Pyotr’s hand trembled. The vellum sheet, filled with the tight, urgent script of a field agent, shook as if caught in a winter wind. The old man’s face had gone the color of the gesso-coated boards that lined the walls, a flat and bloodless white. He looked up at Sineus, his eyes wide behind his spectacles, and for the first time, Sineus saw not the calm archivist but a frightened man. The scent of beeswax in the sanctum suddenly felt sharp, suffocating.
— What is it? — Sineus asked, his voice low and steady.
Pyotr folded the dispatch with a sharp crackle of parchment. He did not answer immediately, his gaze distant, lost in the implications of the words he had just read. He looked at the thousands of captured memories lining the circular walls, a library of excised pains and forgotten duties. His expression was that of a librarian who had just heard the sound of a lit torch falling among the stacks.
— This is a matter for the Memory Duma, — Pyotr said finally, his voice thin. — An emergency session. Now.
The Memory Duma convened in a chamber of dark, polished oak that smelled of old wood and sealing wax. There were no windows. The only light came from twelve heavy, enclosed lanterns that cast a dull, yellow glow on the twelve men seated around the long table. These were the masters of the Lodge, the guardians of the Empire’s past. Sineus stood by the wall, a silent observer, his presence required but his participation not invited. He was a tool, and tools did not speak at the council of the hand.
The session began, not with the urgent dispatch from Smolensk, but with procedure. A state envoy, a man with a soft body and a voice like dry leaves, delivered a ten-minute report on conventional military movements. He spoke of troop positions, of supply lines, of the number of cannon in a French division. The words were a meaningless drone, a recitation of facts that felt like a history from a different, simpler war.
When the envoy finished, Grigori Levin spoke. He was a senior mnemonic chirurgeon, a man built like a stone block, his face set in lines of unshakeable certainty. His hands, resting flat on the table, were thick and steady. He was the voice of tradition, of caution.
— The reports from the front are troubling, — Levin said, his tone measured, as if discussing a poor harvest. — I propose we begin the fortification rituals for the border cities. Reinforce their mnemonic wards. It is the prudent course.
The council members nodded. It was a familiar strategy, a slow and careful process of strengthening a city’s memory of its own loyalty, its own walls, its own history. It was a defense built of belief, but it took weeks. Weeks they might not have. Sineus felt a cold knot tighten in his gut. This was ignorance. This was the price of a system that valued protocol over perception.
His gaze drifted to the large campaign map of the western front that dominated the far wall. It was a masterpiece of cartography, the rivers and forests rendered in exquisite detail. But Sineus saw more. He saw the shimmering Istopis, the script of memory, laid over the land like a second, luminous map. He saw the bright, strong threads of Russian towns, the deep-rooted memory of centuries.
Then he saw the wrongness.
It was a space on the map, west of Smolensk. A space that felt cold. It was not a color, but an absence of color in the script. A patch of psychic silence where the luminous threads of the world seemed to fray into nothing. It was a void, a hole in the fabric of what was. A place where a story had been unwritten.
He tried to trace the source of the cold spot with his mind, to follow the severed threads back to the blade that had cut them. But there were no threads. It was not a clean cut. It was an erasure. The anomaly resisted his focus, a sensation like pressing his hand against a block of ice that did not melt, but simply drank the heat from his skin, leaving it numb.
— The memory-tariff on French wine is another point of contention, — a council member with a thin, grey beard was saying. — Their merchants are attempting to bypass the wards by embedding shipping manifests with false memory-stamps.
The man’s words were a distant buzzing. Sineus’s entire being was fixed on the cold spot on the map. The psychic pressure was growing, a silent scream that only he could hear. The wrongness was not static. It was spreading, a slow, cancerous stain on the Istopis. The threat awareness in the room was zero. They were debating tariffs while a piece of the world was being eaten.
He wanted to shout, to stride to the map and point to the void. But what could he say? That he felt a cold spot? That he sensed an absence? They would dismiss it as fatigue, as the strain of his work. His unique perception, his greatest weapon, was a cage. It isolated him, leaving him to watch the coming storm alone.
He clenched his fist at his side, the leather of his glove creaking. The price of his silence was their continued ignorance. The price of speaking was his own credibility. He was trapped.
The session droned on. Levin’s proposal to begin the fortification rituals was approved. Committees were formed. Reports were requested. The great, slow machine of the Lodge turned its gears, oblivious.
Finally, the meeting was adjourned. The twelve masters of the Lodge rose, their chairs scraping against the wood floor. They filed out of the chamber, their conversation returning to court politics and personal rivalries. Sineus did not move. He remained by the wall, his eyes locked on the map, on the silent, growing void in the west.
The low hum of the lanterns filled the empty room. The air smelled of cold dust and extinguished purpose.
He had to go there. He had to see the void for himself.
