“Can we just get back to work?”
“Laila, I wonder? The living temple goddess?”
Enrique rolled his eyes. Séverin, on the other hand, went entirely still.
“Or is it the little ice queen?”
“Neither,” he said sharply.
But even as he said the words, he couldn’t help remembering that one of the last times he’d been in this room was with Zofia. Together,they had cracked the code on the Sator Square. Together, they had found something. He’d just thought they made a good team. Yet even as he remembered it, he saw Zofia in the train compartment. The light catching on her candle-bright hair. Her pale fingers tracing the neckline of her velvet dress as she practiced, of all things,flirting.
Enrique shook himself. His head was a snarl of too many impressions. Tristan’s closed eyes, the dead stare of the figures on the bone clock, the peppery scent of Hypnos’s skin, and light catching on Zofia’s hair.
“When will they be back?”
“In an hour,” said Séverin. “Where are we on the clock?”
“Nowhere,” grumbled Hypnos.
“Have you tried taking off the glass covering?”
“What would that do?” demanded Enrique. “It’s far too delicate as it is. Maybe that’s why it’s called a bone clock in the first place. Fragile bones and all that. I lifted the covering once and examined it with kidskin gloves, and the silver immediately started flaking.”
“Fine, fine,” said Séverin, although he didn’t sound very convinced. He turned to Hypnos. “What about any headway on the Fallen House?”
“There’s nothing here that we haven’t already discussed. The Fallen House believed it was their sacred duty to rebuild the Tower of Babel. They sought to do that by”—Hypnos paused, squinting as he held a piece of parchment to his face—“‘harnessing the power of the dead.’ I have no idea what that means. It sounds both sinister and terribly unfashionable.”
“Well, they were always cryptic,” said Enrique, gesturing at the famed bone clock.
At the height of their power, the Fallen House had never once revealed where they held their meetings. Only their infamous bone clocks, their Forged objects of communication, could reveal themeetings’ location. Supposedly, the clock also contained a failsafe method allowing a non-House member to locate them in case of emergency, but Enrique was starting to think that was nothing more than rumor.
“How do we know Roux-Joubert is even at the Fallen House’s original meeting place?” asked Enrique.
Séverin turned over the honeybee chain in his hand. “He’d consider it a point of pride. As if he were intentionally continuing a legacy.”
Hypnos snorted. “Him andwho else? You told me that man kept saying ‘we,’ but the Order has tightly controlled anything even resembling recruitment to the Fallen House. They had the leader executed, and the rest of them were given the choice of death or a strong mind affinity alteration that would wipe out any recollection of the Fallen House.”
“But so many of those members must have been with the Fallen House for most of their adult lives, wouldn’t mind affinity make them—”
“—a shell of their former selves?” finished Hypnos. “Yes. Which is why a shocking number of them chose death. Fanatics.”
“Some must have escaped both death and punishment, though,” mused Séverin. “Perhaps they were driven deep underground.”
“My guess is that it’s a clever, deranged man and his hench person with that blade hat you mentioned. The Fallen House loved to travel in packs, like they were wolves or some such. Trust me, if he had more than one person on his side, he would’ve brought them all for that little showdown in the greenhouse,” said Hypnos. At this, even Séverin nodded in agreement. “Also: Who wears a blade hat? What if it slips and then you end up slashing your face? Detestable.”
Enrique shuddered, crossing himself. “At this rate, we’re not going to find Roux-Joubert or his henchman. Nothing on this clock is helpful. Not even the notation.”
He pointed at the one word scrawled just beneath the sixth hour marking:nocte.
Midnight.
“It’s just the name of the clockmaker,” said Séverin.
“I wouldn’t be too sure… It might be a directive, a rule of some kind meant to inform us how to look at the clock.”
“Can I just see the clock without the protective covering?” asked Séverin.
“Only if you promise you won’t smash it.”
