The vestibule had two things: a ceiling that didn't need your opinion and a door that did. It was a heavy slab of black metal set into a brass frame that a thousand careful hands had polished over centuries. There was no latch, no keyhole and no hinge. There was only a hairline seam down its centre and a single engraved sentence that hummed with old, impersonal authority.
STATE YOUR NAME.
'Bold,' Valeria clicked her tongue inside my mind. 'Door HR.'
'Hostile etiquette,' Erebus noted, a cool shadow at the edge of my senses.
I could feel Lysantra's influence here, but it was thin, a trace of perfume caught in the weave of an old, heavy coat. Under it ran the steady, metronomic beat of Julius's Order. Not a rhythm imposed on people, but a rhythm set under them, the way a good road keeps a whole city from rolling an ankle.
