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Syrenya’s voice drops. “That is deliberate.”

“I know.”

“She is bait.”

“I know.”

“Knowing is not the same as enduring.”

“Lady, if you are trying to be helpful, you have a strange technique.”

“I have been told my bedside manner lacks warmth.”

“By patients who survived?”

“Occasionally.”

The exchange barely reaches me. Isolde takes her position near the inner edge of the circle, close enough to the pedestal that any surge from it will hit her before it reaches Vaerith. She looks out over the crowd once, and our eyes meet across the distance.

Her message travels through the bond before her face betrays anything.

Do not let him aim you.

I swallow the snarl rising in my throat.

Vaerith places one elegant hand on the pedestal. “This device contains a harmless projection, modeled from infernal residue collected after recent unlawful incidents. You will see how contamination seeks weakness, how irresponsible contracts leave civic wards vulnerable, and why corrective authority must be expanded before rumors become bodies in our streets.”

The pedestal runes ignite.

Red light crawls through the carved channels, too smooth at first, too staged. A projection rises above the surface, a translucent shape of black smoke and silver flame, vaguely demonic, obviously controlled. Several nobles lean forward with polite interest. A clerk near the west rail begins taking notes.

The smell hits me half a breath later.

Rotwine and lightning.

Greasy obedience.

Compressed hunger.

My mouth goes dry.

“Lie,” I say.

Syrenya’s head turns. “What?”

“That’s not a projection.”

The glamour around my horns strains so violently that pain shoots behind my eyes. The bound demon inside the pedestal is folded under illusion, packed tight beneath the runes like a spring held by decorative string. The scent of it leaks through the staged residue, hidden from mortal noses and probably masked from most ward-scribes.

But not from me.

Not after I have absorbed one like it.

On the dais, Vaerith’s expression remains serene.

Isolde’s attention snaps to the pedestal.

She knows.