Paris is a city famed for its doors.
Its doors are not just doors, you see, but works of art. They’re meant to stop you in your tracks, like the brilliant entrance of Eight rue de Braque, where even the lion knockers have been painted blue. Other entryways are decorated with hanging brass hands or rings of intertwined serpents, inviting you to rap against wood lacquered with every color imaginable: turquoise, plum, crimson, yellow, pink, green…
But some of the city’s most powerful doors are not painted at all.
If you stand in front of Notre-Dame de Paris long enough, its gargoyles might start to whisper, telling you the tale of the cathedral’s devil doors. How a smith by the name of Monsieur Biscornet traded his soul to forge their intricate ironwork. Flourishing birds, scrolling vines, and budding angles—it was all so masterful, so unprecedented for its time, that Parisians believed he’d made a deal with Lucifer himself to finish the commission. It did not help that the locks wouldn’t work until they’d been doused with holy water.
But a true devil’s door lies at the end of rue des Ombres.
It does not need holy water to open, merely keys.
They hang from a chatelaine—that long set of chains attached to the nameless Sanct’s jacket. When he moves, they sing songs of iron and gold and rust. The single door to his study whistles back. Air is always sliding through its ever-changing lock, filling the small room with strange scents: Melting snow. Hookah pipes. Salt from all seven seas and coal burning off the ships that crossed them. Sometimes you can smell fir trees—clean as stripped bone. Or berries ready to stain lips with ripe red bites. Or the sweet withered flesh of dates grown in far-off deserts.
This is the world.
It is at XXXXXXX’s fingertips. All he has to do is reach for a key, and the door’s lock stops. Settles somewhere. This morning’s selection is more ornate than most—the double-headed bird perched at the top of the key looks as if it has been dipped in gold. The sunlight that slants through the keyhole is the same color. Blinding. When the door opens, the young woman standing next to XXXXXXX tries not to shirk back from how bright things have suddenly become. A ballroom waits on the other side, with polished parquet floors and gods glaring down from the ceilings.
Another figure looms by the window. His monk’s robes look much too ragged to belong here—wherever here is. The glass past his shoulder shows a park filled with plants you’ve never seen in Paris. Much less France.
This is a wilder kingdom.
The golden icon necklaces around the monk’s neck tangle as he bows to XXXXXXX. His hairline is crooked. Too crooked. His blue eyes would be unsettlingly bright even if they weren’t set inside a masque. They linger on the white-haired woman, pooling at the hollow of her throat. His own voice sounds as slick as oil.
“This is the Mad Monk,” the nameless Sanct translates. “He is most pleased to welcome you to Russia.”