Unwilling to say it aloud, Sirus nodded.
“Very well.” The agent returned the glass to the bedside table. “I’m going to send you home, Sirus Akiv Kapazin. You will find your household largely unchanged, although sadly my colleagues felt obliged to arrest your father’s butler and he failed to survive questioning. All the papers we could find in his offices at the museum are awaiting your scholarly attentions.”
So he had gone home, finding it bare of servants save Lumilla, his father’s long-standing housekeeper, and her daughter Katrya. It seemed the Cadre’s visit had been enough to convince the others to seek employment elsewhere. He spent weeks poring over his father’s papers, compiling copious notes and drawing diagram after diagram, making only the most incremental progress. The agent came to the house several times, appearing less impressed with every visit.
“Three cogs?” he enquired, one eyebrow raised as he looked over Sirus’s latest offering, a simple but precisely rendered diagram. “After two weeks of effort, you show me three cogs.”
“They are the central components of the device,” Sirus told him, his voice imbued with as much certainty as he could muster. “Establishing their exact dimensions is key to reconstructing the entire mechanism.”
“And these dimensions are correct?”
“I believe so.” Sirus rummaged through the pile of papers on his father’s desk, unearthing a rather tattered note-book. “My father wrote in a shorthand of his own devising, so it took some time to translate his analysis. I am convinced the dimensions of these cogs is directly related to the orbits of the three moons.”
He saw the agent’s interest deepen slightly, his shrewd eyes returning to the diagram. “I suspect you may well be right, young sir. However”—he sighed and set the diagram aside—“I have a Blue-trance scheduled with our employer in a few short hours and I fear he will be far from dazzled by your achievement. I regret I must anticipate his likely instruction to encourage you to greater efforts.” He moved to the study door. “Please join me in the kitchens.”
They found Katrya scrubbing pans at the sink whilst Lumilla prepared the evening meal. Sirus had known her for most of his life, a lively woman of plump cheeks and a ready smile, a smile which froze at the sight of the agent. “Which are you least fond of?” the agent enquired, plucking a vial from his wallet and gulping down a modicum of Black.
“Please . . .” Sirus began, then choked to silence as an invisible hand clamped around his throat. Katrya began to move back from the sink then froze, limbs and torso vibrating under the unseen pressure.
“I’d hazard a guess the pretty one’s probably your favourite,” the agent went on, pulling Katrya closer, her shoes dragging over the kitchen tiles until he brought her within reach. “I always find it curious,” the agent mused, raising a hand to stroke Katrya’s cheek, “how pleasing to the eye the gutter-born can be despite such lack of breeding.”
Katrya’s mother, displaying a speed and resolution Sirus would never have suspected of her, snatched a butcher’s knife from the chopping-board and charged at the agent. He let her get close before freezing her in place, the tip of her knife quivering an inch from his face.
“It seems the choice has been made for you, young sir,” he remarked, allowing Katrya to slip from his unseen grip. She collapsed to the floor gasping, flailing hands reaching out for her mother as she was lifted off her feet.
“Now then, good woman,” the agent said, angling his head and lifting Lumilla higher, the knife falling from her hand to ring like a bell as it connected with the tiles. “I’m not a needlessly cruel fellow. So, I’ll just take an eye for today. But which one . . .”
He trailed off as a boom echoed outside, loud enough to rattle the glass in the windows. The agent’s head jerked towards the sound, a twitch of irritated alarm playing over his bland features. For several seconds nothing happened, then another boom just as loud as the first, quickly followed by two more. Despite his panic Sirus managed to recognise the sound: Cannon fire.
“How curious,” the agent said, still holding Lumilla in place as he stepped towards the window to peer out at the street. People were running, dozens of them, all casting pale, terrorised glances up at the sky. Then came a new sound, not the flat boom of cannon but something high-pitched and sufficiently piercing to provoke an ache in the ears. Sirus knew it instantly, his sole childhood visit to the Morsvale breeding pens had left an indelible impression. Drake’s call. Pen-bred drakes invariably had their vocal cords cut shortly after birth, but in the interval the infants would scream out their distress. As a child his tearful reaction had been enough to earn a judgemental cuff from his father, but now he couldn’t help regarding it as a potential deliverer, for the agent clearly had no idea what he was witnessing.
“What in the name of the Emperor’s countless shades . . . ?” he murmured, watching as more and more people fled past the window.
It was at this point that Katrya snatched the fallen butcher’s knife from the floor and plunged it deep into the agent’s back. The reaction was instantaneous and near fatal for all concerned, the agent’s reserves of Black seeming to explode in one convulsive burst. Sirus found himself hurled against the far wall, plaster cracking under the impact as he subsided to the floor. It took seconds for him to shake off the confusion, stumbling upright to find the agent on his knees and screaming, his body contorted like a circus performer as he pulled the knife from his back.
“You . . . fucking . . . little slut!” he yelled at Katrya, now lying semiconscious several feet away. The agent gave a final shout of agony as the knife came free of his back. “You vicious whore!” His voice had taken on a strangely peevish edge, like a child who had been hit for the first time. He staggered to his feet, sobbing as he fumbled for his wallet, blood covering his chin as he babbled hate-filled threats. “I’ll rip out your mother’s guts and make you eat th—”
The iron skillet made a dull sound as it connected with the back of the agent’s head, sending him to all fours, vials scattering as the wallet flew from his grip. He glanced over his shoulder at Sirus, now raising the skillet for a second blow. The agent’s brow formed a frown of aggrieved betrayal. “I . . . let you . . . go . . .” he sputtered.
“No,” Sirus replied, “you didn’t.” He brought the skillet down with all the force he could summon. Once, twice, a dozen more times until the agent’s head was a pulped ruin and his legs finally stopped twitching.
Lumilla was dead, her neck snapped by the impact with the wall. Sirus left Katrya weeping over her body and went to the window, where he saw the first full-grown wild drake in his life. The Red landed in the middle of the street, pinning an unfortunate Morsvale resident under its claws. It was at least twenty feet long from nose to tail and stood in stark contrast to the emaciated, wingless wretches from the pens; muscles bunching beneath its crimson skin and wings beating as it gave a small squawk of triumph before beginning its meal. Sirus jerked his gaze away then saw another impossible sight, more running figures but, judging by their completely unfamiliar garb, not townsfolk. One paused outside the window, a tall man dressed in what Sirus instantly recognised as hardened green-leather armour near identical to an exhibit in the museum’s Native Arradsian collection. His suspicions were instantly confirmed when the man turned his head. Spoiled . . . The scaled, spine-ridged visage and yellow eyes left no doubt that the creature he beheld was a living breathing member of the deformed indigenous tribal inhabitants of this continent.