Horror and dismay stole his breath and balance. Light-headed, he dropped the lid with a clunk and nearly fell. His eye was gone. Hasdrubal’s blow had opened a gash from the bridge of his nose, across his eye socket, and through the thin outer bone of the orbit. That whole quarter of his face was a chasm of half-healed wounds, proud flesh, and scar tissue.

Where his eye should have been was a bronze-colored clockwork eye. Wires out the back of it had embedded themselves in his flesh and threaded themselves along the whole remaining surface of his eye socket. The mechanical iris opened and shut, and the artifact eye tracked with his real one.

Saints, but he looked like Kantelvar. That clockwork parasite had tried to breed the Savior using Isabelle as his divine broodmare. It was he who’d cut off her arm.

What would Isabelle think when she saw him like this? It would be like looking in a twisted nightmare mirror of a memory.

More pressingly, why had Ivar done this to him? On the one hand, it seemed like a cruel prank. On the other hand, the eye worked. It was clearly a quondam artifact left over from before the Breaking of the World. Even broken artifacts were rare and valuable. Working ones like this, devices so arcane and complex that they could replace living flesh, were treasures beyond compare. Ivar could have bought a bigger ship with this thing, or maybe a fleet of ships. Yet he’d stuck it in Jean-Claude’s skull and sent him off to be tortured by Travers.

He tried splashing water in his eye to dispel the glamour, but the illusion remained, for he could feel no metal in his face. The glamour itself must be attached to a charm somewhere nearby, but where? Travers had removed everything he’d brought with him.

This was too much to think about out here in the open. Jean-Claude filled a waterskin to carry him through the next day, then replaced the lid and hurried back to his crate. Once safely ensconced, he began examining the rest of his battered body. The surgeon had fitted him with the prosthetic eye, taking advantage of a wound that was already there. Why not do the same with the charm? His body was, after all, the thing he was least likely to lose.

Within his left forearm, lying just below the skin, his mechanical eye spied a heavy shape, like a metal pin had been sewn into him when his arm was stitched up. Jean-Claude pinched, poked, and prodded it, grimacing in pain. He would have to cut the thing out.