The boundary around the church feels spun-glass fragile, but still there is power enough here to make Acht's teeth ache. This has been rebuilt after being broken, he thinks as he picks his way carefully over the sleet-strewn ice, and the rubble nearer to the church only serves to confirm his suspicions.

He keeps to the shelter of the trees, his hands clenched in his pockets. The cold is almost unbearable, but for Lara's sake, he will bear it and watch.

This is the place. He has only to remember the priest's stricken face in the headlamps of his car to know that this is the place.

The driver does not protest at being awakened at this late hour; he has had protest culled from his code and replaced with a perfect knowledge of the roadways between Fuyuki and the nearest airfield. When Acht says, "There is a man on the road ahead. Keep the headlamps off, and search for his light," the driver says only, "Yes, sir" in reply and starts the car.

Acht has never heard him say anything but "Where to?" and "Yes, sir." While rage burns hot in his breast, he thinks that he would never like to hear anything but "Yes, sir" again.

He forces himself calm, forces his circuits open. He lacks Larasviel's innate ability to interface with the terrain--but one man on a smooth-stuttering engine, while the rest of the forest huddles under the new-fallen snow, he can follow like a trail of blood.

Acht storms down the central stair, practically vibrating with power; the air around him shudders as though with distant thunder, and the chandeliers flare to light as he passes. As his shoes strike the tile of the entry hall, he raises his eyes to the door and calls, "Larasviel." The name is unmusical in his mouth, unemotional, without even the singsong cadence of a man calling his pet to heel.

Her name is a summons that cannot be disobeyed, and it never occurs to him to inflect it with a note of pleading.

Children, Acht has read, are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Across all of Europe, the Einzbern line continues on the fecundity of innumerable cadet branches--but at the family's heart, at the taproot that draws on ancestral magic, Acht's forefathers have heeded well the lesson of Francis Bacon. Acht has no daughters to brighten his endless twilight years; instead, he has the willful Justeaze line of homunculi.

He raps twice at Larasviel's door, a velvet-lined box under one arm. It will not do to send Lara into a sulk at this critical stage of their enterprise--he can afford a modicum of courtesy.