Page 115 of The Unweaver

She had misheard Moriarty’s thick Irish brogue. No wonder her search had been fruitless. It wasn’t Coshoy’s Egg, but Koschei’s Needle within the egg.

The spirit was the conduit for magic but also paid its cost. A mage’s body couldn’t perform magic without their spirit, unless some of the spirit remained in the body while the rest was stored… elsewhere. In a vessel that could absorb the cost of magic without damaging the spirit trapped within.

“Is it more than a myth?” Cora asked, urgent. “‘Koschei’s Needle? Is it real?”

“Real enough.” Dimitri hefted the rucksack over his shoulder. “Many men spend life searching.”

“What do you know about it?”

Outside, the lorry honked. His gaze slid from the door to her desperate features. “Only stories. Myth says it is needle inside egg. But others say it is egg made of needles. So, Koschei’s Egg.”

At her confused expression, he set the rucksack down and sketched a drawing on a bar napkin. A metal egg made of long, curving needles without sharp points, arranged like thin bars on the cage for a spirit. “See. Koschei’s Egg.”

The lorry honked again. She clutched the drawing as his giant form retreat. Realization shivered through her. Koschei’s Egg—Bane’s weakness, the Oneiromancer’s quarry—was a loophole to immortality.

Bane’s half-truths wove into a complete tapestry of deceit.

He’d been so stricken to hear about the Specter’s Scourge not because splitting the spirit was the profanest curse, but because he had an intimate familiarity with it. He’d split his own spirit and hid it away like a twisted nest of Russian dolls.

Whatever sliver of spirit remained inside him would be blacker than his eyes. Those obsidian eyes with irises bleeding into the whites. How much longer until they were the black-on-black of the Coal-Eyes in the Demonomicon?

Only in dreams, with his eyes as clear as a summer’s day, was his spirit uncorrupted.

I haven’t the heart to love you, he’d told her. Because he had no heart at all. Only a sliver of his spirit remained in the blackened dregs.

The thumping in the forbidden room, calling out to her for release, was Malachy Bane’s heart beating in the cage of Koschei’s Egg. Buffering him from dark magic’s lethal cost. His greatest strength. His greatest weakness.

If Koschei’s Egg could preserve his spirit, could it also preserve his body? Bloody hell, how oldwasBane? Perhaps Master Lyter literally was his oldest friend.

Twenty years and you haven’t aged a day, Mother had remarked during parley.Had she known about Bane’s Faustian bargain?

The Realmwalker had bartered his spirit for power, all right.Magical power is intrinsically valuable,he’d said on the drive to the Crossbones cemetery.It’s the hardest power to get and therefore the most worth having. The truest thing he’d ever said to her.

Bane reentered the club, and she looked at him with new eyes. The heartless stranger approached her, saying something she didn’t hear, stunned beside the bar.

He looked askance at her. “You’re being weird.”

“I am not being weird,” she said, an octave higher than intended. She turned away, knocking a pile of ammo across the floor.

Arching a brow, he watched the bullets roll to the far reaches of the club. “Further proving my point. Come on. Let’s finish this.”

Chapter 32. Their Fates in Her Hands

The Realmwalker’s gang, cloaked in the Umbramancer’s shadows and parked in a lorry across the street, looked out at Mother’s sprawling, mismatched boarding house. The windows were dark, the house quiet. The midnight sky was clear as if the clouds too had gone to bed.

“All right, boss,” Anita said. “What now?”

“Stealth plan. Get in, keep quiet, get the Oneiromancer. Kill everyone who gets in the way.” Bane tossed an arm over the driver’s seat and glanced back into the cold, cavernous cargo bed. His gaze pierced Cora through the gloom. “Are the upper floors bedrooms?”

“A decade ago, yes.”

“I sense at least a dozen heartbeats up there,” Anita said, her eyes closed in concentration. “Younger, stronger. Steady, like they’re asleep. There are at least two slower heartbeats on the bottom floor, near the back. Maybe more, but very faint.”

“We can’t keep sitting here,” Sloane said. She had taken the farthest possible seat away from Cora, watching her every twitch. Ravi had followed suit, wrenching Cora’s guts as he flinched and shied away.

“Sitting ducks,” Dimitri grumbled. Peeling back the lorry’s canvas, he scanned the dark street, illuminated only by the moon creeping across the sky.

“I can dampen sound, but the Bestiamancers are bound to hear us,” Ravi said. “Should we just knock?”

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