He wiped at some of the blood on the framework, revealing the intricate spellwork carved on the metal. Chips of clarion crystal were embedded throughout the device, none of them active.
“The other two assassins don’t have this sort of machine in their chests. I’ve never seen it before,” Soren said.
He knew the machine had pumped blood at one point, because the woman he’d killed had been alive. Her flesh wasn’t rotten. She’d been a living person, not a revenant, walking around with a metal clockwork heart in her chest, no one the wiser.
Vanya extended his hand toward the device, but Soren jerked it out of reach. “Don’t touch it.”
“I won’t, but let me try something. Put it down. I don’t want you holding it while I check the spell components.”
Soren set the clockwork heart back in the chest cavity. It sank a little against the organs there. Vanya held his hand over it, fingers splayed, and aether pooled against the palm of his hand. Not starfire, but still magic that drifted like rain down on the clockwork heart.
Which promptly broke.
The clarion crystals shattered while the framework cracked along every weld, the spellwork hissing with foreign magic that abruptly dissipated, leaving behind melted slag where the inscription had sat. Soren swore, glaring down at the mechanical mess now nothing more than bits in a dead woman’s chest.
“Very helpful,” Soren said irritably.
Vanya grimaced and drew his hand back. “The spell had a self-destruct component to it. That’s all I got off it before it was destroyed.”
“I’ll draw what I can remember seeing of the spellwork.”
Soren stepped away from the worktable and stripped off his gloves and the heavy work apron he’d appropriated from the room’s storage cabinet. He dug into his rucksack and came up with a notebook and fountain pen. He quickly sketched out a rough shape of the device before flipping the page to write out what pieces of the spellwork he’d seen.
He’d meant to take photographs of it, as he’d done with the body before he carved into it, but that was a useless endeavor now.
“The bodies need to be burned.”
“The high priestess is prepared to remove the bodies tonight and send them to a crematorium owned by the Star Order. They’ll be taken care of.”
Burning the bodies still left them with more questions than answers. Coming on the heels of his discovery of the crypt, Soren couldn’t know what the governor would make of this.
“I need to return to the Warden’s Island,” Soren said as he put away the notebook.
Vanya went still. “Tonight?”
He looked over at Vanya, taking in the more neutral robes the older man wore and the crown that still sat upon his head. The intricate gold filigree of the crown’s spikes was inlaid with rubies along the wide circlet. No House emblem could be found in its design, for it predated the Houses. But every emperor or empress that sat on the Imperial throne had worn it, a symbol of Solaria’s power.
He reached out and brushed his knuckles over Vanya’s cheek. “Tomorrow. I’ll want to say goodbye to Raiah.”
Vanya blew out a breath before nodding. “If you are finished with the dead, the living have use for you.”
“Let me gather my things.”
He took with him his rucksack and the camera with its few tintypes packed up in a separate case. The delicate remains of the clockwork metal heart were placed in a storage case Soren appropriated by emptying it of embalming tubes. Vanya took charge of that, despite Soren’s protest.
“Of the two of us, who can use the aether?” Vanya asked.
Soren bit the inside of his cheek so hard it bled. “Just don’t let it break any further.”
Vanya smiled a little at that jibe and waited while Soren washed his hands with an old bar of soap and hot water. Then he followed Vanya into the corridor, where two star priests still waited by order of the high priestess, the only people outside the Houses allowed below.
“Cremate the bodies,” Vanya ordered.
The two star priests bowed deeply. “By your will, Your Imperial Majesty.”
Soren had retrieved all he could from the dead, and they took what mattered back aboveground. The star temple was nearly empty, but beyond its doors, the legionnaires ever guarded it.
The escort wasn’t something Soren was used to, though he supposed this was how things would be from here on out. He wondered what else would change, now that Vanya wore the crown that gave him the right to sit upon the Imperial throne. The disquiet stayed with him through the walk back to and through the palace to the royal wing and the bedroom there. The rooms were different than what he’d grown used to. Soren wasn’t sure he’d get the chance to learn the walls of this bedroom as he had the other one.
