The Office of Shadow

by Matthew Sturges

  War was coming, and soon.

  But there was a more immediate problem. The few border crossings would now be more closely guarded than ever. The Border Wall stretched across most of the length of the border; it had been created during a long-ago treaty, and maintained by both sides ever since. It was composed of interlocking bindings, one Seelie, one Unseelie, and was impossible to cross from either side. Presumably Virum had known of a secret crossing, one of the spots where the resonance from Shifting Places of the nearby Contested Lands created soft spots in the Border Wall. These were all guarded, but from time to time new ones cropped up. The problem was that Ironfoot had no idea where Virum's soft spot was located.

  Once the column of soldiers had passed, he returned to Sela and they continued, hurrying across the road and back into the forest. That night they camped without a fire, eating berries and nuts and the last of the stale bread they'd taken from the villa.

  The next morning they continued their ride. They must have made good time, because the sun was still well above the western horizon when they ran into the Border Wall. Ironfoot dismounted and examined it. It was merely a low stone wall, nothing particularly imposing, though runes were scattered across its surface. He put his hand out to reach across, and met with resistance. He pushed his hand farther and the resistance grew stronger. A little farther and the resistance became physically painful. He quickly withdrew. There would be no crossing here.

  They followed the Border Wall to the southwest, where hopefully he could find a border crossing that wasn't too crowded. He had no idea what he'd do when he found one, but there wasn't much of a choice. Every step they took to the southwest, though, took them closer to the remains of Selafae, and Sylvan beyond.

  Near sunset, they came upon a group of soldiers stationed along a length of the wall. Not particularly attentive soldiers, since they had yet to notice the two riders approaching them, and not a true crossing, simply a soft place. That was a lucky break. Ironfoot counted ten soldiers, however, and that was less lucky.

  Nothing to do but try to talk their way through.

  "Sela," he said in a low voice. "I need your Empathy here. We're going to have to talk our way through these men."

  "I don't know," said Sela. "It hurts so badly." She clutched her arm, where red welts from the touch of the uncovered band had burned her skin.

  "You're going to have to try, dammit!" said Ironfoot. "You're a Shadow, Sela. You have a job to do."

  "I know."

  "Then wake up and do what needs to be done."

  She looked at him, angrily at first; then her expression hardened. "You're right," she said. "I will be what I was made to be."

  Ironfoot wasn't sure what she meant by that, but if it brought her back to her senses, he was glad. They rode toward the soldiers.

  "Who goes there!" one of them shouted.

  "We have orders to cross the border," said Ironfoot. "A mission from the City of Mab itself."

  "Dismount," said the foremost soldier, who was a lieutenant, and a young one.

  "I don't have time, Lieutenant. Now get out of my way or I'll move you."

  The officer stood his ground. "No one crosses the border," he said. "I have my own orders, and I don't care what yours are."

  Ironfoot looked at Sela, who was concentrating on the lieutenant. "Who are you?" he said, looking at her.

  "We're on a critical mission," she said, her voice clear and distinct. "Surely you understand that." Ironfoot could see the tension in her gaze. The struggle.

  "I don't know," said the lieutenant, faltering.

  Another of the soldiers approached. "You heard the lieutenant," he said. "Dismount now, or we'll dismount you."

  Just Ironfoot's luck; the officer didn't have his men at all well in hand. In Ironfoot's army days he'd had a few such commanders. Smart infantrymen knew how to manipulate them to keep themselves from getting killed. Apparently the soldier now eyeing Ironfoot was one of these.

  "We can't do that," said Sela. She was trying, but she'd been through too much in too brief a time, and these were strong-willed, suspicious men.

  "All right," said Ironfoot. He dismounted and, with deep regret, drew the Bel Zheret's knife.

  It was amazing, even to Ironfoot, how quickly he managed to kill them all. He whirled and struck, all of his anger and frustration flowing into his actions. All philosophy and higher thought evaporated. There was only motion and balance and cut. Blood and bone. Shriek and hiss.

  There were ten of them, and the last barely had time to draw his sword before Ironfoot pierced his neck with the point of the Bel Zheret blade. If Ironfoot hadn't been a complete Shadow before, he was now.

  He remounted, slowly, after wiping the Bel Zheret knife on the uniform of one of the fallen soldiers. They circled back and then took the wall at a run, the horses' hooves clearing it easily.

  They must have spoken at some point during the long night ride to the Sylvan road, but Ironfoot couldn't remember saying anything. They stumbled on the road out of the forest at the break of dawn, and in less than two hours they were at Sylvan, having passed column after column of Seelie soldiers heading north.

  When they returned to the City Emerald, in a fast carriage loaned by the Seelie Army, Paet was waiting for them at Blackstone House. He received the report of their mission-of the flight from Preyia, the Arami, the deaths of Timha and Silverdun-in silence, asking no questions. When Ironfoot was done speaking, Paet thanked him in a quiet voice.

  "When will Silverdun's body be delivered to his family?" said Ironfoot.

  "It won't. There will be no funeral."

  "Excuse me?" said Sela. It was the first thing she'd said since they'd arrived.

  "Shadows don't get funerals," said Paet. "We're never so lucky."

  Ironfoot fumed, but Paet wasn't someone who could be argued with.

  "I'll be gone for several days," said Paet, standing. "I expect you both to spend that time recovering. When I get back, there will be much to do."

  "Paet," said Ironfoot. "They knew we were coming. At every step along the way."

  "I know," said Paet. "And I have no idea who's responsible."

  "I want to get back to work," said Sela. "Now. I don't want to rest."

  "I agree," said Ironfoot.

  "Some things cannot wait," said Paet. "And some can. If you insist on working, Ironfoot, go over Timha's notes with a fine-toothed comb. The Unseelie couldn't figure them out, but perhaps you can."

  "In time for them to be useful?" said Ironfoot.

  "You never know when something will be useful," said Paet.

  "I'd like to go through intelligence reports," said Sela. "From everywhere. Look for anything that might tell us who our traitor is. There are some leads I discovered before we left for the Unseelie."

  "Any ideas?" asked Paet.

  "I'll let you know," she said.

  Paet left soon after, leaving Sela and Ironfoot alone in the Shadows' Den. Ironfoot took Timha's notes and plans and books and spread them out in the mission room. The Unseelie had some very bright minds, but Ironfoot had one thing they didn't have. He had the map of Selafae.

  He pored over these things for hours, carefully juxtaposing the plans for the Einswrath. Just as he had on his return to Queensbridge from Selafae, he became lost in his work, the rising sense of fear growing with every hour.

  But Ironfoot's relationship to fear had changed in the intervening months. Fear was a driving force now, and it was something he could control. Whenever it got to be too much, he simply reached in and damped it down.

  From time to time, Sela poked her head out of the den to see how he was doing, or to go collect another stack of briefs and dispatches from the analysts upstairs. Neither of them took a break, even for a moment. To stop would be to think about what had happened, and neither of them had any interest in that.

  The two patterns from Ironfoot's dream upon the Arami net reappeared on paper in front of him, and he saw what these patterns had bee
n all along. Not too surprisingly, one was the map, which he'd stared at so many times that he had the thing damn near memorized. The other was the overview from Timha's plans, which he'd examined just minutes before falling out of the sky in the burning yacht. The two were clearly connected, but something was very, very wrong.

  It was morning before he realized what it was. He'd gone over everything a dozen times before he spotted it.

  "Sela," he said, coming into the Shadows' Den and falling into his desk chair. "I believe I've worked it out." He was smiling.

  Sela had dozed off at her own desk, and now looked up.

  "What? What have you worked out?"

  "I've discovered exactly why the Unseelie thaumaturges were unable to construct an Einswrath weapon from the plans that Timha gave us."

  "Really?" said Sela.

  "Yes," said Ironfoot. His smile widened. "Because they're fake."

  "What?"

  "Oh, it's a very clever hoax, but that's all it is. Whoever dreamed it up, presumably the estimable Hy Pezho himself, spent a great deal of time composing plans for a massive feat of thaumaturgy that is brilliantly, extravagantly, and quite subtly, a total fraud."

  "What are you saying?" said Sela.

  "There's no way these are the plans for the Einswrath," said Ironfoot, standing. He stood and kicked his chair violently, where it struck the wall with a loud crash and shattered.

  "You get it?" said Ironfoot, laughing. "They're totally worthless! It was all for nothing! Silverdun died for nothing!"

  Ironfoot continued to laugh, and at some point his laughter turned into tears. He sat down on the floor, crying. After a moment, Sela came and sat beside him, and they wept together.

  An Easterner calls a lightsmith to his home to charge the witchlamps."What color would you like them?" asks the Iightsmith.

  "Oh, it don't make a lick o' difference," says the Easterner. "I'm blind, you see."

  "Then why do you need your lamps charged?" asks the lightsmith.

  "Well, I hates to admit it," says the Easterner,"but I'm afraid o' the dark."

  -Seelie joke

  lack.

  But not black. Black implied sight, seeing nothing. This was the lack of sight, lack of the knowledge of sight.

  Things had been going well. Very well. He'd been as close as one could get to the fulfillment of his every dream. Everything had fallen into place just as he'd planned. And then at the moment of his ultimate victory, his triumphant revenge, like a beard-flicking villain in a mestina he was defeated utterly. The fel-ala, his own personal wraith of vengeance, had turned on him and devoured him, at the moment it ought to have devoured his nemesis. Yes, nemesis. After what he'd gone through as a result, he had a right to absolutes. He had a right to thoughts of revenge that passed understanding, that left logic and justice and morality far, far behind.

  Where the fel-ala's tentacles had touched him, there was pain. A deep burning sensation that went beyond the skin and traveled through channels up his arms and legs, through his spine and into his brain. A fierce, unbearable sting, infinite, breathtaking, unfathomable. Then the wraith enveloped him and swallowed him whole. Inside the creature was darkness, a darkness he'd thought complete.

  He'd known nothing about darkness then.

  Inside the beast was the pain of dissolution. The knowledge that he was being devoured. Eaten alive. The thing had something like teeth, but they were hooked; they dug into the flesh and tore, slurping away skin and blood. They reached around bone and snapped and sucked. Time slowed for him, a reitic property of the fel-ala that he himself had designed. The purpose of this was so that each cut could be experienced fully, individually. His consciousness was forced into the depths of the pain, each slice, each bite, one after another after another.

  This was the pain he'd devised for her. The nemesis. Using only himself as a measure, he'd constructed the most nightmarish end he himself could imagine. And now it was his to experience.

  As he twisted and thrashed in the belly of the fel-ala, it occurred to him that the pain was only the prologue. Only the appetizer to the true meal. Knowing it was coming made it all much, much worse.

  If he ever escaped from this-and he wouldn't, he knew-he'd have to remember that knowing made it worse. A bit of useless knowledge to ponder forever.

  Because that was the meal; that was the meat. After the pain, came the eternity. Even as he thought it, he felt the pain begin to recede, not because the fel-ala had finished with him, but because there was less and less of him to sense it. His body had been consumed almost thoroughly. His eyes had been ripped from their sockets, his manhood shredded, his entrails drawn from him, tied in knots with nimble hooks and yanked piecemeal from within. He'd felt internal organs puncture, rupture. By the time his lungs collapsed and he stopped breathing, it was almost a relief. The death of the body was imminent.

  There was the rising panic and wholly other pain of suffocation. His chest, what was left of it, bucked and heaved. He would not have guessed that he'd have the energy for that by now. The pressure grew in his chest and head. The pressure soon pushed out all of the other pain. He felt his heart stop with a sickening, straining leap. Then it all faded away. The sound of flesh tearing and his own gurgling (and from somewhere, tinkling laughter). The visceral, seething agony. The smell and taste of thefel-ala's digestive liquids and his own blood mingled. And last, the blackness that was not yet complete. The blackness that was a painting of night compared to night itself.

  True darkness. Infinite darkness, eternal. It embraced him. A silence beyond silence.

  If he'd had a body he would have shuddered. The lack of sensation of any kind enveloped his mind, and at first he was relieved; the pain was over, finally over. For a time he was calm. Had he any lungs he would have breathed deeply, sighed.

  Then he noticed the darkness. The lack, the total lack of light, of sound. The lack of being. Nothing with which to reach out, nothing with which to see or hear. Nothing.

  For a time there was only the darkness and the horror of the darkness.

  Then the itching started.

  In his quest for power he had seen enough horror-caused it, experienced it-that he had lost the ability to go insane. It was a requirement of the Black Art, one of the first things his father had taught him. And if he was unable to lose his mind, then his nemesis was doubly so. She had been committing atrocities when the gods themselves were young. This was only an expression applied to anyone else, but with her it might have been a reality.

  It was cliche, he knew, to think that it was thoughts of revenge that sustained him. He'd been avenging his father's death for as long as he could remember. But now it was his own death that demanded satisfaction, his own torment. This was new.

  No, he would never lose his mind. And in that knowledge there was a slim hope. The slimmest. Even though he'd been certain of his victory, some paranoid part of him had compelled him to devise an insurance policy. Even if it never did him any good, the thought of those idiots bumbling around trying to follow in his footsteps, using useless plans for his masterpiece, gave him a touch of satisfaction. And a touch of hope.

  They would never guess. How could they? Only Hy Pezho could be so audacious. Never in the wildest dreams of any of Mab's great thaumaturges would Hy Pezho's solution occur.

  That was what put him above all others: He dared what no other would.

  Thoughts of revenge sustained him for a very, very long time.

  In an instant, nothing then something. Everything. Pain, blood, sound. Harsh smell, rank spellcraft odor. Darkness, but only the mundane kind. Only a lack of light. If he had eyes, they'd be blinded by the brilliance of this blackness.

  But he did have eyes. They rolled in their sockets.

  His chest hurt. A chest! Why? Something familiar digging at him.

  Breathe. In. Out. Yes.

  Fingers, legs, arms, a neck. Movement, restricted. Restrained? Injured? Where was he?

  Sounds, musical. Lilting fam
iliarly. Tinkling. Tinkling laughter. Laughter.

  Mab. Queen. Lover. Empress.

  Nemesis.

  Her voice. The sounds were her voice, and in the voice were words. Words to hear with ears.

  "Awake, Hy Pezho," she said. He thought that was what she said. "Awake now and serve your empress as you once feigned to."

  He was tied to a table. Helpless.

  A shiver, joyfully afraid.

  He pissed himself.

  Bliss.

  Hy Pezho sat up, testing his new body. It felt different from his old one. Leaner, stronger. He was in a small room, a thaumaturge's workshop. Mab's workshop. What horrors had been wrought here in this very room?

  Mab was smiling at him. She wore no glamour, and the sight of her true face chilled even him.

  "Clever," she said. "You're a clever, clever boy, Hy Pezho."

  "That's what made us such good friends," he said, trying his voice. His speech was slurred a bit, but only because he hadn't attempted it in so long.

  "I should have known that the great Hy Pezho would have found a way to cheat death," she said.

  "So your coterie of thaumaturges have admitted that they can't duplicate my masterpiece?" He chuckled. "Even with the carefully crafted blueprints I left them? Or are they still plugging away at it?"

  "I've killed them all," she said.

  "Ah."

  "And this new body of yours, Hy Pezho, has been built with some protections, so I pray I will not have to kill you as well. Kill you in the true death."

  "I live to serve," said Hy Pezho. And with horror, he realized that he meant it. He wanted nothing more than to serve her. Would die to serve her.

  "What have you done to me?" he said.

  "You've been given a great, great honor," she said. "I've brought you back not in a frail Fae body, but in the body of my most loyal and faithful and mighty servants."

  Hy Pezho looked down at his arms. Long, thin, strong. No.

  No.

  "You're Bel Zheret now, Hy Pezho," said Mab, her tinkling laughter falling on him like sparks. "Congratulations on your promotion."