“That didn’t go as planned!” Booker shouted over the wind.

  “No, it didn’t,” Avril snapped, ducking low as a burst of force magic exploded against a nearby tree, sending bark and splinters showering across the path.

  She leaned harder into the reins. The stag responded with another lurching surge, plowing forward like it didn’t care whether the rubble moved or broke.

  “Fournier—” Valleron whispered again, voice cracking.

  “He’s gone!” stated Blackwood, not cruel — just final. “The Builder has him now.”

  Booker didn’t speak. His eyes were darting about, lost in his own ability set, using Stop And Think to come up with detailed plans in moments. Avril focused forward. The cart, the stag, the wind cutting her cheeks. Behind them, the checkpoint’s shouts grew more distant. It would be a chase with the reinforcements now.

  “Lighten the load,” said Booker to Lefevre who hesitated a moment before nodding grimly and summoned his giant monowheel that was already spinning before it hit the ground. Booker threw out his own enchanted reins bringing his arachnoraptor screaming into reality, its legs skittering across debris as it rushed to match pace with the wagon.

  Avril ignored the now familiar sensation of eldritch anxiety the arachnoraptor brought as it passed the cart and was surprised to see two slips of paper speared on pens drop out of the bottom of Booker’s cloak, flying low to her and Sam. It flew low and practically popped up into her hands at the driver’s bench. Avril quickly pulled the impaled paper off the pen and glanced at the note.

  Can’t let the cult know about thaumographs. Can’t tell the Adsoc either; too many spies. They have to die here.

  She shuddered as she read the words. It was an execution warrant. A chill passed through her that had nothing to do with the wind. This was never the plan. They were supposed to leave the ruins one artifact richer, one cult deeper. No blood and fire courtesy of their own allies and certainly not murdering anybody.

  Beside her, was Sam putting away her own note much more casually, making the movement by pretending to check her bracers. She didn’t even frown nor blink.

  It felt… wrong.

  "Blackwood, Payne, Valleron! " Booker barked, having dropped back to riding beside the cart in a strangely debris-free street.

  “Sir?” responded Blackwood eagerly with wild eyes as the other two looked on.

  “We all need to know how to contact the Builder cult!” Booker pointed back the way they came. There were three pursuers from the checkpoint they’d blown through coming visible; two mounted and three using movement abilities. “What if only Avril survives?”

  Payne looked ready to tell but Valleron held firm.

  “The Builder’s workers will find you!” shouted Valleron firmly.

  “The same way they couldn’t find me for a month?” retorted Booker over the wind. “I know you told them about me!”

  Valleron wavered.

  “He’s got a point!” shouted Avril over her shoulder. “We must pass onto the Builder and his workers the outcome today! It’s too important!”

  One of the pursuing guards used a power to vault a ruined house and land within distance for long-ranged abilities behind the galloping cart.

  “Shit!” muttered Booker and took out that yanking sceptre of his.

  Valleron gave a defeated look to Blackwood who caved.

  “The old granary road west of Hallowmere. Go at dusk. Phrase is ‘Bless the Foundation’s hand’,” confessed Blackwood.

  “One of us has to get back,” stated Booker, giving a solemn nod, the picture of revolutionary solidarity.

  The Cernunnos stag drove the cart forward like a battering ram, hooves slamming stone, ice shattering beneath the iron-bound wheels but as the wind howled past them the obvious became apparent; a loaded cart was slower than mounts or abilities.

  Avril saw them clearly now. The cryomancer was back on her feet. A woman in deep green robes skimming across the frost-slick ground like a skater, gusts of spiraling wind hissing beneath her cloak. She moved with supernatural grace — an aeromancer as well, it seemed — fast and agile, already closing.

  To her right, a guard in silver-lacquered plate leaned low over the neck of a hornless drake. The beast’s claws gouged the road with every stride, its pace inexorable. It was gaining too.

  “Above!” shouted Booker from his arachnoraptor, pointing up.

  From the rooftops, two more lightly dressed guards arced overhead, landing on the opposite side of the road in step with each other, their boots ablaze with power. The air cracked with their landings. They would hem the cart in.

  And farther back, thudding toward them in long, rhythmic strides, came something worse: a war-construct. Someone with the juggernaut confluence most likely. Twice the size of a horse. Half-man, half-engine and all society-sanctioned brutality. Steam jetted from its joints. Arcane sigils lit up in sequence along its spine. If it could catch them, it’d run them over for sure.

  “Don’t slow down!” Booker shouted, dropping low in his saddle and swerving around a collapsed wagon. “Avril, this gets ugly in twenty seconds.”

  “It’s already ugly!” she shot back, controlling the reins. The stag clattered over somer debris causing the entire cart to jump and land hard.

  Beside her, Blackwood was breathing heavily, his thrown hammer returning to his hand.

  “What do we do?” he shouted. “We’re not a ranged party!”

  “Whatever you can!” snarled Booker. “Improvise!”

  At that, Payne pulled out a flask of alchemical fire and tossed it with all the grace of a panicked farmhand. It shattered wide of the target, lighting up a ruin but not slowing anyone down.

  Booker didn’t scold him. He just rode harder to catch back up to Lefevre, the arachnoraptor accelerating into a blur of clicking legs and clicking screeches. Lefevre was engaging the running guards, trying to alternately crash on top of them or blast them with lightning. Booker began using his scepter to throw the runners off their goals.

  Avril focussed on keeping the cart true. She looked uneasily at Sam who was now crouched lower, Avril thought. Behind the cultist’s backs. A red flare went up from the camp the cart was moving towards. The signal of reinforcements incoming.

  At the same time, Booker shouted something indistinct from his mount — arachnoraptor legs skidding as it fell back to the cart. He jerked his head toward the ground ahead. “Traps! They’re lighting them up!”

  Avril’s gaze snapped forward. She saw it now, the telltale shimmer. Glyphs and ward circles etched into the stone road were starting to flicker with activated and fade to readiness, one by one. The magic society had decided to activate the obstacles on the road.

  “Can you disarm them?” she yelled.

  “I’ll try,” Booker barked back, already moving ahead on the main route. “I’ll mark the traps!”

  His mount lunged forward, skittering toward where Avril had seen some glowing clusters of embedded glyphs. He threw a red paper triangle into the middle of it which hissed and sizzled. He then skittered ahead to a place that looked unremarkable to Avril now but she knew would stand out strongly to Booker with his Eldritch Sight ability.

  Avril hauled the reins, directing the stag around the red triangles as they came. The stag obeyed, tossing its antlers like a war-banner. The cart shifted hard, tilting just enough to make the barrels groan in their braces.

  Behind her, it sounded like Sam and the cultists were engaged in battle. There was a heavy hit on one of the wheels but then a wet smack but Avril was too engaged to turn back. Another flicker of light up came from ahead when Booker used some kind of magic from his hand to set off a pit-trap rune, primed with spatial inversion. She recognised it from demonstrations. He saw her point at Sam and speak a message using that ability of his. Evidently he thought it didn’t matter to her.

  She could see it in the way his head was moving that he was short on time. He was being selective with the traps. Calculating. Picking which ones were worth disabling. She was proven right a moment later when a fire trap bloomed beneath the cart, missing her stag but washing the underside of the cart with flames.

  “NO!” came a horrified shout behind her.

  Avril risked a glance back to see an unsightly scene. Blackwood had been learning over the side of the cart when the fire trap had happened. His head and right arm had been reduced to cinders.

  Valleron screamed, not in rage but in disbelief. Payne went white.

  A nasty jolt of the cart reminded Avril to focus on driving and she brought her eyes forward just in time to see the giant monowheel Lefevre used crash. Lefevre’s corpse limply falling and skidding along the ground.

  “FUCK YOU, ADVENTURE SOCIETY SCUM!” howled Booker, shooting with his wand of hot lead at the runners who peeled off.

  Booker took the time to stop and use his looting power on Lefevre’s corpse. As she drove past, Avril thought she saw smoke coming from the side of the corpse’s head. She tensed in case one of the cultists also noticed but in their grief of Blackwood, they didn’t even process the loss of Lefevre.

  Cold, Booker, thought Avril. Her stomach clenched uneasily. Very cold.

  “Slow, slow,” chirped Sam in Avril's ear from behind. “One hit lightning trap. Now… more careful. Only Dave can shoot.”

  Avril slowed her Cernunnos stag to a trot. She noted now that it’d taken wounds to the legs from smashing through debris during the running battle and a frost bolt to the side. It’d not even slowed from its gallop the whole time. In a bit of a post-battle daze she resolved to find out who made the summon and thank them one day.

  Booker, however, had galloped ahead, throwing down red triangles as he went and released Tzu from his eyes who flew straight up. Scouting, Avril recognised. A few heartbeats later, Avril was catching up to booker who was catching the falling Tzu from the sky.

  “Report?” Booker asked his familiar, resuming his skittering trot next to the cart.

  =Moving as Sam said,= buzzed the lantern. =Equidistant with reinforcements coming from ahead. Skimmer boats on the river.=

  Avril nodded. It made sense. If they could get to the river before the skimmer boats got there though…

  “Make for the river,” said Booker flatly, echoing Avril’s own thoughts. “Keep Tzu, it saw a bit of the road ahead and might help.”

  =Take the main road left in two hundred yards at the intersection,= buzzed Tzu.

  Booker dropped back to talk to the cultists. Avril couldn’t see him but there was a tense silence in which she guessed he gave significant looks to both Payne and Valleron in the eyes.

  “You’re all that’s left,” he said to them.

  Valleron blinked, hollow and stunned.

  “Lefevre…” said Payne, looking stricken.

  “Their runners bashed his head in while I was marking traps,” said Booker softly, low but steady. “I’m sorry. All we can do now is trust in the Builder’s plan and keep going in their name. We’re about to go off road. I need you two looking back to see if any of them follow us. Can you do that? For the Builder?”

  Valleron, loyal and grieving, nodded and turned without another word. Payne followed, silent as prayer. They knelt at the rear of the cart, backs to the team, eyes scanning the road behind.

  The Cernunnos stag clumped to the intersection Tzu had marked. Avril’s grip on the reins was steady, but her knuckles betrayed her: white and locked. She turned, realising she was looking over her shoulder at the cultist’s back for too long as she did. She snapped her eyes to the front and felt a prickling sensation on the back of her neck.

  The uncleared street was full of crumbling stone, potholes and frost-gnawed brush. Collapsed roofs sloped into the old road. The path ahead was frost covered and winding. Thankfully her summoned stag — gods bless it — didn’t care and had the intelligence to navigate.

  She felt alone suddenly. Booker was scurrying ahead on his arachnoraptor and Sam was checking on everything in the back of the cart. But, both of them were planning murder. She could feel it. Like a bit of ice between the shoulder blades. She shuddered again.

  Ahead, Booker pointed at Avril.

  “Noisy glass on the road here,” came Booker’s voice over the distance. “Give Sam the reins. Use Mastery of Arms and take out Payne and then Valleron if you can.”

  Avril’s heart thudded.

  She glanced back — the two cultists were still crouched, their backs to her, shoulders hunched in determination. Still scanning the road. Still thinking they were helping.

  Still thinking they were allies.

  That was the difference, Avril realised. She’d spent the last month killing people with Booker and it’d seemed right but that was different. That was battle. She’d trained her whole life for that.

  This was something else.

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  Sam leaned forward from the cart’s edge and bumped Avril’s shoulder, hand out silently asking for the reins. Avril blinked. Nodded. She passed them over, hands stiff, body slow. The stag responded to Sam’s hands without fuss. The creature was well behaved, summoned or not. It barely even noticed the change.

  Booker dropped back, the arachnoraptor kicking up a scuttle of gravel and looming in their hearts as he veered alongside the wagon’s rear. Avril could see him lean in, could see the gentle gesture of a hand towards Valleron. The way he pointed at something and murmured low. Avril didn’t hear the words over the glass that’d started crunching loudly under the wheels. Payne was still facing back the way they had come, loyally watching for any sign of pursuit.

  The time was now.

  Avril stood. Her world narrowed.

  And, she just stood there at the edge of the cart, hand on her sword hilt. Doing nothing. She felt like her breath was caught halfway between her lungs and her throat. Payne was right there. Oblivious.

  Avril sat back down next to Sam.

  Sam didn’t say anything. The stag kept trotting along a winding path. Booker urged his unsettling mount forward and sent her a puzzled look. She sent back a desperate look. She’d meant to send a defiant look but knew immediately she’d failed.

  She flushed with embarrassment as he didn’t even have the care to look disappointed in her lack. He just neutrally climbed into the cart and whispered something into Sam’s ears as he went past. Tzu manifested out of his eyes and went straight up. He opened his hand as he carefully clambered over the barrels in the back and manifested a sphere of solid paper which he lobbed high. Both Payne and Valleron turned their heads at the noise of it landing in the ruins.

  Booker didn’t pounce on Payne. He slipped around her neck like a warm, winter scarf. His right arm so far around that his wrist went over her back. That wrist nestled into the crook of his left elbow with the ease of thousands of hours of practice and his left hand cradled the back of her head which he pushed into his scissoring right arm.

  Booker quickly dragged her backwards over her own heels and held her behind Valleron. Payne clawed at Booker’s arm in surprise for a moment, flailed desperately for a second and then went limp. She was always shocked at how easily Booker could render someone unconscious with his hands.

  Avril hadn’t even noticed the cart slowing. Detachedly, she noted Booker’s mount disappearing when he let go of the reins.

  “Charlotte,” muttered Valleron, reaching out to tap her teammate. “Charlotte?”

  Valleron turned around to see Booker drawing a hunting knife from his inventory with one hand, supporting an unconscious Charlotte Payne with the other. Her face moved into shock and she started to shout.

  “???????????????!” interrupted Sam, casting a spell in her native tongue. She’d dropped the reins and snapped around with her arms towards Valleron, all her fingers extended.

  Valleron froze, limbs shaking, eyes bulging. Avril recognised the work of Cruel Puppeteer. It was quite reliable for a few seconds on things less powerful than Sam. Avril stood frozen as Booker drove the hunting knife into Payne’s neck and sawed outwards.

  Valleron screamed through a jaw she couldn’t move. Sweat broke out on Valleron’s forehead with the effort of trying to move her body. Her neck muscles strained trying to turn her head. Avril couldn’t look away from her eyes. They weren’t just wide, they were begging. For mercy, for life, for all of this to be a bad dream. Begging just to understand why Booker had betrayed her.

  Booker drew his wand of hot lead and shot her through the eye.

  The shot cracked the air like a hammer blow. Valleron’s head snapped back. A plume of heat and pressure and the back of Valleron’s head ceased to exist.

  Sam let Cruel Puppeteer drop. She’d need another one of her spells for what was left.

  Booker crouched beside the corpse and looted her body. He immediately crossed his eyes, lost in his own information abilities. Avril felt cold watching him. He just didn’t care.

  “Sam, I need a bag,” said Booker. No sense of emotional weight in his words.

  “Here!” chirped Sam.

  They worked quickly. Practiced motions. Like they’d done it before. Avril stood frozen, watching them slide the bodies in feet-first, backs straight, posture relaxed. With the air of workfolk packing away tools at the end of the day. In that moment, she knew they could do the same to her. And, she felt afraid.

  “Well, here’s as good a spot as any, I suppose,” remarked Booker, looking up at Tzu who turned green. “We’re hemmed in. Can’t get away, we need to destroy the fragment.”

  Sam smiled at him and started taking lengths of copper out of her pack setting them down one by one with gentle taps against the frost-slick stones..

  “W-what?” asked Avril. Her throat felt tight and she couldn’t unclench her stomach.

  “We’re surrounded,” explained Booker patiently. “We need to destroy the volcanic glass fragment. Since this was always one of the contingencies, I made a magic circle ahead of time out of copper.” He smiled hesitantly at her as he took a dense cluster of earth quintessence and a sizable stack of iron spirit coins from his inventory. “Copper’s good for rock-based rituals. Low bleed, high resonance with the rock. Just got to set up the ritual circle, Sam can stabilise ambient mana and once I activate it, this ritual will break any rock inside it into dust.”

  Sam and Booker finished setting up the ritual with a quiet efficiency. Sam finished laying the copper lengths in the ritual circle. Booker adjusted them with exacting precision, placing down the quintessence and spirit coins at appropriate places in her wake. Tzu floated back down and updated them all on the trap closing about them; two or three minutes out. Tzu floating around, casting strange shadows around. Avril used Master of Arms to easily move the volcanic glass into the center of the ritual.

  Avril stepped closer to Booker, arms folded and voice low but taut.

  “Why not give it to the Adventure Society? We have the permits. We can still hand it over and the original has got to be better than your measurements.”

  Booker looked up at her with a serious look, chewing his lip.

  “You’re right but I’m pretty sure we need to keep going to the cults meetings,” still chewing his lip he shot her a look. “And, the Builder cult has spies in the Society,” he said flatly. “If they see the Adventure Society captured anyone, or even find out there’s no reports of a destroyed artefact, our cover’s blown.”

  He sighed heavily while putting down the last stack of spirit coins on the ritual.

  “We need good news to deliver when we meet the Builder cult at the old granary road west of Hallowmere and ‘we destroyed the volcanic glass and escaped’ is plausible. ‘We got captured with the artefact but the Adventure Society let us go’ isn’t.”

  “And how are we avoiding that capture?” she asked.

  Booker paused and held his hands over the ritual circle. Sam activated her racial ability Mana Beacon, temporarily stabalising the magic in the area.

  “Dust and ruination come to let all stone break,” intoned Booker, activating the spell, Every rock inside the ritual circle started vibrating. He turned back to Avril. “We dont’ need to avoid capture. We’re in the Adventure Society and in the same team as Johan Schmidt, wholesome, upstanding citizen who’s leading the way here.” He stepped back from the circle. “And when Johan’s boats land, we’ll act like we were just ahead of them the whole time. That we were the first ones on the scene. Hugh can confirm we’re on the team.”

  “Hugh won’t lie,” she reminded him.

  “He doesn’t have to,” Booker replied with a grin. “He just has to agree we’re on the team.”

  The ritual was well on the way now. The smaller rocks inside had already crumbled and the volcanic glass was missing patches.

  “Pack up your things, Avril,” called Booker, who’d picked up his arachnoraptor reins from the cart where they'd fallen and, with Sam, was haphazardly throwing everything from the cart into one of her many dimensional bags.

  Avril touched a locket around her neck and her Cernunnos stag shone and melted into beams of light to become a stag-shaped white gem inside the jewellery.

  “That’s all?” asked Sam in her light voice.

  Avril nodded.

  Sam started pouring naphtha over the cart.

  “Teleport’s next,” announced Dave to them both, walking to the ritual circle. “I’m going to teleport us nowhere. We’ll arrive in the same place as we’re going from.” He waved his hand over the circle that was now full of dust and let a little shimmer of diagnostic magic from his hand. Some kind of test to check if it’d worked. It must have met with his satisfaction because he bent down and started throwing copper bits of the circle into another dimensional bag. “It’ll just show up as one event on Society sensors,” he continued. “They’ll assume someone teleported or gated out. Makes the cultist getaway more believable.”

  “Won’t the teleport ruin the thaumographs?” asked Avril, confused. She’d definitely heard something about that during the planning for this whole event.

  Booker smirked in that self satisfactory manner she hated.

  “No,” he said. “I stashed them.”

  She stared.

  “You what?”

  “Back at the checkpoint,” he said, voice calm. “That’s why I was so late to the getaway. Put them all in the same barrel and marked them as dangerous alchemicals. It’s shielded. It won’t be found until they do a full inventory after this mess.”

  He handed her a narrow slip of waxed paper, folded crisply. A serial number had been etched into it in his consistent-as-clockwork, tidy script.

  “You’ll need to pass that to the Ainsworths,” he said. “As soon as we’re out. Use your name, use your title, whatever works. Just make sure they pick it up before they do the inventory.”

  She took the paper, fingers trembling slightly.

  Sam lit the cart on fire and came over to stand next to Booker. Her big, happy smile looked downright sinister to Avril in the moment.

  “Right, we good?” asked Booker, looking at Avril who shrugged to suppress a chill that went down her spine. “Okay, Blink to positions perceived.”

  They went nowhere. Although evidence of the teleport was apparent in Avril and Sam both feeling that familiar nausea of dimension sickness. They allowed themselves to be led towards the river where they anticipated Johan leading the landing.

  By the time the skimmer boats arrived, only burning wreckage remained. Booker has used his cleaning spell on them so when that beautiful, innocent man Johan Schmidt arrived, hair blowing perfectly in the breeze, they looked like the rest of the fresh adventurers he was leading, not soot-streaked survivors dragging themselves free of an impact zone.

  Johan vaulted from the first skimmer as it scraped ashore. “Breath of the good Gods,” he gasped, eyes wide. “Dave? Avril? What happened?”

  Booker, dressed in his adventuring armour with his alien-looking helmet, gestured widely for Johan’s benefit.

  “Our gamble paid off, Johan!” announced Booker. “We guessed the right side of the river and arrived quickly but the villains were already gone when we arrived.”

  Johan coughed with anxiousness at being caught up in what he knew was a lie. Avril sighed. As much as she wasn’t a murderous spy like Booker and Sam could be, Johan could never. He passed Booker’s shoulder to the road choked with smoke.

  “Did you get anything?”

  Booker shook his head slowly.

  “My guess is that they flew.”

  Hugh stepped off the second skimmer in water form with an Adventure Society official.

  “Who’s this?” barked the official at everyone in particular.

  “Lord Vescari, Detective Booker,” rumbled Hugh placidly. Other magic-powered skimmer landed, disgorging adventure society iron rankers. “He’s the leader of my team. Detective Lord Tharault Vescari.”

  “Pleasure to meet you, milord,” said Booker, giving an acceptable bow. “Since I have a memory ability and contribute little in the way of combat, I was secretly deployed ahead as an observer to try and get a look at the faces of our enemies.” Booker held up a manual looking glass from his inventory to support the lie. “Alas, they were even faster than I.”

  Lord Vescari grunted and followed Johan towards the burning wreckage.

  “Get on a skimmer,” whispered Booker in her ear. “Get Sam to safety and then get that serial number to the Ainsworths. I’ll watch things here.”

  Avril was only too eager to leave.

  Back in The Ash & Chime, Avril allowed herself to relax in the light of the softly glowing lanterns that played upon the ambient chime sculpture that moved gently as the winds of magic blew across it, drifting like metal leaves in a forest breeze.

  She and Booker were sat together on the mezzanine level. Velvet runners muffled the steps of hushed patrons. They could see down to the lacquered obsidian bar through the cool air perfumed with burnt sage and cardamom that circulated around the darkwood tables. The shadows of mist-glass veiled some of the patrons in their booths on the floor below, silhouettes inked in drifting colour.

  Avril sat opposite Booker at a corner table on the mezzanine. They had taken drinks; he a cup of bishop red and she a blue kaff. The air between them was thick.

  Booker broke it with the precision of a mallet.

  "You haven't looked at me since we arrived," he observed in a mild tone. She'd have preferred an accusatory one and he knew it. "I hope you're not ashamed you couldn't literally stab someone in the back."

  Avril seethed. Her gaze stayed fixed on the chime sculpture to her right.

  “You could," began Avril acidly, "have any amount of respect or tact."

  Booker nodded once, accepting the rebuke.

  “I apologise for breaking the norms of your society," he said in a way that Avril felt meant 'I apologise that your society is wrong'. He kept talking in that falsely patient way of his. "But I don't know enough of the rules to avoid breaking them and I think I need to say my part. And, that is; I'm not judging you as lesser for your action. I just need to know what happened so I don’t put you in that position again."

  She turned to face him then, jaw tight. She hated this about him. Why couldn't he just shut up and stop embarrassing her? Why did he have to bring up everything that was wrong about everything? The sharp, little rat took a perverse pleasure in it!

  “You really think that’s the problem? That I need a warning next time you ask me to help murder someone?”

  “I think I made it clear that it's I who'll be wanting the warning,” he said, calm as ever, acquiring an infuriating, little smile. “And, yes. Murder is part of our job description right now. Sorry.”

  “They thought we were friends, Booker.”

  He didn’t flinch. Just nodded and folded his hands neatly atop the table.

  “I know. And if it helps, I didn’t enjoy it. They were keen enough kids. They could've made something of themselves with good leadership.”

  “No,” Avril muttered. “That doesn’t help. It didn't feel right.”

  She let silence return for a moment. Then:

  “I know what espionage requires. I’ve read some history. I’ve studied statecraft, read biographies of famous politicians. Hell, I’ve even marked essays on the ethics of deniable assets at the schools mother sent me to. But I wasn’t trained to be this. I was trained to manage estates, navigate court, trade favours.”

  Booker nodded again. Thoughtful.

  “Then I won’t put you in that role again. I've been thinking I'm not using your talents correctly and this confirms that suspicion.”

  “But you'll be in that role again.”

  “Yep.”

  “Killing people in cold blood just because they trusted the wrong person and joined the Builder cult.”

  Avril thought of all the people in her world who'd 'join' the builder cult if her father converted. She shuddered. She'd be dragged in. There'd be no avoiding it.

  Booker finally leaned back, eyes unfocused for a moment.

  “They pointed a gun - a wand, sorry - at everyone’s head the moment they made that choice,” he said. “And if someone holds a wand to the world's head, everything is on the line. So you do everything to stop them. That’s what I did.”

  Avril looked down at the lacquered grain of the table.

  “I understand that,” she said. And, added softly, “But I can't feel it that way.”

  Neither of them moved for a moment, lost in their own thoughts.

  "It was the way you killed them," croaked Avril.

  Booker didn't even breathe. His absence of presence urged her to talk.

  "They trusted you," she whispered. "You were their hero and you could still..." She shook her head. "And Sam's so kind and she was there -"

  Avril exhaled loudly at not being able to find the right words. She looked Booker dead in the eyes.

  "You could do that to me, couldn't you?"

  She waited to catch him in the lie of denial.

  "Naturally," admitted Booker without the slightest hint of anything in his voice. Regret, anger, timidity, fear... nothing. "As I hope you could do to me if necessary."

  Good Gods. She should have remembered who she was talking to.

  "You... hope?"

  He nodded in unhesitating agreement.

  "Oh, yes." he stated. "I've read about a few cases of mind corruption in recent Magic Society publications." He sipped his tea calmly and went on. "If that happened to me and I was about a task that'd make the Builder win this war, I hope you'd kill me before I end the world."

  "There was a moment... in the cart," she said slowly, softly. "After Sam and you had done it. When I realised how easily you moved. How quiet it was. How... practiced." She swallowed hard. "I was afraid. Not for them. For me. That if I ever said the wrong thing. Or looked the wrong way. Or... changed sides without meaning to—"

  "You thought I’d do it to you," he finished, gently. Not offended. Just listening.

  She nodded, eyes on the grain of the table.

  Booker’s voice came like soft paper.

  “I won’t,” he said. “Not willingly. Unless the world needs it. And I’ll hate it if I do. But I won’t let the world end because I was sentimental about a teammate.”

  Then, as if sensing she couldn’t take any more:

  "But, don't worry, Avril," murmured Booker, taking a sip from his tea. "Being different to Sam or I in this matter isn't a weakness. I'll have you know; I think the world would be far less interesting if we were all the same."

  Avril looked away from her problems, past the chime sculpture, out through the mist-glass, to the drifting figures in the grand cafe below. Blissfully unaware of the quests she was caught up in.

  Quests for the soul of the nation.

  She didn’t hear the footsteps. Only noticed when a change in the light made her glance sideways — just in time to see Mistress Elowen Faraday reaching the top of the mezzanine stairs. Silent on the velvet runner, her scholar’s-grey coat tailored so precisely it barely disturbed the air. One hand held a sealed letter. The other hung naturally at her side, fingers relaxed but ready. She moved with the kind of composure that made her seem like part of the Ash & Chime’s furnishings — an elegant fixture summoned into motion only when narratively required.

  Faraday's eyes swept around once, unhurried. When they landed on Booker, he gave the smallest change of eyebrows in acknowledgement. She altered course without a word and began making her way through the tables.

  Booker gave a small nod to the new arrival as she sat down.

  A new quest had begun.