once it is collected. Is it hauled on to New Amsterdam?"
"That would be a waste of the weight allowance," the pilot said. "It's cast overboard. It helps to counterbalance any hydrogen leakage that occurs via diffusion through the gas bags."
"And it's dumped from where?"
"The side corridor outside the galley," the pilot said. "There are rolling bins to collect the trash, and a chute."
"Thank you," Sebastien said, and took himself outside again.
* * *
When Jack awoke, Sebastien was waiting. He leaned against the wall beside the porthole light. The cabin's sole piece of furniture besides the
bed was a luggage stool for the cabin bags. That stool stood on Sebastien's
left hand, under the light, and a white tented shape occupied its flat top. "Sebastien?"
"Cover your eyes," Sebastien said. Jack obeyed, and Sebastien flipped up the shade on the light. Jack lowered his hands, blinking, and pushed himself upright on the bed, tousled and puffy-cheeked as a child.
"What did you find?"
"Laudanum," Sebastien answered, and uncovered the glinting, pale blue rectangular bottle, still full almost to the bottom of its long neck. "And barely a mouthful gone."
There were new technologies that might be used to recover latent fingerprints from smooth, imporous objects, such as the surface of a glass bottle. The materials—lamp black, fine brushes, adhesive cellophane tape—which Sebastien would need to carry out such research would be available in New Amsterdam. As would the infamous—and, by reputation, formidable—DCI Abigail Irene Garrett. The Crown Investigator would wield an arsenal of forensic sorcery, and numbered among its functions would be spells capable of linking the murder weapon to the murderer. Assuming the laudanum was the murder weapon, and not a middle-aged widow's comfort, as Mlle. LeClere had suggested.
"Boss!" Jack exclaimed, bounding out of bed.
* * *
In the morning, they strip-searched the passengers.
The process required some orchestration, as of course neither Sebastien nor Jack could examine the female passengers. This inconvenience was surmounted by sending Mlle. LeClere, Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Zhang, Miss Meadows, and Mrs. Leatherby aside as a group to examine each other, with the airship's two chambermaids and one female washroom attendant acting as matrons in the smoking room, while the men occupied the larger lounge. From the giggling that ensued, either all eight of them were in collusion, or all eight of them were agreed that men, in general, were a ridiculous species though perhaps best humored.
Meanwhile, Sebastien and Captain Hoak examined the unclothed chest of each of the men.
It was not an absolute test, of course, but if any of them were a university-trained sorcerer (as opposed to a hedge-wizard or conjurer) he would have borne on his chest the ineradicable mark of his training, a sigil tattooed over the sternum. The mark would be red for the great universities at Oxford, Wittenberg, Paris, Rome, and Kyiv, black for lesser colleges.
There were no schools for sorcerers in Spain.
The sigil would be an outline for a wizard who had matriculated, fully inked for a graduate. But it would be there.
It came as little surprise to Sebastien that Oczkar Korvin, who had maneuvered to be last in line, said softly "I believe this is what you are looking for," and unbuttoned the breast of his shirt to reveal a black-inked design the size of a cigarette case. "Prague," he said. "Eighteen seventy-nine. Are you going to arrest me?"
"Not only on the strength of that," Sebastien said. "Mademoiselle LeClere, however, has twice lied—and claimed you as her alibi. Tell me—did she hope to inherit, when Madame Pontchartrain was gone?"
"Neither Mademoiselle LeClere nor I had anything to do with Madame's disappearance," Korvin said. "Nor do I expect you have anything but circumstantial evidence to suggest it."
Sebastien smiled, his shoulders and chest tightening as he considered the probable course of events. "Circumstantial evidence is enough to hold you and your young lady for questioning, however. And Mademoiselle LeClere hardly exhibits the marks of a clean conscience."
"It's no crime to study sorcery." Korvin úr calmly rebuttoned his shirt. "If we're condemning on history and circumstances, Don Sebastien, what about yourself?"
It had been inevitable. If Miss Meadows knew, then likely so did her entire coterie. Sebastien opened his mouth to respond—
Oczkar Korvin raised his right hand, fingers and palms bent around a hollow concavity, and Sebastien's world went white.
He folded reflexively against the light, shielding his face, his face scorched and the flesh on his hands and wrists searing. He groaned, or perhaps screamed; his ears were full of the roaring of that terrible light, and he couldn't hear