Chapter 25
The Third Victim
The weight of every gaze in the travertine chamber pressed upon Cora.
The Masters, cloaked in their ceremonial robes and pretensions, glowered down from the dais.
At her back was a warmer gaze. Malachy watched her testify, flanked by Ferromancer guards and bathed in ripples of perpetual twilight from the watery hollows above.
Her journey into the compound, even with the Tribunal’s Portal Key, had not been pleasant.
Sick anticipation had churned in her stomach on the way through one portal and down another, swallowed by the Gateway’s jaws into the bowels of the echoing compound.
The fortress carved of stone was a breath away from flooding; surely the Master Aeromancer’s domed enchantment overhead would crack under the weight of dark waters.
The whisper of death, susurrous on milky stone, had caressed her with each step deeper inside. Dread trickled down her spine like the ponderous drips of water seeping through the thick walls. But to see Malachy again, even under such dire circumstances, she would traverse a thousand hells.
Now, she glanced over her shoulder at Malachy, seeking reassurance.
His scowl smoothed. He gave her an encouraging nod.
He had coached her for this testimony before his arrest, but no amount of preparation soothed the anxiety that now gripped her in its trembling fist. His fate rested, once more, in her hands. Poor bastard.
She turned back to the stone-faced Tribunal. “Malachy killed Potts.”
Whispers erupted among the Masters.
Cora felt Malachy’s disbelieving stare bore into the back of her head. She twisted her gloved hands in her lap. That had not been part of the plan.
Master Bittenbinder cleared his throat. “If we may proceed, ladies and gentlemen of the Tribunal?” His sharp look invited no further comment. “Ms. Walcott, you claim that Mr. Bane killed Lt. Randolph Potts of the London Metropolitan Police?”
“That… would be the natural conclusion.”
“Yes,” Bittenbinder clipped out in a precise German accent, “or no?”
She grimaced beneath the black veil of her hat. “Yes.”
Roaring silence met her terse admission. Over her head, Bittenbinder tossed Malachy a smug look.
“Potts had to die.” Every head whipped to Cora.
“The human lieutenant knew about mages. Mal was protecting the Covenant, at great risk to himself. I communed with Potts. I know who told him about magic, who funded his round-the-clock surveillance of Mal.” She gazed at each of the Masters in turn.
Their expressions ranged from rapt to incredulous.
“The demon that was once Master Alastair Ghose.”
Shock and anger rippled across the Tribunal.
As the sun had risen over Potts’s crude grave, she had divulged the corpse’s secrets to Malachy.
About the man with a gravelly Scottish burr, uneven gait, and mismatched hands peeking from a hooded cloak.
In one of Potts’s memories, the cowl shadowing his patron’s face had slipped, revealing a grisly scar bisecting mismatched halves.
Moneta and Ishtar and Lt. Potts had all been pawns in Ghose’s revenge game against Malachy.
“Potts,” Cora waded into the uneasy hush of the chamber, “was condemned to death the moment he fell into Ghose’s web.”
“Preposterous,” Bittenbinder said. “Ghose was the Master Chronomancer generations ago. The girl is clearly conjuring ghosts for this flimsy defense. Be advised, fellow Masters, that Ms. Walcott has a personal relationship with the accused. She has likely been instructed to lie on his behalf.”
“While you play political games with a man’s life,” Cora said with a vein of anger in her measured tone, “demons are still running loose. Including Ghose, a demon you saw for yourself in Mal’s office back in February.
I was there, Master Bittenbinder, or do you not remember?
Yet you’ve locked the one mage that could banish them back to the prison of the Demon Realm in a cell of his own.
Again. One might think the Tribunal doesn’t want the escaped demons caught. ”
The threat struck an artery. Bittenbinder flushed a dark, angry red.
“The Tribunal does not appreciate your insinuation, Ms. Walcott. Given our stringent enforcement of the Covenant, which expressly bans the Profane Arts, demons have been relegated to history, regardless of what your boss instructed you to say. What you suggest would be a dereliction of duty at the minimum, and unconscionable at the worst.”
“Has your conscience been troubling you of late, Master Bittenbinder?” Cora tilted her head. “Or is experimenting with magic not also forbidden by the Covenant?”
The Master Memnomancer shifted in his seat as curious eyes sharpened on him. “I have no idea what Ms. Walcott is referring to. Let us return to the trial at hand.”
Malachy’s instructions filtered through her mind. Bittenbinder is the lynchpin. He holds a disproportionate sway over the Tribunal. Discredit him, and the other pieces start falling.
Calm, or perhaps numb shock, washed over Cora as she blackmailed a Tribunal Master.
“I refer to your personal experiments on the heritability of magic, Master Bittenbinder. The results of which you shared with scientists of questionable morals. Dr. Franz Dalton, the founder of the Protean Society that preaches mage supremacy, had a 1918 research publication that might as well have been co-authored by you. Is that not so?”
Stunned silence met the words Cora had recited in the empty Victorian house to fill Mal’s absence.
“Sh-she has no proof,” Bittenbinder spluttered.
“She does,” Cora said.
Proof had come from the unlikeliest of sources.
After Ari Razaq, Sloane’s bastard of an ex, had brought Mal’s attention to the Master’s private research, Malachy had cashed in on several favors to unearth the details.
Madam Kalandra’s continental colleagues had been most informative.
The madam of a Berlin mage brothel had plied them with an arsenal of damning intel, at a steep price.
Despite the madam’s intimate acquaintance with countless sins, Bittenbinder’s tastes went too far even for her.
“Otto is trying to breed mages like garden peas,” the brothel madam had said with a shudder.
Cora did not look away from Bittenbinder and his twitching mustache as she listed each woman by name and magical affinity that he had acquired through suspect means for his personal harem of breeding experiments. He paled further with each name.
Good, she thought, feeling a rush of power.
She hadn’t balked when Malachy first outlined his Bittenbinder scheme.
The Master Memnomancer needed to be held accountable, and she was happy to lend a hand.
Not just because he deserved it, but because she wanted to.
A dark, nasty part of herself wanted to make the Master pay in pounds of flesh.
“Shall I continue?” she said when she reached the fifth woman’s name.
Narrowed gazes and whispered speculation gathered around Bittenbinder as he fidgeted.
“Gossip, need I remind you, is inadmissible evidence before the Tribunal,” Bittenbinder managed after several false starts. “As for the rest of this uncorroborated hearsay, I shall not dignify it with a response. The Necromancer is clearly addled, as her kind tends to be.”
“Now, Otto,” drawled the Master Necromancer. With the top hat resting at his elbow, Samuel Lakwa was as much the Southern gentleman as he had come across in his letters inviting Cora to New Orleans to study as his apprentice. “You are willfully misconstruing the facts about death mages.”
“If these allegations are true, Otto has violated the Covenant,” rasped the Master Sciomancer. The pained whisper from Virgil Carpathia’s shredded vocal cords reduced the chamber to silence.
“As the newest and greenest Master,” Lakwa said with a condescending smile. “I would not expect you to understand the nuances of the Covenant yet, Virgil.”
“I understand,” Master Carpathia said, his gaze hard on Lakwa.
“Virgil is right.” The Master Bestiamancer stroked his beard. His gaze swept the assembled faces, dark eyes flashing a telltale amber. “A thorough investigation must be conducted into Ms. Walcott’s allegation. The Tribunal’s purpose is to uphold and enforce the Covenant, for ourselves and others.”
Bittenbinder, pale cheeks splotched with color, stammered in flustered embarrassment. “Kabir, that is hardly necessary—”
Discredit, then distract, had been Mal’s instructions. Done and done, Cora thought.
Her gaze connected with Malachy through the gloom. It was time for the next move.
Slowly, she crossed her legs away from the bickering Masters, distracted by in-fighting. Her fingers rested over the dress pocket Mal had enchanted to contain much more than its size suggested.
Malachy’s hand traversed across the chamber, slipped inside the pocket, and grabbed the knife she had smuggled inside the compound. A reassuring squeeze of her thigh, and then the disembodied hand returned through the portal, a ripple amongst waves in the phantom light from the watery sky above.
“Nevertheless.” Bittenbinder’s voice rose over the others. “These baseless accusations do not change today’s trial, nor the murder of Lt. Potts by Mr. Bane. Let us return to the matter at hand.”
“Let’s,” Cora said. “Potts had to die, by your rules. The Covenant states that humans who pose a significant risk to mage secrecy must be silenced, by any means necessary.” A convenient clause she had memorized courtesy of Mal’s solicitor, John O’Leary.
“We’ve tied up loose ends about Potts with the humans.
No one believed his rants about magic. The London Police had put Potts on leave due to his unhealthy obsession with Mal.
When Potts went missing, we fed the police a steady drip of false leads.
No one asked too many questions about where the mad lieutenant had gone. ”