that much. The fact that the two men comported themselves so similarly was an issue of court manners, most likely. “One of them was a lord. An investigation is called for, and while that investigation is taking place, no one involved in the incident may leave the premises. You have stayed here before, Monsieur, and you are most welcome again. I will take pains to ensure your continued comfort.

“Now, Lady Cuthbert,” he continued, ignoring the stuttering Deschamps as if he wasn’t even there, “if you’ll be so kind as to follow Madame Vernier, she shall tend to your needs while I ensure that your baggage is delivered to the appropriate room.”

“I would be delighted,” Caroline said, ever cordial. “It’s been a rather trying day, and I’m looking forward to a respite from it all.” She seemed to wilt a little for the first time that evening, and Anton bit back a smile. He knew what she was doing—Caroline was adept at playing into the common apprehensions about her sex as a means of getting others to let their guards down around her.

Anton’s urge to smile faded as he realized that the reason she was doing it now was probably in an effort to make it easier to steal secrets. He glanced away, out into the darkness beyond the airship, the one direction that wasn’t blocked with a building. A low rumble seemed to emanate from the gloom—he couldn’t quite see what was making it, but he could hear it clear, if faint, and beneath that, the noise of men calling to one another.

What was going on out there?

“You’ll find out soon enough,” a soft voice spoke from just behind him. Anton barely contained his jump as he turned and faced Camille. “You must be tired, now. Allow me to escort you to your chambers.”

“How do you even know where my chambers are?” Anton challenged him.

“I know where Dr. Granger is to be housed, and your rooms adjoin his.”

Oh. That was…not quite what Anton had expected. He didn’t know what he had been expecting, but it wasn’t that. This is no place to lower your guard, he chided himself. “Thank you. I’d appreciate that.”

“Excellent. Come with me.” Camille swept off down the path without a second glance at Lord Jourdain. Interestingly, his lordship said nothing about the lumière absconding with a guest, and let them pass with a cordial nod to Anton, which he returned in a rush.

They walked into the building ahead of them, which turned out to be something of a dormitory—the bottom floor seemed to mostly consist of common rooms, but at the far south-facing end a number of elaborate doors were situated—visitor’s suites, most likely. Next to the one on the far right was a much less decorative door, which led into a small but well-appointed set of rooms: one for sleeping, one a washroom. A wardrobe showed that some simple clothes had been provided, as well as a tray of food and a steaming hot tin bath in the other room. Anton was glad that he wouldn’t need to brave a communal bath in order to cleanse himself.

Camille shut the door behind them, and it was as though all of the nervous energy that had been keeping Anton on his feet since the train wreck abandoned him at once. He slumped onto the bed, then straightened with a hiss as his ribs complained. He touched them gingerly, his fingers running over the bump of the holster inside of his vest.

Then he remembered that Camille was there, and looked up.

Camille was staring straight back, a worried frown marring his face. “Anton,” he said, quiet but firm, “you must tell me what happened on the train.”

“I didn’t hurt anyone,” Anton insisted, too fatigued to realize what he’d given away until Camille’s expression darkened further.

“Who did hurt someone, then? Who is responsible for the death of Vicomte Voclain and that poor woman?”

“I…” Anton’s thoughts swam. “I found…but it’s just, it’s too late to be of any use, I wasn’t allowed to cast my spells on the car and now…”

“Anton.” Camille came to him, but instead of looming over him, he knelt on one knee in front of him, reached out and clasped his free hand. “I do not blame you for anything that happened on that train,” he said, slow and distinct. “Anything. But I am a lumière, and I have a crime to solve. Help me to protect the innocent by giving me what I need to discover the guilty.”

How could he refuse such a plea? “I found this,” Anton said, pulling out the holster. He stared at it, running his fingertips over the silver design in the leather. “There was no gun in it, but that could have been disposed of outside. I wanted to test it against the bullet in Voclain’s chest, but I didn’t have time. Still…it’s more likely, isn’t it, that someone shot him during the crash than that someone made an impossible shot from outside the train? The spell in the palimpsest…it can’t have gotten so far so fast, can it?”

Camille stared in silence at the holster for a moment. “Is it too late to cast a spell to discover its owner?”

“In all likelihood,” Anton said morosely. “I doubt I would be able to get anything definitive.”

“Mm, a pity.” Camille touched the outline of the silver. “A beautiful design—Hungarian, if I’m not mistaken. Quite striking. Not the sort of thing that you could buy in the heart of France, and I daresay the weapon that goes with it matches it in design.” He smiled. “Thank the good lord for idiot criminals, is all I can say.”

Anton frowned. “Who is an idiot criminal?”

“Oh, I’ll discover it soon enough. Right now, I’m afraid I’m done in, and so are you.” Camille squeezed his hand, then stood. “I’ll bid you good night, then, and see you again in the morning.” There was no kiss, but Anton was all right with that. He felt foul with sweat and blood, and was going to wash off before climbing into that feather bed if it was the last thing he did.

“Anton…”

He glanced up and saw Camille half-turned at the door, watching him. “Was there anything else you wanted to tell me?”

So much. So very much, but I can’t. “No,” Anton murmured, averting his eyes. “Nothing else. Good night, Camille.”

“Good night, then.”

Chapter Twelve

Anton woke to feel his bed shaking.

Well, not shaking per se, more of a continuous low rumble causing a light vibration in the exquisite marble flooring. It traveled up the metal frame of the bed in such a way that it was just enough to break through Anton’s unquiet slumber. He hadn’t slept well, despite his immense fatigue and the demands on his body, but that wasn’t the bed’s fault.

It was someone’s fault that he was awake right now, though—whoever thought that driving a plow right outside the window of an imperial building was a good bloody idea? How many horses—

No, wait, this was all new-fangled technology, wasn’t it? It was likely to be something automated. Anton growled under his breath before sliding out from beneath the down comforter—lord, his chest and back had tightened up terribly overnight, he was going to need a long soak in a deep tub to rid himself of that ache—and onto his feet. He limped over to the window and opened the shutters, quite prepared to open the glass next and shout at his tormentors.

He was not expecting to see the thing that rolled by. Anton was struck dumb by it, his brain as tied up as his tongue seemed to be. He had never seen anything like it.

It was a…no, not a train…and not an automobile, he’d seen pictures, they were nothing like this. This was like a metal box traveling about on rolling pins, or something quite like them. It was odd and blocky, and would have looked ridiculous if not for the very long, big-bore cannon sticking out one end of the box. That took the contraption from fanciful to fearful in a heartbeat.

What in God’s name was the Empire experimenting with? Not merely a cannon, but a mobile one—Anton was willing to bet that those odd conveyances at its base did a decent job on a wide variety of terrains. Presumably there was a person inside the box, perhaps two, one to drive it and another to load balls into the cannon. The box itself was metal—how thick, Anton couldn’t say, but probably dense enough to turn aside most infantry-level firearms. This contraption could turn the tide on a frenzied battlefield.

He was so engaged in watching it, he almost forgot about his injuries until an injudicious lean forward made his entire back spasm. Good grief, that tree had battered him from tailbone to skull. He couldn’t imagine he had time for a bath now, so that much would have to wait, but he could have another decent shower. The water was surprisingly warm. Then he would find out more about that incredible machine.

Anton was surprised, and a bit perturbed, to find that his personal things had been delivered during the night. He should have remembered that it was far from unusual in an elevated household—or whatever this was—for servants to do their work as though the guests weren’t even there, but if he had remembered to set his customary warding spells, it could have been dangerous to someone.

Anton would have to ask if he was allowed warding spells here, actually. He’d gotten into the habit of it ever since arriving at university, but here he wasn’t a paying student—he was a guest.

At any rate, he found his trunk and his holdall and, after the shower, found a covered tray by the bed containing coffee and the flakiest, richest, most delectable croissant Anton had ever eaten. He devoured it with all the care he could muster—it wouldn’t do to get crumbs on his suit—and sipped the coffee with a feeling of reverence. Tea would have been nice, but on a morning like this, coffee was even better.

Anton made sure his clothes were neat, his tie straight and his jacket as unwrinkled as he could get it before putting his translation plate back in—it never handled pastry well—and heading for the door. He opened it, took one step out of his room, and was met by a servant in the same gold and blue regalia he’d seen last night.

“Mister Seiber?” the portly man asked in a reserved tone.

“I…yes?” Who else would be stepping out of his room right now?

“I have instructions to direct you to the infirmary so that you may confirm for yourself the status of your employer, Dr. Grable. If you would be so kind as to follow me?”

Wait, he was still in the infirmary? “Is he all right?” Anton asked.

“Apart from the broken leg, I believe he’s quite well, sir.” The man’s dry tone could have evaporated a spring shower. “This way, if you please.” He led Anton down the main hall, took a sharp left halfway to the grand doors Anton had entered through last night, and finally stopped in front of a thick white door in a gilded frame. He knocked, and a moment later the door opened.

“Finally!” the physician—and she had to be a physician in that outfit, the cloth as white as the door but elegant enough to stand out in a crowd—snapped. “He has been asking for you all morning, this one. It would have been all night as well, if he hadn’t taken a dose of laudanum.”

“Which I wouldn’t have taken if you hadn’t put it into my tea, you devil woman!”

Anton relaxed a little at the sound of his mentor’s voice. The physician scowled. “Is he always this irascible?” she asked, dismissing the servant with a wave and closing the door. The infirmary was small, but beautifully appointed—not a military setup at all. There were only four beds, but the sheer amount and expense of the equipment surrounding them was impressive.

“Only around people who challenge him,” Anton replied.

“She doesn’t challenge me, I am not challenged by a woman who is little better than a woodcutter but with bones—”

“And I am far from cowed by a man whose only claim to being a doctor is lifting himself high up into an ivory tower so that he might piss upon those beneath him,” she snapped back, stalking over to the bed that Dr. Grable was laid out on. He was sitting up, his leg expertly cast and a dire look on his already-dour face. “And if you do not continue to lie down, I will have my orderlies tie you to this bed for the next six hours, just see if I don’t!”

“I’ve had better treatment from the enemy!”

“I’ll show you an enemy, you old—”

“Excuse me,” Anton broke in, self-conscious but also increasingly worried about the prospect of bloodshed. “Doctor…?” He glanced at the woman.

“Wictoryn. Dr. Boria Wictoryn.”

“Dr. Wictoryn, if you would give me leave to assist Dr. Grable in one of those moving beds—”

“I will not be rolled about in a bed like an invalid—”

“Or something like it, I promise I will keep his efforts to an absolute minimum.” Anton smiled apologetically. “I fear if I don’t, neither of you will get much accomplished today.”

“I have wheelchairs,” she said with a sniff. “I can make one available to you. But I will be relying on you to attend to his every need, is that understood? If he returned to me worse than I left him to you, I will be most displeased with you, young man.”

Anton felt a genuine frisson of fear, coupled with laughter. “I understand completely. Thank you so much.”

“Hmph.” She left the room, and Anton turned back to Dr. Grable expecting to be yelled at. Instead, his mentor was grinning at him.

“Hell of a woman, isn’t she?” he asked.

“Uh…”

“Quite a firebrand. And so she should be, otherwise she would be trodden underfoot in a place like this. But enough of that for now, lad. Tell me, did you see them this morning?”

Anton frowned. “See what?”

“The tanks, my boy!” The doctor gestured toward the long, broad window. “The tanks!”

“A…tank?” Anton looked with new interest at the mechanical marvels roaming about outside. Now that he had a better view, he could tell there were in fact only three of them and not an actual herd…group? Battalion? Whatever you called a group of something like that in a military context. “As in a tank of water? A tank of, of fuel? Or are these magical too?”

“In the case of these particular beasts, I believe the engines are powered by petrol.”

“Really?” Anton couldn’t quite picture it. “Isn’t that enormously heavy?”

Dr. Grable shrugged. “The engines provide enough horsepower to overcome the inertia inherent in carrying the fuel, but it’s true they can’t get very far on it yet. Steam might be more effective, but they’d still have the weight of the coal.”

“Why not magic, then? The way the airship does it?”

“Delicate magic,” Dr. Grable reminded him. “Very delicate, intricate magic acting on a highly unusual flotation system. The equations don’t yet exist that could allow magic to successfully long-term operate a machine like these tanks. They will eventually,” he added with an air of resignation, “but they don’t yet. You must remember, this is a joint research facility. Magic informs science and vice-versa, but these disciplines also stand on their own.”

“If they’re already capable of things like this,” Anton began, “what could they possibly need us for?”

“Judging worth. Remember? We’re not here for the quality of our minds, although I have no doubt you could run circles around some of the thaumaturges they have working here,” Dr. Grable said bracingly. “There is deep mistrust of their own people within the imperial leadership, and for the first time I have to say I’m beginning to see why. Voclain dead, terrorist attacks, experimental airships at the beck and call of a lowly lumière…these are very strange circumstances, to say the least. I’m actually quite pleased to be here, now—we may have the opportunity to thwart an act of sabotage.”

“You might,” Anton said. “I don’t share your ability at evaluating thaumaturgic equivalencies. I’m just here to assist you however I may.” He took in Dr. Grable’s cagey expression. “Aren’t I?”

“Is that woman fetching the wheelchair from the other end of the bloody institute?” Dr. Grable muttered, then patted the bed beside himself. “Sit down for a moment, lad.”

Oh, dear. The doctor was being hospitable. This didn’t bode well. Nevertheless, Anton sat.

“You are certainly here to assist me,” Dr. Grable stated. “To help me with any thaumaturgical heavy lifting, so to speak. And yes, the primary task of evaluating the spells currently in production will fall to me and me alone. However, if my theory that an act of sabotage or falseness has already taken place and been detected, I find it very unlikely that another such act will be discoverable by someone like me. Whoever did it knows that they’re being watched. I could probably scour this place from top to toe and not uncover a whit of imbalanced magic, much less actual sabotage.”

“Then what—”

“Which is where you come in,” Dr. Grable continued as if he’d never paused for breath. “I am a figure who will, because of my reputation, necessarily be a part of an elite crowd while I am here. This isn’t arrogance, it’s simply fact, and now that my leg is broken I shall have even less freedom than I might have had before.

“You, on the other hand, are a young man of excellent mind but few means. You will not be approached by people looking to buy your influence, because you have no influence. On the contrary—it would be considered strange for you not to try and ingratiate yourself with some of the resident thaumaturges and scientists, in case one of them might offer you a better path to solvency.”

Anton was dumbfounded. “You want me to…to what, act as a spy for you?” God, was there no escaping that fate?

The doctor held up his hand. “Only in a manner of speaking, and a crude one at that. What I want you to do is to look at the people behind the work they’re doing, not simply at the work itself. You’re better than most of the students I’ve taught when it comes to understanding the mind as well as the mechanism. Look for someone whose work doesn’t line up with their aspirations, someone who professes one thing but secretly desires another.”

Dr. Grable sighed, his shoulders slumping a bit. “I hate to put this sort of responsibility on your shoulders, Anton, but the truth of the matter is that neither of us would be here right now if all was well. Something in this beautiful, miraculous place is rotten, and we must discover what it is before the rot spreads. It could mean saving hundreds, thousands of lives in the end.”

“Or costing hundreds or thousands of lives,” Anton had to point out. “This is a place that has dedicated itself to the pursuit and improvement of warfare. What if, in rooting out a traitor, we’re actually making way for death to become even more efficient?”

“It’s only something to worry about when it’s your side that’s dying,” Dr. Grable replied bluntly. “The emperor hasn’t held his throne for the last fifty years by being a pacifist, but he hasn’t been a tyrant either. I don’t like the thought of integrating myself further into the machine, but I like even less the idea of uprisings and insurgencies springing up in every town and city with a suitably disaffected populace. It doesn’t take much for mild discontent to turn into a soul-lashing fervor, Anton. I’ve seen it happen many times before.”

He nodded toward the door. “You’re English by nationality, of course, so it’s not your fight, not yet. If you feel you can’t do this, I understand. Now, this very morning, is probably the last chance you’ll have to convince Lord Jourdain or the lumière to let you go.”

No. No, it was already far too late for that. It had been too late the moment Caroline entered the picture. Camille had sealed Anton’s fate. “I’ll stay,” he said.

“I appreciate that, my lad.”

Dr. Wictoryn reentered the clinic, a wide black leather wheelchair with silver fittings pushed in front of her. “It took me a while to find one that would suit your width,” she said acidly to Dr. Grable.

“Oh, for the love of God, woman—”

Anton sighed. He could probably return to his room, cast the stasis spell, and be back before their argument finished. But no—he didn’t have his holdall yet. Perhaps it was in Dr. Grable’s quarters.

“I beg your pardon, let me help you move him,” Anton said at last, breaking into the building argument. He got under Dr. Grable’s arm and was helping him to his feet before Dr. Wictoryn caught her breath and realized she had work to do if she didn’t want her patient to end up on the ground.

The transfer to the wheelchair went well enough, and afterward she escorted them out of her clinic with stern orders that culminated in “—ensure that I see him at least once a day, do you understand me?”

“Harridan!”

“Gasbag!” She slammed the door shut, and Dr. Grable chuckled.

“Once a day, eh? Lucky me! Now, let’s find my rooms and then order someone to give us a tour of this place.”

That, at least, was a plan Anton could get behind.

Chapter Thirteen

The tour guide was easily found—a member of the innocuous disapproving staff approached them as soon as they left Dr. Grable’s rooms and escorted them to the dining hall where, they were coolly informed, “the rest of your party awaits.”

Anton understood that the insinuation had to do with them being inconvenient for everyone else, but he was willing to let it slide. Dr. Grable, however, was used to being attended to by a staff who kept their opinions to themselves, for fear of bringing his wrath and extra duties down on them. He wouldn’t take it at the university, and he wasn’t about to take it here. The dressing-down was short and ferociously blunt, culminating with “—as I’ve just had my damn leg tended to by your in-house witch doctor, I believe I’ve more than enough reasons to force a little wait on my behalf, and I don’t care if you agree with me or not, man, try that attitude to my face again and you might find a frog staring back at you in a mirror one day.”

Their escort went silent after that, bowed a bit lower and kept more distance, and Dr. Grable looked up at Anton and murmured, “And now I’ll be roundly despised by the staff, who will have more sympathy for you if you take care to look a bit beleaguered.” Anton took that as a stage direction, and attempted to make himself appear more hangdog than he already felt as they entered the dining hall.

But this was not a mere hall. This was an elegant oak table that seated perhaps twenty, not a place where the staff and soldiers and scientists and whoever else lived here came to eat. The long, shining expanse of wood was covered with trays of thinly sliced meat and cheese, bowls of fruit, platters of bread and jam and mounds of beautiful white butter carved into elegant shapes, silver pots of coffee and tea, juice and water with actual ice cubes sparkling in it. There was also a small stack of empty plates, indicating that the others in the room had, in fact, eaten.

Lord Jourdain stood talking with Cardinal Proulx over matched cups of coffee by the largest windows. Caroline was sitting in a little gaggle of women at a side table, both high-ranking servants from the look of things, their stern miens softened by her engaging manner and the pretty picture she made in her sky-blue dress. She glanced over at Anton as he and Dr. Grable entered, but had the sense only to smile briefly rather than being more engaging. Monsieur Deschamps paced by the fireplace, staring from one little nexus of conversation to the other as though he knew how odd it was for him to be isolated so, but couldn’t do anything about it.

Camille was nowhere to be seen. That bothered Anton more than he wanted to admit.

Lord Jourdain was the first to break off and join them, his new robes nearly indistinguishable from what he wore to greet them yesterday, grey-streaked hair pulled back in a neat tail. “Gentlemen, welcome. I trust you both slept well?”

“The sleeping went well enough, but your doctor is an unstoppable force when she has something on her mind,” Dr. Grable said with a grunt, waving Anton toward the nearest teapot. He served himself, stretching for the cup with a grimace but scowling when Anton moved to assist him.

“Yes, Dr. Wictoryn is quite excellent at her work, isn’t she?”

Dr. Grable inclined his head. “She is indeed, sir.”

“I’m pleased you think well of her capabilities. Her preferred focus is research, of course, this being a research institute, but one of the caveats of the position of a medical researcher was that she be on hand to deal with any injuries that crop up among the staff or guests.”

“I’ve no complaints.”

That would be a first if it were true, Anton muttered in his own head.

“While you two gentlemen help yourself to breakfast, allow me to begin my explanations of the grounds and those areas permissible for visitors to frequent.” Lord Jourdain looked around the room. “You might have noticed that the Institute is built like a keyhole, with three substantial buildings linked in a U-shape and a gate and guard towers closing that U up. We are currently in the central building, which is dedicated to administrative matters, including the feeding and housing of our guests and staff.

“The building to the north,” he waved to the side with his left hand, “is where our thaumaturges do the majority of their work. The central hall there is open to you, as well as the meeting rooms and learning laboratories, but if you encounter a locked door, you must not try to force it. Intrusion into private research matters of the Empire will result in a swift reckoning.

“The south building,” he continued as if he hadn’t just promised a long drop and a quick stop to anyone who stuck their nose where it didn’t belong, “is dedicated to our engineers, where the laboratories are much larger and less individualistic. You may view them from a walkway accessible on the second floor, but if they are covered, you are not to look further. You are not under any circumstances allowed to be on the ground floor in those laboratories unless accompanied by myself or another qualified engineer. This is for your own safety, and disregarding this rule could result in a very painful accident.” He folded his hands together and looked around the room. “Are there any questions at this juncture?”

“This is all so exciting!” Caroline said, batting her eyelashes a bit. “If I may ask, do you have any women thaumaturges or engineers on staff?”

“Several of each, Lady Cuthbert.”

“How delightful! I would so like to meet them. The thought of bringing word of France’s great social progress in acknowledging all that women have to offer back to England absolutely thrills me.”

Lord Jourdain smiled indulgently, and Anton almost reeled from how smoothly Caroline had stitched herself into the fabric of the place. Lord, if she were a diplomat she would be unstoppable. “That can certainly be arranged, my lady. Anything else?”

“Yes.” Cardinal Proulx was fingering his cross. “What of the late Vicomte Voclain? When are his services to be held?”

“His brother has been contacted and is on his way,” Lord Jourdain said. “It is a journey of several days, and he is insisting that his brother be interred on their ancestral grounds.” His voice went a bit flatter. “Among other things. Undoubtedly he’ll wish to speak with you, to ensure that the last rites were performed as well as could be expected under the circumstances.”

“Of course, of course.” The cardinal inclined his head. “I would be very pleased to meet with the new vicomte.”

“He will be, won’t he?” Lord Jourdain’s eyes sharpened a bit, but nothing else about him indicated undue interest in the incoming Voclain. “Is there anything else?”

No one said a word.

“In that case, I ask that you please follow me to the Engineering wing of the Institute.”

Chapter Fourteen

If Anton had been expecting a scene from some sort of ancient Hephaestionesque forge in the Engineering wing, full of fire and smoke and grit, he’d have been disappointed. This had to be the tidiest shop of its type he’d ever seen, and also the largest. From the second floor, which he and Dr. Grable had reached thanks to the assistance of an elevator—quite a luxury—it stretched on for a length comparable to the entire main lecturing hall at the university. Not just one of the large chambers for lectures—all of them.

The breadth of it was stunning, and the level of organization that had to go into keeping it all running equally breathtaking. There were enormous structures partially elevated in places, with men and, indeed, a few women running around beneath them doing things with tools so esoteric that Anton could hardly imagine their use. He’d rarely felt more out of place.

Engineering and thaumaturgy were close cousins to many practitioners. They both had a basis in mathematical formulas and equations, but where thaumaturgy climbed into the spiritual and ethereal, engineering dug in its roots and planted itself deep within the earthen realm of practicality. For Anton, that was a mental bridge he had little facility at making—he was a thaumaturge through and through, better with alchemical symbolism than imaginary numbers. Someone like Caroline, whom he noted looked rather avaricious right now, saw a long way in both directions.

“Our Chief Engineer is Giovanni Da Vinci. Yes,” Lord Jourdain added with a hint of pride in his voice, “of those Da Vincis. It took some convincing to pry him away from his sinecure with the papacy, but to be the lord and master of the engine of the French Empire did the trick.”

“Absolutely fascinating,” Caroline exclaimed. “Is that the beginnings of another airship over there, like the one that picked us up?”

“It is, with a few modifications to the frame. The next generation of tanks are being constructed in the yard outside—there isn’t space for the number the emperor requested be built in here.”

“And multi-shot cannon,” Dr. Grable noted sourly.

“A step above what you might remember from the front, but not so different overall,” Lord Jourdain demurred. “Single-shot cannon still have their uses, but if a man can carry a double-barreled gun, why shouldn’t a machine make better use of its own solidity?”

“Why indeed? Anything spelled yet?”

“Ah, no. Signore Da Vinci is very particular about finishing his work before passing it on to our thaumaturges. They consult each other on projects, obviously, but for the most part he is left to do his work without consideration of magical enhancement.” Lord Jourdain set off along the walkway at a steady pace, pointing out a few things of interest but leaving far more unmentioned. It wasn’t surprising—he couldn’t be keen to give too much away, after all—but Anton wished for Caroline’s sake that the man was more forthcoming. The less she felt compelled to sneak about in search of information, the better it would go for her.

Unlike me, who has to sneak about regardless.

They spent an hour or so in Engineering, which was about forty-five minutes longer than Anton had real patience for, before finally heading over to the Thaumaturgy wing. As soon as they stepped through the door, Anton felt more at ease—the quiet hum of magic filled the air, gentle pressure along his skin like a breeze that had learned to stand still. The central hall they walked into was empty save for one man writing on a chalkboard taking up the entire length of one wall. It appeared to be a series of equations that had to do with…propulsion? Was that the symbol for quicksilver?

“That is Lord Atwood, one of our greatest masters of theoretical thaumaturgical symbology,” Lord Jourdain said, leading them forward. “My lord, good morning.” When the older man didn’t so much as look up, Lord Jourdain repeated “Good morning!” in an elevated tone of voice.

“Ah!” Lord Atwood turned around to glance at them. “Visitors, how lovely.” He spoke excellent English, without even a hint of accent. “Are you here for the colloquium on ether? One of my students is presenting it—should be quite nice. It’s not happening for a few hours yet, though.”

Caroline raised her hand in a demure wave. Anton knew that wave. For her, it was the equivalent of jumping up and down. “I’d love to listen to it,” she said. “I’ve read all your early papers on the subject, it’s absolutely fascinating.”

“Papers? Eh? Speak up, lass!”

“Yes, all the early ones!” she shouted.

“Ah! The British ones, you mean! Ha! Come a long way since those, we have. You’re British, then?” He turned astonished eyes at Lord Jourdain. “I thought the whole point of me being here was to get my work away from those British bastards.”

Lord Jourdain nodded. “It was, but I think we can exempt Lady Cuthbert from the ranks of bastardry for the time being. The emperor looks upon this as a chance to impress the outside world with our innovations.”

“Impress, eh? You mean he wants us to scare the pants off ‘em!” Lord Atwood cackled to himself. “Fine, fine! I’ll be happy to scare this young woman a bit. You know these symbols behind me?” he challenged her.

“I’m well acquainted with them,” she replied, a bit more tart than cheery now.

“Then take what I’ve got up here and solve for acceleration of an object through the specified magic-free zone, with the variables as given.” He rubbed his hands together. “If you can find a way to get it across our hypothetical barren wasteland, I’ll let you into my lab and show you some really scary work.”

“Fine.” Caroline snatched the chalk out of his hand and studied the board. After a minute of silence, she leaned in and began to write.

Anton would have continued watching, had he not heard the slightest creak of a rusty hinge behind him. He glanced back to see one of the doors to the private labs was open just wide enough to admit an observer to watch the proceedings. When whoever it was noticed Anton looking their way, the gap tightened. Tightened, but didn’t vanish. They were still watching.

Was this a student of Lord Atwood? A curious researcher? If so, were they curious about the equation, or about the visitors? Thaumaturges were notoriously cagey when it came to sharing their work, but these luminaries were only here at the indulgence of the emperor. It seemed that meant that sharing was a given.

Caroline stopped writing a moment later. “There. Done.”

Lord Atwood peered at the equations. “Not bad,” he said at last. “You didn’t compensate for wind resistance, though.”

“That wasn’t part of the original symbology.”

“It’s part of the physics of the problem, girl, and the symbology is only as good as the reality that it works within. Still.” He stroked the sparse hairs covering his chin. “I suppose it’s good enough to warrant a peek at the lab. Bring the rest of these people, Jourdain, let’s see what they make of it all.” He began to wander away, and the party moved to follow.

Anton stopped one of the ever-present staff. “Would you be so kind as to take over conveying Dr. Grable for a moment or two?” he asked. Dr. Grable glanced up at Anton but didn’t object. The servant took over, and Anton glanced at the private lab again. The crack was still there. Taking a breath, he turned and began to walk slowly, softly, toward the door.

Once Anton was within five feet of the door though, it snapped shut. Damn it! A closed door was as good as a locked one, or so he’d been told. And yet…the curiosity was there, inside whoever was behind this door. The interest was present, he simply had to make himself affable enough to put up with in exchange for news.

“Excuse me,” he called out, modulating his voice to keep from alarming the rest of the party as they headed down the hall, but loud enough to ensure it go through the door. “I just happened to notice you observing us. Are you presenting later on today?” He tried to inject a little warmth into his tone. “I’m afraid if you are, I’m already lost. Theoretical thaumaturgical symbology this complex is lost on me. I’m a very practical practitioner at heart. Indeed, most of my work is done on behalf of the dead, so there’s little chance of hurting someone if I write the wrong symbol or use an incorrect blend of herbs.”

The door didn’t quite crack, but Anton could see the handle move. “‘The dead’?” a voice called out from within. It was a faint voice, but enough to give him hope.

“Indeed.”

“What use do the dead have for thaumaturgy?”

“It’s a bit of a rare subspecialty. I’d love to talk with you about it.” Anton waited, patient, and watched the handle bob in its hold. Wiggle, wiggle…wiggle… “I’d love to hear more about what you do as well,” he tried, and—aha! The door opened.

“Really?”

“Absolutely,” Anton assured the man—he was sure it was a man now, for all that he could barely see the person inside. That voice was too deep to belong to a lady.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you interested in my work?”

That was a good question. Because my mentor told me to spy on everyone here in whatever way I could, and this seems a good start. But he didn’t want to start a new acquaintanceship with lies, no matter how easy it might be. The truth was…

“I’ve led a rather sheltered life over the past few years,” Anton said, and in a way that was still true, despite the debacle with Montgomery and his ilk. “Almost everything I’ve done has been very…focused on one subject, and one subject only. I’m interested in learning more about what other people are working on, people who don’t expect me to interrogate them to determine a grade. You’re working in one of the most influential laboratories in the entire world, which means you must be an exceptional thaumaturge. That in and of itself is enough to intrigue me.” He tilted his head and smiled. “Please, don’t speak of anything you don’t wish to. I’m just interested in whatever you might want to share, that’s all.”

The door opened wide enough to admit Anton a moment later. He wasn’t admitted, though—the man within came out to meet him, closing the door behind himself. He was about Anton’s height, but skinnier—his robe hung off his collarbones as though they were coat hangers, and his pale red hair had a look about it that spoke of not being washed in a long time. His fingers seemed abnormally long, clutching the ends of his sleeves and tucking them in toward his center, which emphasized the hunch of his shoulders. He smelled of metal and smoke, in a completely different way than the engineering shop had, but it was still notable.

“I’m Anton Seiber, Master of Thaumaturgy from the University of Zürich.” Anton reached out his hand. The young man shook it carefully, as though he wasn’t really sure that was what he was supposed to do.

“I’m Hrym…um…Theobald.”

Did he not remember his own name? “Pleased to meet you, Hrym.”

“Do you really want to see my work?”

“I’d be delighted to, yes.”

“Will you tell me how you use thaumaturgy on corpses?”

“Absolutely.” None of it was classified, after all. Except, perhaps, for Anton’s latest spell…but that had no sort of value in a place like this, a place dedicated to war. Camille had been overconcerned when he told Anton to be cautious.

“I can’t let you into my laboratory.” Anton was disappointed, but Hrym went on, “I’ve got experiments on every flat surface, it’s impossible to move in there without knocking into one of them. Byron says I’ve got to be more judicious about how I work, but I just think I need a bigger room.”

Byron? Oh—Lord Atwood. They’re on a first-name basis? “That’s all right. What else can you show me?”

He led Anton over to the nearest window, looking out into the courtyard. “I did some of the work on that,” he said, pointing at the airship that was still floating in the center of the compound.

“Oh? Was it concerning propulsion, by any chance?” Hrym must be the colleague in charge of the colloquium later, although Anton was a bit surprised that he had the nerves for public speaking.

“No,” Hrym said, startling him. “Propulsion is the easy part. My bit came in figuring out how to keep the warring energies within the engine and propulsion spells from tearing apart the people who fly it. That much magic and technology working together is very difficult to balance.”

“Shielding,” Anton said, understanding and slightly awed all at once. “Mobile, changeable shielding depending on who enters the ship.”

“Mmhmm.”

That was challenging symbology. It was the mobility of it that made it the work of an expert—the spells had to adjust to varying loads of people and goods, while maintaining a balance between the other spells and keeping them from interfering with each other. “That’s fascinating.”

Hrym ducked his head. “Thank you.”

“Does your work apply to the tanks as well?”

“Not yet.” He changed the subject before Anton could dig deeper. “What use is thaumaturgy to the dead?”

“I learned to use it as a means of providing identification,” Anton said. “And occasionally helping to determine how a person has died.”

“In cases of murder, then?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about that.”

“Why do you want to know?” Anton asked, then backtracked a bit. “I mean, I’m certainly not averse to telling you, I’m just…surprised you want to know about it, I suppose. It’s rather basic thaumaturgy at heart, nothing like what you do.”

“It’s interesting,” Hrym said, and his ice-blue eyes were bright with that strange curiosity. “I’ve never seen a dead body, after all.”

Never…seen…what? “How have you avoided that sad fate?” Anton asked as lightly as he could.

“I’ve been here ever since I was a very small child. A few people have passed away over the years, but I’ve never seen their corpses myself. Most of us haven’t, I think.” He looked intrigued. “How long before dead people start to smell?”

It appeared that as sheltered as Anton considered himself over the past few years, he had nothing on Hrym. What on earth was going on here?

Chapter Fifteen

What is this place? Really?

The thought preyed on Anton’s mind for the rest of the day, long after he’d left Hrym, that brilliant, childlike man behind and rejoined his party, even after he got a moment alone with Caroline, long enough to berate her for drawing attention to herself.

“You’re supposed to be bland and unobtrusive, not drawing attention to yourself by showing off your knowledge of theoretical thaumaturgy,” he whisper-hissed at her over post-dinner coffee that evening.

Her hands tightened around her cup, and the corners of her mouth quivered with excitement. “But Byron Atwood is here! Atwood! He’s one of the most brilliant thaumaturges England has ever produced, one of the greatest minds of the century! He’s been out of the country for decades now, people thought he was dead! I had no idea he was here, and he could be a font of valuable information as long as I can interest him in speaking with me. That’s why I had to encourage him, to seem interesting to him. Otherwise, he would dismiss me completely.”

“Why has he been out of the country for so long?” Anton asked. For all the time he’d spent among the offspring of the upper crust, he couldn’t bring much about the man immediately to hand.

“Oh. He, um…” She sipped at her coffee. “He, ah, fell rather publicly in love with the French ambassador to England. It was quite a scandal at the time. There was talk of, ah, censuring him, and so he and the ambassador fled back to France.”

Anton frowned. “Why was it such a…” Then his rationality caught up with the rest of his mouth. Ah. Byron Atwood shared his inclinations, then. “How did he dare to be so public about it?”

Caroline shrugged helplessly. “He’s brilliant, Anton, I can’t tell you how much. They’ve never even erased his boards in the classrooms he taught in, there’s so much knowledge left to be gleaned from his notes. He was so brilliant, he felt he could live as he pleased. But our society was not ready for that.”

“They still aren’t,” Anton noted. All of a sudden the evening had palled. He excused himself a bit later, and after ensuring Dr. Grable was comfortable, he headed for his room. He needed to be alone with his thoughts.

No. That’s the last thing you need.

Anton stepped into his room and tensed. Someone was here, he could feel it in the shiver of his passive wards, glyphs worked into everything from the stitches of his clothes to the leather of his shoes and holdall. He looked around the sitting room, but there was no one there. Nor in the bedroom, nor the bathroom, but—ah. One of the doors leading out to his small, fenced-in patio was cracked open.

He stepped up to it, one hand moving to the inner pocket of his jacket where he kept one of his spirit globes close to his chest. God only knew what it would turn up here if he set it off in such a place—perhaps nothing, since apparently death itself was a novelty, but still—

He recognized the set of the shadow’s shoulders a second later, and exhaled in relief. “You could have found me earlier,” Anton said, joining Camille beneath the elegant little portico a moment later. “There’s no need to sneak into my chambers.”

“I preferred not to endure the party this evening,” Camille replied solemnly, glancing at Anton but keeping his hands on the wrought iron rails. “It has been a day of many revelations, a number of them unsettling.

“More on Deschamps?” Anton asked, resisting the urge to reach out and touch. If Camille wanted to let him in, he would give some sort of sign. At this point Anton was rather invested in not being distracted by Camille—he had questions.

“Among other things.”

He didn’t immediately continue, and rather than press, Anton took the opportunity to direct the conversation where he wanted it. “What is this place for? Really?”

Camille stared at him, interest overtaking the fatigue on his face. “Why do you ask?”

“Because there’s no way this is simply an institute for high-level research.” Once he began speaking, words flowed from his mouth like music from an orchestra. “I mean, it is, I know that, there is the research and productivity to prove it, and obviously the laboratories here are conducive to that, but I met a young man today, an intelligent and innovative young man, and he asked me how long it took before a dead man began to smell.”

Anton had to move, to walk, even though there wasn’t much room for it on in the small space. “He has never seen a body before! Never! Not the funeral of a relative, not a homeless man in a street—probably, judging from the sheer ignorance at play, not even the carcass of a dog or cat! He is terribly clever, but he is so sheltered that I don’t think he would survive beyond this place, where everything is handed to him and someone comes around to sweep away the dead spiders so he doesn’t have to confront them!”

He lowered his voice a bit. “And there is an admitted homosexual here! England has a great many flaws, but France is not so removed from the hold of the Catholic church that it would cease to care about such things. I do not begrudge Byron Atwood falling in love, far from it, but I am terribly curious as to why he found a place here, of all places! The heart of the empire’s intellectual war machine!” He threw up his hands. “What is this place, Camille?”

Anton was not prepared for Camille to look at him with as broad a smile as he’d ever seen on the other man’s face. “You are terribly clever yourself,” he said in a low voice, and it was almost—almost—enough to distract Anton. Camille was kind enough not to leave him in suspense. “You’re right. This is more than an institute of learning. It is a…call it a safe haven, of sorts. The emperor adapted the previous Institute to his needs half a century ago, and since then this place has served two purposes. The first is the obvious one, the front presented to the world. The second?” Camille shrugged. “It is a home for the…inconvenient. Particularly the inconvenient of the upper classes.

“It is a place that provides structure and learning and focus, while also getting an indiscretion out of sight. The young man you met was born out of wedlock to a powerful nobleman in the south. To protect him from inter-familial retaliation, he was sent here. He was given a new name, told nothing of his origin, and now he is a servant of the empire and nothing more.”

“He is like a child,” Anton protested. “Why—”

“He was born different,” Camille explained. “Surely you know of such people. He can understand vast concepts and create magnificent thaumaturgy, but his mind has never grown at the same pace as his body. Just another reason he is better off here, than in the hands of those who might use his misunderstandings to hurt him.”

Anton wasn’t so sure of that, but… “What about the rest of the staff? The engineers, the thaumaturges, are they all like this?”

“Most of them,” Camille said. “There are exceptions, of course—DaVinci is one of them. He had a renowned career in Italy before coming here, but he also had his enemies, and their reach is long. The pope in particular had some harsh words for the master craftsman, and he felt his best chance at keeping his head a while longer was here. But most, yes.”

“Even Lord Jourdain?” Anton asked, and was surprised when Camille nodded. “What is so special about him?”

“Can you guess?”

Of all the times for one of Camille’s little tests. Anton considered it earnestly, though. Jourdain was an administrator, neither thaumaturge nor engineer. He was quite powerful here, yet Anton had never heard of him before. He was middle-aged…wait. “Is…is he the reason for this place? Its inception, I mean?”

“Indeed he is.”

“Then he must mean something to the emperor.”

“You’re almost there,” Camille said.

“Is he another…” Oh lord, to be speculating on the private life of Napoleon the Third, it was sordid enough to make him shudder. “Is he illegitimate?”

“No, Lord Jourdain is quite legitimate.”

“And he’s clever,” Anton said, narrowing his eyes. “And capable. So why isn’t he the Dauphin…” But, of course, there was no Dauphin. It was said that the Empress had been unable to carry a child to term. But if he was legitimate, yet not viable for the crown… “Is he soulless?” Anton breathed. “Like you?”

Camille nodded again, a wry little smile on his face. “Very like me.”

“But it is such a rare condition! It’s only barely traceable in families, what are the odds of…” Anton felt as though the floor had just vanished from beneath his feet. Oh my god.

“You are also his son,” he breathed. “You’re a prince.”

“I’m a bastard conceived out of desperation,” Camille corrected him, not seeming perturbed. Then again, he’d had his whole life to come to terms with his reality—for Anton it was nevertheless quite shocking. “I was meant to be proof that our emperor could produce a normal child.” His smile twisted a bit. “I was his fourth attempt, in fact.”

“Fourth…what…”

“Yes, Anton. Every one of our emperor’s children has been born like me. All of them, all of us, are born soulless.”

Anton had to sit. “I don’t…” He gulped and tried again, words fighting behind his lips for precedence. “It’s…but no one has ever positively determined a cause for the condition,” he said at last. “The affliction strikes with near-perfect randomness! Only one in a hundred thousand people, thereabouts, and an increased potential for it if you have it in your family history, but even that is largely circumstantial due to faulty record keeping and, and…”

Camille lowered himself beside him, which was when Anton realized that he’d basically collapsed onto the marble floor. “All of that has been considered,” Camille said easily, as though he hadn’t just adjusted Anton’s entire worldview with a single phrase. “Everything you can think of, and probably numerous things you haven’t thought of yet, have been examined. The emperor has reached out—with a great deal of secrecy, admittedly—to authorities on everything from thaumaturgy to spirituality to street magic to physical medicine. He’s the first of the Bonaparte line to produce children with this defect, and every angle had to be examined.”

“And…and has anything been discovered?”

Camille sighed and leaned back against the wall. “Many things. None of them have been directly applicable to our situation, but quite a lot of them stand to do others like us some good. Currently, the popular supposition is some sort of curse, something embedded in the body of the emperor himself. Two of the women he had bastards with went on to have utterly normal children with other men, so it wasn’t transmissible in that sense.”

“That’s good,” Anton said mechanically, but his mind had already begun to take shape around new problems, new angles seeking completion. “Camille…if this trait is discovered, if it is made public…it could mean terrible things for the empire.”

“Worse even than the tangle we’re already in, which is saying quite a lot,” Camille agreed. “The revelation would precipitate a crisis of faith at the very least. Rome might choose to split from the monarchy, and if that happens, then we begin to lose the people. There is no equivalent of the Church of England in the empire, after all—we are Catholic, Jewish, or, on the fringes of the empire, Islamic. And none of these religions have anything but negatives to say about the soulless.” He gestured around them with a hand. “That is another reason for this place, of course—it is an avenue for investigation into the mystery that bedevils our emperor.”

Camille rubbed his fingertips across his temples. “He’s done fairly well, given the hand he’s been played. He is as devoted to Empress Matilde as any husband could be to a wife, and that has lent credence to the idea that she, in fact, is the trouble, not him. His bed partners have been circumspect. His children haven’t been exposed. He has a nephew who is a war hero and is a proper age to be the heir, so the line will stay intact, even if it has to branch out a bit.”

“How can you be so sanguine about this?” Anton demanded. “You’re a…you’re like something out of a fairy tale, a prince living under a curse, the son of the emperor, for the love of god. How can you speak of him with such remove?”

“Because he has never been my father in any way other than biological,” Camille said in a tone of great patience. “Napoleon Bonaparte the Third is a busy man. It’s likely that even if I had come about in an entirely legal and laudable way, I would hardly ever see him. As it is, I feel like I see him more than I ought to. He’s aware of my abilities with detection—his influence helped set me on this path—and he uses me accordingly. In the meantime, my mother lives in a beautiful home in Avignon and wants for nothing, and I have purpose in my life. It is enough.”

“Purpose? What purpose?” Anton demanded, rather pettily, perhaps, but he felt as though he was being held underwater. He could still breathe, somehow, but every moment seemed to drag. “To protect the empire? To protect him? You could do either of these things, anything you wanted to, on your own merits. You’re brilliant, and if he can’t understand that well enough to value you accordingly, to value the whole of who you are, then—”

He waved his hands in the air between them, as though it could somehow jump-start his ability to articulate. “Look at you,” he finished, exhausted and petulant and still reeling. “Look at you, and look at how capable your brother is, and yet look also at how society dictates you must be treated because of something completely outside your control. You’re a person to be valued, and now to know that it’s not just that you were unfortunately afflicted but that you might have been targeted, it…” Anton ran out of both breath and thought.

Camille reached out and took his hand. “I have no regrets,” he said. “I’ve never known a life other than the one I began with, and I’ve had many advantages that others lack. My education has been excellent, my tutors far-ranging, and as I said, my mother is in good health and well-cared for. I enjoy what I do, and even whom I do it for.”

He glanced down as he twined their fingers together. “The only moment of doubt I’ve ever suffered on this path was the result of you. From the first moment I met you, you held my interest. That interest has only grown the longer I’ve known you.”

He looked out at the expanse ahead of them, the lights of distant Paris still enough to blot out many of the stars. “If I did have a regret, it would be…not abandoning my attachment to you when I had the chance, before you became drawn so deeply into this web. Because now there is no chance of it, I’m afraid. Even if you drive me away and want nothing more to do with me, you’ll never be completely out of my thoughts.”

Anton’s heart beat so loud he could barely hear Camille, but he was quite certain he’d heard enough. He turned until he was on top of his lover, sitting astride his thighs and leaning in, bracketing his head with his arms and running his fingers into Camille’s hair and just feeling him. That night together in Zürich felt like forever ago, and since then so much had happened, so damnable much, that Anton had thought it might be over between them.

Even now, even with this confession still ringing on his lover’s lips, there was a chance this might not last. Wasn’t there? Wasn’t there a limit, an edge to what was tolerable and what wasn’t? They hadn’t found it yet, perhaps—not even the revelation that Camille was, in essence, royalty could do that, but if…no, when he discovered what Anton was keeping from him, when he learned about Caroline…

“What is it?” Camille murmured, pressing his mouth to Anton’s neck. “What is it, love? What do you want?”

That was about the only question Anton felt capable of answering right now. “You,” he said hoarsely. “I want you. Come inside with me, stay with me. Just for the night.” It was dangerous to be as free as they were allowing themselves right now, even given Camille’s odd status, but… “Please.”

“Anything, Anton.”

That was the right answer.

Chapter Sixteen

Anton hadn’t known a night of slow, quiet passion with Camille since their affair began. Circumstance rendered every moment they had together fraught with concerns of timing, location, and speed. Even though none of those things were pressing upon them right now, they came together like a lightning strike—fast and frenzied.

The truth of it was, Anton didn’t know how to slow down with Camille. He had never had a lover he could take his time with, and he didn’t feel at ease here, in this house of wondrous invention and desperate lies.

Camille knew what to do, though, how to handle Anton, how to gentle him through the first clash of ardor and into something more relaxed. Anton had his first orgasm almost fully clothed, biting his lip to keep himself from speaking in tongues. He went to return the favor, but Camille distracted him with the promise of a shower. Showers, ones with actual hot running water, were a marvelous luxury, and Anton thought there was a decided chance he would fall asleep standing up in this one if Camille weren’t in there with him.

As it was, there was no sleeping, but they did stay in the shower long enough for Anton’s toes to prune and his voice to go hoarse from the pleasured sounds he made as Camille took full advantage of their privacy. By the end of it, Anton could hardly dry himself with a towel, much less stagger to the bed, but Camille was there holding onto him, supporting him. Anton’s last thought as they fell asleep together, his head cradled against Camille’s chest, was that the smallness of this world, this hidden refuge and prison, might not be so hard to endure if you could do so with the ones you loved.

Anton dreamed too much that night, spirit-fire licking at his brain as he relived some of the deaths he’d seen over the years. It was a common refrain for his subconscious, but this time the corpses and their residual spirits were people that he knew. A man who had hanged himself back in London, after illness had stolen his children—he became Dr. Grable. Gaily Gertrude, the poor whore who had been dragged through the streets of Zürich until a false step crushed her into the cobblestones—she was Caroline. Viscount Bonaparte, the odious cousin of the emperor who had inadvertently been the means of bringing Anton and Camille together, was replaced with a man much less deserving of murder—Camille himself, his eyes open, one hand pressed to the bullet wound in his chest, as though willing himself to investigate his own murder.

The worst of it, the worst thing of all, was that in each of these reenactments, Anton saw himself as well. He was always the murderer: heartbreaking sorrow, a bloodthirsty john, the Dévoué devotee. He was there, and he persisted even after the death was done. He hated it, wanted to die, wanted to kill himself but he couldn’t, not when there were other deaths to live through again, not when—

His eyes snapped open, but not a muscle in his body twitched. That was just as well, for he and Camille had switched places during the night. Now Camille rested against Anton’s chest, his arm thrown across his waist, a position of uncommon openness.

Camille always accepted Anton’s affection, cradled it delicately, treated it with respect, but he seemed less prone to prolonging their touches, more inclined to let one embrace end and move on to something else. Him lying here like this, was…novel. Endearing. Addictive. Anton slowed his breathing and relaxed, willing Camille to stay asleep. He wasn’t ready to let go of him yet. He’d have to before long, but until then he would do everything he could to treasure the moment.

They’d forgotten to pull the curtains all the way closed. Traces of light crept into the room, heralding the start of another day. This day would be different, though. Today was the day an outsider—another outsider—came to the Institute. The new Vicomte Voclain was coming to claim his brother’s body, and from the way Lord Jourdain had seemed to seethe slightly at the mention of him, Anton figured that it wasn’t an occasion for lightness and levity. People would be nervous, be on their guard…it might be an excellent time to check in with Hrym and see what he made of it all. He was too unique a mind to be affected by things in an expected way, and Anton was sure something could be gleaned from him by being with him and seeing him react to change.

Anton tried to keep his mind on the task Dr. Grable had set for him. It was a nice, concrete thing, a task of discovery, complicated but not devilishly so. Far better to focus on that than to think back to what he’d learned last night, everything Camille had revealed.

Too late, now he was thinking about it and it seemed bizarre that he, of all people, should be in possession of information so incendiary it would make the Dévoué seem like a minor problem for the empire. His bedmate was a soulless bastard prince. The emperor was cursed. Lord Jourdain should have been the Dauphin, and had instead ended up the organizer of his own potential for salvation. It was ludicrous. It was terrifying.

Think what Caroline could accomplish with this information, his traitorous mind suggested to him. It wasn’t something Anton wanted to dwell on, but there it was, popping up like a cork in a stream and unfurling into a future he’d given up on so long ago. They would take me back, the Order of Thaumaturgy. They would race to throw honors at my feet, do everything in their power to keep me close and comfortable, because I might in turn be a danger to them if they let me go. I would be able to ascend the ranks of British thaumaturges, put ponces like Montgomery and his ilk in their places, be able to care for my mother the way she deserves…

Seductive thoughts, so seductive, but ultimately useless. Anton couldn’t betray the man in his bed like that—he was already skirting the edges of what was morally possible just by staying silent about Caroline. Was she getting what she wanted?

“Mmmm.” Camille stirred, and Anton realized that his heart was racing. With his head so close to Anton’s chest, undoubtedly Camille felt it too. Sure enough, a moment later he lifted his head. His auburn hair was smushed up on one side, his moustache was bent down on the other side, and his eyes were still blurry with sleep. “What’s wrong?” he managed, and Anton smiled at him.

“Nothing but a bad dream,” he promised.

“How late is it?”

“Not late enough to get out of bed.” Anton stroked Camille’s arm before kissing his temple. “We have some time yet.” Not enough—never enough—but some.

Chapter Seventeen

The impending arrival of the new vicomte had the institute running at breakneck pace that morning. Anton and Camille didn’t stay in bed together much longer—there was no way they could, what with the ringing echo of feet pounding through the corridors and the brisk rap of knuckles against doors, reminding guests and residents alike that it was time to wake up, time to be about their mornings, time to get ready. No one entered the room, per Anton’s instructions to the staff, but the noise and commotion were enough to make Anton nervous, and he was up and dressed before he could fret much.

“Who is this man, exactly?” he asked, sitting in a chair against the wall as he watched Camille emerge from bed and begin to wash up. “Why does he seem to produce such a furor here, when his predecessor was very clearly on the institute’s side?”

“Why do you say he was on their side?” Camille asked as he wiped a wet cloth over his groin. Anton forcibly kept his eyes on his lover’s face—if he let his desire get the better of him now, he would never be out of here in time to breakfast with Caroline and Dr. Grable, which would lead to questions he didn’t want to have to talk around.

“Well, he was a member of the party sent to persuade Dr. Grable to come to the institute in the first place. That means that he had knowledge of their worries, the fear of a saboteur working against them from the inside. That must mean that he was trusted, because it’s a rather important piece of information to entrust to someone not otherwise associated with the place.”

“And did he appear to be a gifted elocutionist to you?” Camille pressed. “The sort of man one would want to send to represent them and be a persuasive force on their behalf?”

“Well…” Now that he mentioned it… “No, not really. He seemed mostly very self-absorbed, and a bit, um, light when it came to the actual substance of his conversation.” Caroline would have had a carnival working on a man such as that, if he had survived.

“Precisely. The late Vicomte Voclain was a self-serving, overly indulged, small-minded wastrel of a man.” Camille said it as though it was nothing, as though he casually insulted members of the aristocracy every day. Given his position, he probably did. “He was a useful rube Jourdain kept on call for two reasons. One, the emperor’s cronies don’t trust anywhere that is beyond their easy comprehension, and having a man like Wilhelm associated with this place was enough to soothe them. He was intensely one of them, a member of court who wanted nothing more than to increase his standing in the eyes of his peers. He could be trusted with valuable information simply because it was in his best interest to know things that other people did not, so that he could lord his superiority over them.

“The other reason he was such a useful man to have here was because Wilhelm’s younger brother, Ludwig, is increasingly ambitious. He was born the third son of the old vicomte, and it was expected he would go into the military, which he did. The middle son, Jacob, managed the estates and household while the eldest went to court. Two years ago, Jacob died, and Ludwig ended his military career to return and take charge of the family estate in Strasbourg. His antipathy toward his brother Wilhelm was well-known, and Wilhelm did nothing to shield himself against it through kindness. As long as Wilhelm had a concrete task to perform in service of the emperor, he was protected from his younger brother’s machinations.”

It sounded like a terrible mess in the making to Anton. “What do you think will happen, now that Wilhelm is dead? It sounds as though Ludwig wasn’t close to his brother, so perhaps he regards it as a boon to be elevated to a loftier position than that which he was born into.”

“I’m certain he does,” Camille said as he pulled on his shirt. “But this is a golden opportunity for him to request a favor from the emperor, and to demand compensation from the institute. He won’t let it pass by without taking full advantage. What manner of advantage that is remains to be seen, but the truth of the matter is, Jourdain won’t be able to refuse him much. If Ludwig decides to make a menace of himself, with his popularity in the military he could very easily do so in such a way that the emperor himself has to sit up and take notice. If efforts have to be directed away from the Dévoué to handle this, Bonaparte will not be pleased.”

“What are you going to do about it, then?” Anton asked.

Camille glanced at him as he tied his cravat. “What makes you think I’m going to take any role other than determining the late vicomte’s killer?”

“Because if it were as simple as that, someone of your skills wouldn’t be necessary. It would be so easy to blame this all on the Dévoué,” Anton pointed out. “The case could be considered solved right now if you blamed it on the Dévoué, and that would redirect the new vicomte’s anger in a direction that’s useful to the emperor. So there must be a reason for not doing it, something I can’t quite see.”

Camille’s expression was a bit hooded. “You think I would lie about a case?”

“I think you are driven to find the truth,” Anton said, considering his words with caution. The last thing he wanted was to get into another intractable argument with Camille. “But I also think you already know the truth. You know who killed the vicomte, or at least you have a strong idea of it. How could I now know that, when you’ve had me keep that stasis spell going since we got here?” He pointed at the holster on the bedside table.

“But that evidence isn’t something you’ve dealt with since then, so whatever it means, you’re not ready to reveal it. Therefore, there’s more going on here than bringing a murderer to justice. Knowing what kind of place this is now and how much it means to Lord Jourdain and yourself, I think that you are likely far more interested in bringing down a grand conspiracy than solving one murder.”

For a long moment Camille simply stared, and Anton began to wonder whether or not he’d overstepped. But then his lover grinned. “You know me better than I thought. There is, indeed, something unsettlingly vast at work here. How long it will take me to get to the bottom of I don’t know, but time is of the essence.”

“What can I do to help?” Anton asked.

“Nothing, directly. Continue working with your master, continue to conduct yourself in a manner that does not draw attention. Don’t let on that you know more than you should.” His smile faded. “I don’t want any more harm to come to you.”

Anton was about to press him on what sort of “harm” he thought might rain down, but a blast of trumpets from the walkway outside startled him.

Camille walked over to the curtain and glanced outside. “Ah. The new vicomte is here early.” He looked back at Anton. “We’ll be meeting with him over breakfast, then, if he doesn’t demand a private audience with Jourdain immediately. I suggest we hurry and get a good spot at the table.” He turned his attention back outside. “I have the feeling it will be a very interesting meal.”

The new vicomte apparently did, in fact, demand an immediate audience with Lord Jourdain, but it wasn’t granted. Instead, Lord Jourdain cited protocol and the fact that he had other guests in residence at the Institute and insisted they sit for a meal before he made private time for Ludwig, which had clearly incensed the man striding through the broad doors into the dining hall. He was taller and broader than his brother, less fine-featured and attractive, but far more active-seeming. He was accompanied by two men in matching dark brown livery, and the expressions on their faces spoke of suspicion, anger, and disdain.

All conversation stopped as the three men made their way to the head of the table, where Lord Jourdain was speaking quietly with Cardinal Proulx. “This?” Vicomte Ludwig Voclain denounced in enormous tones as he swept his arm toward Anton and the rest of his party. Camille was there as well, but a little ways apart—it wouldn’t do for him to be seen as getting too close to one of the visitors he’d rescued from the mountains. “This is the reason you put me off, these people? Commoners, tricksters, and judging from the style of her dress”—he looked at Caroline with an expression of pure distaste—“even a foreigner? Are you a fool, to be inviting a wench like that here, or just besotted?”

“Neither, I assure you,” Lord Jourdain said, his voice polite but tone as dry as dust. “Please, be seated to my right, my lord. Now that you’re here, our meal may begin.”

“No need to insinuate so delicately that I’ve kept you waiting.” Vicomte Voclain sneered, but nevertheless sat down. “It doesn’t bother me in the least. Why should it, when you’ve had my brother’s body on ice for two days already?”

“Two days, given the distances at hand, is as nothing, my lord.” Lord Jourdain glanced around the table to make sure his guests were seated before joining them. Anton, next to Caroline, looked into her smooth, calm face but detected beneath it the roiling rage in her eyes of a woman who’d been put down by a man she already despised. He knew she could control her reactions to such affronts—she’d done it enough times during her tenure at Oxford—but he hated seeing her have to.

“Far from nothing when the circumstances surrounding his death are so clouded,” Voclain said, spearing a sausage onto his plate and following it with a freshly baked roll. He tore into both of them with his fingertips, breaking them apart and smashing them together again like a young child just learning to experiment with food. He looked toward Camille. “What do you have to say for your silence thus far, Lord Lumière?”

“I can certainly assure you that I’m exploring every possible avenue when it comes to your brother’s unfortunate death,” Camille replied.

“That sounds like a heap of nothing wrapped around a pile of shit.” Voclain threw his manually macerated food back onto the plate with a huff of disgust. “Why not just say that you have no interest in finding the truth of my brother’s murder, because you are worried it will inconvenience you?”

“It will do no such thing,” Lord Jourdain assured him.

“Oh no? What if the finger ends up pointing at one of your esteemed members? Or one of your guests? Are you certain that the woman over there is not the killer? Or one of those…other people?”

“I’m sure of nothing but that we will find the culprit, and we will bring him or her to justice,” Camille said.

“Be of good faith, my son,” Cardinal Proulx added, leaning forward a bit as he addressed the vicomte. “There will be no rest for any of us until your brother’s killer is brought to justice, but in the meantime, life must go on for the living. That means continuing to work, for what better balm is there for misfortune than the solace of work? Is it not written in the bible that ‘This is what I have observed to be good: that it is appropriate for a person to eat, to drink and to find satisfaction in their toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given them—for this is their lot.’ We all must continue in our lots, my son.”

“Who here toils?” the vicomte asked savagely. “I don’t speak of you, Father, I know you saw war, but who else here has done the same?”

“In fact, Doctor Grable has—”

“I mean true war, the war of men against each other, not a war of magic against men,” Vicomte Voclain interjected with a sneer. “None of you, I wager. You sit in this ivory tower and scheme of ways to wreak horror with your gifts, while those of us who live in simpler, darker places must contend with battle every day of our lives. Who here has encountered the Dévoué more than I and my stout-hearted men? None of you. Not one.” He shook his head.

“You set yourselves up in a place of power and peace and consign the rest of us to a fight we may not be able to win. We are your guardians whether we will it or no, and what do we get in exchange? A few new spells here and there? Not worth it. We need more, and although my late brother was unable to impress that necessity upon you, I won’t be taking no for an answer.”

He leaned forward and locked eyes with Jourdain. “I want your tanks. I want to see them work, and then I want them in my province, in my city, defending my people against the Dévoué. I want them delivered immediately, and if they aren’t, then I’ll be speaking with the emperor next. And if he refuses to listen to me?” He shrugged his broad shoulders. “I’ve made a great number of friends over the years, in very high places. Some are in charge of several large contingents of our empire’s military. I daresay their word will carry more weight.”

With that threat lobbed into the center of the table like a mortar on the verge of exploding, Vicomte Voclain got up and walked out of the dining hall. His men, and everyone else’s ability to speak, seemed to walk out with him.

Chapter Eighteen

It was as good a time as any for Anton to visit with Hrym again, once a few of the others left first so his absence wouldn’t be remarked upon. There were levels of political maneuvering going on that Anton had no need or desire to be a part of, and he still had a job to do for Dr. Grable.

Let Lord Jourdain and Camille handle unstable, shouty aristocrats—they had been born for the work. Anton, however, felt more now than ever that he was unsuited to a life in the public eye. He didn’t have the instincts for it—he never automatically assumed the worst about someone, and because of that he failed to see when they were being their worst. He’d done it over and over again, especially at school, and been burned anew every time.

He didn’t want a sinecure, like so many of his fellows had, or a place in Parliament or at court, just an honest job where he could use his talents to make the world a slightly better place. That seemed like the most he could hope for at this point, and perhaps was more than he had a right to expect given the company he kept. Imperial bastards, genteel ladies who were also spies…

To Anton’s surprise, he saw Hrym coming out of the small chapel that sat between the engineering and thaumaturgical wings before he even got to his laboratory. Fortuitous.

“Hrym,” Anton called out, and the young, stoop-shouldered man stopped obediently and waited for him to catch up. “Thank you. Was there a morning service?” he asked as they fell into step together.

“Oh no, not today,” Hrym said. “Cardinal Proulx always cancels services when someone with a title comes here. It gives the rest of us a chance to…” His voice trailed off for a moment.

“Keep to yourselves?” Anton suggested. He could see why the people in charge of this place wouldn’t want their staff to be seen by many members of the aristocracy—this was meant to be a sanctuary for their castoffs, after all.

“I was going to say hide,” Hrym replied, all bluntness but with a tiny smile on his wide, pale face. “But I had not been to confession in over a week, so he made time for me today.”

He made quick work of coming here. “That was kind of him,” Anton said. Cardinal Proulx seemed like a man who paid close attention to the needs of his flock here, tiny though it might be.

“He’s kinder than most,” Hrym agreed. They walked down the long hall of the thaumaturgical building, the board on one side still touched with Caroline’s own handwriting, then stopped outside of Hrym’s laboratory.

“I’d be pleased to wait, if you care to—” Anton began, but Hrym cut him off.

“You can come in, if you would like to.” He blushed. “Lord Atwood says I should work at being more outgoing, and it was a good excuse to finish up some of my simpler experiments and make room on my tables. You’ll be perfectly all right, as long as you don’t touch anything. If you do, though, you shall get quite a shock.”

Well, he was kinder than most to be warning Anton in advance. “Thank you,” Anton said, and Hrym blushed further. “Please, lead the way.” Hrym unlocked the door, opened it, and stepped inside. Anton followed, and—

It was as if he’d stepped into an underwater cave. Anton had seen bioluminescence before, on a trip with his parents to Norfolk. It hadn’t lasted long, just a brief, bright blue glow along the edge of the water where it hit the beach, but Anton had been mesmerized. He’d asked his father if there were thaumaturges nearby who put on the show, and ended up getting a lesson in biology.

This room was filled with a similar sense of light pouring out of the darkness. There were sconces, here and there, but no internal windows, and every thaumaturgical symbol in the place glowed blue. Anton turned to Hrym, speechless.

“I make my own chalks,” Hrym said. “And blue is my favorite color. I find it soothing.”

And so you made it glow. Anton didn’t know why he was surprised. “May I…” He indicated the room. “Look around?”

“Oh, yes. Yes.” Hrym pointed to a two-meter table along the wall closest to the door. “I’ve got some symbology to balance over here, but yes, please look.”

It was like being invited to take anything he wanted from the sweet shop as a child. Anton made his way through the room, careful where he was stepping—it was still quite cluttered, every flat surface and some vertical ones covered with experiments or notations, but that too was fascinating in its own way. He recognized all the basic symbols, and some of the spells were familiar as well, but others were completely novel. One in particular, in the far corner of the room, worried at his brain the moment he set eyes on it. That circular pattern, the way the symbol for fire seemed to twist again and again and—

Anton’s lungs seemed to freeze. He didn’t breathe as he leaned closer, stretching his trembling fingertips toward the symbols even though he knew it would be foolish to touch them, he’d been warned, but how could it…where had they…who…

“Hrym,” he managed to croak. “Where did you get this spell from?”

“That one?” Hrym glanced over. “Oh no, don’t look at that, it isn’t finished. Lord Atwood would like me to focus on it more, but I don’t really like it.” He sounded a bit wistful. “He used to bring me new pieces of it almost every day, but he hasn’t given me anything else for weeks now, and I have so many other, better spells to be working on.” He pointed at the one at the table in front of him. “This one magnifies sound. I think I might be able to make it split rock, eventually.”

Of course you could. But Anton was far from done with his interrogation. “Do you know what this spell is meant to do?” Anton pressed.

“It’s clear enough from the symbols, isn’t it? It will create a weapon that never misses its target.” Hrym looked back down at his table. “It seems like a good idea. Isn’t it better to succeed with only one shot?”

Anton reflexively touched the middle of his chest, where another man had taken a bullet intended for him once. It depends entirely on what you’re shooting at, and who’s taking the shot. Where had he gotten this? Had someone recovered the palimpsest from Montgomery? Was it being translated?

Or was Montgomery…here?

Anton rounded toward Hrym again, determined to get to the bottom of this, but then the thundering echo of a cannon’s blast reverberated through the building. Anton nearly grabbed a table to stabilize himself. “What the hell is that?” he demanded.

“Oh.” Hrym didn’t look bothered at all. “It’s nothing. Just the tanks firing.”

Just the… Anton headed for the door. He could question Hrym more later—right now he had to be sure that the damn building wasn’t about to come down around their heads.

Chapter Nineteen

Anton was, quite frankly, expecting to confront something of a fuss when he emerged onto the lawn where the tanks were firing from. The new viscount had given every indication of being on the verge of attack if he didn’t get the tanks immediately, and Lord Jourdain hadn’t seemed as if he was in the mood to suffer being threatened. Would there be fighting amongst the guests and the guards, screaming matches over jurisdiction, and threats of future violence promised if conditions weren’t met?

Instead, Anton stepped out beneath a rainbow-colored sky and wondered if, between this and Hrym’s strangely beautiful laboratory, he’d somehow walked into a dream. The tanks were firing, but whatever it was they were shooting wasn’t shells. How could it be, he chided himself as he crossed the lawn to stand beside Dr. Grable’s chair. He didn’t see Camille, or Caroline, oddly enough—but then she never cared much for loud noises, and this was about as loud as it could get without being in the middle of a genuine firefight. Dr. Wictoryn was also there, standing behind the wheelchair with her arms crossed, looking highly displeased.

“This display is hardly conducive to healing,” she shouted to Dr. Grable over the noise. “I must insist you return to the infirmary at once!”

“I will be damned to the farthest corner of Hell before I enter that whitewashed prison again!” he shouted back, clearly enjoying himself.

“It has sound-dampening glyphs on it, you won’t hear a thing there!”

“Exactly!”

“You ignorant, foolhardy, reckless son of a—”

“I’ll bring him back inside as soon as possible,” Anton said, stepping in before the good doctor lost her voice screaming at his mentor. “It’s quite important that we witness this, however.”

“Oh, is it?” she said scathingly. “More important than delivering his pain medication on time in a safe and sterile environment?”

“I’m afraid it is. We’ll come along as soon as possible, though.”

She looked at him long and hard, then turned on her heel and stalked off, presumably to the nice, quiet infirmary where Anton would rather be himself.

“Well done, man,” Dr. Grable congratulated him. “You’ve a way of getting people to bend to your will that I simply don’t understand.”

“It’s called courtesy,” Anton replied. Dr. Grable pretended not to hear him.

“What do you think of all this?” he asked, pitching his voice low enough that it wouldn’t be heard by the other onlookers, not that that would be hard with all the noise. Cardinal Proulx and Monsieur Deschamps were both present, part of the larger group of the Viscount’s entourage and Lord Jourdain and his assistants. The tanks rolled back and forth on the grass twenty yards distant, pausing to adjust their guns and fire every twenty seconds or so, then rolling a bit farther before repeating the feat. For only three tanks, the cacophony was quite regular.

“What are they firing?” Anton asked.

“Dummy rounds filled with flammable salts and colorful chalks. Basically nothing more than big fireworks, lad. It’s an interesting play on Jourdain’s part.”

Anton didn’t see it. “How so?”

“It’s a display both of strength and of weakness. Strength because it validates what the tanks should be able to do, which is fling big projectiles long distances with accuracy. Weakness because those projectiles haven’t actually been developed yet.”

Wait a minute. “I thought these were just modified cannons.”

“Heavily modified. Solid shot won’t work, not if the tank wants to be able to maintain its momentum over any sort of challenging terrain—it’s just too heavy, and the engines haven’t figured out how to get over that challenge yet. All the new tanks being built will do better, but even there, the shells have to be custom. It hasn’t been a priority for the Institute.” Dr. Grable’s smile held a hint of satisfaction. “And I believe I see why, now.”

“Do you think Lord Jourdain saw this coming?”

“If not this, then something like it.” Dr. Grable settled back into his chair, completely unbothered by the booms overhead. It likely didn’t compare to the clamor of war, but it was beginning to get to Anton—he flinched every time another blast went off. “Humanity is always looking for an edge in conflict. These tanks are an excellent start, but until they’re ready to be put into the emperor’s service, with trained troops to operate them and loyal commanders to lead those troops, they’re almost as much of a danger as they could be a benefit. Delay makes many things possible.”

Right now, delay was giving Anton a headache. “Have you seen enough?” he asked.

“I’ve seen plenty, but I have to stay, for the sake of putting on a show of my own.” Dr. Grable looked at Anton, probably reading entire volumes from the paleness of his face and the pinch of his mouth. “Why don’t you go see if you can wrangle that pain potion out of Dr. Wictoryn for me? It comes in liquid form, so you could bring it out like you were carrying an innocent cup of tea.”

“You want me to fetch you tea.”

“With a biscuit on the side, if you please.”

It wasn’t quite a dignified request, but another crack went off and Anton decided he’d rather lose some dignity than his composure, not to mention his hearing. He walked back into the Institute and headed straight for the infirmary. When he got there, though, there was no one in the main room. He checked the doctor’s office—also empty.

There was, however, an open door to the right of her desk that led directly into a set of wide, dimly lit stairs. Anton stepped up to it, aware that he was trespassing but just as disturbed by what he saw. If the clinic was muted with sound-deadening glyphs, then whatever was down that staircase had to be louder than the Devil himself, if the number of glyphs painted across the interior of the door were anything to go by. Equations for diminishing strong scents were there as well, glyphs pulsing with magical suffusion. What the hell was down there?

Another crack trickled in through the open infirmary door, and Anton, slowly filling with dread, began to step down the stairs. He’d seen glyphs like those once before, on a tour of the Tower of London when he was a boy. It wasn’t used as a prison these days, of course, but the keepers of the place maintained all the old magic for the sake of history, and Anton vividly remembered the glyphs on each of the tower’s interior doors: for silence, for deadening scent, for dimming the mind, for diminishing hunger. It was magic that turned prisoners into thoughtless, desireless bodies, only alive because they still drew breath.

Anton reached the bottom of the stairs, where the minuscule natural light gave way to a freshly-lit row of torches. He followed them down a short, stone-walled hall, then poked his head around the corner at the end of it, toward where the voices were. What he saw was both anticlimactic and devastating at the same time.

Dr. Wictoryn was tending to a man sitting on a bed. He had a collar around his neck, unattached to anything, but Anton could tell there was magic in it. He looked comfortable enough—the room was clean, he was fully clothed, and there was a rough toilet in one corner and a stand covered in books beside the bed. As prisons went, it was quite nice. That was not the surprise.

The surprise—and it shouldn’t have been, Anton felt that to his bones—was that the man being tended to was Gerard Montgomery, lately of the University of Zürich, who had tried and almost succeeded in murdering Anton a year ago.

It was an even greater surprise when he glanced up, saw Anton, and grinned with caustic recognition. “Look what the maelstrom has dragged to the bottom of the sea with us, good doctor! Seiber, old chap, get in here.”

Oh, hell and damnation.

Chapter Twenty

Dr. Wictoryn whirled around before Anton could say anything, one hand going to her hip. There was no weapon there at the moment, but that it was an automatic reflex told Anton that she was used to carrying a pistol. He took a moment to be grateful that she was unarmed.

“You! What are you doing here?” she demanded, her voice gone shrill with tension. “This is a private treatment area! Get out immediately!”

Montgomery began to laugh. “Is that what you tell other people? ‘Private treatment,’ my dear doctor, oh, what fun you must have at confession. I daresay that cardinal of yours gives you light enough penances, considering his loyalties. He wasn’t nearly so gentle with me when he tried to take my confession, but…” He shrugged. “Perhaps that’s because I have nothing to confess.”

Anton finally managed to propel himself forward. “What in heaven’s name are you doing here?” he breathed, staring at his former acquaintance and nemesis with growing discomfort. “I thought you fled for one of the Baltic states.”

“I did, and well done you for being so up-to-date on the politics of rebellion,” Montgomery said, his grin a bit too sharp. Apart from needing a shave and having longer hair, he looked…well. There were no signs of abuse, or starvation. He was pale, but he was healthy. “I didn’t expect to be hunted down by an imperial wolf of unusual tenacity,” he went on. “The more fool me, I suppose. I should have spelled more of my guns.”

“Mr. Seiber, I must insist that you leave at once,” the doctor hissed. “It is entirely inappropriate for you to be down here right now.”

I’ll never get this chance again if I leave. Anton wasn’t even sure what kind of chance it was that he had, but he wasn’t going to give it up now. There was too much riding on getting an answer, and with the spell from the palimpsest up for grabs, he had to get an answer. “If you want me to leave, you will have to drag me,” he said. “For now, I will stay and speak with Gerard.”

“I never thought I’d hear my name again from that sweet mouth of yours,” Montgomery said, his tone mocking but his eyes oddly intense. “Aren’t you supposed to be dead?”

“You should have stayed to make sure.”

Dr. Wictoryn stared between the two of them and cursed, then rushed past Anton out of the door. Anton watched her go, then looked back to find Montgomery tapping the collar around his neck. “She doesn’t have to worry about me fleeing, or attacking you,” he said. “This keeps me from acting on my more pressing desires. Any hint of aggression and my reflexes go as slow as honey flowing uphill. It’s a brilliant bit of spellwork.”

It was, but Anton wasn’t interested in dissecting that right now. “Of the two of us, I’m more amazed that you’re alive,” he said, not bothering to soften the delivery. He loathed Gerard Montgomery, loathed him with a passion, but he was betting that the other man was more interested in talking right now than he was at taking offense. After all, he’d been down here for…it could have been months. Nearly a year, even. “How have you wrangled a continuance?”

“Would you believe it’s the benefit of my personality, my charm, my joie de vivre?” Montgomery asked, batting his eyelashes like a coquette. “I’m always the life of every party, Seiber.”

“And right now it’s a party of one,” Anton pointed out.

“On the contrary, you’re here! And I find myself desperate for news of you, so before you attempt to lambast me into answering your questions, let me make you a deal. It shall be an eye for an eye between us, a cut for a cut. One of yours answered for every one of mine.”

“You must be truly desperate for news if you’re coming to me for it,” Anton said, his heart rate quickening despite his reservations.

“Oh, I am indeed,” Montgomery murmured. “What do you say?”

They might have only minutes. They might have less than that. “Fine. How did they find you?”

“A devilishly clever man hunted me down and refused to take a bullet for an answer. How did you survive the fall from the tower?”

That was scarcely an answer from Gerard, but Anton would circle back. “I never fell in the first place. Did you work out the spell on the palimpsest?”

“I wouldn’t be alive if I hadn’t. How did you not fall?”

“I was rescued by a friend,” Anton replied, gathering his nerve. “Why can’t the thaumaturges of the Institute use the spell?”

Montgomery grinned. “Because it comes with a rather fiendish failsafe. How did you come to be here?”

“I came with Doctor Grable.”

“Ah, so the old man has returned.” Montgomery stroked his chin. “I thought they might bring him here to take his try. These fellows are brilliant at their little spells, but they lack the cruel edge you really want in an interrogator. Grable might manage things better.”

“What is he meant to manage?” Anton shook his head. “I mean, what is the failsafe?”

Montgomery laughed. “Two questions, and I should answer neither of them since you’re breaking the rules, but this is the first fun I’ve had in ages, Seiber, so I’ll give you both of them. He’s meant to manage me, of course. I’ve been sabotaged, and not even I can tell exactly how, but damned if my keepers will believe that.

“And the failsafe? It’s brilliant, absolutely brilliant.” He bared his teeth again, but it wasn’t a grin this time. He was furious, it was written in every line of his body. “That targeting spell should have made my fortune. Instead, it ruined me. Casting the spell creates more than just a bullet that never misses its target, Seiber. It stitches a geas into the caster themselves. I could perform it a thousand times and never feel the effects, but to pass the spell itself on? It won’t allow it. Trying to do so damaged my mind.” He clenched his hands into fists. “I can’t cast a single spell anymore, I can’t even read them without becoming nauseous. I’ve lost my ability to be a thaumaturge, do you understand? It stripped me of everything.”

Oh God. No wonder Hrym couldn’t look at the whole spell—even if they had all the components, it would be too risky to his genius. They must have tried to get Montgomery to give it up, gotten the bit Anton had seen on Hrym’s wall, and then…it was gone.

“Gone,” Montgomery murmured, as though he’d read Anton’s mind. “All of it, gone. I’m useless now, a simpleton, normal like all the rest of those fools. Did you know this would happen to me, Seiber?” He stood, taller than Anton by a good margin. “Did you know what that palimpsest would do to me? Because the only thing that’s given me a lick of decent sleep ever since I was captured was the thought of your pretty face smashed to bits against the cobblestones of the university, and yet here you are…whole.” His glare was so intense, Anton practically felt the flames it yearned to conjure on him.

“Do you know it?” he continued. “The spell? I hope so, Seiber, I dearly hope so. I would like nothing more than for them to try and pry it out of your head next, and for you to end up down here with me. Just the two of us, alone.” His hands clenched again. “I can’t leap at you, I can’t even walk up to you, but I bet I could crawl. Slow as worms cleaning a corpse, but I could do it, and one night when you’re asleep, I’ll crawl up beside you and shove a pillow over your face and hold it down with all my might until—”

“That’s enough from you,” a familiar voice said. Anton exhaled—he hadn’t even realized he was holding his breath until Camille broke the spell that Montgomery’s voice wove around him.

“Ah!” Montgomery’s face brightened with murderous mischief again. “And here is my oh-so-clever wolf! Fresh from hunting new prey, I suppose?”

Anton turned to face Camille, but the lumière wasn’t looking at him. “Still alive, I see,” he said calmly.

“Despite your admonishments, I’ve no doubt.” Montgomery leered. “Is little Seiber yours, then? A fine choice—he’s so soft, yet so staunch. Did you save him from the end I tried to give him?”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to wonder a while longer.” He finally met Anton’s eyes. “We need to go. Immediately.” Doctor Wictoryn and two guards stood back by the door, the doctor staring daggers at Anton.

“No,” Anton said, surprising himself. “No, I want you to explain this, him.”

“Not right now.” Anton opened his mouth to protest, but Camille cut him off. “Your friend, Lady Cuthbert, has just been caught stealing privileged information from Lord Atwood’s laboratory. She’s under arrest.”

Chapter Twenty-One

The worst thing was the way Caroline didn’t try to deny it. Anton had expected better of her, wanted her to fight it, to come up with some reason for why she had been alone in Lord Atwood’s laboratory, something that would exculpate her, or at least cast enough doubt that it would intensify the international discord if the Institute tried to keep her. Instead, she sat by herself at the far end of the dining table, her hands folded, her face haunted but somehow serene, while Lord Atwood gleefully detailed the lengths of her offenses.

“The spellwork guarding my laboratory is such that the lady could not have entered it without expressly intending to usurp my private research,” he said, sitting down and helping himself to a cup of tea while he spoke, as though this were just any other day for him. “My warding isn’t a matter of doing damage to the person entering, it’s a matter of establishing their reason for entering in concrete symbological ways, and it’s accepted thaumaturgy, nothing experimental. Most people don’t bother with safeguards that don’t actually stop a person from intruding in their private places, but for me this was the perfect solution. She triggered a series of equations that carried increasing degrees of registering pre-meditated intent, and the work she did with her own chalk on my doors will show that.”

“What did she take?” Lord Jourdain asked. He sat across from Lord Atwood, his expression urbane. No one was even bothering to look at Caroline, as though now that she’d committed the crime she didn’t exist.

No one but Anton.

“She was attempting to steal the translated pieces of our most pressing puzzle, my lord,” Atwood replied. It was a vague answer, but one that the people who understood the shape of that puzzle understood. Anton was ashamed to be one of them.

If he had given the copy he’d made of the palimpsest to Caroline…if he had even told her what he was working on, not given it to her but intimated that he had it…

Then he would have ended up being talked into working on it for her, and it would be his brain that would have been turned to blancmange instead of Montgomery’s.

How could she do this? He knew she didn’t care much for her husband, but she had a son, a child who needed her. How could she…

“How could you?” he asked, voice soft and carrying in the few feet that separated them now. When had he walked over here? Was Camille watching him? It hardly mattered anymore—Anton was done contorting himself into pleasing his lover when Camille had told him next to nothing about the real truth.

She glanced at him, and a hint of her former vivacity lit her eyes. “It was such a chance, and there could have been so much gained,” she murmured. “How could I not?”

“Your family. Your son. Did you think nothing of him?”

“He has a place with his father no matter what happens to me,” Caroline said. “Whereas England must fight to maintain its status in the world, or die beneath the boots of those who have dared more and gone further. Everyone knows of this spell by now, but no one has been able to find it. Not until this place. I don’t know how they did it, but I recognized enough when Lord Atwood showed us around his laboratory that I had to chance it.”

Oh, if only you’d paid more attention to Hrym. She could have stolen from his very walls and no one would have been the wiser. “It wouldn’t work for England,” Anton said, fighting to keep his voice level. “It only works on a very limited basis, not the thousands and thousands of weapons that an entire country would need to enchant. This is information meant to enhance a single person’s life, not make a nation’s future.”

Her eyes sharpened. “How do you know that?”

“I know enough.”

“That is more than ‘enough,’ Anton, that is a level of detail that you shouldn’t know unless you have special information.” Her hands clenched around each other.

“Do you have it?” she whispered. “Do you have the spell? You must take it back home. They will reward you handsomely, they will take care of you—”

“I don’t want it!” he hissed furiously. “I never wanted it! I know the evil of such things firsthand and if it were my choice, I would abolish even the memory of this wretched spell until no one in the world thought such horrible things were possible. Weapons that never miss. How would you like it, if such a gun were fired at your family? At your child? How would you feel, knowing you had brought that darkness into the world?”

“It could be controlled—”

“It can only be controlled by destroying the people who try to share it in the first place!” Anton yelled, and—oh dear. Now he had the attention of the entire room. He swallowed back his anger and stepped away from Caroline. “My apologies,” he said stiffly.

“No no, do go on, Mr. Seiber,” Lord Jourdain said with a wave of his hand. “What is it, exactly, that can only be destroyed in the process of being shared?”

Anton gulped, his mouth dry with fresh and sudden fear. Before he could stammer something out, though, Camille intervened. “If we could put aside riddles, Laurent,” he said, “we have an issue of thievery to work out.”

“And to work out fast,” the new vicomte snapped from where he sat with his own entourage a little ways down the table. Between him and Lord Jourdain were Monsieur Deschamps and, a bit more surprisingly, Cardinal Proulx, who looked calm and serious in his red robes. Perhaps he was meant to keep the acts of bloodshed to a minimum. “For there are more important matters to redress here.”

“Oh, on the contrary,” Lord Jourdain said. “There is nothing more sacred than ensuring the security of our empire, and this act of espionage has struck at the very heart of our most sacred duties to the crown. The emperor must be informed immediately, and until he has made his own decision about the fate of Lady Cuthbert, all other deals and negotiations are on hold.” He smiled thinly. “You are welcome to argue your stance to him in an audience, but if you expect to win out over a matter of this magnitude, you are sorely misguided. However, it should not take more than a month or two to decide the matter, and after that—”

“‘A month or two’?” The vicomte hammered his fist down on the table so hard the silverware clattered. “Are you playing games with me, monsieur? I come to you in dire need, the body of my own brother not yet cold, and you have the audacity to tell me that my city must wait for you to decide whether or not to kill this English wench rather than allow us to protect ourselves?” He stood and leaned in menacingly.

“Be calm, my son,” Cardinal Proulx cautioned, but there was no calm left in the other man.

“I will wait no longer. You will give me the tanks I need, today, or I will march on this place with my troops and take them by force.”

“Fascinating,” Lord Jourdain said. “And in speaking this order out loud, in front of witnesses, you’ve now provided me with all the ammunition, so to speak, that I need to take this to the emperor myself and have you arrested for threatening to attack an imperial institute. But that, I’m afraid, would be a rather secondary crime to report compared to the murder you had carried out.”

Vicomte Voclain’s eyes narrowed. “What murder are you nattering about?”

“The murder of your brother, of course,” Camille said, stepping into his role of lumière as naturally as breathing. “Which you planned, but had another man execute.”

Monsieur Deschamps was beginning to tremble. Anton watched his gaze dart around the room, as if he was looking for a place to escape to and not finding it. You will go down with this ship, rat, he thought viciously.

“This is preposterous! I would never—”

“I think this is a matter for me to look into,” Cardinal Proulx said. “A holy confession might do every man and woman in this room some good, and once I have all the information I can act on it without compromising the sanctity of what I have been told.”

“On the contrary, your Eminence,” Camille said, not unkindly. “The only confession I’m interested in at this juncture is yours.”

Cardinal Proulx looked at him, one eyebrow raised. The whole room seemed to hold its breath. “Oh? Why is that, my son?”

“Because you were the one to pull the trigger and end Vicomte Wilhelm Voclain’s life, your Eminence.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Anton couldn’t keep his jaw from dropping. No, this couldn’t be—no, it was Deschamps, wasn’t it? He’d been there, he’d had the means and the opportunity, he was the owner of the weapon, for the love of God—wasn’t that the reason Camille had had Anton preserve it? To show resonance with Deschamps that no holy blessing could diminish?

Cardinal Proulx smiled. “You weren’t even there, my son. And I know, better than most, that you and those like you have no special abilities that lend you insight into matters of thaumaturgy and holy faith. Your zeal is misguided.”

“On the contrary, Eminence,” Camille replied. He stepped around the room as he spoke, pausing at times behind chairs or beside a member of the speechless audience. “My special abilities allow me to see what is truly there, not what might be obscured by belief or influenced by magic. And what I saw when I came upon your party in the mountains was a dead Vicomte, killed by what would have been an impossible shot from anyone outside the train car unless they carried a weapon that never missed. They did not carry weapons like that. If they had, then people like Lady Cuthbert would have no need to risk their lives infiltrating one of the most secure intellectual bastions of the entire Empire. They would take what they needed from bandits and brigands, and the world would be much poorer for it.

“I saw Lady Cuthbert badly shaken, her maidservant dead from the crash,” he went on, pausing behind her chair now. She met his gaze with wide eyes. “I saw both thaumaturges damaged and weary from fighting back with magic, but not with their hands. I saw Monsieur Deschamps shaking in his boots, and as I have had opportunity to both travel and fight with him before, believe me when I say that I understood his state of being, both mind and body, as inconsistent with an aptitude for assassination.

“And then there was you.”

He steepled his fingers and deepened his voice a bit. All eyes were on Camille, although Anton managed to glance away a few times to look at the rest of them. The men beside and behind the cardinal were tense, and growing more so with every word. “You,” Camille intoned, “with your many years served in the military, first as a fighting man, then as a soldier’s priest, unafraid of saving souls on the battlefield. You, with your abiding faith and your keen knowledge of the emperor and his personal affairs, after you were given your position here. It can’t have taken you long to understand what this place is, not when so many come to you with their confessions. I have never done so, and I know Lord Jourdain has not, but you didn’t need us to, did you? You were clever enough to see the truth for yourself.

“A truth you could not abide,” Camille finished, so quiet everyone had to lean in. “A truth you could not let pass unpunished.”

“God himself could not let it pass unpunished,” Cardinal Proulx replied after a long moment, his wizened hands tightening on the beads of his rosary. “I am a man of God, first and foremost, and his instrument in all things. The Lord Himself brought knowledge of the emperor’s foulness to me, that I might be a means of cleansing it. After all, an empire is only as great as the man who sits at its head. What good to God is a man who is so accursed in His sight that all his children are born soulless?”

There were gasps, including one from the new vicomte, who looked stunned. Clearly, whatever deal he’d struck with the cardinal, it hadn’t included this information. “Abominations?” he asked, his voice harsh. “Those who are unseen and unloved by God?”

“Just so,” Cardinal Proulx replied, his expression sad.

“Ha! This, this—this is the information we need to overthrow the emperor!” Voclain stood up, a vicious grin on his face. “This will topple him! A new ruler can rise in his place, one secure in his favorable position as a true son of God!”

“No,” Cardinal Proulx said, as gentle and dampening as a summer rain. “The time for such things has passed. God himself has forsaken this empire. It must be tumbled down, for the sake of every soul within it, and built anew.”

“You want to support the Dévoué?” Caroline spoke up, her face still pale but her voice strong. “You want to support the very people who would rip your world apart?”

“I have accepted that we are living in the end times of the French Empire,” Cardinal Proulx said, spreading his hands as if indicating the world around them. “It has rotted, as all empires rot eventually. Whatever rises to take its place, it will at least not be led by a man who creates monsters.”

“You’re a monster.” The words slipped out of Anton’s mouth before he could stop them. “You condemn whatever you feel you can’t control, and you’d rather tear down a functioning state and hand its tatters over to a bunch of infighting anarchists than accept that there are things even a man of God isn’t meant to understand.”

“What does a young man like you know of God?’ the cardinal asked, his gaze piercing. “A thaumaturge, already close to blasphemy with every equation you design, and an invert as well? No, my son.” He shook his head. “You are as damned as they.”

He stood and faced the six of them—Anton, Jourdain, Camille, Caroline, Dr. Grable, and Lord Atwood. “You are all stains on the honor of God, and as such you must be removed.” He pulled a small, silver-embossed gun from his cassock. Anton recognized the design—it matched the holster in his safekeeping. “This weapon was taken from the one man on the continent to decipher the very special targeting spell he placed on it. There are only five shots within it, but if God is with me, perhaps one of them will ricochet.”

Deschamps, who was pacing and tugging on his amulet, suddenly turned wide eyes on the cardinal. “Wait! Don’t—”

Five shots fired in rapid succession, each of them out of the barrel before Anton could do more than shout and lunge forward, before Caroline could even scream and throw up her arms. The silence afterward was broken by a single low groan, then the slump of bodies hitting the ground.

Not the bodies the Cardinal had hoped would fall, though.

Vicomte Voclain and his two men-at-arms collapsed with clattering thuds, two of them bearing holes in their chests, the vicomte himself taking a bullet straight through the forehead. Another one had indeed ricocheted and hit the cardinal, severing the cord holding his rosary together before driving straight into his heart. Jet and ruby beads scattered across the floor as Proulx folded, going to his knees as if he were invoking one last prayer before toppling onto his side.

The last bullet bounced once, twice, then out of a window. There was a brief squawk a moment later. Camille went up and glanced out through the hole. “Pigeon,” he noted.

“Better than a mouse in the wall,” Lord Jourdain said. “We’d have to take the room apart to get rid of the smell.”

“What…you…” Monsieur Deschamps looked from person to person, his knees knocking together so hard they seemed almost incapable of holding him up. “How…what …”

“Look at you, milord,” Camille said. “You truly do create exceptionally competent protections. didn’t notice you stealing that gun from Montgomery, and I’m not surprised you didn’t have the fortitude to wield it yourself given your…unease with combat, but your shielding is unmatched. This is the second time you’ve avoided being taken out by that particular spell.”

Lord Jourdain smiled thinly. “The third time is the charm, as they say. We’ll see how well it protects you from a noose. Guards!” A moment later, two liveried men entered the room, doing their best to look unperturbed by all the bodies on the floor. “Please remove Monsieur Deschamps to his own room in the Hole, for the time being. Keep him well away from our other guest, if you please.” The men nodded, and each one took one of Deschamps’ arms, leading him and eventually dragging him out, as he collapsed.

“And thank you for your very efficient preparation of additional talismans bearing that spell,” Lord Jourdain said to Atwood, who shrugged.

“Child’s play. The hard part was getting them onto the right people. You’ve a very light hand, Lord Lumière, I didn’t see you plant a single one of them.” He held up a tiny blue glass sphere in one hand.

“The simple sleight of hand skills of a street magician,” Camille replied with a smile. “They don’t even merit a comparison with your masterful abilities.”

Wait, one of those had been tucked somewhere in Anton’s clothing? But…how, when? There was too much going on that Anton didn’t understand—he was almost dizzy from glancing back and forth. He looked at Dr. Grable for guidance, but all he saw in the older man’s face was reluctant admiration. “A pretty trap, Lord Jourdain,” he said.

“I could not have done it without your assistance.”

“Assistance with what?” Anton shouted. He was easily the lowest-ranking person left alive in the room, but by God he was going to have his say now. “What was this all about? Really, truly, what was it about? And I don’t want to hear it from you,” he snapped at Camille as his lover stepped forward. “I’ve no interest in having you lie to me with a straight face again. What is going on here?”

Lord Jourdain stood up. “I’ll explain it to you, once we’re in my office and away from the offal on the floor,” he said, motioning for more servants to enter. “Come along now.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

It was only Anton, Lord Jourdain, Dr. Grable, and Camille who met in the administrator’s office a short while later. Lord Atwood had lost all interest in the proceedings once the death had been meted out, and Caroline was escorted to her own rooms, to be held under lock and key until Jourdain made his decision about her. At least it wasn’t underground with Montgomery, but Anton wasn’t inclined to consider that charitable at the moment.

“What does he mean by assistance?” Anton demanded of his mentor as soon as the guards left. “What did you have to do with this charade? How long did you know this was going to happen?” A sudden thought left him cold. “Did you…have you been planning this since Zürich? Did you know what was going to happen on our journey?”

Dr. Grable held up peaceable hands. “I had no notion back then,” he insisted. “I truly thought we were coming here to assess the production and figure out where the saboteur was here. I wasn’t brought fully on board until a short time ago.”

“But there was no saboteur.” Anton turned to Lord Jourdain. “There wasn’t really a saboteur, am I right? It was part of your ruse.”

“Indeed,” he said, as unruffled as ever as he sat behind his large, mahogany desk. It was topped with white marble, struck through here and there with gold veins. Suitable for a child of the emperor, Anton thought, because that was who he was seeing here. Not a simple lord, not a societal outcast, not even the powerful keeper of the empire’s intellectual secrets. This was a man who bowed to very few people, and no one in this room. This was a man secure in his personal importance, so secure that he hadn’t hesitated to manipulate them all like pawns on a chessboard. Or perhaps, more aptly, daisies in a daisy chain, because Anton certainly felt all knotted up right now.

“I needed to accomplish several things in short order,” he went on. “First and foremost, I needed to unseat the simmering rebellion rising in the aristocracy’s ranks, fomented by none other than the more military-minded Vicomte Voclain. To do so, I needed an excuse to get him here. I was going to use the tanks as my lever—he has been asking about them for months, and his brother didn’t see fit to check him—but then, well, Wilhelm was murdered. The bomb on the train was an unforeseen act of terrorism, but Cardinal Proulx took quick advantage of it. I’ve no doubt he’d been planning to kill the elder Voclain for some time.”

“You knew about the cardinal, then,” Anton said. “What he thought about you, what his sentiments were.”

“Of course. Anyone who’s ever met dear Hrym knows the boy is terrible at keeping secrets. It was simplicity itself to coax the content of his confessions out, and coupled with other things I’ve heard and seen in these corridors, it was no surprise. I was a bit shocked he took matters into his own hands,” Lord Jourdain added, “but then I met the cardinal’s chosen accomplice, and, well. He chose very poorly in Monsieur Deschamps.”

“But what does this have to do with Caroline? Or me?” Anton asked. “Or, or Camille, for that matter?”

Lord Jourdain sighed, and Dr. Grable winced. Anton couldn’t see what Camille did, since he was standing behind him, but he assumed his expression was similarly pained. “You really must learn to be more discreet,” Lord Jourdain admonished. “Calling him by his given name? Far too familiar. If Cardinal Proulx could see through your façade, imagine what someone with direct authority over you might do.”

“It’s not my business,” Dr. Grable said in a kind tone that grated on Anton worse than a harsh warning would have. “But you really should take more precautions if you’re determined to carry on with a man, especially one as scrutinized as a lumière.”

Still nothing from Camille. Anton ignored the silence for now. A revelation was brewing inside of him, something big—something that Camille knew to be wary of. Anton just had to figure out what that was.

“Honestly, it all had very little to do with you,” Lord Jourdain said. “Certainly, it was a stroke of luck your knowing Lady Cuthbert, but that is down to the foresight of your mentor, not any of my doing.”

And suddenly Anton knew. He knew what Camille had been doing in Zürich. He turned to look at him, and received a blank face in return. Anton wanted to knock the moustache off this cold, calculating man.

“You were there for Caroline.”

Camille shook his head. “I was there on a personal matter—”

“You were there for Caroline! You knew, somehow you knew that she was a spy and you were following her even then!” It was the only explanation Anton could think of that made sense.

“No, Anton.” Emotion finally cracked through Camille’s stiff exterior—regret, pain, unhappiness. Anton stuffed his urge to comfort down deep inside. “I was there to see you.”

“You…what?”

Camille sighed. “A personal matter, I said. Remember? I had not seen you in nearly a year, I had just finished a hellish stint chasing Montgomery and his ilk through countries and across mountains, and I…I wanted to see you again. Lady Cuthbert’s presence was entirely coincidental.”

Anton stared, stunned and disbelieving, at Camille. He stared back grimly.

“It appears Mr. Seiber isn’t the only one in need of a reminder on how to remain discreet,” Lord Jourdain said. “Brother, really.” He straightened some papers on his desk. “Your personal quandaries will have to wait. There is still the matter of what to do with Lady Cuthbert.” He smirked, a mere hint of it around the lips, but more than enough to set Anton’s blood to boiling. “She is a comparatively decent prisoner for trade, but given that she was betrayed by someone from her own country, well…” He shrugged. “Perhaps she would best serve as a warning.”

Anton felt his blood go cold. “You can’t mean killing her.”

“I can and I do. She is a spy and a thief, Mr. Seiber.”

“She is a mother, a wife, a member of the peerage!” Anton protested. “She is precious to them!”

“Not as precious as she is to you, perhaps.” Lord Jourdain tilted his head slightly. “Another lover?”

“No! Not anything like that. Just an old friend.” Anton swallowed hard. “My oldest friend. You must let her return to England.”

“Absolutely not.” His voice was final. “There is nothing you could offer me to allow that. She must pay, one way or another, for her attempt on our sovereignty. She will stay here for the time being, while you and Dr Grable go—”

“I can fix your tanks.”

The entire room went silent. Anton was very aware of the fact that the reactions of the men around him were vastly different, ranging from dismay to curiosity to cold appraisal, but he didn’t let himself respond. It was time for them to come to him, to see that he had something to bargain with. It wasn’t what he wanted to do, but he wasn’t going to let Caroline be murdered for her own foolishness, either.

She would pay a price for getting caught as a spy when she returned to England, he was sure of it, but by God she would return to England and be there for her family, and for Anton’s mother, who Caroline loved like her own.

“To my knowledge, you’re not an engineer,” Lord Jourdain said at last. “Nor are you a weapons expert of any kind. Your gifts are solely thaumaturgical—indeed, you specialize in spells relating to the dead. Your skillset seems irrelevant in the theater of war.”

“So are your tanks,” Anton said bluntly. “They’re little more than firework-flingers right now, as I understand it. They can’t fire solid shot, and you don’t have the facilities up and running to make shells that they can fire. You’re looking at the prospect of a slow but seething revolt, one that will attract all manner of people to its banner, and your potential show of force is utterly ineffective. It won’t take long for people to realize that they have nothing to fear from your tanks.”

Lord Jourdain folded his hands. “We will have new models and sufficient ammunition developed within the year.”

“Developed, but not in mass production,” Anton countered. “Not in the numbers you need. You need something quick, a weapon that can get the point across to your enemies that you’re not to be trifled with. Something powerful, that strikes fear into their hearts. You thought that something was the spell Montgomery carried around in his head: a gun that always kills, bullets that never miss their target. I say you are not being imaginative enough.”

“And you are?”

“I am.”

“Anton, no,” Camille said softly behind him. Against his better judgment, Anton turned and looked at his lover. His handsome face was exquisitely pained, like Saint Sebastian pierced through the heart by arrows fired at his emperor’s orders. “Don’t give them this. They will only corrupt it.”

Anton opened his mouth to speak, to defend himself, but the truth was that Camille was right. The empire would take his spell and use it, and it would bring them victory. It would also cause a terrible amount of pain, of mental and emotional agony to those who witnessed its effects, and possibly bring about a number of deaths on its own.

But what would the Dévoué do, as they sought to amass their own power? What would the bored, unruly aristocrats who longed for conflict do? How many deaths would they bring about as they sought to throw down their emperor?

In the end, Anton had no way of weighing the balance of the lives that would be changed by his decision. All he was certain he could do was save one life, one person. He would do that, and gladly be damned.

“Let me show you.” He reached into his waistcoat pocket and pulled out a small wooden sphere. “Or at least, let me show you, Dr. Grable. The lords, given their afflictions, will not experience it as we do, but you will be able to recite the truth of it to them.” He looked at Lord Jourdain. “Has anyone ever died in this room?”

The man’s flinch was slight, but there. “Yes.”

“Then here will work fine.” Not giving himself a moment to reconsider, he twisted the globe in his hands, feeling its heat expand against his fingertips as the chemicals inside mixed together. He dropped it to the floor, and a second later his alchemical equation flared to life across the surface of the wood, a brief burst of glowing silver. A second later the ball dissolved, particles of ash and metal and blood rising into the air. For a moment, nothing happened. And then…

The woman who swirled up out of the smoke was beautiful, but her face was anguished. She knelt on the floor in front of the desk, facing away from it, holding a small paring knife or letter opener in her hands. She opened her mouth with a despairing scream, and a moment later drew the blade across her own throat.

It seared like fire, and Anton clutched his neck with a gasp. Dr. Grable did the same. She bled and bled, crying but unable to moan with her ruined throat, and in under a minute she was dead.

“Good God in Heaven,” Dr. Grable murmured, his face as pale as chalk. “I have seen spells like this before, Seiber, with the freshly dead, but never felt them like this. How is it possible?”

Anton coughed a bit, just to remind his body that his throat still worked. “An accident, one that won’t be easy to reproduce without my assistance,” he said hoarsely. “And I won’t give it unless Caroline is freed and allowed to return home.”

Lord Jourdain had gone very still. “You contained that spell within your simple wooden ball?”

“I do.” He stared Lord Jourdain straight in the eye. “Will you trade a useless spy for ammunition that will allow your tanks to function as intended right now, today even? I have more of these in my holdall. With proper packaging, they could be deployed over very long distances. And when they land…” He shrugged. “It isn’t physical annihilation, but it’s certainly incapacitating for a time.” And horrifying.

“You would agree to stay here and work with us on this matter until we are secure in the results and manufacture of your spell and do not require your continued services?” Lord Jourdain pressed.

“Within reason, yes. I won’t stay here forever.” Except he might, if it meant Caroline going free, but he wasn’t going to admit that yes.

“Nor would we want you to,” Lord Jourdain said dryly. “You’ve proven far slipperier than I ever imagined when I first set eyes on you. God only knows what you could get up to here on a permanent basis.” He sat back in his chair. “Agreed. In exchange for your spell, and your assistance in adapting it to suit our tanks, I will have Lady Cuthbert on a ship back to England within a day’s time.”

“Unharmed.”

“Unharmed, naturally.” Lord Jourdain smiled. “Welcome to your life for the foreseeable future, Mr. Seiber.”

And what a future it is.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The series of farewells that followed Anton signing his life over to the Institute were disconcertingly rapid. Dr. Grable was the easiest to say goodbye to, and the one that also felt the least permanent, in a way. “You can’t possibly think I’m giving you up for lost to these bastards, can you?” he asked gruffly that evening. He was preparing to board the airship—Dr. Wictoryn was standing by to load him onto it, and perhaps to do a bit more, if the pink flush in her cheeks was anything to judge by. “We’ll be in touch, Seiber, and I’ll continue to communicate with Jourdain on a regular basis. The moment you’ve served your time, I’ll come and get you myself.”

“Thank you, sir,” Anton said. It was as much enthusiasm as he could manage, the limit of how far he could push his mind to overcome the fearful flutters of his heart. The second after he’d made his deal with Lord Jourdain, he’d been terrified of the ramifications, but there was no way he could go back. His choice was made, and no matter what happened to him, he would see it through.

“Lord above, don’t thank me for being the one to drag you into this, lad.” Dr. Grable held out his hand, and Anton took it. His mentor’s grip was warm and strong. “We’ll see each other again soon,” he promised, and Anton was warmed by the assurance in his voice. That sort of confidence was catching, and when Anton straightened again his carriage was a bit taller, his head a bit higher.

Seeing Caroline appear at the entrance to the Institute, dressed in her traveling clothes with two servants bringing her trunks behind her, was almost enough to break him down again. She looked elegant, like a woman who wasn’t being forcibly escorted off the grounds, but the expression on her face was pure panic.

“Anton!” She ran to him, and he held out his arms and pulled her in close. She trembled, silent sobs wracking her frame, and it was all he could do to keep himself from joining in.

“I’m so sorry!” she wept into his shoulder. “I should have been more careful, I should have—I never meant for you to be dragged into such a mess. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I promise, I didn’t—I would never prey on your good nature, and when you told me ‘no’ I knew that was the end of it. I didn’t think you would—that you would—”

“I know,” he said as soon as he could get a word in edgewise. “I know, I promise. I never thought that, not for a second.” Caroline might have tried to use their friendship to get him on her side in the beginning, but his no had been final and she had respected that. If she hadn’t, he wouldn’t have offered himself in her place.

“I do not deserve it.”

“You do,” he assured her. This part, at least, he felt confident in. “You deserve to go home to your family.”

She made an ugly noise. “To a husband who doesn’t even notice when we’re in the same room together and a child who probably won’t remember my face once I return.”

“He will.” Anton pulled back a bit. “You know he will. Children need their parents, and he will need you even more if your husband is truly neglectful. Be there for him. Do your research and improve your craft.” A knot swelled up in his throat, but he managed to speak around it. “Try not to think of me.”

Caroline pulled back and stared at him, dumbstruck. “Are you mad?” she demanded at last. “To ask me not to think of you, as close to me as any brother, who puts me before you despite my terrible mistakes? Darling.” She kissed his cheeks. “You might as well ask me to forget the sun. I will think about you every day, and pray for the moment that they let you go and you may come back home. Come straight to me.” It was half plea, half command. “Come to me and you will always have a place, and never have to worry about money or providing for your mother. You are always, always welcome in my home.”

“Thank you.” Anton hugged her again, one last time, pressing a kiss to the top of her head before pulling back and letting her go. “You must leave now,” he said quietly.

“Yes, Lord Jourdain already informed me of where I am to be deposited,” Caroline said, wiping the corners of her eyes and regaining her composure until she was once again a lovely, haughty noblewoman. “Which, given the circumstances, I must be grateful for.” She caught his gaze one last time. “I love you very much, Anton.”

“And I you,” he replied. Then she was gone, off to the airship, and he was left to watch as a few minutes later it floated into the sky, moving so quickly it vanished into the clouds in moments.

It was so strange, to be here without anyone to anchor him now. He had come with people he relied on, people he cared for and communicated with—now there was just him. Hrym came to see him at dinner, which Anton ate in the big room without the benefit—or blight—of more company, but Hrym was distraught himself, and not easy company.

“I thought God loved me,” he said, as confused and hurt as a caged mouse. “I thought I was his child, beloved by him. That’s what Cardinal Proulx told me. But he wasn’t telling the truth. He thought we were bad.”

“God does love you,” Anton said, feeling out of his depth but trying anyway. “God loves all of us.”

“Even those with no souls? Or those of us born outside of holy matrimony?”

“Of course. We are all made in God’s image, aren’t we?” Anton tried. “How could he despise us for faults that are not of our own making? If God’s hand is in everything, then it’s in the making of us as well. No person is perfect, but he loves us just the same.”

“Then why did Cardinal Proulx try to kill Lord Jourdain and his brother?”

Anton’s meager appetite slipped away, and he set his napkin down in his lap with a sigh. “I don’t know. He was a man with many harmful thoughts, Hrym. I don’t know why he did what he did.”

“But you don’t think he was right?”

“No. I don’t think he was right at all.” The rest of the meal passed in slightly-less-painful silence, which Anton was grateful for.

He kept the rooms he’d been originally given—entering them was both a relief and a sadness at the end of the interminable day. He’d been set up with his own laboratory, and all of his possessions left at the university would be coming back with the airship. He could pick up his research where he’d left off, with more supplies, more assistance, and more financing behind him than ever before. He would be unstoppable.

And soon, Napoleon III’s forces would be as well.

He showered that night alone. He undressed and got into bed alone. He had thought he would fall asleep alone too, his room only brightened by the light of a huge full moon, but just as he began to drowse, the comforter moved, and a second later a warm body pressed in behind his.

“You came,” Anton murmured.

“I did.”

“Where were you?”

“Readying for my departure.” Camille’s voice was pained. “I leave before first light.”

“But Montgomery is already here. Who else do they have for you to hunt down?”

“The list is endless.” There was a moment’s silence, then Camille pressed a gentle kiss to the back of Anton’s neck. “I don’t expect you to forgive me. But you should know that I don’t leave lightly, and I will return to you as often as I can, if you wish it.”

If I wish it… Anton wiped his face across his pillow before rolling over to look at Camille. He seemed exhausted, a shell of himself, dry-eyed but pallid, and too thin through his face. Even his moustache drooped.

“I always want you with me,” Anton said simply. Fighting his desires was too much, now. He couldn’t do it, even though he was angry over all that Camille had kept from him, and all he would have to continue to keep from him. As a lumière, Camille belonged to his country, to his emperor, first. Anton had to accept that.

Camille swallowed hard and closed his eyes. “Then I shall return as soon as possible.”

“Good.” There was no lust between them tonight—Anton was too afraid, and his lover too exhausted. He tucked himself into the curve of Camille’s arms and closed his own eyes. “I shall depend upon it. I’m…” Sorry I didn’t listen to you, sorry we’re both stuck here, sorry I’m not sorry that you’re part of my life. “I’m glad I won’t be alone,” he whispered at last, ashamed but honest.

“Never. As long as I’m alive, I will be here for you whenever I can.” He kissed Anton’s forehead. “Sleep. We both need it.”

“Yes,” Anton agreed, and with the warmth of Camille’s body and the thrum of his steady breaths to lull him, he fell asleep in moments. He slept harder and better than he had in days.

When he woke, Camille was gone.

Epilogue

The room was dark, barely illuminated by the remains of the fire in the grate. It was intimate, which fit the mood, but not a warm, tender intimacy like Camille had just shared with Anton. This was an intimacy forged from blood and duty, and despite the bond that flowed between him and his half-brother, Camille felt cold within it.

“You have your instructions?”

“I do.”

“Good.” His brother swirled the brandy in his rounded glass moodily before taking a sip. “We need to make an example of the Dévoué, preferably one that will serve to inspire our own aristocracy back into line as well. I want a list of suitable targets within two months; at least ten, no more than twenty.”

“Understood.”

He sighed in a long-suffering manner. “You needn’t be so petulant about it.”

“Petulant, Laurent?” Camille half wished he had his own glass of brandy at the moment, so he could have the satisfaction of throwing it into his brother’s face. “I’m not petulant.”

Laurent scoffed. “I see it in every line of your face, every movement of your body. Don’t blame me for your lover’s inability to choose his friends wisely, Camille.”

“I don’t blame you for that,” Camille said, making an effort to keep his voice even. “I certainly do blame you for putting him into a position where he had to give up both his freedom and his research to further a cause he has next to nothing to do with, though.”

“He did so voluntarily.”

“Because you threatened to kill a woman he loves like a sister as a spy!”

“She was a spy,” Laurent said simply. “Letting her go without some sort of punishment or appropriate governmental exchange would weaken my position in court, which is something neither of us can afford. Proulx and Voclain weren’t the only men in a position of power with doubts about the monarchy, and you and I are both very vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life in Paris, brother. You know I had no choice.”

“You had to act,” Camille agreed. “But you didn’t have to force his hand.”

“I didn’t even know he had anything to offer,” Laurent pointed out. “But I’m grateful for all of us that he did. If this works, Camille, we will buy peace for the entirety of the French Empire for years with it. Tell me you see that.”

“I see it.”

But you will buy it at the cost of Anton’s heart and soul. Nothing he could say would dissuade his brother once he had the bit between his teeth, though. “I will go now.” He stood up and pulled on his cloak.

Laurent stood up as well. “I need regular messages, weekly if you can manage it.”

“I understand.”

“And return here within two months’ time.”

Two months… It was barely enough time to do what Laurent wanted from him, and far too much time to be separated from Anton. Camille’s heart yearned to rejoin him, to kiss him awake and fill him with pleasure. He was the first thing that Camille had ever wanted for himself, with no regard to family or duty, and the only thing he’d wanted to keep separate from those heavy responsibilities. Now they were inextricable, and he felt sick with the weight of that knowledge.

Laurent touched his arm with one chilly hand. “I will ensure he’s taken care of,” he assured Camille. “No harm will come to Mr. Seiber while he remains with us. You have my word.”

Camille knew it was the best his brother could do. “Thank you.” After a moment’s wavering, he leaned in and embraced the other man. Laurent seemed startled, but clasped him back for a moment.

“Carry on then, Lord Lumière,” he said once they were parted.

“As you bid, Lord Jourdain.” Camille put on his tall hat and nodded, then left his brother’s cozy study and headed along the cold, empty corridor to the front of the Institute, where a carriage was waiting for him. He didn’t stop to take one last look at Anton. He couldn’t—otherwise leaving would be unbearable.

He stepped into the cold pre-dawn air, handed his valise over to the footman waiting for him, and got into the simple black coach. It rattled as it set off down the road for Paris, and the train that would take him north.

Camille closed his eyes, bit his lip, and tried not to think of Anton.

He failed.

Be well. May God and my brother keep you safe until we see each other once more.

For if they did not…Camille would burn the world down.

What’s next for Anton? Purchase or borrow your copy of The Trials on Amazon! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BJ2VV876

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~*~

The Trials

The Spell Saga: Book Four

Anton Seiber, Master Thaumaturge and reluctant architect of the French Empire’s newest weapon of war, is on the verge of collapse. It wouldn’t be so bad if his blood wasn’t required to power the spell revolutionizing the battlefield, or if he were allowed to communicate with his friends and family, or if he could see his lover Lord Camille Lumière, special investigator for the emperor himself, more than once every few months. As it is, he’s barely holding himself together. He’s determined to make it through…until an accident in the laboratory leads to his collapse.

Camille is a loyal servant of the empire, but it will take more than a war to keep him away from Anton. He returns to find his lover on the brink of death, and it takes Camille’s special “gift” to keep him alive. He is ordered to leave Anton behind and return to service—the future of the empire, and everyone “gifted” like him, might depend on it.

There’s only one thing to do: escape to England with Anton. If only they weren’t surrounded by armed guards, dangerous magic, deadly cannons and, oh yes—a war for control of the entire continent.

Find The Trials on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BJ2VV876

The Trials

The Spell Saga: Book Four

Chapter One

The first battlefield trial of the empire’s newest weapon took place in Strasbourg, France, on a cold spring morning just before dawn. Anton Seiber watched with trepidation as the tanks rolled into position several hundred meters out from where the Dévoué insurgents were camped all around the city. It was early, but the men defending rebellious Strasbourg were as awake as the Imperial forces were. He could hear them shouting, see fires blazing to life. Anton knew from reconnaissance brought by the scouts that the Dévoué had secured over a dozen cannons for their camp, all of which now faced the south, directly at the approaching army he was part of.

Only it wasn’t an army. It looked like an army from a distance, a force to be reckoned with, hundreds of men stretched out in a line and supported by cavalry and the emperor’s newfangled metal “tanks,” treaded machines that stank of the fuel they burned, and which were rumored to be an engineering disaster.

“They can’t even handle firing a proper shell,” whispered gossipmongers both inside and outside the Imperial court. “Armored or not, enemy fire will turn them into scrap in no time at all.”

That was the worry, and the reason the “army” supporting this armament trial was a hundred men long but only five men deep. They were here to prevent the Dévoué’s cavalry from making a sally across the field separating them until the trial of the emperor’s secret weapon had been completed.

If it worked, it had the potential to turn the tide of the oncoming confrontation before it began. If it worked, thousands, perhaps even millions of people would live who otherwise would have died in the war that was looming. If it worked, Anton’s name would go down in the history books as the creator of a device so hideously effective it saved an empire.

If it worked, Anton wasn’t sure he would ever be able to forgive himself. There was no choice, though, not if he wanted to save lives. Saving minds and spirits…that would be the work of the clergy once this was all over.

“Sir.” Lieutenant Romilly lowered his spyglass and glanced at Anton. “The mist is lifting. If you want to beat the sunrise, now is the best time for it.”

Anton glanced over at the architect of this entire scheme, Lord Laurent Jourdain, the head of L’Institut D’Ingénierie Technologique, colloquially known as the Institute. He was much more than that, in truth, but it wasn’t Anton’s place to speculate on such things. “Now’s as good a time as any,” he said after his personal assistant relayed the image emanating from the golden orb they held at head-height. “They’ve got their own mages looking our way, helping to aim those cannons just right. We need to beat them to the punch.” He looked at Anton. “Our attack should be on your word, however, Mr. Seiber.”

Right. Of course it should. It was his invention being tested right now, after all. Never mind there was no incantation needed for these shells—the simple act of firing them provided the impetus for their activation. No, he had to take responsibility for what was to come next. He hated it, but he had to.

Anton drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, then moved a few paces to the left so he stood next to the lead tank. It was short, no taller than a horse, and the turret at the top of this one was open so the gunner could see him. This tank was one of four that they had—experimental prototypes from the Institute. By this time next summer, they would have a thousand of these.

Hopefully by then, they wouldn’t need them.

Anton looked up at the gunner. “Loaded and ready,” the man said. Anton nodded, then turned toward the Dévoué camp. He could see more men moving about now, could hear them hyping themselves up. It had to be now if they were going to beat them to the attack.

“Fire.”

The gunner nodded. A second later, a relatively gentle FOOM sounded from the four-inch gun at the front of the tank as it sent one of Anton’s inventions flying through the air. The shell exploded on impact with the ground just a few dozen meters in front of the line of Dévoué, flinging bits of wood and ash in a haphazard ring around it. The contents smoldered for a moment, then the flames died down.

The Dévoué, who had taken cover for a moment, returned to their posts with jovial ferocity, jeering and laughing loudly enough that Anton could hear it without straining his ears. He waited. Five seconds…ten…

“Sir,” Romilly began, but then all of a sudden things began to change.

The smoke from the shell, which had been drifting across the front line of the Dévoué, abruptly coalesced into a singular figure. Anton couldn’t make it out from here, but he thought it might be a man, staggering forward. The distant jeers turned to shouts of alarm, and as the figure dropped to the ground, their shouts became screams of agony as the moment of death for the apparition before them caught them in the jaws of its pain.

Well then. The resonance between the blood and the spell worked even when the quantity of blood was quite small. That was a positive development. The fact that the shell had only produced one ghost was less positive, but its psychological impact couldn’t be overstated. At least a dozen men were on the ground, still screaming—others had run, but there was no outpacing from this psychic pain. It had to be endured until the spell ran its course, and given the amount of powder Anton had put into the shell, it wasn’t about to end any time soon.

“That is good enough for me,” Lord Jourdain said, then turned to the lieutenant. “Fire at will, Lieutenant Romilly.”

“Aye, sir.” The command spread along the tanks, and more shells soon joined the first at the front ranks of the Dévoué. Some didn’t produce any ghosts at all, but one must have hit a family’s plot, because dozens of ghosts rose from it, and the chaos it caused as the spell forced the watchers to relive the shadowy spirits’ deaths was incredible. Even the peaceful, sleepy ends were their own brand of terrifying as the sensation of a sluggish heart beating its last was felt by everyone in range.

The entire line broke, men abandoning cannons and losing control of their horses as they ran for cover from something that couldn’t be evaded. Soon the shells penetrated deeper, and after fifteen minutes the Dévoué had managed exactly one cannon’s worth of resistance—and just one shot from it at that—to the tanks’ barrage of spirit shells.

It was an utter rout.

“A good first effort,” Lord Jourdain mused. “Of course, rain and snow will change the shell’s effectiveness, and the Dévoué’s mages will try to work up spells to deflect them. We’ll have to stay on our toes if we want this weapon to keep its potency in battle.”

“Of course,” Anton agreed dully. He ought to feel glad it was such a success, but he just felt sick inside. Resurrecting the shades of the dead—not their actual souls, several priests had confirmed for him, but the shadows of the lives they’d led and the deaths they’d endured—was a harrowing experience. Sharing those deaths with the people close enough to be affected by the smoke was a whole new type of combat.

In his lighter moments, Anton thought about the positive ways his spell might be put to use. As a means of discovering the truth behind someone’s death, it was a fascinating avenue of investigation. He wasn’t sure how far back the spell could reach, but early tests at the Institute had brought back shades dating to Roman times, and for all the awfulness of their deaths, it had been a fascinating illumination of a time long gone.

As a method for tracking down the perpetrators of atrocities, there was also a lot to be said for the process. Of course, the fact those atrocities then had to be experienced by the person using the spell was rather a dampener, but…

The tanks stopped firing a moment later, holding back some shells until they verified how successful their initial attack was. Anton stared into the distance, willing the smoke to clear faster. A second later the sun crested the horizon, revealing…

There was no word for it other than devastation. Even without a glass or a spell to sharpen his distance vision, Anton could see that not a single person had been left standing upright in the camp itself. No one was manning the guns. Those who could be seen were either on the ground or kneeling, while in the distance some few who were on the periphery of the spell had run, and were still running.

There remained some people within the camp, men who were lucky enough to be out of range of the spell, but the rout of their colleagues had put them into a similar state of disarray. Of course it had—they’d been expecting bullets and cannon fire, and they’d gotten something completely different.

“No more than a hundred men remain behind in the camp,” Romilly announced. “It will be a simple thing for our troops to march in and apprehend them before they manage to regroup.” He glanced at Anton. “If the air is safe for our own men, of course.”

“It’s fine now,” Anton replied, sure of this much. “The effect lessens exponentially in those who aren’t there for the initial detonation, and by the time the shades are gone, there’s nothing to be feared.”

“Well, then.” Lord Jourdain nodded to the lieutenant “See it done. Once you’ve rounded up the leader from wherever he’s run off to, I want you to prepare him for an audience with me. Bring the mayor of the town as well. Our initial assault is just the first round of repercussions to be felt for their efforts toward anarchy.” His face was calm and cold. “An example must be made of the enemies of the empire, after all.”

“Yes, milord.” Lieutenant Romilly began moving, calling for his men, but Anton didn’t pay attention to him. He was caught in the viper’s stare that was Lord Jourdain’s appraisal.

“As for you,” Lord Jourdain said, “we need to have a discussion about the efficacy of your new armaments immediately. Walk with me back toward the transport.”

Transport. How needlessly vague. As though the silvery airship was going to be able to hide from the sun, and prying eyes, much longer. It was one of only three like it, and all of France knew it was the craft carrying those in the Emperor’s particular favor. Right now, that was Lord Jourdain and Anton, among others.

They walked back to where it was docked together. Upon seeing their approach, the cabin boy opened the compartment that would allow them inside.

“Takin’ off already, milords?” the lanky youth asked, looking between them curiously.

“Not quite yet, Bert,” Lord Jourdain replied. “Merely here for a conversation. Go and join your captain abovedeck.”

“Aye, milord.” Bert left, leaving Anton and Lord Jourdain alone in the dim underbelly of the airship. The smell of its magic, petrichor and ice and the eerie Nothing that powered it was almost enough to take the scent of his own spells out of Anton’s nose. He hadn’t even been close enough to smell the explosives going off, but he knew their scents, and couldn’t help but feel that knowledge reflected in his mind.

“The trial went better than I expected, but not as well as I could have hoped,” Lord Jourdain said, getting right to the heart of the matter as he always did. Small talk was for people he needed to cozen, not his indentured servants.

Unfair. You indentured yourself to him in exchange for Caroline’s life. Anton would never regret giving up his freedom and the science behind this particular spell in exchange for Bonaparte III granting his oldest friend clemency after she’d been caught spying, but he was not a saint—he harbored plenty of resentment over it.

“Apart from the long-term effects of the spell itself needing more study, the shells need to spread the effect over a larger area,” Lord Jourdain went on, ignorant of—or more likely ignoring—Anton’s moment of pique. “As the cost of production currently stands, we’re spending five times the price to manufacture one of these shells as opposed to traditional armaments. It’s not a good enough return on the empire’s investment.”

“Those costs would go down if you would allow me to teach the spell to someone else,” Anton pointed out, not for the first time either. “The catalyst for the spell is simple enough, and the structure of the equations could be learned by any master thaumaturge after a short period of study. They don’t even have to specialize in spells for the dead.” Like Anton did. It was a rare specialty, among thaumaturges—far more popular these days were ballistics experts and explosion generators, ever more desired as the continent careened toward war.

But Anton was the one who would stop that. If he could sway Lord Jourdain to his way of thinking, at least.

“You have Hrym for your assistant,” Lord Jourdain said dismissively.

“Yes, and he is a massive help when it comes to component balancing and the basic enchantment to arm the shells,” Anton said, “but he can’t help provide the primary ingredient. That has to come from a thaumaturge who has seen death on an intimate level. None of the people at the Institute have even that basic experience now that Lord Atwood has passed away.” Not that Anton would have let that crotchety old man near his spellwork unless he was under orders. He wouldn’t forgive him for setting Caroline up to be caught.

“The process is too powerful to be shared,” Lord Jourdain replied. “If it got into the wrong hands, the effects on our troops could be devastating.”

“You are talking in circles, milord,” Anton said tiredly. “Either we must find a way to cut the cost of the process down by farming production out to more facilities, or we must shut the whole program down because it is inefficient and costly. You cannot have it either way right now, and I would venture to state that given all the resources you have already poured into these shells, it would be far better to grapple with your security issues and place any new practitioners you might hire under a geas of silence than to end this now. After all, I’m supposed to be working for you for another year.”

Lord Jourdain smiled. It was a small, chilly thing, but seemed genuine enough. “There are times when I understand why he likes you,” he said, and Anton went still at the mention, however oblique, of Camille. Lord Jourdain almost never talked about him, despite their personal connection, but whenever he did, Anton couldn’t help but lean in for more.

“You are inelegant with your words,” he went on, “but there is a time for elegance and a time for action. Very well. I shall send you a number of dossiers to review, and we will discuss the training of your secondaries three days from now. Have a manual written up by then with all pertinent information contained.”

“Of course,” you bloody taskmaster. Good thing Anton had been keeping his notes on process so organized; it wouldn’t take much rewriting to turn them into a comprehensive training manual.

“Good.” Lord Jourdain turned and headed for the exit, motioning Anton to walk with him. “What is our current stockpile of armaments at?”

“Somewhere around three thousand shells,” Anton replied. “Your quartermaster would know for sure.”

“We need ten times that within a month.”

Anton sighed and shook his head. “Then you’d best bring me ten more thaumaturges who have the necessary qualifications quickly, milord, because I only have so much blood.”

“And we must be careful not to drain you completely dry,” Lord Jourdain added with a wry tilt to his head as he stepped back onto the ground. The sun was a hand’s width above Strasbourg now, illuminating a cityscape as beautiful and calm as any other morning…from this distance. If he listened harder, Anton could still hear screaming. The closer someone was to the heart of the explosion, the longer the symptoms lasted. “Very well, then. Three days, Master Seiber.”

“My lord,” he interjected just as the tall, regal man began to turn away. “If I could—that is, if you don’t mind—I would greatly like to speak to Camille again.” He received letters, of course—he couldn’t send them in return, since Camille moved around so frequently in the course of performing his duties—but it wasn’t the same as seeing his face and speaking to him. The process of doing so was convoluted, thanks to what Camille and Lord Jourdain were, but it wasn’t impossible to make a connection.

“Hmm.” Anton waited breathlessly, with an eagerness he was almost ashamed of not controlling better. “I suppose it has been a while, hasn’t it? Tonight, then. Let my steward know after you return to the institute and he’ll make the necessary arrangements. You realize it may take a while,” Lord Jourdain cautioned him. “Days, perhaps. It’s hard to track Lord Lumière’s movements as closely as I would like.”

That’s just how Camille likes it. “I understand, milord,” was all Anton said.

“Very well.” He gave the barest nod in response to Anton’s much deeper bow, then walked back toward where his soldiers were rounding up members of the Dévoué for questioning and, ultimately, imprisonment. It made Anton happy to be leaving.

About The Author

Cari Z. is a Colorado girl who loves snow and sunshine. She writes award-winning LGBTQ fiction featuring aliens, supervillains, soothsayers, and even normal people sometimes. Cari has published short stories, novellas and novels with numerous print and e-presses, and she also offers up a tremendous amount of free content on her blog and on AO3 as CariZee. Follow her blog, join her Patreon, or sign up for her newsletter to read her serial stories! New chapters post on a weekly/monthly basis.

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