Vienna

The Burning Ball and the Broken Baron

The chaos at Palais Lobkowitz reached a fever pitch in Round 3. A bronze-scaled Wächter rose from the headless corpse of Mikhail on the dance floor and turned its attention on Vladimir, raking its claws across his chest and shoulder in a spray of blood that splattered across Freddy’s face. Freddy dragged at the wounded officer, but Vladimir’s legs gave out and he crashed to the parquet. A second Wächter came barrelling out of a side corridor and bounced off the walls before giving chase. Adler sprinted across the dance floor and vaulted the refreshment tables with Sasha and Nikolai Volkonsky pounding after him. Sasha’s flying tackle missed by a yard, and he crashed into an end table in a heap of silverware and tablecloths. In the same breath, Georgiana — sharp-eyed in the pandemonium — registered two critical details. Baron von Kaunitz was gone, slipped away via the balcony with the calm of a man who had simply grown bored of the evening. And at the far wall, a domino-masked man with a half-drawn pistol stood frozen, his eyes locked on Adrien: Captain Vogel, identified at once beneath the mask, there as a Kaunitz surveillance asset and caught now in a scene he had not been warned about. He held a breath, then turned and fled through the main entrance, leaving the carnage behind him.

Varrio wasted no time. He tore a strip of tablecloth, wrapped it around a salvaged chair leg, doused it in a cracked bottle of cognac bleeding across the parquet — paused to take a swig — and lit the whole thing from a still-smouldering candle stub that had fallen from the shattered chandelier. The torch erupted in a whoosh of flame, and the nearest Wächter reared back from Vladimir with an unearthly screech. Across the ballroom Katherine shouted the party toward the windows; Emma smashed a chair through the nearest one, opening a body-sized gap over the flat lead-sheeted roof of the port-cochère eight feet below. Thomas leapt through and landed in a crouch, turning to help the others — but Fräulein Lindqvist jumped too hard and sailed past him at an angle, and he lunged, caught her by the arm and the dress, and ended up flattened on the roof, half-hanging off the edge, the singer dangling above a ten-foot drop to the cobblestones of the Spiegelgasse below.

Katherine fired her pistol at the fleeing Adler, forcing him to throw himself to the ground and skid across the parquet, halting his progress just outside the withdrawing-room door. Freddy, watching Varrio’s success with fire, tore cloth from his own clothing and fashioned a second flame in a frantic motion. The effect was immediate. Both creatures recoiled from the fire with a desperation that bordered on terror, scrabbling backwards across the hardwood floor like animals fleeing a bonfire. Varrio pressed his advantage, ran up to the second Wächter as it leapt at him, and thrust his torch directly into its jaw. The creature ignited instantly and completely, going up like a Roman candle in a roar of unnatural flame, thrashing and shrieking on the ballroom floor before it was still. Nobody had expected to kill one of the horrors, let alone so dramatically. The first Wächter, unfettered by the dying commands, bounded across the dance floor and pounced on the fallen Vladimir, wrapping its tongue around his neck and gnashing at his face and jaw — his muffled screams rose through the creature’s mouth before fading. Across the ballroom, Adler — sprawled on the parquet with a viable exit still possible through the withdrawing-room window — struck his tuning fork against the floor and recalled the third remaining Wächter from the port-cochère roof. In the alleyway below, Thomas pushed Anna behind him and raised a stone; the creature shuddered, turned, and tumbled clumsily back down to the cobblestones, drawn by the fork’s summons. Georgiana met the second Wächter as it came sprinting out of the corridor, twisted aside, and raked her sword across its flank in a single fluid cut that spilled dark ichor across the dance floor.

Georgiana had been watching every move Adler made. As he scrambled to his feet and sprinted for the withdrawing-room window, she was already in position between him and every possible exit. She caught up in a single decisive stride and swept her sword low, slicing through both of his Achilles tendons in one fluid motion. Adler collapsed with a scream, fetching up against the window with blood pooling beneath him. Emma rushed forward to seize the fork; Adler, even in his agony, drove his knife up under her arm and inflicted a deep and serious wound before Nikolai and Sasha crashed into him like a wall and pummelled him into the floor. Varrio stepped on Adler’s wrist and pressed his torch to the man’s hand until the fork clattered free, and Katherine dove for it — and the moment her fingers closed around it she was struck by a brief, disorienting vision she could not quite explain. The surviving Wächter reached the broken ballroom window and clambered up. Georgiana touched the fork in Katherine’s hand and through some unknown sympathy of brass and blood saw through the creature’s eyes — an alien colour spectrum, its claws as her own limbs — and for a moment forced it to sit submissively on the cobblestones outside. The link fractured and she lost it, paying a point of sanity for the trespass. Varrio, in the courtyard below and ignorant of any of this, stepped around the corner and saw the creature sitting there. He set it on fire without hesitation. It burned. Moments later, as the party regrouped in the withdrawing room to plan their exit, Georgiana asked for the fork and Katherine handed it to her without a word. It has not left Georgiana’s person since.

The escape from the Palais was a scramble of bodies through broken windows and darkened gardens. Varrio navigated the walled rose parterres and the iron-spiked fencing to reach Charles and the carriage, waving his torch to keep any remaining Wächter at bay. Adler was bound hand and foot with strips of gold brocade rope and tassels torn from the ballroom hangings, and the entire party — with Nikolai, Sasha, and a catatonic Fräulein Lindqvist wrapped in a borrowed cape — piled into the carriage. They picked up Thomas and Anna on the Spiegelgasse as they fled, and Charles drove hard for the Josefstadt district as police whistles began to echo through the Vienna night. Ten minutes later, Thaliastraße 12 opened its door to them for the first and, by Thurner’s standing order, almost certainly the last time. Inside, Varrio found the upper garret arranged as an observation post, with a clear view of the street below and a rooftop hatch that opened onto the neighbouring rooftops — an emergency exit spanning three houses in either direction. In the cellar, behind a section of false brickwork, the hidden cache was exactly as Thurner had described: two cavalry pistols, forty rounds of ammunition, an Austrian-pattern sabre, thirty feet of rope, and several lanterns with oil.

Adler was hauled down the rickety cellar steps and tied to a rickety wooden chair. His heels were ruined, his left hand burned to a blackened claw, his face a map of bruises from the Russians’ attentions. The interrogation that followed was thorough, if unconventional — every attempt to first-aid the screaming prisoner only seemed to cause him more pain, until he was begging them to stop helping him and simply answer their questions. What he revealed was considerable. The party’s stolen occult books and Marina’s notebook were in the Polizeidirektion’s ground-floor strong room under Vogel’s authority, accessible only to officers of captain rank and above. A secret passage behind a bookcase in Professor Herzfeld’s University office led directly to the anatomical theatre below, bypassing the main guard station entirely. Anna was confirmed as the essential and irreplaceable final piece of the ritual — no backup soprano, no time to prepare one. The name Caroline Hartley, a dark-haired English music student, was mentioned as a potential future target. Adler explained the fork’s mechanics — A=432 Hz, rhythmic commands coded in the spacing of strikes — and admitted the Wächter were not crafted things but rather the unsuccessful by-products of the Brotherhood’s integration process. When Nikolai demanded to know what had happened to his missing friends, Adler’s answer was chilling: they had been integrated into the machine. They had transcended. One more dormant Wächter, he added, lay inert in his carriage, waiting. As the first grey light of dawn crept over the rooftops of Josefstadt, the party sat with a hamstrung prisoner, a traumatised soprano, two grieving Russian officers, a tuning fork of terrible power, and exactly six days until the fifteenth.