The heavy oak bookbinding table in Sub-Basement Twelve groaned beneath the collective weight of four divergent lifetimes and one stolen animal fat lantern.
Manifesting many summons at the same time inside the physical world was a luxury Ren Vale couldn’t afford for more than a few minutes without risking a brain heavy bleeding. But inside the secure, damp outer edge of the abandoned bindery, the boundary between the Speculum of Forfeited Paths and physical reality became permeable. The ghosts didn’t need to draw full body life-force to exist as spectral silhouettes around the salt-cured timbers.
Vane Vale leaned against an iron screw-press, his tailored midnight-blue frock coat looking absurdly fancy against the flaking limestone and rotting thick parchment shavings. In his kidskin-gloved right hand, his gold-trimmed brass pocket counting frame clicked with a wild, metal fury that sounded like a clockwork grasshopper.
“The numbers are ugly,” Vane said, his manicured goatee twitching with high-born disgust as he stared at the scrap of butcher’s paper where Ren had recorded the chemical supply manifests of Sub-Basement Nine. “A single batch of royal redaction bleach needs four gallons of packed potash lye, sixty ounces of distilled dragon-gall mordant, and three drams of potion-made quicksilver. Do you have any conception of what that costs on the open market, you bankrupt primitives?”
