Page 132 of The Unweaver

Master Bittenbinder, with his gunmetal gray hair cropped short and his starched suit spotless, was the petty tyrant of blustering bureaucrats. Stiff-backed and thin-lipped, he held the perpetual expression of someone trying to un-shit their trousers.

The Lethe would cut an intimidating figure, if Malachy hadn’t dug up certain dirt on him.

“Not informing the Tribunalat onceof this errant Oneiromancer, Mr. Bane, was in breach of several of our established protocols. Shall I enumerate how you have violated Code 14, section 3C?” Bittenbinder tossed his well-fondled rulebook down like a gauntlet.

O’Leary, his traitorous solicitor, nodded eagerly, not bothering to hide his admiration for the fellow memory mage.

“You don’t need to quote the rules to me,” Malachy said, wishing the reins on his temper were as tight as they’d been for several decades. Political grandstanding and tedious proprieties tested his already limited patience.

“Absurd notion,” Bittenbinder bristled. “We must all abide by the rules. The Tribunal demands answers, Mr. Bane. I know how your usual handler, Master Lyter, dotes upon you.” He shuddered, as if feelings were contagious. “Which is why the Tribunal, in its vast wisdom, has sent me to oversee this disaster. And what a disaster it is.”

Bittenbinder threw newspaper after newspaper onto the table, reading the headlines in a tight voice. “Bizarre hallucination shared across London. No cure in sight for sleeping sickness. Sleepers number over a hundred. Suspicions of psychoactive toxins in the water. And nowthisslander on the front page of the London Times: Germans! Poisoning Brits!”

Displeasure deepened the lines on the Berliner’s face. Malachy opted not to inform Bittenbinder that he’d personally planted that story, and was pleased it was catching on. Replacing one boogeyman with another would buy them all time.

Bittenbinder tossed down more newspapers. “Lt. Randolph Potts of the London Police claims, ‘These inexplicable events are tied togangactivity.’Lord Crispin Fairchild demands answers for the sleeping sickness, stating he will ‘find whoever is responsible for Lady Fairchild’s unnatural slumber and bring the full weight of the law down upon them.’”

Malachy shifted in his seat. Potts was still a persistent pain in his arse. An overzealous Lord didn’t help matters. “There were mitigating circumstances, Bittenbinder, which O’Leary explained to the Tribunal while I was indisposed. Ikelas—”

“Do not be preposterous.” Bittenbinder shot a sharp look at their attentive audience. “There was no official paperwork submitted to reclassifythatOneiromancer as… living.”

Their gazes clashed. Arguing with Bittenbinder about the impossibility of a dead demon possessing a living vessel was moot. Officially, the Tribunal insisted demons were relegated to history—admitting otherwise would advertise their incompetence at enforcing their own Covenant. Unofficially, they’d shackled Malachy with retaining that illusion.

The Tribunal had learned about Koschei’s Egg after an unfortunate incident while Queen Victoria still sat on the throne. Rather than executing him for using the Profane Arts, they’d made the Realmwalker their private demon hunter. Not even the Master Choromancer, Nastassja, could traverse to the Demon Realm, let alone ferry corrupted mages across its veil.

Taking a deep breath, Malachy checked his temper once more. “Dream bitch and her co-conspirators have been dispatched. I will smooth things over in London and elsewhere.Line the right pockets. Plant the right stories. I’ll handle it,” he lied.

Some loose ends were too far gone to tie up again. At least he’d avoided the elephant in the room. They were fucked. And much worse than the Tribunal suspected. Ghose and an untold number of demons had escaped through the rift in the veil. The veil the Tribunal had tasked him with ensuring remained intact.

Malachy knew his former Master was out there, biding his time.

He was spread too thin to have sunk so many resources into following dead ends. Chasing demons had been a wasted effort. They remained hidden, and the origin of the Sephrinium bullets, likely derived from the Tribunal’s long lost Ruination Stone, also eluded him.

If his suspicions were right, the Tribunal was the last he’d inform of the full catastrophe. Ikelas had been the Master Oneiromancer, and she hadn’t been reborn as a body-snatching dream demon without help. Master Ghose hadn’t slipped through the veil as a sewn-up bastardization of his former self without a network of accomplices.

“In my humble opinion,” Rune Borges said in a gruff voice, readjusting his paunch in a tunic festooned with jeweled weapons. “The London Nightmare is a blessing in disguise. Mages have always been superior to humans and it’s high time they learned.”

Bittenbinder’s nostrils flared. Malachy regretted backing the former Ferromancer mercenary every time he opened his mouth. Which, unfortunately, was often. Rune’s bark was worse than his bite, but Bittenbinder didn’t know that yet.

“My esteemed colleague Mr. Borges makes a compelling argument,” chimed in Julian Morro, the boss of the Lumomancer and Umbramancer gang that had moved into London while Malachy slept. His two-toned eyes—one blue, onebrown—flashed. “Mages should stop cowering in the shadows and come into the light.”

Julian reached into his arsenal of charm for a disarming smile. Without a filter between his platinum blonde head and silver-tongued mouth, the young Lumomancer would be a useful distraction. Malachy already had several ideas in mind.

“The Covenant,” Bittenbinder ground out, “states that mage secrecy is to be upheld inallcircumstances.”

“The Covenant was written in the Middle Ages,” Julian Morro drawled. “It’s time for a change, darling.”

“Now, see here, young man—”

Over their arguing and the club’s chatter beyond the door, Malachy heard her sultry voice singing. The architect of his undoing was playing a mournful piano tune. Cora must have at least a liter of gin in her bloodstream to croon before a full audience. But to hear her sing again was a balm to his spirit. He drank her in by the heartful.

Reminders of her inhabited everything. He caught himself looking at the door, hoping she’d appear. The same door she’d burst through on the Winter Solstice like a harbinger of fate. A vaguely familiar woman, tear-stained and near hysterics, with vengeance in her eyes and a revolver in her hand. Impeccable aim, too. He glanced at the holes she’d left in the wall behind his desk. Without his Choromancy, she would’ve shot him through the last shriveled piece of his heart.

Instead, she had brought him back to life. He wished he deserved it. The full realization of every heartless thing he’d done haunted him. All the blood on his hands that would never wash clean. Sins he could never atone for.

Regret hadn’t been a word in Malachy Bane’s vocabulary since the early 19th century. Now, a planet of regret sat upon his shoulders, growing heavier by the day. Before he dealt with theTribunal and hunted down Ghose, he had a century’s worth of his own demons to banish.

The man he’d been before the Specter’s Scourge had been buried under decades of numbness. That gap between what he felt and what he should feel had grown wider, deeper. Guilt had become as distant as satisfaction, pleasures mechanical, sex perfunctory.

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