“Not inside,” Lila said. “Just close by. The Brotherhood would have fits if we turned up without them having to let us in.”
“Yeah. You ready, Piper?”
“Me? No.” He nearly panicked, recalling the unpleasantness of solo transitions with Heris.
She and Lila enveloped him in a hug. Lila nodded over his shoulder.
Twist.
Darkness, haunted by terrible things, none of which thought him worthy of notice. Then morning sunshine and cool air. He was in the foothills of the Jagos, outside the mouth of the Remayne Pass.
Heris asked, “That wasn’t bad, was it?”
“No. Maybe I’m getting used to it.”
“But you sound suspicious.”
“I am suspicious. The attitude of the Night toward me can’t have improved.”
“We need to put that runt Armand in a fool suit and have him follow you around telling you that you aren’t nearly as important as you think.”
“You miss picking on me when we were little, don’t you?”
“Could be.”
“My point is, the Night doesn’t think I’m important anymore. After all that trouble trying to kill me.”
“So the Night finally understands that the genie can’t be shoved back into the bottle.”
“That would be one interpretation. Giving the Night too much credit.”
“Your theory is?”
“The Night forgot me because it found you.”
“I don’t think so. Asgrimmur would’ve warned me. Lila and I need to get back. Just sit. The Righteous will be along later.”
“You plopped me down ahead of them? How am I supposed to explain that?” He tossed a look of appeal at Lila but the girl was infatuated with the view. The air was crystalline. The Jagos were dressed in magnificent grays and purples, wearing capes of pristine white. The breeze from the high slopes was cooler than the coolest morning air in Brothe. Hecht shivered.
Heris said, “You’ll come up with something. You’re so clever. Hell. Blame it on sorcery. Or divine intervention. It’d all be true.”
“And no one would believe me.”
“So much the better, eh? Lila! Time to go.”
“You go ahead. I’ll catch up. I want to look at the mountains.”
Heris shrugged. “Don’t be too long.” She turned sideways.
Lila waited half a minute to say, “Promise you’ll be careful.” She stepped close, hugged him, squeezed his right bicep and his left wrist as though disguising a check to make sure his amulet was still there. It was. And it still itched. “You’re the closest thing to a father I ever had.” Said like it was torture to get out.
Lila turned sideways, so close he felt the breeze when she vanished.
He took a deep breath, shivered some, decided to warm up by walking. He headed downhill. The road into the pass had to be close by.
He found the road. He perched on a boulder to wait. There was no traffic, which was not a good sign. Could it be because soldiers were coming?
* * *
Lila arrived in Brothe to find Heris and Cloven Februaren already heads together scheming to move her, Vali, and Muniero Delari into the hidden Chiaro Palace basement where the Construct lay hidden. Anna and Pella had been transitioned to the vicinity of the Castella already. They could cross a bridge and approach a gate, get inside, and prepare quarters where the girls could join them.
Mrs. Creedon, with Turking and Felske, had been sent to Principaté Delari’s apartment in the Chiaro Palace. There could be no safer place for them.
As Heris explained, the Ninth Unknown, laughing, turned sideways with the Eleventh, who entered the nothing squawking.
Vali joined Lila and Heris. All three rotated into the bright lights and bustle of the secret world of the Construct-though not where their arrival would be witnessed by the career priests and nuns perfecting what looked like a vast and intimately detailed relief map of the known world. Brothe was its pivot. It revealed ever less exact detail as the eye tracked toward its edge.
The environs of Brothe and central Firaldia were defined so minutely that an observer with a sharp eye and determined focus could discern minuscule dots moving along the roads and streets. A ghost of a haze drifted toward the sea west of the Firaldian peninsula.
A Patriarch and a Collegium centuries past had ordered the Construct developed as a means of seeing and understanding the expanding Chaldarean world. It had been, from its inception, an undertaking that beggared any cathedral project. It had been secret from the start and of such little popular interest that no one had bothered spying. In time it became lost even to Church insiders. The only recent Patriarch aware of the project-a definite anomaly-had been Hugo Mongoz, sitting the Patriarchal Throne as Boniface VII.
The project would continue. Cloven Februaren and Muniero Delari, the Ninth and Eleventh Unknowns, hoped to polish Heris into the Twelfth.
They wanted to keep the magic in the family.
Heris was not yet fully aware of their ambitions.
She growled and snapped and pulled her companions into a huddle away from the project staff. “There’s something wrong with Piper.”
The others awaited specifics. Nobody asked. She could not deliver her punch line. That irked her.
The whole damned family was that way.
Cloven Februaren yielded enough to observe, “He did develop some quirks after he died and we brought him back. But I thought he’d worked through those.”
“He learned how to hide them, you mean.”
A shrug. “Could be.”
“He even hid from himself. I think his transitions were rough because they reopened him to influences from the Night.”
“The answer is in the question.”
That confused Heris. “Excuse me?”
“Make him walk if transitions cause him distress.”
“It’s not that simple. I wish he’d made transitions before he died. We’d have something to compare.”
“Did he suffer much today?”
“Not this time. He might be getting used to it. Though I don’t actually believe that. There was something weird about him.”
Februaren asked, “What do you think, Lila?”
“I think he’s worried about us. And he has a hard time because his world keeps changing. Remember where he came from.”
“Is that it, Heris? Is he turning into a lost soul because everything he ever believed has turned to smoke?”
Heris hated to admit that that might be what she sensed. But she had her own moments on slippery footing and she never had believed in anything, truly. But that was not all of it. Not even the majority of it. “So let’s just keep an eye on him, look out for him, and get in the way if he starts heading in a bad direction.”
She would figure it out. Piper was her brother. Family. That was what family did.
Heris had not had a family before. Not one to which she belonged by blood and emotion.
* * *
Hecht was sound asleep on the ground when vedettes from the Righteous discovered him. It was two hours after noon. Those advance riders were some of the more superstitious of the Righteous. One stood nervous guard while the other galloped off to report.
Two hours passed before someone senior arrived. By then fifty soldiers had surrounded the snoring Commander.
Titus Consent and Clej Sedlakova arrived together, the chief of intelligence and master of the horse of the Righteous, respectively. Consent and the Commander had a friendship that went back to when Piper Hecht had been a hired sword working for the Bruglioni, one of the Five Families of Brothe. Even now Consent was just in his middle twenties, though gray flecked his dark hair already. He slid down off his bay, waited to see if Colonel Sedlakova needed assistance dismounting.
Clej Sedlakova, onetime associate of the Brotherhood of War-and still reporting back, probably-had only one arm. But he managed, even in a fight. He had no trouble dismounting. He had become accustomed to his situation.