The four days before the new moon were the most frantic of Lina Varda's life. She had thought, after the crater and the Closed Mouth and the release of the memory that had nearly consumed her, that she had exhausted her capacity for urgency. She had been wrong. The knowledge that someone in Kaelor was preparing to complete the Vigil of Whispers, to tear open the door permanently and anchor the Mouth to the world forever, lent a feverish intensity to every waking moment. She slept in fragments, two or three hours at a stretch, and she ate whatever Donal Keane put in front of her without tasting it, and she worked, ceaselessly, to identify the summoners before the new moon rose.
Savar had given her the list of fragments and their provenances, the names of the collectors and museums and academics who had come forward in the weeks after the crater appeared. It was a long list, dozens of names spread across Voranis and the neighboring countries, and Lina knew that somewhere in that list was the identity of the person or persons who were preparing the Vigil. The ritual required three summoners, Savar had said, three voices speaking in harmony, and that meant three people who had access to the fragments, three people who had studied the glyphs, three people who had felt the hunger of the Mouth and had chosen to embrace it rather than resist it.
She began with the obvious suspects. The academics who had published papers on Kalandri mortuary practices, the collectors who had amassed private hoards of obsidian artifacts, the museum curators who had overseen the fragments in their collections. Savar had given her a list of a dozen names, the small community of scholars who shared his obscure expertise, and she worked through them one by one, cross-referencing their publications and their travel records and their known associates against the timeline of the scattered reports and strange occurrences that had been accumulating across the city.
The first name she investigated was Doctor Ulric Fen, the curator of the National Museum of Voranis Antiquities, the man who had told her about the unauthorized access to the Kel-Mahtar fragments on the day she had visited the museum. Fen had been studying the Kalandri for decades, and he had access to the museum's collection, and he had been acting strangely ever since the crater appeared, refusing to speak to the press, canceling his lectures, retreating into a seclusion that his colleagues found unsettling. But when Keane's network of contacts dug deeper into Fen's activities, they found nothing that suggested he was involved in the Vigil. He was simply a frightened old man, traumatized by the realization that the artifacts he had spent his career studying were not merely historical curiosities but conduits for a force that had nearly destroyed the city.
The second name was a private collector named Joren Kass, a reclusive billionaire who had amassed one of the largest collections of Kalandri artifacts in the world. Kass had acquired several of the obsidian fragments years before Savar had begun his research, and he had refused all requests to study them, keeping them locked in a private vault in his estate in the eastern provinces. But when Keane's contacts investigated Kass, they found that he had died three months earlier, a heart attack that had been ruled natural causes, and his collection had been dispersed among his heirs, none of whom had any interest in ancient curses or supernatural rituals.
The third name was a graduate student named Rennick Holt, who had studied under Savar at the University of Kaelor and had written his dissertation on Kalandri legal codes. Holt had dropped out of the program six months ago, after Mira Savar's death, and had not been seen since. His apartment had been abandoned, his phone disconnected, his social media accounts gone dark. He had simply vanished, and no one had been looking for him, because the world was full of vanished graduate students and no one had time to search for them all.
But when Lina dug deeper into Holt's disappearance, she found something that made her blood run cold. Holt had not vanished alone. He had been part of a group, a circle of students and young academics who had become obsessed with the Kalandri rituals, who had believed that the Mouth was not a force of destruction but a force of liberation, a weapon that could be used to tear down the corrupt institutions of modern society and build something new in their place. The group had called itself the Open Throat, a name taken directly from the Kalandri texts, and its members had been studying the fragments in secret, preparing to summon the Mouth themselves.
And then Lina found the connection that tied everything together. The leader of the Open Throat, the charismatic figure who had recruited Holt and the others and had guided their studies of the fragments, was Thessaly Orin.
Lina sat back in her chair, the name echoing in her mind like a bell tolling in an empty church. Thessaly Orin, Savar's graduate assistant, the woman who had shown her the storage room and the fragments and the list of five names. Thessaly Orin, who had claimed to be Mira Savar's cousin, who had said she was trying to stop Savar, who had fed her information and then disappeared and then returned with the final fragment and the story of Savar's invitation. Thessaly Orin, who had been lying from the very beginning.
She called Savar immediately, her voice tight with a fury that she had not known she was capable of feeling. "Thessaly," she said, when he answered. "The third summoner is Thessaly. She's been part of this from the beginning. She wasn't trying to help us. She was using us. She used me to get close to you, to learn about the rituals, to find the fragments. And now she's going to complete the Vigil of Whispers, and we handed her everything she needed."
There was a long silence on the other end of the line. When Savar spoke, his voice was heavy with a grief that went beyond anything Lina had heard from him before. "She came to me after Mira died. She said she wanted to help. She said she understood what I was going through. She was so kind, so attentive, so eager to learn. I thought she was just a dedicated student. I thought she cared about the work. But she was studying me the whole time. She was learning the rituals, memorizing the translations, mapping the network of fragments that I had spent years assembling. And when I was weak, when I was grieving, she pushed me toward the Unclean Mouth. She encouraged me to summon it. She knew what would happen. She knew the Mouth would grow stronger with every death. And she wanted it to grow stronger. She wanted the door to open wide enough for the Vigil to be performed."
"She told me she was Mira's cousin," Lina said. "Was that a lie too?"
"Partly. She knew Mira. They grew up in the same neighborhood, and she did babysit her when Mira was small. But she was not family. She was not motivated by love or loyalty or a desire for justice. She was motivated by something else entirely. Something that I should have seen but didn't, because I was too blinded by my own grief to notice."
Lina closed her eyes and pressed her fingers against her temples, trying to push back the headache that was building behind her eyes. The pieces of the puzzle were falling into place, forming a picture that was uglier than anything she had imagined. Thessaly had not been trying to stop Savar. She had been trying to accelerate him. She had pushed him toward the Unclean Mouth, fed his grief and his rage, encouraged him to kill, all while positioning herself to take control of the Mouth when the time was right. And now, with the Vigil of Whispers, she was going to complete what Savar had begun. She was going to become the Open Throat, the permanent conduit, the living embodiment of the Mouth's hunger. And she was going to do it at the Dog Run, on the spot where Mira Savar had died, using the sacrifice of the girl's death as the final key to open the door.
"The new moon is in two days," Lina said. "We have to stop her before the ritual begins. Do you know where she is? Where she's been hiding?"
"No. She disappeared after she brought you the final fragment. I thought she was afraid, that she had gone into hiding to escape the authorities. But she wasn't hiding. She was preparing. She was gathering the other summoners, the two voices she needs to complete the Vigil. She has everything she needs now, thanks to us. The fragments, the translations, the location of the door. We gave her everything."
Lina thought about the obsidian fragment in her pocket, the keystone that Savar had given her on the night of the new moon. Thessaly had not known about that fragment. She had given Lina the final piece of the Unclean Mouth invocation, but she had not known that Lina had kept the keystone, the fragment that contained the Closed Mouth invocation on its reverse side. It was a small advantage, a single card that Thessaly did not know Lina was holding. And it might be enough.
"I have an idea," Lina said. "But I'm going to need your help, and Keane's help, and the help of everyone who still believes that the world is worth saving. Can you meet me at the warehouse in two hours?"
"Yes. I'll be there."
Lina hung up and sat motionless in her chair, staring at the wall of her apartment, at the photographs and documents that covered every available surface. She had spent six years documenting the failures of the justice system, the corruption and indifference and bureaucratic cowardice that had destroyed countless lives. She had thought that the story of the Mouth was just another chapter in that long and bitter history, another example of the way that power protected itself and the powerless were left to suffer. But she had been wrong. The story of the Mouth was not about power. It was about hunger. The hunger for justice, the hunger for vengeance, the hunger for meaning in a world that seemed determined to deny it. Thessaly Orin had that hunger, the same hunger that had driven Savar to summon the Mouth in the first place. And she was going to feed that hunger, unless Lina found a way to stop her.
She stood up, pulled on her coat, and walked out of her apartment into the cold night air. The city was quiet around her, the streets empty, the buildings dark, the only sound the distant barking of dogs in the alleys and the faint hum of the streetlamps. She thought about the Dog Run, the empty lot on Irongate Lane, the place where Mira Savar had died and the door had first cracked open. In two days, on the night of the new moon, Thessaly would be there, standing on the spot where Mira's blood had soaked into the dirt, speaking the words that would tear the door open permanently and anchor the Mouth to the world forever. And Lina would be there too, with the keystone in her pocket and the Closed Mouth invocation on her lips and a plan that was either brilliant or suicidal, she did not yet know which.
She walked through the empty streets, her footsteps echoing on the pavement, and she did not look back.
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