Chapter 532: Hermes Will Not Go

By the time the carriage turned out of the street where the Phillips residence stood, the fog had already crept up.

Isabella sat across from him with her sable collar turned up, her chin buried deep inside it.

She rested the tips of both boots on the foot-warmer grate and kept her eyes fixed out the window, saying nothing at all.

Richard waited for two blocks, but nothing followed.

As the wheels jolted over a drainage gutter, he could no longer hold back. Wanting to know why MacFie was in such a rush, he went with the safest question he could ask: "Auntie, when did Professor MacFie get back?"

"Noon today." Isabella didn't even look at him.

"From Marseille?"

"Yes. Five days on a Franc hospital ship, followed by an overnight train as soon as he disembarked."

She turned her gloves inside out.

"According to the staff on duty at the department office, he went straight to his office after getting off the train, then called me to go fetch you."

The carriage paused at an intersection. Outside the recruitment office on the street corner, a long line had formed.

Registration under Lord Derby's scheme closed tomorrow, and half the men in line had already slipped on khaki armbands embroidered with a small red crown.

With that armband on, a man could walk down the street without young women shoving a white feather into his hand.

Being handed a white feather marked you out as a coward dodging military service.

An omnibus squeezed past alongside them, a female conductor in a long skirt standing on the rear footboard and calling out the stops at the top of her lungs.

This time last year, that job had still belonged to men.

"Asking for you was the first thing he did upon getting back."

Isabella watched the street for a while before speaking again. "And then over the phone, he asked where you live now and what time you usually leave the house."

His aunt lifted her chin slightly from her collar and finally turned her face toward him, a teasing glint in her eyes.

"I've partnered with plenty of Hunters on field assignments and met my fair share of Highlanders. When a Highlander starts asking right off the bat where someone lives and what time they leave the house, odds are he's already got a weapon tucked in his hand."

The carriage cabin wasn't the least bit cold, yet Richard felt an inexplicable chill run down his spine, wondering what he had done lately...

In Genoa, he had sliced a merchant's calling card in half, only to turn around and sell the man a prescription for his wounds.

In the mountains, he had eaten a plate of beans grown atop a grave, and beside a lake in Switzerland... He pinched that thought off right there.

Not a single one of those things had anything to do with MacFie.

Except for that rabbit messenger—the hare had delivered his reply to Salonika, and inside that letter...

"Oh, right," his aunt said, sounding a bit puzzled herself.

"He also asked what kind of camera you used to take the photograph."

The carriage hit a pothole, and the back of Richard's head thumped against the cabin wall.

Out of nowhere, Isabella asked another question. "Aside from your sister, who else sat in the chairs beside you?"

"Oh, Phillips took one."

She shot her nephew a sidelong glance and buried her face back in her collar.

MacFie's office door stood cracked open, the scent of peat smoke seeping out to mingle with the dry aroma of rolled oats. Perched on the windowsill was that hare, munching on oats and scattering crumbs across the ledge.

At the sight of Richard walking in, the black tips of its ears twitched, and it thumped its hind leg hard against the wood.

Amused, his aunt reached out a hand to pet it.

Richard quickly stopped her. "Don't touch it. It bites."

The white-haired giant sat behind his desk, facing the doorway squarely.

The moment they stepped inside, he slapped a photograph down on the desk right in front of Richard.

"You're here. Explain yourself, then."

In the photograph, the girl had fallen asleep with her head tilted to one side, a strand of red hair draped across her cheek and her lips slightly parted.

"Uh..." Richard felt his face burn.

"You took this?"

Isabella leaned in from beside him, looked the photograph over, and raised an eyebrow.

"Not a very good shot... The lighting is too dim, the framing is off-center, and the armrest takes up half the picture." She straightened up. "Next time you take a picture of a girl, don't shoot from above looking down—it makes her chin look short."

MacFie turned his head toward her. "Isabella, stop interrupting."

Isabella met his gaze squarely. "I'm offering a professional opinion."

Richard spoke up, his throat a little dry. "That day in July, she shoved the Sealing Deflection manuscript into my hands, leaned back in her seat, and fell fast asleep. My... supernatural item had just undergone an evolution and I wanted to test it out. My hand moved before my brain did."

"Your hand moved before your brain did."

MacFie let out a snort of laughter. "I've heard that excuse plenty of times in the Highlands. Every sheep-stealer says the exact same thing when he gets caught."

On the windowsill, the rabbit thumped its foot again to second the motion.

"Enough of that. I called you here on serious business."

MacFie flipped the photograph over, every trace of teasing vanishing from his face.

On the back of the photograph lay the other side of the veil. Catherine was still reclining on the sofa with the Scales suspended above her head, the left pan heaped full of small gray pebbles.

The right pan held only slips of paper, and the beam had tilted so sharply that the left side was nearly touching the floor.

Richard's gaze fell on the slips of paper in the right pan—to his surprise, they were the IOUs she had written to him.

When Clara had examined a photograph taken with the Sphinx Lamp back then, she had said the reverse side held a stretch of sealed, slow-moving time.

He had always assumed "sealed" meant it had stopped altogether.

Yet looking at it now, the time inside the photograph had clearly kept flowing all along.

Isabella made no further comment on the lighting. Pulling off her gloves, she picked up the photograph to study it closely again, then remarked out of the blue, "In Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, a handsome young man makes a wish for the portrait in his attic to grow old in his stead, so that all his sins and wrinkles appear on the canvas."

She cast a glance at her nephew.

"Your photograph here is a bit like Wilde's story—it records every trace and change that time leaves on a person."

MacFie picked up the photograph and said, "On the night of November 28, the rabbit brought the letter back to Salonika. The girl read it the instant she got it, then tucked this photograph face-down inside her notebook and wouldn't let anyone near it."

"This damned rabbit even took her side and bit me once."

The white-haired giant held up his left hand, revealing a pale scar on the webbing between his thumb and forefinger that still hadn't completely faded.

"It had never been that vicious with me before, which meant there had to be something in that letter."

MacFie paused, not a shred of shame on his weathered face.

"...Later, once she fell asleep, I sneaked a look."

The white-haired giant held the photograph up and turned it to the front.

"When I saw the front, I nearly took you for a scoundrel and thought the very first thing I'd do back in the Imperial Capital was wring your neck."

Isabella gave an awkward cough and brought the edge of her hand down in a sharp chop across the back of her nephew's neck, about to offer an apology on his behalf as his elder.

MacFie's next words came right on the heels of that.

Turning the photograph back over, he rapped it with his knuckle, his expression turning grave. "Once I sensed the ether traces and flipped it over to see the back, I realized it was actually a stroke of luck you took this picture—it managed to expose everything wrong with her."

Richard didn't understand. "You're a Major Adept, and she was right there in front of you..."

"All I could see were the day-to-day changes."

MacFie leaned back against his chair. "I traveled with her through Macedonia for over a month, watching her grow thinner and her voice raspier by the day, yet I couldn't see where the root of the ailment lay."

He went on to recount what they had witnessed during their field assignment in Greece.

Around Salonika, a vast perimeter of barbed wire had been strung up, which the Empire's soldiers called the Birdcage.

During those days, the retreating forces blew up the railway bridge at the Iron Gate Gorge, stranding the Serbian refugees on the far bank.

A station quartermaster chose to burn an entire warehouse of flour rather than hand any of it out to the starving refugees.

And an Empire sergeant beat a Macedonian villager until his face was covered in blood over a single mule.

Every single time, the Nemesis Mask urged Catherine from inside her throat to speak out and pass judgment.

The channel of the Sealing Deflection Ritual redirected that urge toward copying inscriptions, but out in the snowfields there were no rubbings to copy.

She wasn't a military judge and had no authority to pronounce sentence upon soldiers on their own side, and MacFie strictly forbade her from opening her mouth. In the end, Catherine wrote "Why" in her notebook and collapsed into the snow.

Lying aboard the Franc hospital ship, she had kept that photograph clutched in her hand, flipping it front and back the entire voyage.

By the time MacFie finished speaking, the only sound left in the office was the faint crackle of burning peat in the stove.

"How is she now?" Richard asked.

"At the sanatorium, just a wall away from her uncle."

MacFie let out a sigh. "She can't even write anymore."

Richard stood rooted to the spot, his hand pressing against the left side of his chest before he even realized it.

"Who else have you photographed like this?" MacFie asked.

Richard counted them off silently: the family portrait in the backyard of Ashford House, the two from Room 314, Duncan at the sanatorium...

"My family, all the students in my aunt's department seminar, and Catherine's uncle. That's all."

"Lock every last one of them away." MacFie knitted his brows tightly.

"If a photograph like this falls into someone else's hands, it becomes a window opened straight through the veil. Even if they don't use it as a Spellcasting Medium, just holding it would tell them your family's condition and which day is best to strike."

"...I understand."

Isabella, who had remained silent the whole time, turned around now. "Where is the one with your grandfather?"

"In my dorm desk drawer."

"Give it to me tonight." She crushed her gloves into a tight ball in her hand.

A spark popped through the grate of the stove and landed on the rug.

MacFie broke the half-eaten oatcake on the windowsill in two and held the larger piece out to Richard.

"Eat."

Richard took it.

"If you're not eating it, I will."

The white-haired giant began munching on the smaller piece himself. "I starved for over a month in Macedonia."

Watching him chew the oatcake, Isabella quietly slipped a piece of candy into her own mouth.

Chewing on the cake, MacFie spoke in a muffled voice. "There's a very old ritual in the Highlands called a blood oath."

"Back in the day, the MacFie family and the Blackwood family feuded for generations over the hunting grounds on the North Shore of Lake Eirin. Eventually, someone from the MacFie family fired a shot through the fog using an enchanted bullet and killed the Blackwood family's eldest son on the spot."

MacFie finished the oatcake and brushed the crumbs from his hands.

"The younger brother buried his older brother, went home, and stopped speaking. He ate his meals as usual, hunted, and chopped fodder for the cattle without uttering a single word. When his mother wept and begged him to speak, he simply helped her sit down in a chair, turned around, and went back outside to keep splitting firewood. The girl betrothed to him waited half a year before she had no choice but to marry someone out of town. All the elders in the clan said the boy had gone mad."

"How long did he hold it in?"

"A year and a day."

In the old law codes, many time limits were set at a year and a day: a serf who fled a manor and lived inside a chartered town for a full year and a day became a free man.

Once time built up to that final day, nothing could be undone.

"The following autumn, at the Inverlochy cattle fair."

"He walked across half the market straight up to the man who had fired that shot and spoke a single word. The man dropped dead on the spot without a single wound on his body."

"What word?"

"The man's name."

On the windowsill, the rabbit stopped chewing.

"I've heard that story twice."

MacFie said, "Once at the tavern the MacFie family frequented, told by a toothless old man; and once by a campfire from Catherine's great-grandfather Alpin, the year he took me out on field duty."

Isabella laid her gloves across her knees and slowly smoothed them out. "So for the past few weeks, Catherine..."

MacFie nodded. "The mask kept forcing her to speak, and she stubbornly refused, gritting her teeth and enduring it day after day—until the imprint in her bloodline mistook her silence for the start of that ritual all over again."

"And now that the girl has shaken hands with Maggie and neither of them cares a whit about the old feud between their ancestors, it makes things even trickier."

"Every time she holds it back, another stone gets added right here."

MacFie pushed the photograph toward Richard.

"Take it and have a look. Old Mo mentioned you picked up some new skills in Milan."

Richard spread out the Condensed Mirror Method, letting Still Water settle over the slow-flowing time on the back of the photograph.

Once the self-check of [Speculation: Morphostructuring] activated, examining the photograph was much like inspecting a blueprint:

If the left pan kept sinking, it would plunge straight into Catherine's throat.

The fulcrum at the center of the beam was a knot tied in an ancient style, holding an oath within it: I shall speak it.

After that phrase, there was a slot meant for the person who was to hear those words, yet right now it stood empty.

He shifted his gaze to the right pan. Every one of those IOUs trailed a fine thread tied to the hand of the person holding the photograph—namely, himself.

Richard looked up. "The problem is that the blood oath has no landing point. The IOUs, on the other hand, have a clear owner—they spell out exactly who owes whom and who the creditor is."

He set the photograph gently back onto the desk.

"Professor, there's a method from the Subcontinent. When a divine weapon is unleashed and cannot be recalled, you designate a landing point for it."

"Since the IOUs have an owner, we can make the oath land on the IOUs."

MacFie raised his eyebrows slightly.

"Where did you learn mystical side knowledge from the Subcontinent?"

"From a borrowed book."

"Who lent it to you?"

"...A librarian."

The white-haired giant stared at him for a long time. "...Old Mo mentioned Milan once in his letter, and the next three lines were blacked out."

At those words, Richard abruptly turned his face toward the window, though nothing could be seen through the fog.

"All right, let's go see her first today."

MacFie stood up, the top of his head nearly brushing the chandelier.

When the three of them arrived at the sanatorium, Duncan was sitting in the glass conservatory with a copy of The Scotsman spread open in his hands.

He had put on a little weight since the summer, yet his complexion looked even worse.

Folding up the newspaper, the old Hunter shot out a hand and gripped Richard's arm with tremendous force.

"Lad, you promised me last time that you'd keep an eye on her for me. Don't you forget it!"

Catherine's room was at the far end of the corridor. She was sitting propped against the headboard, her red hair braided and resting over her shoulder.

On the nightstand sat an enamel mug filled with broken pencil stubs.

The instant the girl saw Richard walk in, her eyes flew wide open.

Then she spotted the photograph in MacFie's hand. Lunging halfway out of bed in a flash, she snatched the photograph from the professor's grasp, flipped it over, and shoved it under her pillow.

MacFie held up his empty hand, looking a bit put out.

"...I am your mentor, at least."

Catherine gave a huff and ignored him.

Reaching for her notebook, she picked out the longest pencil stub from the mug and began to write.

She wrote very slowly; with every stroke she put down, it looked as though a boulder were pressing on the tip of the lead.

"...The photograph."

The moment she finished, the pencil snapped in half with a sharp crack.

Tossing the broken stub back into the mug, she looked up and glared at Richard.

Duncan cleared his throat from the doorway. "As for the photograph, the professor showed it to me too. It really is a mediocre shot."

Catherine grabbed a broken pencil stub from the mug and hurled it at the doorway. It bounced off the doorframe, and Duncan didn't even bother dodging, grinning broadly as he strolled away.

Meanwhile, MacFie wasted no time getting down to business and was already preparing to set up the ritual.

He went to the head nurse and asked for the most undisturbed spot in the sanatorium.

Without asking a single question, the head nurse unhooked one key from the heavy ring at her waist and slapped it into his palm.

"Bring it back before twelve, and don't touch the developing tank."

The place was a small darkroom next to the sanatorium's newly added X-ray room, used specifically for developing negatives.

Catherine was settled on the developing table with two blankets draped over her.

MacFie pulled a stone from his coat pocket.

"Picked it up by Lake Ailin," he said, resting the stone on the girl's stomach.

Catherine looked down at the stone, then back up at him, her green eyes brimming with questions.

Isabella answered for MacFie. "With that weighing it down, the words won't leak out."

MacFie sat down on a round stool and held out his hand. "The IOUs."

Richard did a quick count as he pulled the whole stack of IOUs from between the pages of his notebook.

He counted seventeen slips in total.

Some had been torn from notebooks, one had been jotted down on the back of a ticket on the spur of the moment, and one was even written in the blank margin of a restaurant bill.

MacFie untied the string and reached beside Catherine's pillow for the antler chisel—the very one brought back from Covered Fire Village, which she now kept with her at all times.

The white-haired giant picked up one of the IOUs and flicked the tip of the chisel along the edge of the paper.

As he worked through them, he read each one aloud:

"One chisel from Covered Fire Village—owed."

"Treating Uncle Duncan's injuries—owed."

"Water Horse mane—taken for my own use."

On another, tiny pencil script was crammed onto the back of an old train ticket:

"Fell asleep on the sofa on a certain day in July and failed to pour tea for my guest—owed."

Isabella leaned in for a couple of glances at the IOUs and shook her head. 'My nephew's charm is growing greater by the day,' she thought. Once MacFie finished carving the last IOU, he set the chisel back beside Catherine's hand, stood up, and stepped back into the corner of the room.

"All right, begin."

Isabella stood inside the salt circle, facing the bed directly.

She cleared her throat and began in the cadence of a bard.

"Èisib. (Listen.)"

For the second line, she switched to Latin, alternating between the tongues as she chanted the verse of judgment.

"Listen, you who sit beside the fire."

"The words have taken shape in the dark."

"Before daybreak, they must fall to earth."

At that point she shifted to another passage, speaking in the Albion Language—the scripture every child had heard in church:

"To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven... a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak."

Outside the window, the fog slowly froze in place, clinging motionless against the glass. Richard activated his Spirit Vision, and before long, Nemesis's Scales surfaced on the other side of the veil.

Drawing a Silver Needle from its case, he fixed his eyes on the Scales for a few seconds, then abruptly raised his hand.

"I! (Settle!)"

The Silver Needle slashed diagonally through the air, grazing right across a ridge completely invisible to the naked eye.

With a sharp click, the long-suspended Scales finally stirred.

The next instant, the entire stack of IOUs grew abruptly heavy.

Richard's wrist jerked downward under the sudden load, nearly dropping the stack.

Changes unfolded on the other side of the veil as well.

Above Catherine's head, the Nemesis Mask slowly emerged.

With only two hollow eye sockets, the mask hovered motionless, facing Catherine directly.

Immediately afterward, a voice neither male nor female, and of no discernible age, sounded directly inside her mind: "Must this retribution be carried out by you?"

Catherine parted her lips, and before she could even make a sound, a thread of blood seeped from the corner of her mouth.

She swallowed the blood down. "It doesn't have to be me."

The room fell quiet.

Catherine closed her eyes for a moment; when she opened them again, she was no longer staring at the mask.

She looked past the Nemesis Mask toward the thick, motionless fog outside the window.

"...Precisely because it doesn't have to be me."

The girl's voice was terribly hoarse, reduced to little more than a breathy whisper.

"If no one else will do it, then I will."

As the final words fell, the IOUs in Richard's hand began to change color.

At that very same moment, the scene outside the window shifted.

The fog that had been frozen against the glass suddenly parted to either side, revealing the night sky.

A few stars hung up above, almost piercingly bright. Right after that, every windowpane in the entire sanatorium shuddered in unison, letting out a low hum.

In some ward or another, someone disturbed by the commotion mumbled a curse in their sleep.

Within the veil, the Scales swayed even more violently.

The left pan, which had been weighed down so low, sprang sharply upward, rocking back and forth several times before finally settling near balance with only a slight tilt remaining.

Nemesis's second Divinely Crafted Armament was finally complete.

Yet MacFie did not relax.

"It's not over yet."

As soon as he said that, he turned his head toward the darkroom door—something had been drawn over.

Richard spread his Still Water outward and perceived a mass of damp, freezing vapor.

Clinging all over this evil creature were other people's breaths—dozens of them, hundreds of them, each carrying the rusty tang of blood.

MacFie made no move to strike, simply explaining, "This kind of evil creature is called consumptive vapor. It loves nothing more than sucking away the breath of people with weak lungs who venture out at night. They're most common around hospitals, and the nurses on night duty just mistake them for nighttime coughing."

The evil creature outside the door seemed to sense that something was amiss in this sanatorium; having only just drifted close, it was already moving to slip away.

"Hurry and try it out, or it'll get away."

MacFie said to Catherine, "Isabella and I have both reined in our ether, but at this range, no matter how sluggish it is, it's caught on."

Catherine pushed the stone off her stomach and propped herself up on the table, the streak of blood at the corner of her mouth already dry.

She fixed her eyes on the door, outside which the sinister mist was churning rapidly.

Catherine spoke a single word.

"Disperse!"

The instant the word fell, the red darkroom lamp burst with a sharp pop.

Every one of the several hundred breaths clinging to the consumptive vapor dropped away at once. It shriveled faster and faster—flattening into a thin skin, crumbling into ash, until at last not even ash remained.

Upstairs, in some room or another, an elderly patient let out a long sigh in their sleep.

MacFie gave an approving hum, the creases on his face relaxing. "Remember how that felt. From now on, save up this blood oath—the longer you store it, the stronger its power."

Catherine nodded.

"It can disperse evil creatures, interrupt a Spell Formula someone is halfway through chanting, or preemptively define the nature of a target—just like you did a moment ago."

The white-haired giant glanced over at the stack of darkened IOUs in Richard's hand.

"Whatever your pathways can't hold will be stored in that stack of IOUs he's carrying. Whenever you need to use one, just ask him for a slip back."

"But therein lies the risk as well—if those IOUs fall into an enemy's hands, the ability is as good as crippled."

Richard tied the stack of IOUs back up, tucked it into his inner pocket, and buttoned his overcoat over it.

MacFie added to Catherine, "You'll still cough when you speak in daily life, just less severely. Use your own judgment."

Catherine reached for her notebook and the pencil beside the chisel, and wrote: Then I'll talk less.

This time, the lead didn't snap.

Setting the notebook down, she turned her head to look at Richard.

She looked at him for a long time—so long that Richard began to wonder if he had developer fluid smudged on his face.

"I won't say thank you." Her voice was very raspy and soft.

Richard said nothing.

"Saying thank you means wanting to settle the tab."

She swallowed a mouthful of blood-streaked saliva.

"This debt, I want to keep owing."

The darkroom was quiet. She was the sort of person who would shove a meat pie right back into someone's hands, who felt compelled to record failing to pour a guest a cup of tea on the back of a train ticket.

For someone who insisted on keeping every score even, this was an imbalance she embraced of her own free will.

All of a sudden, Isabella spun around and grabbed hold of MacFie.

"Professor, let's go see if the water has boiled yet!"

"What water?"

"Any water at all."

Half dragging and half pulling, she hauled the old man—who stood a head and a half taller than she did—out the door. It swung half shut behind them before Isabella pulled it firmly closed from the outside.

Catherine drew her gaze back, letting it rest on the spot over Richard's inner coat pocket.

"...The photograph came out ugly."

"Give it back to me, then?"

"No."

With that, she leaned back onto the developing table and pulled the blanket up over half her face.

Before long, her breathing beneath the blanket grew long and deep.

She was asleep, one hand resting outside the blanket, her red braid hanging over the edge of the table, and her lips slightly parted—just like that afternoon.

Standing beside the table and looking down at her, Richard raised his right hand without realizing it, spreading his thumb and forefinger to frame a shot.

"Don't you dare."

Half of MacFie's body was still being yanked down the hallway by Isabella, while the other half poked back through the doorway, his eyes glaring wide and round.

... December 14, eleven o'clock at night.

The atmosphere inside the temple was colder than usual.

All seven stone chairs were occupied. The flames in Hecate's torch burned low, and the keys hanging at her waist did not stir.

She dispensed with any pleasantries.

"The winter solstice. St. Gotthard Pass."

Her voice issued from all three faces at once—maiden, mother, and crone—all three tones equally cold and unyielding.

"Anyone who dares approach that pass will have their chair revoked. This rule supersedes all else."

Hecate rested her hand upon her torch.

"Several times this month, I sent word to inquire about the situation there."

"One source sent no reply."

"Another replied with only a single word: Hungry."

As that word left her lips, every flame in the temple shrank downward in unison, and the ears of wheat atop Demeter's head rustled faintly.

Hecate continued, "The third source ate the messenger I sent."

No one answered. Heracles shifted in his seat.

"I also have an old friend in the north, whom you all saw during the last group battle," Hecate went on.

"She has lived longer than everyone at this table combined. When I went to ask her, she gave me only a single line in reply."

The flames on her torch fell completely still: "On that night, do not let anyone or anything connected to you appear near St. Gotthard Pass."

At those words, everyone seated at the table grasped the gravity of the matter.

"Very well. I have said my piece."

Hecate rapped her knuckles on the table and swept her gaze around the circle.

"Now, each and every one of you will swear upon your mask not to go anywhere near that place."

Dionysus was the first to raise his cup.

"I swear by this cup that on the night of the winter solstice, I will drink in my cellar straight through to noon the next day without even stepping out my bedroom door."

He thought for a moment, then added, "And if anyone comes to invite me up that mountain for a drink, I'll drink them under the table too."

Heracles planted his olive-wood club against the floor with a thud.

"I'm up north, seven or eight hundred miles from that mountain with a sea in between. I swear by this club, I wouldn't go even if my wife dragged me there."

Demeter laid her sickle across her knees.

"The fields need turning around the winter solstice. I will stay and watch over the farmland."

Prometheus remained silent for a moment, then opened his palm to cradle a small wisp of flame.

"I will not go. Not a single one of the furnaces in my workshop will go out on the night of the winter solstice."

Nemesis's Scales rose into the air, two words surfacing upon them: Will not go.

Hecate's gaze lingered on those Scales for an extra beat.

Saying nothing, she turned to the final chair. "Hermes."

Richard sat there, the Ancient Bronze Mask adorned with golden wings and twin serpents covering his face.

He knew what Hecate was waiting for: any words sworn upon a divine mask would be weighed by the veil.

On the night of the winter solstice, however, his physical body would remain in the Imperial Capital, lying in bed without taking a single step outside.

The one actually ascending the mountain would be his shadow, wearing the [Mask of the Inverse Envoy] with its golden serpents flipped to bite their own tails.

The veil did not recognize that mask as Hermes; what the lord of the hunt recognized was the "Exalted Envoy," and what the Norse table recognized was also the "Exalted Envoy."

He spoke: "Hermes will not approach that pass."

Every bit of that sentence, down to the punctuation, was the truth.

Hecate looked at him for a moment. "Just that one line?"

"Just that one line."

The flame on the torch flickered once, then stood straight again.

The veil weighed the statement and likewise found no fault with it. Hecate withdrew her gaze.

Inside the front of Richard's coat, the other mask grew hot, warming his chest.

Where no one could see, the two golden serpents slowly coiled once around each other.