He’d sensed gazes like hers countless times before, and on instinct, Trent raised his right arm and aimed his palm toward this dirty woman. In her glee, her gaze pulled him into a blackness that squeezed his chest and plugged his ears, caused his nose to run from ash and dust and pricked at his skin like nettle. His throat burned, like he’d tried to swallow a mouthful of cinnamon.
His feet had left the ground before he could think to plant them, and he floated, weightless. Here, for the first time in twenty years, relief washed through him. The void called. All he’d have to do is stay. Even if he didn’t find her, all his troubles, his foibles, gone. Why go back? What’s waiting for you?
Trent’s mind pushed through the quagmire. “Lillie,” he said. Darkness gave way to dead space, and pinpoints of light appeared in his periphery. He doubted whether he even had the strength to leave.
The dirty woman materialized over him. Her gray eyes shone against the nether’s night. She pulled him to her, held him in her arms, petted his face. “There. We see your thoughts. Give in to darkness’s embrace.”
Trent closed his eyes. Smoke filled the air. For too long he inhaled her scent of dirt and coppery blood as her breath crawled over him. The tattoo on his left forearm pierced like an icicle.
“Why won’t you let”—she gasped, looked over her shoulder, and made away.
A great light shined upon him and warmed him through his coat. He hid his face in the crook of his right arm, and when he thought the radiance would finally burst and annihilate him, it instead coalesced and cooled.
“Love,” Lillie said in a quick whisper.
Trent opened his eyes and saw his wife, clothed in a simple and tattered dress that bared her midriff. “Lillie.” His hand passed through her body. When he swiped the other way, her visage swirled and reformed.
She shook her head. “She won’t be gone long. You have to leave.”
He marveled at her. Though color had washed from her face and hair and clothes—her chestnut eyes appeared merely a simple brown—she looked as she did when he last saw her, days before the War’s end. I’ve tried to get here, the last place I thought to look. “I’ve”—
She pressed a finger to his lips. “You found me, Pushkin, and you’ll find me again. But you can’t stay. This is not your place.”
“It’s not yours, either.”
Sadness draped over her face, and a faithless smile spread across her lips. “For the time, it is.”
“Goddess, no. I didn’t think I’d ever see you again. I’ll not leave you”—
“Your journey isn’t over yet—our journey’s not finished.”
Trent’s mind lulled. “What?”
“The Call,” said Lillie. “Fulfill your oath.” Her opaque fingers grazed his cheek, and she cupped his left hand with her own, pressing into it what felt like a jagged marble. “I took this from her. She doesn’t know. You must find out what to do with it.” Trent grabbed her hand, but his fist closed around only what she had given him. “You must.”
He reached for her as she turned. “No.” But he stayed in place, unable to move or right himself, and he had no choice but to watch her go.
The dirty woman stepped from behind a curtain and looked from Trent to the willowed form of his wife. A devilish gash stretched across her face and exposed her rotting teeth. She shot a wry bounce of her brow at Trent before she turned and followed Lillie.
“No!” Trent yelled and hammed his hand into a fist. “I’ll take you all!” Bright light pushed against the blackness, and the world flashed through myriad shades of white and gold and black. His vision threatened to fully resolve what waited on the other side: the negative of a forest, set in the nether’s ethereal darkness. He screamed and squeezed his eyes shut for the effort as he forced Light all around him. But his lungs became unwilling to fill with air, his muscles lost their vigor, and Trent fell into a nightmare for his weakening body.
Lillie screamed.
When next he opened his eyes, Trent stumbled at the mouth of a hallway of elevators and fell forward onto his knees, catching himself with his right hand. In his left, he clutched a stone.
—“er, sir,” Sieku finished.
Trent struggled to breath. “I’m out.”
“Repeat sir.”
“I’m out. Start the cover-up.”
“What did you find?” Sieku asked.
Trent thought of the dirty woman, the endless hall. “Ugh, gods.”
“Can I help you?” said the guard at the end of the hall.
“Pardon me.” Trent stood and raised his right hand. “Took a wrong turn somewhere.” He straightened his jacket, brushed the front of his slacks, and fought the urge to turn and run.
The guard walked toward him. “Are you a party guest?”
“Course I am,” Trent said. He turned and walked the way he’d come. Outside the elevators’ hallway, he pocketed the stone and clipped the access card back onto the guard’s belt before he snapped his fingers next to the man’s face. He bent over, pretending to tie his shoe, then tsked when he stood. “Sleeping on the job, mate?” The guard’s eyes narrowed over his hung-open mouth as Trent walked past him toward the party hall.
“Hey,” the closer guard said.
Trent didn’t stop.
“Hey!”
The other from down the hall joined him. “Stop.”
Trent did so.
“Turn around.”
Trent still hadn’t caught his breath. Sweat trickled down his right thigh as he followed the instruction. He lamented what he’d have to do if they made a fuss.
The guard probed him with his gaze. “You should do up your collar and tie. This is a dinner for the royal son, ya know?”
Trent chuckled. “Right.” He pulled his tie from his pocket. “Got a little warm. S’why I went for a walk.”
“Be a little more mindful here, sir. It’s easy to get lost. Seven months and I still don’t know all this place’s secrets.”
“Pray you never do,” said Trent. “Secrets”—he shook his head and pulled the tie’s knot to his neck—“terrible things to try to unravel.”
“Be careful,” the other guard said, scowling as he turned. The two ambled back to their posts, muttering to each other as they went.
Trent stopped outside the reception hall and peered inside. Everyone still watched the king making his speech. He felt his right cheek, where Lillie had touched him.
“That was close,” Sieku said.
“Who gave us this tip?” Trent asked. “Originally.”
“A younger gentleman. Worked personal staff on the queen’s floor. Months ago.”
“Check through the entire file and cross-reference it with a few other queries.”
“For anything in particular?”
“Demons. Specific morphologies—humanoid affectation. Soul stones and how long they can be apart from their host. Anything about passabridges, too. Corroborate what we have on the three we used, the queen, and”—Trent paused.
“And what, sir?”
Trent sighed. “Nothing. Gettin ahead of myself.”
“May be frank, sir?”
“I hope you always are, Sieku.”
“The chances of anything coming of a search with parameters like that is countlessly infinitesimal.”
“Search for anything.” I don’t think our target is the queen anymore, he wanted to say but couldn’t be sure yet. His mind raced, trying to connect dots out of sequence. “A crack in the well,” he said to himself.
Sieku pitched a whistle. “Will you be leaving early?”
Trent wanted to. He looked through the bell window again. “It’s too awkward. Be on watch.”
“For what?”
“Anything. Virtual or physical.”
“Ha. Horrific, I like it.”
5
The hall’s ceiling vaulted four stories above the guests. Dancing shadows from flickering fires in hearths around the room balanced on exposed beams high above them. As T
rent walked back to his seat, the king spoke.
“Watching you grow is one of the greatest joys of my life. And as you transition this year from boy to man, so too will the world continue to burgeon in harmony—not by chance, but because it must. Nothing in life is arbitrary, not even felicitous. Ours are stories written by the gods themselves, and it is no accident that every person in this room is here. Father and son”—Brech gestured between them—“this, too, is no accident.”
Denard turned a stretched grin to his father.
“Let’s not get overly sentimental yet,” Trent said to the man who sat next to him as he pulled in his chair. “We’ve only just finished the third course.” The blond, who Trent didn’t know before tonight, chuckled.
Royal staff brought out the next course: poached Rine fish with a pumpkin mousseline sauce. The meat came from salmon that traveled upstream in the River Rine this time of year.
“But tonight, indeed, is for celebration,” said the king. “Eat more than your fill, drink more than you can handle, cheat on tomorrow for the vigor of today, and above of all: gods bless us and our continued peace.”
“Blessings to you,” the gathered intoned. Trent joined the saying out of time. A band, during muted applause, began an instrumental piece that hung well under the din of conversation.
Trent ate a token bite of fish, then set his silverware at five o’clock for staff to clear it. While he waited, his mind chewed through questions for which he had no answers. What had started as a fool’s investigation had devolved into aspersive implications that—not to undermine his urlan—didn’t horrify him so much as made him question a lot of choices he’d made in his life. He’d chased the ball of getting to the nether, and now that he’d caught it, he had no clue what in the hells to do with it.
As he listened to the conversations at his table through the rest of the fourth and fifth courses, the night’s tone changed. What mattered to others and what mattered objectively existed in seeming-opposition.
“I couldn’t care less about the Lowdowns,” the woman next to Trent said. Her voice, low in register, issued from her like a cork plugged one of her nostrils. Perhaps the hook in her nose resulted from a break that hadn’t mended properly, but that seemed odd since her lower jaw and irises glowed a shattering blue, replete with cybernetic lines. She wore a conservative dress with a Winstone collar that extended high up her neck. “They haven’t been competitive in years, and if the only way they can seek a championship is through doping”—
“There should just be a separate league where everyone is out with using Sardar or whatever newfangled drug they come up with,” said the man next to her. His pencil mustache lined his colorless upper lip. He batted his hand in front of his face. “It would be a lot more fun than just toeing the line. Ya know Pharaoh”—referring to a performance enhancer by its old street-name—“was illegal before the War, and now it’s used as an analgesic in nearly all sports arenas. It’s arbitrary and without objective codification what’s illicit and what’s not. If we leave this up to the board of the Liscerring committee, or worse: the Liscerring commissioner”—Trent’s focus shifted to a conversation across the table.
“Did you hear about the execution over in Sandeburrow?” a woman with preternatural white hair asked the man who sat next to her, as though the topic constituted typical dinner conversation. Her hair hung over her shoulder and served as part of her wardrobe over her left breast.
“Awful,” said the man. The buttons on his shirt strained each time he exhaled for his growing stomach, yet he cleared his plates as they came and even asked for a second helping of the fifth course: seared lamb with pumpkin-mint sauce and creamed pumpkin over steamed rice. Miss white-hair called the rotund gentleman ‘Lemon.’
“Are you named after the fruit?” asked Trent during a break in their conversation.
The gentleman bristled, and his lips puckered in mild antipathy. Trent got the idea people had questioned him of his name before. “I’m named after the symphony house in Doorwing.” His voice caught in his moustache, the ends of which had wetted for the man licking his continuously cracked lips. “And that house is named after Elector Lemon, the preceding commonstate official who served as his Majesty’s great-grandmother’s first Prime Elector.”
Trent nodded. “Huh.”
Lemon’s lips spread in an elfin smile.
The other guests knew each other, at least in a way. A few kept their conversations aside from the table as wait staff served a citrus sorbet, roasted duckling, and an apple salad with tangy vinaigrette in turn.
“There’s fucking pumpkin in everything,” a dark-haired woman said to a redhead who sat between her and Lemon.
Turkey pâté with salted pumpkin crackers constituted the meal’s ninth course.
Lemon tucked another napkin into his collar, though any debris that fell from his mouth and fingers bounced off his chest to his expanding stomach. “I’ve always asserted,” he said, his mouth half full of pâté, “that the commonstate should be abolished.” And though he didn’t say it, Trent knew, in that case, the man also held the view that the monarchy shouldn’t exist, either. “All this nonsense”—Lemon took another bite—“where every check passes by the king—the only member of the commonstate who isn’t elected, mind”—
“And why would he be?” the woman on Lemon’s right said. Her hair hung in a red plait down the right side of her head and onto her shoulder. She’d styled the left side of her head into an undercut. “The monarch’s right to rule is providentially divine. Do you think you know better than the gods, Elector?”
“Of course not,” said Lemon, though to Trent it sounded like token patronage. “But within the commonstate, which his Majesty’s however-many-greats grandfather”—
“Uncle,” the white-haired woman said.
“Yes, yes.” Lemon spread turkey pâté across a cracker, then set it down to prepare another. “Uncle. The commonstate exists at his Majesty’s ‘discretion,’ which means the electorate serves as governors within their realms but have no supersession against his Majesty’s word.”
“As it should be,” said the blond-haired man to Trent’s left. “You sound embittered that his Majesty doesn’t approve of Yarnle’s collective air traffic restructuring. That, at least, is the word around Arnin.” To his left, a man stroked the prong of beard on his chin and said nothing while he watched the table’s conversation through slit pupils. He wore Leynar robes the color of a desert lizard—brown with accents of copper and white—and had inked the whites of his eyes pink.
Lemon peered at the blond through beady eyes. “Yes, well informed, aren’t you, Bradle. The other side of the world requires different resources than his Majesty sees fit to proffer us, and he’s unwilling to relent on—well, anything.”
“And what would you suggest to fix such an imbalance?” the woman next to Trent said. “You can’t break up the union. The only way that might occur is if there’s another War, and gods forbid that ever happens. At least not in our lifetimes, please.”
“To speak of a dissolution borders on treason anyway,” Bradle said.
“What sounds like treason is merely sedition,” said Lemon, brushing his hand over his mustache. “And we’re hardly going that far, unless you’d suggest anyone questioning the king equates to wishing him gone. His Majesty makes choices that impact us all—every person on Coroth—and that’s such a simple fact. Yet he is often content to forget such contrivances, so it’s hardly anyone’s fault other than his Majesty’s that he creates board states where it’s fanciful to discuss such things. Perhaps if you ever unlatch from Whites’s teet, Bradle, you’ll eventually learn how to think and speak without her arm up your ass.” He glowered at the blond, who stared back at him with a cool smile.
“Anyway, madam Elector,” Lemon continued, “you needn’t worry about another War, even if one did spawn in our lifetimes—or that of our great-great-grandchildren for that matter. M’keth doesn’t always show up, and with
him gone just after the last, I doubt Coroth will see the avatar or his ilk for a very long time.”
“But before the War,” said Bradle, “the last time he showed was only two centuries and change after the War of the Cradle, in which a lieutenant—that Crippler of Princes—led the demon horde. They fought against—I want to say it was Kateryn Perinold.”
“You’d be correct,” the man with the pencil-moustache said. “And while we’re on the topic, Towers was hardly ignorable.”
“Yes, and pissed M’keth off enough to make such a push in the next.” Lemon said.
The man nodded. “That’s my point.”
Lemon ignored him. “The world will hopefully never again see the destruction wrought from that Greatest of Wars. But M’keth does disappear for a while after a loss. It’s hardly a wonder, in that case, that the Grand Master took off. Peacetime Masters rarely have anything more to do in their Seat than push papers, counsel the king, and settle faction disputes.”
“Gentlemen,” said Trent, barely managing to sound casual. “This Teardrop politics is wearisome. Can you at least wait until the electorate is in session? Or should I pay tuition for a one-oh-one history lesson?”
Conversation at the table paused.
“I suppose you’re right,” Bradle said as he eyed Lemon, who hmph’d. “We’re here to celebrate, not wonder if the Grand Master would consider Yarnle’s position virtuous.”
“I don’t think he’d give a shit,” Trent said.
“Well.” Mirth accompanied Bradle’s word. “You’d probably be right. Mr. Geno, isn’t it?”
Trent fixed his face against the crease that formed on his brow. “Yeah.”
“The Mr. Geno whose labor, I hope I’m correct in saying, furnished our entire meal?”
“In part. I provided what the king asked of me.”
“Splendid,” said Lemon. He gestured for the woman next to him to pass another tray of crackers to him. “You know the world needs more people like you—those who aren’t afraid to live simply and provide well for others. Though I must ask, in that case, how a pumpkin farmer now sits at a table with electorate politicians.”
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