The study had been losing arguments all morning. Papers covered the desk in decisions Max didn’t like; Maximilian sat behind them with fewer good options than he’d started with and a methodical interest in what remained.
He looked up when Laila entered without knocking, which she had been doing since before he was born and showed no signs of stopping.
“I need to show you something,” she said, and set the envelope on the desk.
He looked at it without answering. “What is this?”
“A list. Names, addresses, affiliations. Every loyalist still operating in this city who answers to Vaziri.”
A pause. “Where did it come from?”
“Madeleine de Hiver.”
He had prepared for several contingencies; his mother had introduced a new one without consultation. “You went to see de Hiver. Without telling anyone.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” she said, “and it won’t be the last.”
Max looked at her a moment longer, then picked up the envelope.
He read it in silence, then read it again. His face did not comment.
“Alcazar,” he said, at one point, with mild surprise.
“Mm.”
“Père Duchamp.” No surprise at all.
He reached the bottom of the list, set it down, smoothed it once with his palm, and looked at it a moment longer.
He turned to Percival. “Fetch Isabella, Lambert, and Wylan. All three.”
He told them the plan. Lambert said nothing. Wylan had the biggest grin.
The list had twenty-three names on it. Twenty-three names, addresses, and affiliations, written in a hand that was precise without being elegant: the handwriting of a person who had long since stopped caring whether records were beautiful.
Lambert read it through once in the cold of the estate’s front steps, the paper steady in his hands. Then he folded it and put it inside his cassock, against his chest, where it sat, already impatient.
He had not had reason to use Inquisitorial authority since Esteban had given it back, which meant that everything he was about to do today existed in a legal condition that a sufficiently motivated canonist could argue either way. He was aware of this. He had decided it was not, strictly speaking, his problem.
? The legal status of Lambert’s authority depended, strictly speaking, on which of three competing canonical interpretations one accepted. Lambert had reviewed all three. He had found the one he liked and stopped there.
The street was quiet. In an hour it would not be.
Lambert descended the steps and walked toward the city.
The first address was a merchant’s townhouse on the Rue du Vieux-Comptoir, three storeys of prosperous limestone with a brass plate beside the door that read Alcazar & Fils, Negociants Maritimes.
Lambert looked at the plate for a moment. Guillaume will have opinions about this. Then he knocked.
A houseboy opened the door, took in the cassock, and called for someone senior without being asked. The factor who appeared was a man of middle years who had been expecting bad news and found it punctual.
“I am Lambert sol Pallas, Inquisitor of the Church of Invictus,” Lambert said. “I require Basil Alcazar. Please tell him he is not being given a choice.”
Basil Alcazar appeared at the top of the stairs in a dressing gown, which was either brave or miscalculated. He was a broad man in his fifties; his face had spent decades winning arguments and had not yet learned to stop expecting to.
He descended without hurrying, tying his dressing gown as he came. “Inquisitor.” He said it with his arguing voice. “Under whose appointment?”
“Pontifex Esteban.”
“Esteban.” Basil reached the bottom of the stairs. “Installed by Valère.”
“By the founder of the Church,” Lambert said, “whose authority to appoint was never delegated.”
“And by that logic,” Basil said, “Valère could appoint his boot to the Pontifical Sede and we’d all be obliged to kneel before it. I’m afraid I don’t recognise the authority.”
Lambert nodded. He had anticipated this and set it aside.
“I know,” he said, and stepped forward.
The two men Lambert had brought with him came through the door. Basil made a creditable effort, which Lambert noted without pleasure; it was over quickly.
Basil got to his feet. He took a moment with it.
“I have money,” he said. “Considerably more than an Inquisitor’s salary accounts for. I have connections to three noble houses, contracts with the harbour authority, and information about people whose names would make yours considerably more interesting to the right ears.” He straightened his dressing gown. “I am suggesting there is a mutually beneficial arrangement available to us both, if you are a reasonable man.”
Lambert gave him the look reserved for something unidentifiable on a plate.
“I am Lambert sol Pallas,” he said. “Inquisitor of the Church of Invictus. Chaplain to House de Vaillant. I do not have a salary.” He held out Basil’s coat. “Get dressed.”
The second door belonged to a notary who explained, at some length, that there had clearly been a clerical error.
The third belonged to a chandler who offered Lambert a very competitive rate on beeswax candles and proposed they discuss it like reasonable men.
The fourth belonged to a minor canon of Notre Reine who took one look at Lambert’s face and went to get his coat without being asked.
The fifth required the two men again.
By the seventh address, Lambert had heard four separate theories about why his authority was invalid, three offers of financial accommodation, two appeals to his better nature, and one entirely sincere invitation to breakfast. He declined all of them on principle and most of them without speaking.
The Boulevard des Merveilles was, technically, a street. It had paving stones and gutters and a name on the map. In practice it was a state of mind that happened to have a postal address.
Wylan had been here twice before, both times by accident. The first time he had lost his hat to a street conjurer and spent twenty minutes before realising it was on his head. The second time he had stopped to watch a puppet show and arrived home three hours later than intended, which Laila had noted in the tone she used for things she was filing under ‘later’.
This time he had a purpose, which was useful, because the Boulevard did not reward uncertainty. On either side, small theatres advertised their programmes in overlapping layers of playbill, each pasted over the previous one until the boards had acquired a geological quality. Between them, in every available gap of pavement, performers occupied their patches: they had been there longer than the buildings, and they knew it. A contortionist. A man doing something technically impressive with fire that the city watch had apparently decided to regard as agriculture. Three separate puppet theatres within fifty metres of each other ran different material at different volumes; the combined result was, without question, contested.
Wylan found the largest troupe at the far end of the boulevard, where the pavement widened into something approaching a square. Their stage was a converted cart, their curtain was red velvet that had seen better decades, and their current production appeared to involve a dragon, a magistrate, and a very large wheel of cheese. The audience was enthusiastic.
He waited until the cheese had resolved the plot and the crowd began to thin.
“I have a proposition,” he said to the woman in charge: she was the one dismantling the dragon; the head came off first, then the spine. “For your entire company. And anyone else on this boulevard you can get to listen in the next ten minutes.”
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She looked at him: at his coat, which was expensive; at his face, which was earnest.
“We’re booked through the month,” she said.
“Cancel it. I’ll pay the difference.” He reached into his coat and produced the script he had spent most of last night writing. “I need puppet shows. As many as you can stage simultaneously, across as many squares as you can cover. Starting this morning.”
She took the script and read the first page, then the second, then looked up.
“This is Primate Vaziri.”
“Technically it’s a fictional ecclesiastical administrator with an oversized hat.”
“This is absolutely Primate Vaziri.” She turned to the nearest member of her company. “Félix. Come and read this.”
Félix read the first page, then the second, then looked up.
“This is the job of a lifetime.”
“Ours,” he said, “if Vaziri gets hold of us.”
Félix and the woman looked at each other. Something was decided.
“How much?” she said.
Wylan had taken the family coach for the afternoon on the basis that a man inspecting a city-wide satirical operation should not have to walk between data points.
The driver had not asked questions, which Wylan appreciated. The city had.
From the window, Pharelle was doing something he had not entirely anticipated, which was to say it was doing exactly what he had anticipated, only louder. The streets had the oscillograph’s hum when a reading was coming in strong.
He rapped on the roof. The coach slowed.
The first square was the Place du Sel, where a troupe of six had commandeered the base of the fountain.
Two of them were playing Vaziri: one wore a mitre made from a bucket, the other wore an identical bucket-mitre, and they were engaged in a heated theological dispute about which of them was the real Primate. A third performer, playing the City of Pharelle, kept trying to ask about the price of bread and being talked over. Every time she asked, the two Vaziris found a new reason to ignore her. The crowd had begun shouting suggestions.
“Ask about rent,” someone called.
The performer playing the city turned to the audience, spread her hands, vindicated, and asked about rent.
Both Vaziris fainted simultaneously.
Wylan noted the crowd size, the laugh frequency, and climbed back into the coach.
The second square had taken a juridical approach. A mock trial, the defendant being a loaf of bread, charged with the theological crime of being more immediately useful than the Word of Invictus. The prosecutor was a cardinal. The defence was the entire assembled crowd, which had not been invited to participate but had done so anyway.
? The theological crime of being more immediately useful than scripture had no formal name, which had not, historically, prevented conviction.
The loaf was currently winning.
“How does the bread answer to the charge?” the prosecutor demanded.
The performer playing the loaf said nothing, being a loaf.
“Silence!” the prosecutor thundered. “Clearly guilty.”
“We’ve been silent for twenty years,” someone in the crowd called back, “and you called us guilty too.”
The prosecutor looked at the crowd.
“...The defence raises a point,” he said.
Wylan gave it another thirty seconds, confirmed the crowd was not going to stop, and got back into the coach.
The third square had dispensed with narrative entirely. Four performers, a drum, and a song that had apparently written itself sometime that morning and already had three verses. The chorus was simple enough that the crowd had it by the second repetition. By the fourth it was coming from the windows above the square.
Wylan sat at the edge of the square in the stationary coach and listened to a city singing a song that had not existed when he woke up. He felt satisfaction, or alarm, or probably both.
He checked his notes: one more square.
The fourth square was the Place de la Monnaie, which was the largest open space in the Merchant Quarter and had, by the time the coach arrived, achieved a condition that could only be described as ‘full’.
The stage was a proper booth: striped canvas, a painted proscenium arch, a curtain in Church purple that had been chosen with intent. The crowd was three deep at the edges and still growing. Someone had brought a child onto their shoulders. Someone else had brought a meat pie and was eating it with the comfortable propriety of a man at the theatre.
? Puppet theatre had been formally classified by the Church of Invictus as ‘devotional entertainment’ in 1743, a designation intended to bring it under ecclesiastical oversight. The Guild had accepted the designation, the tax exemptions, and nothing else.
Wylan stepped out of the coach and could not get within twenty metres of the stage.
He could hear it perfectly from the edge of the crowd.
“Oh no!” wailed a small felt figure in a disproportionate mitre, careening across the puppet stage with the dignity of a man falling downstairs. “My very large hat which I definitely earned through humble service to the faithful!”
“Perhaps it doesn't fit,” said a second puppet, smaller, with a long-felt snout and a coin stitched permanently into one paw. A small sign around its neck read MISTER SQUEAKY, CORRUPTION WEASEL. Three tiny bats on strings orbited it with what was clearly meant to be menace.
“Nonsense! I shall simply make everyone else’s heads smaller!”
The crowd did not so much laugh as roar. It was the sound of a city that had been waiting for someone to say the thing out loud and had discovered that felt and string would do it when no one else would.
Wylan stood at the back of the crowd and watched Pharelle laugh itself into something that had not quite existed this morning.
He thought: it’s working.
And then: Laila is going to have opinions about the receipts.
The reports had been coming in since mid-morning. Max had been reading them at the study window when the gate bell rang.
He looked out.
Laila appeared at his shoulder.
Mirembe, in travelling clothes. Vivienne d’Aubigne behind her, fan closed. And beside Vivienne, a man Max had never seen in the flesh but knew on sight: the Count d’Aubigne, Renaud, the King’s representative in Pharelle, built like a siege engine and apparently dressed for one. The soldiers along the perimeter stood differently near him, braced where another man’s soldiers would stand at attention. A declaration.
“She’s been busy,” Laila said.
Max was already moving. They went down together.
The gate was cold iron in the evening air. Laila took her position a step behind and to his left.
“Madame Ankhara.”
“Your Grace.” She acknowledged Laila with a glance and did not address her. “You know why I am here.”
“I know what I see outside my gate,” Max said. “I would hear it from you.”
“The Inquisition has been operating in this city all day under authority granted by a man installed by Valère.” Her voice was level, and each word delivered acerbically. “Every arrest made today is unlawful.”
“The Pontifex was recognised by the College of Prelates and the Court of Reason.”
“The Pontifex was installed by the founder of the Church, who expressed a wish. That is not investiture. That is instruction.”
“Madame Ankhara.” Max put his hands behind his back. “You are standing shoulder to shoulder with a dragon cultist.”
“I am standing with the King’s own people,” Mirembe said. “True subjects of the Crown. What I see is a family using a contested Inquisition to remove its political enemies and calling every arrest a cultist.” A pause. “The pattern is not subtle, Your Grace.”
Renaud d’Aubigne stepped forward. His voice arrived before he did.
“Twenty-three arrests,” he said. “In a single day. Using an authority the Crown has not recognised, against citizens whose guilt has been established by no court, under a Pontifex whose investiture is contested by half the clergy in Gallia.” He looked at Max and took his measure. “The King will want an account, de Vaillant. I will be providing one.”
Max held his gaze. “The King’s representative is welcome to submit his account through the appropriate channels.”
“I am the appropriate channel.”
“The d’Aubignes orchestrated an attack on this estate,” Max said. “They tried to take Aurora: documented, corroborated, on the record.”
Vivienne d’Aubigne’s fan stayed closed.
“I have heard what your family calls evidence.” Mirembe’s composure held. Then: “Where is my daughter.”
The gate between them.
“Where is my daughter, you unreasonable heathen.”
“You stood before a court under compulsion,” Max said, “and told them you had no daughter—that you had only a monstrous half-blood. The compulsion confirmed it. The record stands.”
The soldiers held. Mirembe stood very still.
“This is not finished,” she said.
“No,” Max said. “It is not.”
She turned. Vivienne followed. Renaud held Max’s gaze one moment longer: a measurement. Then he turned and walked; he knew exactly what came next.
The soldiers dispersed into the evening in ones and twos.
Laila waited until the street was empty.
“The custody claim,” she said.
“I know.”
They stood in the cold. Then Laila locked the gate and they went inside.
The surcoat had belonged to someone in the Order of Civil Restoration, which was what the Church of Invictus called its militant arm when it wanted to sound like it had moved on from that sort of thing. Isabella had found it in the estate’s third-floor storage, beneath a moth-eaten cavalry pennant and what appeared to be someone’s doctoral thesis. It fit well enough. She had added her own sword, which was considerably better than the one that had come with it.
She checked the sword’s hang in the mirror and found it satisfactory.
Then she went out through the window.
The city received her without comment, which was how she preferred it.
The Arcade du Serpent ran between the Merchant Quarter and the river, technically a covered passage, practically a city within a city that had opted out of several municipal ordinances. The city watch had developed a philosophical position on its existence, which was to say they walked past it with great purpose and looked at something else.
Isabella dropped into it from the roof of the building on its eastern side, landed, and walked out of the alley into the arcade’s main passage in full view of everyone present. She stood in the middle of it looking professionally offended.
The arcade noticed her: the surcoat first, then the sword, then the expression.
“In the name of Primate Vaziri,” Isabella said, into the silence, “and by the authority of the Church of Invictus, this establishment is in violation of seventeen municipal ordinances, four ecclesiastical statutes, and one commandment I am choosing to apply liberally.”
“Which commandment?” someone asked, from the back.
“I haven’t decided yet. I’ll let you know when I get there.”
She upended the nearest gambling table.
The coin went everywhere. The arcade went somewhere else, mostly toward the exits. The money changer made a calculation and decided his rates could be competitive somewhere less supervised. Isabella worked through the remaining stalls with methodical thoroughness, confiscating three ledgers, two sets of loaded dice, and a quantity of coin for the Church’s poor relief fund, which was a fund she had invented forty seconds earlier and felt good about. She quoted ordinances. She cited scripture, approximately. She told a man attempting to hide behind a curtain that Invictus saw all things, which was theologically sound, and that she personally also saw him, which was more immediately relevant.
It was while she was concluding proceedings that she saw Phaedra.
She was at the far end of the arcade, still, watching. Isabella looked directly at her. Phaedra turned and walked out.
Isabella handed the last money changer back to himself and followed.
Phaedra moved quickly through the Merchant Quarter, taking the smaller streets; she knew the city well. Isabella knew it better, and knew which routes could be watched from above. She tracked her across three quartiers as the afternoon light went the colour of cold copper, rooftop to drainpipe to the shadow of an archway, keeping her in sight without getting close. Phaedra glanced back twice and saw nothing.
She stopped at a door in the Noblesse Quarter and reached for a key; the door opened from the inside before she used it.
Isabella, from the roof of the building opposite, watched the door close.
She had recognised the house before Phaedra reached the step. She stayed where she was, in the cold, and watched the lights move from room to room as they do when no one is in a hurry to leave. She lives here.