Gabriel shrugged. “The magister who now styles himself Thorn—” He smiled grimly, paused, and pointed at a glass-shielded candle on the cupboard. A dozen moths of various sizes flitted about it.

Across the press of the crowd, Mag felt the pull of ops. She tensed.

He stood on the bright new mosaic floor of his memory. Prudentia stood once more on her plinth, and her statue was now a warm ivory rather than a cold marble, the features more mobile than they had been in his adolescence and her hair the same grey-black he remembered from his youth.

He knew in his heart that she was now a simulacrum not an embodied spirit, but she was the last gift that Harmodius the magister had left him, and he loved having her back.

“Immolate tinea consecutio aedificium,” he said.

Prudentia frowned. “Isn’t that a bit… dramatic?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I’m renowned for my arrogance and my dramatic flair,” he said. “He’ll be blind and with a little luck, he’ll attribute it to the said arrogance. Consider it a smokescreen for our visitor. If he’s coming.”

She didn’t shrug. But somehow she conveyed a shrug, perhaps a sniff of disapproval, without moving an ivory muscle.

“Katherine! Thales! Iskander!” he said softly, and his memory palace began to spin.

The main room—the casting chamber—of his palace was constructed, or remembered, as a dome held aloft with three separate sets of arches. In among the arches were nooks containing statues of worthies; his last year as a practitioner had clarified and enhanced his skills to add another row.

On the bottom row were the bases of his power—represented by thirteen saints of the church, six men, six women, and an androgynous Saint Michael standing between them. Above the saints stood another tier, this one of the philosophers who had informed his youth—ancients of one sect or another from various of the Archaic eras. But now, above them stood a new tier; twelve worthies of a more modern age; six women and six men and one cloaked figure. Harmodius had installed them, and Gabriel had some reservations about what they might mean—but he knew Saint Aetius, who killed his emperor’s family; he knew King Jean le Preux, who stopped the Irk Conquest of Etrusca after the catastrophic collapse of the Archaic world; he knew Livia the empress and Argentia the great war queen of Iberia.