Probably did it himself, I thought with an inward shake of my head. It was hard to believe that this was the boy Genya had fallen so hard for.
His eyes flicked to the collar at my neck. He began to fidget with the items on his worktable, moving them around and arranging them in careful lines: a compass, graphite pencils, pens and pots of ink in different colors, pieces of clear and mirrored glass, a hard-boiled egg that I assumed was his dinner, and page after page of drawings and plans that I couldn’t begin to make sense of.
“What are you working on?” I asked.
He blinked again. “Dishes.”
“Ah.”
“Reflective bowls,” he said. “Based on a parabola.”
“How … interesting?” I managed.
He scratched his nose, leaving a giant blue smudge along the ridge. “It might be a way to magnify your power.”
“Like the mirrors in my gloves?” I’d asked that the Durasts remake them. With the power of two amplifiers, I probably didn’t need them. But the mirrors allowed me to focus and pinpoint light, and there was something comforting in the control they gave me.
“Sort of,” said David. “If I get it right, it will be a much bigger way to use the Cut.”
“And if you get it wrong?”
“Either nothing will happen, or whoever’s operating it will be blown to bits.”
“Sounds promising.”
“I thought so too,” he said without a hint of humor, and bent back to his work.
“David,” I said. He looked up, startled, as if he’d completely forgotten I was there. “I need to ask you something.”
His gaze darted to the collar again, then back to his worktable.
“What can you tell me about Ilya Morozova?”
David twitched, glancing around the nearly empty room. Most of the Fabrikators were still at dinner. He was clearly nervous, maybe even frightened.
He looked at the table, picked up his compass, put it down.
Finally, he whispered, “They called him the Bonesmith.”
A quiver passed through me. I thought of the fingers and vertebrae lying on the peddlers’ tables in Kribirsk. “Why?” I asked. “Because of the amplifiers he discovered?”
David looked up, surprised. “He didn’t find them. He made them.”
I didn’t want to believe what I was hearing. “Merzost?”
He nodded. So that was why David had looked at Morozova’s collar when Zoya asked if any Grisha had ever had such power. Morozova had been playing with the same forces as the Darkling. Magic. Abomination.
“How?” I asked.
“No one knows,” David said, glancing over his shoulder again. “After the Black Heretic was killed in the accident that created the Fold, his son came out of hiding to take control of the Second Army. He had all of Morozova’s journals destroyed.”
His son? Again, I was faced with the knowledge of how few people knew the Darkling’s secret. The Black Heretic had never died—there had only ever been one Darkling, a single powerful Grisha who had ruled the Second Army for generations, hiding his true identity. As far as I knew, he’d never had a son. And there was no way he would destroy something as valuable as Morozova’s journals. Aboard the whaler, he’d said not all the books prohibited the combination of amplifiers. Maybe he’d been referring to Morozova’s own writings.
“Why was his son in hiding?” I asked, curious as to how the Darkling had managed to frame such a deception.
This time David frowned as if the answer were obvious. “A Darkling and his heir never live at the Little Palace at the same time. The risk of assassination is too great.”
“I see,” I said. Plausible enough, and after hundreds of years, I doubted anyone would question such a story. The Grisha did love their traditions, and Genya couldn’t have been the first Tailor the Darkling had kept in his employ. “Why would he have had the journals destroyed?”
“They documented Morozova’s experiments with amplifiers. The Black Heretic was trying to re-create those experiments when something went wrong.”
The hair rose on my arms. “And the result was the Fold.”
David nodded. “His son had all of Morozova’s journals and papers burned. He said they were too dangerous, too much of a temptation to any Grisha. That’s why I didn’t say anything at the meeting. I shouldn’t even know they ever existed.”
“So how do you?”
David looked around the almost empty workshop again. “Morozova was a Fabrikator, maybe the first, certainly the most powerful. He did things that no one’s ever dreamed of before or since.” He gave a sheepish shrug. “To us, he’s kind of a hero.”
“Do you know anything else about the amplifiers he created?”