Chapter 114 A Fraction of Light
Lucian had converted one of the smaller council rooms into something that looked nothing like a council room anymore.
The furniture had been pushed against the walls and the floor was covered in a pattern that Lilith didn’t recognise, concentric shapes drawn in something dark that she chose not to ask about, with seven points marked at intervals that corresponded to no map she had ever studied. Three mirrors stood at angles to each other in the centre of the room, tall and frameless, their surfaces treated so they looked less like mirrors and more like windows into a room with no light on the other side.
Lucian was standing in the middle of it all when she arrived, his mirror eyes closed, his hands at his sides, perfectly still in the way that things were still when they were doing a great deal of work that wasn’t visible from the outside.
Belphegor was in the corner.
He had a chair pulled close to the wall, sitting in it with his forearms on his knees and his eyes on Lucian, and he had the look of someone who had been in that chair for a long time and was not planning to leave it. He glanced at Lilith when she came in and moved his chin toward the wall beside him, an invitation to wait without speaking.
She took the space beside him and waited.
The room was not silent exactly. There was a sound at the edge of hearing, low and continuous, that seemed to be coming from the floor patterns rather than from Lucian himself, a sound that sat just below the threshold of comfort and made the back of her teeth ache faintly if she paid attention to it.
She stopped paying attention to it.
Seven minutes passed. She counted them by the candle on the windowsill, watching the wax move.
Then Lucian’s eyes opened.
He looked at the centre mirror for a long moment without speaking. His expression was the most unguarded she had ever seen it, not open exactly, but stripped of the usual layering, the careful arrangement of features that he maintained the way other people maintained posture.
“She’s alive,” he said.
Belphegor’s hands tightened on his knees.
“Eastern territory,” Lucian continued, his voice measured, picking through what he had the way someone picked through something fragile. “Not the outer reaches. Somewhere internal, underground I think, the reading has a particular quality when there’s significant stone above. The signal is heavily blocked, whatever Malachi used to cover his tracks is still active, but there was a gap.”
He paused.
“Small. It closed within seconds. But it was there.”
“Did you see her,” Belphegor said.
“Briefly.” Lucian looked at him directly. “She was sitting. She appeared to be counting something.”
A pause.
“She looked thin.”
The room held that information for a moment.
Lilith pressed her back against the wall and breathed carefully. Alive. Thin and sitting in a cell somewhere underground in the eastern territories counting something because that was what Sera did when she needed to hold herself together, she found something to count and she counted it, and the fact that Lucian had seen her doing it meant she was still herself in there, still finding ways to hold on.
“Can you get back through,” Lilith said.
“Not today. The gap closed and the block resealed and forcing it would alert whoever is maintaining the wards.”
Lucian moved to the edge of the floor pattern and stepped carefully out of it.
“I need to map the gap first. Understand why it opened, whether it was deliberate on their end or a structural weakness in the ward. If it’s a weakness it will open again and next time I can be ready for it.”
“How long,” Belphegor said.
“I don’t know. Days. Possibly longer.”
Belphegor nodded once and looked back at the floor.
“Eastern territory is large,” Lilith said. “Underground, internal. That narrows it but not enough to move on.”
“No,” Lucian agreed. “Not yet. But it confirms she’s in the eastern reach and not beyond the border, which eliminates roughly two-thirds of the search area.”
He looked at her with his mirror eyes, calm and precise.
“It’s something.”
“It’s something,” she agreed.
It was not enough. She knew it and Belphegor knew it and Lucian knew it and none of them said so because saying so accomplished nothing. What it was, was more than they had yesterday, and more than they had yesterday was the only direction available to them.
She looked at Belphegor. He was still looking at the floor with his forearms on his knees, and she could see him doing what he did with difficult things, taking it apart quietly, finding the edges of it, deciding how to carry it without letting it carry him instead.
“She’s counting,” he said finally, to no one in particular.
“Yes,” Lilith said.
“That’s very like her.”
“It is.”
He nodded again and stood up from the chair, and she watched him cross to the door and pause with his hand on the frame.
“Tell me when the gap opens again,” he said to Lucian. “Whatever time it is. Wake me if you have to.”
“I will,” Lucian said.
Belphegor left.
Lilith stayed a moment longer, looking at the three mirrors and the floor pattern and the candle burning low on the windowsill, and she thought about Sera thin and counting in an underground cell in the eastern territories, holding herself together the only way she knew how, and she thought about Armageddon’s army moving somewhere beyond the border getting ready for something that was not going to wait for them to be ready.
“Thank you,” she said to Lucian. “For not giving up on the scrying.”
He looked at her with the particular expression he used when something had surprised him and he was deciding whether to acknowledge it.
“I told Mammon we would find her before the ceremony,” he said. “I intend to keep that.”
He turned back to his mirrors.
“Go rest. You look like you haven’t slept properly in days.”
She left him there in his converted council room with his floor patterns and his mirrors, and she walked back through the palace with the small hard fact of Sera’s survival sitting in her chest like something she was afraid to hold too tightly in case it shifted, and she kept walking until she reached her room and closed the door and sat on the edge of the bed and let herself feel it properly.
Alive, holding on and counting
She could work with that.