"Indeed," said Everess. "Well, where can we walk where it doesn't smell like a tannery and we may speak in private?"
"In the mornings the wind comes from the north; it smells nice down by the river."
"Lead the way," said Everess. "Ironfoot."
They walked down the path toward the river, to the spot where the team did their laundry. The river snaked around the wreckage of the city to the north, and Ironfoot headed in that direction.
"You're a very interesting fellow, you know," said Everess. "A study in contradiction, as they say."
"Thank you, sir," said Ironfoot. "I like to think myself unique."
"A shepherd's son from a tiny village who managed to parlay a single tour in the Gnomic War into an admission to Queensbridge. And now here you are years later, a respected thaumaturge, and a tenured professor at the most prestigious university in all of Faerie. That's beyond interesting. That's damnably impressive."
"Thank you," said Ironfoot. "Though fortune played a large part in it."
"Fortune only takes one so far," said Everess. "You've got a fine mind and you're a fine soldier."
"I don't mean to be critical, sir, but I'm well aware of who I am and what I've done. May I ask what it is you're leading up to?"
Everess laughed, a barking noise that made Ironfoot uncomfortable. Ironfoot smiled in return.
Everess let his smile fade. He looked out over the river. The light from the rising sun behind them skipped across its surface. "I'm aware of what it is you're doing here, what it is you're trying to accomplish," he said.
"Is that so?"
"I also know that the dean of your college at Queensbridge thinks it's impossible, and is attempting to have the project suspended."
"It's expensive," said Ironfoot. "And for all I know it may come to nothing."
"For all your talent, son, you're not the best politician."
"Not something I've ever aspired to be."
They came to a steep rise in the path, and Everess stopped talking for a moment to pick his way up it, using his walking stick to climb. When they reached the top he stopped, admiring the view. The ruined city was behind them, and the river valley below them was farmland, much of it gone fallow now that the city it once fed was gone.
"Do you know what my position is, Ironfoot?" asked Everess.
"I don't, I'm afraid. As you pointed out, knowledge of politics isn't among my many astonishing qualities."
"I'm the minister of foreign affairs, which means I have a great responsi bility to this land. And in order to execute that responsibility I must have only the best and most talented men and women working under me."
"Are you offering me a job, sir?"
"What if I told you that if you were to come work for me, I would fund any thaumatic research you chose to pursue while at the same time allowing you some physical diversion as well?"
"Sir?"
"It was you who stole across the border through the Contested Lands in order to examine an ancient Arami excavation, was it not? An Unseelie expedition, at that?"
"It was interesting."
"Indeed! We thought you were a spy for the longest time until we vetted you."
"You've been watching me? I don't understand."
"Only the best and most talented," repeated Everess. "I don't approach just everyone with these offers."
"What makes you think I'd leave the university?" asked Ironfoot.
"I know exactly why you'd leave it, and that you're considering leaving already."
"You do? And why is that?"
"Because you're bored."
Ironfoot had no rejoinder to that.
"I appreciate the offer," said Ironfoot after a moment, "but as you're well aware, I'm in the middle of something fairly important here."
"Oh, I quite agree," said Everess. "And one of my preconditions for your coming to work at the Ministry would be that you complete that work. As you can guess, we're more than a little interested in its outcome."
"I know," said Ironfoot. He turned away from the river and looked down at the crater. "I'm not sure I know how I feel about potentially handing the plans for the thing that did that over to anyone."
"If it's to be used," said Everess, "I prefer that it be used on the Unseelie rather than us."
"Yes," said Ironfoot. "I suppose I do, too."
"Good then. When you get back to the City Emerald, I'll send you a sprite."
They stood silently together, looking down at what was once Selafae, and then turned and walked back down the path.
Four days later it was finished. Ironfoot collected the last of the readings, which would be mapped in the comfort of his rooms back at Queensbridge. The tents were struck, the army guard removed. The Arcadian priests and loved ones, kept away for so many months, streamed into the ruined citythe priests to administer beatitudes; the relatives looking for keepsakes, bones, trinkets ... anything to remind them of what they'd lost. It was an emotional moment, and Ironfoot had no desire to get caught up in it any further than he already was.
Returning to the Queensbridge campus was like coming home. He couldn't remember the air in the City Emerald smelling so fresh, or the colors being so vivid. For weeks and weeks his entire life had been gray dust and acrid tar, and nights spent hunched over the map. Despite his urgent need to finish the project, he was almost pleased that the minor emergencies that had cropped up in his absence took him away from it for a time. He needed to get some distance from it.
There were message sprites lined up against the office window, bored out of their little minds, all of them clamoring to be the first to deliver its message and disappear. He took them all in turn, scribbling little notes to himself. A dinner invitation from a love-struck female colleague; a meeting request from the dean that could certainly wait. And a simple message from Lord Everess.
"He says he wants you to come over to his office and talk and so on and so forth," said Everess's sprite.
Ironfoot took the tiny creature in hand and said, "Maybe you could just tell him I'm busy."
The sprite's face took on an air of abused hospitality. "Well, he's not going to be too pleased with that, I can tell you. He's a lord, you know. Very fancy. He wears a hat and smokes a pipe. I don't see you with a hat or a pipe, so I guess he wins. Ha!"
Ironfoot had a soft spot for message sprites, though he wasn't quite sure why.
"You think so?" he asked. "You think I don't have a pipe and a hat around here someplace?"
The sprite sniffed. "I know you don't because yesterday I got really bored and I rifled through all of your stuff."
"Clever sprite."
"You think so? You really think so? Because nobody else thinks so, that's for sure. Do you have any roast beef?"
"Excuse me?"
"I like roast beef. I like the smell of it, and I like people who like it. But I can't eat it myself because sprites are herbivores, and it's the greatest tragedy of my life except for when my family died that time."
"Sorry," said Ironfoot. "No roast beef."
"Darn," said the sprite.
"Go on," said Ironfoot. "Send back my message. I think I have some parsley somewhere around here. You can have that."
"Uh, yeah, funny thing about that parsley," said the sprite, flitting up toward the open window. "Remember what I said about rifling through your stuff.?
Ironfoot had done every errand he could think of, returned every message, even cleaned his apartments and straightened the papers in his office. What was he trying to avoid? He'd been so impatient to get back to the city, and now that he was here, he couldn't stop stalling.
The map loomed from the corner of his office. It was rolled up and stored in a tube that was taller than he was, sealed with his own university signet. It called to him, and part of him wanted to answer it, but part of him wanted to set fire to it.
Why? Was this guilt? Was he worried about working on a weapon, about providing the key to re-creating the thing? He didn't think so, to
be honest. As much as it might bother him intellectually, it didn't spur this gut reaction. Was it the eeriness of it, the smell of death and tar and gray dust that seemed to emanate from it, even though it produced no actual scent? No, that wasn't it, either.
He knew what it was, but couldn't admit it.
The next morning he awoke early, poured a strong cup of coffee, and forced himself to face the map. He unrolled it in the small parlor of his apartments, where it took up the entire floor, requiring him to lug the settee into the kitchen. He had the final measurements from the intensity gauges stacked neatly on a small stool next to his mug. He took quill and ruler in hand, and began working.
Once the data were entered, there were calculations to be done. These he did on lined sheets of linen paper that he ordered specially from the campus stationery. With each result, a new line appeared on the map. A web was emerging, a pattern. That was good. But still, that unsettling feeling would not leave him. The feeling was linked to that tar smell that he couldn't quite place, the memory it spurred that he could not recall. As the pattern grew, so did the feeling of dread inside him.
When he next looked up, the clock on the mantel read after midnight. The fire had died down in the fireplace, and he realized that he was cold. He stoked the fire, poured himself a whiskey, and went back to work.
He finished the formulaic interpolations around dawn. He'd lost count of the pots of coffee he'd drunk, now measured only in the level of queasiness in his stomach and the frequency with which he'd had to visit the privy. The web was complete, more or less. Some of the data had been lost. Some of the measurements, he was certain, had been faked. One region in particular was a total loss, the readings totally inconsistent with any of the others. It had been handled by the son of a lord whose father had pressed him into the assignment believing that it would reinforce the boy's character. Ironfoot could have told him that there was nothing there to reinforce.
Regardless, what he had was enough, and now the work could begin in earnest. He copied the pattern from the map onto a new sheet of linen paper-large, but not so big as the original map. Only the pattern remained, with detailed figures noting the invocative spectra, the normalization factors. The web stood in front of him, begging to be understood. It was a pattern, yes, but what did it mean? In his imagination about this moment, he'd assumed that the answer would leap out at him at this point. These exact physical components. This precise juggling of Elements, Motion, and Poise, and perhaps any four other Gifts that he could theorize being involved. He was damn clever. It should all have been there, leaping out at him. But it wasn't. The pattern implied nothing. The pattern meant nothing. It was only itself. It suggested things, certainly, but only impossibilities.
Ironfoot awoke. It was late afternoon. He'd fallen asleep at some point, still contemplating the pattern, still frustrated. He opened the shades and let the (morning? afternoon?) sun illuminate the pattern. Still nothing. He stood it upside down. Nothing. He held it up to the window, viewing the pattern through the back of the page. Still nothing.
It gnawed at him, this sensation that the key to its mystery was just outside his grasp. The Einswrath was an explosive-there had to be an Elements component to it. It was a delayed reaction, so it had to use the Gift of Binding as well. But what components? Which bindings? There was no binding ever created to hold in that amount of Elemental force, and no way to trigger it from such a distance. So what, then? It was right there in front of him. So why couldn't he see it?
The dread inside had grown into a fever. This was what he'd truly been afraid of. This was the source of the dread that had been welling up inside him ever since he'd returned to Queensbridge.
He had the pattern complete in front of him.
And he didn't understand it.
He turned toward the wall and lashed out with his fist, making a strangely satisfying crack in the plaster, though the pain that followed wasn't worth it. Raw failure sunk into him like a stone through mud.
You can do better than this, came the voice from inside.
He was disturbed from his misery by a message sprite tapping at the window. It looked familiar.
"Hey, handsome! Open up!" the thing shouted.
He tried to ignore it, but it just kept rapping on the windowpane, calling, then shouting, then howling expletives. He pulled himself out of the chair and shuffled across the room, stepping on the map and not caring. He opened the window, and the sprite flew in and alit on the edge of the chair in which he'd been sitting.
"What do you want?" he said.
"Wow, it took you long enough," said the sprite, sticking its tongue out for emphasis. "What are you, deaf or something? You weren't deaf last time. Did you stand too near something really loud? Because that can happen sometimes."
Ironfoot stared at the sprite, all of his fondness for it having evaporated in his desolation.
"I have feelings too, you know!" said the sprite, stamping its foot soundlessly. "Of course, my feelings are quite shallow, and can easily be repaired with a yummy stalk of parsley, or better yet ..." The sprite paused, rubbing its tiny hands together. "Celery!"
"Enough already!" Ironfoot shouted, stunned at the anger in his voice. The sprite fell backward, swore loudly, then flitted up again, raising its head gingerly above the back of the chair.
"Wow, you sure got mean."
"I'm sorry," said Ironfoot, trying to be patient. "I've had a hard day. What's your message?"
"Lord Everess replies that he's extra-sad you won't come see him. Except he said it in a less nice way."
The sprite thought for a moment, tapping its finger on its forehead. "There was something else, too. Something important. Let's see. Lord Everess ... extra sad and so on ... celery ..."
It snapped its tiny fingers. "Oh, yeah! He wants to know if you're done with your map-thingy yet. He was just blah blah blah about that map."
"I see," said Ironfoot. "Thank you."
"Oh, happy day, you like me again!" it said, looking at him with a loopy grin. "You want to be my boyfriend? I realize that there's a serious size difference that could present some interesting physical challenges, but I'm willing to work through it if you are."
Ironfoot sighed. Maybe this was what he liked about message sprites: their absurdity. Nothing could ever truly upset them because they had no real feelings to begin with.
The sprite flew up and wrapped its arms around his finger. "I want to have your big fat Elvish babies!" it cried theatrically.
"Tell Everess I'll come and see him tomorrow," he said.
"Okay! This is the best day ever!" shouted the sprite, and it zipped out of the window.
The city is old, older than anyone knows or suspects, save its ruler. There are myriad tales of the founding of the Seelie Kingdom and the birth of the City Emerald. Some are religious explanations; some are histories cobbled together by scholars based on the evidence of stones and documents so ancient that to expose them to light is to destroy them. Still others are the writings of retrocognitives, though even they will admit that theirs is an art rather than a science.
There is the official history, of course, taught to schoolchildren, that Regina Titania caused the ground to be leveled and the stones of the Great Seelie Keep to rise into place during the Rauane Envedun-e, the Age of Purest Silver. Like most legends of the Rauane, however, the story is often told with a wink, and the queen's official biographers parrot it with a telling blandness.
The city's original name was Car-na-una, which in Thule Fae meant "the first true thing," or perhaps "the basis of reality," and whatever the origin of the name, it is evocative of the feeling that the city often arouses in visitors; there is a weight, a feeling of solidity and eternity that resonates in the stones and in the art of their arrangement.
The poet Wa'on remarked in his journals that "it is not the city itself that provokes this emotion, this unconscious awe. Rather, it appears as if it is something beneath the city, a deeper truth upon which it was built.Th
e City Emerald is ancient, yes, but what lies beneath it is older still. Something older than Fae, older than words or memories. A giant that slumbers, while the city and its inhabitants crawl across its massive frame like fleas on a dog, each unaware of the others' presence. As I passed through the gates I had a sudden fear that the leviathan might awake and stretch its limbs and I would be crushed. By the morning, however, the feeling was gone, and I would not have remembered it save that I had noted it in the margin of a book."
The City Emerald has a reputation as the most beautiful city in the Seelie Kingdom and perhaps in the entire world of Faerie. Even its most ardent admirers, however, have sometimes felt a momentary chill within its walls, sensing the presence of something just outside the edge of perception; something too large to be real; something that has already swallowed them whole.
Midwinter 02: The Office of Shadow Page 5
