“If you value your life, Rumm, do not finish that sentence! This work comes before all. Now get out. And tell Barl to stop her nagging. She will have me between her legs again when I am done here, and not before.”

A shocked silence.

Shamed, Morgan pressed a hand across his eyes. Justice save him, he was so tired.

“Of course you can’t tell her that. Rumm, tell her—tell her—” He shuddered his way through a yawn. “Tell her something. Just—not that.”

“My lord,” Rumm said quietly, and withdrew.

His hands not quite steady, Morgan unwrapped his precious supplies. Last of all, unwrapped the four smallest boxes, worth more than all his other catalysts combined. Worth a future. Worth every sacrifice he must make.

Heart pounding, blood racing, anticipation washing away fatigue, he assembled the other catalysts for this, the greatest magework ever attempted. Lined up his crucibles. Pushed aside the sheets of notes, save one, the single piece of paper on which he’d recorded the syllables and sigils that would save Dorana from its enemies. Remake the world.

Prove me the greatest mage who ever lived.

No time for doubt. No room for it. He must be magework made man. Fleetingly, he thought of his father. What a shame Greve Danfey had died before learning the truth of the son he’d accused of betrayal. Of failure. Of sullying the Danfey name.

You were wrong, my lord. I do not sully us. I glorify us. I will be remembered for this until the last star burns to death.

Smiling, invincible, he set about proving his dead father a liar.

Azafris. Tinctured susquinel. Powered vilys root. Crushed crulin leaf. Tilatantin. Domish and gribb, ground into a paste. A pinch. A dribble. A touch. A drop. The balance exquisite, like Barl’s lips on his skin.

Binding them together… his own hot, red blood.

The sigils bloomed like wildflowers in the heat of the summer sun. Immaculate and indestructible, they formed above their crucibles. Each matrix held with a shimmering solidity, as though they’d been painted on the air. Remembering his struggles with those first reworked sigils, he laughed. Then he wept. With a single word and burst of power he confirmed them.

And then he whispered the syllables of the transmutation incant.

“You should be alive, Father,” he said, as the sigils and syllables merged, seamless, like the workings of Barl’s clocks. “Were you alive I’d have you apologise to me.”

The incant was a success. All it needed now was to be spoken. But that could wait. Would have to wait, because he was swaying on his feet. The attic was blurring, spinning madly around him. He was tired. He was so tired. The strangest roaring in his head.

Before he saved Dorana, he needed to rest.

A tentative knocking on the attic door roused him.

“My lord? I’ve brought you some supper.”