Vienna

The Fork in the Road

The night after the catastrophe at Palais Lobkowitz pressed its weight into every dream at Thaliastraße 12. Emma stood at the Lainzer Knoll gates in the grey dawn mist and watched Thomas fall — Sternberg’s shot through his chest, Adler kneeling with a surgeon’s calm to lift the still-beating heart into a humming brass resonance bowl, Thomas rising hollow-chested with his lips stitched shut in musical notation string, humming through the sutures while a Nightgaunt folded around Emma from behind and dragged her through an open window. She woke gasping to find Thomas alive and warm beside her, and whispered her relief that Adler, at least, was their prisoner. Katherine’s nightmare gave no mercy either — she was small again, a child in a London rebuilt from geometry, every doorway frame too clean, the hum of the tuning fork seeping from every corner as dark oil pooled in the angles and thickened into something that was not a face but a set of planes too sharp for bone. The dream shifted to St. Margaret’s Academy and the creature stepped out of the corner and opened its geometry wide. Katherine woke screaming, lunging at Georgiana who had leaned over to check on her — mistaking her for the Hound before Georgiana caught her hand and held her face still. Adrien fired at the Wächter on the chandelier and hit Caroline in the throat instead. She fell through the floor of the Lobkowitz into the cellar of the Maison du Corbeau, where a masked surgeon split her along harmonic lines before she reappeared at the heart of the Engine, bronzed and singing and unreachable, while a man at a lectern marked a notation book and said, simply, “You brought her to us.” Varrio dozed in the parlour and found Brenner in the attic at Widow Katz’s boarding house, neck at the angle Varrio had put it at, his voice carried through brass pipes that had grown through the plaster like roots. The Engine’s bellows cycled the sound of a last gasp — Brenner’s last breath, made mechanical. Varrio found himself holding a pillow over Colonel Moreau’s face. He woke screaming and bolted from the safehouse into the dawn, yelling at God, and ran directly into Charles and Dr Heinrich Voss arriving at the door. Georgiana dreamed last and strangest — the Drury Lane Theatre with its burgundy carpets and its audience of children whose mouths were sewn shut, the stage holding a brass engine behind a mirror that showed her not her own face but her hands: bronze, scaled, clawed. She opened her mouth to scream and what came out was a sustained inhuman harmonic tone, and the theatre collapsed around her like a closing fist. She woke with the fork warm in her hand — certain she had not been holding it when she closed her eyes — and for several long seconds the colours of the room were wrong before they settled back to normal, like water finding its level.

The morning was practical. Dr Voss stitched Emma’s knife wound, examined Anna Lindqvist’s bruised throat and vocal cords, and left a card and a large bottle of laudanum. Anna had woken screaming and hyperventilating before the doctor arrived; Katherine tried to calm her and failed, resorting to a slap that also failed, before Emma intervened and the laudanum took her down again. Freddy took Nikolai and Sasha to Palais Kinsky to warn the Hartley family about Caroline. Nikolai delivered the warning with characteristic Russian bluntness — her daughter was in danger of being sacrificed to a machine made of human bodies — and Mrs Hartley dismissed it as a tasteless joke and went about her morning. The terrible truth was already settled: Caroline had been sent off in a coach that very morning to an audition at the University, and she was already gone. Pemberton pressed a stack of urgent correspondence into Freddy’s hands, including a formal summons from Prince Metternich to the Ballhausplatz. Freddy instructed Pemberton to locate Fischbein, and dispatched Charles and Francois to retrieve the party’s belongings from the hotel. Thomas was found asleep in the corridor outside Emma’s bedroom, still clutching his pistol.

The party gagged Adler with a sock, wrapped him in a cloak, loaded him into a carriage alongside the sedated Anna in servant’s garb, and drove to the Ballhausplatz. Lord Harcourt was waiting at the foot of a marble staircase, dressed in diplomatic black and looking as though he had not slept and as though it did not matter. His instructions were economical: no one was to say the word monster in that room; Adler was a gift, not a bargaining chip; Anna was a victim who would speak plainly because Metternich had spent thirty years reading coached witnesses. Fischbein arrived at the last moment, announced himself as legal counsel for both Freddy and Adrien, and was warned in no uncertain terms to keep his mouth shut. Inside the Staatskanzler’s private office — walnut desk, heavy curtains, porcelain coffee service — Harcourt introduced the party and presented Adler as the operational commander of a university-based conspiracy that had targeted musicians to disrupt the Congress. The investigators laid out what they knew. Anna straightened in her chair with the reflex of a performer and described being blindfolded and led through a side entrance, hearing rhythmic forced singing and screaming from below the floorboards, and being inspected by Herzfeld as though she were a component rather than a person. The moment that cracked Metternich’s composure — the only moment — came when Count von Kaunitz was named. Three full seconds of perfect stillness before Metternich picked up his coffee cup and drank. He declared that Kaunitz would not appear in any report and that he would attend to him personally. Then Fischbein rose and placed the Bauer release order on the desk — Captain Vogel’s signature on a document freeing the assassins of Colonel Moreau. Metternich absorbed it without visible surprise.

What Metternich gave them in return was considerable. A writ bearing his seal, directing all officers of the Crown to render full assistance. A promise to divert city watch patrols from the University between ten o’clock and dawn on whatever night they chose to act. Medical cover at the Josephinum with no records. He could not send men — every soldier was a witness, every witness a document, every document a scandal — but he sanctioned the raid and trusted the capability they had demonstrated at the Lobkowitz. Vogel would report to the Ballhausplatz at six o’clock that evening believing he was delivering a routine briefing, and would instead be relieved of his credentials and his sidearm by Gentz. Metternich took custody of Adler and arranged for Anna Lindqvist to be removed from the city entirely. Harcourt handed the writ to the investigators outside and told them to use it sparingly.

The afternoon split into two operations. Varrio peeled away to find Graf von Sternberg at the Hotel zum Römischen Kaiser, still dressed from the aborted dawn duel and working through a bottle of Tokaji. As Thomas’s second, Varrio charmed Sternberg over a shared drink into accepting a delay — dawn the next morning, 10 August, at Linienwallgasse, pistols. Sternberg’s terms were plain: if Thomas did not appear, he would publish him as a coward in every salon in Vienna by noon, and Miss Wentworth would hear about the outcome either way. Varrio also sent a note to Countess von Thun asking to reschedule her evening invitation to the following night. Meanwhile, Georgiana, Katherine, and Fischbein moved on the Polizeidirektion. Fischbein walked in as legal counsel for the Viscount de Montferrand, demanding the return of confiscated property with the practised authority of a man who argued with bureaucrats for sport. The desk sergeant cited Vogel’s authority; Georgiana produced the writ. Leutnant Gruber read it twice and offered his immediate assistance. The evidence clerk made a move toward the stairs to alert Vogel, but Fischbein’s legal pressure and the weight of the Staatskanzler’s seal overrode him. The Liber Ivonis and the De Vermiis Mysteriis were brought out from the ground-floor strong room, and the three of them made a swift exit before the captain could learn what had just walked out of his evidence locker. The books were back in hand, the writ had served its purpose, and the clock was still ticking — toward the fifteenth, and toward whatever waited beneath the University’s West Wing in the dark.