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Avery unlocked the lighthouse door and stuck the skeleton key back in his pocket. “Last time he didn’t have any traps on the door but there was some kind of complex barrier about ten feet in that stopped us cold. He got Ron Wheeler, the other deputy, by crushing him with it while we were trying to break through. We did break it eventually but von Nighburg may very well have put it back.”

“What kind of barrier was it? A series of interlocking triangles?” Van der Klein asked.

“No, I’ve seen those before and it definitely wasn’t one of those. It was much more chaotic, almost like that pasta stuff they serve out East, except all the lines were straight and the corners square.” Avery squiggled the tip of his finger in twisting patterns that didn’t really match his description. “It was strange and that doesn’t describe it well, but…”

“That’s okay, I know what you’re talking about.” He handed Avery a mirror with several marks on the surface written in waxy chalk. “If you see another barrier like that, place the glass flat against it. Then back up, those barriers tend to throw off a lot of excess heat when they fail.”

“Will your mirror be alright?”

“That charm is a one use trick, so don’t worry about it.”

The mirror was in a bronze frame with a beveled edge and there were signs it had been removed from hinges, like it was originally in a larger frame meant to sit on a table or desk. At a guess, Avery priced it at ten silver marks. “Pretty expensive for a one use charm.”

“Eight marks to keep us alive is a bargain in my book.”

“Won’t argue that.” Avery leaned out a bit so he could look past van der Klein, Samson and Tanner to where Harper waited in the middle of the line that stretched along the narrow stone path beneath the lighthouse. “If von Nighburg cuts us off I’d go ahead and use your skiff to get up to the top.”

“Not sure dividing our forces is the best call at this point,” Harper replied. “But I’ll think about it. If we really wanted to shut all this down we’d have brought iron like I said in the first place.”

“We’d never get through to the hidden space if we used iron, Roy,” van der Klein said. “If we’d done that the girl would be lost for good.”

Harper snorted. “Just open the door before the sun sets entirely.”

The door opened on well oiled hinges, which was surprising since no one had been out to maintain the building in months and the sea air was hard even on good brass fittings. Avery hadn’t thought about it on his first visit but now the fact stood out to him. Had von Nighburg been using the children as housekeepers in addition to whatever else he did with them? An odd choice.

If so he hadn’t tasked them to keep the rest of the building clean. When the door opened a wave of dank, fetid air rolled out to greet them. The dark, rust red stain flecked with pieces of molding, rotted flesh made it clear where it came from. They’d pulled Wheeler’s body out of the front room and left it on the path during the last, abortive raid but the place he’d died was much as it was before. Sheriff Breen’s body was still somewhere on the next floor, doubtless adding to the smell.

Unless von Nighburg had found some dark use for that.

There was a moment’s pause as they pulled out handkerchiefs or scarves to fix over their faces and Cassandra passed a bottle of perfume forward to sprinkle on them. It wasn’t a perfect solution but it did help with the smell. Then Avery lit his candle and carefully stepped into the room, his senses alert for any potential trap or ambush.

So far the lighthouse’s uninvited guest hadn’t ever engaged in direct combat. Before he’d examined Stu Strathmore’s memories Avery had only seen the blackguard’s face in the sketch on his wanted poster. Instead he’d left a number of deadly pushing and crushing traps for interlopers. At least, based on what Avery had seen on his last visit. Johan van der Klein had added a long list of other potential tricks von Nighburg might play with moon prisms and other Teutonic spells added to the mix, including poison gasses and something called madman patterns.

In theory, as a fully trained Son of Harmon, van der Klein could counter these traps. That was why he was the second in line. In practice Avery was deeply uncomfortable relying on that. Wheeler claimed he’d been a magical sapper during the Lakeshire War, a master of booby traps and rigged structures, but he’d been the first one to die last time. Avery figured it was best he rely on his own intuition as much as anything else. After all it worked last time.

The bottom floor of the lighthouse was the living area and the splintered remnants of the table and chairs that had once dominated it were still tossed around the room. Avery’s candle sputtered in the stale air. However the telltale spark of the barriers he’d encountered last time didn’t appear and no stray thoughts met Avery’s questing candle magic as he went looking for the threats. Moving cautiously, the sheriff moved through the twenty foot by twenty foot space, looking back and forth warily. Van der Klein followed behind, pausing a moment to examine the brick stove. It squatted in the far corner, across from the narrow wooden stairway, almost a ladder, that led up to the second floor.

“Anything interesting?” Avery asked as the other man poked at the metal grate and old ashes.

“Looks like the anchor point for the booby trap you encountered earlier.” Van der Klein dusted his hands off and went over to look up the stairway. “Very unorthodox hand. I’m not an expert but I’m fairly sure our blackguard wasn’t trained by anyone in Columbia. There’s still only a few major styles represented over here. His work doesn’t have any of the flourishes I’d expect from those schools.”

“Trained by a continental, then?” Roy asked, joining the two of them at the stairs.

“So I’d surmise. I don’t see any signs of tampering with the stairway but give me a moment.” He set a mirror down on the bottom step of the stairs then another on the highest step he could reach, only one step below the opening in the ceiling. After a little adjusting they had a clear view of the ceiling above and the short hallway that led to the lighthouse’s sleeping quarters. The door off to the side of the opening was barely visible. However they could see enough to make out the strange, repeating pattern that described a large circle painted on the door in blue paint. Van der Klein frowned. “Was that there on your last visit, sheriff?”

“No it was not.”

“Isn’t that a stasis trap?” Harper asked.

“Hard to tell from here but it could be,” van der Klein said. He carefully climbed up on the stairs and moved the top mirror a step higher, then adjusted everything so they had a better look at the design. “Yes, the outer tier is a stasis trap. There’s a second spell nested in there but it’s not anything I recognize, or if it is then he’s drawn the pattern in such an idiosyncratic way that I can’t make sense of it. Very strange.”

“Why’s that?” Brandon asked. The rest of the group had examined the room and congregated by the stairs while van der Klein was tinkering with his mirrors.

“A stasis trap is kind of like a lesser version of the moon prism.” He stowed one mirror and started writing on the other with his wax chalk. “It changes the way time works in a small area. Problem is, if you slow time you also slow down most other magic and thus combining stasis with other kinds of magic generally doesn’t work well.”

“Can you counter it without knowing what the second spell does?” Proud Elk asked.

“Yes. The nested spell will be dependent on the stasis spell working unless von Nighburg has discovered some revolutionary way to perform Teutonic magic.” He finished his work and was about to start up the stairs again when Harper put a hand on his shoulder.

“I’ll take that. On the off chance you’re wrong about those spells I’d rather not have to explain to your wife why you never came back.” Van der Klein clearly thought about refusing but ultimately turned the warded mirror over to Harper without comment.

The firespinner took the mirror in one hand and unclipped a lantern with two comically large sulfurite crystals in a bronze cage from his pack with the other. Then he carefully climbed the stairs, keeping the mirror facing the trapped door. As his shoulders disappeared through the ceiling there was a sudden flash of blue light and the sound of cracking glass. Harper paused a moment.

“Looks like that worked, Johan,” he called. A strange moaning sound cut off anything else he had to say and the firespinner’s lower body shifted and pivoted, suddenly leaning to the right and bracing against the opening in the floor. A roar of fire, a wave of heat and a surge of yellow orange light poured down around Harper. It was accompanied by sizzling sounds and the sickening sweet smell of burning rot while the groaning noises continued unabated. That lasted about five seconds. Harper looked back and forth once then climbed the rest of the way up. “Wait until I check in.”

The second floor wasn’t any bigger than the first and it took Harper all of fifteen seconds to finish his sweep before his head appeared in the opening. “All clear now. Von Nighburg left a ghoul of some sort for us but I cooked it down fast enough.”

“A ghoul?” Avery climbed up the stairs briskly and found the second floor much unchanged since his last visit. The two bedroom doors stood open giving a brief glimpse of two beds with unkempt linens and little else. A pile of ash and burnt bones lay at the entrance of the room to the left. “Well, I suppose we won’t be sending Sheriff Breen off on his pyre.”

“My apologies.” To Avery’s surprise Harper actually sounded apologetic about it. “It’s usually better to burn a ghoul rather than dismember it but it is a pity he won’t have the normal rites. Raising things like that isn’t usually a Teutonic spell, is it?”

“No,” van der Klein said, cresting the top of the stairs himself. “That’s generally Slavic or Mesopotamian stuff. I think the Nubian traditions have similar spells but that’s far outside my knowledge. Our von Nighburg has an interesting mix of tricks to play, it seems.”

“Why didn’t we hear it until now?” Avery asked. “Ghouls are supposed to be noisy creatures.”

Van der Klein took one step over to the marked door and gave it a look over. “Hard to say for sure but I’d guess whatever spell was nested in the stasis trap also slowed the ghoul somehow. When the stasis spell changed its target to Roy the ghoul was set free. I don’t know much about that kind of magic so I can’t be sure.”

“Dust and ashes,” Tanner muttered, following right behind van der Klein and eyeing Breen’s remains warily. “I’d say ghouls are horrible but I saw what Hank looked like after that blackguard finished with him. Y’don’t suppose he was actually dead and turned into a ghoul, do you?”

“Sure.” Harper’s tone suggested he believed just the opposite. “A ghoul. That’s very possible.”

The old sailor’s face fell and Avery suppressed a twinge of annoyance. Roy Harper was a lot of things but Avery wouldn’t count a good leader among them. In most circumstances the sheriff suspected that a firespinner who worked most jobs alone or with one or two trusted associates wouldn’t really need a good sense for people management. Hopefully van der Klein would be a better fit to managing two townies with little experience in practical violence.

Avery kept an eye on the skinny wizard as they carefully moved on to the next floor of the lighthouse. Von Nighburg left two more traps for them, one was another crushing trap on the ceiling by the next set of stairs which Avery countered with the mirror van der Klein gave him. When the barrier crashed into the mirror they both fractured into shards and scattered on the floor. The pieces of the barrier faded into heat. The shards of the mirror did not.

On the third floor the rotting ghoul of an enormous crustacean waited for them, its claws reaching from one side of the tower to the other. It launched itself at Avery as soon as he peaked over the top of the stairs. That was a poor choice because Avery was able to drop down to the second floor and the giant creature couldn’t follow him. It stuck a claw down trying to grab him and that sealed its fate.

Proud Elk wrapped one end of his whipclub around the claw then he, Samson and eventually Tanner hung on to it, holding the creature in place in spite of its increasingly frantic attempts to escape, while the others stabbed it to death with their weapons. Once the corpse was definitely a corpse again, Brandon used his remarkable strength to push it aside. On the top floor they found themselves in the storage room where barrels of oil, spare reflectors and other supplies to keep the lighthouse beacon lit were kept.

One of the spare reflectors sat in the center of a strange frame made of a gleaming, silvery metal. The frame fit poorly and was clearly not an original part of the reflector and the edges of the frame overlapped with it creating strange, twisting patterns full of odd curling designs marred by sharp spikes at seemingly random intervals. When he first saw it Avery thought it was some kind of silver because he thought he saw it squirming in the corner of his eye. Then Harper pushed past him, running a curious hand over the frame.

The firespinner examined the frame for a full five minutes without speaking, looking at the sides, back and base with incredible scrutiny. The whole time his frown grew deeper and deeper. Avery glanced at van der Klein, unsure why Harper’s handpicked expert wasn’t joining him in his work. From the other man’s expression, van der Klein wasn’t sure what was going on either. So Avery asked, “What’s wrong?”

Harper completed a full circuit around the reflector and folded his arms, head tilted to one side. “I’m not sure… but I think that frame is made of steel.”