“YOU’RE CERTAIN HE’S drugged?” Drogo Veles peered cautiously at the captive. The prisoner was in his early forties, with shaggy dark hair, an untrimmed beard, and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses sitting askew on his face. The man was bound at the wrists and ankles, and again across the chest, tying him to the chair.

“My man got him with the dart two hours ago,” Thwaites replied. “It’s a hefty dose.”

Veles circled the bound man. The prisoner hung against his bonds, apparently insensible. It’s a delicate thing, questioning another mage—especially a powerful one, Veles thought. Can’t leave him with his powers, but take away the powers and one’s not certain what remains of the mind.

The prisoner was the Polish witch Karl Jasinski. What Veles wanted, needed, was locked inside Jasinski’s mind and unlikely to be given up willingly. Yet if he dug too assertively, the precious knowledge about how to control—or banish—the gessyan might be lost completely.

“You’ve got magic. Why can’t you just make him tell you what you want?” Thwaites asked, his tone mocking.

“As usual, it’s not as easy as you assume,” Veles replied, his voice a quiet growl. “It’s a delicate thing to get information from another witch who doesn’t give it willingly.” He had no desire to elaborate. His ‘partnership’ with Thwaites was necessary, but hardly based on trust. Veles had not lived for so long by trusting others with knowledge about witches and their secrets. Even the drug he had given Thwaites to use against Jasinski was one Veles had long ago developed a tolerance for. Should Thwaites decide to double-cross him, Veles would likely have no worse than a bad headache, rather than Jasinski’s complete collapse.

Jasinski moaned. “He’s coming around,” Thwaites said. “Ask your questions.”

Interrogating a witch of real power was a difficult undertaking, Veles knew. Mortal torture could compel a prisoner to provide answers for the sake of ending pain, but most of the time the answers were false, given just to stop the torment. Witches were even more complex to question. Leave them with their powers intact, and they would fight to the death rather than give up their secrets. Suppress their powers with charms and curses, and the questioning witch was in danger of damping his own magic to the point of uselessness.

Every attempt to bribe, flatter or scare Jasinski into cooperating had failed. Chasing his damned crate halfway around the world and pursuing Jasinski for weeks had come down to this: a man drugged nearly insensible, and a dark witch at the limits of his patience.

“What did you ship from Poland to Brand and Desmet?”

“Alekanovo stones and a book.”

“Marcin of Krakow’s book?” Veles pressed.

“Yes.”

“Where is the crate?”

“Don’t know.”

“Did you arrange for it to go missing?” Veles asked.

“No.” Jasinski’s voice was faint, like a man jarred from a deep sleep who believes himself to still be dreaming.

“Did you send someone to take it?”

“No.”

“Did you steal the crate from Brand and Desmet?”

“No.”

“This is getting us nowhere,” Thwaites fumed. He picked up a riding crop from where it was leaning against a crate and brought it down hard across Jasinski’s face, opening cuts across his nose and cheek. “Tell us what you did with the crate!”

Veles used a flicker of magic, and the crop was torn from Thwaites’s hand, flying through the air to land in his own outstretched palm. He broke the crop over his knee and dropped it. “I control this interrogation,” he said, meeting Thwaites’s gaze. “I will not warn you again.”

“And it’s coming along so beautifully,” Thwaites retorted sullenly, but he did not make another move toward Jasinski.

Veles returned his attention to the prisoner. “What’s in your apartment and store that’s connected to the gessyan?”

It took Jasinski a moment to reply, as if his addled mind were searching for words. “Books. Papers. Drawings. Things.”

“Can you use them to control the gessyan?” Veles pressed.

“No. Need the stones.”

Veles cursed in Romanian. He began to pace. They had chosen to interrogate Jasinski in the Vesta Nine storage building where Tumblety and Brunrichter constructed their automatons and created their clockwork corpses. The air stank of decay and embalming fluid. Guards surrounding the perimeter of the building ensured that they would not be disturbed, and the wardings around the interrogation area contained Jasinski’s power. The single overhead light did little more than intensify the shadows surrounding them. And though Veles had used his magic to make certain that nothing would trigger either the clockwork corpses or the automatons, yet he eyed their still, unnatural forms with suspicion.

“How much did you tell Thomas Desmet about the stones?” Veles asked. The drug mixture he had concocted was lethal in high dosages, and he had made a strong portion to assure Jasinski’s compliance. The poison would give them a finite amount of time to question their prisoner, but make him more docile, stripping away most of his magic. It was a devil’s bargain, in more ways than one.

Veles watched Jasinski closely. Every witch worth their salt had a death spell, a final curse to cheat an enemy of victory. Veles’s own conjuration would send a city block up in flames. Other witches he had known took different approaches, all of them unpleasant and fatal to themselves and their captors. He did not want Jasinski to regain enough lucidity to use his.

“Enough. Enough that he knew how important it was. He waived the fee.” Jasinski’s voice was barely above a whisper. “Desmet knew the things in the crate were magic. Dangerous.”

“Did you tell him about the gessyan? About Vesta Nine?”

“No. Just… bad spirits.”

Thwaites moved to backhand Jasinski, but Veles’s arm snapped out, stopping Thwaites before he could touch the drugged witch. “If you make another move to hit him, I will hurt you,” Veles growled.

“We’re not getting anywhere!” Thwaites snapped. “He’s not so tough now.”

“A drugged witch is unpredictable,” Veles said with more patience than he felt. “Like a wounded dog. Ask him questions, he’ll answer. Rough him up, and he may be able to summon up enough magic to incinerate you in self-defense.”

Thwaites’s eyes widened, and he stepped back, sulking. “What good are your drugs, then?”

“He hasn’t incinerated you yet, has he?” Veles replied, then ignored Thwaites and turned back to Jasinski.

“How do I control the gessyan?” Veles asked. “How do I use the Russian stones and the witch’s book?”

“You can’t,” Jasinski said, his voice drifting and unsteady. “Need the Logonje… priests. Holy magic…”

Veles felt his temper rising. “Tell me what I want to know. I can give you an easy death—or a hard one.”

Jasinski straightened and for one terrifyingly coherent moment, his eyes were clear and his voice steady. “Go to Hell,” he said, and muttered a word of power. He was dead before the breath left his body.

“What just happened?” Thwaites demanded. “Did you bugger this up?”

Without a backward glance, Veles clapped his hands and Thwaites was hurled across the room, slamming into the wall. He landed hard on his back, dirtying his bespoke Savile Row suit. Thwaites lay still, cursing a blue streak, as Veles moved forward cautiously and felt for a pulse.

“Damn,” Veles muttered, although he had known Jasinski was dead before he tried. He laid a hand on the dead witch’s forehead and reached out with his magic. Trying to read a dead man’s mind was difficult, forbidden and dangerous.

Veles gasped, and tried to draw away. Jasinski’s brain was an unreadable puddle of goo, mangled as if by a shotgun shell. But the witch’s last spell drew Veles down, drowning him in the madness of a dead man’s decomposing brain.

Veles struggled against the spell, but Jasinski had used all of his cunning. The Polish witch was even stronger than Veles had suspected. Tendrils of power lashed out, worming their way into Veles’s defenses, burning skin and psyche, boring into his power. Veles cried out, sending a blast of magic to free himself as the dead witch’s power launched a last, brute-force attack, a spell prepared in advance to trigger with the witch’s last breath.

Jasinski had nothing to lose. The outlay of power to launch the spell had taken all his life force, his breath and body heat, the energy of his brain and heart. Everything was poured into a complex, deadly spell which forced Veles to call on his own magic to fight off the tendrils of power that burned him any time they slipped past his defenses, depleting his power.

He means to take me with him. He means to kill me.

Fighting Jasinski’s spell was like fending off an army of octopi. Welts rose all over Veles’ body as his life drained out of him with every painful blow of the tendrils. His skin was a mass of bloody sores. Blood ran from the open wounds and trickled down from his scalp. Distantly, he realized that Thwaites was screaming, but he had no time to deal with his panicked partner.

Worse, Veles knew the blood would draw the attention of the gessyan still in the depths of the Vesta Nine. He sensed that they were watching, and that if he failed to break free, they would surge up from the darkness to suck the marrow from his bones before tearing his spirit free of his wretched corpse.

Veles sent his will deep into the ground beneath his feet, drawing on the power of the earth. He willed that elemental force to geyser up through him, burning across sinew and veins, blasting from his palms into Jasinski’s body. The blast ripped the corpse apart, shattering its rib cage, flaying the skin from the face, crushing bone.

For an awful instant, Veles felt the tendrils of the dead man’s magic hold firm, until the power frayed and snapped with such force that Veles staggered back. He found himself in a defensive crouch, hands raised as if to fend off another attack, facing a savaged corpse tied with bloody bonds to a splintered chair.

Behind him, he heard he heard the slow, sarcastic applause of one man clapping. “Bravo!” Thwaites cried out. “Jolly good show. Encore!”

Were his power not utterly spent, Veles might have indulged himself in the luxury of blasting Thwaites with a bolt of energy, shutting the socialite up permanently.

“Shut the hell up and get rid of the body,” he gasped.

“Me? Get a guard!” Thwaites snapped.

Veles rounded on him, snarling like a cornered beast. “Get rid of the damn body or I will turn you inside out and let you lie, gasping, while your ruptured lungs heave for breath.”

Thwaites blanched. His lip rose in a sneer, but he grudgingly took one step and then another toward the bloody, mangled corpse. With a baleful glare toward Veles, Thwaites dragged the broken chair over to where Tumblety and Brunrichter left the unused ‘bits’ of their clockwork corpses. He pulled a straight razor from one pocket, snapped the blade open, and sliced down through Jasinski’s bonds, letting the body fall onto the rotting, maggot-infested heap.

“Happy?” he snarled.

“No. I’m not happy,” Veles replied venomously. “Jasinski is dead, and we don’t have the Russian stones or the Polish witch’s book. Desmet is meddling dangerously, and so is the Scottish detective. We have tourmaquartz left to mine, for buyers who are despots and arms dealers across two Continents. Men who will not look upon us kindly if we do not meet our obligations.” He took a menacing step toward Thwaites.

“You think what I did to Jasinski was bad? If we fail to deliver, that’s nothing compared to what our clients’witches will do to us. How many times can you be tortured to death, resuscitated and killed again?” he asked, slowly advancing on Thwaites, who had the good sense to back away.

“Get a grip on yourself!” Thwaites ordered. “We’ll deliver. The mining’s gone on despite Desmet and his nosy friends. You said yourself, the deposit’s almost completely exposed; that should make it easier to remove. Just another week or two, and we can cash in and leave this god-forsaken hole.”

A shudder went through Veles from head to toe. He took a deep breath and relaxed his balled fists, forcing his jaw to unclench. “It’s taken twice as long as it was supposed to. There’d better be no more problems.”

“Not once my men kill the newest DSI spy,” Thwaites replied. “We keep killing them, and they keep sending more. And we need to get rid of Jake Desmet and Rick Brand. That snoop Fletcher, too. They need to go—permanently.”

“You tried and failed to do that with the sabotage at Brand and Desmet,” Veles pointed out. “And your ham-handed attempt to kidnap Farber nearly destroyed the Tesla-Westinghouse building—and nearly killed him.” He fixed Thwaites with a lethal glare. “I want Farber alive.”

“It’s not my fault!” Thwaites snapped. “We were going to pull Farber out before the bombs went off, but Desmet and his friends got there first.” He gave Veles a self-satisfied look. “Although killing Farber would have still been better than letting Desmet have him.”

“And you failed to kidnap or kill him,” Veles pointed out. “Now he’s missing, and so are most of his designs. I told you sending that spy to be his assistant would backfire.”

“I still say it’s time to make sure Jake Desmet and Rick Brand stop sticking their noses into our business—and their private investigator, too. They need to die,” Thwaites argued.

Veles nodded. “Do it. It’s taking all my power to keep the gessyan still in the mine from breaking loose—or attacking the miners. It’s all coming down around us—and that will look like paradise compared with what our clients will do if we disappoint them. You’d better come through on this,” he said, eyes narrowing.

“Don’t have a fit,” Thwaites said. “I’ll take care of Desmet and his friends. We’ll step up the mining. Tumblety and Brunrichter have more of their mechanical marvels to help.”

“You’d better,” Veles replied. “If I have to face our backers with a failure, I am offering up your squirming, toady body first.”