He did not request the emergency session. He forced it. The doors to the Memory Duma’s antechamber slammed open with a crack that made the junior archivist jump, spilling a tray of ink pots and sealing wax. Sineus strode past him without a word, the cold iron certainty of his purpose radiating from him like a winter chill. The wrongness he had seen through the Chronos Telescope was a physical weight in his gut, a shard of ice lodged beneath his ribs.
The twelve masters of the Lodge of the Double-Headed Eagle convened with visible irritation. They filed into the windowless chamber of dark oak, their faces masks of strained patience. The air, thick with the scent of old wood and the faint, cloying sweetness of beeswax, felt heavy, stagnant. They were men who measured time in generations, and his urgency was an insult to their deliberate pace. Sineus stood before them, not as an instrument awaiting orders, but as a herald of a coming storm.
— I have seen it, — he began, his voice cutting through the formal silence. He did not wait to be acknowledged. He described what he had witnessed through the Chronos Telescope, the complex apparatus of brass and lens that allowed the Lodge to see the memory of distant places. He spoke of the French siege weapon, the Lethe Mortar, and the hollow iron shell that released not fire, but a shimmering, silent mist.
He explained what the mist did. He did not use the language of theory, but of a man who had watched a wound open in the world. He told them how the memory-script of an entire village—its people, its history, its very right to exist—had not been cut or damaged, but annihilated. Burned to nothing.
— It leaves behind a void, a Lacuna, — Sineus said, his voice low and hard. — A hole in the fabric of what is. And it spreads. I watched it consume the land around it at a rate of two meters per minute. It is not a scar. It is a cancer.
A wave of shock and disbelief rippled through the council. One of the masters, a thin man with a tremor in his hand, leaned forward.
— A malfunction, perhaps? The telescope is a delicate instrument. The strain of a long-distance viewing…
— The instrument was perfectly calibrated, — Sineus stated, his gaze unwavering. — The energy signature was unlike anything I have ever seen. It was not the clean snap of a severed thread. It was the shriek of erasure.
The room filled with the sound of uneasy murmuring. They were grappling with a concept that their entire craft deemed impossible. You could cut a memory. You could store it, study it, even let it fade. But you could not unmake it. To unmake a memory was to unmake a piece of the world. It was a violation of the fundamental law.
Then Grigori Levin stood. He was a senior mnemonic chirurgeon, a man whose life was dedicated to the slow, painstaking repair of damaged memories. He was built like a stone buttress, his face a mask of unshakeable certainty, and he moved with the deliberate weight of a man who believed tradition was the only true shield. He waited for the murmurs to die down, his pale eyes fixed on Sineus.
— Your findings are disturbing, — Levin began, his voice a calm, deep baritone that absorbed all panic. — But they are unverified. A single observation from a single operative, no matter how gifted.
He let the words hang in the air. He was not just questioning the data; he was questioning Sineus. He was framing urgency as instability.
— We will not risk schism, — Levin continued, his gaze sweeping across the other masters, who nodded in slow, grateful agreement. — We will not throw our centuries of protocol into the fire based on one frantic report. Panic is a worse enemy than any French weapon.
Sineus watched him, his jaw tight. He saw a loose, dark thread on the cuff of Levin’s perfectly tailored coat. It was a small imperfection, a detail that should have been corrected, and the sight of it was an irritation, a tiny point of chaos in the man’s otherwise crushing order.
— I propose a measured and prudent course of action, — Levin announced, his voice resonating with the comforting authority of the familiar. — We will begin the fortification rituals for the border cities. Smolensk first, then Vyazma. We will reinforce their mnemonic wards, strengthen their memory of loyalty, of their own walls.
It was a plan of profound, suicidal ignorance. A process that would take three to four weeks to complete for each city. It was a strategy for fighting a conventional siege, not a spreading plague of nothingness. It was like building a fortress wall, stone by stone, while the ground it was built on dissolved into dust. But it was a known procedure. It was safe. It was slow. The council members visibly relaxed, their fear replaced by the simple comfort of a task they understood.
Pyotr Orlov, his face pale and drawn, rose to his feet.
— Grigori, you are not listening! — the old archivist pleaded, his voice thin. — The threat is not the city walls, it is the land itself! The weapon is mobile. While we are chanting over Smolensk, it will be annihilating a dozen more villages. Sineus has never been wrong.
Levin turned his head slowly to look at Pyotr, his expression one of mild disappointment.
— Your affection for your student is understandable, Pyotr. But it is not a basis for grand strategy. I call for a vote on my proposal. All in favor of beginning the fortification rituals.
Hands went up around the table. Thick, manicured hands. Old, liver-spotted hands. Eleven of them. Sineus watched as his mentor’s hand rose, followed by one other, a younger man at the far end of the table who could not meet Sineus’s gaze. Two votes against eleven. The thread of his argument, of his desperate warning, was cut. He was utterly alone.
Levin’s gaze returned to Sineus. It was cold, final. The master of the Lodge was now addressing the disobedient tool.
— Your unsanctioned observation has caused considerable disruption, Bielski. Your investigation is concluded. You are to stand down.
The words were hammer blows. Each one drove the nail of his failure deeper.
— You will retire to your family estate and await further instructions, — Levin commanded. — You will not speak of this to anyone. You will not act. Is that understood?
Sineus did not answer. He stood in the suffocating silence, his fists clenched at his sides, the leather of his gloves creaking. He was trapped. His oath to the Lodge demanded obedience. But his sight, the very gift that made him their greatest weapon, showed him the cliff edge they were marching towards. To obey was to be complicit in the world’s end. To disobey was to become a traitor. The price of his silence was their continued ignorance. The price of speaking further was his own career, perhaps his life.
The council was adjourned. The masters rose, their chairs scraping on the polished oak floor. They filed out of the chamber, their conversation already turning back to court politics, to rivalries, to the price of French wine. They left him standing alone in the gloom, the weight of their decision pressing down on him.
The low hum of the lanterns filled the empty room. The air smelled of cold dust and the wax of a sealed tomb.
His oath was to the Empire, not to the twelve blind men who had just condemned it.
His honor, or their survival. A choice had to be made.
