It was ironic that at the moment when the world made the least amount of sense to her, she finally understood Silas.
She knew she was pushing him when she asked him to talk to her, but she didn’t expect him to stand up from his chair, grab her hand, and lead her to a glamoured door with more locks on it than Rasmus’s sex dungeon.
Not that she knew Rasmus had one of those, of course, but one could only assume.
She winced at the thought, recalling what she’d given the were in exchange for the meeting with Silas. At the time she hadn’t felt any remorse throwing him some information about the woman he’d been hunting, but now that she was tied to her own undomesticated man, she felt a little chagrined.
Good luck, Healer Mason. You’re going to need it.
Petra braced herself as they descended. There were walls on either side of the steps, clearly newer than the steps themselves, and what could only be described as a vault door at the bottom. She waited on the second to last step as Silas paused at the door. He waved a hand.
Magic rippled with a nauseating lurch. She had to brace herself against a wall to stop from swaying.
Silas glanced over his shoulder and used their linked hands to gently pull her away from the wall. “Shoulda warned you. When I took over the house, it needed a lot of work. It was basically left to rot after the war. Meant I could build the wards and sigilwork right into the beams and foundation. In the areas I really want to keep people out, it’s a bit stronger than you’re probably used to.”
In other words, the reason the house nearly hummed with his magic was because it was builtintothe house itself. She’d only felt wards that strong once before, when she got a vanishingly rare invitation to have tea with the extremely busy new Sovereign’s Consort.
The hallway that led to the private floor of Solbourne Tower was guarded by a mesh of wards painted onto the ceiling — in blood.
“Did you use sacrifices?” she croaked, not entirely sure she wanted to know.
Silas entered an extremely complex coded pattern of dots and triangles into a sleek glass panel to one side of the door. After a moment, the device he always wore on his wrist beeped. That beep was echoed by the panel. The door unlatched with a hydraulic hiss.
“I don’t need sacrifices or blood to make my sigils stick,” he answered, a touch waspish. She’d pricked his professional pride, apparently. “Only the unskilled need a crutch like that.”
Her necklace felt a little heavier than it had a moment ago. It occurred to her once again that a man like Silas shouldn’t have any use for her magic. She was all raw power, sure, butthis…The hair on her arms lifted in a wave as she followed him through the door.
Cold, smooth tile met the bare soles of her feet. Lights, tastefully set into the ceiling all around the perimeter of the room, lit the sprawling open space without casting an antiseptic glow over everything.
The room was split into four rough quadrants: One side of the square room was dedicated to a massive wall of computer servers. A desk was set up in front of it, decked out with a single massive, curved screen that nearly spanned its length. Another wall and the space before it was dedicated to what looked like a cross between a workshop and a high-tech, glass-enclosed cleanroom.
Another corner was all movable wire racks holding just about every sort of gadget, metal pipe, wire, and tool known to man or god. Finally, on the far side from where they stood, was a huge stainless steel work table covered in what could only be described as metal body parts.
He was right. It wasn’t a dungeon.
It was a lab.
“It might surprise you to learn that I consider my criminal career to be my day job,” he explained as he pulled her toward the wall of servers and its single, sparsely decorated desk. Petra’s attention refused to settle in one place, which explained why it took her so long to notice the line of red leather trunks arranged on the floor there.
“I like making money and I like doing things I shouldn’t. That runs in the family. Anti-authoritarianism is baked into my clan’s DNA, so I think someone like me was always bound to come’round sooner or later. Crime filled both my need for money and kept me entertained. It’s never been thegoal,though.”
She was almost too afraid to ask, but there wasn’t really a choice. “What’s your goal, Silas?”
They stopped by the desk. Somehow alerted to his proximity, the massive, curved screen came to life. A ribbon of changing color undulated across its transparent surface.
Silas waved his hand in front of the screen. A wild array of windows replaced the colorful ribbon: cascading lines of code, math equations, several download progress windows, and sprays of organic-looking sigils that moved on their own. They separated and recombined to some end she couldn’t even begin to guess.
He squinted at the download progress, grunted to himself, and then turned back to her. “I’m a sigilhacker first,” he finally answered. “I’ve been doing it since I was old enough to draw sigils in the dirt. I started with mastering wards, then I moved to combining magic with computers. But this shit is expensive, so I needed a quick way to make cash.” He shrugged. “Blackmail, murder, and mayhem is fun and pays well.”
Maybe a dungeon would have been better. Then she would have known what to expect, at least.
Petra watched the sigils curl and expand, split and reform, and felt a little bit like she was dealing with a complete unknown. Not because she was surprised he was a master sigilworker — Shade was famous for his wards as well as the price he demanded for them — but this was something so far above what she knew that it evoked a sense of vertigo.
Because Petra was no expert, but she knew her way around a sigil or two. She was rusty, of course, after so many years of not needing to use that knowledge, but sheknewthe standard western sigil alphabet.
The sigils scrawling across his screen like infinitely multiplying fractals weren’t that.
Their shapes were foreign, jagged. When she looked at them, a tremor erupted from an atavistic place in her brain, a warning to stay still, to not look too closely at a thing that was beyond what her mind could safely comprehend.
