Midwinter 02: The Office of Shadow

by Matthew Sturges

  Everess stood and walked to the window of his office, which overlooked the Promenade. "You came to me," he said. "You wished to barter your Arcadian intelligence for a bit of influence."

  "That's right," said Estiane. "Influence. Not assassination."

  "`Everess,' you said. `The secretary of states is causing grief for the Arcadians. She refuses to address the persecution of our adherents in the worlds in which the Seelie have influence.' Is this not so?"

  "I have a sacred duty to protect those in my charge," said Estiane. "I understand that this sometimes requires compromise. I am willing to accept the moral taint that accompanies such things. I will be held accountable by Aba for that. But I will not be a party to murder!"

  Everess whirled on him. "How noble of you!" he said. "You will suffer the ethical opprobrium from on high, on behalf of your people. You will happily make yourself a martyr. But when it comes to the required actions, you suddenly want no part. You want the effect, but you will not be a party to the cause!"

  "I demand that you confess to this crime. If you confess then Aba will forgive you," said Estiane.

  "You are in no position to demand anything of me," said Everess. "If I resigned today as foreign minister, there is no one to take my place that would give your church the time of day. Your influence in Corpus would drop to zero. And then all of this will have been for nothing."

  "Not this way," said Estiane. "I do not want it at this price."

  "Of course not. You want your crops to grow, but you do not want your hands in the dirt. It doesn't work that way."

  Everess poured himself a drink and took a sip before continuing. "Now listen, Abbot. The most likely replacement for the secretary would be Lord Palial. You know Lord Palial, of course, because he is one of your most ardent disciples. In secret, of course, but such is the way of the world."

  Estiane thought this over. "This is not ended, Lord Everess. By no means. And let me be very clear. If I ever hear of you doing something like this on my alleged behalf again, I will confess to this act myself, and the consequences be damned!"

  Everess laughed. "Such consequences are always damned, Abbot. That is the price we pay as men of action."

  Estiane spewed a few more complaints and empty threats and then stormed out just as he'd stormed in. But he'd accepted what had happened just as Everess had known he would. So insidious, this sort of thing was. A slippery slope, as they said. Within five years the abbot himself would be sticking the knife in.

  Everess picked up the fat little Nymaen statue. The antiquities dealer who'd sold it to him claimed that rubbing its belly was good luck. "Luck is for amateurs," he told the statue, replacing it on his desk.

  Given time, all wonders become ordinary, and cease to be wonders.

  -Fae proverb

  utumn ended with a series of bitterly cold days that brought to mind echoes of midwinter. But those days passed, and spring began to work its deep magic in Faerie. The cherry trees on the Promenade blossomed, the rain slowed to intermittent drizzle, and the City Emerald came to life. Titania's Spring Pageant took over the city for a full week, during which colorful banners were hung from lampposts and windows and the streets were strewn with rose petals, the blossoms taken from Titania's own private garden. Music blared from the Outer Court of the Great Seelie Keep day and night, and the pageant itself, at the week's end, was a ten-hour extravagance with a parade, a show of pyrotechnics, and a grand mestina on the keep grounds open to the public.

  The mestines produced a massive epic, beginning with Uvenchaud slaying the dragon Achera and culminating with him leading the combined Fae clans to victory over the Old Thule in the Midlands War. Achera's flames were so realistic that children screamed when he flew overhead, and the crowd roared when Uvenchaud's army climbed the ramparts at Drae and overcame the Thule king Marlace in the last battle. The final scene showed Uvenchaud being crowned King of Faerie, and the crowd cheered, throwing flower petals at the mestines who stood on the ground, working the intricate glamour art above them.

  The Shadows did not attend the pageant. That week, Silverdun returned to Annwn to deliver a hefty sum of gold to Magyster Wenathn, who won his reelection bid handily. Wenathn now had his sights set on election to high council, and the Shadows were more than happy to assist him in any way possible. Useful intelligence soon began to flow from him as their relationship deepened.

  Silverdun's spring was primarily taken up, however, with the reviewing of an endless stream of intelligence from sources far and wide, looking for any sign of Mab's intentions, and finding scant little. Unseelie forces continued to build near the border, albeit slowly, but no solid indication that this was meant as anything other than posturing was forthcoming. Nor was there any information about the Einswrath weapon, or why it had not been used anywhere since Selafae.

  Ironfoot spent most of his time at Blackstone Manor, his maps spread out before him, performing calculations, but his anger at being unable to discern the workings of the Einswrath had turned to despair and then disillusionment as he began to believe that the problem was unsolvable. He developed a rhythm during the spring: He would work the problem until he began to feel violent, and then he would push it aside for a few days and join Sela and Silverdun in scanning intelligence.

  Both Ironfoot and Silverdun noticed their Gifts steadily increasing in power, but as they rarely found themselves in significant danger, no more marvels such as Silverdun's regrown hand or Ironfoot's burst of Leadership took them by surprise. They spoke of it often at first, and Ironfoot had undertaken some research on the side to try to determine what had been done to them, but such inquiry went nowhere, and as Ironfoot already had one impossible problem in front of him, he had no great desire to commit to another.

  As Everess had predicted, no progress was ever made on the murder of Guildsman Heron; ultimately the official pronouncement came down from the high prosecutor's office that it had been a robbery attempt gone wrong. A patsy had been arrested and hung, and the matter dropped. Guildmistress Heron had resigned and gone to live with relatives in the East. After her resignation, another of Everess's predictions came true. The Arcadian Lord Palial was appointed by Corpus to take her place.

  Sela was sent out on assignments from time to time, usually by herself, usually to cajole information from male informants who had proved less than forthcoming. Due to Paet's constant and strenuous objections, she undertook no more assassinations on Seelie soil.

  When not on assignment, she and Silverdun studiously ignored one another. Her feelings for him only grew, however, and while she sensed that he felt the same way, something kept them apart, some reservation on Silverdun's part that caused them never to be alone in the same room together, and never to speak of anything other than work.

  As a result, she found herself spending more and more time upstairs, with the analysts. As time passed, she grew to enjoy teasing out information from among the stacks and stacks of disparate documents, working out how to apply it, how to sense patterns. It was a different way to use her skill with Empathy, and she much preferred it to the way she'd been taught.

  Paet allowed his Shadows a certain amount of leisure, but that was only because he sensed that rough times were ahead. Cries for war continued to escalate in Corpus, and there would soon come a time when cooler heads would cease to prevail. When war came, as he knew it would sooner or later, the lives of the Shadows would change in ways they couldn't imagine.

  Spring grew; Faerie warmed; the waters of the Inland Sea grew calm and lost their chill. Spring, however, was only a season. Summer would come soon enough, and then autumn would be back for more.

  The cynosures are objects with remarkable thaumatic properties, though because they are objects of worship the Chthonics do not allow them to be studied. Twelve were created in the wake of the Rauane Envedun-e, but it is not known how many of them are still in existence, as the Chthonic priests refuse to discuss them in any detail.

  The philosophical significance
of the cynosure is multifarious. Its wholeness represents the wholeness of the spirit. Its size, the area of each face, the angle of each vertex, the length of each side, all relate to both the religious and thaumatic aspect of the object. As I will show in the following chapter, the two can be seen as indistinguishable.

  -Prae Benesile, Thaumatical History of the Chthonic Religion

  ourneyer Timha sat in Master Valmin's study, stuck on a passage in Beozho's Commentaries. It was an exceedingly dense passage in a work well known for its obliqueness. Alpaurle himself had referred to it as "the ravings of a great man in decline." Over the centuries, scholars had debated the value of the work; for a tome ostensibly about thaumaturgy, there was very little spellwork in it. The Coninientaries was, rather, a massive philosophical work, littered with partial references to and quotations from documents that had been lost to the ages, but which Beozho clearly expected his audience to be deeply familiar with. About these secondary documents, Alpaurle had com- mented, "some are works of genius, others flights of fancy, and yet others are intellectual self-pleasure."

  The passage now plaguing Timha was in one of many sections of the work that appeared to have nothing whatsoever to do with thaumaturgy. It was, however, referenced twice in the notes that the black artist Hy Pezho had left in the margins of his plans. Valmin had gone over the passage twice and found nothing of interest, and now Timha was reviewing it only because he could think of nothing else to do.

  The panic among the senior staff had been growing daily in the months since the Bel Zheret's visit. They'd elected not to tell the rest of the group about the approaching deadline. What good would it do? Everyone understood the urgency of the project.

  Timha reached the end of the page and realized that he had no idea what he'd just read. He went back to the top of the page and tried to find where he'd left off, but recognized nothing. He had to flip back three pages to find the passage at which he'd stopped paying attention.

  "We are bound by division," the paragraph began. "Categories mean nothing at depth. All Gift is flow. Eternal, unchanging. We refuse eternity, refuse what we unsee, and so must make what we can see and judge. It is our nature, but it is also our failing."

  What the hell did any of that mean? It was all loopy doublespeak as far as Timha could tell. More to the point, it had nothing to do with reitic mechanics whatsoever. What Timha needed was a derivation of Folding that would solve the energy containment equations. He needed a solution to Vend-Am's inequality with a resulting force greater than the square of its input vectors. The Commentaries contained not a single spell, no concatenations of triggered bindings, nothing that might ever be remotely considered to be practical thaumatics.

  They were all going to die. There was nothing for it. It had become clear to Timha that Hy Pezho's talents had not only been greater than anyone had imagined, but they were greater than any of them could comprehend. And as a result, everyone here was going to die. Bel Zheret didn't make idle threats. They were Mab's personal secret police, loyal as hounds. The ultimatum had come from Mab herself.

  There was no possible way that the Project would be finished in the time remaining to them. Even if Timha had discovered the innermost secrets of the universe in Beozho's Commentaries, there wasn't enough time to translate that into a working weapon.

  Master Valmin, who'd been sleeping in his chair, sat up with a start. "How goes it, journeyer?" he asked, already knowing the answer.

  "The Commentaries are still as opaque and meaningless as ever," said Timha, without looking up.

  Valmin leaned back in his chair. "I discovered at university that, in a pinch, I could get high marks in my history classes by writing term papers about that book."

  Timha looked at him. "Really?"

  "Oh yes," said Valmin with a rueful smile. "None of the professors wanted to admit that they didn't understand the thing, so they never argued with anything that I said."

  Timha laughed, weakly. Valmin was looking off into the distance.

  After a few minutes' silence, Valmin rose from his chair and stretched slowly. He strode to Timha's side and patted the younger man on the shoulder.

  "All will be well, journeyer. All will be well."

  But all would not be well. And they both knew it.

  Timha waited a short while, pretending to examine a book by an Annwni lunatic named Prae Benesile. Benesile's tortured writing made the Commentaries seem downright lucid by comparison. None of the thaumaturges here in the Secret City had ever even heard of Benesile, but his books were referenced more than once in the marginalia of Hy Pezho's plans for the Einswrath. But if Beozho's work was tangential at best, Prae Benesile's were beyond unconnected. This particular text, for instance, was entitled Thaumatical History of the Chthonic Religion.

  Pointless. Folly.

  "I'm going to go study in my room for a while," he said.

  Valmin didn't even look up, just grunted and waved. Timha carefully gathered a very specific set of documents, along with a few innocent books and scrolls, and left the room, breathing hard.

  Timha took the books and papers back to his room and dumped them on the table. He would look at them in the morning.

  But his desperation would not let him rest. He picked up a book-it just so happened to be the Prae Benesile book again-and opened it at random. The first line completed a sentence from the previous page: "bound like the Chthonic gods at Prythme." Timha sat and stared at that line, which meant nothing to him, until he heard a knock on the door.

  It was Master Valmin. 'Journeyer, I'm afraid I've just received some terrible news. It's your mother. She's passed away."

  Timha broke down crying. But not for his mother. Not much, anyway.

  The next morning, Timha's bag was packed and he stood on the threshold of his bedroom, looking back into it. The wooden doll his sister had carved him for his tenth birthday he left on the table by his bed, along with the antique clock his mother had given him as his graduation present from university.

  He picked up the clock and turned it upside down. The inscription read, "For Timha, who will do astonishing things." Indeed. He put the clock down gently and began to cry again.

  He left the palace and strode down the bone-white stairs toward the lock landing. With every lonely step, he looked out across the vast city with its silent spires and vacant shadows, thinking that within those long-empty windows something was watching him. Something old and hungry, with teeth the same color as the stones.

  The two guards at the lock landing were Elev and Phyto, neither of whom Timha knew well. Neither was notorious for being especially strict, but that was only a relative comfort; these were Mab's palace guards, the cream of the crop. They were not fools.

  Elev took Timha's travel documents, signed by Master Valmin, and studied them carefully.

  "Sorry 'bout your mother," he muttered, handing the papers back.

  "Surprised they're letting you go for the funeral, to be honest," said Elev. "What with them canceling all leave and everything."

  "Well, Master Valmin pulled some strings for me," said Timha. "One of the perks of being a trusted servant, I suppose."

  "Must be nice," said Elev.

  Phyto reached out for Timha's bag. He opened it and pulled out each article of clothing, waving a tiny wand across each piece. The purpose of the wand was to dispel glamours, to ensure that Timha wasn't attempting to smuggle anything out of the city.

  Phyto replaced the contents of the bag neatly and refastened its latches, then turned the wand on Timha himself. He started at Timha's feet, feeling first with his hands, then following with the wand. Up Timha's body he went, paying careful attention to the belt buckle and the brooch that fastened Timha's journeyer robe. As Phyto moved the wand above Timha's neck, Timha held out his hand.

  "Please," he said, "not the hair." His eyes pleaded with Phyto to let it pass.

  "Bald on top, are you?" smiled Phyto.

  "Yes," answered Timha, "and glamoured hair this believabl
e costs a fortune in the city. I'd hate to lose it all just for a security check."

  Phyto thought this over.

  "Sorry," he said, and passed the wand over Timha's scalp. Timha's beautiful, thick hair vanished, leaving the fine wisps that were his natural complement. He sighed in relief, he'd considered hiding the documents he'd stolen up there.

  "Ah, I can see why you went with the glamour," said Elev.

  "Thanks," sneered Timha. "Can I go please? I don't want to miss my connection on the other side of the lock, and it's almost highsun."

  "Go on," said Elev, looking a bit regretful.

  Timha knelt down to tie the bootlace he'd deliberately left slightly loose. It had taken only the slightest touch of Motion to pull it entirely undone. He looked up as he tied. Phyto and Elev had begun quibbling about whose shift ended at highsun. Still watching them, Timha reached back and grabbed at the loop of cord he'd left on the ground. It was glamoured invisible, so he'd had to drop it a few paces back from Phyto and his wand.