walls, folding them up, and stuffing them in her pockets.
“Where are the slaves?” asked Gregor. “What have you done with the people aboard this ship?”
“But…we couldn’t see,” whispered the man. “Weren’t allowed to see. Can’t see him. Cannot see the…the king behind the veil…” He coughed wetly.
Gregor sat back and stared at the mutilated man, his face like ash. “What did you do here?” he asked softly.
“Please…I have seen him.” The scriver’s words were slurred and drunken now. “I’ve looked at him. I can’t have that in…inside me…”
“What has my mother done?” asked Gregor.
The scriver’s head lolled back, and he went silent.
For a moment they did nothing, not daring to speak. Then they stared at the door beyond, leading to the larger chamber.
Sancia looked around again at the books and the bowls on the table. This was their preparation room.
Gregor and Sancia crossed to the large door on the far side of the wall.
But is this where they did their true work?
“Do you see anything inside, Sancia?” whispered Gregor.
She flexed her sight. The room on the other side of the door was dark, devoid of any logic or arguments. She shook her head.
Gregor slowly took a breath, opened the door, walked into the room, and held up his lantern.
“Oh…Oh my God…” he moaned.
Sancia joined him. Then she saw, and she felt faint and fell to her knees.
Nearly a hundred bodies of men, women, and children lay on the floor of the room, all bound in chains and ropes and arranged in overlapping rings around a small, circular space where a single lantern shone. Sancia instantly recognized the bodies as slaves, judging from the spectrum of races, or the brands on their arms, or the hardness of their hands. They were all dead, though none bore any sign of injuries—except for a small, scrived metal marker that had been placed upon their chests.
Sancia dropped her espringal and covered her face. It was too horrible, just too horrible to see…
And the most curious thing was the moths: the floor of the room was covered in dead, tiny, fragile white moths, so many it was almost like a light dusting of snow.
“What did they do?” asked Gregor. “How could they…It’s not midnight yet, is it?” He fumbled for his timepiece and read it. “It’s not even eleven o’clock…”
She shook herself and stood. She studied the little metal markers that lay on the chests of the dead slaves. She saw no silvery tangle of logic, no bundle of commands woven into their reality.
Which means, she thought, that they aren’t rigs…Or they’ve been used in the creation of something else, like a smithy might use a mold…
Fighting the urge to vomit or run or scream, she walked among the rings of bodies on the floor to the space in the center, the little circle with the lamp. As she grew closer she saw countless sigils running along the circle’s edge, a dense, tangled stream of metals and paints.
A stream of blood marred the sigils at one point, breaking whatever binding they’d once laid upon the world here. Sancia saw they were hierophantic commands, but not ones she was familiar with. She pulled out one of the parchments she’d taken from the other room.
“Sancia,” pleaded Gregor. “Sancia, what’s going on?”
“Be quiet,” she said as she read.
“Sancia…it can’t have happened already, can it? He…he cannot be back already…”
“Gregor, be quiet!” she snapped.
She studied the sigils on the parchment carefully, then looked at those written on the floor. Her heart grew cold as she became more convinced of what had happened here.
“They…They scrived time,” said Sancia finally.
“What?”
“These sigils here,” she said, pointing to them. “I’ve never seen them before. But…But I think they convinced reality that the time inside the circle was different from the time outside.”
“You’re not making sense.”
“Are you listening, Gregor? They didn’t have to wait for midnight. Not