apartment. The cards were cold to the touch, and none of the figures twitched or exploded into fragments. Philippe and the rest were keeping their distance.

'This is my father's handwriting,' Vivienne said, pointing to a scrawl of marginalia on one of the pages. Realizing each page was a fragment, she spread them out on the desk. Putting the puzzle together. Making sense out of nonsense. Re-creating the world.

'It's the org chart they were working on. At the safe house.' I glanced at the pages. I hadn't really paid attention to all the details when I had first seen them. There hadn't been any time. The majority of the notes were in the same precise block characters, but there was scattered notation done by someone else. Hubert Lafoutain, apparently. 'They were trying to sort out who they could trust. I showed up late, and they were mostly done.'

'Figuring out who the Architects were,' she said, quickly divining the purpose of the pages. She spotted her father's name, and involuntarily looked up to see if I was paying attention.

'I know,' I said. 'He was the Scholar.'

'There are nine,' she said, nodding. 'Just like Mnemosyne had nine daughters.'

'Is Marielle one of your number?'

'No, she is the Daughter of the Hierarch. Though, like he is sometimes considered a peer of his Architects, she is often mistaken as one of us.'

'The tenth Muse.'

Her lips curled back from her teeth. 'Everyone feels better when there are ten. Nine seems unfinished, especially in our metric world.'

'Only if you start from one.'

'So few think otherwise.'

'We're all so concrete-sequential. Zero makes things complicated.'

She gave me an odd look, a laugh rising in her throat. 'Ah, Monsieur. . ' She caught herself, and let the rest of the sentence go unfinished, busying herself with lining up the pages. I didn't press her, and quietly finished ordering and putting the cards away.

When the chart was laid out again, she looked at it for some time, reading all the notes. 'The Tulbriss,' she said absently, as she traced her finger along an arc connecting the Crusader and the Navigator. 'Do you know how many copies were actually made?'

'Fourteen, I heard.'

She nodded, still looking at the chart. 'We have six of them. Three more were destroyed during the occult purges of World War II. One is buried in the archives of the British Museum-' She glanced up, a twinkle in her eye. 'Misfiled in a crate catalogued as 'Miscellaneous Texts Damaged in the Great Fire.' And another is in a private collection in Massachusetts. That leaves three.'

'It does.'

'Forge has tried to buy one of ours. Many times. He's a sanctioned collector, and he's got far more dangerous things in his library, so why can't he have a copy of the Tulbriss edition of the Secretum Secretorum? This is his argument, you understand.'

'Of course.'

'I think my father liked saying no, frankly. There wasn't any strong reason Forge couldn't have one, other than the basic policy that things come into the Archives, they don't go out. But Father always said he liked listening to Forge rant: that English accent, those rigorously exotic Chinese curses, how he'd go on for minutes at a time.

'Though, more pragmatically, if we denied Forge what he wanted, he would obsess about it. He'd not stop until he found one, and in doing so, might actually scare up one of the remaining three copies. We'd probably have let him keep it, if a copy did surface, but that was dependent upon whether or not we got to it first.'

I recalled the meeting in Bangkok where I had taken receipt of the book, and the ensuing fracas that had left my Thai contact dead and me on the run from several of my black market competitors. It hadn't been my first brush with the seedier side of underground occult artifact trafficking; just the first where I realized how difficult it was going to be to stay off the Watcher radar and continue doing what I had been doing.

'You were the Weatherstones' client,' I said. Thomas and Rebecca Weatherstone. English antiques dealers who also moved occult artifacts. One of my main competitors, and over the years, we had had a reasonably friendly rivalry. Until Bangkok, where their field agents had killed Kraisingha and tried to do the same to me. I still had the scars-a couple of knots of hard flesh on my chest from the bullet holes.

Vivienne nodded. 'We were.'

Rebecca had been sleeping with the magus I had killed. Thomas hadn't known, and probably still didn't. Rebecca didn't know I knew, but that's only because she didn't know what I had done to her man. I knew a lot of things about Rebecca and Thomas, enough to have made it easy for me to avoid them ever since. They didn't need to know what I had in my head about them.

'What were you offering them?' I asked, professionally curious.

'Finder's fee of twenty-five percent.'

'Twenty-five percent of what? There isn't an open market on these.'

She shrugged as if that was a minor detail. 'What did Forge pay you?'

'Two hundred thousand.'

'Dollars? He got quite a deal.'

He had paid me in Euros actually. At the time, I hadn't been too happy about it, but recently, the United States dollar had been taking a beating in the world market. But, even in Euros, she was right. He had gotten a deal.

He had also given me a few other things. Objects I had leveraged for other deals I had had in the works. The two hundred thousand had been for 'operational expenses.' The rest had been a much quieter-and less violent- transaction. Two men, exchanging briefcases during an intimate and private dinner at a very exclusive club in Hong Kong.

But I didn't see the point in bringing that up with Vivienne. I had probably already said too much. The rest was sure to cause me grief.

Especially if it got back to the Weatherstones.

I smiled at that thought. Worrying about next week, when tomorrow was the bigger problem. Classic sign of denial.

XIX

How much do you know?' I asked Vivienne, indicating the chart on the desk. 'Did Marielle tell you what happened?' Who lived, who died, who was left. The litany of wounds sustained so far in this war.

'She did.' Vivienne sighed, reluctant to engage on the present. 'Most of the secret masters are dead. Are the remaining Architects working in concert to remove the rest, or are they still targeted? Is there some unknown party behind the whole affair?'

'The guys who hit the Chapel of Glass came with soul locks and whoever was running them put an oubliette around the chapel. And, when we were fleeing the apartment, they were doing some heavy-duty structural assault on the building. Trying to bring the whole thing down.'

'Geomancy.'

'Certainly a step up from reading the pattern of leaves and arrangement of stones, but that'd be my guess.'

'So, the Mason. Is he working alone?' She sighed as she looked at the wealth of names on the page. 'Impossible to know, isn't it? He could be any one of the remaining Preceptors. Any number of them could be working together too, removing opposition to their own advancement. And what of the other Architects who aren't accounted for?'

'The Mason is Jacob Spiertz,' I pointed out, touching his name on the chart. 'The Scryer is Ulrich Husserl, and he's still out there too. The Thaumaturge is. . missing. The impression I got was that he was unaccounted for, but not dead. What that means I don't really know. And the Shepherd is. . '

My gaze wandered along the lines connecting Spiertz to the other Watchers, and I spotted a pair I knew. The

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