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As full night fell on Riker’s Cove something subtle shifted in the waters of the Cove. To the discerning eye it might have looked like the moon was slowly growing closer and closer to the surface of the water as the light it reflected there grow brighter and covered more and more of the waves. A discerning eye was necessary because the moon above did not change from its normal route through the heavens.

Yet as the lesser light reached it’s zenith the rays that shone from the water seemed to catch in the reflectors of the lighthouse, glancing off the surface meant to direct the beacon within out to sea. The reflector turned slowly away from the waves and towards the Cove. No human hands moved it yet move it did. In the market square above the docks, where the fishermen sold the day’s catch, the beam of unearthly light focused to a point.

A few minutes later the light faded and the lighthouse reflector turned back out to sea leaving a five foot tall crystal pillar behind.

In his time working with Books, sorting out lost shipments, tracking down pirates and quietly exterminating foreign blood cults, Roy had worked with a lot of aluminum skiffs. The principles were simple. Heat a sheet of aluminum up until it floated then used tin to propel yourself and there you go. A flying platform to take you over land and sea.

He hadn’t realized how hard it was to find one of the things on short notice, usually Books handled that part of things. It took him the better part of the two days preparatory time they had – not to mention a great deal of his personal silver – to locate a skiff he could buy. Not rent, buy. Some pretty clever banking was necessary to get the money ready to actually make the purchase. Hopefully he’d be able to liquidate the thing later.

In the meantime he had his ride back in to Riker’s Cove and hopefully up to the lighthouse. Flight metal was difficult to refine and its use in transportation quite novel. Roy hoped that novelty would translate to a blindspot for both the sheriff and von Nighburg.

It turned out Johan wasn’t quite ready for it either. Once they got the thing off the ground he took one look over the side, moved to the center of the eight foot by fifteen foot skiff, sat down and refused to move. “If I wanted to fall to my death,” he said, “I could’ve done it at home.”

“I’ve been to Leondale,” Roy said with a smirk. “It’s flatter than flapjacks.”

“Falling off a roof will do the trick nicely.”

“There is no trick to dying,” Proud Elk said. “It happens every day and will happen to us all soon enough. Now flying? That is something special.” The Sanna man leaned against the back wall of the skiff, a smile on his face as he stared up at the sky. He hadn’t wound up steering the skiff but he didn’t seem upset at that.

Roy envied him a bit. He had to spend most of his time looking down for landmarks to ensure they actually reached their destination. Flying a skiff was much different from riding in one. But he’d done his fair share of both whereas this was Proud Elk’s first flight so Roy couldn’t really hold his friend’s wonder against him. Flying really was magic in its truest sense.

In the interest of approaching the Cove from the direction most conductive to stealth Roy looped out to sea for most of the flight south. He stayed about five feet over the waves, which he’d had impressed on him as the optimal height for stable flight. Too high for most waves, to low for sudden breezes.

Lighthouses weren’t common along the shoreline that far south so when they caught a glimpse of one peeking above the horizon line Roy assumed it was the Cove’s and moved the skiff over land and set it down. The whole trip took less than an hour. As they climbed out and Johan shook feeling back into his limbs he remarked on the brevity of the trip.

“Skytrains are huge and heavy,” Roy said. “They take forever to get going and they aren’t that fast once they do. Our skiff has good top speed and gets up to it faster than a locomotive so of course the trip is faster.”

He got a grip on the fist sized sulfurite crystal built into the skiff’s rudder. First he coaxed all the heat still in the vehicle’s underside back into the sulfurite. Then, once he was sure he’d reclaimed all the loose magic left in the skiff, he pulled the crystal out of its setting and carefully put it in a special carrying pouch in his bag.

“How much fire was lost?” Proud Elk asked.

“About two fifths of what it holds,” Roy said. “We’ll need to restoke it before tonight if we’re taking it up to the lighthouse.”

“Must we?” Johan asked.

“It’s the simplest way to get up there, especially if we don’t want to cross paths with the sheriff.” Roy slung his pack over his shoulder and took stock of their location. Large spurs of rock jutted out into the ocean ahead of them, old ridges of volcanic stone well worn by time and tide. They were sheltered from the elements by the stone ridge to the north and dunes in the other two directions. Only a passing ship was likely to catch sight of them. They’d just have to hope no one headed towards Riker’s Cove thought to report their presence there to Sheriff Warwick. “Guess I should try and whistle up the Fairchilds.”

“How exactly do you intend to do that?”

“Watch and learn, Johan. Watch and learn.” The Henge and Hills was an old Avaloni tune that many knights from their Stone Circle learned, although Roy wasn’t quite sure why. It was kind of a slow tune and not suited for march or drill. It opened high and clear, with a rising set of notes that stopped abruptly before opening out into a wider, deeper melody that carried the weight and purpose of the old country’s chivalric tradition. During the gold drinker hunt Brandon had taught it to him. It was the traditional tune used to signal your location to Fairchild stone singers and, while he wasn’t entirely on key, Roy managed to whistle the first six or seven bars correctly nine times out of ten. After hiking up to the edge of the hill, at a place where the dunes still hid him from sight, he repeated them twice then settled in to wait.

The other two collected their things from the skiff and came to join him. Proud Elk had found a dousing rod and collected samples of the local flora in Loewenburg but he’d also drawn several samples from the local water table which he carried with him in a series of flasks. The Sanna divining traditions he drew on were exotic but, in Roy’s experience, not very offensive in nature. Roy hoped the man hadn’t gathered all that for nothing.

Johan had a backpack full of dinner plate sized bundles wrapped in heavy cotton cloth that he’d kept a death grip on during the flight out. The magic system devised by Rembrant, son of Harmon, relied on mirrors to direct and amplify light, the aspect of fire the hardest to transform into practical magic. Roy wondered if he’d had something in mind when grabbing them or if he’d just wanted to hedge his bets. Either way, he hoped van der Klein hadn’t laid out too much of his own money. Von Nighburg’s bounty probably wasn’t even going to cover the expenses they were incurring on this part of the job, to say nothing of transportation costs. Unlike Books or Roy himself, Johan wasn’t in a position to spend money freely.

If he was worrying about his finances Johan didn’t show it when he sat his bag down next to Roy and joined him in peering over the top of the dunes. All he said was, “This wasn’t what I thought you meant by whistling them up.”

“What else did you think I meant?”

“I presumed you had a signal prearranged with them.”

“You presumed correctly.”

They hadn’t waited more than ten minutes when the sound of hoofbeats built over the dunes. Roy frowned. He had expected the Fairchilds to make a more discreet approach. Roy got to his feet and peeked over the top of the hill to spot a short, rather portly man approaching on a horse. He reached down for his sword, an old falcata he’d carried in his younger days before Books had imported his Alexopolous made blade. He’d broken that masterpiece a few months ago. In fact, now that he thought about it, he’d gone through a lot of swords in the last four months or so.

The many grisly fates of his cutlery weren’t germane at the moment, however. What was important was the man coming over the dunes and, from what he could see, that man had the look of a sailor rather than a townie. He was wearing a light blue vest, canvas pants and a battered cotton shirt with no collar. There was no weapon at his side or strapped to his saddle. Roy got to his feet and raised a hand in greeting. The rider pulled up about ten feet away and said, “Hello there! Any one of you go by the name Roy Harper?”

“That’s me.”

“Chester Tanner.” He touched his battered sock cap as if he was tipping a hat although his own headgear wasn’t suited to the motion. “Miss Fairchild asks you join her down in the square by the docks.”

“Is that a fact?” This wasn’t nearly what he’d expected as a result of his signal but perhaps the sheriff had left town or something over the last couple of days. He turned to the other two. “You heard the man, let’s get going.”

Unfortunately Tanner hadn’t brought horses for all of them so they were forced to walk briskly as the local man kept his horse at a very restrained trot next to them. At that pace it took them less than fifteen minutes to make the trip down to the docks. To Roy’s surprise they found both Fairchilds and Sheriff Warwick there. To his even greater surprise, they found them walking around an eight foot tall crystal pillar that looked like it contained a boy of about ten years old.

Roy tilted his hat back and stared at the surreal thing. “What is this?”

“The penalty for our good deeds,” Warwick said, his hands on his hips as he stared at the crystal. A set of eight burnt out candles were laid around the crystal in a circle, the smoke from their burning still ringing the unsettling monolith.

As far as Roy knew a magic candle didn’t burn any different from a normal one. Whatever Warwick and the others had been doing here they’d been at it for hours and hadn’t found a solution. There wasn’t anything for it. Roy took the direct approach and walked up beside the sheriff, folded his arms and stared at the crystal, saying, “What good deed have you done recently?”

“Agreed to save some children.” Warwick hooked a thumb at the Fairchilds, who were a quarter way round the crystal and also studying it with incredible intensity. “Those two found one of von Nighburg’s hostage kids in town and freed him. I met your friends when they returned the boy to his parents and they talked me into working with them – and you lot – to save the others. That was last night.”

Roy nodded. “And this morning the town woke up and discovered how he responded.”

The sheriff turned and spat on the ground. “Dust and ashes, that blackguard gets worse every coalstoking day. The day we drown him in the stormwracked bay can’t come soon enough.”

The torrent of sacrilege took Roy by surprise. The sheriff had never struck him as the type to speak so coarsely, especially in public, but maybe he felt von Nighburg had escalated. A mistake on his part. After crossing paths with several groups of black magicians Roy had largely written the hostages off as dead already. He’d have to try and keep the sheriff on track. “Looks like you’ve already taken a good, long look at it. Have you been able to figure out what Nighburg did here?”

“I’m stumped,” Warwick admitted. “Whatever he’s done it’s not rooted in the earth or its fruits, no matter what the thing itself looks like. Your friends have been humming at it but don’t have anything either.”

“I wouldn’t underestimate that humming, sheriff,” Roy said, tapping on the crystal with his knuckles. “That lady’s voice is something else.”

In spite of Warwick’s insistence that the crystal wasn’t earth or stone it felt like any other piece of quartz Roy had touched in his life. Admittedly he didn’t often handle such things but it was also unavoidable in his life of work. He’d chosen to leave his wendigo bone necklace in his armory at home since he wasn’t sure how such a thing might interact with whatever strange pacts von Nighburg wielded but he still knew magical ice when he saw it. That wasn’t what this was either. There was no voice to the crystal so if there was an element of fire to the thing it was very, very small or similar to the sheriff’s candles and its magic kept the flame silent. His intuition told him there was just no fire.

Light glinted off the crystal next to his hand as he ran it along the crystal facets. Glancing behind him he saw Johan setting up and one of the spare mirrors he’d brought along on the ground. “Sheriff,” Roy said, “this is Johan van der Klein, the Son of Harmon I told you about.”

Avery turned away from the crystal and walked over to van der Klein. The two men shook hands as the sheriff said, “Mr. Harper speaks very highly of your abilities, sir. Do you think you can help us with our problem here?”

“Depends.” Johan manipulated the pieces of his lightbox, the reflective inner panes of glass pivoting and sliding on hidden hinges and poles made of silver, the metal animated by the magic stored within. The six sides of the box split and folded into a formation halfway between a flower and the mirrored sides of a lantern. In the middle was a sunstone.

No one outside the Sons was quite sure how Rembrandt Harmonson transformed sulfurite into sunstone, the process was one of the order’s greatest secrets. But the change in the stones afterwards was unmistakable. Where the average piece of fully stoked sulfurite burned with a dull, rich, red-orange light a sunstone shone with a clear, pale yellow glow. Unless the person wielding the stone put it to work.

Johan adjusted his lightbox a fraction of a degree then it unleashed a vibrant, clearly visible bar of light at the crystal, which caught that light and refracted it in a dizzying spray of colors. Roy and the others around the crystal flinched at the display but van der Klein ignored it entirely. Instead he studied the pillar in his mirror. After about fifteen seconds the mirrors of his lightbox shifted slightly, then shifted again after another thirty seconds. Then the light faded and the box closed.

“It’s a moon prism,” Johan said, tilting the mirror on the ground so that the crystal and only the crystal filled the pane.

“You’ve seen one of these before?” The sheriff asked.

“Not directly but they’re very common in the literature and some of the principles in them were inverted when the First Son invented sunstones.” Johan handed Tanner, Brandon and Roy mirrors. “Place those at the other compass points, please.”

Warwick peered over Johan’s shoulder as Roy and the others moved off to their positions. He heard the sheriff’s questioning continue as he worked to position the mirror he’d been entrusted with as van der Klein had.

“Is Hank okay in this moon prism of yours?”

“Hard to say without knowing how von Nighburg constructed it,” Johan replied. “Most of the references to them outside our own order come from very early Teutonic wizardry, stuff they discovered in even older records from the Forever War. Nothing I’ve seen of them says going in one would be dangerous. But there’s no saying your Hank was in good health when von Nighburg put him in it, either.”

“Fair. Is he gonna get hurt if you tinker with it now?”

“There’s several methods I could try to dissolve the crystal and they should all be perfectly safe, save for the last one. Which is why it will be last.”

“Should?” Tanner perked up. “How should are we talking here?”

“If the boy was healthy going in he should be healthy coming out,” Johan said, carefully drawing a series of precise marks on the glass of his mirror with waxy white chalk. “Save the last one methodology where there’s a chance we could set ourselves on fire. Roy, you’ll be our insurance against that if it comes to it.”

Roy got up from his mirror dusting his hands off. “That’s not how it works, Johan. If you start burning I can move the flames off somewhere else but you have to be burning before I can do it.”

“Well let’s not try that one, then,” Tanner said, folding his arms over his stomach. “If my sister’s boy burns to death on my watch she’s liable to send me him. He’s alive now, isn’t he?”

“Not necessarily. A moon prism holds the things inside it in stasis, so there’s a lot of things that could be wrong with him right now that we cannot even see. For example, the air frozen in there could be full of poison gas, like you’d find in a mine.” Johan moved to the next mirror in the circle and started marking it up, too. “In the hands of a malicious person there are any number of ways you can make an empty looking prism incredibly dangerous.”

“That’s a nasty bit of magic,” Roy muttered, looking at the crystal again. From Warwick’s testimony von Nighburg was exactly the kind of man to bait a boobytrap with a kidnapped child.

“It’s worse.” Johan looked up from his work on the mirror. “Remember why we came back here today instead of yesterday? It’s a moon prism.”

Avery spat again. “Dust and ashes, Low Noon’s comin’.”

Roy sucked in a breath. “I don’t suppose an eclipse will make the kind of magic you use to manufacture a moon prism weaker, will it?”

“Unfortunately, it does just the opposite.”