1.25. BZZZZZZZZZZZNRZZZZZZZZZGRZZZ

Seth scrambled back from the hellish bug-seraph. His back thumped against the closest of the office’s emerald-papered walls. Their cheery aquatic theme seemed suddenly ridiculous in the face of the horror that had spawned in its compass.

The seraph’s scything left arm snapped outward like some skeletomuscular slaughterhouse piston, tearing into the wall behind him, shearing a slice of gypsum board away. It bit into a vertical stud, and that saved Seth’s life, kept its right arm followup from reaching his stumbling dodge.

“Fucking saints,” he yelped.

“BZZZZZZZZZZZNRZZZZZZZZZGRZZZ,” the thing replied, and now its claw was free, and it pounced again. He dove to one side with such desperate haste that he fell on his ass; it ricocheted off the desk with a chitinous crunch, sending a blizzard of papers flurrying through the room, and then another leap, and it was on top of him. It was all he could do to tuck his knees up and prevent its grappling claws from spilling his entrails. It pressed its weight in, legs going thok-thok-thok on the hardwood in its mad scramble to close the distance. Another swipe from the claw and this one grazed his chest, ripping open his rental suit and scoring a shallow slash of red on the skin beneath. He screamed in pain and fear, and outrage at this absurd, bullshit death which had found him and he didn’t even understand why.

Your boot. The Fox’s giggly whisper in his head. The stiletto.

No, he hadn’t brought it. He remembered even as he reached for its place. Stupid Fox. Why would it—

His fist wrapped around a thin, cruciform hilt. No time to wonder why, no time to do anything but rip his stolen knife from where it was tucked impossibly into his boot and overhand plunge it like an ice pick into the seraph’s eye-blob.

The seraph burst into flames.

It clattered and caterwauled, burning brilliant and horrible and smelling like boiling trash, catching and spreading the fire in its dying frenzy—embers and melting flesh scattering to the rug, the bookshelves.

Seth sprinted past the odorous insectoid bonfire and out onto the second-floor landing and here was Marston’s doughy guard, powering up the stairs and hissing breath from his nose.

This fucking guy. Seth dashed back into the office, which was filling further with dirty smoke, and when the man got to the doorway and saw the burning, mutilated seraph lying on the smoldering rug, that moment of horror was what Seth needed to lunge past his attacker like a striking stoat, popping out of the belated attempt to catch him by the arm and scampering to the first floor.

He shouldered through the swinging door and nearly plowed face-first into Lisa, who was on her feet. Breakfast, it came as little surprise, was abandoned. Cutlery and cuisine lay strewn where it had fallen. Marston and Luka were huddled on the windowed side of the room, sheltering behind the upturned table.

On the other end of the chamber stood Lisa, her humanizing glamour dispelled, her unlit eyes wide, wild, and black as new-moon night. Still with her omnipresent smile. “How about everyone stays still and quiet,” she said, “and do what I tell you.”

Her hands were outstretched, fingers quirked into a preparatory gesture Seth knew, because everyone knew it.

A sorcerer was not a sorcerer until they could cast it; certainly not a Legion sorcerer, at any rate. You could learn your glamours and your infusions and your utility magicks later, after you learned the first spell. This was the reason everyone was afraid of sorcerers, why their names were registered on a Legion list, and they had to introduce themselves to whichever Corregidor governed them, and spend their lives under constant watch. Because of the one spell every sorcerer knew, the first spell they were taught, and for most of them the last.

There were many names for it, from the stuffy arcanists who called it offensive kinesioclasty to the hard-bitten veterans of the Winter Wars who called it the siege spell, to the frontline serialists and writers of martial poetics who had endless sobriquets for it, awe-inspiring as it was to watch the artillery mage lines unleash a volley across the sky.

Seth, being an uncultured rural sort, had always thought of it by its popular moniker. Two simple syllables, as unsubtle as the battlefield magic from which they came: Fireball.

“I’ll have Marston up from that table, if you please. And you will freeze.” She didn’t redirect her gaze from her target, but the bodyguard’s forward momentum was arrested regardless, mere feet from Seth. “Step back from my friend there, or I turn your employer into a crater.”

“You mad bitch.” Marston peeked past his hardwood cover with furious fear. “What are you?”

“Look at me, Marston,” Lisa said. “Look into these eyes. You know what I am. But you didn’t last night, or this morning. If I could do that, surely I can do this—” Her middle finger straightened out; the entire room jumped as though a firework had gone off. “And surely you’re a heartbeat from obliteration. Conduct yourself accordingly.”

“At this range?” Marston tried desperately for that old master-of-the-house bravado. “You’ll blow us all to pieces.”

“Nope,” Lisa said, all calm matter-of-fact. “I’ll put it right there, right in the rear corner of the room by that lovely hanging planter. Seth and I will be well clear of the primary blast. You and Luka will be obliterated, I’m afraid. I’ll be walloped by the table, maybe, but I’ve been walloped by far worse. And this chap behind me won’t be any trouble.”

“Let me go. Please, just let me go.” Tears shone on Luka’s face. “I have no inkling of what’s happened here. I just want to go.”

“We’re all going, Luka. We’re paying a visit to the hermandati.” Lisa didn’t shift her hands, but her tone softened. “I am Fontana’s new Verdugo, as it happens. I’m here to find out what happened and dispense the Sorcerer-General’s justice. If you’re innocent, you’re right as rain. And if you’re not, I’ll sniff it out.” Her nose wrinkled. “Speaking of. What’s that smell?”

“I don’t want to further complicate things.” Seth raised a finger to the stairwell. “But the office is a little bit on fire.”

Putting out the second floor of Marston il Molacq’s home was not, in the end, their responsibility. They instead spent the turning of the afternoon bringing Marston and his wife to the harrowed Corregidor’s office in Fontana’s splendid, waterspout-encrusted council hall, where Lisa paid her respects, explained her presence, and turned them both over to the hermandati. “For safekeeping,” she said. “This man has been poking into forces beyond his ken. I doubt he’s an occultist, but he took something from me. It will come down hard on him.”

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“Of course, Madame Verdugo.” Corregidor al Kalarre, in theory, outranked Seth’s employer. But she didn’t act like it around the smiling unlit, not now that she’d been revealed, with blades at her waist and hexes in her skin. “We will hold him here. Er. And you’ll be back?”

Lisa nodded. “In a week. I look forward to whatever you’ll have uncovered about the gentleman’s dealings. Most of it survived the fire. If he was bold enough to wrong me, I want a full accounting.” She extended her hand. Al Kalarre just stared at it for a few seconds, and then shook it as quick as she dared, which was more like a lingering high-five.

It was on the way back out, threading through the many basins and fountains of the lobby, that Seth glimpsed his reflection, and the field dress on his chest, and realized:

He’d been cut by a seraph. That turned you unlit.

Numbly he followed Lisa from the council hall, as she babbled cheerfully about the plumbing miracles they’d achieved here. Silently he followed her back to the hotel and helped her retrieve and pack away their things.

The entire time he felt unreal and automatic, his mind floating in a sphere of anxiety and fear and a strange color that it took much squinting at to register as excitement.

Excitement at becoming unlit. Why was he excited, he asked himself, as if he didn’t recognize the answer, strong and shapely and smiling by his side.

The ebullient doormen and curtseying maids, in contrast, had no smiles for them today. Not when the woman cutting them tips had white skin and black eyes. Sallow faces followed them, and fearful whispers. Lisa changed her behavior not one bit, still poised and regally polite, even now clad in her black road leathers and her pale gray skin.

The thief and the Verdugo trotted Demetrius out of the stable, hitched up to the splintery rented wagon, and joined the rolling thoroughfare. From the other side of the hotel, a column of smoke slashed through the mint-dyed sky. Passers by in their hang-bauble necklaces and ruffled neckerchiefs slowed as they saw it, unused to such a sight in the affluent garden district for the second time in a day.

Seth craned around to join them in watching the dark ribbon as it rose and dissolved into a patina of soot in the distant air. “What’s that smoke all about?”

Lisa didn’t bother looking. The round frosted panes of her sunglasses reflected the road back at itself. “They’re burning the bedsheets,” she said.

“Oh.” The implication caught up with Seth. “Saints. I’m sorry, Lisa.”

“Hmm?” She spared the spectacle a glance, then. “For what?”

“Surely they didn’t need to do that,” he said. “I understand if it feels, uh… bad.”

Smooth as usual, Seth.

“It doesn’t feel anything at all, Mr. il Gutierre. I am well used to it. And you’re right, of course. It’s just superstition.” Lisa smiled and turned back to the road. “But thank you for being thoughtful.”