The stairs wound down in silence, or what passed for silence when Lambert was thinking aloud.
He had the journal open, angling it toward the fading torchlight, turning pages like a man looking for a map in a burning building. “Father must have documented the sequence. The rooms aren’t random, the architecture is liturgical, there’s a progression. If I can find his notes on what comes next—”
Nobody answered. The stairs were narrow enough to enforce single file, which at least prevented Lambert from pacing. Isabella led, Lambert behind her, Laila between them, Wylan at the rear.
“The altar room was devotional. The lake was confrontational. That’s a deliberate escalation.” He turned another page. Alexios’ familiar handwriting, cramped and unhelpful as ever.
“Lambert,” Isabella said from the front. Not unkindly.
“If I can just find the right entry—”
“Lambert.”
“—we’d at least know what we’re walking into, which given that the last room made us fight ourselves seems like reasonable preparation—”
“Lambert, dear,” Laila said, “you are sermonising at a staircase.”
Lambert’s mouth closed. Then opened again. “I’m preparing.”
“You’re spiralling.”
“Would it really be so bad,” Wylan said from the rear, lobbing the incendiary as though it were a bouquet, “to learn that the Church’s worldview is... limited?”
Lambert turned on the stairs. “The Church was founded on the pursuit of truth. That’s what Inquisition means. Not heresy. Not punishment. Questions. We ask questions until we find what’s real, no matter how uncomfortable the answer. If something has failed here, it’s not the questions. It’s us.”
“You say Reason and Enlightenment,” Wylan said, “but the Inquisition’s not exactly known for polite disagreement, is it? Reason might be the method, but swords do most of the talking.”
Lambert opened his mouth to respond, but the darkness took the argument from him.
The gloom had been growing over the last hundred steps. Now Isabella’s torch guttered and died, and the darkness closed around them with the finality of a door pulled shut.
“Lovely,” she said.
She reached back for Wylan’s arm, then held her other out like a bar to stop the rest.
Her head tilted. Listening. For a long moment there was nothing but the drip of unseen water and four people trying not to breathe.
Then, very quietly: “Something’s moving.”
“Where?” Lambert whispered.
“All around us.”
The first one hit Lambert. She heard it land, heard it scrabble, heard him squeal in a most unpriestly way.
“Lambert’s down.” Laila. Clipped as a field report.
The scuttling started in earnest. Dozens of creatures. The sound came from the walls, the ceiling, the dark itself, on a tide of small chitinous bodies.
Isabella drew her sword. The dark was her element.
She tracked by sound, struck where the scuttling was loudest, and felt the blade connect. Chitin crunched. She pivoted, struck again. Something burst under her boot.
But she couldn’t parry everything, and the things kept coming.
A mandible found her calf. The sting was bright and precise, and her leg stopped working. She swung once more. Her arm followed her leg. She hit the stone face-first, her body locking mid-fall, and the last expression she’d wear for the next several minutes was vexed annoyance.
She could hear everything. That was the worst part.
Laila shaking something off her arm. The chittering closing in. She heard Wylan fumbling off to her right.
“Wylan! Light!”
Wylan’s hands were already in his satchel. He felt three vials, a spool of copper wire, something that squelched, and the Immolator lamp he had packed, alongside his blowpipe Persuasion.
? Wylan had a habit of naming his weapons ironically. This one was called Persuasion. Its prototype, Patience, had exploded.
He pulled the lamp out and thumbed the ignition. Nothing.
I don’t have time for this. He checked the reservoir by touch. Full. Wick seated. Flint intact. He thumbed it again. Spark. Nothing.
Something landed on his shoulder. He slapped it off and felt mandibles graze his palm.
The lamp would not light. It had, apparently, decided the matter was not its problem.
Something crawled up his calf and he swatted it away.
Fine.
There were always the Muses. Tutelary spirits, not deities — they don’t answer prayers. They gave inspiration, when it suited them, to those who listened.
He had never had the sense to listen.
Lilith. I could really use some inspiration. Now would be good.
An idea surfaced.
The Immolator lamp ran on volatile compression. So did his alchemical reagents. Different fuel, same principle. A few drops of reagent might be just close enough to phlogiston to work.
He uncorked the vial blind. His hands were steady.
Two drops and he thumbed the ignition.
Nothing.
A beetle found his neck.
“By all that is sweet and merciful if you don’t work, I will take a hammer to you!”
Three drops. Thumbed the ignition.
The lamp blazed, not amber, not gentle, but a searing white brilliance that turned the passage into noon and every beetle in it into a professional coward.
Beyond the circle, the walls glistened with chitinous hunger.
Wylan took stock. Lambert face-down and rigid. Isabella frozen mid-swing. Laila shaking two beetles from her arm with an expression that promised each of them a formal reckoning.
He decided not to think about what would have happened with four drops.
“Don’t let it go out,” Laila said.
“I know.”
“Antidote?”
“Satchel. Left pocket. The blue one.”
Laila found the syringe and moved to Lambert. Wylan held the lamp high and tried not to think about what would happen if the fuel ran out.
“What happened?”
“You lost a fight to a bug,” Laila said.
“A very large bug.”
“You didn’t see it. You don’t know how large it was.”
“I could feel how large it was.”
Wylan knelt beside Isabella, a second syringe in one hand, the lamp in the other. “Couldn’t you have cast a light spell?” he said to Laila as he worked. “Illusions are your speciality.”
“Illusions aren’t actual light. They’re ambitious lies told to your eyeballs.” A pause. “Also, panicking while covered in beetles isn’t conducive to proper spellcraft.”
“Fair.”
The antidote took hold. Isabella’s fingers twitched first, then her eyes found the lamp.
“What is that?”
“Salvation,” Wylan said. “Temporarily.”
The stairs continued. They descended in a tight knot around the light, the lamp held high at the centre. Nobody volunteered for point. Nobody offered the rear. They moved as a single unit, and beyond the pale circle, the walls clicked.
In the lamp’s glow, the architecture changed. Dressed stone gave way to something rougher, more organic. Walls that had been built becoming walls that had grown, surfaces folding and ridging like tissue over bone.
The geometry was wrong, and it knew it, and it didn’t care.
The air thickened, grew warm, acquired a mineral weight that sat at the back of the throat. The walls wept gold. Thin veins of it running through the stone like capillaries, branching and converging in patterns that were neither natural nor designed.
Goblets clutched by skeletal hands had fused into the stone as though the wall had grown around them and forgotten to stop. Gem-studded crowns sat on grinning skulls whose teeth had multiplied beyond anatomical sense, wealth and mortality locked in a macabre pas de deux. The chamber didn’t display its riches. It was its riches, architecture and hoard collapsed beyond distinction.
The air thrummed, as if the chamber’s mere existence were a personal affront to natural law.
And at the centre, the pièce de résistance: a diamond the size of a watermelon that had been to finishing school. It held the quiet menace of old money, and a sheen that suggested you’d remember your place.
The diamond hovered over a pit lined with faintly glowing runes, scattering prismatic light. It had been waiting a very long time, and patience had only improved its disposition. The darkness below was not depth. It was appetite.
“Charming,” Laila murmured.
Isabella stepped forward. Her eyes narrowed. “It’s a massive floating diamond.” She leaned on her bow with studied casualness. “We’ve seen better.”
Her gaze, however, lingered.
“Have we?” Wylan was already reaching for his notebook before catching himself. Not the time.
Lambert moved past both of them. He was reading the chamber the way he read a chapel, the arrangement, the intention, the liturgical grammar of the space. His boots crunched on what might have been gold dust or the pulverised remnants of prior visitors.
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“This isn’t treasure,” he said. “It’s a sanctum. Wealth and death, bound together as devotion.” He was recognising a prayer in a language he didn’t want to understand. “Another place of reverence, or a trap?”
The diamond turned, slowly, in its column of light. Prismatic colours swept the chamber walls like the beam of a lighthouse that had noticed a ship worth wrecking.
Isabella stepped forward. Her fingers brushed the edge of the light.
The want arrived like a door slamming open. One moment she was assessing, the next she was certain. Totally, murderously certain. The diamond was hers. Had always been hers. The light pouring off it was warm and right and she would kill anyone who tried to take it from her.
“Get away.” Her voice came out raw. “This is mine!”
Her sword was in her hand. She didn’t remember drawing it. Her body was doing things without consulting her. She agreed with every one of them.
“It’s mine!”
Laila saw it happen. The blazing eyes, the drawn sword, and her daughter’s voice coming out of a stranger’s mouth.
The Enchanter in her knew what to do. The mother in her stalled, and for three heartbeats the mother won.
Lambert got there first. Two strides, hands on Isabella’s shoulders, and the diamond’s light flared. Isabella’s sword swung wild, the blade singing past Lambert’s arm. He held on.
A dart found Isabella’s neck. Wylan, behind her, had Persuasion raised. Her arm sagged but her hand on the diamond remained, and the grip on the sword held.
Wylan uncorked a second vial and drank. The elastifying potion took hold immediately, his body twisting and elongating. It never got easier to watch. His arms stretched across the distance and wrapped around Isabella with calculated precision, careful not to brush the diamond’s light.
“Right then,” he said, his voice strained. “Let’s not make this harder than it needs to be.”
Isabella made it harder. She thrashed against Wylan’s elastic grip, fingers clawing toward the diamond even as her body sagged under the paralytic. The want in her face was naked and enormous on features that Laila had known since infancy.
The mother stepped aside. The Enchanter got to work.
She found the strands of greed threaded through Isabella’s mind and began to unpick them, one by one, the way you’d disarm a tightly wound trap.
Isabella’s eyes flickered. The want dimmed, returned, dimmed again. Laila pulled another thread. Another. She could feel Wylan straining to hold, could hear Lambert praying through his teeth.
The last thread came loose.
Isabella went limp. Wylan caught her, still elongated, which meant she landed in something closer to a hammock than a rescue.
Her eyes found Laila’s looking for relief, but found only recognition.
Nobody spoke. The diamond turned in its column of light.
Laila felt it before she saw it. A warmth at her back, where her shadow pooled against the chamber floor. A shifting weight, like someone stepping into a space she’d left empty.
She looked down.
Her shadow had changed. The silhouette was wrong. Too tall, too broad in the shoulder, and standing the way he always had, taking his time before speaking.
As she watched, the features began to surface, pressing up through the dark like a face pushing through fabric. The line of a jaw she knew. The set of shoulders she had watched carry burdens he’d never admitted to. Almost Alexios. Almost.
I could give him back. The thought arrived in her chest, not her ears. Not words exactly. A pressure. An offer shaped like certainty. Whole. Real. Yours again.
The want was genuine. It rose in her like water finding its level, and she let it. She wanted him back. She wanted the arguments and the secrets and the infuriating, meticulous, endlessly complicated man she had married.
The desire was strong, and it did not care that she had already made her peace.
The shadow sharpened. A jawline took shape. Brows furrowed in his manner. One more moment and she would be able to see his eyes.
Laila looked at her shadow, and her shadow almost looked back.
Almost, she thought. But not quite.
“You’re very good,” she said aloud. Her voice was steady. “But you’re working from a description.”
The shadow wavered. The features blurred, sharpened, blurred again. The fiend pressed harder. The want pressed with it.
Laila closed her eyes. When she opened them, her shadow was her own again. Smaller. The right shape. Empty in the way she had chosen to carry.
She stepped back from the diamond’s light.
Lambert watched his mother step back from the diamond’s light. He couldn’t read what had just happened to her, but he knew the aftermath when he saw it.
The diamond’s light found him.
His shadow stretched across the chamber floor until it no longer matched the shape casting it. The shoulders broadened. The silhouette straightened into a posture he recognised before the details arrived. Weight on the back foot. One hand where a sword hilt would be.
His father’s shadow looked back at him from the wall.
Lambert. You’ve carried so much. The firstborn, but never the heir. The faithful son, but never the favoured one.
A pause.
Hasn’t it been exhausting?
His training held.
The Church runs on gold, Lambert, not prayers. You know this. You’ve seen the legates who purchase influence while men of genuine faith go begging.
The shadow wearing his father’s shape gestured with his father’s hand. Gold veins pulsed in the walls.
What if you didn’t have to beg?
“I already faced my father in the last room. This is just a cheap echo.”
The shadow stilled. Then it changed.
The silhouette narrowed. The military bearing softened into something more ecclesiastical. Shoulders settling into the posture of a man accustomed to vestments rather than armour.
Lambert’s breath caught.
Esteban.
Better, the shadow said.
The voice had changed too. Gentle, feigning Esteban’s authority.
You know the Church is broken, Lambert. You’ve been saying it all day. The corruption, the politics, the distance between what the faith teaches and what the institution practises.
It would have taken a breath, if it breathed.
You could fix it.
Lambert said nothing. He pressed his hands flat against his thighs.
Not with gold. With authority. The right word in the right ear, the right pressure on the right fracture. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted? Not wealth. Purpose.
True. He had sought to reform the Church ever since he saw the gap between doctrine and practice.
He hesitated a moment before finding his conviction. “No.”
You could lead them. Shape them. Make the Church what it was always meant to be.
“What you’re offering isn’t reform. It’s control wearing reform’s clothes. The answer is no.”
Esteban’s silhouette regarded him for a long moment. Then it smiled, sadly, the way Esteban himself smiled when Lambert disappointed him.
Twice refused. The voice had lost its warmth. Think carefully, Lambert. I will not be able to help you after the third.
The silhouette shifted again. Slowly, this time.
The shape that emerged was nothing Lambert recognised.
A feminine silhouette resolved, broader than his father, taller than even Esteban. Not merely tall. Large.
The silence that followed was worse than the offers.
Lambert stared at the shape on the wall. He didn’t know this woman. He had never known this woman. He had asked his father, once, and Alexios had looked away.
Lampetia.
Just the name. Nothing else.
The shape on the wall didn’t move. Didn’t speak. It simply stood there, enormous and still, and the name echoed through the hollow places in Lambert’s history where a mother should have been.
I could tell you everything. Who she is. What she is. Why your father could never speak of her.
A whisper now.
Why you are what you are.
The chamber waited.
Lambert closed his eyes. When he opened them, his voice was steady, and it cost him everything he had.
“I rebuke you. For the third and final time, I deny you.”
The shadow recoiled. The shape of Lampetia shuddered, blurred, and collapsed inward like smoke in a closing fist. A hiss filled the chamber, rising to a shriek that cut off like a slammed door.
The oppressive weight lifted.
Lambert stood in the diamond’s light. His shadow was his own again. Small. Ordinary.
The name stayed where he left it.
“You must win arguments with rhetoric,” Lambert said, stepping toward the diamond, “but demonstrate conviction with action.”
He shoved the diamond.
Or he would have, had it not wobbled once, tipped, and tumbled into the pit like a bully folding at the first sign of resistance.
Its light spiralled downward, swallowed by the dark, and the chamber’s oppressive thrumming faded to silence.
He turned back to the group and dusted his hands.
“It no longer has power over me,” he said. His hands were still shaking.
Wylan cleared his throat. “What about all this?” He gestured at the treasure.
“Leave it,” Laila said.
Wylan looked at a ruby the size of his fist and sighed.
The chamber dimmed around them as the diamond’s residual light faded, its treasures retreating into shadow like guests who’d outstayed their welcome.
Lambert walked at the rear this time. Nobody turned to look at him, which was its own kind of kindness.
I didn’t accept the bargain, he told himself. But I’ll take a gift unasked for.
The corridor narrowed as they descended, the dressed stone of the bargaining floor roughening underfoot. Laila kept count of the steps. She had been keeping count since the mirror.
Forty-seven steps. Then the corridor levelled, and there was a door, carved in stone and framed in devotional precision. Candle niches flanked it, but long since dark, and the lintel bore iconography she did not recognise. Lambert would.
Lambert had stopped three paces behind her.
“It’s a chapel,” he said. “I don’t recognise the deity.”
Laila reached for a retort and found nothing. Her shoulders curled over. The exhaustion had been waiting for her to stand still.
I’m not as young as you used to be.
As she took a moment to breathe, Isabella, as if to prove a point, crossed the corridor to try the handle.
“It’s locked,” Isabella muttered. “Lambert, don’t suppose Invictus has a boon that would let us pass through.”
“The light of Invictus touches me even here, but I’m afraid his gifts are gone from me for now.”
“Reckon you can crack it?” Laila asked.
“Maybe. Not quickly. This isn’t really my forte.” Isabella produced her lockpicks from somewhere inside her coat.
“Nothing a bit of acid wouldn’t make quick work of,” said Wylan, reaching for his satchel, and suddenly Laila found a reserve of strength.
“No, Wylan, it’s all right. I think we need to rest anyway.”
Wylan considered this with the look of a man running numbers that only he could see.
“Very good,” Wylan said. “We shall rest and face these final challenges in the morning.”
Wylan pulled out a canteen, held it under some trickling water, and then dropped a few tablets into it. The water hissed audibly and then settled.
After a cautious sniff, Wylan took a tentative drink.
“I think it’s good,” he said, and handed Laila the canteen.
“Reassuring,” she said.
“You’re welcome.”
Over the next hour, they made a small camp with their backs to the chapel door, facing the corridor they’d come from.
Wylan’s lantern held its pale circle against the dark, smaller comfort than any of them would admit to needing.
They sat and passed around silence in turns. No one settled.
“You know, this wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had to put any of you to sleep. Once upon a time, I would have just told you a story,” Laila said. “But you’d go straight to sleep.”
Wylan snorted. “That’s because they were boring. You tended to linger far too much on the kissing scenes.”
“Then you tell me one.” She kept her voice light. “What about that trip you and Isabella took out to sea?”
“What happened at sea between me and Isabella stays between us. Sibling secrets.” He grinned irascibly.
“Fine, then why don’t one of you tell me about what happened when Aeloria attacked.”
The clicking of Isabella’s lockpicks stopped.
“Mother, you were there,” Isabella said.
“No I wasn’t. I was back at the de Vaillant manor. All I know is what was reported afterward, the desolation from the attack. You never told me your account.”
Isabella glanced at Lambert. Lambert stared blithely at the lantern.
Isabella was quiet for a moment. Then she set down the picks.
“Fine.” She leaned back against the stone, arms folded. “But I’m telling it properly. Which is not the way Lambert tells it.”
If Isabella was seeking a rise from her brother, she had misjudged the depth of his exhaustion.
“We heard the bells first,” Isabella said. “The warning bells from Notre Reine. Then the roar. You don’t mistake dragon-sound for anything else.”
“I was at the seminary,” Lambert said.
“Yes, and every door in the building slammed shut and the instructors herded students into the cellars.” Isabella folded her arms tighter.
“And you ran out into the open,” Lambert confirmed.
“Like hell I was going to be stuck inside.” She paused. “The sky was gold. Her wings hid the sun.”
“And you followed her,” Laila said to Lambert.
“I followed her.”
Isabella’s voice had settled into a clipped mission report. “Civilians streamed the other way. I found a vantage point among the smokestacks.”
“Aeloria gripped the cathedral spire, not so much directing the assault but laying waste. And in small numbers, loyalists emerged wearing dragon blazons and starting fires of their own.” She shook her head. “Coordinated, but undisciplined.”
“What did you do?” Wylan asked. He’d rolled onto his side, listening.
“What I was trained to do. I mapped the sightlines and choke points, and started putting arrows into anything with scales.” The pride in her voice was eighteen years old and hadn't aged a day.
“And Lambert?”
“Lambert was in the streets.” Isabella glanced at him. “Which was stupid, by the way.”
“Someone had to direct the evacuation,” Lambert said.
“You were sixteen.”
“The adults were running. I was not.”
“He was standing in the middle of the Rue de la Reine with his arms out, channelling shields of light across the whole street while people streamed past him. And the fire just... stopped where he told it to stop.”
“It wasn’t quite—”
“‘By Invictus, be still.’ Those were your exact words. I heard you from two rooftops away.”
“I was focused on the civilians.”
“You were showing off.”
“I was not—”
“You were sixteen. Of course you were showing off.” She paused. “And it was the bravest thing I’d ever see you do.”
“We were barely able to hold the line, and if it weren’t for the water cannons in the Bassin-de-Marne we might not have been able to drive her back.” She folded her arms. “The city was battered but standing. We’d won.”
“That’s not where the story ends.”
The corridor was quiet.
“The next morning, the fires were out but the smoke was still hanging. Everything was grey. Ash on the cobblestones, ash on the windowsills, ash in your teeth.” He paused. “It was quiet. That was the worst part. The day before had been so loud, and now there was nothing.”
He spoke the way he healed. Meticulously.
“Six blocks east of where we’d held, the fire had gone through unchecked. Whole streets just... gone. The relief stations were already up. They had lists pinned to the walls. Names of the found on the left, names of the missing on the right. The right side was longer.”
Laila’s fingers tightened on the canteen.
“I found a girl sitting in the street next to a woman who wasn’t moving. She couldn’t have been more than five. She wasn’t crying. She was just sitting there, holding this woman’s hand, waiting for her to wake up.”
Lambert continued to stare at the light.
“I worked the lists for three days. Matching names. Writing letters. Helping people find what was left of their homes. That’s where Barthold found me. Not on the battlefield. At a desk, covered in ash, cross-referencing the dead.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“Everyone remembers the Rue de la Reine.” His voice was steady. “Nobody writes ballads about the morning after.”
Laila gently touched her pouch and reached for her umber pigment. As Lambert stared she pretended to dust her hands, allowing it to settle over her son.
Slowly, gently, she found the thread of his worry and all its jagged edges, and sanded them down.
Lambert’s breathing slowed. His head dipped, and Alexios’ journal slid out of his lap.
Wylan and Isabella began to protest, but she simply blew the same dust their way, and their protests ended with them hitting the sack.
“You can complain about it to me in the morning.”
Laila pulled the blanket around her shoulders and settled in to watch the darkness.