She raised her chin, looking at her father down her nose. “Then I suppose we should talk prices.”

He showed those empty gums of his as he smiled. “That’s my—”

There was a crash. Outside, in the gardens. Savine’s father frowned towards the window. An angry cry, cut off in another crash, even louder, as if something heavy had fallen from a height.

“What was that?” For some reason, Savine felt the need to whisper.

Her father held up a hand, eyes still narrowed at the window. “Stay calm.”

“Calm? What have you done?”

“Freed us from Bayaz.” His eyes flickered sideways towards a muffled yell. “But the First of the Magi was never going to simply let us steal the Union from under his nose.”

Savine heard shouting in the corridor, then a long, thin scream. She took an unsteady step away. She had been on a battlefield and knew what genuine agony sounded like. It ended in a sickening metallic crash, and another, closer, then a crunching thud so near and so hard that Savine felt the floor vibrate. The painting rattled on its stand. Dust filtered gently down from the vaults above.

Her father slowly, effortfully swivelled his chair towards the door to the hallway. “Get behind me,” he said.

The knob turned and the door swung open. A face appeared around the edge. An unremarkable face, with different-coloured eyes.

“Knock, knock.” Yoru Sulfur stepped into the room. He was neatly presented, as he had always been at meetings of the Solar Society. That same polite manner, that same unassuming smile. The only difference that he was spattered from head to toe with blood.

Savine took a quivering step back. These rooms were the best guarded in the Union. He must have come through several well-armed men. She presumed it was their screams she had heard, their gore with which he was showered.

He called himself a magus, but she had thought of it as a hollow title, left over from a distant age of ignorance and superstition. She knew that Bayaz had ruined the Agriont, but that had been before she was born. She had heard people whisper about Eaters, but written it off as small-minded fearmongering. Every day she had seen the dark outline of the House of the Maker, looming over even the city’s tallest chimneys, but she had somehow allowed herself to believe that actual magic would never play a role in her thoroughly structured, ruthlessly rational, entirely modern life.

It was with a feeling of chill horror that she discovered her error.

Sulfur smiled at her father. The smile of a disappointed tutor, finally tracking down a wayward pupil. “Sand dan Glokta. You have become a difficult man to find.”

“Did you try making an appointment?”

“You know I prefer to arrive unannounced.” Sulfur rooted through his curly hair and picked something out between finger and thumb. A piece of bone. Perhaps a tooth. He flicked it away and it bounced clicking across the floor. “I warned my master you could not be trusted.”