by karlov, matt
A light rap on the door disrupted his thoughts. Garrett, arriving almost on time.
A bad sign.
Clade seated himself behind his desk, the window at his back. A slender steel pen rested beside an inkwell in a graceful lacquered stand, half hidden by the piles of paper. Beside it, a marble horse-head bookend gazed out from atop a stack as though surveying the room. Clade pushed the stack aside, clearing a space where he could rest his hands.
“Come,” he said.
The door opened with the hesitant swing of a reluctant messenger. Garrett sidled into the room, blinking at Clade through floppy, straw-coloured hair, the swagger that usually animated his stride conspicuously absent. His hands were empty.
“I don’t have the urn,” Garrett said, his tone somewhere between apology and defiance. “They lost it.”
A hollow opened in the pit of Clade’s stomach. He responded instantly, walling off the feeling of despair, denying it access to the rest of him. Control. Above all, control. “Tell me what happened.”
Garrett cleared his throat and fixed his gaze on the papers on Clade’s desk. “Your estimate of the location was correct,” he said. “The Quill showed up just like you said they would.”
I was right. Satisfaction bloomed, weaker than his frustrated disappointment, but recognisable nonetheless. He confined it as he had the hollow in his stomach.
“The Quill led Terrel and his men straight to the site,” Garrett continued. “A few hours later they had something out of the ground. Terrel was some distance away, but he’s pretty sure it was the urn.”
Clade grimaced. You think I want to know his name? Fool. But it couldn’t be unheard now. He sighed, smoothed his expression. “Go on.”
Garrett moistened his lips. “The Quill had a firebinder with them. Terrel waited for night, but the moon was full and the Quill set a watch. They trailed them the next day, but not well enough. Somehow the Quill realised they were being followed. In the end, Terrel had to give up on surprise.”
“And?”
“He won, of course. But the Quill killed two of his men, and wounded a third badly enough that he died the next night.”
“And the urn?”
Garrett swallowed. “They couldn’t find it. They searched the Quill, but none of them had it. It just… wasn’t there.”
Clade fixed his adjunct with a cold stare. The young man was generally adept at hiding anything he considered weakness, but his reluctance to meet Clade’s eyes betrayed his level of discomfort. Garrett hated to admit failure, Clade knew. Almost as much as I hate to hear it.
“You are a member of the Oculus,” Clade said. “How are you going to repair this?”
“I’ve already told Terrel to go back,” Garrett said, the words tumbling over each other in his eagerness to please — or was it simply eagerness to move on? “His job was to retrieve the urn. He doesn’t get paid until he does that.”
“Good,” Clade said. His stomach no longer felt hollow. It was hard, now; a tight, heavy ball. He adjusted his barriers to compensate. “Remember that it’s not just Terrel’s job to retrieve the urn. It’s yours.”
Garrett nodded, though Clade thought he caught an edge of resentment in the gesture. “As you say.”
“Pursue all avenues. Don’t rely on Terrel to rescue the situation. Go out there yourself if you have to. Just find it.”
“So why all this pissing about with journals and Quill and mercenaries?” Garrett burst out. “Why not just send one of our own sorcerers and be done with it?”
Anger flared. He dropped fences around it, corralled it, placed it alongside the other captured emotions.
“There is more at play than you realise,” Clade said. “Suffice it to say that it would displease the Council if this operation were to become more widely known.” That was true enough. They’d be more than displeased to hear that it was happening at all. “Be assured that the Council notices and values both your discretion and your effectiveness.” Clade watched his adjunct absorb the meaning of the words. That’s right. Keep your mouth shut and get the job done.
“Fine,” Garrett muttered, then caught himself. “As you say. Do you have any other instructions?”
“Just find the urn. That should be more than enough to occupy you.” Clade flicked a finger toward the door. “Go.”
Garrett went, leaving Clade alone with his thoughts. His caged emotions were already dissipating. Only the tight knot of despair in his stomach still beat against the walls of its pen. Soon it too would fade.
It had been a mistake, perhaps, to entrust the urn’s retrieval to Garrett. Within Anstice, the man seemed capable of finding or arranging almost anything. Beyond the sprawling city, though, his capacities dwindled rapidly. And perhaps his judgement was not as sound as Clade had hoped. The mercenary, Terrel, had been Garrett’s choice. His failure was Garrett’s failure too.
As Garrett’s failure is mine.
Clade refused to permit himself the luxury of self-pity. What was, was. Wallowing would achieve nothing. But regret was different. Regret could be harnessed and forged into something else: determination, and strength of purpose. Resolve. And so Clade sat behind his desk and allowed himself to feel regret.
•
By midday his caged emotions were gone, but their departure failed to restore his equanimity. In their place rose something else: a vague, unsettled apprehension, like the tense stillness before a storm. It drifted through him like smoke, defying his attempts to wall it off. For a while he ignored it, pressing on with his task of reconciling invoices and receipts; but as the afternoon progressed, the feeling grew stronger, filling him with a deep, pervasive unease. At last he gave up, abandoning the unfinished summary of accounts on his desk and making his way outside.
The Oculus forecourt was a cool, drab rectangle, paved and walled with featureless grey stone. Two ornamental cannons stood atop the wall, pointing absurdly at each other over a plain, timbered gate that stood slightly ajar. Clade slipped through it and out onto the busy thoroughfare, picking his way between men, horses and carts to the domed Kefiran temple on the other side. The thick door swung open at his touch and he stepped inside, closing it behind him to shut out the clamour of the road.
He paused a pace in from the doorway, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim interior. The antechamber was a simple room of bare stone, smooth and cool to the touch. A pair of censers flanked an open portal on the other side of the room. Rich smoke curled up from the wide brass bowls, suffusing the chamber with a sweet aroma that reminded Clade of sugared almonds. He took a deep breath, filling his lungs with the cloying, familiar scent, then crossed the chamber and passed into the tabernacle itself.
The god didn’t like temples. Clade had made the discovery by accident some time ago, after the majordomo employed to manage the Oculus building lost his daughter to the Brachan fever. The god had been with Clade when he arrived at the Gatherer’s squat temple for the funeral, but as he entered he’d felt it shiver, and a moment later it had left. It wasn’t that the temple had refused it entry, exactly; or at least, it hadn’t seemed that way to Clade. Rather, the god had simply found it more comfortable to be somewhere else.
A few days later, in the middle of a discussion with several of his sorcerers about the differences between binding eucalyptus and other kinds of wood, the god had come upon him again. Curious to see whether the outcome could be repeated, Clade had halted the debate and brought the god here, slipping tentatively into the round Kefiran tabernacle; and once again, its presence had departed the moment he stepped inside. Since then, he’d repeated the experiment at a Gislean shrine, a Sarean sanctuary, and the grand Tri-God pantheon on the far bank of the Tienette, and on each occasion the result was the same. Whenever Clade entered a temple, the god preferred to be elsewhere.
The portal opened onto a large, circular room. A tall, elaborately carved box stood upright in the centre of the room, surrounded by a low velvet rope. Sunlight filtered through stained-gl
ass windows high in the domed wall. Curved timber pews filled the outer two-thirds of the space, arranged in such a way as to form four quarters. Though the aisles between quarters approached the central ark at right angles to each other, they seemed misaligned with the encompassing building, as though whoever had arranged the seating had imagined the doorways to be a few paces around from their actual positions. It had taken Clade several visits to realise the reason for the odd arrangement: the aisles were aligned with the cardinal directions, making the large, round space into a kind of oversized compass.
At this hour the tabernacle was largely deserted. A pair of elderly men sat in the northeastern quadrant, their heads bobbing in unison as they prayed. Clade selected a pew in the next quadrant along and bowed his own head.
Anxiety rose within him, thick and noxious, plucking at the strands of his awareness and inviting him to draw deep. He closed his eyes, resisting its pull but not its advance, allowing it to range through him unimpeded. Something like a butterfly flitted through his stomach. His fingers twitched, then began to tap out a pattern on his knee. Clade retreated within himself, watching as his body gave itself over to the insistent, needy emotion. Then he turned his attention inward, striking into its billowing swells in search of the canker at its heart.
I don’t have the urn, Garrett said in his mind, rueful and defensive and insolent all at once. They lost it. The Quill had taken the bait, providing the team and the resources that Clade had been unable to raise from within the Oculus for fear of attracting the god’s attention. They’d followed the information Clade had fed them, located the urn, and raised it from its millennia-long sleep. And then, somehow, they had lost it.
Did they know? Clade experienced a genuine burst of fear, its dark stream blending with the pale, elusive currents of anxiety. If the Quill knew what the urn was and where it led…
But no. It had taken Clade years of painstaking research and investigation to discover this single thread leading back to the fabled Valdori golems. Surely the Quill could not have made the same connection from the journal page Garrett had fed them to induce their participation — and if they had, there was no way they’d have sent only a standard field team to retrieve it. An army of soldiers fashioned from stone and sorcery by the Valdori themselves? The Quill would have burned down the entire forest to find anything even remotely connected.
Yet the urn had vanished all the same. His one lead to the golems was gone. And without the golems, his entire plan to rid himself of the god was little more than smoke.
Heaviness returned to his stomach, leaching despair like a drenched rag. He responded instantly, dropping walls into place, sealing it off from the rest of him.
Despair. Not anxiety.
Not the urn, then. He blinked up at the red wood of the carved Kefiran ark, at the stained-glass windows and domed ceiling. Something else.
A sung note sounded from somewhere behind him, high and clear. It was joined a moment later by others, male and female, from various points around the perimeter of the room. The pews had filled up a little since Clade’s arrival, though the two elderly men still had a complete quadrant to themselves. Clade settled into the pew, watching as the brown-robed singers filed slowly down the aisles to form a circle around the roped-off ark and commence their afternoon prayers.
Here in Anstice, the major services at dawn and dusk were conducted mostly in Yaran, the common trade language of eastern Kal Arna. Further west, it was said, Kefiran services were often held in Kharjik, and in other, more obscure languages. Prayers, however, were always and only recited in the native Kefiran tongue. Clade had come to appreciate, if not exactly enjoy, the winding, arrhythmic tapestry of voices. There was a strange, alien beauty to it, something wild and melancholy and profoundly other. Many of the olive- and brown-skinned singers had the characteristic brown-auburn hair of native Kefirans, but Clade saw others who could easily have lived in Anstice their whole lives, as well as two pale, high-browed Mellespenes. And the dark, hook-nosed woman nearest the east aisle was almost certainly Bel Hennese.
Of all the All-God religions, the Kefirans seemed to have the greatest success in attracting outsiders. Despite the compelling strangeness of their prayers, Clade found it hard to understand the appeal. The Kefiran god was obsessed with laws: what to eat, what to wear, how high to build the fences around one’s roof, and what animal to kill whenever one of the other laws was broken. There was a bank of altars behind the tabernacle, where proscribed sacrifices were performed daily at the request of penitents. When the wind was right, the stench of offal and burnt animal flesh carried directly into Clade’s study, where it would linger for the rest of the day in silent testimony to Kefiran sinfulness.
Yet even as he despised the mess of laws at the heart of the Kefiran faith, part of him harboured a grudging respect for the seriousness with which the Kefirans took them. Though their concept of wrongdoing seemed hopelessly tangled, their treatment of it was not. Where the Gisleans watered down the weightiness of evil, proposing acts of good with which one might somehow balance out the cosmic ledger, the Kefirans held firm. Only blood could buy atonement. Only with death could the slate be wiped clean.
The prayer drew to a close, the singers ending on a single note, startling for its clarity. Then, heads bowed, they turned and filed back up the aisles. A man sitting a few rows in front of Clade stood with a grunt and followed the last of the singers out.
They lost it, Garrett had said. They, not I. As though the wrongdoing had belonged to someone else, someone unconnected to him. And in his eyes, a flicker of defiance.
And then the uncharacteristic outburst. Not frustration, as Clade had initially thought. Something else.
Contempt.
His unease thickened, pressing against his throat. He raised hurried barriers and drove it back, pushing the shapeless emotion down toward the cage he had prepared for it. It resisted, slithering sideways as though it might slip past his will; but he had its measure now, and he took hold of it as if it were a rebellious puppy, dropping it in its box and snapping the lid shut.
Garrett. The man had let his mask slip, there in Clade’s study. And beneath it Clade had glimpsed… disloyalty? No, not exactly. Garrett was not the type to offer loyalty to anyone other than himself. In truth, Clade considered it a point in the man’s favour — an absence of loyalty to the Oculus left him malleable, more receptive to Clade’s direction. Loyalty was a method of control, nothing more, and where one such weakness was absent, another could usually be found. Pride, for instance, or avarice; or, in Garrett’s case, ambition.
It had served them both well. Clade had promoted Garrett to adjunct, feeding the man’s hunger for advancement with promises of recommendations to the Council, some of which he’d even kept; and Garrett in turn had done all Clade had asked of him, always willing and usually successful.
And now it was over.
There had been contempt on his face, and more. Resentment. Garrett no longer saw Clade as the best avenue to satisfy his ambition. He had begun to see him as an obstacle.
From such a fall there was no coming back. The man’s usefulness was at an end. He could no longer be controlled, and therefore he could no longer be trusted.
Coloured sunlight from one of the stained-glass windows crept across Clade’s knee, causing him to look up. Even the two old men were gone now. A still, pensive silence filled the room like a held breath, marred only by the faint noises of the street outside.
I could find a new adjunct. Clade frowned, considering the possibility. Bring in someone new, and send Garrett back to Zeanes. But there were dangers with that option. So long as Garrett was close, he had an interest in making at least a show of loyalty to Clade, and in keeping the secrets with which Clade had entrusted him. Away from Anstice, however, such discretion could not be assured.
No, Garrett would have to stay. After all, the man wasn’t stupid. Even if he no longer saw Clade as an aid to his ambitions, he could hardly fail to realise t
hat Clade could still hinder them greatly if he chose. Fear would keep him in line for a while yet.
The remaining details assembled themselves in Clade’s mind. Garrett would have to retain the task of recovering the urn, at least for the time being. To insist on the urn’s importance and then reassign the task to someone else would likely be a provocation too far. That aside, Garrett would work on Oculus business only, and Clade would find someone else to assist him with his private project. A party from Zeanes was expected in a few days’ time, bringing with them two new sorcerers for Anstice, including an old student of his. Perhaps he could find a way of assuring himself of her trustworthiness. Perhaps, with her, it would be loyalty after all.
Clade stood, stretching the kinks from his back. The despair he’d contained was gone now, vanished as though it had never been. He nodded, satisfied.
A sharp bray from somewhere nearby caught Clade’s ear. The noise came again, then abruptly cut off. A chanted prayer took its place; a lone baritone this time, delineating the contours of the earlier song like a pencil sketch traced over watercolours. A sacrifice, conducted on one of the altars behind the temple.
He paused, a smile playing about the corner of his lips. For all their solemnity, for all the gravity with which they invested their law, somehow the Kefirans were never quite able to stop sinning. Rather than amending their actions, they chose instead to address the consequences. Forgiveness. Absolution for sins committed. Removing the sin as though it had never been.
But it had. Imagining otherwise was worse than foolish, and Clade had never been a fool.
He strode from the temple, through the smoke-filled antechamber and onto the street. The Oculus building stood opposite, tall and imposing, dark despite the afternoon sun. Arms folded, Clade squinted up at his adjunct’s window, just around from his own.
