It ought to have been cleared by now.

  That was Avril’s first thought as she stepped over the frost-bitten shards of a whitesmith’s sign and into the blasted silence of Lutetia. The explosion had torn through over a month ago. At the time, she hadn’t understood the scale, so she'd asked Hugh. He’d likened it to casting a fireball on a single black ant — hot, fast, and unthinkably loud.

  But it was over. And yet the ruins still stood untouched. No reclamation banners. No surveyor glyphs. Not even a clearance sigil from the Healer clergy.

  She knew why, of course. But knowing only sharpened her frustration. The Societies weren’t cooperating. Too many factions. Too many suspicions. And — she sighed inwardly in reluctant admission — too many nobles. Administrative paralysis had set into the gilded peers. No one could agree on salvage rights, let alone who could be trusted with the aftermath. Until they did, the city would remain in stasis — encircled by tent-cities and half-built taverns, with wards pulsing like silent threats at the gates.

  And that, naturally, meant opportunity for some. She’d talked about it last night with Booker and Friar Hugh who’d had a dizzying perspective on it: The team who’d found the glass fragment initially had seen opportunity in the ruins and gone and got it. The bronze rankers from the Builder cult who’d found out they had the glass fragment had seen opportunity too. Now, it was their turn. Avril wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

  Mist clung low, pooling in gutters and fractured flagstones like a patchy carpet. Frost silvered the edges of broken eaves. Avril moved carefully, boots placed with precision. This wasn’t the sort of place she'd ever imagined herself — not on a morning like this. But here she was, skirting ash-caked ruins beside a death-essence user, a half-dozen world traitor cultists, and — worst of all — Detective Booker.

  Executive Services – renamed The Good Crew when they were in front of cultists – had come into Lutetia under the guise of salvage. The permits were real, properly stamped. That was what the bribes had been for. Booker had simply... found out who needed paying. Not deduced. Not investigated. Just known, the way he always did — with those unearned, unwarranted abilities of his that always paid off.

  It irritated her endlessly.

  He walked ahead with his rude indifference, constantly checking his ewe-eye. She refused to ask why he had an ewe's eye. It seemed rude to mention, and she didn’t want to encourage him. Also, everyone else seemed to understand and it’d be embarrassing to ask now.

  Sam caught up beside her with the characteristic silence she possessed. Avril started slightly — then adjusted her gait, letting the smaller woman pass. Sam moved like she understood her place under the sky: light steps, windward lean, boots on bare cobblestones where others trudged frost. Let her lead, Avril thought, grudgingly giving way.

  There was no shame in ceding the front to a natural sneak. This wasn’t a ballroom. It was a battlefield. And she was no fool.

  As much as Booker was arrogant, rude and generally unbearable she’d found he had a point about some things. Her education had instilled in her a need to be in the front, showing the peasants what’s what and why her kind was the favoured of Dominion. Then she’d run away from home and travelled incognito with Booker who seemed to have a magical sense for when one of the peerage were about to try something they shouldn’t. It had been painful to watch and she’d acquired a new respect for the restraint of the common folk’s polite lack of laughter. She’d observed enough now to know: Leading when you had no idea what you were doing made a church-fool of the self.

  But she made certain to stay ahead of them — the so-called “Foundation Gang,” as Booker’s little cultist clique called themselves: Blackwood, Fournier, Lefevre, Payne, and Valleron. Simpering, little toadies if Avril had even seen one. They were earnest to the point of nausea, muttering in excited stage-whispers, tripping over each other’s egos in an attempt to look competent. She’d seen their kind before — first-year fencers who thought enthusiasm could substitute for technique.

  “No patrols in the last two hours,” Blackwood announced brightly, as though he’d earned the observation.

  “I noticed,” Booker called back without turning. The smirk was audible. “But thank you.”

  Blackwood beamed at the minimal praise and fell back into line.

  They passed the sundered wall of a guard substation. Booker paused, pacing, clearly triangulating something with his map ability. Valleron gestured toward a half-buried stairwell beneath the rubble. “That’s where it is. See? They broke through. Chamber’s still intact.”

  “They?” Avril asked, her tone smooth as glass. “You mean the ones who retrieved it? Why didn’t they bring it out?”

  “They left it,” Lefevre replied, bowing mid-stride. “Couldn’t risk detection. Surveillance glyphs on the outbound paths.”

  She disliked the reverence in his voice — artifact, made it sound sacred. Then again, maybe it was. A fragment of a construction built for a Great Being’s purpose that held some memory of the Builder’s intent? She adjusted her perspective. It probably was sacred. Just not the kind she approved of.

  Booker crouched beside a half-exposed ladder, brushing aside grit until rusted rungs caught the light. He muttered something and summoned a ball of harsh white light to his palm. He didn’t ask. He never asked.

  Avril leaned in beside him.

  The chamber below wasn’t entirely buried — a shallow vault folded in on itself, framed by warped stone and blackened frost. The air down there looked wrong. At its heart, the centre of it all, lay the object: volcanic glass, raw and out-of-place in its revealing. Veins of milk-pale shimmer traced through its surface in unnatural patterns, like lightning frozen mid-arc. It didn’t glow, didn’t hum — but it caught the light in ways it had no right to. It glimmered when one wasn’t quite looking.

  A lie told in light. She narrowed her gaze. Definitely a magic – Avril had been trained to notice such things – but it was a magic that strove to be a trick of the eye.

  “So that’s what we’re stealing,” she murmured.

  “Salvaging,” Booker replied, flat.

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Naturally.”

  Behind them, the cultists unpacked gear with more fervor than finesse. Padding, null-ink bands, brass stabilisers — all handled like clumsy farm tools. One dropped a bracket. Another misjudged the harness weight and had to scramble to catch it. Children playing with their father’s tools.

  She went over the plan in her head: get in quiet, haul the thing past checkpoint one under salvage permits, switch routes before the hard checkpoint, continue on the new path where the hard checkpoint was behind them and through checkpoints two, three, four and five and walk it right into the Builder cult’s lap at temporary docks five — proof of loyalty wrapped in a bow. Except Johan and Hugh were there leading a posse who’d do a surprise inspection of the entire docks on Dave’s signal. Meanwhile, Booker’s scans would go to the Ainsworths. Two victories for two masters. The Builder cult would have to admit Executive services had done everything right while also, not getting anything they wanted. Simple!

  Of course, Booker had a ream of pages on contingencies. The most prominent being that they actually deliver the rock to the Builder cult. That was the most likely outcome they couldn’t control. If the boat they put it on left too quickly, it couldn’t be helped. Another outcome she remembered from the boring meeting was Booker talking about blowing it up, which she was for on principle.

  Avril turned her gaze back toward the vault. That thing — that fractured knot of Builder glass and whatever magic coiled within — was a treasure. It looked like a broken length of pillar at first glance, but she gave herself a few moments to take it in. This object could leverage power to, or siphon it from, the same forces that had orchestrated Betrayal Day — the same forces that had leveled Lutetia.

  She let out a quiet, shuddering breath. This had to work. Booker’s plan, with all its contingencies and escape valves, had to work.

  She glanced toward his back — the way he hunched slightly, eyes tracking every motion, every shift in the barrel’s weight as they prepared it for transport. Whatever else one might say about him — and she had plenty — she was glad he grasped the stakes as clearly as she did.

  This had to end up in the right hands.

  Avril had seen magical recording devices in her life. Delicate things. Crystal spindles bound with silver wire, humming softly in velvet-lined cases, used only by solemn professionals at great expense. The nobility employed them rarely — and only when the presence of memory had to be beautiful as well as useful.

  Booker’s thaumograph mechanism was not beautiful.

  While she and Sam kept the cultist gang busy, he inserted a carefully stained parchment into a holder at the back of a box he’d made the previous evening. A box attached to a large, flat bit of paper that could be placed over the barrel that had only two holes in it. Once for recording and one for projecting. So she’d been told.

  The object of that projecting and recording, the volcanic glass with those delicate veins of memory stone, had itself been unceremoniously hauled from its resting place, draped in a sheet, and plonked into the wagon with only the reverence of a piece of delicate freight. The paper she’d just watched, despite herself, Booker put into the thaumograph shimmered faintly with a strange iridescence — the inherent magic of the Virelay salt in them interfering with the light. He handled them with an engraver’s economy. No reverence. Just care.

  She’d heard of Virelay salt. She’d known it was a common magical component since she was a child but Hugh had explained it to her in brief while Booker was making his device last night. It was a crystalline compound that altered its structure in response to ambient magic. According to Hugh, Dave’s insight had been to find a way to calibrate the mixture using a kind of magical titration and that’s when Avril’s mind had started drifting off. Booker had noticed, which she hated him for, and given her what he called a ‘too long, didn’t read’; he’d mixed the Virelay salt with some things that mean it now needed to be exposed to a particularly high amount of magic so it’d change and then stop. Frozen at that moment.

  The device itself was laughably plain — just a barrel, a paper-lined interior, and a narrow aperture for magic to enter at the right angle. It reminded her, uncomfortably, of a trick-viewer she’d once seen in a street magician’s booth. It had the same whiff of stagecraft and sleight-of-hand. Knowing Booker, she felt this might be correct.

  Working quickly, Booker pulled a talisman from his coat — a palm-sized disc etched with concentric symbols. The metal was dull, the runes like mirrored hollows. Normally, Magic Society workers held them out majestically and walked around for minutes holding objects like this, recording shifts and feelings in the air. Booker just held it in one hand and, using his small magics – he used it all the time, Avril didn’t care what the ability was called – he just created a variety of magic types above it which he could see and interpret. Then he adjusted a few things on the device, looked up and nodded at her.

  Sam, meanwhile, had corralled the cultist gang into play-acting cross-checking paperwork against permit stubs and crate manifests at the checkpoint they would come across — the kind of busywork that looked important, sounded urgent, and would ensure they were not noticing that Booker was obviously not working on shielding the barrel from magic detection which, thankfully, none of them knew was unnecessary. Booker had made sure that all the barrels were shielded. Avril waved subtly at Sam.

  Avril started coughing with a will at the same time that Sam started shouting like an annoyed guard and Dave started the incantation for his new spell that came low and sharp at the edge of her hearing:

  “By prismatic spectrum and potent crystals bound, Let what lies hidden now resound.”

  She slapped the wagon wheel during the ‘coughing fit’ at the same time as a white pulse of mana burst outward from Booker’s hand which he’d placed over the projection aperture of his device. It cracked the air without thunder, left no heat, no light — just a hollow pop and a ghostly bloom of colour-shifted afterimages. She blinked and they were gone, but her eyes still felt full of them. Ozone clung faintly to the air. Burnt sugar. Elemental cold and fire fought.

  “Sorry!” called Avril to the cultists who looked around. “I must have breathed in something reactive.”

  “You guys almost done?” called Booker, undermining his own authority with his casual tone. “I’m just putting the finishing touches on the shielding.”

  He bent his head back toward the barrel, running one hand along the rim as if testing a spellline. From a distance, he looked like a man performing enchantment maintenance — and that’s what the gang needed to believe.

  “Almost done, Detective,” grinned Blackwood.

  Avril ground her teeth instead of openly rolling her eyes at the simpering cultists. She busied herself pretending to rearrange the barrels they were transporting. From his inventory his device, he drew out a stoppered vial of thick, pearled oil. It moved slowly, like syrup in winter, and refracted the air around it like heat over stone.

  Dawlins Oil. She’d seen it mentioned in the footnotes of many art displays. A substance that turned magic into colours. Or, changed colours with the magic. Something like that. Except Booker had purchased the expensive kind that’d only change once.

  He’d said that the Dawlins oil was a substance that would develop a picture of the magic on the Virelay paper but it took time and the magic shielding they had around the barrel wasn’t just for the volcanic glass, but also for the thaumograph. He took the piece of paper out of back of his crude device, slipped it into a tin tray, poured Dawlins oil over the top, covered it and put the tin container into another of the false-topped, shielded barrels.

  Booker rewrapped the thaumograph and inventoried it at his waist without a flourish. He had only six more spell slots to cast that spell today. Seven spells total, one reserved. The number stuck with her.

  She didn’t often think of spellcraft in terms of rationing, but it struck her now: he’d given over nearly all of his casting for the day to this plan. To recording that resonance.

  That last slot — the one she knew he’d held in reserve — was for a teleportation spell. An emergency exit, if it came to it. But knowing him, it wouldn’t be used selfishly. He’d never teleported to save himself during all their battles at Harrows Point despite being in apparent mortal danger. If anything, he’d always responded to the danger by just going further towards her and Johan in the thick of things.

  Booker might be many things — glib, opaque, insufferably smug — but he wasn’t a coward.

  If it came to the worst, she bet that he’d hold onto that spell long enough to get her and Sam out even if he had to pay for it. It was a comforting thought.

  And that, damn him, made it harder to hate the insufferable outworlder.

  “It’s stable,” called Booker to everyone. “Let’s go!”

  The wagon creaked through a gap in the ruined buildings, its wheels crunching frost-laced gravel. The volcanic glass, now packed beneath warded canvas and stabilised by ritual clamps, sat deep in the cart bed. Booker walked alongside it, hands buried in his coat, lips a tight line.

  Avril moved in parallel, boots skimming the frost with quiet precision. She hadn’t spoken since they’d left the collapse site, and neither had he. But she kept glancing at him. Watching.

  He checked the thaumograph case again. Not urgently. Deliberately. A professional verifying the state of his apparatus — but she saw it in the crease of his brow. Something was off.

  “It’s too faint,” he muttered.

  She angled closer. “So just wait a bit, Booker.”

  “Nah, nah, nah. Much too faint.” His voice was soft, clipped and adopted a strong, strange accent. “Not enough flash. Turns out I need more here than in the tents.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  “Fix is for laboratories,” he said, voice dry as paper, “Here, I can take another.”

  Both of them set their jaws.

  Without waiting for permission, he unlatched the case and slipped out another square of parchment. The surface of the Virelay salt parchment shimmered slightly in the grey light of the rising morning.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Is everything alright, Detective?” asked Fournier, turning her head at Dave’s rummaging. Payne, who was walking next to her also craned her head back to look

  “It’s fine,” called Booker, not stopping his movements. “I’ve just left some things in each barrel to see if they can be detected.” He waved his hands dismissively. “Ignore me, I’ll be fooling around here with some tests.”

  Avril admired for a moment the way his casual manner could just stay calm and brush off the most suspicious behaviour she’d ever seen.

  Sam, walking ahead with the cultist gang, caught Avril’s eye and slowed her pace. She bumped into Lefevre with a quiet apology and Sam began getting her to recheck their forged route manifests aloud, pulling the group’s attention away. Avril supported the move, stepping between Dave and the cart to obscure him further.

  Booker opened both apertures on his device, fingers working carefully, flicking back and forth between his inventory as he once again brought out the rune calibration glyph. No showmanship. Just quiet, efficient magic beaming from his hand, telling his sharp eyes numbers that Avril couldn’t place. He looked up and nodded.

  Avril leaned toward the wagon’s side. Coughing wouldn’t do this time. She jostled a pack of brackets with a deliberate clatter and shot Booker a look.

  Booker’s voice intoned exactly:

  “By prismatic spectrum and potent crystals bound, Let what lies hidden now resound.”

  Avril smacked the brackets against the cart to hide the pop of the spell. The mana burst was sharper this time. Colder at the edges. Avril felt its residual skate along her hand that was still in the cart like a static shock. Thankfully, like last time, the residual of the spell was mostly visual. When she blinked, there were faint colour trails in her eyes — pale, blurred and ghostlike.

  Booker slipped the treated parchment into its development tray and nested it back within the warded barrel housing. Minutes passed. Sam kept the gang preoccupied. Payne had found a packing error in one of the secondary crates and was loudly blaming Valleron. It worked.

  But Dave’s face was grim when he checked again.

  “Overexposed,” he said quietly. “Caught too much this time. Burned through the edges.”

  “Third time?” asked Avril.

  He didn’t answer, just reached for another sheet.

  She stepped closer, her frame still masking his movements. He worked fast — faster than before, less calibration this time, more instinct. The talisman shimmered again in his hand, and with a flick, he cast.

  “By prismatic spectrum and potent crystals bound, Let what lies hidden now resound.”

  Pulse. Pop. The air shimmered. Ozone bloomed. The scent of earth pursued an ice-wind gale into the sky.

  The new sheet went into the tray, oil on top. The barrel was resealed. The image was developing.

  Avril let her hand brush the wagon’s frame as she walked. It was getting warmer. That meant it was approaching the third hour of the day and people would be alert.

  Ahead, the road turned slightly — and with it, she saw the outline of a checkpoint through the fog.

  Torches. Uniforms. Movement. Set up closer today than it had been all the previous week.

  She swallowed. “Booker?”

  He looked up.

  She pointed. “You’ve got about five minutes. Maybe less.”

  He stared sharply at the checkpoint and then stroked his chin thoughtfully. She could read his troubled face had some of her own thoughts. They’d planned to pass an easier checkpoint and switch routes before this one ever came up. That was the trick — use real permits, avoid attention, slide between roads like good little smugglers. That all-search checkpoint wasn’t supposed to be there.

  “I think we might have to tell the kids what we’re doing,” he muttered.

  Avril insisted on a last check of the latest thaumograph with the sharpest senses the group had.

  =Underdeveloped confirmed.=

  Tzu floated from over the barrel to over Booker’s head and, despite being symmetrical, managed to give the impression of looking at her.

  “Yep, that’s it,” Booker muttered. “We have to assume they’re going to open the barrels,” His tone was flat. Resigned.

  Avril agreed — she could already see the guards at the back of the checkpoint moving back and forth to collect a cooper’s tools. Not folder or scrolls to check permits and wave them through like the checkpoints were supposed to do. Something had changed. Security here wasn’t supposed to be this tight. That was for the outer boundary. The one they were skipping.

  In front of them, the cultist gang walked cheerfully unaware.

  “Blackwood,” Booker called gesturing them over.

  The group slowed. The gang turned, faces open and expectant. Blackwood blinked, then trotted back to fall in beside them.

  “I’ve been recording the object’s resonance,” Booker said plainly. “A type of Thaumatic recording. A contingency so that if we lose it or the artefact gets destroyed, the revolution will still have the data of the explosion. Something to work from to keep the revolution going.”

  His tone was conspiratorial yet serious. Avril’s stomach turned. She found herself questioning his allegiance to everything. To say he was no friend of noble peerage was an understatement. Her heart thumped, thinking. Was Booker keeping copies of these readings? Wait, didn’t he have a memory ability? She inwardly cursed. She should know this.

  Avril watched Blackwood’s brow furrow — not in doubt but figuring out how his hero could do this. Finally, his nod came slow, deep.

  “That makes sense, Every artifice starts from the plan,” he intoned solemnly. “You’re helping us build stronger.”

  The others of the Foundations Gang who were hanging back to hear murmured in agreement.

  “Easier to smuggle paper than barrels,” half-whispered Valleron with approval.

  “Makes the shattering option less final,” remarked Lefevre.

  Booker said nothing. Just turned back to the cart.

  The thaumograph case clicked open. One plate already too much. One too little. The third — still developing — was just a blank slip of treated parchment tucked into a tin tray. Nothing visible yet. Nothing reliable.

  He had three spell slots left.

  Booker withdrew a folded scrap of paper from his inventory — a fresh square, notations etched across its face in a script Avril didn’t recognise. Not Byzasic. Not Trade Tongue. She suspected his native language. But the central figure, she understood. A plotted line, sloping between points. The same kind of thing she’d seen on old estate ledgers tracking supply returns over time. A graph.

  He checked the marks, adjusted something in the thaumographic machine, and nodded to himself.

  They had time, barely.

  As he began setting up for the next shot, Sam drew closer, murmuring softly. “After this… we still go across river to ashwater ruins?”

  Avril shrugged. “If everything doesn’t go to hell, yes. Less inspection. But, prepare for hell.”

  Sam nodded, visibly uneasy. Avril couldn’t blame her. If captured, she’d definitely be executed as a death essence user. Still, Avril’s heart panged as Sam just bobbed her tattooed read in agreement and started corralling the Foundation’s Gang into moving things around in the cart to obscure Booker’s activity from the coming checkpoint.

  Booker was already positioning the next sheet. No hesitation. No calibration glyph this time. Just his notes. Just his math.

  “By prismatic spectrum and potent crystals bound, Let what lies hidden now resound.”

  The pulse flared out — crisp and wide. The cart groaned softly. A few birds startled in the frost-slick trees nearby. Nothing else moved.

  He slid the paper into its tray. Dawlins Oil followed. The tray vanished into the secondary storage compartment.

  Second sheet. Slight correction on the aperture.

  “By prismatic spectrum and potent crystals bound, Let what lies hidden now resound.”

  Sharper. More refined. The kind of pressure one felt before a storm. Avril flinched, just slightly, and turned her face to the wind.

  Third and final. Booker checked his notes, carefully adjusted the Thaumograph and cast his spell.

  “By prismatic spectrum and potent crystals bound, Let what lies hidden now resound.”

  The pop was tight and bright. No one spoke. Just the faint sting of ozone — and something sweeter beneath it, sharp and acrid as burnt sugar.

  Booker sealed all three sheets in separate tin trays. Only now did she notice the fine etchings along their rims, a magic-repellent script. Subtle. Efficient. He’d carved them this morning, she realised, likely before breakfast. He’d barely slept. He put the thaumographs back in a barrel. All in the same one this time. She realised it was right. The engravings in their tin containers would be enough to subdue their inherent magic. It was the barrel that mattered. She wished she could just put them in his inventory but the dimensional magic of the location would surely spoil the developing thaumographs.

  As it was, she figured that one of the thaumographs would work. Maybe two. But they wouldn’t know which — and they weren’t getting a second chance with the volcanic glass.

  He had one spell left. Nobody knew what it was for. Only that it wouldn’t help them here. Teleportation was heavily restricted within the ruins — the most they could do was blink to another site in the ruins of the city. Additionally the Magic Society tracked every instance of it, and they’d find who was doing it. Unauthorised teleportation was a crime in the ruins.

  Avril could see the guards now. A lot more than usual. What had happened to cause this?

  “I bet Johan nobly declared to someone,” Dave muttered, as if reading her mind. “Figured they’d help.”

  She couldn’t disagree. And decided, firmly, to hate Booker for bringing it up.

  Booker’s eyes narrowed as they came within speaking distance of the guards. One of them was raising her hand in greeting to come and meet them. Booker rolled his shoulders once.

  “Well,” he muttered, squaring his shoulders. “Let’s all slip into character.”

  Booker’s idea was to confuse and overwhelm the guards with authority, paperwork, and sheer bureaucratic momentum. Avril couldn’t think of anything better. They certainly couldn’t subdue this many. Not without killing them all which – she would personally ensure – was off the table.

  She idly wondered what had happened for a checkpoint to have been moved a mile into the ruins and given triple the guard. Three inspection tents, two dozen guards, and at least one Magic Society supervisor meant someone had approved more staffing. Their original plan had counted on a bored Magic Society underling with a standard detection wand with two or three helpers.

  Avril privately doubted it’d work but she couldn’t see a better option. As much as Booker was an arrogant schemer who took pleasure in telling his betters what to do, he’d seen him abandon his carefully laid battleplans on more than one occasion to follow her into the fray on a flight of her momentary inspiration. He could do the same again.

  “You need to impersonate another noble,” muttered Booker hurriedly. “Someone who looks a bit like you?”

  He held up his hand, ready to do his minor magics and paint an illusion on her face. Avril understood.

  She drew herself upright, dusting nonexistent ash from her sleeves. "Lady Seraphine DuLaurent," Avril whispered decisively. "A tiresome third cousin. Similar cheekbones, tragic taste in hats."

  "Perfect," Booker murmured. His fingertips brushed air, sketching an illusion that settled over her face like a cold mist. "You’re in a hurry and above those guards but also act like her."

  "Miserable then," drawled Avril, adjusting her posture to the familiar stiff-backed hauteur of her upbringing. "Shouldn’t be hard."

  Ahead, Sam had already begun a deliberately awkward conversation with the lead guard, fumbling through trade-tongue syllables like she was half-deaf. The guards looked somewhere between pity and irritation. Perfect.

  Booker moved forward, spreading forged manifests and security passes in front of him like a dealer shuffling cards. "Right, inspection form 38-B," he began briskly, thrusting papers into hands, interrupting before questions could be raised. "Cargo from zone two to zone five. Standard decontamination protocols observed. Signature from Inspector Rueland—"

  "Who?" a guard interjected, brows knitted in confusion.

  Booker gave a long-suffering sigh. "New assignment. Look, this is just what's in the manifest. You can cross-check with headquarters later."

  The guard glanced uncertainly at the papers and Avril felt the moment.

  "Are we expected to loiter here indefinitely, Detective Booker?" she snapped imperiously. "This frost is ruining my boots. I didn't cross the continent to be inconvenienced by provincial bumbling. I came here to join the fight!"

  "My sincerest apologies, Lady DuLaurent," Booker replied stiffly, turning but not meeting her eye. He turned to the guard and shifted to an undertone. "Let's expedite this, shall we? I'd rather not suffer through another lecture about footwear."

  The guard captain stepped forward, sensing disruption.

  "Lady DuLaurent? My schedule doesn’t mention any inspections today."

  "Your orders hardly concern me," Avril retorted sharply. "I’m here with the authority of Byzasian Trade, not to local society official who can't even sort their paperwork."

  She sniffed disdainfully and the captain bristled, hand tightening on his belt. Avril pressed harder, raising her voice with cultivated disdain.

  "If this is some kind of political maneuvering by the Sondals then, believe me, the consequences will extend far beyond your station, captain."

  Guards exchanged uncertain glances. The Magic Society supervisor emerged from one of the tents, robe fluttering as he hurried toward them. The supervisor fixed his gaze on Avril, eyes narrowing skeptically.

  “Lady DuLaurent, was it? I am Magic Supervisor Edrin, and your presence here has not been expected. If this is an official visit of the trade guilds, why was I not notified through the proper channels?”

  Avril regarded him coolly, chin raised.

  "Perhaps, Supervisor, your superiors found the 'proper channels' to be insufficiently discreet. I was informed that our permits had been arranged in advance. Evidently, administrative incompetence extends beyond mere provincial matters."

  Booker escalated matters by pressing a handful of papers into the Magic Supervisor’s hands and gabbling about several different levels of security that paralysed the mess around Lutetia. Edrin bristled, face reddening und Avril’s scornful look.

  “Incompetence? I’ll remind you, Lady DuLaurent, the Magic Society holds exclusive jurisdiction over artifacts within Lutetia. Your so-called Byzasian Trade – a guild council with no authority – does not supersede our mandate.”

  Booker intervened again, shuffling the manifests pointedly in front of the supervisor's face.

  "Sir, sir, if we might refocus — this cargo has clearance from Inspector Rueland and provisional approval from Magic Society officer Daubert. I trust you recognize at least one of those names?"

  "Daubert has no authority in Lutetia." growled the supervisor, who’s brow furrowed deeper.

  "Perhaps you should inform him," Booker said, voice dripping with feigned politeness. "As he just arrived yesterday. For me, I merely execute instructions handed down by my betters, which I assure I am very good at. See here, our security passes for zones two, five and eleven."

  Edrin seized one of the manifests, examining it closely.

  “There is no security pass for Eleven!”

  Booker managed a look of helpless outrage.

  "You are - holding one in your hand, sir. I don’t know what to say. We have legal salvage of dangerous goods here." Booker handed over another sheet. “And marked it properly for transport.” He gestured at the barrels. “And under the authority of Marquis Elain de Courtemont from the Magic Society, I trust you know the rules there!”

  Avril cut in sharply, giving the harassed Adventure Society captain no room to think.

  "Your career teeters dangerously close to ruinous accusation, Supervisor. I suggest you weigh your next words carefully. Charges of harassment toward guild representatives acting in accordance with the Magic Society’s wishes are not taken lightly."

  The supervisor opened his mouth to retort, fury gathering visibly—

  Sam stepped back, glanced once at Avril, and abruptly turned to one of the younger guards examining a barrel. She exploded into an outraged tirade in Funanic, her words nobody understood but all heard an echo of a maternal figure scolding a child in them.

  “Hey!” yelled the guard, looming over Sam, who was immediately backed up by Blackwood who shoved the guard back roughly.

  “What’d you say to her?” roared Blackwood.

  Other guards jumped in, the other cultists jumped in. Booker hurled himself into the middle of it all quoting the proper handling of prisoners, the limits bodily searches and even the constitution of Lutetia. Avril rolled her eyes at the guard captain as aristocratilly as she could and stomped over to the mess.

  “Stop it! All of you!” screamed Avril. Childishly. Just like DuLaurent would have done. She bodily hurled Booker into the cart where he could cause mischief. “Captain!? Captain, stop handling your men and answer me at once!”

  She was pleased to notice Booker took the ongoing distraction as cover, his fingers flicking discreet gestures, small illusions shifting manifests, seals, order numbers. He leaned over to continue harassing the Magic Society official.

  "Look here, you wrote 759-C, but the manifest clearly says 579-G. Honestly, this is basic bureaucratic diligence-"

  A crash echoed suddenly from the back of the cart, cutting Booker short.

  All heads turned. Lefevre, who’d been in a back-and-forth about the possession of a barrel with a guard, stood frozen beside the barrel he'd just dropped, smoke bombs spilling from a shattered crate. A thin, acrid plume snaked upward.

  “Look - what - you’ve - done!” snapped Avril to the guard captain, enunciating every word before the smoke covered the entire area.

  "Oh, good," muttered Booker. She heard him whisper in Payne’s ear next. “Cause chaos.”

  A guard stumbled into Avril, eyes watering, coughing violently. Someone yelled orders nobody followed. Another guard seized Blackwood, who swung instinctively and caught the man squarely on the jaw. Payne tackled a mage who’d begun casting something bright and loud—sparks fizzed uselessly into the swirling smoke. Booker surged through it all, shouting deliberately contradictory instructions about procedure and protocol, adding fuel to the chaos.

  Shouts devolved into coughs, orders became curses. The Foundation’s Gang fumbled through the chaos, pushing and shoving guards away from the cart who blindly surged forwards. She caught a moment of Booker, leaping onto the cart half-visible, flinging manifests into the air, the fluttering papers drawing attention everywhere. Someone crashed into a tent pole, canvas collapsing with muffled yelps beneath it. Lefevre, panicked, tripped straight into a guard, sending both sprawling through a stack of crates. Chaos bloomed fully.

  Then she heard the sound of weapons scraped free of scabbards. She internally groaned. It was bound to happen in confusion. Someone would panic. Time to run. A cultist who got injured and captured was ruination. The Foundation's Gang knew about Booker's thaumographs, and any talking they did to the Adventure Society meant word reaching the Builder Cult via their agents.

  “LET’S GO!” she shouted, voice cutting through the noise like a commander’s horn.

  Avril ran to the front of the cart, drew her rapier, and slashed clean through the beam blocking the road. She flung the splintered wood aside with both hands. “GET ON THE CART!”

  She vaulted onto the driver’s bench and seized the reins. Her Cernunnos stag, sensing its moment, reared slightly — towering and broad-chested, hooves churning frost. With a sharp flick, Avril set it loose. The stag lunged forward, and the cart followed like a boat catching a tidal surge.

  Sam was already on the cart, Avril noticed belatedly, her small frame amongst the barrels. The Foundation’s Gang swarmed in next. Payne hauled himself aboard, dragging a dazed Valleron with him. Blackwood landed hard on the barrels with a grunt. Lefevre, shaking off guards and running to catch up, missed his first grab and shouted a curse, then lunged again, arms catching metal. He made it. Barely.

  "Where’s Fournier and Booker?" Valleron shouted, twisting back toward the smoke. "Where are they?!"

  No answer. Just shouts behind. Chaos. Smoke. The gleam of steel.

  Booker appeared through the fog, coat streaked with ash, one sleeve torn. He was running, faster than she'd ever seen him. He’d taken a potion of speed.

  “Fournier’s gone!” he called out as he ran. “Blade caught him in the first scuffle. He’s down.”

  “No—no, no—!” Lefevre yelled, lunging toward the back rail as though he might jump off. Blackwood caught him, held him there, snarling something low and furious in his ear.

  Booker vaulted up, almost too late. His body unused to the extra speed, his boot slipped on the edge. Arms pinwheeling, he landed on top of Lefevre and Blackwood before falling back out. He clutched the rail with white-knuckled fingers. Eyes wide, breath short, he looked at Avril.

  “Sorry. I—meant to do that.”

  The Cernunnos stag thundered before them, charging along the cleared street toward the river. The cart surged behind it, wheels jolting across frost-chipped stone and half-buried debris. Behind, the checkpoint shrank but not in silence.

  Bolts of magic snapped past their heads, glowing red or bright white, some shattering harmlessly against the wagon’s bracing, others missing by feet. Arrows, bolts and a chakram sang after them too, angry potshots loosed without order or aim, but no less deadly for it.

  Someone screamed, “STOP THEM!” A flare went up, green and bright, the signal for reinforcements in the case of someone running the checkpoint. In the clearing smoke, they could all see Fournier’s body on the ground.