Mario said, “You said you would pay good coin for refuse brought from the blown-up room, and this fellow spent all day tracking me down. He was incredibly persistent.”
“Top coin, he says, but only if it’s real. Tony’s is real. Tony was first.” His breath smelled of rotting teeth and cabbage.
“Well, let’s see it, then.” The way today was going, Jean-Claude didn’t expect much.
“Top coin,” Tony insisted, holding out a cupped hand.
Jean-Claude displayed five copper coins in one hand and drew his main gauche with the other. “I will give you these coins, but what you show me had better be genuine or I will have them back with a tithe of your skin to boot. Do you understand?”
Tony quailed but managed to stammer, “Y-yes.”
Jean-Claude drizzled the coins into Tony’s hand, probably more wealth than he’d seen in a year. Quicker than a conjurer’s trick the coins vanished and Tony produced a few twisted bits of brass. “Here, here. Take!”
Mario spat in disgust. “You followed me around all day for that, mongrel?”
But Jean-Claude took the bits and examined them closely. “Hinges,” he said at last. “These were brass hinges.” If he just unbent them with his mind, he could see the shape, and they were covered in gunpowder smudge. “Tony, where did you find these? Where in the room?”
Tony stammered, “M-mirror. On the mirror frame they was.”
“And did you bend them getting them off?”
“No. No, they was already like that.”
Jean-Claude gripped a hinge that had been bent nearly in half and prized it apart, revealing a chunk of iron that had embedded in it. Metal from the bomb, just like the metal the doctor had extracted from his leg.
“Thank you,” Jean-Claude said, and put his main gauche away. “Don’t drink it all in one place.”
Tony scuttled off like a reef crab with a broken leg.
Jean-Claude climbed aboard the chaise. “A bunch of Temple guards just left the Cog and Crank with Nufio. Let’s find out where they’re going.”
Mario flicked the horses into motion. “What does that brass tell you it doesn’t tell me?”
“It tells me that whoever killed Vincent was no Glasswalker.”
“I don’t understand,” Mario said.
Jean-Claude grinned, his blood coming up. “How do you hide a hole in a wall?”
Mario shrugged. “You could cover it up.”
“Yes, with a curtain, or a mirror, but then if someone looks behind the curtain or the mirror, they see the hole. But if you planted a bomb in the room, it would blow the wall to smithereens.”
Mario’s brows drew down in puzzlement. “Then you’d have a very big hole.”
“Exactly. The small hole would be invisible.” He could see the progression of events. The sharpshooter in his nest shot at the princess, lit the fuse on the bomb, opened the mirror on its hinges, and escaped through the other room. Any witness who wasn’t killed by the blast would see only an empty room with no other means of egress; in a land ruled by Glasswalkers, it would be easy to assume the shooter had gotten out through the mirror.
Yet where did this brilliant insight lead him? It did nothing to suggest who was actually behind the cavalcade attack. The only fact with a name attached to it was that Duque Diego owned the building. That smelled of a stalking horse, but Jean-Claude would investigate the man anyway.
Mario had no trouble locating the Temple cart or following it up the hill to the citadel, where it lurched to a stop before the great Temple across the courtyard from the royal palace. It was a vast wheel of a building with six chapel wings extending from a central hub capped with a huge brass dome. A dozen alchemical floodlights illuminated the hemisphere, making it seem as if the Solar, swollen and sullen, had come to rest on the roof.
Even after dark, the pilgrims, scholars, and other worshippers came and went through the doorless entrance. Jean-Claude joined the flow, following the guard sergeant inside. The Aragoths had certainly spared no expense on this edifice. The walls were lined with a series of alcoves painted on the inside with vibrant frescoes, each depicting the life and deeds of a particular saint. There was Cynessus the Blind, the first to awaken from the long sleep in the Vault of Ages. She was the last person ever to gaze on the Primus Mundi and the only one to witness the breaking of the world, for which sin her eyes had been withered in her skull.
There was Saint Cerberus the silver eyed, first and greatest of the Glasswalkers, or perhaps the last of an elder breed. The artist here had naturally depicted him as first and greatest of all the saints, with several other prominent figures showing him deference.
On and on they went, probably weaving together some greater narrative for people who were impressed by that sort of thing. Jean-Claude’s quarry turned down a side corridor. Jean-Claude followed without breaking stride.
The hallway was short, with a door at the end, where an all-too-familiar voice from the other sided rattled, “Enter.”
Jean-Claude put on a lurch of speed just as the guard heard him coming and turned.
“?Alto! This is—”
“Crown business,” Jean-Claude said automatically. Never mind which crown. He barged past the guard and into a room that looked like a cross between a clerk’s office and an alchemical workroom. A chandelier hung with humming alchemical lights provided harsh, brilliant illumination. The walls were lined with bookshelves, pigeonholes, and glass-fronted cabinets filled with brass instruments, crystal beakers, vellum scrolls, pots of slimy worm-things, a jar of what looked like eyeballs, and even the occasional book.
In the center of a horseshoe-shaped desk in the middle of the tile floor sat Kantelvar, his clockwork fingers drumming a tinny tattoo on the desktop. On the desk before him lay Jean-Claude’s much-abused hat, now with a hole in it from being nailed to the Temple door.
“Artifex Kantelvar, why did I know it would be you?”
Kantelvar said, “Jean-Claude. How … unexpected.”
The guard rushed in behind Jean-Claude, drawing a dagger. “I said stop! Exaltedness, my apologies. I’ll remove this ruffian.”
Kantelvar held up a warding clockwork hand. “That won’t be necessary, Sergeant. Jean-Claude is, in fact, the person we have been looking for.”
Jean-Claude kept his attention fixed on Kantelvar. “A private word, if you don’t mind.”
Kantelvar said, “You may go, Sergeant.”
The sergeant said, “Are you sure that’s a good idea, Exaltedness?”
“Not entirely,” Kantelvar said. “But diplomacy does have its place.”
Jean-Claude waited until the sergeant had taken himself out and said in a lower tone, “Just what in blazes are you up to?”
Kantelvar steepled his fingers. “If by that you mean why did I send my men to the Cog and Crank, I should think that would be obvious. I was looking for you.”