Chapter 11 #2
The flush deepens. August turns back to the mirror, considers his reflection for a moment, and then walks past Vale to the kitchen table without changing his shirt.
Vale hands him his tea and doesn't bother hiding the satisfaction.
They settle at the table. The research is still spread across it: maps, notes, Cabal diagrams, the photographs from the library printed out and annotated in both their handwriting.
Three days of combined work, layered over each other.
Looking at it now, with the railway rift closed and only one site remaining in Voss's binding circle, the picture is simultaneously clearer and more urgent than ever.
"One open rift left," August says, wrapping his hands around his cup. "The one in the subway, the one we left because the blessing circle was fresh and the location was isolated."
"If Voss opens his final rift at the last site in the pattern, the binding circle completes and the vault wards fail.
" Vale taps the map. "But we closed three of his rifts.
The binding circle is incomplete. He'll have to compensate, either reopen the closed sites or find a way to power through the gaps. "
"He'll power through." August's voice is certain.
"Reopening closed rifts takes time and energy he doesn't have.
The corruption is eating him alive. He'll pour everything he has left into the final rift and brute-force the binding circle into completion.
" He traces the remaining sites on the map: the open subway rift, and the blank space where Voss's final rift has yet to be placed.
"He's been planning this for years, Vale.
He'll have contingencies for lost nodes.
The question isn't whether he can complete the ritual with gaps, it's how much more power the final rift needs to carry to compensate. "
"Which means the final rift will be massive."
"Beyond anything we've seen. And he'll be desperate. Dying. Burning the last of himself to get through that vault." August looks up from the map. "We need to be ready for that."
"We need more than readiness. We need the vault itself fortified against a breach." Vale sets down his cup. "Which means we need help we don't currently have."
A knock at the door.
August tenses, the reflex is still there even after everything, but it passes in a second. He knows who it is. They both do. Vale watches the way August consciously relaxes his shoulders, uncurls his fingers from his cup, and nods toward the door.
Vale opens it.
Knox is in the hallway, and he looks exactly like Knox always looks: immaculate.
Grey Templar coat buckled pristine to his chin, blond ponytail draped over one shoulder without a hair out of place, mace gleaming at his belt, holy rings catching the dim hallway light.
He looks as though he's about to pose for a recruitment broadsheet.
He also looks as though he's been awake since before dawn managing a crisis on behalf of a partner who has been otherwise occupied, and the slight tightness around his eyes is the only thing that betrays it.
Knox's eyes find Vale first, assessing quickly in the way partners do: are you okay, is there trouble, what's changed since I saw you last. Whatever he reads in Vale's face makes something flicker across his expression. Surprise, maybe. Or recognition.
"Good morning," Knox says. "I come bearing intelligence and pastries." He holds up a paper bag. "The pastries are for August. The intelligence is for you, since you treat food with a disdain I've never understood."
"It's fuel," Vale says, stepping aside. "Not a pastime."
Knox enters the apartment with the easy, nonthreatening energy that makes him so effective at everything he does, though the effect is somewhat undermined by the fact that he's dressed for combat and armed to the teeth.
He sets the pastries on the kitchen table, surveys the spread of research with raised eyebrows, and turns toward August, who has risen from his chair and is standing with his tea in both hands and an expression that's working hard to be neutral.
"August." Knox inclines his head with genuine warmth. "How are you feeling?"
"Better." August manages a thin smile. "Significantly better, actually."
"You look it. The color suits you." Knox's voice is kind, his posture open despite the coat and the mace, and then his gaze drifts down from August's face to his neck, a casual, inevitable movement, and lands on the bruises.
Knox stops.
His eyes rest there for exactly one and a half seconds.
Long enough to catalogue. Short enough to pretend he hasn't.
Then his gaze returns to August's face with an expression of studied, immaculate neutrality that is, to someone who has known Knox for four decades, absolutely screaming.
It's the same expression he wears when he's defusing a diplomatic incident, and Vale suspects it's taking approximately the same amount of effort.
"Tea?" August offers, because he's either oblivious to what just happened or is handling it far better than Vale would have expected.
"Love some," Knox says evenly.
August turns to the kitchen. Knox turns to Vale.
The look Knox gives him is a masterwork of restraint.
His mouth is a flat line. His eyebrows are perfectly level.
His grey Templar coat is buttoned with military precision, his posture is parade-ground straight, and his eyes are communicating at a volume that would shatter glass.
We are going to discuss this, that look says.
We are going to discuss this at length, in private, at a time and place of my choosing, and you are going to sit there and endure every single question I have.
Vale meets his gaze without flinching. He's endured worse interrogations than whatever Knox is planning. Probably.
Knox looks away first, shaking his head in the particular manner of a man who is adding this to a very long list of his partner's catastrophically poor decisions and is running out of space in the margins.
Then he pulls out a chair and sits down at the table, adjusting the hang of his mace so it doesn't catch on the chair leg with the practiced ease of a man who has been armed at kitchen tables before.
"Right," Knox says, accepting the tea August brings him with a warm smile that he does not extend to Vale. "Bring me up to speed."
Vale sits across from him. August takes the chair between them, angling it slightly toward Vale in a way that's probably unconscious. Their knees don't touch under the table, but they're close enough that Vale can feel the warmth of him.
"The railway rift is closed," Vale begins. "That leaves one active rift, the subway station, and one or two possible rifts Voss hasn't opened yet."
Knox nods slowly, processing. "So the binding circle is compromised. Three of the original nodes are destroyed."
"Compromised, not neutralized." August sets down his cup and leans forward, pointing to the map.
"Voss has been planning this for years. He'll have contingencies.
The most likely scenario is that he pushes all remaining power through the remaining rifts, overcharges them to compensate for the missing nodes.
The binding circle completes, but messier.
Less controlled. More dangerous for everyone involved, including him. "
"Including the vault," Knox says.
"The vault most of all. A brute-force completion of the binding circle won't surgically disable the wards the way the original plan would have.
It'll hit them with overwhelming force. If the wards hold, the energy has to go somewhere, and it'll discharge into the surrounding area.
The Cathedral. The streets around it." August's jaw tightens.
"If the wards don't hold, Voss walks into the vault and takes what he came for. "
"Which is what, exactly?" Knox looks between them. "Do we know what he's after specifically?"
"The Mortis Crown," Vale says. "Primary Cabal relic. Grants dominion over death within a localized area, effectively negates the corruption cost of death magic. He puts that on, the corruption stops killing him, and he becomes a necromancer with unlimited power and no price."
"A necromancer with a hundred and seventy-three years of Templar training," August adds quietly. "Who knows the Order's defenses, tactics, and weaknesses from the inside."
Knox is silent for a moment. He picks up his tea, takes a deliberate sip, and sets it down with the careful precision of a man selecting his next words.
"All right," he says. "Then the way I see it, we have two problems, and we need to address them both before Voss makes his move.
" He holds up one finger. "First, we need to know exactly what's in that vault.
Not just the Mortis Crown or what you've discovered so far.
Everything. Because if Voss gets in, he's not going to limit himself to one artifact.
We need a complete inventory so we know what we're protecting and what happens if any of it falls into his hands. "
Second finger. "And we need the vault itself fortified.
Additional warding, barriers, contingency measures, whatever can be layered on top of the existing defenses to buy time if the binding circle completes.
The current wards were designed by the Order centuries ago, and Voss has had a hundred and seventy years to study their weaknesses.
We need protections he hasn't had time to plan for. "
"Agreed on both counts," Vale says. "Which is why we need Fiora."
Knox nods. He'd been expecting the name.
Fiora, the Order's archivist and ward specialist, the woman who'd helped Vale piece together the binding circle pattern, who knows more about the Cathedral's defensive architecture than anyone alive.
She's meticulous, discreet, and, more importantly, she's the only person in the Order who Vale trusts to help without immediately running to Cael.