"No, I think it's you who doesn't see."
"Come, Watkins, you can show me where the samples are," said Raffmir, "While my cousin revives his daughter."
"The samples? What do you want with the samples?"
"I am afraid that we will not be leaving your work intact. It has become… an embarrassment?" He echoed the tone of Petrokos' voice.
"But my work…?"
Raffmir put a hand half around his shoulder, propelling him towards the side door into the central lab area. At the same moment there was another dull boom from within the building. "Hurry, we do not have much time." He prodded the doctor forward.
I returned to Alex's side, lifted her wrist and patted it, trying to encourage some kind of life into her. Her hand dangled at the end of her wrist as if connected by string. I pointed the sword at Petrokos.
"Get in the corner. Stand where I can see you."
He moved sideways slowly until he was pressed into the angle of the corner. I laid my sword between me and Alex's body and lifted her shoulders. Her head flopped to one side at what looked like a painful angle. I laid her back down, trying to figure out a way to lift her on to my shoulder and still keep my sword arm free.
Raffmir pushed Watkins back into the room. "You're sure the glass meets the specification?" he asked Watkins. They had left all the doors to the fridges and freezers open, the containers open on the benches.
"It was all built to the specifications you demanded," he said. "We have complied with the trust's every wish. All our experiments have been conducted within the ethical guidelines." It sounded like an excuse.
Raffmir stood in the open doorway. He raised his hands and cupped them. He appeared to breathe into his hands and within them a spark of light kindled. It glowed bright through his fingers and as he parted his hands it persisted, hanging in the air, like the arc of a welding torch, casting his stark shadow huge on the wall behind. The air smelled of thunderstorms and the hairs on the back of my neck lifted.
I had seen this before. In the tunnels below the streets of London, Raffmir sent a glowing spark up into the vaulted roof of the hall where the anvil stood to illuminate the scene where I had been subject to a trial by ordeal.
Now, though, I stood in two worlds. In the physical world I could see the light as it fizzed and crackled and then glowed, but in the shadow world that overlaid it, the spark looked entirely different. It was a distortion in space, a lensing of reality where everything collapsed into the spark. Space bent inwards around the star as matter collapsed into it, releasing fierce energy. Raffmir urged the star forward and it drifted into the lab, floating on the air like a feather on the breeze. He swung the door shut behind it and the star glowed brighter.
"Dogstar, shield your eyes and those of your daughter. He turned his back to the star as its brightness grew.
"My work," said Watkins. "All my work."
"I would advise you both to avert your eyes," said Raffmir. Petrokos turned his face into the corner, covering his eyes with his hands. Watkins continued to watch the lab.
I covered Alex's eyes with my hand, bowing over her and shielding my own eyes against the painful brightness. Even then I could see the bones in my hand when the flash came. There was a cracking, popping crescendo, the sound of tinkling glass from the lab, and it was dark again.
I blinked, lurid green spots obscuring my vision. There was a scuffling sound as Petrokos ran for the door. I grabbed the hilt of my sword and went after him, still blinking away the luminous afterglow. As I reached the doorway, Raffmir stopped me. "Let him go. His patients are waiting for him in the darkened corridors."
Raffmir caught Watkins by the scruff of the neck and dragged him forward. He stumbled, eyes staring sightlessly, still mumbling about his work.
"What, cousin, would you have me do with this?" He shook Watkins, but all resistance had left him.
Part of me still wanted revenge, but there had been enough death already to satisfy any lust for blood. "Let him go. He can find his fate with the other one." I nodded after Petrokos and the darkened corridor.
"But what of his reward?"
"Reward?"
"Indeed. You do not yet know the full enormity of the good doctor's work. Tell him, Watkins."
The doctor looked back towards the lab, though it was clear he was seeing nothing. Things smouldered on benches. There were scorch marks dimly visible on the fridges. He shook his head.
"Oh, come now. This is no time for false modesty." Raffmir turned to me, "Your daughter was to be only the beginning of this man's crowning achievement." He shook Watkins again. The man was a rag doll. If Raffmir hadn't been holding him up, I think he would have collapsed to his knees.
"Tell my cousin what you made," Raffmir insisted, and shook him again.
The sword appeared from nowhere in Raffmir's hand. Raffmir released him and Watkins wobbled on his feet, but he did not have a chance to fall. Raffmir whirled on the spot and the blade sliced in under his chin and his head snapped back, the blood spraying around the glass walls. It splattered over the floor, Raffmir and Alex and me, running down the glass in sticky rivulets.
"That seems a poor reward," I told him.
Raffmir leaned on the end of the central table and used the sleeve of his coat to wipe the blade.
He looked up. "The coat is ruined anyway," he said with a shrug.
The sound of repeated gunshots came from the corridor.
"We need to get out of here," I reminded him.
I made to move forward, but Raffmir lowered the sword point level with my chest. "Not quite yet."
"I thought you did not need to be reminded of your oath."
"I don't, but I must remind you of yours."
"Why?"
He held up two small glass vials in his free hand.
"This is the culmination of the good doctor's work," he said. "Twenty years' dedication." He looked down at the headless body. "No wonder he was upset."
"Souvenir?" I asked.
"There is not one sample here, but two. The first is the one intended for your daughter and would surely have killed her, though we can allow that the good doctor might finally have reached his goal and cured her – it remains untried, after all."
"She's not sick, Raffmir, she's fey."
"Half-fey, or a quarter, or a hundredth part, but not fey."
"Whatever."
"No, there is a difference, and that difference is everything. The second vial contains the weaponised version of the cure. A strange word, is it not? Weaponised? No, don't worry. I am not intending to use it on you, though if it got broken it would quickly be fatal for both you and your daughter. It would be a very unwise thing to attack me when I hold so delicate an object, Dogstar." He lowered the point of his sword, confident now that I would not fight him.
"What do you want with it, then?" I asked him.
"Fear. That's what drives them. They live such short and fragile lives that they are governed by fear; driven by it."
Gunfire stuttered in the corridor behind me. "We do not have time for this, Raffmir."
He stayed relaxed, ignoring the approaching sounds of conflict. "They fear not only us, but each other. What if another nation has fey? What if they are secretly coaching their own squads of half-breeds in the arts of intelligence gathering, assassination, insurrection?"
"There are no other fey. Are there?"
Raffmir smiled. "They don't know, and not knowing drives them. It's the fear of the possible. What if someone else has found a way to control it – indeed, to create super-soldiers to use against them? Enormous strength, stealth, strange powers – it's a dream and a nightmare. That's what made it so easy to manipulate them, their fear and their greed. With a gift of funding and resources, they were easy to subvert. We are not their enemy, after all."