Cleaning the Web

Catherine's triumph at seeing Jun-Ho Park escape was short-lived.

It was swept away by the pure terror of the Inquisitor Micah's psychic hunt. And that terror, in turn, was eclipsed by an even deeper and colder horror when her desperate maneuver reached its target.

She felt the thread of her perception, the lance of light from Micah that she had redirected, touch Soren's aura at the docks.

She had expected an explosion, a confrontation of energies, a struggle. Instead, there was nothing.

The link she had created, a thing of pure will and power, simply disintegrated. It was not broken, nor repelled. It ceased to exist, turning to dust in the psychic void.

There was no fight.

There was only a calm and absolute negation.

Catherine almost collapsed, severing the contact, her heart hammering.

The ease with which Soren had erased the attack of a Sequence 5 Inquisitor was a terrifying display of power.

It was the equivalent of watching a man stop an arrow in mid-flight, not by blocking it, but by convincing it that it had never been fired.

Soren was on a much higher level than she had feared.

And worse, he knew.

He might not know who she was, but he now knew that a third player was on the chessboard, a player cunning enough to try and pit his enemies against each other.

Paranoia returned with a vengeance, but this time, she channeled it.

Fear became the flint that lit the fire of her strategic thinking.

She began to pace her library, her new cage, her new headquarters.

She was a queen whose kingdom was under siege from all sides, and her own spies had become weaknesses.

She took stock, coldly.

The Square of Scriptures:

The dead drop was burned, known to The Rook and the Church. Unusable. Mathieu: Her primary agent was identified by Soren.

He was safe for now at Doctor Thorne's, but he was a direct link to her.

A dangerous link. Rick: The street urchin was being actively hunted by the Church.

Kenji had received the order to seal the conduit, but the Inquisition was a far larger and more methodical organization.

As long as they were looking for a street kid connected to a case of heresy, they would keep digging in the slums, her old territory.

Rick, dead or alive, was a trail that could lead to Cat, her former identity.

She had to erase these traces.

She had to throw the Church another trail, a trail so juicy, so credible, that they would abandon their own.

She needed a scapegoat.

Her plan formed, cruel and complex.

She needed three things: a target, evidence, and a way to deliver it.

The target was easy to find.

The next day, she probed Valerius during their lunch.

She played the role of the exhausted but lucid Oracle.

"Last night's vision was chaotic, Magistrate, but it revealed one thing to me. The corruption I sensed on the square… it had a source. A nobleman. A man who pretends to be your ally on the council, but whose threads are dark and knotted."

Valerius's interest was immediate.

"Who?"

Catherine described an aura of "sickly vanity and frustrated ambition."

Valerius, in his smugness, immediately named one of his minor political rivals, a man who had been irritating him for months.

"Baron Armand de Courville!" he exclaimed. "I knew it! He's a snake, a plotter."

Catherine had her target.

A man whose fall would suit Valerius, which would guarantee his support.

For the evidence, she had to be creative.

She spent the afternoon drafting a list.

Then, she once again called upon Leo, the kitchen boy.

It was a risk, but he was her only uncompromised external connection.

She entrusted him with a purse containing a considerable sum of gold and a note for Doctor Aris Thorne.

The note read:

"Doctor, a second service is required. This is a down payment. The rest will follow. I need you to hire discreet men, thieves, not brutes. They must break into the manor of Baron de Courville. Here is a list of items they are to hide there, in his study: a grimoire on demonology (you can find one at any clandestine bookseller), a ritual knife, and most importantly, a handful of sycamore leaves, scorched at the edges as if by a cold flame. Once this is done, one of your men is to go to a chapel in the temple district and deposit an anonymous denunciation in the penitents' box, accusing the Baron of heresy and witchcraft."

It was a diabolical plan.

She was using Thorne's resources, paid for with her own gold, to create a perfect false trail.

The presence of the scorched leaves would directly link the Baron to the incident at the Square of Scriptures, satisfying the Inquisitor Micah's curiosity.

The Church, fanatic and eager to find culprits, would jump at the chance to bring down a nobleman.

The final link was the denunciation.

Thorne would see to it.

Catherine waited, her heart icy with her own audacity. She had set in motion a plan that condemned a man, likely innocent of this crime, to torture and the pyre, simply to cover her own tracks.

The part of herself that could have felt pity was silent, buried under layers of strategy and necessity.

A few hours later, a message returned to her via a manor servant, who had received it from one of Thorne's couriers. The note contained only a single word: Accepted.

The trap was set.

The Church would have its heretic.

The trail leading to Rick and to her would vanish in the flames of Baron de Courville's trial. She had cleaned a part of the web.

She felt empty. Efficient, but empty.

She turned to the map of the city spread across her table.

One problem was solved, but the largest remained. Jun-Ho Park.

The fugitive. How could she find him now that she no longer dared to use her vision to scan the city?

She took out the leather purse containing the rest of her gold. If her most powerful ability had become a weakness, she would have to use the oldest power.

The one that all men understood.

Money.

She could no longer be the omniscient spider feeling the vibrations of her web.

Very well.

Then she would be the one who paid the flies to tell her where the web had trembled. She would have to build a new network.

A network of human eyes and ears, bought and paid for.

Her war had just entered a new, dirtier, and more pragmatic phase.