“Good,” she said. “Good.” She took a deep breath. “I think it’s time I saw your archives.”

  “I think it is,” said Doom.

  The archives’ reading hall was deep in the foundations of Castle Doom, directly beneath the laboratory tower. Helm’s initial impression was that this was an architectural inversion of the lab, an enormous amphitheater whose sides she could not see. She could tell she and Doom had entered a bowl from the way the walls curved away from the door, vanishing into the gloom. She guessed they were midway down the slope of the bowl, though she could not see how far the terraces of monolithic bookcases went up behind her. Stone walkways cut down the slope, connecting the terraces, and leading to the bottom of the amphitheater, where sat a huge reading table and a single, equally huge chair. Lighting everywhere except at the table was low, just enough for nearest shelves and the materials on them to be visible.

  The reading hall was a sea of shadows. Helm thought about the knowledge contained in this space. That, she thought, was where the real shadows came from.

  A man in dark robes climbed the walkway to meet them as they descended towards the floor of the hall. His back and shoulders were rounded from a life of hunching over documents. Thin lank gray hair framed a sallow face that might not have seen the sun in years. His wrinkled flesh had the yellowed texture of decaying parchment, and hung from his skull like melting wax. There was something familiar about him, though, and the sense that she should know who this was startled Helm.

  “Your Excellency,” the man said, his tone even more obsequious than his low bow. “You honor me with your presence.”

  Doom acknowledged him with a grunt. “Maria von Helm,” he said, “this is Vassily Dubrov. He is the chief archivist. He will provide you with whatever you need.”

  “Dubrov?” Helm asked, startled. “Are you a relation of Ivor Dubrov?”

  “I am. He was my uncle. Did you know him?”

  “Not well. And that was a long time ago.” Faded memories stirred, none of them welcome. She remembered Ivor’s nephew now, as he had been then. The archivist had been in his early teens when she had last seen him.

  Dubrov scuttled down ahead of them to the reading hall floor. The table was easily fifteen feet long, large enough to be a banquet table, but it was clear no plate had ever touched its polished oak surface. Helm would have room to lay out a vast array of documents. The chair was massive too, a throne of mahogany and brass. She would disappear in it. But the light here was good, and she was sure that if anywhere in the world held the knowledge that she needed to find and interpret, it was this hall.

  “Tell me what you require, and I will bring it to you,” Dubrov told Helm.

  “Thank you. I will start with the Lemegeton, the Cyprianus, the Zekerboni and the Grand Grimoire. It would be helpful, too, for you to show me how the materials are organized, so I can find my way around.”

  “I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” said Dubrov. “It will be much more efficient if you just give me your requests.”

  “It’s not a question of efficiency. It’s a question of serendipity, and of not artificially narrowing the paths of my research. There will be books and papers here that I don’t know about and don’t know that I need, and I won’t know without the happenstance of stumbling upon them. I will need to explore.”

  Dubrov’s pallor became even more pronounced. “Explore?” he said, as if she had suggested setting the hall on fire. “Oh, I don’t think that can be done. I don’t think so at all.”

  “It can and it will,” said Doom.

  “Your pardon, your Excellency, your pardon.” Dubrov spoke quickly, bowing and shrinking away before the most powerful shadow.

  “You will have the run of the archives,” Doom said to Helm. “Go wherever you like. Find whatever you need.”

  “Thank you,” said Helm.

  “Is that understood?” Doom asked Dubrov.

  “Absolutely, your Excellency. As you wish, as you wish.” The archivist was bent so low he was almost crawling.

  “There will be no obstruction of any kind to Maria von Helm.”

  “Or course, of course, of course, I didn’t mean…”

  “Why aren’t you already retrieving the grimoires she requested?”

  “Your pardon, your pardon, your pardon.”

  Helm watched him scuttle away, feeling the same distaste she had felt for his uncle more than fifteen years ago.

  When he was gone, Doom said, “When you want, Boris will show you to your quarters.”

  Helm nodded. “I think I should begin my research first.” She was surrounded by a storehouse of occult knowledge that had few equals anywhere in the world. The excitement for the work was growing. There was no question in her mind now.

  This was what she wanted.

  Dubrov loaded another grimoire onto a book cart. The cart was wheelless, its antigrav drivers holding it a few inches off the ground. It required very little strength to push. Even so, Dubrov leaned into it as if it were a burden. He needed something to strain against, to work off some of his anger.

  As he emerged from the aisle onto a ramp, he saw Helm one level up, moving along the shelves with a rapt expression. She had a hand out, her fingers just brushing the spines of the books as she gazed at them. The sight enraged Dubrov. Helm hadn’t been here an hour, and she was touching the books, touching them, touching everything as if the archives were hers.

  Dubrov forced himself to look away. He maneuvered the cart onto the ramp and headed slowly down to the reading table. His chest was tight with anger. It was hard to breathe with the decades’ worth of fury suddenly squeezing him in a fist.

  Had she known Ivor Dubrov? Had she known the heir to the title of Count Ivor Dubrov?

  Not well. And that was a long time ago.

  Long by whose memory? Not long as far as Dubrov was concerned. Nor should for Helm. She destroyed two families. That wasn’t the sort of thing it should be easy to forget.

  We have a shared destiny, witch. It could have been a golden one. You made sure it wasn’t.

  There was nothing wrong with his memory. He had only been fourteen, but he remembered what it had been like, when the Helm and Dubrov families had arranged the union of Maria and Ivor. The Dubrovs had had the advantage of an older name, and of a distant familial connection to Baron Vladimir Fortunov. Their fortune, though, had been diminishing the past few generations, and Ivor’s father, Sergei, had lost the rest of it. The Helms had money, and they wanted prestige. The marriage would have strengthened both families. Dubrov remembered the optimism that had reigned in the mildewing family manor house in those days. He remembered the excitement, the belief that everything was going to be better soon. His uncle entranced him with stories of the glory days to come. The marriage banns were read. The date was set.

  And then Maria von Helm ruined everything.

  She had refused the commands of her parents. She had rejected Ivor Dubrov.

  That was bad enough. But then she joined Cynthia von Doom in her fight against Baron Vladimir. When that struggle failed, Maria fled, and the Helms fell. Vladimir burned their home and wiped them out to the last servant. And for the Dubrovs, it didn’t matter that Ivor had been rejected. The fact that a union had been attempted was enough to taint the family by association. Only the kinship with the Fortunovs saved them from extermination.

  Financial ruin came within months.

  As a teenager, Vassily had resented Maria for the loss of personal comforts. He had blamed her for the poverty that had overwhelmed the Dubrovs, and for the humiliation of being forced from their ancestral home.

  As an adult, he blamed her for the ultimate fall of the Dubrovs, too. In the last days of King Vladimir’s reign, as the threat of Doom plunged the monarch into desperation and paranoia, Latveria had not been spared the convulsions that came with the collapse of a regime. Vladimir had imprisoned anyone he suspected of disloyalty, and his suspicions had turned on his distant cousins.

  Vassily Dubrov had been the only one to survive Vladimir’s prisons.

  Dishonor, destitution, incarceration and torture. Helm did this, and she doesn’t even remember.

  Dubrov had, under Doom, found a measure of pride again. Doom had freed him from the prisons, and with an unnerving eye for others’ skills, made him the castle librarian. The archives were his domain. He was important here. He served only one master, and he had value. This was not the life he had been promised. At least it mattered. He was grateful to Doom for the meaningful life he had now.

  And now Helm was here, in all her arrogance, to take it all away again.

  Why did Doom bring her here?

  Dubrov began unloading the grimoires onto the table. Each tome he set down felt like placing a brick in a wall. The question was the purpose of the wall. If Helm won, Dubrov was immuring his pride.

  He would not let her win.

  Dubrov feared Doom too much to hate him.

  He did not fear Helm.

  Chapter 5

  Doom met with Verlak in his command chamber that connected to the Castle Guard operations center. Banks of screens covered the windowless walls, surrounding the swivel throne where he sat. The chair’s arms held controls for the castle’s surveillance and defense systems. The door to Operations was closed and sealed. The screens received all the feeds from the larger room beyond, but nothing that was said in the chamber could be monitored without. Verlak stood before Doom, the image of the frustrated hunter. She was burning with the need to be out in the field, chasing Fortunov to ground, yet stymied by the fact that there was no chase to be had for the moment.

  Doom understood her anger and her frustration. He approved of both. They sprang from a loyalty that bordered on fury.

  “Despite Fortunov’s mistakes,” Verlak said, “there isn’t enough for us to know whether he is planning something or reacting to you. Determining that would help shape our strategy against him.”

  “It would not,” said Doom. “With Fortunov, acting and reacting are one. He lays plans, many plans, I’m convinced of that, based on his coup attempts of the past. The plans lie dormant until opportunity arises. The nature of the opportunity determines the nature of the plan. Sometimes, he is more prepared than others.”

  None of that pleased Verlak. Her right hand twitched, as if she could strangle Fortunov here and now. “I believe he is an active danger,” she said.

  “Of course he’s dangerous. The fact that he has avoided capture and execution is proof enough of that. Do you believe he is an imminent danger?”

  “He may well be.” Verlak turned to the screens. She tapped one, calling up an image of Fortunov’s escape hatch in the sewer. “This shows a lot of preparation.”

  “How is the search proceeding?”

  Verlak tapped a few more screens. “We’ve deployed squadrons of drones.” Active scans of the tunnels appeared, the updating images shimmering grey and amber. “From their telemetry, we’ve already identified and sealed seven other camouflaged hatches. I will not pretend we will find them all quickly.”

  “I would not believe you if you did,” said Doom. “What about at the rectory? Any useful evidence there?”

  “Not much. Some soil from the soles of their boots. We’ve analyzed it, hoping to identify some geographical particularities.” She called up the results. “Most of it is from the sewers and the streets of Doomstadt.”

  “Most,” Doom repeated. “But not all.”

  Electron-microscope photos appeared, showing grains the size of asteroids. “The sample of interest is very small,” Verlak said. “Hardly conclusive.”

  “But it is of interest.”

  “Organic content and particle size distributions suggest the viniculture regions to the east of the city. That still gives him a massive area to hide in.”

  Doom thought for a moment, the geography appearing before his mind’s eye faster than Verlak could summon the digital maps. “We might narrow things down a bit,” he said. “Fortunov will favor the cliffside vintners over those on the plains.”

  “For the commanding heights?”

  “Such as they are. Though we should not underestimate his ability to put limited resources to good use.” He was contemptuous of Fortunov as an individual, and even more so of what passed for the deposed prince’s ideals. The prince was wedded to a vision of feudal aristocracy that would never return. Fortunov had skills, though, and contempt for them would be a mistake. For almost a decade, since he had come of age, Fortunov had been fighting to reclaim the throne. He was an irritant, sometimes a dangerous one. “We should consider the Kavan family.”

  “Why them?”

  “They have never appeared on your counterintelligence radar, have they?”

  “No, they haven’t.”

  “Such a low profile would be useful for someone like Fortunov, don’t you think? They have prospered, and their service to me has been unblemished, but they do have old ties. Aristocracies never forget their fall. There are families in France whose anger over 1789 remains fresh.”

  “I’ll have them placed under surveillance,” said Verlak.

  “Discreetly. There must be no possibility of their being aware of it.”

  “If Fortunov is there, we’ll know, and we’ll hit with such force he will have no chance of escape.”

  “No,” said Doom. “Observe, from maximal distance, and do not act unless I give the command. We must not move against Fortunov until we know what he has set in motion. Attacking too soon can cause as much damage as acting too late.”

  “Unless we kill him.”

  “Assuming you succeed and that he doesn’t disappear again. Even then, the risk is too high. Tell me, captain, do you believe Prince Rudolfo’s love for Latveria exceeds his regard for himself?”

  “Not for a second,” she hissed, every syllable drenched in the venom of her hatred for the traitor.

  “Precisely. Am I confident that he has not prepared contingencies that will trigger indiscriminate attacks in the event of his capture or death? I am not. Watch for him. Watch for what he might be planning. When we know what we must, we will act. When Fortunov is ready, he will break surface. And there are ways of encouraging him to do so. They have already borne fruit.”

  “I don’t understand, your Excellency.”

  “There was a reason why I paid a personal visit to Grigori Zargo instead of simply having him summoned to the castle.”

  “Your visit was bait,” Verlak realized.

  “Yes. That is also why I did not have any guards posted on the church or rectory. And Fortunov took the bait.”

  “He told the priest they would meet again.”

  Doom nodded, pleased to see that Verlak was seeing the strategy now. “The hook is in his jaw.”

  “So Zargo is to be released?”

  “He will be free to go as he pleases. Or at least, where he pleases in the furtherance of the task I will set him.”

  “How close a watch shall we set on him?”

  “You will use two kinds. The first should be subtle, and not too close. Far enough back that Zargo does not detect his minders. Fortunov will spot them, though. He will be suspicious if he sees nothing at all. The other observers will be further back. They must not be seen at all.”

  “Will Fortunov be brazen enough to return to the rectory?”

  “Highly doubtful. We must be prepared for the possibility that he will get at Zargo some other way, a way we won’t see. But the priest will see. He will be our eyes and ears. He will help us find Fortunov, willingly or not. Knowingly or not.”

  It was afternoon before the door to the Chamber of Contemplation opened. If not for the chiming from the clock towers of Doomstadt, far below the rock of the castle, Zargo would have lost all sense of time. He had been alone with his thoughts and his fears long enough. He almost felt relief when Doom entered the chamber. At least the waiting to know the worst was over.

  The great metal mask looked down at him for a long moment, and Zargo wondered if he was about to be thrown from the tower. His head swam with anticipatory vertigo.

  Doom moved to the stone balcony instead of hurling Zargo from it. “You did well last night,” he said.

  “Did I?” Did I really keep my balance on the wire?

  “Breaking the window. A clear signal of your intentions. That was quick thinking.”

  “Thank you, your Excellency. But Prince Rudolfo is going to come to me again.”

  “Of course he will, one way or another.”

  “What do I do?”

  “You will tell him your truth.”

  Zargo saw a number of ways to interpret Doom’s words. In every one of them, he saw himself as the object of satire. He was too frightened to take offense, and he was too tired to guess which meaning was the one Doom intended. “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “No, you won’t,” said Doom. “Not everything. That will ensure your continued survival.”

  “I thank you for that,” Zargo said without irony.

  “Your survival is useful to me,” said Doom. There was no irony in his words either.

  “You said you want me to find an intersection of ley lines.”

  “Yes. The resources of the Werner Academy are open to you again. I presume you still know your way around its halls.”

  “I’ll manage,” Zargo said, dreading his return and the temptations that would come with it.

  “As needed, you have the use of the castle’s archives as well. Here you will work in conjunction with Maria von Helm.”

  The Witch of the Mountains. So, Doom had brought her down from her lair and out of the rumors and nighttime whispers of Latveria. If sorcery was an ocean, then Zargo was going to drown in it. He said nothing, waiting to hear the rest, and know the anchor that would drag him down.