Vienna

The War Council

The night of August 10th found Katherine and Nell slipping out of Thaliastraße 12 under cover of darkness, navigating Vienna’s labyrinthine back routes through canal-side paths, service alleys beneath the Piaristenkirche, and a rooftop shortcut across a cooper’s workshop. They arrived at the Universitätsplatz around half past ten to find the square nearly empty, a single gas lamp throwing amber light across the cobblestones near the Jesuitenkirche. Two guards stood smoking in the shadow of the main portico, and a faint glow leaked around the edges of a shuttered second-floor window in the medical wing. The building loomed three stories into the dark, its lower windows shuttered tight.

Nell scaled the side of a building with practiced ease, using embedded flower pots and ledges to haul herself up to a rooftop vantage point, while Katherine struggled to follow. A slate tile came loose from where Nell climbed and fell directly toward Katherine, who barely managed to throw herself aside before it shattered loudly on the cobblestones below. Guards came to investigate, and Katherine pressed herself into a doorway, pulling her cloak tight around her until the patrol passed. She then crept around to the side entrance, where she observed a fifth guard sitting on a wooden crate in a recessed alcove, noting that he walked down to the east corner and back roughly every twenty to thirty minutes, leaving a narrow window of opportunity. She also overheard two patrolling guards speaking in German, though she could not understand a word of it.

Katherine eventually managed to shimmy up a drainpipe and join Nell on the rooftop, where Nell had been lying flat and watching the building’s interior courtyard below. Through the lit window of the medical wing, a tall, gaunt figure paced behind the glass, twin discs of candlelight catching the reflection of his spectacles. Both women became aware of a strange, low rhythmic pressure in their chests, below the threshold of hearing but unmistakably physical, like sitting above railroad tracks as a train passed beneath. Nell translated what she had overheard from the guards: the professor wanted everything finished in three nights, the hired men wanted their money and planned to disappear, and one had muttered that he was not there to die for a crazy professor. On the way back down, Katherine lost her grip on the drainpipe and fell, landing with a muffled crunch on the cobblestones, while Nell descended as smoothly as if she had wings.

Back at the safe house, Varrio spotted the two women returning from his perch on the roof and came downstairs to meet them, coffee cup in hand. Katherine laid out everything they had learned: five guards total, a two-minute gap at the side door every twenty to thirty minutes, a fifteen-minute patrol circuit, and a deadline of the 13th of August — not the 15th as they had feared. The machine, whatever it was, was already running. Georgiana, drawn downstairs by the sound of voices, began to feel a faint sympathetic vibration in her chest as Katherine described the strange pressure they had felt near the university, as though something in the house was resonating in answer.

That same morning, Varrio and Thomas made their way to the Café Zur Blauen Flasche, a small coffee house behind the Naschmarkt stained amber by years of tobacco smoke. Morosi was already seated, his magnificent mustache freshly waxed, and beside him sat Captain Luca Ferrante — a lean, dark-haired man with a badly set broken nose, a thin scar across his forearm, and the bearing of someone who had used a musket, a saber, and a shovel in roughly equal measure. Ferrante offered himself and four of his men for two hundred florins, but pressed hard for the full truth of what they were walking into, noting that the price and the coalition assembled were far beyond what seven guards would warrant. Varrio described the bronze-scaled creatures they had encountered, their long unhinged jaws and strangling tongues, and crucially, their vulnerability to fire — a detail that shifted Ferrante’s expression from skepticism to the focused calm of a man who understood problems that could be solved with flame. Thomas cut in to frame the mission in plain military terms: assault a building, destroy a machine, rescue a hostage. Ferrante agreed to finalize the contract at a war council and departed, leaving Morosi to order another coffee.

Back at the safe house, Nikolai arrived with news that his uncle, Major Andrei Volkonsky, had arranged a private dinner at the Heuriger Zum Rebstock for that very evening — a cover story of a Russian officer hosting international friends, which would serve as their war council. Shortly after, Thurner, the owner of the safe house, appeared at the door having been sent by Lord Harcourt to offer whatever assistance he could before his next assignment. Varrio and Thomas returned from their negotiations, and the house filled with people, coffee, and the low hum of planning. Nikolai slipped upstairs briefly and returned with a bloodied blade before departing without explanation, leaving the investigators to wonder what business he had attended to on the third floor.

It was Varrio who first noticed that the writing desk on the third floor was not flush against the wall, a thin extra shadow betraying a false panel at its back. He brought Georgiana up to investigate, and she reached into the air with focused concentration, pulling forth a glowing amorphous mass that she then threw apart with both hands — and it expanded into a vast, glittering geometric map of interconnected stars that layered over every surface in the room before slowly fading into nothing. Varrio stood frozen, then became utterly transfixed, his mind cracking open around the edges as something fundamental shifted in his understanding of the world. He developed an immediate and consuming obsession with magic, unable to think of much else from that moment forward. The hidden compartment, once opened, yielded a sealed leather portfolio containing forged identity papers, letters of introduction on British Embassy letterhead bearing what appeared to be Lord Harcourt’s signature, a coded cipher key, and two hundred florins in small notes — someone’s emergency escape kit, waiting to be needed.

In the parlor, Georgiana and Adrien settled in with the Liber Ivonis and the De Vermis Mysteriis respectively, hoping to find something useful about the machine humming beneath the university. Georgiana worked through the Latin of the Liber Ivonis and found sections describing harmonic gate theory — the idea that specific sound frequencies could thin the barrier between dimensions — and the particular significance of the 432 Hertz frequency as a resonant key tied to the domain of Yog-Sothoth. The knowledge hit her like a wave, and she lost herself entirely for several minutes, laughing and crying simultaneously in a fugue of half-glimpsed visions from beyond the veil, while the rest of the party looked on in alarm. When she came back to herself, she reached for Nikolai’s gifted flask of vodka with a shaking hand.

Adrien fared worse. The De Vermis Mysteriis described tonal sequences used in invocations of terrible things, and as he read, the weight of it became too much — he went rigid, then slumped unconscious in his chair, the book dangling limply from his hand. What happened next was witnessed by everyone in the room: the window behind Adrien clouded over and then transformed into something like a moving picture, playing out his worst memory in first-person — his men being hunted through mountain mist outside a Pyrenees abbey, screams carrying through the fog as something unseen took them one by one, until only Adrien remained. When he jolted awake with a shout, he was pale and shaking, but he had found what they needed: the De Vermis Mysteriis contained descriptions of counter-frequencies, tonal inversions that could collapse harmonic fields rather than sustain them. Georgiana realized that by cross-referencing the two books, she might be able to synthesize a counter-ritual — and she already had something that vibrated at exactly the right frequency to test it against.

The interrogation of Werner Bauer in the basement added the final pieces to the picture. The grave robber, desperate to survive, told them everything: Herzfeld had stopped sleeping since the masquerade, was working around the clock in the university cellar, and had a woman locked in a room at the end of the south corridor on the ground floor. He sketched a map of the medical wing from memory, marking Caroline’s room, the stairwells, and the route to the cellar. He also described the machine itself — pipes and metal and something that hummed — and said the sound had been building for days, making guards’ teeth ache even on the ground floor, with one man having already quit rather than endure it. The party began to see the shape of a plan: use Bauer to pay off and dismiss the external guards, then move in through two entry points simultaneously.

That evening, the Heuriger Zum Rebstock was lit with garden lanterns and laid with bread, cold meats, and sweating jugs of wine. Major Volkonsky had already pinned a map to the table with a bread knife and a wine glass by the time the last of the party arrived. Ferrante brought his second-in-command and two of his men, and trailing behind him came Fischbein, a Viennese lawyer with a disheveled collar and a leather document under his arm, engaged to formalize the contract and ensure the indemnity clauses were legally sound under Austrian civil law. Thurner confirmed that Baron Otto von Kaunitz had fled Vienna two days prior, his carriage tracked south toward Graz. The plan took shape around the table: Bauer would be used to dismiss the five external guards with their pay and a story about a change of orders; Ferrante’s team and Adrien would go in through the service entrance to retrieve Caroline; the Russians and the rest of the investigators would secure Herzfeld’s office and push down to the cellar. Georgiana told the assembled coalition about the counter-ritual she believed she could construct, which the Russians accepted without hesitation and the Sardinians regarded with polite skepticism. The assault was set for pre-dawn on the 12th of August.

The council never got to finish its wine. Something landed on the pergola above them with a sound like a breaking spine, tearing through the grapevines and sending a lantern swinging wildly until it fell and spilled burning oil across the flagstones in a spreading sheet of fire. In the flickering light, a shape crouched on the crossbeam — bronze-scaled, jaw too wide, eyes reflecting the flames in flat gold discs. It was motionless for one heartbeat, watching the table below with the patient attention of something that had once been a man and was now only hunger. Then it dropped.