His word was worthless. Alessandro Volpe was right. In this grey, broken town, his name was a liability and his honor was a foreign currency. He was a ghost with nothing to offer but the truth, and the truth was not enough. The Italian’s pistol remained steady, a dark punctuation mark at the end of a death sentence. Elina Petrova’s rifle was a rigid line of judgment. The third man, silent in the window, was an unmoving shadow. They were a closed circuit of grief and anger, and he was the intruder.
— On your knees, — Alessandro repeated, his voice flat.
Sineus did not move. He had knelt to his Tsar. He had bowed to the Patriarch. He would not kneel here. Not to this. He had made a choice in the dust of his ancestors’ library, and that choice had a price. This was part of it. The cost was everything he had been.
— Escort me to your hideout, — Sineus said. It was not a request. It was a statement of the next logical action. — My proof is not for the open street.
Alessandro’s eyes narrowed. The sheer audacity of the command, spoken by a man with three guns trained on him, seemed to momentarily short-circuit his rage. A flicker of something—amusement, or perhaps a grudging respect for nerve—crossed his face before the mask of the hardened revolutionary fell back into place. He gave a sharp, almost imperceptible nod.
The man in the window vanished. Elina lowered her rifle but kept it ready, its muzzle pointed at the ground a meter in front of Sineus’s feet. Alessandro gestured with his pistol. — Walk.
They moved through the dead town, a small, tense procession. Sineus led, his back a perfect target. Alessandro followed five paces behind, his steps silent on the cold ash. Elina walked to his left, her gaze sweeping the ruined rooftops, a soldier on watch. They were a unit, their movements economical and practiced. He was the foreign object in their machine. A frayed thread on his own coat cuff, torn during his flight from Moscow, caught his eye. It was a small, stupid detail, a reminder of all the other, greater threads he had severed.
The hideout was not a building, but a hole. A collapsed cellar beneath what had once been a tannery, the entrance hidden by a sheet of rusted iron. Alessandro slid the metal aside, revealing a dark maw that smelled of damp earth, ozone, and hot metal. He gestured again with the pistol. Sineus descended a set of steep stone steps into the earth.
The space was cramped and alive. It was the absolute opposite of a Lodge sanctum. There were no sterile vaults or silent archives. This was a workshop, a laboratory, a den. A small, roaring forge cast a pulsing orange glow over everything, its low hum a constant vibration in the floor. Workbenches were buried under brass gears, spools of copper wire, and strange, half-finished clockwork devices. Blueprints showing complex schematics for artillery shells and handheld tools were tacked to the soot-stained brick walls. The air was thick with the sharp, chemical tang of strange reagents. This was a place where things were made, not preserved.
Alessandro shoved him toward a sturdy wooden crate. — Sit.
Sineus remained standing. He had been escorted, not captured. It was a fine distinction, but it was the only ground he had to stand on. He unslung the heavy saddlebag from his shoulder and set it carefully on a workbench cluttered with tools and metal shavings. The Carbonari watched his every move, their suspicion a palpable force in the cramped space.
— You wanted proof, — Sineus said, his voice quiet in the humming workshop. — Words are not proof. I understand.
He reached into the bag. The tension in the room snapped taut. Elina’s rifle came up. Alessandro’s pistol was instantly level with Sineus’s chest. Sineus moved with deliberate slowness, his hands in plain sight. He wrapped his fingers around the cold, dense sphere within the bag. He drew it out.
He placed the Orphic Compass on the workbench.
It sat there in the flickering forge-light, a perfect sphere of solid, polished night. It absorbed the light, reflecting almost nothing. It was a hole in the visual world, twenty-five kilograms of impossible density. Its presence seemed to drink the sound from the room, the hum of the forge suddenly muted.
Alessandro stared at it. He did not move for a full ten seconds. He was no longer a revolutionary holding a gun. He was an inventor, an artisan, looking at a masterpiece of forbidden craft. He knew what it was. He knew what it meant. He slowly lowered his pistol, placing it on the bench beside a set of calipers.
— Where, — Alessandro breathed, his voice a hoarse whisper. — Where did you get this?
The question was not an accusation. It was awe. It was the professional jealousy of a master craftsman.
— I took it, — Sineus said. He had to give them the whole truth. This was the price of an alliance. He was trading his last secrets for a chance. — From a lead-lined vault in the Lodge armory in Moscow. It was the price of my exit.
Alessandro circled the workbench, his eyes never leaving the Compass. He reached out a hand, then hesitated, his fingers hovering just above the sphere’s flawless surface. He could feel its low, resonant hum without touching it. He looked at Sineus, and the raw anger in his eyes had been replaced by a complex, warring expression of disbelief and calculation. The distrust was still there, a hard kernel of hate for Sineus’s class, his accent, his entire world. But it was now overlaid with the undeniable fact of the object on the table. No loyalist of the Lodge would ever be allowed to touch this, let alone steal it. The act was so profound, so absolute in its treason, that it was its own kind of truth.
— This is not a tool for butchers, — Alessandro said softly, more to himself than to Sineus. — This is a cartographer’s instrument. It reads the wounds.
— It does more than that, — Sineus said, seizing the opening. He did not wait for permission. He began to speak, his voice low and precise, the words stripped of all emotion. He laid out the intelligence as he would for a general staff meeting. He described the Chronos Telescope, the Lodge’s device for seeing into the memory of the past. He described his observation of the French unit west of Smolensk.
He gave them the numbers. The hard, undeniable metrics of the new war.
— The weapon is a Lethe Mortar. Its shell detonates mid-air, releasing an alchemical agent. The area of effect is approximately a 500-meter radius. It does not cut memory. It does not sever a single thread. It annihilates the script itself.
He saw Elina flinch at the word. Her knuckles were white where she gripped her rifle.
— The result is a Lacuna, — Sineus continued, his gaze fixed on Alessandro. — A void. But it is not a static scar. It is cancerous. It actively consumes the adjacent reality. I measured the spread rate. It is approximately two meters per minute.
Alessandro stopped circling. He stood perfectly still, his face a mask of intense concentration. He was processing the data, running the calculations in his head. The revolutionary was gone, replaced by the scientist.
— Two meters a minute, — Alessandro repeated, his voice a low murmur. He looked at the blueprints on the wall, then back at Sineus. — It doesn't just erase. It eats. It’s a self-fueling reaction. The energy released from the annihilated memory powers the expansion.
— Yes, — Sineus confirmed. — The French have not created a weapon. They have created a plague. They are not conquering territory. They are unmaking it.
A heavy silence descended on the workshop, broken only by the soft hiss of the forge. Elina slowly lowered her rifle, leaning it against the wall. The fight had gone out of her, replaced by a vast, hollow emptiness. She now had the physics to explain her grief. Her town had not been captured or burned. It had been eaten.
Alessandro walked back to the workbench. He looked from the impossible black sphere of the Compass to Sineus’s face. The last of his fiery anger had burned away, leaving only the cold ash of strategic reality. This threat was bigger than empires, bigger than revolutions. An expanding void that consumed memory would consume everything, indiscriminately. It would consume his workshops, his people, his cause. It would unwrite the future he was fighting to build.
He picked up his pistol from the bench, but he did not point it. He checked the mechanism with a practiced motion and tucked it into his belt. It was a gesture of finality. A decision made.
— We have a common enemy, — Alessandro said, his voice flat and devoid of any warmth. He looked at Elina, who gave a single, slow nod. Her eyes were fixed on Sineus, her expression unreadable. — For now.
The truce was offered. Not with a handshake, but with a shared, grim understanding. It was a partnership born of necessity, a fragile bridge across a chasm of blood and belief.
— The terms are simple, — Alessandro continued, his voice all business now. — You have knowledge the Lodge protects and a way of seeing the world that my instruments cannot replicate. We have a network, workshops, and weapons they do not understand. You give us your intelligence. All of it. In return, we give you shelter, resources, and the muscle to act on it. This is not a friendship. It is a transaction. Your life, for your knowledge. Is that clear?
— It is clear, — Sineus said.
He felt the shift in the room. The weight of their hostility had not vanished, but it had been redirected. He was no longer the target. He was now a component in Alessandro’s machine. A tool. He had traded one form of servitude for another, but this time, it was a choice he had made. He had given up his most valuable asset—his secret knowledge—for a chance to fight. The price was leverage. He had none left.
He was no longer isolated. He was interdependent. The feeling was not one of comfort, but of a new and profound vulnerability. He was tied to these people now, his survival linked to their own. A new thread, coarse and uncertain, was being woven.
The low hum of the forge filled the silence. The sharp smell of ozone was now the smell of a shared, desperate purpose.
Alessandro picked up a strange, half-finished rifle from the bench, its stock a skeleton of brass and wood. He slid the bolt home with a sharp, definitive snap.
— Good, — he said, his eyes glinting in the firelight.
They were prey. And everyone was a hunter.
