a cigarette between his teeth and fished out his lighter. Almost reflexively, he ran his fingers over the case. He knew the etching by heart: crossed antlers and a wolf’s head.
When he looked up again, he could have sworn he saw Biele?’s head twitch toward the lighter’s flash. The professor paused a split second before he resumed his talk.
“Their—their beginnings were modest enough.” He faltered. “The brothers began by hunting lesser dragons, collecting bounties on Lern?ki. Living off the troves of Dewclaws.”
There was a skittering sound overhead, and a few pinpoints of dust fluttered down from the vaulted rafters. None of the listeners looked up, but Lukasz’s focus shot to the chandelier and the shadows beyond. A wisp of smoke, scarcely larger than a cat, rolled across the rafters and disappeared into darkness at the far end of the hall.
He relaxed. Just a dola. Nothing more.
Lukasz settled back against the doorframe, watching Biele? through the hazy air.
“And then,” continued Professor Biele?. His knuckles were white on the lectern. “The brothers arrived in the town of Saint Magdalena, where for three hundred years, a Faustian had terrorized the countryside.”
The slide changed again. Amid the wreckage stood a man and a boy. A Faustian dragon sprawled behind them. This photograph had been taken among the ruins of a cathedral—now nothing more than splintered pews, shattered glass, and scorched stone. So fresh was this kill that its antlers had not yet fallen, and its still face was crowned with glittering, staglike horns. . . .
Darkness tipped one of the tines.
The man in the photograph was tall. He was handsome and hawkish, smiling and savage in leather and fur, broadsword strapped across his back. He beamed, like a proud father, arm around the boy, as if congratulating him.
Lukasz knew better. The man was holding the boy up on his feet. It did not show up in the monochrome photograph, but the boy’s pant leg was soaked through with blood. At the memory, pain stabbed through his knee.
On went the professor.
“The last of the Wolf-Lords.” The professor’s voice fell to intonations usually reserved for worship. “Their exploits are chronicled in photographs and newsprint. But we know so little of who they were. Of how they must have felt—how lonely they were—the last of their kind in a world like ours.”
The slide changed. The brothers in one of Kwiat’s famous bathhouses, cast in shadow by flames burning in the stone pool behind them. The image shuddered, disappeared, was replaced. Brothers standing on a dock, while behind them a pair of Tannimi hung nose-down from cranes like enormous, grotesque salmon. A click, and a new image appeared. Brothers smoking with swords propped on their shoulders, a ?ywern stretched out across the cobbles beside them. As the photographs changed, the brothers changed: from leather and fur to sleek black uniforms, from wild beards to fashionably short hair. From savages to celebrities, each moment captured. Immortalized on celluloid film, even if they were dead.
As the slides changed, Biele?’s voice became hushed and hallowed.
“Bound together by blood, by fire, by the loss of the world they’d left behind and the fear of the world they’d entered. Cursed, lonely, destined for the outskirts of civilization. By tooth or by claw, they promised. The Brygada Smoka. The last of the Wolf-Lords, and the greatest dragon slayers in the world.”
The whole room held its breath, with the exception of Lukasz. Then again, he thought, perhaps this is worship.
Lukasz glanced down at his hands. Realized, a little distractedly, that he’d forgotten his gloves. When he looked up again, the slide had changed once more.
The last pair of Smokówi brothers smiled for the camera. They wore black army uniforms trimmed in silver braid and gleaming with medals. One had spectacles and artistically messy hair that did nothing to soften the brutal slant to his cheekbones. The second man was younger, with black hair and eyes whose blue had evaded the colorless camera flash. All the same, they had a wicked glint.
Lukasz knew those eyes very well.
They were his.
“But then,” whispered Professor Biele?. He spoke, it seemed, into Lukasz Smoków’s very soul. “But then the Brothers Smokówi began to disappear.”
Lukasz waited for the auditorium to empty before he strode to the front of the room, where Professor Biele? was folding his notes into a briefcase.
Lukasz could feel the Apofys in his bones. He’d spent the morning reciting its curriculum vitae: the demonic taxidermy collection devoured, the pagan amulet exhibition plundered, and four Unnaturalists gutted. And Damian