“I was there.” It had to be He Who Visits Who broke this silence—no child of Earth’s civilization could have. “I have been in that place, many days. They waited for this time, when I was not.”

“Ἄναξ?” I used the Greek in public now that there was no need to hide what we were to each other. “Where’s Martin?”

“Elsewhere,” He answered. “Safe.” Here was a small mercy, a drop of rain to give our desert life.

Some moments more we watched, the outside view of the tower showing emergency forces swarming the soot-stained entrance. Now the inner view cut out altogether, and something bullet-slim and blue shot from the tower’s larger wound and flight-fell to the water. Only as its splash-foam thinned did I realize that what had seemed tiny at this scale must have been nearly room-sized, large enough to bear the violators to their well-planned but ill-deserved escape. A submarine?

“TM.” Chagatai still managed to sound warm. “Everyone who’s anyone is calling me to ask why you aren’t answering your tracker. Shall I tell them to shove off?”

“Say I am safe.”

“Your mom wants you. Ancelet. Heloïse. Dominic. Every newspaper ever.”

“Say I am safe.”

“Righto.”

“How about Cornel? Has Cornel called for Donatien yet?” The stray voice interrupting from the Members’ balcony was Felix Faust’s. Did you think the age’s sage and grand voyeur would pass up such an exquisite feast as the gestures and twitches of this Blacklaw company as they asked ‘important questions’ of his Nephew? “If Cornel hasn’t called, you should worry.”

“Why?” In any other meeting it would have been someone in charge, Natekari perhaps, who answered Brill’s Headmaster, but in this company of sovereigns it was instead someone I did not know, a grave face in the second row, wise, to-the-mark, and, save for her sash and backpack, naked (as is a Blacklaw’s right).

Faust liked the interruption. “It is my not-inexpert opinion that my Nephew is the only living being capable of calming Cornel MASON down enough to stop them declaring war on the whole world instantly over this theft.”

“Theft? You mean exposure.”

“I mean theft.”

A pause. “You think they also robbed the vaults?”

The Headmaster nodded. “I think few creatures on this Earth could crack the Sanctum Sanctorum and not succumb to curiosity.”

I felt the blood drain from my face. “The Oath of Office. The MASONIC Oath of Office is in the same block in the vault! No one but an Emperor has seen the Oath since thousands of ages of however-long-you think-the-Empire-is-old ago!”

Faust applauded the wounds my fear inflicted upon grammar.

“Caesar angry.” I slumped onto the nearest something. I often feel in my mind the vice of Caesar’s black-sleeved hand upon my throat, but now I seemed to see it on everyone else’s.