As a senior actuator, one of the long arms of the Order’s Council of Seven, Ernst Drexler II had his own office here in the Septimus downtown Lodge.

Slootjes turned to Kushner. “You did well by alerting us to your client’s books. I find them very upsetting.”

“Well, I couldn’t miss the obvious parallels to the Order in his new novel. He’s tried to disguise it as the ‘Octogon’—I don’t know if the misspelling was intentional or not—by using an eight-pointed sigil instead of the seven points of ours. A clumsy attempt. But as soon as I saw it I knew I had to take action.”

Although he’d been a member since his teens when his father introduced him to the Berlin Lodge as an acolyte, Ernst remained wonderstruck at how deeply the Order had penetrated the workaday world. Members everywhere, even among literary agents. When Kushner had become alarmed by his client’s latest book, he’d alerted the loremaster and emailed him a copy.

“Yes,” Slootjes said. “That novel…it’s…well, it’s deeply disturbing.”

The loremaster seemed genuinely upset. Ernst could see why. Kushner’s client, Winslow by name, had penned an apocalyptic novel that closed with the end of human civilization, with the survivors serving as prey for the otherworldly beings that had reshaped reality to their own liking. The whole scenario was overseen by a former human transformed into a being better suited to this horrific new world. All the other humans in the ancient brotherhood—the “Octogon,” as he called it—who had helped him realize this state of affairs, were abandoned to become prey as well.

The novel had parallels to the Change the Septimus Order was engineering, and Winslow depicted them as dupes who engineered their own demise.

Yes…” Slootjes said, nodding slowly. “P. Frank Winslow…who is he and how does he know what he knows—or what he thinks he knows?

Kushner shifted in his seat. “When he arrives, we can ask him. But while we’re waiting I can tell you that he’s a hack writer who—”

Ernst bit back a laugh. “I’m surprised to hear an agent admit his client is a hack.”

“Well, that’s strictly entre nous. But the truth is, I don’t consider ‘hack’ a pejorative term, and I’m not saying he’s a bad writer. He’s decent enough. What I mean is that he has no aspirations to art. He simply has this seemingly bottomless well of story ideas he draws on to keep cranking out one novel after another. He finished four in various genres last year, which I sold under his own name and two pseudonyms. He’s never had a bestseller and probably never will. He’s what we call a midlist writer. He earns enough to live in a one-bedroom walk-up in Alphabet City. His biggest success—if you can call a series of paperback originals a success—is his continuing character named Jake Fixx, which he’s milking for all it’s worth.”

“Did you ask him where he got all his information for his book?”

“Of course. He said from the same place he gets the ideas for all his books: from dreams.”