The Angelist

“They continue until eternity, in both directions. Ascending or descending, it makes no difference. They reach toward, strive toward, the infinite,” said the Angel in its peaceful voice.

“That,” snarled Balthus, “cannot possibly be true.” He had grown to hate this creature in the hours and days since he’d called it forth. “Numbers, like all things, like life itself, must have an end.” He was tired of the Angel’s condescension. Despite its divinity and the level, harmonious, tone in which it spoke (its voice like the subtle chiming of distant bells on a windy day, sounding through the trees), Balthus suspected that it was mocking him.

It is, he thought, smug.

The Angel shrugged in response. This was a complicated affair, for it was limbered with many feathered wings, and the confines of Balthus’ summoning circle kept it from fully expanding or unfurling any one of them. It blinked eyes of liquid gold, which Balthus suspected it did not, strictly speaking, need to blink, as the Angel was composed of planar Empyrean rather than mortal flesh. It was not grown, but made.

“Ask any of your student-companions at your University,” it said, “Any rudimentary philosopher will confirm it.”

Balthus only growled. The damn thing probably did want him to ask, to make an ass of himself to his peers. No chance. He snapped the ledger he held on his knees shut with a bang, slamming his pen between the pages. “Enough for now,” he said.

The Angel did not reply. Perhaps it felt there was nothing to say. He stared at it for a minute of brute fury, willing it to obey him, to speak sense, to divulge the secrets he knew it must contain. When it failed to do anything more than blink — redoubling his anger at its dissimulation — he threw his mantle over his shoulders and announced to it, “I’m going for a drink.” He felt uncomfortably like he was announcing his dissolution to his own mother.

It’s gaze lingered on his back, judging him, as he left.

#

The Blue Toad was a fixture in Coinditch. A stone’s throw from the University, its proprietors had, since time immemorial, provided the students with all the alcohol (and darker vices) they could desire. It was rumored that the tavern had hidden weapons during the Revolution and before that had daily compiled reports on the students for the old king’s secret police. That was the way with tavern keepers — one day on your side, the next turning you over to torture in the Marmortine, the following plotting the death of a tyrant and the installation of a republic.

Within, it had the air of a cave, encouraging the mushroom-like growth of students at the tables. The walls of heavy stone were lined with massive casques, each ancient, containing some variety of prelapsarian vintage from what had ironically now become the “good old days” when the students had mostly been noble by-blows, flush with coin, and not starvelings hoping to find some well-paying sinecure or a job as a menial factory overseer.

Vandor Balthus looked as if he belonged in that semi-darkness, half toadlike himself. He puffed over his stiff collar, blowing furrows in the foam of his beer. He had been at the Toad for some hours now, the wait staff come and gone to serve him: first a plate of Trantzen blood sausage and potatoes, then mugs of beer, healthily dispersed across the afternoon. His particularities, like those of a dozen others from the University, were well known in the Toad.

Balthus grew more and more disconsolate as he considered his failure. Each of the classical masters — Baldassar, Temporio, Jondrimas — had completed a Great Work by the time they had reached his age. What had he, Balthus, done? He was thirty-five and a wastrel, the sole accomplishment to his name that he had secretly (and in violation of several major Republican laws) summoned and bound an Empyrean celestial in the dank attic he called home. As yet, the thing had revealed none of the secrets he was convinced the celestials were hoarding, nor did it display even the slightest discomfort at being imprisoned in a material form, held in bondage in a circle, prevented from going about its empyreal duties, and trapped in Balthus’ moldy garret apartment. Each hour he failed was another step toward embarrassment and potential penury. How long his father would stand for this “behavior,” he didn’t know — but the old canker had made it clear that he had a limit.

It was in this state that the hated University crowd who considered themselves his peers (and possibly, Cyrene forbid it!, his friends! — A shiver of disgust) came into the Blue Toad. They were led by the cock-sure braggart Ander, but the whole brood followed down the tavern steps:

Censora in her sorcerer’s purple, her hair pinned in that ludicrous Ophidian style as though she fancied herself an elf; followed by Tivol, with his laughable fencing sword dangling from his baldric like a second penis. Radover and Undina were twined about each other, as always, engaged in a lascivious play Balthus was partly ashamed to look upon. Last, there came the bulk of gutts with the sharp mind called Prothagen Malstaff, the only half-competent conjurer of the crew.

Like honeybees hiving, the swarm came straight for Balthus. He did his best to arrange his face into a semblance of good-humored amity and bared his teeth in imitation of a smile.

“Ah, our fellow Brother of the Quill, the master Van Dorr,” said Ander, belligerently pronouncing Balthus’ surname in the old, pre-republican style.

Balthus stiffly turned up the corners of his mouth even further, applying the now-tiring muscles of his face like mechanic’s winches. He murmured some anodyne response, hoping his lack of enthusiasm might drive them off. When it failed and they — horror of horrors! — sat at his table, he sank into the foam of his beer.

“Come, come!” Ander said, pounding the thick oaken boards, “tell us of your work! How it has progressed! You are always so mysterious!” Balthus did his best to avoid Anders’ huge blue eyes. The idiot had the nose of a bloodhound for weakness, and now he was prying into that one subject Balthus would rather forget. “You great learned coves in pursuit of the High Mastery spend all your time in sequester!”

“Ander,” Balthus said by way of greeting as the boy’s towering trunk thumped down onto the bench. “Malstaff,” he added, getting a nod from the corpulent magus-in-training. “What brings you all to the Toad so early in the day?”

“Early? Cyrene’s civic cunt, old man! ‘Tis darkmans already, and the glimstones are lit!” Ander laughed uproariously at this, as though he thought Balthus had made a witty jest.

Censora slid in next to him and snapped for service. Between ordering wine and casting a hateful glance at the bawdy show of Undina and Radoven’s pawing, she said, “Classes are out.” Her expression betrayed something — worry? Contempt? — but Balthus couldn’t decide what.

Instead, because she was also completing her High Mastery and striving toward a Great Work, and thus was at least ostensibly upon the same field as he, and thus knew the politicks of their College, he quirked his brow in what he intended to be a waggish fashion, but blundered when he bluntly asked, “And what news of that bungling fool Albumor?” Realizing at once that he had misstepped, called his own High Tutor a fool in public, in such bald and unadorned language that he could never take it back nor make pretense that it was a mistake or mishearing, he reddened at once and sipped his beer to hide his shame. None of the others seemed to notice. Even Ander and Malstaff laughed.

Censora raised her green beaker, eying the wine within with distrust. “As ever, up in his tower at the Temples, a terror to striplings. They cast lots to avoid his lectures.” She downed a mouthful.

Good. The acerbic spite of High Tutor Adcursus Albumor had been a foundation-stone of Balthus’ own studies. If Albumor moderated, some of the pure gut-fire that drove Balthus might desert him — and now, at a moment when he was certain he was on the verge of greatness. No, no, best that spite will not cool. For generations men like Albumor had passed down the received wisdom of Carrandor and the dwarf infernal enginers that there was no usable work to be coaxed from celestials — that demons and devils, therefore, should form the bulk of a binder’s work save, from time to time, the occasional fae dabbling with the nature spirits of the Otherworld encouraged by the elves.

Balthus had set out on a course to prove them wrong. At first it had all been theoretical, the reading of dusty tomes, even traveling to the fume-filled streets of Ur Izar to plumb the wells of her ancient daemonological libraries. The more he read, the more he became convinced that the conjurers of old had simply been asking the wrong questions. But now that he was in their place, now that he had captured an Angel of his own, his questions, too, all seemed to be the wrong ones.

The other students had moved on to babble about something incomprehensible to Balthus. Politics, he thought, as he heard the names of the Feathered Star and Cannon and Pike, both parties in the Commerce. He had no interest in the factional battles of that beastly institution that sat not far from the door of the Toad in Coinditch as the road ran, and yet, over that slender stone bridge, might as well have been in another world. There, in the Commerce, withered old men spent their days debating… Balthus wasn’t sure what, discount rates on bank notes or tariff-costs on riverine trade — hiding in marble and gold committee chambers, huddled beneath that awful cluster of carbuncles, domes, courts, and loggia down on Exchange Island.

When Ander saw Balthus’ glazed look, he brought the conversation back around to Balthus’ work, as though unable to avoid the sensitive subject. He must nose around it. He knows, Balthus thought, and now shall expose me as the fraud I am. The little snot!

“We never heard from you on the subject of your research!” said Ander, then elbowed Censora with such force that she spilled her wine. “We’re boring him. He yearns to speak of himself.”

Balthus smiled thinly. “It progresses. In ways beyond imagining.” That much, at least, was true. None of the callow scribblers at the table would ever guess he had conjured up a celestial in his very rooms! It was beyond their meager conceptions that Balthus might have broken the city’s strict laws on summoning, let alone gone so far as to reach up into the heavenly realms to pull down an Angel.

“There he is, that clever old man,” Ander laughed.

Malstaff, however, frowned, crunching the crisp pork belly he held between his fat fingers. “You were going to disprove the old Choradaemonians and Carrandelians on the subject of the Celestial Realms, no? But how can you do that definitively without making contact with those planes? How will you prove it, I mean? The danger in trying is clear!” He took a swig of his own beer.

Danger? What did the half-wizard mean by that, Balthus wondered. A cold lance shot through him. Was there something he’d failed to consider? Some elementary property he’d not accounted for? Cursed, stupid, ignorant Balthus! Oft he had made some error while in the house of father that any dolt would have seen at once, and his father had always been fast to tell him. When he had, for instance, left the casement open and allowed his poor little Casavenne to escape — just a pup he was, like Balthus himself at that age, for he had only been six! — his father had made quite sure the poor domestic who discovered the doglet all blue and bloated in the canals had brought the corpse home and shown him, displayed it like some trophy. “Detail,” his father had snapped. “The boy lacks detail.”

It was no wonder his father thought him a useless byblow and Albumor treated him like a dimwitted child! But soft, attend, idiot Balthus, for perhaps Malstaff would reveal the gap in the plan, and he might still have time to plug it up. Now his palms itched and his back ran cold with the stinking sweat of rancid fear.

“Is - is it?” he asked. He was surprised at his ability to control his voice, despite the stutter. He was further surprised to see the other students at the table react as though he had pronounced the question to dispel all dolt, as though it were a statement of disbelief.

Even Malstaff hesitated to reply, and when he did he was defensive. “I mean, the legal trouble of course, but also the fact that you’d be… you know… bothering with the Gods.”

“The real Gods are dead,” Balthus found himself answering, now on well-tread territory, the argument almost automatic. “The new ones are all former mortals: magi with too much ambition or warlords steeped in mortal blood. Not only am I not afraid of a little blasphemy here or there, but they can’t very well object to the pilfering of heaven on moral grounds; they’ve already done it!”

Mutters of shock came from the others, save Malstaff, who held his chin in far-off thought, as though considering the impact of his words. So! The childish bunch had never truly grappled with the implications of his thesis! He should have suspected as much from them. Perhaps now they would finally — finally! — leave him alone.

“All that aside,” Malstaff mused, “wouldn’t you be worried about retribution?” Balthus groaned and prepared to elaborate, to fend off this clumsy thrust as he had a thousand times before, but the fat ingrate cut him off. “What I mean is that we have thousands of years of experience, collectively speaking, when it comes to binding various types of infernals. That goes all the way back to the giants. So we know the ways, the common ways, anyhow, that the Princes of Hell twist their contracts, but we have far fewer records, maybe only a handful, of binding Empyrean Principalities. So, it would be dangerous in the sense that we don’t know quite how an angel might seek its revenge.”

Balthus froze, mid-retort.

An Angel.

Revenge.

#

Adcursus Albumor had earned his High Tutorship in Two Temples College through the typical combination of hard work, bravado, graft, and naked politicks. It was exceedingly difficult to advance in a university where certain chairs and appointed offices might be held by any one of the very long-lived races; Albumor himself was already an old man of sixty, but his own High Tutor (and the Chair of Occult Archaeography) was the esteemed elf Senantes Gwaelon, who was entering his two-hundred-and-sixtieth year. It was no matter now, of course, for Albumor had laid irrefutable claim to tenure and his future as a lifelong member of the Sepulchrine University was assured. Still, he more than understood the difficulty. For this reason, he always made certain allowances for those of his pupils pursuing the High Mastery who had the unfortunate luck of being born with a limited lifespan — but Vandor Balthus was pushing it.

The weeks when he didn’t hear from his star pupil were the best. Some days he was even able to forget Balthus’ existence altogether, which had a salutary effect on both his health and his mood. On those afternoons he found himself full of an unaccountably light sensation, as though having just emerged from a suffocating cloud of darkness. He was trying to train himself not to interrogate the feeling, for the moment he questioned why he felt that way, the source of his earlier oppression swam into his mind’s eye, and with it came the dread: Vandor Balthus.

It wasn’t that he hated his student, although Balthus certainly had numerous loathsome qualities that made him worthy of hate. It wasn’t even that Balthus’ chosen work of study flew in the face of all known arts. It was that, for Albumor, Balthus presented a problem. He was a politickal liability.

The Vandors weren’t, by any means, one of the wealthiest families in the Republic. The father, Utrest, was a middling grasper, a minor industrialist who had, through a lifetime of striving and clipping coins, entered the Civic Register through the ownership of a small oyl-processing concern. That had been parlayed into a little empire of workshops and factories in the City’s industrial slum of the Hamerklang. Balthus was therefore technically a Preferatus, no matter how humble when he was compared with a scion of the Ten Families, whose wealth and power outstripped all the rest of the Republic.

This gave Vandor Utrest a certain amount of influence, and it also meant that, where Albumor was concerned, it was an ever-growing issue that it appeared Utrest’s eldest son (and the likely successor to the Vandor estate and fortune) would never matriculate from the University. The boy’s fanatickal devotion to the frankly insane prospect of capturing the agents of the Empyrean and putting them to work had not yielded fruit and he was now growing very long in the tooth indeed, kept alive mostly, Albumor understood, by the fact that Vandor Utrest’s thalers occasionally dribbled into his hands.

Not to say that Vandor Balthus was Albumor’s only concern. Far from it. He had a host of bodily weaknesses to contemplate (piles, a dull ache in the spine that never relented, and a crick in his left leg that the physicks all said would stay with him until he died short of some miralce, and which necessitated the use of a gold-handled cane to walk, to name the most serious few, not to mention his slowly failing eyesight) as well as certain professional rivalries both numerous and bitter. Nor did his romantic assignations lay lightly on the mind of the august professor. Despite his advancing age, Albumor maintained the disposition of a much younger man in the vigor with which he pursued the objects of his desire (and with which he exercised himself in the privacy of drawn curtains).

The present object, which had been for several years now, was the Professor of Near Antique Studies at the Gramerie, Morosin Lucan. A man of fine taste and clever turn-of-phrase, who waxed his beautiful white mustaches into curling spirals. Albumor had been married once before, in the springtide of his youth, but the nuptial bond hadn’t been able to withstand the infernal fires of University. Besides, as his life wore on and spring turned inevitably from summer into fall, Albumor realized that he found little delight in the company of women, even those as blindingly brilliant as the highly-accomplished former Madame Adcursus, now the Rector at Gunwall College, Lysistra Aercola.

In that way, his professional disputes and his romantic life were intertwined. Aercola made pretense of a civil friendship with Albumor — and it was true, he had thought of her as a friend during their marriage! A close and special friend, but sadly nothing more — but in private she slandered his name and shot holes through his grant proposals. Even from within the walls of another College, her reach at the University was long. No doubt the shade of Vandor Balthus was of aid to her now, a sharpened blade with which to strike at his support in the faculty.

So things stood that morning as Albumor prepared his advanced lectures for the week. His office, one of the largest in the College of Two Temples, was well-stocked with material. Enormous drifts of paper made towers and canyons interspersed with the occasional sheet of fine vellum or roll of foolscap, many covered with the dizzying signs of mystical writing, or else printed with crisp black letters. He had three skulls (two human, one orc, all donated to the College by graduates who went on to serve in the Republican army), an armillary sphere representing the planar intersections of the Infernal Realms which could be configured to represent any given occult conjunction, complete with a lemure-charged motivator to give it automatic and self-driven motion. He also kept the various assorted oddments expected of any decent magic worker: a stuffed Zavelendi crocodile, two articulated owl skeletons hung from the ceiling by wire which turned in the breeze, rare glimstones pulsing in odd colors, and a selection of silver pens with orichalc tracery in their nibs.

A pot of water bubbled over the huge hearth, which had been banked to a low glow. Albumor liked the hooded fireplace, particularly because it was useful for compounding reagents, but this morning he had used it to brew his tea.

The finished product sat at his elbow in a boneware Sartorian cup. Pen in hand, his verminous familiar, the quasit Cacopomp, roosting in the bookshelves, Albumor had begun the morning by surveying the kingdom he had won for himself and admiring the geography of his office-domain. Cacopomp had croaked, “Best to work, master catchpole, lest thy one-time wife finally baste thy balls beyond saving! Haw haw haw!” This was all the motivation old Albumor needed to begin writing his notes on the lesson.

Most of the regular lectures he could give in his sleep. Those students merely passing through his classes due to an unlucky draw (he knew about the lots they cast to determine registration, encouraged it even) required no attention of his at all. It was enough to merely pose to them a truly unholy amount of reading and keep them on their toes by calling them out, at random, to answer obscure questions of daemonological lore. All the better to then use his wit, sharpened by forty years of debate with other razor-witted scholars, to humiliate those who gave the wrong answer, or who took too long, or merely stuttered through the response, before the entire class. No, those lectures that truly needed preparing were for his advanced classes in infernal law and politicks. He sighed as he began, remembering how quick and studious Balthus had been when it came to learning the intricacies of the laws governing Gehenna, the Abyss, and the Hells. Where had that pupil gone?

It was thus, in the throes of academic excess, his pen flying across the page and Cacopomp shouting out its hateful encouragement in a feculent voice, that Adcursus Albumor looked up to see his door darkened by none other than Vandor Balthus.

His student did not look well. His cheeks were puffed and eyes sunken, ringed by deep circles like purple bruises. He seemed to spill out of his stiff-collared blouse. His cuffs were sodden — with ale? Sweat? Vomit? Impossible to say. His surtout hung limp around his shoulders like the wings of a bat. Albumor blinked.

“Maestro Adcursus,” Balthus breathed, his voice a curse, as though Albumor could somehow be blamed for his present, lamentable condition. “You have sold me, professor. O! Mercenary wisdom! What did my father promise you? What golden blandishments did he wave beneath your nose, you old fraud? Tell me! For how many thalers was my future purchased?” The boy’s expression was wild. For a moment, Albumor believed his student had come with a lunatic plan to murder him, for he was waving something about in the air. Gods! A dagger? A pistol? Worse, perhaps, a wand charged with killing fire? Had there ever been a Tutor killed by a student? Albumor wracked his brains — but no, the thing was a sweat-drenched and much handled spindle of paper that Balthus must have been fretting over for some time.

A letter!

“My child, my child,” Albumor said cluckingly, summoning up a hidden reserve of calm, drawing his deepest cisterns, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I stand to lose a great deal if you cannot complete your studies. We are in this task together.”

Rather than producing the sought-for stillness in his raging pupil, Balthus fair seemed to explode in a shower of spittle. “Horse-cocks and hairy cunts!” he shrieked. “How else do you propose to explain this? How else, Maestro?”

Balthus slapped the offensively moist document down onto Albumor’s desk. Cacopomp, roused from the lazy routine of making drowsy insults, winged his pot-bellied body over to look.

Albumor made a great show of holding up a single finger, sipping his tea, then adjusting his pince-nez before peering down at the smudged handwriting.

My most Useless Childe, it ran.

Not an auspicious beginning.

My most Useless Childe,

I have had word from certain Sources within the pompous halls of your School of Puffery concerning the lack of progress with your Final Degree. Yes, Ungrateful Boy, even in your precious University, dear Father has his Ears. If my calculations hold (and, unlike yours, they always do, for a I have ever had an Eye on that which you Lack: namely Diligence and Detail) you are now a full Two Years over your Due.

I give you Three Months to complete the nonsense you have begun, not because there is any Meritt in the result but because there is at least something to be said for a Thing Done. Should you fail to bring the effeminate Bluestockinged nonsense you have thus far pursued as your life’s Entire Aim to a close, I shall cause you to be withdrawn from that Iniquitous bastion of antipatriots and malcontents.

Do not doubt my Word. I have never yet had cause to Retract it.

Your father, Vandor Utrest, etc., etc.

Albumor adjust the lay of his scholar’s robe and wished he had closed the windows. Gods help them if anyone heard Balthus’ ranting. “I would be brought into ignominy with you,” he said softly, “so I am certain you can exclude me from your list of eavesdroppers.”

Cacopomp cawed. “As ever, thy dark dalliances come to haunt thee old conjurer! Thy eye should turn to thy growing brideprice!” This caused Albumor to blanch. Yes, the demon was right, this could very well be the hand of Lysistra Aercola, moving now to crush him. He did not offer this, but said instead:

“Is there any way you can present something before the time your father has set expires? You’ll have to abandon this nonsense about angels, I’m afraid. Even if you had prepared the preliminaries, it would take fully two months or more to receive the proper licenses through the city, and the temple might never consent. No, it must be something altogether simpler. Now don’t make that face, boy. This could be a blessing. You can at least matriculate. It’ll be hard work, but we’ll think of something, I assure you.”

Balthus wasn’t answering, which was troubling. From full-throated denunciation to dead silence in a moment’s time did not inspire Albumor’s confidence.

“Lad? What’s wrong?”

Then, the boy opened his mouth and made everything worse.

“I have,” he said, voice quivering, “bound an imprisoned an Angel in my apartments. The ones on Chalk Street.”

“Mithrod’s staff boy, not that crumbling set of attic rooms? An angel? There?”

To add insult to injury, Balthus began to weep.

#

That disgusting old coward was going to turn him in, Balthus was sure of it. He had been wrong to confront him without sufficient evidence of his involvement in Father’s schemes, and he was doubly wrong to confide the secret of the Angel to him. Vile hypocrite! He was afraid, yes afraid, of what Balthus might do, prove, achieve! Afraid that Balthus would surpass him, would destroy the edifice of lies upon which the entire academic discourse, not to mention the vast industrial labors, of ages rested.

Now Balthus paced like a beast with the whole city as his cage. The towering stone walls of the Sepulchrine University, some swathed in cloaks of ivy, honeysuckle, or nodding purple clematis, hemmed him in like the bounds of a labyrinth. He passed gaggles of robed-and-stockinged scholars and pushed through whole rivers of students. As the sun brushed his brow, passing between the leaves of antique plane trees or the angles of high-crested rooftops, so too did Balthus’ mind flicker back to his Chalk Street room and the immensely powerful Celestial bound there. The thinnest of chains held it in place: a circle of wax, chalk, salt, and charms, interspersed with glyphs of mystic potency. Beneath all this, nothing more than the secret words whispered by Balthus and the magic that lay behind them.

Should the thing burst free… the cold sweat returned. Yes, yes, Father. Detail! Attention! But the mistake was now made. Should he return and check the bindings? Yet, no, for he had done it already five times over since that night in the Toad when Malstaff had planted the evil thought in his head, and even begun a kind of nervous habit of reinforcing the sorceries each morning before he left and each night before he went to sleep. A cruel jest it was, for the object of his labors to become the instrument of his torment.

He was wandering indiscriminately, moving from the Coinditch southward, toward the heart of the old colleges. He sightlessly pushed through Binder’s Court and passed the enormous tower of the Cloche on his left, dodging students congregating around the Long Fountain. He avoided the closed squares of Highwatch and came out on Cryptmaker’s Street, behind the Ophidian Embassy. Here, the foot traffic was light — just the occasional carriage or drake-shaped locomotor lumbering along, or a peaceful-looking Ophidian elf in long robes. From a great marble basin fashioned to appear as a sleeping dragon, the subterrene waters of the river Southgrave welled up. Like the river Coin, its sibling to the north, the Southgrave was embanked into the Southditch; unlike the Coin, the Southditch was shaded by quiet trees instead of taverns and gaming hells. Few students came this way, at the south-easterly edge of the Hill. On the far bank of the marble-lined trench through which the river flowed was Hamerside, just on the edge of the Necropolis. Beyond, the steep and precipitous slope with its graves and crypts tumbled down toward the ‘Klang, that warren of muddy streets and ramshackle wooden structures that clustered like plague-warts on the ass of the great manufactories and workshops. Up here, separated from that congerie of desperation by the green verge of the tombs carved into the slopes of the Necropolitan Hill, it was still possible, for a moment, for Balthus to pretend he had no relation to that world of smog and misery below, that the University was apart from it, unaffected, and that he was apart from it too, that his father, callous and calculating, did not oversee his portion of it.

The shadowed walls along the Southgrave were chill as the wind blew in off the coast. It was late in the month of the Peach (Peachmonth, as the Calendar Republicaine called it), and the spring air still bore a hint of rime. Away, over the rooftops, the great carillons of the Cloche sounded the hour. Balthus flinched at heir chiming, for the harmonies of the bells reminded him of nothing more than the Angel’s voice.

It was thus distracted that he came upon Censora without first seeing her. She was seated alone upon a wrought-iron bench beneath the shade of a spreading Hyalene willow (from which there hung a glimstone lantern, now quiescent in the sunlight). His fellow journeyman spotted him first, and she hastily concealed something in the folds of her mantle. “Balthus!” she exclaimed, rising, smoothing her clothes. “I’d not thought to see you today, let alone in this quarter of the Necropolitan.”

Balthus, confused at the unexpected appearance of his colleague, caught in the midst of his own spiraling anxieties, could only make faint noises in his throat, rather than proper, human speech. Interpreted liberally, they might have been “Ah! Censora! Lovely to see you!”

Mardenne Censora smiled at him, and, further shocking the prudish sensibilities Balthus had learned in the cold and loveless halls of his youth, she grabbed Balthus by the arm and piloted him away from where she had been sitting — away from the embassy of Tar Ophis. “Out for a stroll to clear your head?”

He wanted to snap at her, to say Madame, unhand me, this is improper, but he didn’t much care, at that moment, to be left alone with his thoughts. “Something like that,” he conceded. When she shifted her grip to bring more of her body to bear, to make further contact with his arm, Balthus nearly shrieked wanton harlot! Instead, he smiled through clenched teeth and asked, “And your studies? Your great work? How does it progress?”

“Oh, well, well,” she said airily.

What is she looking at? He wondered. For indeed, Censora glanced about every so often as though she expected footpads to spring out of the cobbled walks or from the wealthy lintels of the shadowed doorways by which they passed. It was true that Hamerside was a stone’s throw across the water, but even so, those streets were firmly Sepulchrine, part of the great Necropolitan Hill, and housed neither bandits nor even the most crude mechanicals of the lower city. “I think, madame, we are quite safe here.”

“It’s not that,” she laughed. “Just say that there are interested parties in Tar Ophis and leave it at that.”

Mithrod’s staff, he thought, is she some manner of enemy operative?

She shot him a sidelong glance. She might have a poisoned poniard in my ribs, even now. Perhaps that’s why she’s drawn so close!

“And yourself? You were so morose the other night, and then we didn’t see you.” When he didn’t reply, she pressed. “And besides, there’s a rumor you fought with Albumor this morning in his office. It’s not true, is it?”

Forgetting his fear of imagined daggers, Balthus jerked his arm from where it was twined with hers. “Absolutely not,” he said, “and it’s a slander, whoever’s saying it.”

Censora withdrew a few steps and if Balthus hadn’t known better he would have thought her wounded by his remark. Alas, he knew it was mere trickery — all pretense, likely, he was realizing now, to do with her secret work as a catspaw for the Ophidians. All of her concern over him, those looks and sighs that might else have betokened warm feelings, perhaps even romantic ones, were naught but base politicking for crass gain. It filled his gorge with bile to think that he might have been prey to her blandishments, had not his work been his first priority.

“I did not mean to offend,” she said. Her voice dripped with feigned sorrow. Clever masquerade!

He lifted his chin. “It makes no matter,” he said, intending to convey icy magnanimity. “My father has said I am to be withdrawn from the University in disgrace.”

To this news, Censora offered a jerky motion, as though she wanted to approach him anew but was stopped by the memory of his prior coldness. “Your father? Has he that little respect for you?”

This drew from Balthus a wild and derisory snort that threatened to develop into a full-throated laugh, unconstrained and untrammeled, explosive and dangerous and free. “My father? Respect? The mighty Vandor Utrest, have respect for me? I am, after all, only his eldest son, and of what value is the life of an eldest son? Of what value are his desires? He would see me ruined among every scholar in the world if only he could bring me to heel, to become for him his little calculator of sums, to bob my head at his every snap and clatter, to study his life and his work as though he were a man of distinguishment! Ah, yes, such is the respect of my father!”

He felt as though every part of him might suddenly disarticulate, as though his body were merely a collection of poorly-joined parts and he, like a marionette struck by a sledgehammer, might shatter to all his constituent pieces. And, his traitor’s mind added silently, would it not be nice, for once, to be shattered and mindless? To be nothing more than paint and sawdust, with no past and no future, and no father at all?

Before Censora could reply, Balthus laughed again, this time throwing his head back. “I have never seen you this way,” she said.

“You have never seen me at all, though you pride yourself on your prying,” he snapped. “Nor has my father.” Something went all to steel in his heart and he forgot about his fear of Utrest’s retribution. He made a decision in that moment as the iron flowed through his veins. “I shall go and see him,” he said, biting at the words like an animal bites at the leg in the snare. “I shall tell him just what I think of him.”

#

It was galling but unavoidable that Balthus had to pay nearly a whole thaler to reach the Vandor offices, particularly since the public trolleys didn’t come to Necropolitan Hill and he had to venture down by foot through Necrops Quays and out onto Exchange Island to catch one. Nevertheless, the only other option was to hire a private hackney (disgusting) or a locomotor (beyond his means); there was simply no way to walk across the city and still be at one’s dignity upon arrival at the other side. He was already sweating quite sufficiently merely anticipating the disquisition he intended to have with his father, there was no need to add hours of walking through the spring mugginess up and down the canals, up and down the hills, and across the great Armorian thoroughfares, to further disarray his person.

The offices of the Vandor Oyl and Mfg. Concern were located in the corner of a building in the Valefar, on the square of the Golden Dome. Three street-car lines (one heavy, aurochs-drawn and two light, horse-pulled) met at the Dome, making it an important interchange in the south of the City. The square was clean and broad, boasting clusters of small stalls, a grassy park, and a post for the Armorian Heralds to cry the news. Civic guard, in their pure white lacquer armor, patrolled it regularly, even at night. Although it wasn’t far from the seedier Clawment, it had none of that district’s ill repute.

For Vandor Utrest, there was another draw — it wasn’t that far, by foot, from the fabulous house he’d built himself on Weaver Hill. Balthus knew his father’s morning routine from long acquaintance in that house: each day he rose before the sun, drank a bracing tot of sack and then a boiling cup of coffee, had his house servants dress him, then smoked exactly three-quarters of one cheroot as he walked to the office. There, he discarded the final leavings of that cigarillo (he strictly forbade all fumings and smokings in the offices, and meted out harsh punishments to those who dodged his dictates).

Balthus had not set out in the morning. It was now late afternoon. Having realized his aim while he was speaking with Censora, he set off at once the catch the Valefar Trolley at the Exchange. He only now arrived as the clocks all called out half-past the hour of Four. His father would still be working, that much he knew, so he landed on the rectangular paving stones street with a lively step as he sprang from the street car.

At the square, Balthus was immediately subjected to the screaming of some politickal hawker and her pet broadsheet. The hatchet-faced woman was accompanied by a cloud of imps trying to drown her out as she shrieked about the latest machinations of the Armorian Commerce. He waved her off and did his best to duck through the street vendors without getting anything unpleasant on his surtout.

At the other end of the square he reached the elegant metal doors over which a hand-painted sign proclaimed VANDOR OYLS. In a smaller hand, a long-ago addendum added as a counterpoint between pride and economy, there was a small “&c.” to signify Utrest’s expanding business interests.

He threw them open and blew by the clacking brass golem at the front desk without stopping. Its hooting cries followed him as he vaulted the stairs and made for his father’s office. Let it weep in that trumpet-voice! His thoughts were racing, lighter-than-air, like a caelamentar-ship flying high above the clouds of reason. He was filled with poisonous laughter that nevertheless felt pure and, for the first time in an eon, clean.

There was even time to give the somber and grave clerks who looked up from their ink-stained work, startled, at the boss’ progeny striding purposefully through the work-floor, the flash of a mad grin that felt as though it could split him in two. He pitied them, he suddenly realized, but he also hated them, for he could easily have become one of those pale little creatures. Men, elves, dwarves, even a little contingent of the river-halflings, all clustered around their writing desks and applied their noses and eyes to the sheets of paper before them that represented the transmission of monies or goods from one place to another. A whole army of accountants and advocats, all working break-neck to support the gossamer strands of Father’s commercial empire.

A bolt of lightning passed through Balthus as he put his hand on his father’s office door. It was not unlike the slender thread that bound his Angel, this world of words and whispers, of ink and stamps, by which Vandor Utrest caused ships to depart from ports, caused wages to paid or withheld, caused his entire fortune to turn and turn as a great flywheel on some vast machine of mercantile plunder.

Before he had time to confront the thought further, he was through the door and in the chamber beyond, marching down the long carpet that crossed the polished hardwood floor, toward the black ebony desk and the big window that looked, shaded and smoked to prevent peepers and pryers, down on the square of the Golden Dome and the park below.

Behind the desk, listening intently to a cupped speaking horn held up to his ear that sprouted from his desk like a bouquet of rubberized flowers, Vandor Utrest spared his son a glance. It was just that - a chance contact of the eyes, as a bullet might glance from a well-proved piece of reinforced breastplate. From that brief vision alone, Utrest’s face soured like milk turning bad.

“No, no,” he was saying into his speaking-tube, now, “don’t let them out. I don’t care if they can’t fulfill it! They can bring us to court then, damn you. Demand delivery, every delivery, and when they fail to… yes, demand they receive the goods as well. It doesn’t matter if they have nowhere to… Gods curse you, Plinis, don’t you understand? I don’t care if they set fire to it, they will take delivery! They have a contract, and one I don’t care to let them out of. They will abide by it or they will sue for better terms! That is all!”

He slammed the horn back down into the cluster of its fellows emerging from his desk then smoothed his face and looked with baleful calm upon the visage of his son. They faced each other in silence for what seemed like an eternity. Balthus knew only that he was not going to speak first — his father knew why he had come, and knew the hurt he had done. Let him broach the subject, or else let Balthus remain in the doorway like an accusing ghost out of one of Monier’s plays. The only sound was the scribbling of pens and the occasional clack of a typometer from the room behind.

The office smelled faintly of varnish and strongly of oak gall, Balthus noted. The floor creaked gently beneath his weight which, he knew, was not inconsiderable. His father stared, and the more his father tried to bore into his soul, the stronger Balthus became. The very expression on his idiot father’s face was enough to cause him to burst out into laughter — but he did not, knowing the gravity of the situation and the drama of it required him to remain stoical and silent until the proper time. Would he call for the civic guard to drag his son away? Would he have the clerks bundle him up in a carpet and throw him in the river?

At last, Utrest spoke.

“So, you have got my letter.”

Balthus felt he could reply to this, for it was apparent. “I have got it,” he said.

“Then you realize that you will be disinherited as my scion should you refuse. The entirety of the business will go to your, frankly much more capable, younger brother.”

This was a tactic. His father was keen on such little snipes and barbs. He had often expounded upon their use in a negotiation. The intent was to disorient his interlocutor, to confuse him, to drive him to make some hasty mistake. Diligence and detail, Balthus reminded himself, but found the mental notes unnecessary — he didn’t need to remind himself: the living reminder was standing before him. Do not rise to his bait, and he will be disarmed.

The threat itself was shocking. It was not apparent to Balthus through the letter sent, for Utrest had spent his (Balthus’) entire life lambasting him (Balthus) for failing to live up to what was expected of a Vandor son. To think he could have so easily been free of the obligation, could just be cut out like a tumor, excised from the family, well… Why wouldn’t that have come up before?

Gods and demons, he realized, it would actually mean I was free.

Think of that! Free, not only of the monumental fear of becoming his father, but free of the man himself, free of his cruel jests and put-downs, free of dinner parties with the other industrialists in the city where his father paraded him about like a freak of nature in a carnival. Free, in other words, of the entire Vandor history and enterprise. Devils take the oyl business, he thought.

“Clavell,” said Balthus in a measured voice (quite like the cadence of the Angel, he thought) “is a third-rate magus who couldn’t enchant himself out of a city park armed with a map and a lodestar.”

Balthus had never spoken like this of his brother before. He remembered Clavell mostly as a sickly second shadow, snot always running down his lip, ever toddling after him and bidding him to “wait, wait!” His pudgy little hand was forever smearing Balthus’ clothes. When Balthus completed his first apprenticeship and became a capable binder, having received the city acclamation and his license, been signed and indentured in his first infernal contract (flush with the power it brought), he had come home for the first time in years to the shocking discovery that little Clavell Clatterstep had transformed, in his long absence, into a thick-necked bruiser with a head like a musket ball. Whatever fraternal bond they shared (and Balthus had to admit, it was on his own head for treating young Clavell shabbily), it was then irrevocably severed. Clavell had become a second Utrest, a larger and haler version of their father. So, too, had he become their father’s (and not Balthus’) shadow.

Yet, for all Clavell’s progress toward a kind of blind and muscular manhood, Balthus knew, both by rumor and demonstration, that his brother was barely competent as a magic-worker. He never progressed to state certification, knowing he couldn’t attain it.

Balthus was shocked to see his father’s face turn apoplectic red at this insult. So, he thought, doing his best to keep his features composed, the old man does have a weakness or two.

“And yet, unlike my eldest progeny, Clavell can do simple sums and does not shirk his clerical work,” Utrest said with growing heat, “Nor has he ever made pretense to perform some work for me and then spent the day reading in a supply closet, delivering me forged books thereafter.”

The flinty bastard truly was desperate! To be drawing upon Balthus’ teenaged indiscretions (and how he had suffered at the time for that! The belt would have been kinder than Utrest’s frozen silence!) meant he was running out of barbs to throw. Balthus let the grin now paint his features and took a few steps closer to his father’s mammoth desk. “For instance,” Balthus said, “despite all the expensive training —” and despite, he did not add, the fact that Utrest had, at the end of his rope, paid some fifty-thousand plus thalers to have Clavell take part in that ludicrous elvish Blooding ceremony, literally having the stuff of magic infused into his person like a gods-cursed priest, “he could never, for instance, call forth even so much as a quasit, let alone an angel.”

Furious, Utrest brandished an engraved orichalc-and-lusterwood pen that he grabbed from the desk. “And again you stand mistaken, boy, for your brother Clavell fashioned me this.”

Balthus laughed and took the proffered pen, its ink reservoir glistening like the leviathan oyl that flowed through Utrest’s warehouses and processing mills. He could barely contain his contempt — it was bursting from his pores. “This trinket?” He felt the tell-tale vibrations of a spirit prison humming in his hand. “And what has he bound here? The breath of a morning breeze? The shade of a sorrowing butterfly?” He laughed again. “Go ahead, father. Make Clavell your heir.”

Utrest sputtered as Balthus gave voice to a full-throated and thunderous roar of laughter. “Goodbye father. You may write me when Clavell has enchanted a cornamuse to play you a lullaby.”

#

Albumor shifted. The corner of the box on which he was perched was digging into his bony ass. The room smelled of rainwater and its faithful companion, mold. Atop this musty foundation, there was a layer of hot wax, incense, fresh coffee, and the rising, toothsome scent of bread coming from the ovens of the bakery over which Balthus lived.

The creature — a type of Malakhim, according to Balthus, what he called “the mightiest class of Empyrean, the very heralds of the gods themselves, nearly demigods,” and insisted should be called by their proper name of Thrones — was watching him, had been watching him for the last half hour while he waited for his wayward student to return with the necessary implements. Neither Albumor nor Balthus could boast of knowing the proper type of spirit prison to house an Empyrean, let alone alone this “Throne.” In other circumstances — in daemonological, naturological, and elemental lore — the shape, substance, bindings, and materials prepared to house the extraplanar being were long prescribed by study and experiment, confined to their ancient forms. Brass worked well for demons and devils, for instance, but try to bind a river spirit to a brass bauble and you would end up with a flooded workshop if you were lucky, a fragment of brass lodged in your skull if you weren’t.

Two days after the explosive confrontation in Albumor’s office, Balthus returned. There had always been, Albumor reflected, something unwholesomely toad-like about the boy, but this time he had the look of a toad-in-triumph, puffed up with some secret success. Balthus had told him how he’d naysayed his father and challenged the man to file papers disinheriting him; and thus, he said, laughing obscenely, depriving the old prick of the right to determine Balthus’ status as a student. “Should he trade me for my brother, he will have no right to order me withdrawn!” Albumor did not share the boy’s enthusiasm. After all, should the father disinherit the son, who would pay the son’s tuition? Who would fund the Vandor grant that came with Balthus’ attendance, and upon which Albumor counted? But more, this did nothing to solve the much more pressing problem of the imprisoned angel, held in bondage against law both mortal and divine.

But Balthus wasn’t done. He had snapped his fingers with nervous energy and said, “And, in his office, he had this pen with a lemure or manes bound to it. And while I’m there, he’s yelling into a speaking tube. What’s this bastard saying? Talking to one of his advocats, trying to force some poor sucker with whom he’s signed a losing contract to adhere to it. And that’s when it comes to me.” He had smiled then, and Albumor was stunned at the innocent beauty of the boy’s joy. “We can do the same to the Throne I have captured. Force it into a contract that we have no intention of using.”

The major issue, Balthus had explained (as though there were only one! As though every step the boy took did not leave both of them stranded ever further beyond the shores of hope or reason!) was that infernals wanted to contract. They gleefully entered into any indenture presented them with the hope of finding some catch or loophole, of perhaps devouring the binder’s soul, or even of being accidentally set free upon the mortal plane. Contracting with an angel, therefore, was more similar to binding an elemental or a spirit of nature. Neither type of spirit had any desire to be enslaved to any magus and had thus to be induced or compelled by main force. It did not escape Albumor that, when the magus lost control of an elemental spirit and it broke free, the thing invariably tried first to hunt down and kill the wizard which had brought it into the mortal realm.

“It will in the end give in, despite the struggle with us, for our proffered contract will appear to align with its own ends.”

He had forced Balthus to explain the plan thrice before he had, reluctantly, agreed.

So here he sat, waiting for Balthus to return with the gold and marble vessel he’d commissioned so they could proceed. He risked a glance at the angel, the Throne, pulsing with golden light. The shock of seeing the creature was renewed, its presence like a window looking out onto an amber expanse of sun. There was almost a palpable sound, like a chime or a choir, that accompanied the vision of the angel.

“You are regretting your choices in this matter,” the angel observed, matter-of-factly. “The roads that led you to this place. You are wishing you had taken another path.” Albumor found himself bristling at the way the thing spoke. It was absolutely certain, as though it had some perfect knowledge of his own inner thoughts.

“Khalqa’il,” intoned Albumor, following Balthus’ instructions in addressing the angel by name and rank to compel it to obey. “Throne of Cyrene, Flame of the Law, I bid you to speak truly.”

The angel shrugged. Albumor winced as the strange motion sent a spray of brilliance through the attic. “I never lie,” it said.

“Then tell me, angel,” Albumor frowned, “did you reach into my thoughts, just then? When you said I had regret?”

The parts of the angel that resembled a human face smiled. Albumor tried to look only in its eyes, rather than at the other, disquieting, pieces. “I didn’t need to,” it said. “You are so full of signs. If only you could focus your attention on something as simple as observing one another, instead of dividing it constantly in your worries about the meaningless trivia of your own minds, your endless retreading of your own histories, your aches and pains,” it here gestured with some of its hands to Albumor’s cane, “then you, too, would see more clearly.”

At that moment Balthus flung upon the door. He was heaving the heavy marble urn, hauling it tucked up beneath his arm. Though his cheeks were red and puffed with exertion, he replied to the angel — Khalqa’il — as though he had been part of the conversation all along. “Yes, yes,” Balthus rolled his eyes, “you’re infinitely superior to us in every way. But while you’ve been condescending about your attention to detail, I’ve been collecting this.” He placed the urn down on his rickety three-legged breakfast table, which shuddered with the weight. Albumor staggered forward as a little oyl lamp clattered in protest, grabbing it to keep its burning oyl from spilling onto the floor.

“And,” Balthus went on, oblivious to the near-catastrophe, “I have this.” He drew a roll of vellum from his surtout. This was the contract he and Albumor had labored over together for long, midnight hours. Balthus unrolled it with a gesture, revealing the densely-written silver ink upon its face.

The angel moved to the edge of the binding circle, its complex body shifting as it sent its many eyes questing after the writing, its entire body in a position of attention, questing to see what Balthus had produced.

“Ah!” Balthus said, pouting his lips in mock commiseration, “Not quite perceptive enough, it seems. Never mind. Since you’re so much more clever than us mere mortals, you should have no trouble reading this over and seeing through all the errors I’ve made.” Balthus gave Albumor a conspiratorial grin as he approached the angel. The professor’s stomach flopped as he silently cursed Balthus for his unnecessary showboating, which still, if the angel was as gods-cursed clever as it appeared, might give the game away.

“Here it is,” Balthus said. “This is the contract. I mean to bind you to it.” He thrust the vellum scroll into the circle for Khalqa’il; the angel plucked it from his hand with one of its many long-fingered appendages. “Go on and read it. You’ll see that it’s quite sound. When you’re ready, we can match our wills.” And then he, that foolish little man-child, smiled a taunting smile at the Empyrean beast. Albumor could have throttled him with his cane.

In response, the angel fluttered. Its many wings and feathers shivered. Albumor thought he could detect in that movement a measure of anger — or of fear. Its many fingers ran over the translucent calfskin. It held up the intricate scrollwork of the lettering (written in ink that Albumor had specially prepared himself, in the fireplace of his office, combining droplets of molten quicksilver with the dust of powdered diamond and boiled oak gall) right up before its eyes, scanning the lines so rapidly that it had soon read the entire thing in its entirety several times over.

“I am a servant of the divine Cyrene,” Khalqa’il protested. “I will not be made into a glorified washerwoman for a warlock.”

Balthus clucked his tongue, supremely overconfident in his ludicrous plan. Albumor blanched and clutched at the handle of his cane. “Ah, but you will,” said Balthus with mocking sorrow in his voice. “Albumor. Lend me your aid.”

It was too late for any other path. The boy began to speak the binding words, long-practiced by warlocks of their school, going all the way back to the giant kingdoms of Primal Night when the first binders called forth infernals from the pits of the realms below and forced them into service. Hysterical terror and astonishment at his own hubris threatened to stop up Albumor’s mouth and deprive Balthus of his second binder. For, Albumor reminded himself, what had become of Choradaemonia, the pride of the warlocks, the kingdom of bounden slaves? Remember the histories — Did not King Erysichthon not overstep in his pride and thus bring forward his famous curse, through which the denizens of the realms below burrowed up and infested his people? Was that not the first and most potent warning to all warlocks, to remember the giants and their folly? A fresco of the horror, the wars of extermination that led, inexorably, to the Theomachy and the death of all the gods, adorned the walls of the Temple for which their college was named. Each and every feast day, when the college gathered in the two temples, Albumor was forced to look upon the Folly of the Binders as part of the ritual reminder that warlocks were the keepers of a lesser lore. While pure-art mages took their turns at the lectern, Albumor and his pupils were always kept to one side, opposite that horrific painting with its blazing giants consumed in purple-white fire.

But the time had passed for doubt and backfoot retiring. Balthus was looking to him, the first phrases of the binding ritual already lingering in the air like the wind of an old man’s bowels. Albumor stood, let his cane take his weight, and joined the chant.

A gust came into the attic, its source unseen. It blew not through the slats of woodwork, but rather through the slats of the world. The angel roared, and its voice was the chiming of ten thousand clocks, the smashing of a hundred thousand bells, the thunder of a million cannon. It was a sound of brass and lightning, but Balthus and Albumor spake on. Balthus lit a candle that burned first blue, then purple, then black, as he wove it around the angel’s shivering body.

Albumor went on chanting and Balthus shouted against the hurricane: “Give in, Khalqa’il! You cannot resist!”

Then, the room was illumined by a flash, like the shock of lightning, followed by a deep and lasting dark.

#

In the warmth of midnight, the urn glowed with livid fire. “Don’t start,” Balthus said, curling his lip in a snarl. The Angel had been bothering him of late. The plan proceeded apace, although the coward Albumor ever threatened to turn on him and seek the aid of ‘better mages.’ Who was better than Vandor Balthus, who had wrangled an Angel out of Heaven and corked it in a marble urn? No, he would complete his work.

It was 22 Ripemoon, nearing the very end of the time his father had allotted him to bring his High Mastery to a close. He sat, legs folded, in the dark.

“You have bound me to a contract,” came Khalaq’il’s sonorous and angelic voice from out of the depths of the marble urn. “I am in your service until I perform three minor acts — your words — that you choose, and those acts are required by your contract to be ones that further the aims of the divine Cyrene.” Balthus waited. After a moment, it went on. “It has now been one month since you and your mentor forced me into this prison, and you have named not one deed you would have me perform so that I might satisfy your contract and receive my dismissal from the mortal plane. Thus: I remain here, useless to you, useless to the world, and useless to the Goddess.”

Balthus smirked so broadly it hurt. “You have stated it precisely. Put the needle direct upon the question.”

The attic was quiet again. From outside there came the soft hush of the wind of spring’s ending and summer’s beginning. The occasional clank of a carriage or locomotor was the only punctuation in that thoughtful waiting for a long, long time.

At last, from the throat of the urn, like a voice from a tomb, the Angel spoke again. “You will never set me a task,” it said, “and that, too, is part of your plan.”

Balthus stood. “Khalaq’il, my good Throne,” he said, “we can finally get down to business.”

#

The high table had been erected at the foot of Cyrene’s altar, near the back of the great temple. The whole building was bedecked for the day with leaves of oak and laurel, and the floors strewn with sweet-scented petals. The ceremony was to be held in the larger and more ornate of Two Temples two temples. The Sacred Enclosure of the Scholar was the same hall that boasted the Folly of the Binders by Calametto, that hideous fresco depicting the vomitus of the Nine Hells and the Abyss exploding from below the earth, covering Galta, and consuming the ancient giants of Primal Night with wytchfire. This was the very fresco that haunted Adcursus Albumor at ever official event held by the College, and the one he so despised. It was covered for the occasion, out of deference, and the whole wall was draped in a hanging the velvety blue of the Civic Temple, adorned with the six stars of the six faiths embroidered in golden thread as though fixed in the heavens. State faith, Balthus thought. Stultifying. It was all the more ridiculous when one considered that Balthus had won the right of this ceremony by imprisoning an angel.

He was seated at the place of honor, in the center of the high table, his back to the great golden altar with its bowl of sacred fire. The whole College was in attendance, as were a few notables from other colleges in the University. Gold chargers sat at each place, and the Two Temples’ oldest collection of gilded feast-day chairs (their arms and ears all fashioned from dark brackwood to resemble the ropy bodies of twining snakes fitted with heads of solid gold) had been retrieved from storage to provide the seating. It had taken a crew of five ogres two days to find and bring them all within.

At Balthus’ place there sat a lectern, disarmingly plain in its design, which caused its passenger to stand out all the more, for it held, in its wooden embrace, an enormous codex with hasps of orichalcum and pages of hammered platinum. This was the fruit of all Balthus’ labors, and both Balthus and his mentor Albumor treated it with great deference, patting it and cooing to it quietly, as though it were a living child, bare bottom borne to the cutting scrutiny of the assembled professors, tutors, rectors, and all the other dandruff of the University.

After lunch was served — poached quail egg, curried lobsters fried in coconut milk and cream, and thrice-baked potatoes — and well underway, Albumor rose with a groan. Conversations stilled and the clank of fork and knife grew quiet as the old man drew from his place the long black hood of High Mastery with its red-gold warlock’s tassel and the runes worked in the satin with orichalc wire thread.

“Having come,” he said, to the answering cries of “speak up!” and “louder!” So he cleared his throat and said again, “Having come —!” then eyed the open hall and challenged any further interruptions, “Having come! I say, through the fires of a long and arduous study, I present you your High Master, Vandor Balthus.” He held for applause (a smattering) and placed the hood around Balthus’ shoulders. The satin felt smooth and cool, the weight like a mother’s touch. Balthus nearly wept.

“Before him, your High Master has brought his Great Work: a book on Divine Law wrung from a Throne of Cyrene by his great cunning, which shall provide the foundation of all future research into the binding and command of Empyrean Celestials.” There were a few gasps from those half-drunk professors who had yet to hear the rumors. The rest of the hall was deadly silent as aged men and women of all species thought to themselves the implications of this unveiling. “A new future is open for binders and warlocks — and it is an Armorian in Armoria who has done this wonder, the first in our field since Antiquity.”

Now there was applause, and smiles, and a few broke out pipes and cigars. A merry atmosphere was coming over the gathering. The College band struck up a tune on cittern, cornett, and cornamuse. Balthus knocked back a full beaker of rhum and called for another — the College was paying — before downing that too. He ate with the delight of which he was infamous, and gleefully bespattered his new hood with butter and sauce in his frenzy.

Hours later, after Balthus spent a dizzy afternoon fielding congratulations from all quarters, he found himself in the Blue Toad, surrounded by the sycophants that dared call themselves his friends. He had been fending off the Rector of Gunwall College, of all people, when Malstaff discovered him in the quadrangle outside the Enclosure and swept him away. Albumor was in their train, as were a number of other jubilant warlocks. Balthus noticed not only the two domes of the Temples, but patches from many of the other University colleges, including the snarling black wolfshead of the fabled College of Gramarie, which outdid all the others in prestige and pedigree.

Ander clapped him on the back so many times that Balthus feared he would have an indelible palm-print on his flesh. Still, he did not shy away from the boy, but drank with him and accepted his many awkward toasts. “You were closer to completing the work than you let on,” Ander said with a beery wink.

Even Undine and Radoven stopped their endless groping for the night. Balthus was flattered to see he had broken through their seemingly endless lust. Ferra Tivol flashed his phallic fencing rapier twice, demonstrating dueling cuts in the air, as though facing invisible foes. “In Sartoria, every young man must train with the sword,” he said.

Balthus burped a laugh. “In Sartoria, every young man is a catamite.”

It turned out that the band had followed them, and soon the Toad was filled with rollicking music, much more lively than what they had played in the temple. There was dancing and even (to Balthus’ everlasting horror) the singing of folk songs.

Old Albumor danced around a professor that Balthus vaguely knew (Morosin Lucan, he was called, though what he actually professed, that is what he taught, Balthus knew not). The two old men seemed to be having the time of their lives; everyone, in fact, was having a wonderful time. Everyone, that is, except Censora, who found Balthus in the midst of a country ayre and tugged on his sleeve. Her whisper was hot in his ear as she hissed at him over the merriment. “Was that him? That man at the ceremony? The one who looked like if you were a brawler?”

“Eh? What?” Balthus asked.

Censora ground her teeth. “Your father. In the red frock coat. With the great bald head and the look that could melt glass.”

Balthus frowned at the scene around him. His father had most certainly not been there. He would have been aware of that, would have felt that daemonic presence like a baleful second sun. “No,” he said at last, “it couldn’t have been.”

“No,” Censora agreed. “He was too young for that, anyway. Wasn’t much older than you.”

A thought struck him, an unpleasant one, which bubbled through his consciousness and forced his mind away from all the day’s delights, from his victory over time, over circumstance, and most of all, over his odious father. “Clavell,” he said. “It must have been my brother Clavell.” But what was he doing there? Why come?

At that moment, he spotted Malstaff across the cavernous taproom. The fat wizard-to-be raised his tankard in Balthus’ direction, and Balthus was reminded, unaccountably, of the warning Malstaff had given those months ago, right here in the Toad. Censora gripped his arm, but he did not even feel it.

An Angel, he thought.

Revenge.

#

Balthus was provided an office that was somewhere between a broom closet and a boiler room. The Scholar of Two Temples (a position that Balthus had a little residual respect for, despite the fact that he was the brightest star in the University, at least for a time) had called upon Balthus to extend a teaching position, and Balthus had immediately accepted. Although the research was his, the book on divine law and all the academical rights belonged to the University through its college; it was expected that Balthus expand the school’s investment and begin to produce explicatory and investigatory works. Thus, Taelamon Sirk, that diminutive magus, stood between Balthus and access to the codex.

The Taelemons were rumored to come from across the river in Hurgasland, but if the dwarf had been born from mining money, Balthus saw no sign of it. Sirk was a prim, well-groomed wizard with impeccable hair (held in its carefully studied place with copious amounts of Brabant’s Bearfat or some other fixative) and a tidy beard clipped in sharp angles and cut close to the jaw, which made him look like  politician. Sirk had given Balthus the offer to teach accompanied by a snifter of rhum and a red-and-white Two Temples sash to wear.

When he pushed the contract across his blotter, the Scholar laughed. “I suppose you warlocks are all half advocats yourselves, so no need to consult one.”

Balthus took the insult in stride and signed without reading a single line. It didn’t matter what the contract to join the University faculty required of him; he knew he would do it.

In the month of the chrysanthamum, Balthus moved out of his Chalk Street apartment. There was a certain sorrow to this departure from those rooms, for he had hallowed them with sweat and blood. There were the marks from the summoning and binding circle, and there the rust-red stain where he’d sliced his hand with a paring knife. There, he had made coffee for Albumor on more than one occasion, heating his little pot on a sorcerous flame. He had little in the way of personal belongings to remove — the sodden cot on which he slept, his largest investment in furnishing, wasn’t worth more than a handful of groats. He took his few movables packed in an apple crate and the rest he paid an ogre handyman from the Temples to clear out and cart away, parting with a whole ten thalers for the task.

On his way out, he once more crossed the faded etchings that even a good soak and scrub could not remove, and thought anew of the Empyrean he’d kept there for months on end. With this, there came that old, troubling thought that, although Balthus had forced that creature to transcribe the innermost workings of the Empyrean courts, the Angel might somehow poison his triumph. Set that fear aside, he cautioned himself, knowing that it might swamp him.

The rooms he was provided by virtue of his professorship were to be found on Cypress Street, not far from the Infirmarium of the Sacred Silence. He could see the sisters going about their quiet work from his window. The street was a quiet academic retreat, shaded by namesake trees and only a short walk from the Two Temples. He found that if he woke by the sixth morning hour, he could buy a cup of coffee fresh from the copper ewer of a local coffee boy on his way to the college and still arrive in time to pluck a hot honey-smeared bun from the master’s commons before they were all gone.

He received his lecture assignments by way of a messenger mephit, one of those scurvy little elemental imps bound to the University’s service, which bore a crisp scroll in its sooty claw. He was surprised to see how light his work appeared to be: two sections of basic conjurations and the philosophy of magic, and was further concerned that none of his assigned students appeared to have anything to do with the subject of his long labors. He was not even given an address to the faculty concerning the bindings or law of the celestials.

“Don’t worry,” Albumor told him, and the old man seemed healthier and more lively than he had in years, “likely it will be addressed at our summertide meeting and all will be sorted to everyone’s satisfaction.”

But Balthus could no more stop himself from worrying than he could stop the sun from rising or halt even the smallest of the moons in its path. It was little help that he found his days shapeless and devoid of all duties. The codex was kept locked away in a secure collection and he couldn’t work out how to get to it. Sirk was suddenly absent, never present in his office when Balthus arrived, no matter when he tried. Balthus began to suspect the dwarf was avoiding him.

This void of order and responsibility led him oft and oftener to the Toad, where he would brood in silence. In these empty hours, the fear of the Angel’s vengeance found fertile soil to germinate and grow. Before too long, his soul was infested with the many vines of a thorny plant of foreboding that advanced from day to day in slow but creeping growth until all his waking hours were beneath its canopy.

In the silence of the sisters at the Infirmarium, he began to suspect a plot; where they watching him, perhaps, and reporting back through the mouths of priests to the gods? Perhaps their prayers raced swiftly through the earth to the realm of Dorea of the Lusterless Gold where she even now summoned up her own Thrones to punish him. Angels, too, he knew, could take other forms. Was the coffee boy with the copper tank upon his back merely the Angel Khalqa’il in disguise? No, no. And yet…

So the fading summer turned, and Balthus once more returned to this former habit of furtive study. Now armed with his master’s hood, he was free to pierce the innermost chambers of every University library at any hour. No more ferrying little chits of permission signed and countersigned by college rectors, bursars, tutors, and librarians. Nor was he forced to leave the premises at sundown as once he was, but now spent his night-time hours immured in tombs of parchment and granite.

Once he realized he could freely explore not only the library of the Two Temples but the three dark and bejeweled stacks at the Blackwolf College of Gramarie and make use of books and chambers so ancient and secret that they were forbidden the student body, he found himself always beneath the wolfshead banner or among the half-ruinous quadrangles of the black wolf. Ever he sought out rumor and research of those who had defied the gods, for Balthus thought his own transgression in the enslavement of Cyrene’s servant and the pilfering of heaven’s holy secrets most alike the crimes of ancient apostates and blasphemers. When he slept, and this was fitfully and in brief bursts, his dreams were disturbed by visions of being held captive in a soaring marble hall or chained to some divine dock in a court of gold and obsidian, being sentenced to some terrible fate by a judge all of silver fire and flashing eyes.

From the wreckage of a thousand tales and accounts, dredged from the notes of heretic wizards, Balthus began to assemble an arsenal of defense. At first this consisted of knowledge alone: Arianrhod the Speaker wrote that his dreams were haunted by dragon gods who he had slighted (and were not Balthus’ dreams haunted?), while Indominus Masticus warned that the celestial hosts could descend in darkness to inform their followers in secret whispers of his hiding places so that he was forced always to leave a city after no more than a week and perished on the road of a traveling sickness caught along the Coasts of Ruin.

Now, he wondered if Sirk had not been struck by the inspiration of some nocturnal visitation; perhaps the heavens had sent down messengers — devas, guardinals — to woo him in his sleeping state and fill his head with poison against Vandor Balthus. His bigotry might extend to all warlocks, spreading like a secret sorrow; Do not allow Balthus to meet you in your office, Taelamon Sirk, the Angels might be whispering. Whole legions and hosts could very well illumine Sirk’s apartments at night, a violent cavalcade of anti-Balthenian hate.

He moved on from these accounts to gathering a wild and eclectic armory of charms and wards, gleaning them from any source he could find, respectable or not. These, Balthus tested, refined, and experimented upon in his boiler-room office. It was hard work, having only the notes he’d taken from the great Codex to work from, unable to read from the pages the Angel had penned.

His research drew him into a study of the war of the gods, the Theomachy, in which the original divinities had destroyed each other. Balthus (and other apostatic scholars) believed the old gods to be little more than nature spirits swollen to immense size and power, like ticks fed fat on the blood of magic. The thing was, when the gods went to war, it surely meant that they had at one time fashioned weapons that were proof against each other. Little by little, Balthus began to seek out inscriptions on old stones, recorded in journals or documented by eccentric Sartorian natural philosophers and deranged Hyalene sorcerer-priests, for on those giant and wyrm-work dolmens and menhirs were recorded the memories of a time when gods slew gods.

Here and there, mostly in secondary sources, Balthus would uncover a useful tidbit of arcana and this he unerringly added to his treasure-horde of lore.

#

Adcursus Albumor had broken free of his former student. Gratefully, gracefully, he had been allowed to forget all about Vandor Balthus and the boy’s obsession with plumbing the depths (heights?) of the heavenly hierarchies. Even his nemesis and onetime wife, Aercola, had made a grudging obeisance when the boy received his hood — had traveled across the Sepulchrine from Gunwall to the Temples, and even forced herself to come over the threshold of Albumor’s office to hand-deliver a bottle of aeminic wine from the Maelgon reserve.

“Congratulations, you old bastard,” she’d said. He took it in the spirit she offered it, placed her hand between his (gods, how withered they both had become!) and said, “Thank you. Help me drink it?”

They had a good time together for the first time since Albumor could remember, getting beastly drunk and reminiscing about old hurts they had done one another. She teased him mercilessly about Lucan and his pursuit of that professor, then gagged on her drink at the revelation that the two had already slept together.

Before she left, he asked her quietly, “Could we have been happy together?”

“We were, for a while,” she said, and his spirit knew a peace it had not known for a decade. It was as if he had asked her forgiveness, and she had given it.

That peace evaporated when the blot of Vandor Balthus once again stained his door. He had seen Balthus a few times during the summer but, thankfully, none for long. The boy had missed the summertide convocation (which was foolish) and been sequestered in his tiny offices, away from the other professors.

Now that the semester was starting and the autumn stealing in on swift unseen feet, Balthus, that monument to human hubris, was back again. He came this time not as a student-supplicant, but as a High Master in his own right. Yet, no Master had ever so bedecked themselves in curious and folk charms as the man Albumor now saw. Knotted coils of copper wire, gimcracks of quartz that a streetside diviner would be ashamed to foist on the most credulous tourist, little strands of twig and leaf, were all stuck on him or hung from him.

“By the gods, Balthus,” Albumor said.

Balthus shivered and came with a haunted look into the office. He went at once tot he fireplace and hunched over it to warm his hands. “I pray you, do not invoke them. The thought of them eats at me like a cancer.”

Cacopomp cackled from the shelves.

Albumor looked at the boy and came to his side, suddenly moved by a great feeling of pity that welled up from some dark place within him. “Look at you, lad. Unhappy in defeat, unhappy in victory.” He sighed and gripped Balthus’ shoulder. “You’ve bested that angel, boy, and you can be content in that.”

“Dreams,” Balthus said, a nonsense reply. Albumor suppressed his natural urge to snap and demand that Balthus explain himself, waited for the natural pace of the boy’s thoughts to clarify. “The Empyreans can visit mortals in dreams. I have shut them out, through cobbled-together spellwork. But even what I saved of my notes — and why can’t I get to the Codex? And why is Sirk dodging me? — confirms it. They can crawl into the mind, inspire terror, or murder, or madness.”

“You had these dreams?”

Balthus whirled. “I don’t know! I had dreams — nightmares — but were they sent by the Thrones? I don’t know!”

Albumor reached behind the wild-eyed boy, unhooked the tea kettle from its hook over the fire. With the help of his cane, he limped back to his desk while Cacopomp murmured insults. He poured the boy tea, brought it to him in a pale green cup.

“You’ve done it, Balthus,” Albumor said softly. “You’ve completed your masterwork. You’ve bested both your father and all the gods. No one can take that away from you now.” He sighed again. “No angel is filling the dreams of some poor fool with the thought of knifing you in the street.” He looked his student in the eyes, saw the fear there of a boy searching, desperately searching, for someone to tell him the things he needed to hear. Albumor’s spirit balked and he hesitated. After all, what were they to each other? Who was this child to impose upon him like this? Balthus was nothing more than a blister, an enormous wart upon his ass, always complaining whenever he tried to take a moment to relax, ever stopping him from sitting still.

And yet… was he not also, in a way, a father to this boy, whom he had nurtured through the perils of academe? Had he not responsibility for him?

“Balthus,” he said at last, his voice breathy with realization that he meant the words he said, despite it all. “I’m proud of you.”

#

On the first day of the autumn semester, in the month of the Orchid, after Balthus finished his lectures, which had amounted, in the absence of any direction from his colleagues, to reading aloud in a dry voice from a stack of notes and papers he kept bound by twine, he decided to find Taelamon Sirk. He had spent the entire summer bound up in the quaking terror of the Angel and its vengeance, but now had worked himself into a righteous little storm of anger. Where was his work, the great work that had earned him his mastery? Surely he should be pursuing it for the greater glory of the university, of the binding art, of Armoria, and, of course, of the name of Vandor Balthus. How could it be that he went from the accolades of his ascension to these empty afternoons? Why were the faculty all so quick to end their conversations with him, so fast to turn away? Why did they hastily dream up excuses to depart from the master’s commons or hurry across the square? He was determined to dispel whatever evil cloud hung over him.

It had become indispensable that he find and confront Taelamon Sirk. It was the only way to get answers, and Sirk had become the door through which Balthus had to pass to reach the Codex.

As the college’s scholar, Sirk taught few classes. His lectures were poorly attended exercises on obscure topics, really nothing more than what was technically necessary to maintain his standing as a member of the college. After dismissing the dull batch of students still lingering in the lecture hall, Balthus spotted Sirk hurrying across the quadrangle. He clenched his fists, tucked his lecture notes under one arm, and determined to follow the dwarf. At first, Balthus thought the scholar might return to his office, but Sirk veered for the two-towered gate of the school.

Little beast, Balthus thought nastily.

He wasn’t, however, about to lose this chance. He would catch up to Sirk in the street and address him directly. The scholar would be surprised, have nowhere to retreat, be devoid of the fine trappings of his college office to give him strength. He would be isolated before the oncoming storm of Vandor Balthus.

But Sirk was fast, and despite the fact that he marched about on those stumpy little dwarf legs, he was picking up speed and gaining distance from Balthus. Balthus was not a strong runner, but he saw no choice except to surrender to the urge to race after. He loped in awkward bounds, his belly slapping against him like an empty sack. His gown and stockings made it no less difficult, as the folds of his robes fouled his stride and the useless leather slippers on his feet failed to make good purchase on the rectangular sett-stone pavers. Still, he kept Taelamon in view, hurtling like an ungainly cannonball. As he plowed out onto Trystamere Street, Balthus smashed right through a cluster of students. Their lecture notes and his scattered together in a whirlwind of paper and parchment. He didn’t pause to register their cries of outrage, or to snatch after the tatters of his lecture as they took wing.

Taelamon was hot-footing around a corner, and there was a terrible chance that Balthus would lose him among the more crowded central streets of the Sepulchrine where tourists crammed between the little curio stores buying here a replica crypt made of soapstone, there a little coffin, and at a third storefront a real tanned goatshide journal in the shape of a spell book. Balthus put on a burst of unholy energy to catch his quarry. He had had enough of it, of all of it. Taelamon evading him all summer, the mysterious insult of his light lecture schedule, the mad and all-consuming fear that an angelic choir had chosen to inspire in he, Balthus, an ocean of interior disorder like a wind-frothed tempest of irrationality. His anger burned like a well-banked furnace, his legs pumped like locomotor pistons.

He struck the sharp granite corner of a university hall as he turned onto Capstone Way. He careered away from it, almost losing his footing, pushing a bespectacled Sartorian to the curb. He fell as he ran, pinwheeling so far forward that he was actually able to slap his palm on the ground and right himself without breaking his gait. For a moment, Balthus thought he’d lost Taelamon and his chance at uncovering the truth about his treatment in the college, but then he saw the scholar’s well-coiffed hair and dark red gown off in the distance.

Sirk had been forced to slow, more by the swirling action of the crowd near the Cloche than any will of his own. The tower began to chime in its deep tubular voice as the sunburst-shaped dials reached the Eleventh hour. Balthus, too, could do little more than weave his way forward, evading sedan chairs, hackneys, and the occasional locomotor as he pushed after Sirk. Foot traffic was lighter on Commerce Street, which ran all the way from the Great Temple of the Tombs at the summit near the Southditch until it reached the Exchange Bridge at the Commerce.

Balthus realized that Sirk was heading beyond the Cloche and making for the Long Fountain. He cast his eye beyond the dwarf and into the crowd of university types that always clustered around it and the shadow of the bell tower. His gaze traveled haphazardly among them until he was stunned to see the bare, gleaming, bullet-shaped head of his brother Clavell near the waterside. What were the odds? But, despite the gnawing desire to confront him and share evil words of victory with his younger brother, he had more important business this day. Whatever the numbskull was doing, Balthus silently wished him good luck in it, for he had other quarry.

He stalked now, pretending to be about other business while keeping Sirk in his view, and the thought flitted through his consciousness that this might be what Censora did all the time as a spy for the Ophidians. That drew a sly smirk from him which curled on his lips like contented lizard at first, then slowly died as he realized Sirk was making straight for his brother.

This was intolerable.

Balthus shoved his arms forward and threw people out of the way left and right, scooping through them as though he was swimming. “Excuse me,” he growled, “Pardon. Excuse me. Madame. Monsieur.” His world had shrunk down to the little snake Sirk and the huge bald head of his detestable brother. The two men met and began to speak, but almost immediately Clavell looked up and saw Balthus passing through the crowd, leaving a wake of angry people behind him like an infernal courser cruising at full steam through a school of fish.

“Well, well, well,” Clavell laughed, folding his obscenely large arms across his chest and pulling the fabric of his fancy (but all-too-flashy) floral-patterned frock coat tight. “Speak of a devil, and lo he shall appear.”

Balthus threw the last interlopers aside and strode up to where the two stood at the Long Fountain. He looked between Sirk and Clavell. Sirk was sagging, had a sick hangdog expression, but Clavell was pleased as a swordsmith learning of a war.

“Speak of a devil? Of me? Of me?” Balthus puffed himself up. He towered over Clavell, but his brother was clearly the stronger and more dangerous man. Balthus was all soft folds of fat, and pale from his years hiding from the sun behind creaking stacks of books.

Clavell nodded and winked at him, even as he handed a stack of crisp notes from the Republican Bank to Taelamon Sirk. “Indeed,” he said, “For devils are all you’ll be speaking to from now on, I fear.”

“What do you mean?” He asked Clavell, then, to Sirk, he demanded, “What does he mean? What is going on here?”

“Well…” the dwarf began, but Clavell intervened.

“Father had a dream,” he said.

Balthus felt the chill working its way up his spine. “So what? He has dreams each night,” he replied with bravado he did not feel.

“Perhaps, but this one gave him an idea.” Clavell fingered the gold chain of his hand-watch. “It would be awfully untoward if the Vandor name was associated with any scandal, you see.”

Balthus did not see.

Clavell waited for his older brother to catch his meaning. When he did not, the bullet-head registered a look of surprise and went on. “So he spoke with the university about the research you had supplied. So heretical and anti-clerical.” Clavell chided him with a clucking sound. “Just like our Balthus.”

“Get to the point,” Balthus said, hoping Clavell did not; hoping that instead he died on the spot, or dried up and blew away like a puff of seeds on the wind.

Clavell nodded. “Indeed. So. He inquired of the scholar here and the other scholars of the other colleges just how much the right to your research was worth.”

Balthus was staggered. “No,” he said.

“Oh yes, I’m afraid so. You see, he dreamed he bought you. But of course, slavery has been outlawed since the bad old days before the Revolution! So he knew he couldn’t do that.”

The Angel. This was the work of the Angel, Balthus knew it in his heart. The Angel had done this to him.

“But there was something he could buy. He was hoping he’d have the pleasure to tell you himself.” Sirk was shrinking away, obviously trying to escape this unfortunate affair. “Sadly, you stumbled upon us as we were completing the final transaction, which makes the whole thing binding. A shame he’s lost the opportunity. But I will say, it’s a delight that I get to be the one to break it to you.”

“No,” Balthus said again.

Clavell nodded. “Yes. So there you have it. You are disinherited two ways: from Vandor Oyl and from your ludicrous ‘work.’”

Balthus staggered backward, actually sat down on the raised step of the fountain.

“Just think of it,” Clavell went on, relishing every word, even as the sky wheeled overhead and Balthus felt the whole world receding into the distance. “You’ll be permitted to spend the rest of your days at the university! Just as you wanted. Of course, you will never be permitted to work on that silly book or the binding of angels, because all your techniques belong now to father, and some day to me. Instead, you will teach a few classes,”

No.

“You will go to and from lectures and meetings,”

No. It could not be. How could this be the way things were? He had been overproud, yes, but did he deserve… this?

“You will, you know, hobnob with the other masters. Although I have never heard you had much of a social life. Perhaps you’ll develop one. Because, big brother, you will never, ever, work on angels again.”

Clavell’s smile was the wide and toothy grin of the archdevil Asmodeous preparing to rise out of the infernal realms to devour the world. “And all the students at the Two Temples will pass your office or see you walking alone across the way, that professor no one ever speaks to, that no one ever really knows, and they will bow their heads together and whisper, ‘There he goes. There goes the Angelist.’”