The night over Paris was cold and clear, a vast sheet of black glass pricked with the light of indifferent stars. Sineus lay flat on a wet rooftop, the coarse tiles digging into his coat, and watched the city’s distant glow. His coalition was not an army. It was a collection of thirty desperate souls scattered in the darkness, a threadbare alliance of traitors and revolutionaries poised to strike the heart of an empire. Below him, in the alley, he could see the faint outline of Alessandro’s team, their shapes dark against the darker shadows. Every one of them was in position.
He felt the familiar, dull ache in the bones of his right hand, the crystalline reminder of Pyotr’s fall. He had followed that pain here. He had followed the memory of Elina’s sacrifice, and the ghost of a baker who died for five seconds of time. He was done running. His goal was simple: get inside the Vaucanson Atelier and give it a mortal wound. The price for that attempt was the lives of the people crouched in the darkness around him, a cost he had named and accepted in the damp quiet of the wine cellar.
A sudden, brilliant bloom of green-orange light lit the clouds to the east, followed a second later by the deep, gut-rumbling whump of an explosion. Luca’s diversionary team had engaged the river patrol. The fire was on the water. The first part of their plan, the loud, chaotic part, was in motion. Most of the Atelier’s conventional guards would be drawn to the river, leaving the western approach vulnerable. It was a crude but necessary sacrifice, sending men to die so that others might have a chance.
Sineus shifted his gaze to the narrow building across the courtyard. The Vaucanson Atelier. It was a tall, featureless block of stone, its memory-script a solid, impenetrable wall of interwoven light, pulsing with a slow, arrogant rhythm. It was a fortress of pure history, its defenses written in the very fabric of the world.
— It is time, — Alessandro’s voice was a low whisper from the darkness beside him. The Italian inventor lay beside a strange device, a complex lattice of brass and copper wire that hummed with a low, expectant energy. The Reality-Scrambler. It smelled of ozone and hot metal, a scent of contained lightning. Alessandro made a final adjustment to a glass-encased dial, his movements precise and economical. — The ward is cycling. Give me one minute.
Sineus nodded, his eyes fixed on the Atelier. He could see the wards clearly, a shimmering tapestry of order and power. He watched as Alessandro threw a lever on the scrambler. The humming intensified, rising in pitch until it was a sound felt in the teeth rather than heard. A beam of invisible, paradoxical energy shot from the device, striking the Atelier’s defenses.
The effect was instantaneous and violent. The solid wall of light, the memory of the fortress’s own integrity, wavered. It did not break, but it flickered, the clean threads of its script fraying into a chaotic, shimmering smoke. It was like watching a tapestry unweave itself, a thousand severed threads of light coming loose at once. The ward’s memory of itself was being corrupted, forced into a loop of self-doubt. The breach would not last. Mikhail had estimated fifteen minutes at most before the system corrected itself or failed completely.
— Now, — Sineus said, his voice low and steady. He pushed himself to his feet.
The assault team, eight of them in total, rose from the shadows around him. Mikhail, the pale ex-Lodge loyalist. Two of Alessandro’s hardened Carbonari veterans. Four others. They were the ghosts who carried the fire. Sineus led them at a run across the empty courtyard, his boots silent on the cobblestones. They moved toward the flickering, distorted section of the wall, a place where reality had grown thin and uncertain.
They passed through the breach not like walking through a door, but like pushing through a cold, static curtain. The air on the other side was different. It was cold, sterile, and utterly silent. The sounds of the city, the distant explosions from the river, were gone. They were inside. The state of the game had changed. They had breached the fortress.
The corridor before them was long and featureless, cast in the flat, sourceless light of the workshop’s own internal glow. For a moment, there was nothing. Only the sound of their own breathing, harsh and loud in the unnatural quiet. Then, the air began to shimmer.
The silence was broken by a low, discordant whisper, the sound of a thousand forgotten voices speaking at once. The air thickened, and from the walls themselves, figures began to materialize. They were not men. They were Paradox-Constructs, the workshop’s internal defenses. They were shifting, unstable amalgams of memory, the psychic residue of fallen soldiers given a fractured, horrifying form. One moment a construct had the shape of a French grenadier, the next it was a whirlwind of screaming faces and grasping hands, a severed thread of a man’s last moments made solid.
They were inside the fortress. And the fortress was built from the dead.
