Couldn’t concentrate on MORGAN BAROD, so I worked on this. Almost done!
There is an art to waylaying men in a dark corridor; and the first step is, make the corridor dark. There was one sprite-lamp above Pierre and the sergeant, set too high to extinguish without a ladder. Or else… Gerard made an appreciative noise as Tempeste pulled a gadget of crystals and gears out of a belt pouch. Belt satchel, really. “Oh, is that a sprite-snuffer?” he asked.
“No,” she said with the smallest of sneers. “I am not a hedge-witch, assigning every phenomenon I do not understand a place in some farcical animistic taxonomy. This,” she said with not a little triumph in her voice as the gadget started to whirr, “is a phlogiston enervator.”
“That is what I said, mademoiselle.”
“Indeed you did not, sir. This is science, not magic. You can tell the difference by the way that, unlike magic, this will actually work.”
Gerard had seen enough of the uncanny in his career to be far less dismissive of the occult than Tempeste, but he had to concede: whatever you called it, the device did extinguish the lamp.
For what it’s worth, Morgan Barod was really quite good even in the beta copy. I recognize that the work of editing may be something of an unpleasant slog regardless, but you have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.