The assassin came.
Faust would not have caught him, had it not been for the eye. He was sitting up in the dark of the east wing, reading by candle and thinking about nothing, when something at the edge of his vision flickered.
A dim, uneven distortion in the air, moving through the corridor with a stealth that no stealthy man possessed.
He was on his feet before he thought.
He took the stairs in four strides, silver case in his coat, Rita's bedroom door already in his sight. The door stood ajar. In the doorway crouched a man in a grey cloak, a long blade gleaming in his fist.
He had one foot over the threshold.
Faust threw the first card that came to his hand.
It was [0 — THE FOOL].
It spun through the dark with a sound like tearing silk, and it did what the Fool always did. It was unpredictable even to him. It struck the assassin not in the heart, not in the throat, but squarely in the instep of the foot he had just put over the threshold.
The man yelped, hopped back, and brought the blade up with a snarl, and Faust realised at once that he was in genuine trouble.
That the sword was no ordinary.
In the thin skin between the visible and the invisible, the thing howled like a gutted animal, a wail of fury and fear and a loneliness so complete that it made Faust's teeth ache. He had never felt anything like it. Isbert's Frost had been proud, and fierce, and whole.
This was a rag of a thing, stitched from fragments and held together with hatred.
The fight lasted perhaps ten seconds.
The assassin was strong, and quick, and had the dreadful borrowed strength, as if the weapon fed on him. But he was not a swordsman. He swung like a butcher, and Faust, who had been fighting dirty for a century, took the blade on his cane and let the man overbalance onto the carpet.
Isfrid arrived at that instant, bare-chested and wild-eyed, Frost unsealing in his hands.
A single stroke ended it.
The assassin lay dead at the doorway of Rita's room.
The blade lay beside him, and as it left his hand the scream cut off mid-note, and the metal crumbled into a heap of grey ash.
Isfrid stared down at it, panting. "What was that?"
"An Artificial Arma," said Faust, kneeling beside the ash. "Forged. Not born."
He sifted a pinch between his fingers.
It smelled of grave dirt and copper and something sweet.
"Your lecture on the road said they are made by smiths who force a soul into the steel. I think this one was forged from several."
"Several people?"
"Fragments. Whatever a dying man leaves behind." Faust stood and wiped his hand on his coat, feeling suddenly very old.
Isbert's face hardened.
"It would be called a crime among the Adeptus. Which means someone in this house has been shopping on the black market for weapons the Concord would have burned him alive for."
"Reinhardt," Faust said.
"Reinhardt's rapier made no sound at all," Faust said. "I should very much like to know why."