Philippa Ballantine: Spectyr

I cannot—I am Hatipai’s angel and have none of my own, it whispered, laying its empty hand flat against the surface, a mirror of hers on the other side.

“What is your purpose?”

To kill the Young Pretender.

Zofiya’s jaw tightened before she could voice a protest. Raed Syndar Rossin, only son of the deposed Emperor. He had saved her life at the fountain. Someone had shot at her, planning to end her existence in front of a crowd of people. He’d tackled her to the ground, taking the bullet for himself when her own bodyguard had failed to see the danger.

He’d been willing to sacrifice himself for the sister of his enemy. A mob had tried to kill Raed, and Kal had him imprisoned for his own safety. The Emperor had hoped to buy some time to decide what to do with the Pretender to his throne. Yet Raed had escaped. Zofiya knew she still owed him.

His death is necessary.

The angel’s face was now so close that Zofiya could begin to make out details. The skin was faintly blue and marked with lines that were Hatipai’s secret sigils, known only to her most ardent followers.

He will bring geists, and they will dance on the cinders of your world. The smooth, dark eyes never flinched from hers.

Yet the Grand Duchess was not so far lost in awe that she did not consider the possibility that this was an agent of evil. So she leaned forward. “Forgive me, bright angel. But speak the words on the inner Temple of Hatipai—the secrets only the acolytes of her divinity know.”

For a moment, the angel glared at her with so much wrath boiling behind its eyes that even the fearless sister of the Emperor trembled. Then it tilted its head, a sliver of a smile on its full lips.

Truly, you are a wise creature, Zofiya of the Empire.

Zofiya’s heart remembered to beat again. And then the angel whispered to her the words that had been passed down in great secrecy to the Grand Duchess by the most holy sisters of Hatipai. These incantations were the heart of the goddess.

As the angel’s words reached her ear, Zofiya began to smile. When the angel had finished, it looked down at her with an almost maternal pleasure. Now, child, let me out to begin the goddess’ work.

The Grand Duchess leaned forward again, placing her lips against the cool slab of mysterious stone. Her warmth traveled into the stone, and a sound like a distant bell rolled from the earth.

The wall shook once and then crumbled like a theatrical curtain being dropped. Zofiya looked up to see the angel step delicately over the rubble. The wings of light trailed behind, and the shifting face beneath reminded her of her long-dead mother—though it was hard to sure under the veils of light and mist.

“You have done your world proud, Zofiya, child of Kings.” The sound of her voice, here in the real world, was sharper—like bright knives in the Grand Duchess’ ears. A cold hand touched her shoulder—it burned. “I will hunt the scourge of your world. The Rossin will die.”

Then the angel wrapped her wings about herself, dissolved into light, and blew from the room. Zofiya was left kneeling on the floor, sobbing frantically with joy.

“When you’ve buried your husband three months past, you don’t expect to come home and find him rattling around in your attic!”

The old woman stood there, an ancient blunderbuss cradled in her arms, looking ready to go upstairs and blast her undead spouse for his temerity. However, her real ire was directed at Deacons Sorcha Faris and Merrick Chambers—as if the Order of the Eye and the Fist was solely responsible for this awkward situation.

Sorcha, who had managed to perch herself on the low wall outside the lady Tinker’s shop, watched with amusement as her partner tried to negotiate his way in. Perhaps she was enjoying the situation a little too much, but these days she savored any excuse to leave the grounds of the Mother Abbey. Her cigar was already half-smoked, evidence of just how much the owner did not want them to go inside the shop.

Merrick, who had always been the more diplomatic of their partnership, posed the same question he had when they’d first arrived: “What is the deceased’s name?” He had to raise his voice because Widow Vashill was impossibly deaf—which only served to increase Sorcha’s enjoyment of the situation.

The old woman’s eyes narrowed as if she suspected it was some sort of trick. “Joshem Vashill—and I was never more happy to see a person in the ground.”

“Doesn’t sound like he had much reason to come back,” Merrick muttered softly over his shoulder to Sorcha. This was why she liked working with the younger man; when she’d been partnered with her husband, Kolya, he had not been nearly as amusing.

“You are sure it is Joshem?” Sorcha shouted, then blew out a smoke ring and tried to keep her hopes in check. The Order had been plagued with a spate of false alarms recently, and though she appreciated getting out of the Mother Abbey, she wasn’t about to crawl around in a dusty attic chasing a figment of this Master Tinker’s imagination.

“I know my own husband!” Widow Vashill snapped. “Now you just yank him down out of there, and I can go about my business.”

“ ‘Yank’? ” Sorcha managed not to roll her eyes. People so quickly forgot the nature of things. Her Order had only been here in Arkaym a scant few years, and yet the population seemed incapable of remembering the plague of geists they had suffered from before the Order’s arrival. “We have to go up there and deal with him,” she replied in what she thought was a perfectly reasonable tone, “because we don’t just ‘yank’ geists. It’s more like wrestling.”

“What?” The Widow Vashill bellowed.

Sorcha gestured up to the top story. “We’re going to have to go up there!”

The woman’s face went abruptly pale. “Oh no—I must have been mistaken. I’m just a silly old woman seeing things in the shadows. No need to—”

“Madam”—Merrick pusheds dark curls out of his eyes with something that looked awfully like exasperation—“if you will just let us up into the attic, we can assess the situation and take care of things for you.” His earnest youth usually moved even the most elderly of women to compliance—this one, though, hesitated.

Tinkers’ Row had grown under the patronage of the forwardthinking Emperor Kaleva: ramshackle houses had been transformed into impressive new brick buildings, the open drains decently covered, and sweeps employed to keep the street clear of filth. Carriages and pedestrians bustled up and down the Row, which had become one of the busiest in Vermillion. The sign above this particular door said VASHILL—MASTER TINKER TO THE PALACE, but then most of them on this street did. The Emperor had become the patron to nearly all the Tinkers in Vermillion.

Sorcha sighed, knocked the top off her cigar and pulled her Gauntlets out from her belt. Usually these symbols of her rune powers tended to grab people’s attention. She was sharply aware of this as she fixed the old woman with a cold blue stare. “So, what’s really up there, apart from your dead husband?”

Widow Vashill’s lips pressed together in a pale line, and she leaned forward. “Things. Secret things.”

Every guild had their mysteries, but the Tinkers, thanks to their close working kin, the airshipwrights, were especially paranoid since the Emperor wanted full control of the new technology. Merrick stood to his full height. “Madam, as long as the devices you are working on are regulation, then you have our assurance that we will never reveal anything to another soul.”

If Sorcha had tried to sound so officious, people would have taken fright, but out of that earnest young mouth it was so much more reassuring. The old woman smiled, revealing a broken expanse of teeth. “Never doubted it, lad; it’s just that many of the devices in the attic contain weirstones.”