Excerpt from Smoke by Dan Vyleta, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Trout is the headmaster. He is very fat and wears his trousers very high, so that the quantity of flesh between the top of his thighs and the waistband dwarfs the short sunken chest, adorned though it is with fine lace and ruffles. What he lacks in hair, Trout makes up for in whiskers. His button nose seems lost between the swell of his red cheeks.

Swinburne, finally: the Master of Religion. Where Renfrew is tall, Swinburne is towering, if twisted by age. He wears the cap and smock of his office. The little one sees of his face is mottled with broken veins, the shape and colour of thistles. A beard covers the rest, long and stringy.

Renfrew, Swinburne, Trout: each of them, it is said, entangled in affairs that reach from school to Parliament and Crown. Thomas has often thought of painting them. He is good with a brush. A triptych. He has not decided yet who belongs at the centre.

It's Renfrew who bids them sit. He points to two chairs that have been pulled up into the middle of the room, making no distinction between them. Compared to the theatricality of Julius's examination last night, the gesture is almost casual. The masters are standing in clusters, wearing worsted winter suits. Some are holding teacups; Foybles is munching a biscuit. Thomas sits. After a moment's hesitation Julius follows suit.

"You know why you are here."

It is a statement, not a question, and Renfrew turns even as he makes it, reaches into a basket, retrieves something. It affords Thomas another moment to look around the room. He sees a leather settee and a brass chandelier; stained-glass windows with scenes from the Scriptures, Saint George with his lance through the dragon's throat; sees a painting of a fox hunt under a dappled sky; sees cabinets, and doors, and a sideboard with fine china; sees all this, but takes in little, his mind skittish, his skin tingling, nervous, afraid. When Renfrew turns back to them he is holding two shirts. He places one over the back of an unoccupied chair, spreads the other between his hands, displaying the Soot stain; runs his fingertips through it, tests its grit.

And launches into lecture.

"Smoke," he says, "can have many colours. Often it is light and grey, almost white, with no more odour than a struck match. Then there is yellow Smoke, dense and wet like fog. Blue Smoke that smells acrid, like spoiled milk, and seems to disperse almost as soon as it has formed. Once in a while we witness black Smoke, oily and viscous; it will cling to anything it touches. The variations of texture, density, and shade have all been carefully described in the Four Books of Smoke: a taxonomy of forty-three varieties. It is more difficult to establish the precise cause for each type of Smoke. It is a question not only of the offence but of the offender. The thoroughly corrupt breed darker, denser Smoke. Once a person's moral sickness is sufficiently advanced, all actions are coloured by its stain. Even the most innocent act will—"

"Sin, Master Renfrew." It's Swinburne who interrupts him. His voice, familiar from the thrice-weekly sermon, has a shrill intensity all its own. He sounds like the man who ate the boy who ran his fingernails down the blackboard. "It is sin that blackens the soul. Not sickness."

Renfrew looks up, annoyed, but a glance from the headmaster bids him swallow his reply.

"Sin, then. A difference of nomenclature." He pauses, collects his thought, digs his fingers into the shirt's linen. "Smoke, in any case, is easy to read. It is the living, material manifestation of degeneracy. Of sin. Soot, on the other hand, well, that is a different matter. Soot is dead, inert. A spent symptom, and as such inscrutable. Oh, any fool can see how much there is and whether it is fine like sea sand or coarse as a crushed brick. But these are crude measures. It requires a more scientific approach"—here Renfrew smooths down his jacket—"to produce a more sophisticated analysis. I spent my morning bent over a microscope, studying samples from both shirts. There are certain solvents that can cancel the inertness of the substance and, so to speak, temporarily bring it back to life. A concentrated solution of Papaver fuliginosa richteria, heated to eighty-six degrees and infused with—"

Excerpted from Smoke by Dan Vyleta. Copyright © 2016 by Dan Vyleta. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.