The roof breathed. It wasn't the wind. It was a slow, heavy exhalation from the stone itself. Threads of a dark, oily miasma rose from the floor and lay themselves along the places my body liked to move, like a cat curling on the exact chair you were about to take. The sky above wasn't a sky at all, just a pale, glass ceiling pretending, its edges running into the tower's brass ribs.
He stood in the middle of it all, a man in a red coat with working pockets and a sword that had seen hard days. There were no medals on his chest, no theater in his stance. He was the kind of man you only notice when something important is already over.
"Arthur Nightingale," he said, as if checking a name off a list.
"Archduke," I answered.
