Sanford looked at the bag, resting where the sodden package from Tillinghast had so recently sat, and felt a triumphant burst of glee. Yes, Tillinghast was still a toad in Sanford’s garden, but stealing the grail from him was a win, and Sanford would celebrate it. He’d put the grail away in a safe place, with the other relics he’d cleared out of his no-longer-invulnerable-vault. But first, he had to get a look at the thing. He unzipped the bag and looked inside.

  The Grail of Dreams was there, standing upright – assuaging his deep-seated fear that he’d find a carved wooden copy or something inside the bag – and it still darkly thrummed. Something was different about it, though, or maybe he hadn’t noticed this detail last time, in Tillinghast’s shop. “There’s something in the bottom of the cup.”

  Sanford turned on his desk lamp and moved it over, so the light shone down into the vessel. “It looks like… a little blood, still fresh. Why didn’t it spill in all that jostling around? I wonder if the grail has preservative properties. Some of the literature suggested that a minor sacrifice was required to make the grail work. This may be a remnant of the last ritual.”

  Ruby and Altman said something, but their voices were far away and strangely inaudible. The grail was still thrumming, and no, it wasn’t a sound, or at least, not one you heard with your ears. It was a song in the mind. It was singing: yours, yours, I’m yours, I’m yours, I belong to you, I belong with you, take me, take me, take this up and let it be yours.

  Sanford reached down to pick up the grail, watching his hands as if they belonged to another person entirely. He wouldn’t normally handle a relic like this so cavalierly, with bare hands and no precautions, but there was something about it, something that drew him, something that entranced him, and he simply had to touch the cup to his lips.

  The grail is my bauble, he thought, horror bubbling up in his mind. Tillinghast has given me the object of my desire, and that means–

  Sanford’s hands touched the grail. He lifted it free of the bag, and up, and pressed the cold stone rim to his lips. Would he drink the blood? He didn’t even feel disgust. He just felt a sort of mild curiosity.

  Something warm broke over the chill of the stone, and wet his lips–

  And then the world was transformed into swirling prismatic black.

  Chapter Sixteen

  New Management

  Ruby screamed, or tried to, but Altman was right there, clamping a hand over her mouth and shushing her. “Be quiet!” he hissed. “You’ll alert the Initiates! We can’t let them know what happened!”

  She wrenched herself away and spun to glare at him. “Let them know what happened? We don’t even know what happened!” She circled the desk, staring at the Grail of Dreams like it was a venomous serpent. The grail had fallen on its side when Sanford, well, “dropped it” wasn’t quite right, was it? It was more that the hands holding the grail had disappeared, along with the person those hands were attached to. The blood wasn’t trickling out, though. In fact, peering into the cup, the blood seemed to be gone entirely. Had Sanford actually tasted that blood? How hideously intimate.

  Back in the apartment over the shop, Tillinghast had taken a small silver knife and cut the back of Ruby’s hand, painless as a razor slice, and then directed her to let the drops fall into the grail. Her hand shook as she complied. He hadn’t cut her deeply, but the fact that he’d cut her at all was ominous. What if he felt moved to cut her again?

  “Amateurs often slice the palms of their hands when they need blood for a ritual,” the man said conversationally. “It’s a foolish thing to do. Human palms are full of veins and muscles and all sorts of important components, and they’re terribly sensitive to pain as well. Plus, every time you flex the hand, you risk reopening the wound. Whereas the back of the hand, if you don’t cut too deeply or slash across the tendons, will provide ample blood without limiting the use of the hand much at all.” He watched the blood flow, then whipped out a handkerchief and offered it. Ruby took it, careful to avoid touching his fingers with her own, and wrapped the cloth around her wound. “Now that the blood is in the cup, the grail is… active. Don’t touch it with your bare hands, or any other part of your flesh, for that begins the ritual, and you will feel a particular compulsion to complete it. The next person to touch this object should be Carl Sanford. And, believe me, he won’t be able to resist doing so.” Tillinghast beamed at her. “See? You get to steal the grail after all, and thus prove your loyalty to Sanford, and still serve me, all at the same time. Isn’t that elegant?”

  “What will happen to Sanford, when he touches the grail?” she asked.

  “Why, his dreams will come true. Or someone’s dreams, at any rate. Oh, don’t worry, it won’t kill him. I wish he could be so easily killed! That would make this much easier. Though also rather less entertaining, and I do so love to be entertained. Killing a man is much less fun than removing the stones from the foundation of his world, one at a time, and watching that world crumble.”

  “You and I have different definitions of fun, Mr Tillinghast. I like taking in a show or playing cards with the girls, myself.”

  “It would be, as they say, a funny old world if we were all the same.” He clapped his hands. “Get your gloves on – or your glove, I suppose the handkerchief will do for your other hand – and put the grail in the bag. It’s best if you go on your way and deliver it to Sanford.” The old man’s eyes twinkled. “There’s about to be a terrible fire here.”

  “What about all your stock?”

  “What stock?” he asked, and shooed her away.

  When Ruby went down the stairs, she was astonished to find that Tillinghast’s wares were all gone, and the shop was as empty as it had been the day after Diana’s departure from Arkham. Even the screens and shelves and curtains were gone. She hadn’t been upstairs for that long – how had he cleared the space so quickly? Ah, but Tillinghast had given her the New Accelerator, and if he had one such relic, he might have others, and Gloria or some other employees – or retainers – of Tillinghast’s could have been flitting away in null-time for hours while she was bleeding in Diana’s old kitchen.

  She hurried out the door – the old door; even Tillinghast’s new one, with the sigil of the eye, was gone now – and into the alley. If Sanford’s arsonist was watching, she didn’t see him. But then there was a crash of breaking glass, and a great whump! and when she looked back, fires were dancing in the windows upstairs. She clutched the grail, wet with her blood, primed for its terrible work, to her chest, and–

  “–the hell did he go?” Altman said, snapping Ruby back to the present. He was leaning over the desk, glaring down at the grail like he could dissolve it through the force of his will. “I don’t see any scorch marks, or any, ah, residue, so I don’t think he spontaneously combusted. Was he transported someplace? Is he, what, inhabiting one of his own dreams now? Is that what the grail does? Lets you bodily travel into your own mind?” Altman made a sour face and shook his head. “Sounds like a living nightmare to me. Why did he even touch the thing?”

  “Maybe Tillinghast planned this.” Ruby spoke slowly, gathering her thoughts. She had to tread carefully now. Altman was loyal to Sanford and probably the closest thing to a friend the old man had, even if they’d only known each other for a few months. She sometimes thought Sanford forgot this man wasn’t his first confidant named Altman. Though to be fair, the brothers Altman were similar in appearance and demeanor, and to be scathingly accurate, Sanford tended to view most people as basically interchangeable anyway. The point was, she didn’t want to give Altman any reason to doubt her. She had no doubt he was an experienced and remorseless killer. “This whole thing could have been some kind of ruse, you know? Maybe Tillinghast let me steal the grail, knowing how badly Sanford wanted it, and set the fire himself. Maybe the grail was even enchanted, like the other gifts Tillinghast has been passing out, and Sanford was drawn to touch it.”

  “That could be,” Altman said. “He’s normally more careful. When we found that wet box on the desk, we took it to an operating theater and treated it like an unexploded bomb.” Altman reached down for the bag, which the grail was still on top of, and wiggled the leather around until the grail settled back inside it again, then swiftly closed the bag around it. He nodded firmly and stepped back. Ruby had to stifle a laugh. Altman was a man of action, and he needed to act, or at least feel like he was doing something useful.

  He looked at her and said, “We should try to find him, right? We could ask the Scholar downstairs where he went. She knows things.”

  Ruby shrugged. “It seems like Sanford would have asked her about the grail already, but we can try if you like.” What Ruby really needed to do was get out of here and wait for Gloria to contact her. Her old boss was gone; long live her new boss. She wasn’t any happier about serving Tillinghast than she had been about Sanford – less, really, since Sanford had only ever threatened to kill her, not strand her in null-time – but Ruby was essentially a realist.

  And she might still actually get that big payday Tillinghast had promised, once his Great Work was finished. He was the sort of person who liked to wield the carrot and the stick. Though she had to wonder if money would be worth anything after his mysterious ritual was complete.

  Altman picked up the bag with the grail. “Can’t leave this lying around,” he muttered. “Let’s find a safe place for it, anyway.” He led Ruby through the warren of passageways, down a secret staircase, and into the depths of the basements. Ruby wondered how deep those subterranean levels really went. She was sure they took up more space than there was room for, geographically speaking, and she’d heard rumors that some of the doorways led to places not strictly of this earth, though the same rumors said they couldn’t be traversed easily, or without Sanford’s leave.

  “Who’s in charge, while Sanford is… away?” Ruby asked. “There must be a chain of command. There are all those levels, Initiates and Seekers and the other ones, so who’s the vice president of the Silver Twilight Lodge?”

  “The Keeper of the Red Stone?” Altman said it like he was asking her, not telling her. “I think he’s the highest-ranking member of the Order after Sanford, but he’s never here. His whole job is traveling the world chasing down leads and looking for artifacts. He was here recently, simply to replenish his supplies, but I think he left again. After that, I’m not sure. There’s the warden, of course, but she’s locked up now…”

  “Why? Van Shaw is the Lodge, practically!”

  “She betrayed Sanford,” Altman said. “She took a bribe from Tillinghast. Some bit of jewelry that gave her powers she didn’t normally have.”

  Ruby started to touch the watch on her wrist, and then made herself stop. So, the warden was on her side? Maybe she should try to set the woman free. “What kind of powers?”

  Altman grunted. “I don’t really know the details. You know how Sanford is when it comes to filling people in. What matters is he caught her, took her new toy away, and locked her up. I don’t have high hopes for her life expectancy.” He paused, then bowed his head and leaned heavily against the wall. “Then again, if the magus is gone… I don’t know who’s going to pass judgment on her. There are a few Knights of the Stars in the city, including myself, and we’re fairly high up in the hierarchy. At my initiation ceremony, the others were annoyed I was given that title when I hadn’t gone through the ranks properly like they all had. But they don’t strike me as leaders. They’re enforcers, like me.” He shook his head. “It’s not like Sanford encouraged us to think about what we’d do without him. The very idea of the Lodge without him is supposed to be impossible. Worst of all, we don’t know who we can trust. If Tillinghast got to the warden, who else has been compromised? Who else has betrayed the sacred brotherhood of the Order?”

  Altman looked so stricken at the idea that Ruby couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  •••

  Am I laying it on too thick? Altman thought. “The sacred brotherhood of the Order” – he sounded like a recruiter for a college fraternity. But he couldn’t give Ruby any cause to doubt his loyalty. She’d proven her own devotion to Sanford by bringing in the grail, even if she had been acting as an unknowing dupe for Tillinghast in the process.

  Ruby knew a lot of the other people in the Order, and if she started pointing fingers and declaring that Altman had turned on the master, some of them might believe her. Even though she didn’t have any official status in the organization, she’d been around longer than Altman had, and accusations from her would at the very least cause a commotion. He needed to keep things together here until Tillinghast did… whatever he was going to do… to seize power, now that Sanford was gone. He just wished he knew where Sanford had gone, and how long he was going to be there.

  Altman stopped. “Wait. Shouldn’t there be a door right here?” He was confronting a blank wall.

  “I haven’t been to visit the Scholar since she was trapped in that nasty old cell,” Ruby said. “You tell me.”

  “I’m sure I… maybe we took a wrong turn at the last branch.” He backtracked, and Ruby followed, and then she touched his shoulder.

  “Altman, this is different, too. The passageway that led to the vault should be right here, and there’s just plaster now. Maybe it’s an illusion.” She closed her eyes and moved her hands all over the wall, methodically touching it from the floor to the highest extent of her reach, then shook her head and faced him. “That’s an actual wall. What’s going on? Could the floor plan be changing?”

  “Sanford said he’d instituted various security protocols, after the business with the Cult of Asterias,” Altman said. “He never told me what those protocols were, exactly, but he said he didn’t intend to let anyone run rampant through his Lodge again.”

  Ruby groaned. “Let’s see what else has changed.”

  The answer was: a lot. There were still plenty of twisting corridors and T-junctions and dingy hallways, but none of them seemed to lead anywhere; worst case, you hit dead ends, and best case, you ended up looping back to where you started. All the doorways to the various chambers, ritual sites, theaters, storage areas, libraries, and mysterious liminal spaces were gone. The basement was all hallways and no rooms now.

  They retreated back upstairs, baffled, and found the dining room full of two score Lodge members, all loudly talking over one another and gesticulating furiously. “What is the meaning of this?” Altman boomed, silencing them. He outranked everyone there, and they all bowed their heads and touched their chests in the Lodge salute.

  One of them, a rabbity fellow that Altman recalled as one of Sanford’s archivists, stepped forward. “We were all working downstairs, and then we… well, I got lightheaded, and sat down, and closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them again, I was here. I must have been somehow transported through time and space…”

  “You walked,” one of the cooks announced flatly, leaning on the counter in the pass-through between the kitchen and the dining room. “I watched the whole lot of you stumble in here, eyes closed. I think you was sleepwalking.”

  One of the Initiates who served in the dining room nodded her head rapidly. “It was like watching a line of ants head for an apple core on the lawn! They came single file and sat down in neat rows and then a second later they all woke up and stood up and started yelling.”

  “Are we under attack?” the archivist said. “I heard something like that happened last year. Where’s the warden? Where’s the master?”

  “No one is under attack!” Altman shouted. “I’m Carl Sanford’s head of security, and he has me testing a new security protocol in case of enemy action. It worked perfectly. That’s all. It’s late. You should all return to your homes, or your guest rooms upstairs.”

  “But I work the graveyard shift,” one of the basement people objected. “My work can only be done under the dark of the moon–”

  “The moon will be dark again another time,” Altman said firmly. “All of you, go home.” They meekly obeyed, and when the dining room was empty, Altman sat down at the long table. Ruby joined him, and Altman put his head in his hands. “I had no idea there were so many people underfoot in the evening. I guess in the basements it doesn’t much matter if it’s day or night. It’s all the same down there.” He yawned hugely. “I’m tired, though. I could use a night’s sleep before it gets to be morning again. Maybe Sanford will return, and all this will be settled before I wake up.”

  “I don’t imagine Sanford will be back anytime soon,” Gloria Dyer said, strolling into the dining room with a smile. She wore a pink jacket over a white shirt and a pink skirt and carried a pink purse to match; even her pumps were pink. “How lovely to see both of you!”

  Altman rose and glanced at Ruby, who was gaping at the woman. “How did you get in here?” she demanded.

  Gloria beamed. “I opened the gate. I followed the path. I opened the front door. I walked through that ghastly foyer. I strolled into the house, and heard your voices, and came here. It’s so strange. No horrible dogs snarled at me, no imperious women barred my way, and the door wasn’t even locked. Aren’t you the head of Carl Sanford’s personal security, Altman? I must say, you’re falling down on the job.”

  Altman glowered and drew himself up. “You. What have you, I mean, what has Tillinghast done with Sanford? Answer me, or I’ll drag you down to the basements and… and…”

  “Oh, settle down, Altman.” Gloria put her purse down and pulled out a chair for herself, then sat at the table with her hands clasped before her. “Go pour us some brandies, would you? We’re all friends here.”

  “What – what do you mean?” Ruby said.

  “I mean, I work for Tillinghast.” She touched her breastbone. “And he works for Tillinghast.” She pointed at Altman. “And you work for Tillinghast.” She pointed at Ruby. “Have you two been circling around each other, trying to prove your loyalty to Sanford?” She laughed like tinkling bells. “How funny. Well, there’s no need for all that now.”