‘And you are?’ a black-haired woman ahead of them demanded, perhaps bored with her friends’ conversation. She was ostentatiously dressed in a boiler suit and overcoat, as though to flaunt her practicality, but the overcoat was clearly new. Her otherwise utilitarian mask was trimmed with fancy copper filigree which glinted in the streetlights.

‘Doctor Viltred,’ Irene said. They’d discussed their cover identities beforehand. ‘Anne Viltred. Timisoara University. I don’t suppose you’ve read my work on preventing demonic interference in radio transmissions? And these are my colleagues, Doctors Balas and Waechter.’ She gestured to Kai, then Vale, both of whom touched their hats politely.

‘Sorry, I’m in bio-energetic amplification,’ the woman said with a shrug. ‘Ingrid Marie-Joseph, professor at the Sorbonne. You must have had quite a trip of it from Romania.’

‘Forward planning helps,’ Vale said. Even with his mask off, it would have been near-impossible to recognize him. His hair was grey and unruly, matching eyebrows curling over the edge of his mask. His slight Romanian accent was perfect and his back was hunched in the sort of stoop that could easily have stemmed from decades of bending over experiments. ‘Though even forward planning couldn’t help with this.’ He gestured to the queue ahead of them.

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Ingrid said. She checked the watch hanging from her lapel. ‘The programme isn’t starting for an hour yet.’

Vale snorted, managing to sound about twenty years older than he was. ‘And I am expected to wait out here, wasting my precious time—’

‘Utterly abominable,’ agreed a man from Ingrid’s group, whose mask resembled a pair of binoculars, with different focusing levers on each lens. His drooping white moustache puffed out with every breath. ‘I can see that you’re a man with the right priorities, sir. Prudvark here – I’m from the Sorbonne too, for the moment at least, but I work in microphysics . . .’

His introduction was cut short by a shout, and some pointed as parachutists began to drift down from a zeppelin overhead. ‘Trying that trick again,’ Prudvark said with a sigh. ‘One would have thought they’d know better.’

‘Did we miss something?’ Kai asked.

‘No, dear, it was two years ago in Helsinki – didn’t you get to that one?’ Ingrid didn’t wait for an answer. ‘That year, the organizers used lasers to prevent queue jumpers – it’s become quite a sport. But they had issued warnings beforehand, and I think at least one person made it to the ground without serious injuries.’

‘And there they go,’ Prudvark said, as the parachutists changed vector, blown off course as they descended. ‘That hill was bound to interfere with wind patterns. What I want to know is what they’ve put in place to prevent intrusions via underground waterways.’

‘But there isn’t an underground river here,’ Kai pointed out. As a dragon whose element was water, Irene reflected, he should know.

Prudvark merely smirked. ‘That’s what they said in Tokyo, and look what happened there . . .’

Irene reflected, as the queue shuffled forward, that Inspector Singh might be right to distrust the Grand Technological Exhibition.

The wide stone steps leading up to the building’s entrance were flanked by uniformed police. They were kept busy monitoring attempts to avoid the checkpoint. The air was thick with the smell of ozone and flash-powder, as newspaper photographers took constant snapshots of anything interesting or disastrous. They had plenty of material.

Vale proffered their three highly sought-after tickets when they finally reached the guards, after what felt like years. His sister Columbine had supplied them, which guaranteed they were authentic. Even so, Irene couldn’t help feeling the usual prickle of suspense that went with handing over documents under a false identity.

Of course, the guards here were probably far less dangerous than the guests inside . . .

‘All in order,’ said the official, barely looking at them after all that. ‘Next.’

The entrance hall was thick with decorative palm trees. Groups of people were dissolving into furiously networking singletons, who then formed new groups. It would have made a splendid demonstration of molecules combining if anyone had been watching from above.

Irene looked around, orienting herself. ‘Time to split up. See you in an hour at the theatre.’

Vale was already strolling away. The twitch of Kai’s mouth indicated just how little he wanted to leave her on her own in this crowd, given the dangers they all faced. But they both knew that splitting up gave them a better chance of hearing something useful. ‘In an hour,’ he said, heading in a deliberately different direction.

Irene took in the main nave of the People’s Palace where she stood, a room about three hundred yards long and already full of people. Three shorter corridors branched off from it like the three tines of an E, the middle one ending with a theatre where demonstrations would be held. An ornate dome reared high above, but the arabesque decorations were difficult to make out under the glare of artificial light, and its windows cast no light at this hour. The maze of cellars beneath the palace had been locked and barred for the occasion, which cut down on the area they needed to search.

The thickness of the crowd was reassuring, in a way. While it might be difficult for Irene to locate anyone in this mob, it would be just as hard for anyone to spot her. Even a werewolf would have problems following her scent here. To Irene’s merely human nose, it already stank of too many people, too many perfumes and too much sulphuric acid.

‘Try it!’ Someone shoved a man-sized contraption in her face, and Irene backed away, blinking. The thing was a mechanical model of a human being, on wheels, costumed in heavy gold and red silks with a turban. It held a jar in one clawed hand. The man behind it was in singed evening wear and his coat pockets were heavy with spanners. ‘You – madam. You’ll do. Go on, give it a go.’

‘Give what a go?’ Irene asked nervously.

‘My Automatic Fortune Teller. Put your hand on his forehead and think very hard about your question. It will then produce a paper giving the answer to your current problem!’

It was probably safe and the crowd was here to sample such curiosities. There weren’t any electrocuted corpses in the device’s wake. A good sign. Irene tentatively put her hand against the mechanism’s porcelain forehead. How do I find Alberich? she wondered, unable to resist the urge to test it properly.

The device whirred into life, interior clockwork audibly ticking away. Then the automaton’s jar flipped open and its free hand dived in, coming out with a piece of folded paper. It proffered this jerkily in Irene’s general direction.

‘Well?’ its inventor demanded, practically bouncing up and down on his toes. An interested group was forming around the two of them.

Irene took the paper and unfolded it. ‘The gulf will open beneath you,’ she read, ‘and the Pit will swallow you.’

Even the inventor could perceive this was a less than cheerful message. ‘Let me guess,’ he said hopefully. ‘You must work in submarines or bathyscaphes. I can see how this would be a really useful answer, right?’

‘No,’ Irene said flatly. Even if she absolutely didn’t believe in fortune-telling, destiny or prophecies . . . it still wasn’t a comforting message to receive this evening. ‘I think your invention needs more fine-tuning.’