13
It was just as well he barely had to sleep, these days.
Felix sat on the roof of the Althion, watching the city come to life beneath him. It was the usual workday morning: supply phaetons rumbling up to the hotel, maids hanging out the laundry, and the first civil servants trudging, yawning, to the skyborne rail.
It had been a strange and fruitless week.
His vigilantus charms had shown him nothing.
Even hours of old-fashioned spying had done him no good.
Miss Rosara had done no more than visit prisons, take walks and pay a call in West Carintheum.
Yes, that young man she’d had tea with had been peculiar, and no, he hadn’t seen much evidence of her seeking employment—but being work-shy and taking tea with oddities weren’t uncommon Carinth pastimes.
Even so, suspicion dogged him, rattling about like spare parts in his head. He was certain they made a machine, but he couldn’t bolt them together. Watching was getting him nowhere. It was time for more direct steps.
Miss Rosara threw open her windows at seven o’clock, and he caught the scent of coffee and pastries not long after. Come quarter past eight, she emerged onto the street.
Within the minute, Felix was climbing through the rooftop ventilation grilles and into the service hatch.
He skimmed down the ladder to the top floor.
From there, it was a moment’s dash to the luxurious guests’ corridors.
Miss Rosara’s room was guarded by nothing but a lock.
He flexed his fingers, ready to turn the mechanisms with a flick of his mind—
Damn.
Six months later, he was still doing it. No matter. He’d been haunting the hotel for long enough to know another way.
He headed for the servants’ corridors. They cleaned the rooms daily, and their tokens opened every door in the hotel. It was a fair bet that the lazier of them kept the things in their uniforms, which they obligingly left hanging on pegs in the cloakroom.
He’d come in plain clothes, and no one paid him any mind when he trudged in and snatched a coat at random.
He swung it over his shoulders and slid his hands into the pockets.
There was no token in there, but the two grumbling men in the room moved on within the minute.
He snapped to action, diving into the pockets of each coat in order. On the fourth, he found what he sought.
He was back at Miss Rosara’s room in moments. The token saw him inside. He waved his hand to light the Do Not Disturb sign, then closed the door behind him.
Well, it’s no villain’s lair, he thought with a touch of disappointment.
It was a neat and pretty place, with barely a personal possession in sight.
He made a search, checking all the places the prefecture had taught him: inside pillows and curtain linings, lamps and paintings, the mattress and the privy.
Nothing. No papers, no money, no mysteriously locked drawers. If Miss Rosara was hiding anything, it was arcanically concealed. He was going to need to look with a different kind of eye.
You can’t risk it, the voice of reason warned him at once. You know what the surgeons said.
But it was just a peek; it wasn’t even casting. Just a glimpse through his arcanic vision, then . . .
Felix set his hands against the wall and turned inside. Somewhere in the deep, he slid a crowbar into a sealed gap and leaned, oh so slightly, on the lever.
Something snapped. Light burst momentarily in his eyes. Pain cracked through his chest, as hard as if he’d seized his own sternum and snapped it in two. He stifled a cry. For a moment, he could do nothing but stand there, trying to breathe.
As the aftershocks of agony faded, though, his mind’s eye replayed what he’d seen. The phantom glows of arcana hovered around him like marsh lights, pale and wan. There was the copper of the cooling charms, the dull blue of the locking spell, and . . .
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. No hidden pockets, no concealment charms—she hadn’t even set up the most basic arcanic protections on the room.
Still, a sensation snagged in his mind, like a strong scent snatching back a memory. There was something wrong with the arcanic fabric, and he’d felt it before.
Carysium Street. That was it. The air felt thin and stretched. Arcanic draining, the centurion had said. He’d assumed that someone had been poaching, but a place like the Althion didn’t need to leach off the fabric.
With his powers, he could’ve pinned it down in a heartbeat. Still, perhaps they had some tools back at the office that could do the job.
Relying on the sixth science? he thought wryly. It’s the end of civilization.
With that, he locked the room, tossed the coat into the staff laundry and hurried on his way.
His hope didn’t last long. He soon discovered that it took the signature of someone higher up than him to get so much as a paper clip released.
He had a mind to ask Regis for the authority.
The moment he recited the request in his head, though, he thought better of it.
I don’t trust her. She took a long bath, talks to strangers, and there’s something wrong with the air in her room. I think.
Near five o’clock, a cylinder came rattling down his postal tube. Felix unscrewed it to find his sister’s jagged handwriting rendering a bill for rent.
Fee for one week’s occupancy: 4 lyrin and 12 cakes. Come and collect your gauntlets, you splitwit. Lots of love, Diana.
“Blast,” he murmured. He’d completely forgotten. Again.
Then it struck him. He needed arcanic power. He already had some, ready-made, and he wouldn’t even have to explain himself.
So get on with it, ingenia.
With new energy, he filed his papers and set off.
Diana was attacking some eldritch clockwork device with a screwdriver when he arrived. Sunset painted golden rose across Carintheum beyond the glass.
“Evening,” he called as he entered. His sister waved the screwdriver in greeting, then patted the gauntlets on the desk beside her.
“Hello, you. Hope you’ve come to repent of your wickedness. Where’s my cake?”
“Here,” he said, tossing her a crystallized plum he’d bought from a streetside market on the way. Diana caught it in one hand and eyed it up.
“You’re a disgrace, Felix Aurelias,” she said, but took a large bite nonetheless. Still chewing, she snatched the gauntlets with one hand. “All finished, and I defy you to find anything better for sale in all Carintheum.”
“Excellent. Now, what do they do?”
“I’ve clipped on all the basic spellwork attachments, and I can make you more as you need them.”
Diana ran a finger across the tiny platinum fittings down the wrist guard. They were as intricate as snowflakes, filled with tiny wire coils, crystal chips and turning cogs.
“Top left to bottom right, it’s incendiary charms, locking and unlocking, heating and cooling—”
“And if I need to track someone or knock them head over heels?” he asked, as politely as he could.
“For tracking, you’ll need prefecture-approved spells. Middle right should give you enough of a blast to knock a fellow over, but I can’t lawfully make anything more dangerous than that. The strongest one’s the patrium spell, bottom right.”
Felix kept the smile carved in place, striving not to hear the voice in his head. Not so long past, you could’ve broken every bone in a man’s body with a thought, one by one, it said. Look at those things. Clipping on to you like shackles. Holding you up like crutches.
He was beginning to suspect that he was going insane. He knocked away the black thoughts and fixed his eyes on Diana: smiling, eager, full of pride at what she’d made. He couldn’t blame her. He’d seen gauntlets in a hundred shops across Carintheum, and her handcraft was visibly a notch above them.
If nothing else came out of your injury, at least it won that, he thought, letting affection swell and drive away the dark.
“Not to worry. What about arcanic analysis?” he said. “If I wanted to reveal any spells, or look at the fabric?”
“I can add one,” she said, turning to fish about in a drawer. “Fully mechanized. Hold this glass in front of your eye, and it’ll play the colors back in front of you.” She waved a brass-rimmed monocle with one hand, still searching with the other.
“Clever.”
“I know!” she declared, bouncing back with another spellwork attachment. She clipped it on, slid the lens into an aperture, and all but forced the gauntlets onto his hands.
“There’s a tracker, in case you lose them,” she added, conjuring a copper token. “Keep that with you.”
She slipped it into the inner pocket of his uniform, then stood back to admire her handiwork.
“There. Height of fashion,” she said. “Now, what’s taken you so long? And what was that garble about the Seraph’s Rest?”
“Don’t start,” Felix sighed. “I was keeping watch on someone.”
“Commissioned to protect some fancy filly?”
“Quite the reverse. A commoner, fresh out of prison.”
“Some plebeian?” Diana wrinkled her nose. “Must’ve sold most of her internal organs to pay for four hours at the Seraph’s Rest.”
“She said the public baths are free.”
“They’re fifty lyrin an hour,” his sister said absently. “Still, can’t say I’ve much time for Lumenia Street. Now, the gauntlets. Remember, it comes out of the fingertips, not the—”
But Felix was already halfway across the room.
“You’re welcome!” she shouted after him.
“You’re a seraph in disguise, Diana!” he called back as he swung around the doorframe—and then, with one quick smile, he was away.
He ran all the way to the Althion, cutting miles of carriageways and roadworks as he dashed down grimy alleys and through terraced gardens. The sunset cast a bloody glow across the city, plunging swiftly into dark.
Relief surged through him as his pulse climbed to a fighting pace. For so long, that energy had brewed inside him, building up like lightning in a bottle. Now, at last, he had a reason to run. The lid came off the jar, and the moth stopped beating its wings to dust against the glass.
She lied, thought Felix, and she’s been lying since the hour we met.