The Grand Ten. Kemmer had been hunting them down, and it looked like he had narrowed down some of them. At least four of them he had narrowed down to one name. The rest, he had several candidates.
His list for The Warrior wasn’t helpful. He had written, “Spathian? Tarian? Could it be Tharek? Or Dayne Heldrin?” So he had no idea. He didn’t even suspect Grandmaster Orren.
Amaya examined the rest of it. There was a method to the arrangement, all focused on a map of the city on the wall. A few different locations were marked, but the one he had circled strongly, with several lines pointing to it: the Grand Druth Opera House. It had been closed for repairs for nearly a year, owned by Duchess Leighton of Fencal. From Kemmer’s notes, she was his prime candidate for The Duchess.
She looked back to the rest of the disarray. There had likely been a tussle here—the drops of blood on the floor started by the overturned bed, and then led out the door. Not much blood at all—consistent with someone getting sliced on the arm, but still able to walk out on their own power. Someone had come for Kemmer, but left his notes and evidence here. Perhaps he fought the person off, perhaps they grabbed him and took him away. She had no way of knowing.
All she had was a place, and an instinct that she would find what she was looking for there.
She gathered up the papers and made her way back to the chapterhouse. It was getting late, and her absence would be noticed.
“So you aren’t really moving your hand? Or feeling it?” Miss Nell asked as they continued down the twist of passageway, the horrifying hybrid animal leading them along. She had had the foresight of grabbing a piece of chalk off one of the slateboards and marking the walls so they could find their way back. While she was no Inspector Rainey, he found her a companion of excellent wit and temper. He could see why Veranix worked with her on his vigilante mission.
“Moving, no. I’m controlling entirely with magic. I do have sensation, but . . . I confess that I cannot tell if it is the natural sense of the body or the application of my magical senses.”
“And you don’t know what it is?”
“I know what Mister Olivant of Lord Preston’s Circle called it,” Minox said. “He said that it was ‘a menace beyond the scope of my comprehension.’”
Miss Nell let out a low whistle.
“He also told me, ‘I will likely spend the rest of my nights lying awake terrified, praying you don’t lose control of the unholy power you use to wiggle your fingers.’”
“Is that an exact quote?” she asked.
“Someone tells you something like that, it stays in your memory,” Minox said.
“Yeah,” she said quietly. “Dim the light on that, something up ahead. Hear that?”
Minox covered his hand with a glove, which mostly muted its blue glow. He was deeply troubled that he couldn’t completely turn it off, that he had lost that level of control. Was this just down here, with the cat-rabbit in proximity? Was something else triggering it? Would his control return once they returned to the surface? He had no idea.
Low bells were ringing up ahead, a deep, resonant clang that echoed through the passage. Their path led them toward the sound, and the passageway opened up to an enormous cavern, lit with a dull green glow from all the walls. The cavern had an entire encampment of tents and huts, centered around a large building with several high towers that touched the roof.
The building was the source of the bells.
“Well, that’s disturbing,” Miss Nell said.
“I’m inclined to agree,” Minox whispered, which was all his voice was capable of at the moment. “How could something like this exist?”
“Look,” she said, pulling him behind one of the huts. “People are going in there.”
“Then we need to do the same,” Minox said. He immediately regretted this, and corrected himself. “That is, I intend to investigate it. I will not impose upon you.”
“I’ve got your back, Inspector,” she said. “Stop doubting that, all right?”
“I don’t want to presume or abuse your assistance,” he said.
“You haven’t yet,” she said.
They slipped through the encampment, Minox noting that all the residents had gone into the building. The bells must indicate obligatory attendance. Who were these people, and what was this—church? Temple? It certainly wasn’t like any of the sainted houses of the Church of Druthal, or even the Racquin-influenced Church of Saint Veran outside the city that his mother favored. As they got closer, he saw that the structure was built out of wood—blackened as if by fire—but the wood was raw and twisting, as if it had grown this way of its own accord. That was, of course, impossible, but that was how it looked.
Miss Nell gingerly touched the wall, pulling away after running her finger along it. “It’s thorned.”
“You work with plants, Miss Nell,” Minox said. “Are you familiar with a wood like this?”
She crouched down to look at where the wall met the floor. “It has roots that dig into the stone,” she said. “If I were to guess—” She paused and shook her head.
“I welcome your guesses, however absurd.”
She looked at the creature, which was rubbing its grotesque form against the building, as if doing so gave it pleasure. “If I were to guess, the same sort of twisted magic that was done to this animal was done to several trees.”
“To what end?”
“Is ‘make a creepy building’ not an end to itself?” she asked.
“I reject that such an effort would be expended on aesthetics alone.” Minox went to touch the wall himself, but felt his hand surge with power. Like
