The bus from Saint-Aubin-de-Pierre deposited Korda at the capital's central station at half past eleven on a Thursday morning, and by noon he was sitting in Lena Voss's apartment on the Rue des Orfèvres, watching her read Matthias's statement with the kind of focused intensity that journalists cultivated to mask their fear. The apartment was small and cluttered, its surfaces buried under stacks of newspapers and manila folders and half-empty coffee cups that had begun to grow a fine layer of mold. A corkboard covered one entire wall, pinned with photographs and index cards and lengths of colored string that connected names to dates to events in a web so dense it looked like a diagram of some neurological disorder.
"He gave you the ledger," Voss said, not looking up from the statement. "The actual ledger. He showed it to you."
"He showed me the page for the 2009 commission. He wouldn't let me take it. But I photographed it, and I have the statement." Korda placed his phone on the table between them, the image of Matthias's ledger entry glowing on the screen. "He also told me something else. He said the Society has been ordering masks for decades, and every time they order masks for Carnival, someone dies shortly afterward. He said the pattern is in the ledger, for anyone who knows how to read it."
Voss finally looked up. Her face was pale, and there were dark circles under her eyes that Korda had not noticed at the café. "The pattern," she repeated. "He used that word?"
"Yes. Why?"
She stood and crossed to the corkboard, gesturing for Korda to follow. Her finger traced a string of red thread that connected a photograph of Armand Duvall to a photograph of a man Korda did not recognize, and then to a third photograph, and a fourth, until she had traced a chain of ten faces spanning more than thirty years.
"The pattern," she said again. "I've been tracking it for two years, ever since I found my father's notes. Every Carnival since 1981, someone has died in circumstances that were either never investigated or investigated and quickly dismissed. Politicians who were about to expose corruption. Journalists who were getting too close to the truth. Witnesses who were about to testify. The deaths are always different—car accidents, heart attacks, suicides, random street violence—but they share two things in common. First, they always occur within two weeks of Carnival, either just before or just after. Second, the victims are always people who posed a threat to the Carnaval Society."
"The ledger confirms it," Korda said. "The Society orders masks, the masks are used in the ritual, and the ritual requires a sacrifice. Neumann told me the same thing. The sacrifice used to be symbolic. The Society made it real."
Voss nodded slowly. She walked back to the table and picked up her coffee cup, then set it down again without drinking. "There's something else. Something I found while you were in Saint-Aubin-de-Pierre. I've been going through my father's archives—boxes of documents that my mother kept in the attic after he died. I never went through them before. I wasn't ready. But after you left, I started digging, and I found something that explains why Steiner's list has my name on it."
She pulled a folder from one of the stacks and opened it on the table. Inside was a series of photographs, surveillance shots taken from a distance, showing a young woman with dark hair walking across a university campus, sitting in a café, talking to a man whose face was partially obscured by a hat. The young woman was unmistakably Voss herself, perhaps ten years younger, her face still carrying the softness of youth.
"These were taken in 2008," Voss said. "A year before Duvall's murder. I was twenty-five years old, finishing my master's degree in investigative journalism at the University of Valdoria. My father had been dead for a year, and I had decided to carry on his work. I didn't know what I was doing. I was reckless. I started asking questions about the Carnaval Society, the same questions my father had been asking. I interviewed former members. I filed requests for documents. I even tried to infiltrate one of their public events, a historical pageant that was held at the Hôtel de Villeroy."
"Did you get in?"
"I got in. And I saw something I wasn't supposed to see. The public pageant was a cover. Behind the ballroom, in the private chambers of the Hôtel, the Society was holding a ceremony. A rehearsal, they called it. They were wearing the masks and practicing the choreography for the Carnival ritual. I watched for perhaps five minutes before someone noticed me. I ran. I thought I had gotten away. But a week later, these photographs arrived in the mail, along with a note that said: 'Stop asking questions, or you will end up like your father.'"
"Who sent the note?"
"I don't know. It wasn't signed. But the photographs were taken by a professional. Someone with access to surveillance equipment. Someone who had been following me for weeks, maybe months, without my knowledge." Voss tapped the photograph of herself and the man with the hat. "This is Cassian Holt. He was my father's source inside the Society. After my father died, Holt reached out to me. He wanted to help. He said he had documents, evidence that could expose the Society. We met three times. The third meeting was scheduled for February 12, 2009. He never showed up. The next day, I received a letter from a law firm informing me that Holt had transferred all his assets to a trust in my name and left the country. That was the last I heard of him until you showed me Steiner's list."
"Holt didn't leave the country," Korda said. "Matthias told me that Holt came to see him two days before he disappeared. He asked for the ledger, and Matthias refused. Holt was trying to gather evidence right up until the end. Whatever happened to him, it wasn't voluntary exile."
"Then what was it?"
Korda thought about the shadow file, and Steiner's list, and the memorandum addressed to "T.K." He thought about the Sanatorium of the Sisters of Mercy and Aldric Neumann's pale blue eyes and the sundial in the garden whose shadow had been swallowed by the night. He thought about Luca Brandt, dying of a conveniently rapid cancer in the medical ward at Montfaucon, writing a confession that no one would read until he was beyond the reach of the people who had silenced him.
"The Society doesn't just kill people," he said. "They erase them. Holt disappeared. Your father died in a car accident with cut brake lines. The witnesses at Montfaucon died of cancers that progressed with unusual speed. Each death is designed to look like an accident or a natural cause, so that no one asks questions, so that no investigation ever gets close to the truth. The Society is not just a cult. It's a machine for manufacturing plausible deniability."
Voss was silent for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice was steadier than Korda had expected. "Then we need more than the ledger. We need evidence that connects the Society directly to the deaths. We need documents, internal records, something that shows they planned the murders in advance. Holt told my father that the Society kept meticulous archives—minutes of meetings, lists of members, records of rituals. He said the archives were stored in a vault beneath the Hôtel de Villeroy. If we can get into that vault, we can find everything we need."
"The Hôtel de Villeroy is private property. It's owned by a shell corporation that's owned by another shell corporation. We can't just walk in and ask to see the basement."
"No. But we can walk in during the public pageant, the same pageant I infiltrated eleven years ago. It's held every year on the Saturday before Carnival. It's the Society's one concession to respectability, a chance to show the public that they're nothing more than a historical preservation society. The pageant is open to anyone who buys a ticket. Once we're inside, we can slip away from the crowd and find the vault."
Korda considered this. The plan was reckless, the kind of thing that a twenty-five-year-old journalism student might attempt and that a thirty-nine-year-old ex-convict should know better than to consider. But the Carnival was less than two weeks away, and the photographs of the ledger were burning in his pocket, and somewhere in the capital, Rolf Steiner and Tristan Kappel and the rest of the Vestry were preparing for another ritual, another sacrifice, another night of collective ecstasy that would end with blood on the cobblestones and an investigation that would go nowhere.
"There's a problem," he said. "The Society knows who I am. They've been watching me for months. If I show up at the Hôtel de Villeroy, they'll know I'm there within minutes."
"Then don't show up as Elias Korda. Show up as someone else." Voss crossed to a closet and pulled out a cardboard box. Inside, nestled in crumpled newspaper, was a mask. It was not one of Matthias's creations, not limewood and centuries-old tradition, but something simpler: a plain white carnival mask, the kind that could be bought at any tourist shop in the capital for a few francs. "My father's last article, the one he was working on when he died, was about the anonymity that Carnival provides. He wrote that in a city full of masks, no one is who they appear to be. The masks are the great equalizer. They hide the rich and the poor, the guilty and the innocent, the hunter and the prey. The Society uses masks to commit their crimes. We can use masks to expose them."
Korda took the mask from her hands. It was light and cheap, nothing like the heavy limewood faces that Matthias had spent a lifetime creating. But as he turned it over in his hands, he felt something shift inside him, the same thing that had shifted when he read Brandt's letter in his apartment in Sainte-Geneviève. It was not hope, not yet. It was the recognition that the world he had been living in—the world of vending machine repair and cold-water basins and the slow erosion of everything he had once believed himself to be—was not the only world available to him.
"There's something else I found in my father's archives," Voss said. She handed him a small digital recorder, the kind that journalists used for interviews. "These are audio recordings. My father made them in the months before he died. Most of them are interviews, notes to himself, fragments of research. But one of them is different. One of them is a recording of a conversation between two men, recorded by Cassian Holt and given to my father three days before my father died."
She pressed play. The recording was grainy and distorted, full of the hiss and crackle of outdated equipment, but the voices were unmistakable. The first voice was Rolf Steiner's, cold and precise, the same voice that had questioned Korda in his hospital bed ten years ago. The second voice was deeper, more authoritative, and it took Korda a moment to place it: Tristan Kappel, the man who was now Procureur-Général of the Republic.
"You assured me that the matter was resolved," Kappel's voice said. "But Holt has been asking questions. He spoke to Matthias last week."
"Holt is being managed," Steiner's voice replied. "He understands the consequences of disloyalty."
"Understanding is not enough. He has documents. He has copies of the minutes from the 2005 convocation. If those documents reach a journalist—"
"They won't. I have arranged for a solution."
"What kind of solution?"
"The permanent kind. It will be made to look like an accident, or a disappearance. No one will ask questions. No one has ever asked questions."
There was a pause. Then Kappel's voice again, quieter now, almost thoughtful. "The Vestry has approved. Proceed. And Steiner—make sure there are no loose ends. The last time there were loose ends, we had to manufacture an entire prosecution to clean them up. I don't want another Elias Korda on my conscience."
The recording ended with a click. Korda sat motionless, the recorder still in his hand, the silence of the apartment pressing in around him like water.
"When did you find this?" he asked.
"Last night. I haven't slept since." Voss took the recorder from him and set it carefully on the table. "It's not enough to convict them. The recording is too old, the chain of custody is too broken, and Holt is too dead to testify. But it's enough to tell us what we're up against. The '2005 convocation.' The 'permanent kind' of solution. The manufactured prosecution against you. This isn't a conspiracy that started with Duvall's murder. It's been going on for decades, and every time someone gets too close, they get eliminated—or, in your case, framed and imprisoned."
"The Hôtel de Villeroy," Korda said. "The pageant. It's in three days."
"Yes."
"And you think we can find the vault before anyone notices we're gone?"
"I think we have to try." Voss's voice was steady, but her hands were trembling slightly as she gathered the files and photographs back into their folders. "The Carnival is coming, Elias. In eleven days, the masks will come out of their boxes, and the rituals will begin again, and somewhere in this city, someone is going to die. We know the pattern. We know the method. What we don't know is the target. But if we can find the archives, if we can find the minutes of the Vestry's meetings, we might be able to stop it before it happens."
Korda looked at the corkboard on the wall, at the faces of the dead strung together with red thread, at the web of connections that Lena Voss had spent two years building from the fragments her father had left behind. Armand Duvall. Cassian Holt. The journalist whose brake lines had been cut on a mountain road. The witnesses who had died of convenient cancers in the medical ward at Montfaucon. And at the center of the web, a single name, written in bold letters: "The Vestry."
"I'll need a costume," he said. "Not just a mask. Something that will let me blend in with the pageant crowd. Something that won't attract attention."
"I know a place." Voss managed a small smile, the first Korda had seen on her face since they met. "The costume shops in the Rue des Masques stay open all night during Carnival season. We can find you something appropriate. Something that will make you look like everyone else and no one at all."
Outside, the bells of Saint Aldric's began to toll the noon hour, their bronze voices echoing across the rooftops of the capital. The sound was the same sound that had rung out over the Cathedral Square on the night of Duvall's murder, the same sound that had drowned out the screams and the chaos and the terrible silence of the crowd as it watched the masks do their work. Korda listened to the bells and thought about the mask in his hands, and the recorder on the table, and the vault beneath the Hôtel de Villeroy that might contain the evidence they needed or might contain nothing at all.
"Eleven days," he said. "Until Carnival."
"Eleven days. And then God turns His face away, and the shadows come out to play."
The bells rang on, marking the hour, marking the days, marking the slow countdown to the night when the masks would return to the streets of Port Cedre and the Vestry would perform their ritual and the people of the capital would dance and drink and pretend that the darkness was only a costume, only a game, only something that could be put away when the sun rose on Ash Wednesday and the masks went back into their boxes for another year.
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