“Of course,” Mirabilis said, watching her hand as she tucked it behind herself. “Your troubles are at an end, Miss Edwards. Come with me, and we’ll get you taken care of immediately.”
Mirabilis opened the office door and gestured her through.
The interior of the Mantic Pavilion was no longer the echoing empty space she’d entered earlier. The place was now packed with hundreds of exposition attendees, apparently drawn by Stanton’s fresh notoriety. Word must have spread that it was a Warlock who’d thwarted the assassination attempt (Emily frowned at herself—even she was thinking of poor Hembry as an assassin now?) and suddenly the Mantic Pavilion had become an exceptionally popular attraction.
“Well, well.” Mirabilis appraised the crowd with the canniness of a cardsharp. “This is quite promising.”
Tarnham oozed out from somewhere unseen, his pencil hovering over his leather pad.
“Your carriage is outside,” he began. “I’ve sent word to the station to have the railcar hooked up. With all the commotion, there might be some trouble getting out, but—”
Mirabilis waved him silent, his eyes narrow with calculation. “Listen, Tarnham … keep track of the reporters who are writing up this story. I want their names forwarded over to Mystic Truth. Tell the editors—tell Barclay, he’s got a flair for the melodramatic—tell him to work this up into a serial. I want a draft on my desk in two days.”
Tarnham’s face disarranged unpleasantly.
“A serial, sir?” he said. “About Dreadnought Stanton?”
“Can’t you feel the power in the room?” Mirabilis closed his eyes and breathed deep, as if he were standing in a field of springtime flowers. “It’s invigorating!”
“Professor, Mr. Stanton won’t want a serial written about him,” Emily said, as Tarnham muttered off.
“Oh, he’ll loathe the idea.” Mirabilis led her past a cluster of women who were oohing and aahing over three neatly shrunken heads arrayed on red velvet under glass. “But I don’t care what Dreadnought Stanton loathes or does not loathe. It’s the interests of credomancy that I’m concerned with.”
They came to a grand-looking door in the center of the hall; it seemed to have been beaten of solid gold. Mirabilis pulled a large ring of keys out of his pocket and began sorting through them.
“Mystic Truth needs stories like this to build the power of credomancers all over the country.” Mirabilis opened the door to reveal a large room, lit by softly glowing orbs of blown glass. He stretched out a polite arm. “After you.”
Emily peered into the room, holding her hand behind her back as if hiding crossed fingers. The glowing orbs sat in circlets of worked gold, each circlet hanging from the ceiling by three slender chains. They certainly looked as if they might be powered by magic, and she didn’t want to test it empirically. Seeing her hesitation, Mirabilis chuckled.
“I assure you, there is no free magic in the room. There are quite a few objects in here that would interact badly with it.”
Stepping into the room, Emily found that it was unexpectedly large. Displays ringed the room, each one lit by its own cluster of glowing orbs.
“This room is not open to the public. It contains exhibits the Institute reserves for its most honored and distinguished guests,” Mirabilis said. “These are advancements that must not be widely promoted … at least, not yet.”
But Emily had no time to see any of the advancements, for Mirabilis led her directly to a carved mahogany pillar on which stood a medium-size ivory statue of a headless Venus, lit by a glowing shaft of light. The Venus had something clasped around her throat—some kind of silver collar—and really, she wasn’t entirely headless. While the statue was completely solid beneath the collar, above the collar the statue’s head was vague and semitransparent—ectoplasmic.
Mirabilis picked up a black marble, about the size of a robin’s egg, from where it sat on a blue silk cushion at Venus’ pretty little feet. He held it up against the light.
“Look inside.”
Emily squinted into the black marble. The light shining through it revealed the head of the statue, floating in a void, clear and distinct.
“It’s called an Otherwhere Marble,” Mirabilis said. He closed his hand around the marble and made a flourish; unfolding his fingers, the marble was gone. Emily half expected him to pull it out of her ear. “It contains an entire collapsed dimension. The Boundary Cuff around Venus’ neck is a transporting device. It sends whatever it clasps into the dimension inside the marble.”
Emily blinked once or twice, trying to wrap her head around the