Lyon

In Paris, the party attended the Ball at the Hôtel de Brissac, hosted by the Duchesse de Brissac. Georgiana Wentworth returned the ring to Comte Émeric de Puyrault, a young impoverished nobleman desperate to restore his family estate. Gratitude turned to invitation — he offered them lodgings at his Lyon estate, Le Coteau des Ombres, and from that moment formed a romantic attachment to Georgiana that she would spend the rest of the chapter politely deflecting.

In Paris, Emma and Charlotte overheard two men whose identities they did not then know. The men were later established as Antoine Lefèvre and Luc Fouchard. Emma also persuaded Thomas Wyndham, who hoped to marry her, to abandon his intended leave in England and accompany them from Paris.

Charlotte’s search for suitable clothing in Paris also had a practical cause: she needed to cover the shoulder-to-hip scar left by Hume’s Spectral Razor at Stonehenge.

Lyon declared itself before they even reached de Puyrault’s door. On the road up to the estate, the party was ambushed by ciimba — zombie children with their mouths sewn shut. Augustus Bolt was bitten and fell sick. The party killed the creatures and stacked them in a bonfire in the back garden of the Puyrault estate. Welcome to Lyon.

Abbe Etienne Duplessis briefed them at the Collégiale Saint-Just — the cult leader Mathilde Savarin, the Société Harmonique de l’Aube, and the ritual they were preparing. Then came the masquerade soirée at the Maison du Corbeau, hosted by Monsieur Goupil, a useful fool in Savarin’s orbit. The investigators hunted down invitations, donned their masks, and sought tokens admitting them to the hidden ritual. Emma and Thomas overheard Goupil discussing the secret ritual with masked guests on a balcony. Elsewhere at the soirée, Georgiana recognised the Greek myths Goupil was passing off as his own exploits. The investigators followed two masked guests in an attempt to steal their ritual tokens. Thomas sweet-talked Victoire Lenoir while Marina tried and failed to lift her token. Emma then quarrelled with Thomas over his talking to another woman, creating a distraction so that he could try to take it himself. In the ritual chamber, Georgiana recognised the significance of the Orphic and Sumerian musical inscriptions set into the black marble floor. They witnessed the secret ritual in the hidden chamber. A Formless Spawn. A child sacrifice. They watched it all and did not intervene. They left traumatized, carrying knowledge they could not put down.

At the Ball at the Château de Camberonne, hosted by the Marquise Éloïse de Camberonne, the party made the connections that would carry them to the end: Colonel Henri Moreau, introduced by Duplessis, who would bring his veteran soldiers to the fight. Commissaire Delaroche, Lyon’s chief of police, terrified and compromised by Savarin — but a potential ally if his children could be freed. And the confrontation between Duplessis and Abbé Ferrant of St. Nizier, Savarin’s fanatic priest, laid bare the theological war simmering beneath Lyon’s civility.

After the Camberonne ball, Émeric took the investigators and Thomas to Adrien’s hunting lodge. Delaroche came there and laid out his terms to Gus: rescue his children from the hospital, and he would turn against Savarin. His appeal precipitated the hospital raid.

Benoît Chasseloup, a retired silkweaver, helped them with a map of the tunnels. His involvement was that of a useful local contact.

Three trips into the tunnels beneath Lyon followed. On the first expedition, the party mapped the passages, killed a silkweaver zombie creature lurking in the old guild vaults, and found “Perform” on their map — the Roman temple excavation beneath Fourvière Hill, where Savarin intended to conduct the ritual. Marina Garrick encountered the Silent Nun in the tunnels — a spectral figure who would appear again. On the second trip, they found “Practice” — a sideways corridor ending in a locked door. The ladies posed as courtesans being brought for Fouchard’s pleasure, conning their way past the guards. During the reconnaissance of “Practice”, the investigators saw Carreau conducting twelve surgically altered children. A wooden screen stood under the guard of roughly twelve Blue Sashes. The investigators left without seeing what lay behind it.

The Orphans’ Hospital raid was the first of two assaults that would cost the party dearly. The objective was surgical: rescue Delaroche’s children, held by Savarin as leverage. Augustus and Jacob went in the front while the ladies, Moreau, his four French veterans, Thomas, and Adrien entered from the back. Blue Sash guards and orderlies fought them through the corridors. Thomas and Adrien were seriously wounded during the hospital assault, one shot and the other stabbed. Someone seized the remaining nurse in a surgical theatre near the veterans’ gunfight and compelled her to treat them. When Blue Sash reinforcements arrived, Augustus went out front alone to hold them off — five against one. The ladies circled the building and volley-fired on the reinforcements from the flank, but it was too late. Augustus took mortal wounds. Jacob rushed to save him, critically failed his First Aid, and shoved his thumb into Augustus’s wound — killing him.

In the basement, they found Dr. Carreau in the middle of surgery on a child — inserting steel rods into the boy’s throat. Five other children in cages: two already operated on, three next. Two of the three were Delaroche’s children. Emma Wentworth shot Carreau. Jacob stabbed him with a sword, pinning him to the ground. But the sight of the room sent Marina into temporary insanity — she saw her brother where Carreau lay — and she shot Jacob dead. Two PCs killed in minutes, both by their own side. Georgiana Wentworth took a cleaver to the shoulder from a surgeon’s apprentice. More than 240 children were freed and escorted to the police barracks under Delaroche’s authority. Among them were children of nobles, politicians and other influential families, breaking Savarin’s wider hostage network. The rescue had cost the investigators Gus and Jacob.

After the hospital raid, Magistrate Béraud was summoned to report and Delaroche arrested him.

The final assault on the Silkweavers’ Guild was the climax. Delaroche and his police went in the front door, fighting hand-to-hand with Blue Sashes at the barricades. Delaroche died trying to scale one — a Blue Sash behind it cut him down. Phil’s second character in a single chapter. The rest of the party and Moreau’s veterans descended into the sewers, found the “Practice” door, took out two guards, picked the lock, and opened into the cellar. Ciimba children charged from the darkness. Emma fled screaming — her second encounter with the zombie children crystallised into a permanent phobia. Charlotte was bitten. Marina was chewed on. Charlotte fled into the tunnels, got lost, and saw the Silent Nun again — the same spectral figure Marina had encountered on the first tunnel trip. Charlotte eventually found her way to “Plan” on the map — Savarin’s headquarters — where she recovered a tome and handouts pointing to Herzfeld in Vienna. The intelligence that would launch Chapter 3.

The Chakota was unleashed. The party retreated. Moreau’s veterans fell back under orders and prepared a volley. Marina waited at the corner with lantern oil and matches — her plan was to burn the creature as it rounded the bend. The Chakota squeezed its bulk around the corner. Marina saw it and her mind shattered one last time. She thought Moreau was attacking her. She lunged at him. He grabbed her and spun her into the Chakota’s mass. The creature began folding itself around her. Marina lit the oil and her gunpowder. The explosion killed her and the Chakota both — body parts and ichor spraying the tunnel walls. Moreau barely survived the blast.

Then Savarin came around the corner in the Chakota’s wake, ready to unleash her spells on whatever remained. The veterans were waiting. Their volley killed her instantly, throwing her body back against the tunnel wall before she could utter a single incantation. Fouchard died when the party regrouped and entered the cellar to rescue the surgically altered children’s choir.

The Fourvière ritual never happened. Savarin was dead, the Chakota destroyed, the choir rescued. The party had prevented the Lyon cell from completing its part of the Grand Canticle — a total victory, bought with four lives.

The survivors rested at the Puyrault estate for several days. Émeric de Puyrault proposed to Georgiana. She shut it down, said she had to move on, and bade him goodbye. Varrio Harrowmont arrived from Venice — Phil’s new character, fresh from disrupting the Confraternita del Bel Canto — joining the group just before departure. Thomas stayed with the party. The road to Vienna lay ahead.

Three encounters marked the journey. At an isolated inn during a storm — the Beast of the Black Forest Inn — the party discovered a cannibal family butchering guests into sweet-smelling candles, soap, and “pork.” They saw what was happening and fought their way out. Then a period of rest at a Swiss chalet overlooking a lake. And finally, the Alchemist’s Final Experiment: the party found an overturned carriage and a dying alchemist named Ernst Kellerman, whose life’s work — a homunculus, invisible in its larval stage — had escaped. Kellerman’s last words warned them: the creature would multiply if it reached water. The party tracked the invisible homunculus through the forest, past a shepherd’s hut where it had already fed, to an abandoned mill with a pond. They barely stopped it before it reached the water.