Read Chapter 13: The Porphyry Stone

Dawn broke over Mont-Saint-Jean with the grey inevitability of a hangover. The smell of wet powder and horseshit was already in the air, but Harrow barely registered it. He was crouched in the lee of a farmhouse wall, the two stolen pocket watches laid out on a scrap of oilcloth before him like surgical specimens.

Fenwick's watch and Elena's watch. Identical cases. Identical cracks spiderwebbing across their faces. They ticked in perfect unison, as if keeping time with each other rather than with the world.

Harrow picked up Elena's watch first—the one she'd given him in the tent before the artillery had turned her to mist. His thumb traced the inner rim, feeling for what his fingers had been searching for across four resets now. There. A hairline seam, almost invisible against the brushed silver. He'd noticed it last cycle, just before a French sniper had put a ball through his throat.

He needed something fine. A knife blade was too thick. He cast about, found a bent iron nail in the debris of the farmyard, and worked its point into the seam.

The case popped open with a soft *click* that sounded louder than the cannonade building in the distance.

Nested inside was a second compartment, cunningly hidden between the clockwork and the outer casing. And in it, wrapped in a scrap of oiled silk no bigger than a playing card, was a stone.

Porphyry. Deep purple-red, the colour of old blood, polished smooth as glass. A symbol was etched into its surface—a circle quartered by a cross, each quadrant containing a single dot. The same mark he'd carved into his memory at the bottom of that shallow grave where Goddard had buried Valmont. The same mark that had been branded into the tree above the traitor's letter drop.

Harrow turned the stone over. On the reverse, three words in French, scratched so fine they might have been done with a needle-point:

*La pierre parle.*

The stone speaks.

He felt a cold wash down his spine that had nothing to do with the morning damp. This wasn't just a murder. This wasn't just a betrayal. He was holding a piece of something far older—a token, a credential, a key.

He heard the scrape of a boot on loose gravel behind him.

Harrow moved without thinking, rolling sideways into the shadow of the wall just as a French bayonet slammed into the earth where his chest had been. The grenadier was enormous—a bear of a man in the dark blue of the line infantry, his face streaked with powder and what might have been dried blood. His eyes were flat and empty, fixed on Harrow with the mechanical determination of a man who had been given one order and would follow it to the grave.

"You have something that belongs to the Society, monsieur." The French was accented, formal. "Give it to me, and I will make your death quick."

Harrow didn't answer. He was already calculating. Musket on the grenadier's back, bayonet in his hands. Harrow had a pistol in his belt—one shot, and the man was too close to miss, but too big to guarantee a kill with a single ball at this angle.

The grenadier lunged. Harrow twisted, feeling the blade tear through the sleeve of his coat and score a line of burning fire across his forearm. He brought his knee up into the man's groin, felt the resistance of muscle, and heard a grunt that was more annoyance than pain.

The bayonet came around again. Harrow grabbed the barrel of the musket, using the man's own momentum to pull him off-balance, and drove his forehead into the grenadier's nose. Cartilage crunched. The man staggered back, shaking his head like a bull.

Harrow drew his pistol.

The grenadier saw it and smiled—a wide, broken-toothed grin that showed gaps like missing fence posts. "The Society has long arms, Englishman. We knew you would come here. We knew about the watches."

Harrow's finger tightened on the trigger. "Who told you?"

"A friend in your camp. A man who will be very disappointed to learn you have not yet died."

The words hit harder than any bullet. A friend in his camp. Not Goddard, who was too busy executing spies. Not Fenwick, whose watch was now in Harrow's pocket. Someone else. Someone who knew about the watches, knew about the stone.

He fired.

The ball took the grenadier in the shoulder, spinning him halfway around, but the man was already bringing the musket up one-handed. The bayonet caught Harrow across the ribs, a shallow cut that burned like a brand. Harrow stumbled back, felt the wall behind him, and knew he had nowhere left to go.

The grenadier advanced. The musket came up.

And then a pistol shot cracked from the shadows of the farmhouse doorway.

The grenadier's head snapped forward. A neat hole appeared in his temple. He stood there for a moment, eyes wide with what might have been surprise, and then crumpled like a puppet with its strings cut.

Harrow turned, heart hammering, to see a figure standing in the doorway—a man in the dark green of a British rifle corps officer, the barrel of his smoking pistol still raised. The man's face was half-hidden by the shadow of his shako, but Harrow could see the flash of a silver pocket watch chain against his chest.

The same cracked silver. The same ticking.

"Captain Harrow." The voice was low, urbane, almost amused. "You've been making quite a nuisance of yourself."

Harrow's hand went to his belt for the second pistol he didn't have. "Who are you?"

The officer stepped forward into the light. He was lean, sharp-featured, with eyes the colour of winter slate. A thin scar ran from his left temple down to his jaw, pale against his weathered skin.

"Someone who needs you alive, for the moment. The stone you're holding—you have no idea what you've found."

"Then tell me."

The officer's lips quirked. "I wish I could. But the moment I do, you'll be marked for death more certainly than you already are. The Society doesn't tolerate those who speak its secrets to outsiders. And you, Captain, are very much an outsider."

"Was Valmont an outsider too?"

The officer's smile vanished. For a moment, something cold and dark flickered behind his eyes. "Valmont was a tool. A broken tool that needed to be discarded. You are... something else."

He raised his pistol. Not aiming at Harrow—past him, at the corpse of the grenadier.

"The body will be found. Discipline in this army is poor enough that one more dead Frenchman won't raise questions, but the Society will know their man failed." He holstered the pistol and looked at Harrow with an expression that might have been pity. "You have until the first cannonade to figure out what you're holding. After that, everyone who knows about the stone will be coming for you. Every soldier in this field. French. British. And worse."

Harrow opened his mouth to demand the man's name, his regiment, anything—but the officer was already stepping back into the shadows of the doorway, and the crack of a pistol shot was already echoing in Harrow's ears.

No. Not the officer's pistol. The grenadier's.

The dead man's finger had found the trigger of the musket he'd dropped, and the ball took Harrow high in the chest, punching through his lung and out his back. He went down hard, gasping, tasting copper.

The officer was gone. The shadowy doorway was empty. And Harrow was drowning in his own blood, the porphyry stone still clutched in his fist.

His last thought, as the grey light of dawn began to blur and fade, was of the rifle officer's face. The scar. The slate eyes.

He should have known it. He should have remembered.

The loop reset, and he woke to the sound of cannon fire in the distance, the stone cold and heavy in his palm.