The music was a river of strings and horns, flowing through the grand ballroom of the Winter Palace. It carried the scent of beeswax from a thousand candles and the heavy perfume of the court. Gold leaf glittered on the ceiling, catching the light and throwing it back onto a sea of dark green uniforms and silk gowns in shades of sapphire and crimson. Sineus Bielski stood apart from it all, a statue in the tide, his duty a wall between him and the celebration. His work began here, in the noise and the crowd.
He let his gaze drift, but his focus was not on the faces or the jewels. He saw what no one else could: the Memory-Script, the luminous threads of light that wove the world together. Every person, every pillar, every glass of wine was surrounded by a shimmering tapestry of its own history. To him, the ballroom was not a room of people but a forest of glowing, shifting patterns. His purpose was to find the one pattern that was wrong.
He scanned the attendees, more than 300 of them, a task that took ninety seconds of intense, unbroken concentration. He dismissed the bright, steady threads of loyal courtiers and the tangled, anxious knots of those in debt. Then he saw it. Three small, flickering anomalies near the French delegation. They were like smudges on a clean pane of glass, a subtle corruption in the script that spoke of a fabricated identity. His eyes narrowed on a visiting trade attaché, a man whose personal history felt thin, recently written.
A hand touched his elbow, a single, precise tap. Count Valerien Orlov stood beside him, a faint, knowing smile on his lips. Orlov’s eyes flicked toward the attaché, then back to Sineus, a barely perceptible dip of his chin. It was the Sovereign’s Waltz, a silent language of glances and gestures that moved empires. The signal was a confirmation, an order transmitted in less than a second. The target was confirmed. The task was his.
Sineus gave a slight, formal bow, a gesture of acknowledgment that no one else would notice or understand. He was now tasked with neutralization. He turned and moved through the crowd, a ghost slipping between laughing groups and dancing couples. The attaché was heading for a side door, seeking a moment of quiet. Sineus followed, maintaining a distance of ten meters, his steps silent on the polished floor.
The man entered a small antechamber, lined with portraits of long-dead tsars whose own memories had been trimmed and polished by generations of the Lodge of the Double-Headed Eagle. The heavy door swung shut, muffling the sound of the orchestra. The target was isolated from all witnesses. The operation could proceed. Sineus entered the room, closing the door softly behind him. The attaché turned, a flicker of surprise on his face.
— Can I help you? — the man asked, his Russian accented.
Sineus did not answer. He focused his will, the world of color and sound dissolving into the pure language of the script. He reached out with his mind, not his hands, and grasped the man’s memory. He sifted through the threads of childhood, of education, of false loyalties. It took fifteen seconds to find the cold, hard line of the man’s true mission directive, a memory implanted by Napoleon’s own occultists. It pulsed with a faint, ugly light.
He tightened his mental grip on that single, offending thread. For a moment, he felt the man’s conviction, the belief in his cause. Then, with a thought, he performed the Excision. There was a clean, cold snap, a feeling like a string breaking under tension. The price of the act was a familiar wave of detachment, a feeling of being hollowed out. The agent’s mission memory was severed.
The severed thread of memory, a shimmering filament of purpose and intent, wavered in the air for less than a second. It was a thing of pure information, a ghost of a promise. Then it dissolved, its energy reabsorbed into the vast, silent script of the world, leaving no trace. The work was clean.
The foreign agent blinked. A deep line of confusion appeared between his brows. He looked at his hands, then around the room, as if waking from a long dream. His purpose was gone. His operational capacity was now zero. He was no longer a threat.
— I… forgive me, — the man stammered, his eyes unfocused. — I seem to have lost my way.
Sineus watched him, feeling nothing but the cold satisfaction of a completed task. His emotional engagement was zero. The man was a broken tool, and Sineus was the one who had broken him. He observed as the agent, now just a lost man in a fine suit, fumbled with the door handle and wandered back toward the ballroom, his face a mask of bewilderment.
Straightening his uniform, Sineus turned away from the scene. The faint scent of the man’s sweat and fear lingered in the air, a scent he knew well. He returned to the periphery of the ball, his duty done, the wall of his isolation built one stone higher. He was a guardian, but he guarded from the outside, forever separate from the life he protected.
A Lodge courier, a young man with old eyes, approached him through the throng. The courier’s uniform was plain, designed not to be noticed. He stopped before Sineus and spoke in a low voice.
— Your presence is requested.
A new directive. The summons from his mentor meant the night’s work was not yet over. He gave a curt nod and followed the courier from the noise and the light, leaving the Sovereign’s Waltz behind.
The work was never over.
