Page 94 of The Unweaver

Lazlo cleared his throat. “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer, hm?”

“Something like that.”

Bane was keeping his enemies close, all right. Literally in his own home. But… why? A vain hope that familiarity wouldn’t breed contempt or predestined murder?

Her mind raced. This Chronomancer prophecy cast everything in a sinister light. She would need to sift through her every interaction with Bane with the fine-toothed comb of this new perspective. The perilousness of her predicament, Cora was only beginning to understand.

You are the most important woman in my life, he’d told her. But not why. Was she the most important woman in his life because she was prophesied to end it?

Sure, Bane hadn’t been outright lying when he’d said that. He’d merely omitted certain critically important details. It hadn’t been a statement of his affection but a prophecy of his death at her hands. A strategic half-truth spoken with careful candidness.

Her thoughts swam with questions. What did the prophecy mean? What wasn’t he telling her about Teddy? What other secrets was he keeping from her?

One thing was clear: Malachy Bane had played her like a damn instrument.

“Have you heard from Master Ghose since—”

“Ghose hasn’t been in this Realm for decades.” In Bane’s stilted tone was a vein of dread. “He hasn’t come back to collect.”

“Yet,” Lazlo said. “I sense the portents of the Profane like a dark cloud over London. Could it be Ghose?”

“No. The veil is still intact between our Realms.”

“What about Ikelas?”

“She can’t escape through the veil either. But if Durbec and his co-conspirators are doing what I fear they’re doing… it would take a demon.”

Demon. The word lingered in the uneasy hush that fell.

“You can’t tell the other Masters about this, Laz. Not until I learn where that Sephrinium bullet came from.”

“Surely you don’t think the Tribunal is behind this?”

Cora shifted, and the floorboards creaked like a thunderclap in the quiet. Her pulse skipped into a thumping pace. Bane’s gaze scorched her through the door.

“Curiosity killed the Necromancer,” he snapped.

Drawing in a sharp breath, she hastened away. To the library. The Realmwalker was keeping secrets from her, and she’d be damned if she let him.

Chapter 26. The Missing Half of His Truths

After Lazlo returned to Budapest and Bane returned to the business of war, Cora scoured the library for everything about the Specter’s Scourge and the Master Chronomancer Ghose. She found few details about the former beyond what the Sciomancer had already told her, and so little about the latter she suspected it was intentional.

Eventually, she stumbled across a mention of Ghose in the footnotes of a dense Chronomancy text that had at least been written in the last century. The Chronomancer’s life was condensed into a single line:

Alastair Ghose. Born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1801. Master Chronomancer from 1840-1855. Death:?

The enigmatic Ghose must have given Bane that prophecy well into his decrepitude. Master Lyter was still kicking, though. Perhaps a long life wasn’t uncommon for the Tribunal Masters.

Cora felt defeated. It was a dead end to a dead man and the death he foretold.

She looked up Chronomancer prophecies to reassure herself they were self-fulfilling and not predestined, and soon becamelost in the complexities of time magic. The subjectivity of observation, temporal paradoxes, alternate timelines only differing by an iota...

According to one particularly pedantic book, these prophecies were predictions of whatmighthappen and were no more accurate than a coin flip, for the very act of perceiving the future changed it. Time was neither a line nor a circle, but an endless regression of possibilities spiraling into infinity.

Ghose’s prophecy was only potentially fatal, then. And Moriarty’s ominous final words—He will love you to death—were a stab in the dark. Not a prophecy, but a possibility. And an unlikely one given, well, everything.

The search for the Coal-Eyecreature Bane mentioned Ghose becoming, however, bore fruit. As mages corrupted their spirits with the Profane Arts, their eyes blackened to glittering coals in the grotesque almost-inhumanness of their faces.

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