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Authors: Roshani Chokshi

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BOOK: The Gilded Wolves
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“For your services. And your silence.”

The driver, a boy no older than thirteen, beamed a gap-toothed smile. The
two of them hopped into the rickshaw just as the guards appeared.

“Get down!” said Laila.

Zofia slid farther down in her seat. The rickshaw itself was little more than a covered tricycle. But at least it could get them to the exhibition.

Laila whispered directions to the driver. Once they sped away down the road, she flopped backward in her seat, breathing hard.

“See?” said. “What did I tell
you earlier?”

Zofia gripped the edge of her seat. “That some people consider disrobing an art?”

“No, not that!” said Laila, as the driver blushed. “I said that beauty was its own armor.”

Zofia considered this. “I still don’t like dresses.”

Laila merely smiled.

INSIDE THE FORGING
exhibition, the lights had been kept dim. The only pinpoints of luminescence were beneath each of the podiums.
Zofia kept herself near the wall.

“What are we looking for, Zofia? Another entrance? A hidden door?”

Zofia shook her head. “Us.”

She reached for the phosphorous pendant from her necklace, remembering how it had revealed the Tezcat door at House Kore. That mirror had been a gift from the Fallen House. And if the Fallen House was behind the theft of the House Kore Ring, then what if she and Enrique
had missed something the last time they were here? What if the whole time they had been walking through the exhibition, thinking they were unseen, someone had been watching them from behind a concealed mirror?

With Forging, detecting the presence of a Tezcat required a burning phosphorous formula. Zofia snapped her phosphorous pendant. She held it out where it looked like a piece of chipped-off
blue flame.

“Don’t walk in front of the flame,” instructed Zofia.

Laila nodded. The two of them made their way slowly through the exhibit. Zofia let the light of the phosphorous pendant climb up the brocade walls. On the left, nothing moved. Zofia held out the pendant as she made her way to the place in the wall where the man
with the honeybee pendant had been waiting as if he had slid out of
the wallpaper itself. The light climbed over the brocade slowly, glittering over the golden embroidery, and then—

Laila sucked in her breath.

The wall changed. At first, it showed nothing but cloth, but then the surface of it rippled, turning liquid and silver. A Tezcat door, exposed. In its reflection, Zofia caught Laila’s eye.

“They’re coming through here.”

 

22
ENRIQUE

Enrique was hanging upside down from his armchair.

He groaned aloud. “It makes
no
sense.”

Hypnos, seated on the black-cherry chair beneath him, raised his nearly emptied wineglass. His third such glass, if memory served Enrique.

“Try wine.”

“I doubt that will help.”

“True, but at least you won’t remember.” Hypnos drained his glass, then set it aside. “How come you have an
armchair? I want one.”

“Because I live here.”

“Hmpf.”

Sometimes Enrique found his thoughts worked better when he was dangling upside down. It helped that he could see the floor beneath him, all the documents they’d found on the Fallen House fanned out across the carpet. And in the middle of it all, encased in a thin quartz terrarium: the bone clock.

It was a feast for both a symbolist and
a historian. It was not an
ordinary clock, though it had a face and numerals and hands that pointed to various hours of the day. Twisting symbols stretched around the clockwork. Carved maidens who drew veils over their faces. Grinning beasts that disappeared beneath silver foil foliage. Sepulchers that opened and closed in the space of a blink, forcing one to wonder whether there was something
that had crept out of their hollow spaces. At first, Enrique had thought the Forged symbols were intentional. But after hours of observation, he had become disillusioned. Symbols meant something, but they could also exist to confuse the eye. Something that he was not willing to share just yet with Hypnos.

All his life, symbols had been a source of comfort. They felt like stories that reached
out beyond the confines of time. And yet, everything about this clock felt like a taunt. To make it worse, every time he looked at it, he was forced to reckon with the hours sliding past. Every hour that went by with Tristan’s life hanging in the balance.

A loud huffing sigh broke through his thoughts.

“How am I supposed to think under these conditions?” demanded Hypnos. “What happened to the
wine?”

“You could always try water for a change,” said S
é
verin from the doorway.

“Water is boring.”

To an outsider, S
é
verin looked no different than he normally did. Dressed in an elegant suit. Irritable, but restrained. As if this minor glitch were nothing to worry about. But the closer he got, the more little details popped out. The slope of his shoulders. The creases under his eyes. Ink
stains on his fingers. The threads on the cuffs of his sleeves unraveling.

S
é
verin was coming undone.

S
é
verin took two steps inside the stargazing room before stopping.

“Can’t find a seat?” asked Hypnos.

Enrique righted himself. Of course, Hypnos had spoken in jest. There were a number of empty seats, but to Enrique they felt like unsteady ghosts. There was the black cushion on the ground
where Tristan should be sitting, hiding Goliath in his pocket. The green, velvet chaise lounge from where Laila would be brandishing her teacup like a queen’s scepter. The high stool with its ragged pillow where Zofia would be leaning forward, a matchbox twirling in her hand. And then S
é
verin’s seat, the black-cherry armchair where Hypnos currently sat.

In the end, S
é
verin chose to stand.

Enrique
looked behind him to the door. “Where are the girls?”

S
é
verin fished around in his pocket and held up a note. “Laila and Zofia went to investigate something at the Forging exhibition.”

That made Enrique sit up straight. “
What
? That place is crawling with security guards. And if there’s someone from the Fallen House there, then—”

Hypnos started laughing. “Oh,
mon cher
. Did you want them to ask
for permission?”

“Of course not.” Enrique blushed.

“Ah,” said Hypnos, his gaze narrowing. “Then perhaps you’re nursing a bit of a wound for not being invited along with them. Which girl, I wonder, has laid claim to some corner of your imagination…”

“Can we just get back to work?”

“Laila, I wonder? The living temple goddess?”

Enrique rolled his eyes. S
é
verin, on the other hand, went entirely
still.

“Or is it the little ice queen?”

“Neither,” he said sharply.

But even as he said the words, he couldn’t help remembering that one of the last times he’d been in this room was with Zofia. Together,
they had cracked the code on the Sator Square. Together, they had found something. He’d just thought they made a good team. Yet even as he remembered it, he saw Zofia in the train compartment.
The light catching on her candle-bright hair. Her pale fingers tracing the neckline of her velvet dress as she practiced, of all things,
flirting
.

Enrique shook himself. His head was a snarl of too many impressions. Tristan’s closed eyes, the dead stare of the figures on the bone clock, the peppery scent of Hypnos’s skin, and light catching on Zofia’s hair.

“When will they be back?”

“In an
hour,” said S
é
verin. “Where are we on the clock?”

“Nowhere,” grumbled Hypnos.

“Have you tried taking off the glass covering?”

“What would that do?” demanded Enrique. “It’s far too delicate as it is. Maybe that’s why it’s called a bone clock in the first place. Fragile bones and all that. I lifted the covering once and examined it with kidskin gloves, and the silver immediately started flaking.”

“Fine, fine,” said S
é
verin, although he didn’t sound very convinced. He turned to Hypnos. “What about any headway on the Fallen House?”

“There’s nothing here that we haven’t already discussed. The Fallen House believed it was their sacred duty to rebuild the Tower of Babel. They sought to do that by”—Hypnos paused, squinting as he held a piece of parchment to his face—“‘harnessing the power of
the dead.’ I have no idea what that means. It sounds both sinister and terribly unfashionable.”

“Well, they were always cryptic,” said Enrique, gesturing at the famed bone clock.

At the height of their power, the Fallen House had never once revealed where they held their meetings. Only their infamous bone clocks, their Forged objects of communication, could reveal the
meetings’ location. Supposedly,
the clock also contained a failsafe method allowing a non-House member to locate them in case of emergency, but Enrique was starting to think that was nothing more than rumor.

“How do we know Roux-Joubert is even at the Fallen House’s original meeting place?” asked Enrique.

S
é
verin turned over the honeybee chain in his hand. “He’d consider it a point of pride. As if he were intentionally continuing
a legacy.”

Hypnos snorted. “Him and
who else
? You told me that man kept saying ‘we,’ but the Order has tightly controlled anything even resembling recruitment to the Fallen House. They had the leader executed, and the rest of them were given the choice of death or a strong mind affinity alteration that would wipe out any recollection of the Fallen House.”

“But so many of those members must have
been with the Fallen House for most of their adult lives, wouldn’t mind affinity make them—”

“—a shell of their former selves?” finished Hypnos. “Yes. Which is why a shocking number of them chose death. Fanatics.”

“Some must have escaped both death and punishment, though,” mused S
é
verin. “Perhaps they were driven deep underground.”

“My guess is that it’s a clever, deranged man and his hench
person with that blade hat you mentioned. The Fallen House loved to travel in packs, like they were wolves or some such. Trust me, if he had more than one person on his side, he would’ve brought them all for that little showdown in the greenhouse,” said Hypnos. At this, even S
é
verin nodded in agreement. “Also: Who wears a blade hat? What if it slips and then you end up slashing your face? Detestable.”

Enrique shuddered, crossing himself. “At this rate, we’re not going to find Roux-Joubert or his henchman. Nothing on this clock is helpful. Not even the notation.”

He pointed at the one word scrawled just beneath the sixth hour marking:
nocte
.

Midnight.

“It’s just the name of the clockmaker,” said S
é
verin.

“I wouldn’t be too sure … It might be a directive, a rule of some kind meant to inform
us how to look at the clock.”

“Can I just see the clock without the protective covering?” asked S
é
verin.

“Only if you promise you won’t smash it.”

“I promise I won’t smash it.”

Enrique narrowed his gaze and then nodded in the direction of the bone clock. Gingerly, S
é
verin lifted the glass covering. He considered the bone clock beneath, the silver foil clinging to the exquisite statues.

And
then he shoved it over, where it toppled to one side.

Hypnos squealed. Enrique leapt out of his chair.

“What did you do?”
he demanded.

“I did what I wanted. It’s my clock.”

“But you
promised
!” wailed Enrique.

“True, but my fingers were crossed.”

Hypnos faked a gasp. “Oh no! His fingers were crossed!”

Enrique shot Hypnos a scathing glare. “S
é
verin, you could have damaged a symbol, some critical
piece of information, and now we’ll never find Tristan—”

“I gave you nearly four hours,” said S
é
verin. “You’re brilliant. If there was anything to find, you would have sniffed it out by now. That you didn’t is proof enough to me that, in the clock’s current state, there is nothing worth finding.”

“I…” Enrique hesitated.

Truthfully, he was both flattered and insulted. But looking at the place
where the bone clock had toppled over, mounting horror re
placed all that. Silver dust now spangled the air, a consequence of the delicate foil that had covered the symbols on the clock. Evening light glanced off it, creating sharp and slender shadows on the face of the machinery.

“Now you’ve done it,” said Hypnos. “He’s lost the ability to speak!”

“Oh, shut up, Hypnos—” started S
é
verin.

Enrique
tuned out both of them. He crept forward slowly, his heart hammering. There was a new pattern on the body of the bone clock, like ink sluicing between grooved wood. Words hewn out of light and silver and shadow. Where the silver had peeled away, a flat paleness revealed itself. Off-white. Like … like 

Hypnos scuttled backward on his hands. “Dear God, is that clock
actually
made of bone?”

At
the same time, S
é
verin squinted. “There’s writing on that clock.”

It hadn’t been clear until now. The hand that had cleverly disguised the words on the clock was cramped and narrow, the words barely legible Latin that Enrique quickly translated:

I have been with you all your life

Though I appear only in strife

My quantity will let you see

All this world was meant to be

Enrique moved closer
to the clock, his fingers hovering over the words that now appeared.

When Enrique looked up at him, there was a renewed light in S
é
verin’s eyes. Something that hadn’t been there until now. The three of them sat once more on the ground. Hypnos with his knees pulled to his chest. S
é
verin, legs crossed, arms crossed. And then Enrique, who was now happily sprawled out, a pen and notebook beside either
hand as he began to transcribe the riddle’s words. This was the first breakthrough they’d had in hours, and he could feel the strength of it like an unaccounted for burst of sunshine in the veins.

“My quantity,” mused S
é
verin aloud. “That suggests the answer is twofold. Both the answer to the riddle and how it relates to the clock. Perhaps the quantity has something to do with the numbers on
the clock face?”

“Yes, but the clock only goes to twelve,” said Hypnos. “What’s in your body that there’s only twelve of that shows up in times of strife?”

And thus began the most excruciating hour of Enrique’s life. At first, there was talk of teeth which S
é
verin instantly dismissed. “
Who only has twelve teeth?”

Together, they combed through different riddled answers but nothing fit. The minutes
stretched by. Not one of them had disturbed the bone clock where it lay. Hypnos had gotten up and started to wander in circles, moaning for wine. While S
é
verin had turned inward once more, his fingers worrying the tassels on Tristan’s cushion.

“Stupid clock that may or not be made of bone.”

S
é
verin lifted his head. “What did you say?”

“I said the clock may or may not be made of bone.”

“Bone.”

Hypnos muttered, “I could use a quick one.”

Enrique ignored him. “Could that fit? As an answer?”

“‘I have been with you all your life,’” read Hypnos aloud. “True. Or that’d be deadly terrifying. Though some people, I honestly believe, are born without spines. And next we have, ‘though I appear only in strife.’ What? I don’t think that fits.”

Enrique fell quiet. The strife bit had thrown him
off too, at first. Bones didn’t
appear
in strife, floating before someone like ghosts. But
they certainly showed. He had seen it in the Philippines, when he accompanied his father on rides through the provinces of Capiz and Cavite to check on the rice production of the paddies they owned. On the road, leaned up against whitewashed churches and houses that looked like a strong breeze might make
them fold over in defeat, crouched the beggars. Young and old, it didn’t matter. Their eyes were all the same: flat and vacant. The faces of those whose hope had hardened and shrunk from too much of life. There, he saw the children with their too-sharp ribs ridging their shirts. Knobbed elbows stained with dirt. Eyes unsettlingly wide in faces sculpted by starvation.

BOOK: The Gilded Wolves
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