A pleasing cross-pattern in colors of burgundy, gold, and jade, purchased from a shop in London on a balmy, carefree summer day, a furnishing for their bedchamber.

Blackwood looked at the hanging. He saw nothing remarkable.

“No—behind it, Hugo,” she said, her face and mouth twisted as though she was about to scream.

Blackwood went to her, touching her face, imploring her to look at him. But her eyes would not leave the tapestry.

“Shall I…shall I take it down?”

She stared, unanswering. Mesmerized.

“Down it comes,” he said at once, determined now. He crossed to the wall and gripped the woolen textile. But before he removed it from its mounting rod, the weaving collapsed as though of its own weight, falling heavily to the floor in a heap.

Blackwood jumped back. The wall behind was unmarked, and unremarkable.

“There, you see—?”

He turned around but Orleanna was lying back upon her pillow again, eyes closed.

“Darling,” he said, feeling her cheeks, patting her hand. She breathed deeply, suddenly and completely asleep. Blackwood stepped back from the bed, a spike of terror in his chest.

He returned to the kitchen to find Talbot pacing nervously. “What is it?” Talbot asked.

Blackwood gripped the man’s shoulders. “We must go to Dee.”

The white-gowned occult philosopher swept through his grand hall with, for him, a quick and eager step.

“On the contrary, a great and profound success!” John Dee said, refuting their concerns. “We have finally pierced the veil of the mystical.”

He led them toward his esteemed library, but Talbot leapt ahead, blocking the door. “Not here,” he said. “Anywhere but in here.”

“Edward,” said John Dee, with the disappointed look of a parent at a weak child. “Come now, spheromancer. Don’t tell me you lack the courage of your convictions.”

Talbot shook his head, eyes averted. “I saw things,” he said. “I felt things. You must smash that orbuculum.”

To Blackwood, Dee said, “To arrive at the precipice only to lose one’s nerve. Come.”

He led them instead to his observatory, its glass ceiling inviting the night into the room.

Blackwood was impatient; he needed to return to Orleanna. He hated leaving her alone and untended.

Blackwood said, “Perhaps you have succeeded in some way, Master Dee, and should be commended for it. But what if…I say, if…you have touched a realm across a divide that you were not meant to breach?”

Dee shook his head, his silken white beard swaying. “No such thing.” He stepped away before turning back to look at Blackwood and Talbot. “You are like agents of doubt sent forth from this earthly plane to cloud my mind, to beg me off this great revelation. Guardians of the old world, my own co-conspirators, turned against me. The final obstacle I must obliterate before the transcendence. This is to be my moment of doubt, is it?”

“Mage,” said Talbot, “have you not witnessed strange portents here, auguring darkness?”