The morning started promisingly. Lambert moved through prayer and ablution with the same meditative care, finding comfort in the ritual if not the words. He only had to catch himself twice uttering scripture by rote, which was an improvement on yesterday. He dressed and descended the stairs expecting a manageable day.
Unfortunately for him, divine intervention was only a few hours away.
The kitchen was empty, which was expected. Lambert set water to boil and laid out two cups from habit, one for himself and one for whoever surfaced next. The house was still. Esteban would be sleeping off a decade of imprisonment in whatever guest room they’d installed him in. Maximilian wouldn’t stir for hours yet. The servants moved through distant corridors quietly and asked nothing.
He was reaching for the tea when he heard it. A sharp crack from somewhere below, followed by a word he was fairly certain wasn’t in any liturgical text.
Then another crack. Then a sustained clattering, of something being taken apart in a hurry.
Wylan’s workshop. But Wylan doesn’t get up before—
A third crack, and a brief, bright flare of light visible under the kitchen door that faced the lower stairs.
Lambert left the water to boil and went to investigate.
The workshop looked like it had lost an argument with an explosion.
The lantern sat on the central workbench, glowing serenely. Around it, in a loose orbit of failure, lay the casualties of Wylan’s night. Callipers warped, tongs fused at the joint, and something that had once been a spectrometric lens, now clouded beyond use.
Three containment flasks, each cracked in a different way. The divine fire had taken the time to find individual weaknesses. A perfectly good set of welding goggles sat among the wreckage with one lens melted clean through.
Wylan was hunched over a notebook, writing at a frantic pace, the pen struggling to keep up with his thoughts. His pupils were too wide and his free hand tapped the bench, arrhythmic, restless.
He had not changed out of yesterday’s clothes. The faintly chemical sharpness about him said the rest: at some point in the small hours, Wylan had decided sleep was a problem to be engineered around rather than surrendered to.
“You haven’t slept,” Lambert said.
“It won’t turn off.”
“I can see that.”
“No, you can’t. You can see it glowing.” Wylan still hadn’t looked up. “What you can’t see is that I’ve tried seventeen methods of containment and it has defeated every single one. It goes through iron. Through lead. Through three inches of leaded crystal, which should be impossible.” The pen jabbed toward the lantern. “It’s solar essence. Part of its fundamental nature is to radiate. You can’t contain light by putting it in a box. You’d need to contain the concept of luminance itself, which is a theological problem, not a mechanical one, which means it’s yours.”
“I’ll add it to the list.”
“I’m serious, Lambert. I put it in a safe. The safe glowed. I put the safe in a chest. The chest glowed. I draped a curtain over the chest.” He finally looked up. His eyes were bloodshot and very bright. “The curtain glowed.”
“So your solution was...?”
“Night light.” Wylan gestured at the lantern with the air of a man who had arrived at absurdity and decided to furnish it. “It’s a night light now.”
? Somewhere, a theologian wept without knowing why.
Lambert settled onto a stool that had escaped the carnage, mostly. He watched the lantern pulse. Wylan returned to his notebook, scratching something out, rewriting it, scratching it out again.
The workshop ticked and cooled around them, making the small settling noises of a room that had been through quite enough for one evening. Somewhere in the house, a clock marked the quarter hour.
“You know what’s worse than having a protocol for managing a divine instrument?” Wylan said, without looking up. “Needing a protocol for managing more than one.”
Lambert’s mouth twitched. “It’s only just hitting me how far beyond us all of this has been.”
Wylan’s pen stopped. He looked at Lambert properly for the first time since he’d walked in. Whatever he saw made him set the notebook down.
“When did you last eat?”
“I’m fine.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Lambert considered the question. He had not actually made any tea, or eaten anything, or done much of anything beyond kneel on cold stone and rehearse conversations with a woman who wasn’t there.
He almost laughed. After everything they’d done last night, none of it was what had kept him staring at his ceiling for three hours.
“I met my—” He stopped. “Lampetia. Last night. My biological...” He trailed off. “She assessed me like plumbing.”
Wylan didn’t say anything.
“She wasn’t indifferent. Indifference would have been kinder.” Lambert’s hands found a piece of bread on the bench and turned it over. “She was interested. In what I could provide.”
To her, I’m a vein. Nothing more.
“What is she, exactly?” Wylan asked. “Seraphina called her the Keeper of the Sepulchre. Is that a title, or...”
“A function.” Lambert’s voice settled into the register he used for theological exposition. “She maintains the Sepulchre and guards what’s interred there. She’s been doing it for decades.”
“And she and Father...”
“Arranged by Seraphina.” Lambert set the bread down. “I was engineered. A useful tool that could walk in daylight.”
“Lambert—”
“It’s not speculation. Seraphina confirmed it in the Catacombs. Lampetia confirmed it last night, by not caring about anything else.”
Wylan opened his mouth, thought better of it, closed it again. The notebook lay between his hands. He picked at the corner of a page.
“I had speeches prepared,” Lambert said. “I’d been rehearsing them for years, in a sense. What I would say, if I ever met her.” His fingers found the bread again. “She didn’t ask my name.”
The workshop was very quiet.
“That’s not what you deserved,” Wylan said.
The lantern pulsed and the workshop settled around them.
Lambert looked at him. His expression cracked, briefly, and then he packed it away efficiently, and completely.
“No,” he said. “It wasn’t.”
Wylan stood, crossed to the far wall, and began operating something.
Lambert watched him pull a lever, adjust a valve, and tap a gauge as though the coffee might detonate. Steam hissed, something gurgled, and a dark liquid began to fill a cup that Wylan produced from behind a distillation column.
Lambert looked at the apparatus, then at the workbench with its ruined callipers and fused tongs, then back at the apparatus.
“That is coffee,” he said carefully. “Isn’t it?”
“Obviously.”
“And the device you’re making it with is...”
“A coffee engine.” Wylan handed him the cup. “What else would it be?”
It was genuinely impossible to tell where the coffee engine ended and the alchemical equipment began. He decided not to investigate further and drank. It was very strong, slightly bitter, and had the aftertaste of a laboratory accident.
“You built a coffee engine in your workshop.”
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“I built it for my workshop. There’s a difference.” Wylan was already filling a second cup. “The kitchen is the other end of the house. That’s four minutes round trip. It would be cold by the time I got back. Unacceptable.”
? Every luminary’s workshop contains at least one device whose original purpose has been permanently forgotten. They’re usually accompanied by a large red button and a small note that says ‘don’t push’.
Lambert drank. The coffee was assaulting his nervous system, but it was also the first warm thing he’d had since yesterday and he didn’t care.
“So,” he said. “R?zvan is awake.”
“R?zvan is awake,” Wylan agreed.
“I needed to see it,” Lambert said. “I still believe that. But I keep turning it over.”
“We’ve woken up the most powerful vampire in Gallia and he owes us a favour.” Wylan blew on his coffee. “Which sounds rather good until you think about it for more than thirty seconds.”
“And Valère gets Caliburn tomorrow.”
“As agreed.”
“As agreed.” Lambert turned the cup in his hands. “Signing that contract felt abstract. We were standing in the tomb of a dead god, and we’ve promised his sword to a man who wants to replace him.”
“You’re not getting cold feet?”
“I’m noting that the ground has shifted.”
“The ground hasn’t shifted. Aurora is still cursed. He’s still the only one who’s offered to do anything about it.” Wylan set his cup down. “Unless you’ve got an alternative I haven’t heard.”
Lambert didn’t.
“Then we honour the deal.”
“And then there’s this.” Wylan nodded at the lantern. “Which I can’t contain, can’t explain, and can’t turn off. And which is currently sitting in my workshop next to a coffee engine and three broken flasks.”
“Father would have known what to do with it.”
“Father would have known what to do with all of it.” Wylan’s voice was flat. “That’s rather the problem, isn’t it? He set all of this in motion and then had the poor grace to die before leaving instructions.”
Lambert looked at him. Wylan had been twelve when their father died. But he’d been in the Sepulchre too, and he was sitting in a workshop full of broken equipment trying to solve a problem their father had left without so much as a note.
“No,” Lambert said. “He wouldn’t have told us even if he’d lived. That was his way. Secrets within secrets, and always for our own good.”
“Sounds familiar,” Wylan muttered, and Lambert had the grace not to ask what he meant by that.
The silence settled. Wylan picked up his notebook again, but his pen hovered without writing. Lambert drank his coffee and watched the lantern pulse. It had been steady all morning.
So he noticed when it flickered.
The flame guttered once, twice, and went out.
The workshop plunged into darkness.
“What happened?” Lambert said.
“How should I know?”
“What does your protocol say about mysteriously disappearing divine flames?”
“How should I know?”
Above them, faint but unmistakable: Aurora laughing.
The two brothers looked at each other.
“Oh no.”
They took the stairs two at a time.
The nursery door was open. Light spilled from it, warm and golden, painting the corridor walls.
Wylan got there first. Lambert was a step behind, and then he stopped in the doorway.
A sphere of light hung above Aurora’s cot. It was no larger than a fist, and it burned with a steady, unwavering radiance.
Death’s vision filled his mind: the void, the vast spheres of burning gas spending themselves into the dark. Not the fixed lamps of the Orrery but furnaces unto themselves, self-sustaining. They simply burned.
A star.
Aurora was sitting up, babbling contentedly, reaching for it with both hands. She batted at it and it bobbed lazily away and drifted back. She shrieked with delight.
In the far corner, Greta had pressed herself against the wall, hands over her mouth, eyes wide and white.
“Greta.” Laila’s voice, from behind them, calm and already in command. “Step outside. It’s all right.”
Greta edged along the wall without taking her eyes off the sphere and slipped past them into the corridor.
Laila crossed to the cot. Aurora looked up at her grandmother and smiled. Laila placed her hand on Aurora’s forehead. The child’s eyes fluttered, drooped, and closed.
The sphere of light trembled, dimmed, and then dissolved.
For a moment the nursery was perfectly still.
Then the lantern in Wylan’s hand screamed, a flare of heat and light erupting from the housing, sudden and violent and furious. Wylan staggered. Arcs of energy burst from it, crackling through the air, lashing the walls. They converged, found a direction, and streaked out of the nursery toward the front of the house.
Toward the entry hall.
Wylan was the first to the balcony.
The lantern was still hot in his hands, but dark and empty. Below, the pedestals were empty.
That took a moment to register. The pedestals were empty. Salt, Pepper, Mustard, and Ganache had stepped down onto the marble floor and they were moving, stone limbs finding their range with an eerie, newborn fluidity. Ganache rolled its wrist, a longsword carving a slow arc through the air. Pepper shifted a halberd from one hand to the other, adjusting its grip precisely. It had no joints. It shouldn’t have been able to.
Wylan’s hands tightened on the railing. Longsword. Two halberds. Mace. All real, all weighted for actual combat. He and Divina had made sure of that. Wonderful.
Lambert arrived at the railing beside him, breathing hard. Laila was a step behind.
“Those are ours,” Wylan said.
“Yes.” Laila hadn’t taken her eyes off them. “The nursery is down the hall. We need to get between them and Aurora.”
She was already moving. Wylan clipped the lantern to his belt and followed, taking the stairs three at a time. Lambert came last.
Laila reached the ground floor first. She stepped into the entry hall and Mustard’s mace came around in a wide, brutal arc that would have taken her head off if she hadn’t already been ducking. The mace buried itself in the wall. Plaster rained down. Mustard wrenched at the handle, trying to pull it free.
Wylan cleared the last step and hit the ground floor running. Diplomacy was already in his hand. He didn’t remember drawing it.
Ganache was closest. Turning toward Laila, longsword rising, and Wylan knew exactly where the core sat behind the sternum plate. He’d built it and he knew every weak point.
He fired.
The shot punched through Ganache’s chest and the construct came apart. It simply stopped being a coherent thing. Stone and marble fractured along the seams Wylan had laid, and Ganache collapsed into rubble sounding like a shelf of crockery falling.
The dust hung in the air where Ganache had been standing.
Wylan was already scanning for the next target. He’d think about what he’d just done later. Much later.
Laila’s hand went to her satchel. She drew out pigment, cerulean, smearing it across her fingers in one fluid motion, and cast it toward the furthest construct. Salt. The one with the second halberd, the one closest to Pepper.
The cerulean flared where it struck, sinking into the stone like dye into wet cloth. Salt shuddered. Its grip on the halberd shifted. And then it turned and drove the butt of the weapon into Pepper with a force that sent the other construct staggering into the wall.
Two of them. Locked together. Battering each other, bewildered and ferocious, unable to stop.
That left Mustard. The one that had already tried to take Laila’s head off.
Lambert raised his hands. Light gathered between his palms, bright and building, and Wylan knew what a controlled invocation looked like.
This wasn’t that.
The focused beam erupted as an uncontrolled detonation. The blast threw Lambert backwards off his feet. Laila, ahead of him, caught the shockwave and went down hard. Wylan was furthest away and still hit the floor as plaster dust and tile fragments rained across the hall.
What in the name of every alchemical principle was that?
Lambert lay against the wall, not moving. Wylan couldn’t tell if he was hurt or just stunned and didn’t have time to find out.
Mustard was still moving. Dazed from the blast, swaying, but upright, mace hanging at its side.
Wylan crossed to the wall panel beside the staircase and pulled the lever. An iron gate dropped from the ceiling with a clang, cutting the hall in two. He’d installed six of these throughout the ground floor, because any home without internal blast partitions was simply not taking security seriously. Mustard was penned in on the far side and Salt and Pepper brawled on the near.
Divide and conquer.
He pulled a vial from his belt and drank it without breaking stride. The effect was immediate and deeply unpleasant. His arms lengthened, his fingers stretched, and his joints loosened past where joints should stop.
He lashed one elongated arm through the bars of the gate, wrapped it around Mustard’s torso, and slammed the construct against the barrier hard enough to crack its shoulder plate. Not enough to destroy. Enough to incapacitate. Mustard slumped against the bars, mace clattering to the floor.
On the other side of the barrier, Salt and Pepper were still locked together. But Salt’s movements were slowing. The cerulean was fading from its stone.
Lambert pulled himself to his feet. His ribs were clearly bothering him, and his hands were shaking, and Wylan was going to ask him what had gone wrong with the radiance as soon as they weren’t surrounded by debris.
“Stop,” Lambert said. His voice cracked. He said it again, louder. “Stop. Everyone stop.”
Wylan looked at him, one arm still grotesquely extended.
Lambert crossed to the rubble that had been Ganache, the split head and the arm still curled around the longsword hilt. He knelt, pressed his palm against the largest fragment, and began to pray.
The words were low, half-murmured, barely audible over the settling dust. Lambert’s eyes were closed and his free hand trembled against his knee.
Wylan recognised it. A prayer for the dead. He’d heard Lambert use it in crypts and on battlefields and once, memorably, directed at a fish that Wylan maintained had been looking at him judgementally. He’d never seen Lambert’s handshake while saying it.
When Lambert lifted his hand, his eyes were bright.
“They’re not hostile.” His hand was still hovering over Ganache’s remains. “They’re frightened children. They were born ten minutes ago.”
The hall went quiet. Salt and Pepper had stopped fighting. Laila’s enchantment had faded entirely, the last traces of cerulean dissolving from Salt’s surface, and the two constructs stood facing each other, dazed and still, as though they’d forgotten why they’d been struggling.
Lambert raised his hands again. The power came reluctantly this time, diminished, and Wylan could see the difference. Lambert’s radiance was thin and guttering. It was a candle where there had been a torch.
But whatever he was doing didn’t require force. Golden light spread from his palms. A slow, warm diffusion, like sunlight through cloud. It settled over the hall, and the last tension bled out of the air.
Wylan pulled the lever. The barrier rose. His arms were already returning to their normal proportions, each joint registering its objection with an unpleasant click on the way back.
Salt discovered sitting and chose not to get up again. Pepper followed. Mustard, propped against the wall where Wylan had slammed it, slid slowly to the floor.
They sat there. Three stone figures on a marble floor. Bewildered.
Pepper extended its arms. Neither toward a weapon, nor in defence. It held them out, openly, asking to be picked up.
Wylan looked at the outstretched arms. He looked at the rubble that had been Ganache. He looked back at Pepper.
“Did we just...” His voice was very small. “Kill something? I thought they were constructs.”
The dust settled and the silence held, the way silence does when it’s waiting for someone to be brave enough to break it.
Wylan found a blanket. He laid it over Ganache’s remains. The wool caught on the broken edges of the stone and didn’t quite cover the hand that still gripped the longsword hilt. He straightened up and didn’t look at anyone.
“I know they’re Demiurge-made,” he said. “But I didn’t think they could come to life.”
The lantern flared and Wylan flinched, but it was only the flame, back where it belonged. It settled into the housing without so much as an apology.
“I don’t think it was anything the Demiurge did.” Lambert was leaning against the wall with one hand pressed to his ribs. “Except perhaps prime them with a semblance of life. A shape that resembled something that could be alive.”
Wylan looked at the lantern clipped to his belt. Its flame was steady again, serene, the same gentle pulse it had held all morning in the workshop, when the worst problem in the world had been that it wouldn’t turn off.
“The divine fire.”
“Yes.” Lambert’s voice was quiet. “I think we just created life.”