The rope burns on Kaelen's wrists were weeping clear fluid, stinging with every pulse of her heart. She didn't bandage them. The pain was a tether. It was the only thing screaming louder than the Voice in her head.
Obolus at dawn was not a city waking up; it was a corpse being washed. The rain had thinned to a freezing mist that clung to the cobblestones, turning the world into a blurred watercolor of grey and charcoal.
"Pier 4," Valerius said, his voice low. He signaled the carriage driver to stop a block away. "We walk from here. The Docks are Guild territory, but the smugglers watch the dawn shift."
Kae stepped out, her boots sinking into the muck of the street. The smell hit her instantly—a cocktail of rotting fish, coal tar, and the metallic tang of the estuary. But beneath it all, there was that familiar, sickly-sweet scent of magic gone wrong.
"He's been here," Kae whispered, pulling her collar up.
Of course I have, the Voice purred. It sounded rested, unlike her. I love the water. It has such... depth.
They moved through the fog like ghosts. Valerius led the way, his shotgun concealed under his long coat, his eyes scanning the shadows of the towering cranes and stacked shipping crates.
Pier 4 was a rotting wooden finger jutting out into the black water of the Iron River. It was supposedly condemned, fenced off with rusted chain-link.
But the gate was open.
And sitting in the middle of the pier, illuminated by a single, flickering gas lamp, was a chair.
It was an ornate, high-backed chair, velvet and gold, looking utterly ridiculous against the backdrop of rotting wood and black water.
And someone was sitting in it.
"Stay back," Valerius commanded, drawing his weapon.
They approached slowly. The silence of the pier was heavy, broken only by the slap-slap-slap of the water against the pylons.
As they got closer, the figure in the chair didn't move. It didn't breathe.
Kae stopped ten feet away, her breath catching in her throat.
It wasn't a body. Not anymore.
The man had been transmuted. His skin, his clothes, his very hair had been turned into flawless, white marble. He was frozen in a pose of contemplation, one hand resting on his chin, the other gripping the armrest.
But it wasn't just a statue. The detail was too perfect. The pores on the skin, the fraying of the collar—it was a person calcified in an instant.
"Alchemy," Valerius hissed, lowering his gun but not holstering it. He circled the chair. "High-grade transmutation. This takes a circle of five master alchemists days to achieve. How did he do this alone?"
Talent, the Voice whispered. And a little help from the Void.
Valerius stopped in front of the statue. He leaned in, brushing the marble cheek with a gloved finger. Then, he froze.
"Lector Halloway," Valerius said, the name dropping like a stone.
Kae's stomach turned. "The Lector? The head of the Archives? Valerius, that's... that's High Command."
"He went missing two days ago," Valerius murmured. "We thought he had retreated to the countryside for his health."
He looked at the statue's chest. Carved into the marble robes, right over the heart, was a symbol.
A chess piece. The White King.
"He's playing both sides of the board," Kae realized. "He gave me the Black Queen. He made Halloway the White King."
"Why Halloway?" Valerius asked, more to himself than her. "Halloway was a bureaucrat. A historian. He wasn't a fighter."
"There's only one way to find out," Kae said, stepping forward. She pulled off her gloves.
Valerius grabbed her wrist—the bruised one. "Careful, Vance. The last time you opened a door, you nearly leveled a city block."
"I'm not opening a door," Kae said, staring at the marble face of the dead Lector. "I'm reading a tombstone."
She shook off his grip and placed her hand on the cold, stone forehead of the statue.
The memory didn't hit her with the usual violence. It was slow, viscous, like sinking into cold honey.
She was in a study. Smell of old paper and sherry. A fire crackling in the hearth.
Lector Halloway was sitting in this very chair, but he was flesh and blood. He was old, tired, his hands shaking as he poured a drink.
The shadows in the corner of the room lengthened. They didn't behave like shadows. They stretched, detached from the wall, and formed a silhouette.
The Killer.
Halloway didn't scream. He didn't reach for the bell to summon the guards.
"You're late," Halloway said, sipping his sherry.
Kae's mind reeled. They knew each other?
"The traffic in the Weeping District is murder," the Killer replied, stepping into the light. He wasn't wearing the mask. But Kae still couldn't see his face. It was blurred, censored by Halloway's own perception—or perhaps Halloway refused to see the truth.
"Did you bring it?" Halloway asked.
"The Cipher? Of course." The Killer placed a small, black box on the desk. "It's the final key, Lector. The one your precious Luminaries tried to bury."
"We buried it to save the city," Halloway sighed. He looked at the box with longing. "But Valerius... he's getting too close. He asks too many questions."
"Valerius is a dog," the Killer dismissed. "He chases cars. He doesn't understand the engine."
The Killer walked behind Halloway's chair. He placed his gloved hands on the old man's shoulders.
"Are you ready to be immortalized, old friend?"
Halloway nodded, a tear rolling down his cheek. "I am afraid of the dying part. The transition."
"There is no dying," the Killer whispered. "Only... calcification. You will become the monument to your own failure."
The Killer's hands began to glow with a blinding white light.
Halloway gasped. "Wait. The girl. The Mindsink. What about her?"
"She is the board," the Killer smiled. "And you, my friend, are the opening move."
The white light consumed Halloway. His skin hardened. His blood stopped flowing. His scream turned to stone in his throat.
Kae yanked her hand back, stumbling into Valerius.
"He knew him!" she gasped, the air of the docks feeling too thin. "Valerius, Halloway knew him! They were talking like old friends!"
Valerius stiffened. "Impossible. Halloway was a founder of the Anti-Occult laws."
"He let him in," Kae insisted, clutching Valerius's coat. "Halloway was waiting for him. They talked about a 'Cipher.' A black box. And... and he mentioned you. He said you were getting too close."
Valerius looked at the statue with a new, cold horror. "Traitors," he whispered. "In the Archives."
"It gets worse," Kae said, rubbing her temples where the Voice was cackling. "He called me the board. He said Halloway was the opening move."
Check, the Voice whispered.
"If Halloway is the White King..." Valerius started, his eyes narrowing. He looked past the chair, to the end of the pier.
There was something else there. Something hidden in the fog behind the statue.
A large, wooden crate. Stenciled on the side was the seal of the Luminaries Archives.
"That's Halloway's personal transport seal," Valerius said, moving toward it.
He used the butt of his shotgun to pry the lid open.
Kae expected bodies. She expected Dreg.
Instead, the crate was filled with books. Hundreds of them. Leather-bound, ancient, rotting.
Valerius picked one up. He opened it, and his face went pale.
"These are the Heretic Texts," he whispered. "The books we were supposed to have burned fifty years ago. The rituals of the Laughing God. The summoning circles. The mind-breaking chants."
"Why did Halloway have them?"
"He wasn't destroying them," Valerius realized, dropping the book as if it were burning his hand. "He was smuggling them out. He was preserving them."
"For who?"
For me, obviously, the Voice said.
Suddenly, the air around them shifted. The silence of the pier was broken by a sound.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Kae looked down. The sound was coming from inside the crate, buried beneath the books.
"Valerius!"
He grabbed her, tackling her behind a stack of shipping containers just as the crate detonated.
It wasn't an explosion of fire. It was an explosion of sound.
A sonic blast ripped through the pier. The statue of Halloway shattered into a million marble shards. The books were vaporized into a cloud of confetti.
Kae covered her ears, screaming as the shockwave hit them. It wasn't just noise; it was a frequency. A discordant, maddening note that vibrated in her teeth and her bones.
The Laughing Note, the Voice hummed in harmony with the blast. The key to unlocking the mind.
As the dust settled, ringing filled Kae's ears. She looked up.
The pier was decimated. The statue was gone. The evidence was gone.
But standing at the edge of the ruin, where the crate had been, was a single, pristine object left behind on a pylon.
A mirror.
It was small, framed in black iron. And in the reflection, Kae saw herself.
But the reflection wasn't scared. The reflection was smiling.
"Hello, roomie," her reflection mouthed, though Kae's real lips didn't move.
Valerius stood up, shaking the debris from his coat. He looked at the destruction, then at Kae.
"He just destroyed the only link to his identity," Valerius said grimly. "And he took out a Lector to do it."
"He didn't just destroy it," Kae said, staring at the mirror. "He broadcast it. That sound... I felt it in my teeth. It wasn't a bomb. It was a signal."
She looked at Valerius.
"He just woke up every sleeper agent in the city."
As if in response, in the distance, across the grey skyline of Obolus, a church bell began to ring. Then another. Then another.
They were ringing in a chaotic, frantic rhythm.
"The Panic Bells," Valerius said. "The city is under attack."
"No," Kae corrected, listening to the Voice hum that terrible tune. "The game has started. And we're already in check."