His head was turned to regard his client. Ixi Yaneyar was smiling, a tight grin that would become the true villainous smirk once Elteria Drayne returned the verdict, throwing out the guilds’ case.
On his other side, unseen by his mortal eyes, Ms. Dyrdac wasn’t smiling.
And there… there it is…
A destiny in which the newest addition to the Yaneyar brood changed Ixi’s heart. One where his money was given to a number of charitable causes – only a nest egg kept to protect his family from eventual poverty –
He followed where the money went. Saw the lives changed by a temple’s increased ministrations. Saw the new schools educating the young.
Saw past it.
Over four-fifths of Yaneyar’s contribution was wasted. And a small fraction of the waste was put towards evil causes, malice far beyond Yaneyar’s darkest imaginations enacted upon the bodies of the young and vulnerable. The enslavement of the weak and witless. Experiments of a magical nature, or events of a more carnal quality – equally ugly. Equally lethal to flesh and soul, in the end.
It was a vanishingly miniscule percentage of the money, and yet –
How can I judge it? I can’t even see it all. There’s – there’s Shadow, over everything…
He knew how to enact the future. He knew how to let it flow through him, out into the void of nothingness wherein it would inhabit the shape of things to come. But he was no longer certain he wanted to.
“You’re smiling,” Garone murmurs, disgust, abhorrence in his tone, “but Ms. Dyrdac isn’t.”
Even that much might be enough – enough to tip the scales of fate towards the future where so – much – darkness –
No, he thought. Change it.
“You’re smiling,” Garone murmured, naked curiosity in his tone, “but Ms. Dyrdac isn’t.”
He watched the man’s expression change. He saw the villainous smirk slip out of the shelves, falling to the floor, into the consuming shadow below existence.
The drool, the sickening smells – they vanished too.
Breathing a short sigh of relief, Garone then looked up just in advance of Elteria Drayne re-entering the room, her Sheaf of Judgement under her arm. The documents would precisely outline the Listeners’ reasoning and the previous Judgements they referenced; after the case was closed they would be returned to the archive for transcription, and cross-referenced for future use in similar situations.
And the Magisterium will pay for their covert efforts.
There was no way this wasn’t going to end in new law, forcing guilds with monopolies on exotic weaponry to share more information with the governing bodies. The pressure was being applied in the right places. To an outside observer unaware of the nuances of the politics involved, it would look like a zero-sum game. What was the benefit of ensuring that such guild-conglomerates, many of them Magisterium-funded or at least in receipt of Magisterium aid, reported their new developments to the Magisterium?
Scrutiny. Officials from their own organisations with absolutely no notion of such funds, such aid packages, would look at the records. They would see the truth. The subtle practises would be forced to change, or at least find new, cleverer loopholes.
He would pursue them all the same. This victory today was only a small one, but a victory nonetheless. Not quite enough to put a smile on his face, in the current circumstances, but that was alright. Garone could smile later, in private, when it wouldn’t have such a strong effect on the world’s fate.
Lady Drayne approached her seat and turned to face the room; she placed her hands on the red-velvet grips of the chair’s arms and started to lower herself –
What is… what is happening?
It was with a deep, soul-trembling trepidation that Garone noted the darkness sweeping across the room. The sky itself dimmed, the illumination in the room dipping precipitously, and it took a few moments for the glow-globes to compensate for the sudden loss of light, leaving them all almost blind for a moment. Within the space of five seconds – by the time Elteria Drayne’s backside hit the velvet – the courtroom was giving the appearance of an evening hearing, rather than mid-morning.
Garone looked up with everyone else, not privy to the turn in the weather ahead of the others. Along with all the mere mortals in the chamber, he stared upwards into the bank of thick, dark-grey cloud that had blanketed the heavens. Where just moments before there had been a few white wisps contorting against an azure-blue sky, there was now a mountain-range of storm-walls.
The crunching drum of thunder, tearing open the air. The wind screamed like it was aflame, but there was no lightning to be seen.
“This is most irregular,” the only-slightly raised voice of Elteria Drayne came down from the judge’s dais. “Clerk, send a missive to Environmental Wiz-“
Now lightning split the sky, striking nearby this time. The white flash illuminated everything, and Garone found the moment yawning, a whirlpool, drawing him in –
Whilst all the room about him froze – while the world itself waited with bated breath – Garone got to his feet in the lightning’s lifespan, and stared as two figures entered the courtroom, moving with him.
He regarded them as best he could, in the vivid white radiance of the storm’s fire. They crossed to the centre of the floor in a flick-flick of motion even he couldn’t follow, and he only realised who they were once they came to a stop.
It is a good thing they aren’t my enemies.
Pitch-black clothing – one a familiar robe, with white hourglasses, upon a tall masculine frame – one less familiar, featureless and clingy, upon an undeveloped young woman.
The fine, rune-etched bow slung over the girl’s shoulder would’ve announced her identity anyway, even if he hadn’t recognised the hollow darkness inside the hood, the faceless black mask.
She’s here. Nightfell herself.
The lightning’s radiance still clung to the air, blinding.
“Advance it a moment, Celestium!” Nightfell barked.
It wasn’t long enough for any of the mortals in the room to move appreciably, but between them the two superior seers dialled the clock forwards an eye-blink. The head-hurting light faded, replaced with muted shadows, storm-clouds pinned in place to the instant, awaiting another thunderous release.
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Garone recognised the voice, though. It had changed – harsher, tougher, yes, but it was the same young girl.
Killstop. It really is her.
At one point, when they’d first met, he’d thought himself on her level. He’d even found her company appealing, in an opposites-attract kind of fashion. But it’d soon become apparent just how vastly she outstripped him. He was to her, as any of these time-locked mortals about them were to him.
Weak.
“Satisfied?” Timesnatcher asked icily.
“It’ll do,” she bit back. “So…” Garone could feel her attention falling upon him, though he couldn’t perceive the eyes behind the mask, inside the hood. “Mr. Corteno, a young, up-and-coming lawyer. Who’d have thought it? I would’ve pegged you for a priest, truth be told.”
“Or a poet,” Timesnatcher murmured.
Garone didn’t answer, leaning into his proclivity for patience.
What do they want with me?
“You know why they let you do what you do, don’t you?” Nightfell asked, her tone jovial, almost mocking.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he answered.
“Why they let you act against them.”
He bit his lip, a reaction he wouldn’t have ordinarily allowed himself to engage in – but his options were limited here, now. He was just a man.
“I have my suspicions.”
She nodded slowly. “They know you won’t live long. You aren’t one of the great ones – not that it would make a difference if you were, really. You’ll never live to become a power in this world,” she tilted her head as if to glance about the Troglodyte, “never live to challenge them. They will allow you the meagre victories you think are so important, and only co-opt them in the end into their larger strategies. You are nothing. No one, Garone Corteno.”
Now he smiled, wore it like a shield.
Can she follow the changes her words produce? he wondered. Does she think she distresses me with this posturing? The girl’s mighty – of that there can be no doubt.
But is she that mighty?
“This whole saga is the bastard offspring of an argument between two members of the Arrealbord. Over zombie trafficking, of all things.”
She laughed, like it was funny.
No. What she found funny was the fact she could see the source of the dispute, and he couldn’t.
“What do you want?” he asked at length.
Nightfell laughed again. “Not nice, not knowing, is it?”
“You come here,” Garone said quietly, “to my place of work, in breach of all known law, custom and social nicety – which records you were forced to steal in order to uncover my true identity I am uncertain, but I have been operating as a champion for nigh on a year, and have achieved great-enough prominence that I very much doubt my file has not been granted the highest levels of confidentiality –”
“You’re reeling in the wrong line, there, pal,” Nightfell cut him off.
He wasn’t used to being interrupted without expecting it. He felt the urge to grind his teeth, but settled for pressing his lips together.
“We’ve always known your name,” Timesnatcher said, in a bored voice.
It was all he’d said to him and, for all Garone knew, all he was going to say. To Garone, who felt he knew the city’s chief guardian as well as any could hope to, Timesnatcher sounded desperately unhinged.
“It doesn’t matter now, does it?” Nightfell snapped, in a rhetorical tone. “Real names, fake names… I don’t know if the katra-heads have pulled it off, but this is it. This is the Incursion.”
“This…” Garone looked up through the glass ceiling at the dark skies once more. “This is an Incursion?”
“Of course,” she spat back.
“The last,” Timesnatcher said with relish.
“The last?” Garone heard his own voice leave its usual husky register, climbing for the heights, surprising him with its intensity.
“Everseer’s done her bit.” Nightfell folded her arms across her chest.
“Everseer failed,” Garone replied instantly. “Do you see an emptied city, or fear and doubt ready to reap? Her speech –“
“Do you think one such as she would not know?” The girl was snarling, real hostility in her voice. “Why leave it until the final year, if there was a hope such a speech would succeed? No… No. She was looking for the unforeseen, praying to… whatever dark gods she worships for a sliver of a possibility.”
“But surely,” Garone looked from her to Timesnatcher, “surely you do not believe her…”
“It matters little.” Nightfell even gave a slight shrug to punctuate her words. “There are no arch-sorcerers left to us – in that, at least, she succeeded. When we fail, the heretics are going to sit safe in the Thirteen Candles behind their shields – behind the twin sorcerers’ shields, you see? – and they’ll protect the archmages they can from the soul-takers. Expecting resistance, the demons will unintentionally run everyone out of the city. Within a month, no one will remain. Then the dragons have their big old Return feast at an empty table. The heretics will win. The Realm will be saved.”
“You… sound like a heretic,” Garone said with difficulty.
Timesnatcher laughed lightly, delicately, and a shiver ran up Garone’s spine.
“How rude.” Nightfell sighed. “We have about eight seconds before the Bells start, and four minutes before it really begins in earnest.” The seeress reached up as if to unsling her bow. “We were going to get into position, but we decided we could really do with your help… Firenight Square’s looking bad, never mind Knuckle Market. Yes, again. Could you take the Sunset Keep off my plate?”
She took her mask in her hand instead of her bow, and removed it. She shook back her cowl.
A relatively plain face with a button nose. Brown hair in loose tangles, streaked with bright white locks. A disarming smile.
“Without you, our city dies tonight. The heretics win. I don’t intend to let that happen. Are you with us?”
Garone stared at her.
And when haven’t I answered the call?
He was on the verge of retorting when she saw it coming – she bared even more of her teeth, almost grinning.
“Tonight would’ve been the night, good old Garone. You’d see what’s in store, and it would be enough for you. But not now. Not anymore.”
He was on the edge of a revelation. The shadow fell aside, and he read the spines of the books, even if he didn’t know their contents.
Not anymore – if only to ensure the city doesn’t end up in the hands of you two.
Words that would never cross his lips. She was no enchanter, and he had an amulet provided by… someone. Someone trustworthy. At least she’d never know the depth of his mistrust.
He’d always fought alongside them as though he were fighting for them, as though he were an employee in Timesnatcher’s pay.
No longer.
He looked between them.
“I did not foresee a need for my daggers.”
The former Killstop’s grin disappeared, replaced with a shocked expression – then finally she gave up the veneer of sanity, cackling like a maniac.
He could barely control his reactions, feeling his eyes widen, his pulse quicken with fear, changes she could hardly help but read –
She didn’t care, and, still crowing, did something with her wrists –
His glittering daggers were there in her hands, silver and gold.
“How…” He halted his tongue, then re-started. “You found my –“
“Oh – oh dear…” Nightfell recovered her breath bit by bit. “You’re killing me, you know that don’t you? You think I – I didn’t br-bring enough w-w-weapons!… And th… these!”
She descended again into laughter, twisting his daggers carelessly in her hands like they were no more deadly than wooden cutlery.
“Here. T-take them, damn it… ow ow it hurts…”
She tossed them to him suddenly, with no regard for the difference in potential between them, and it was all he could do to catch them before they impaled him.
“Oh! Bahahaha!” She actually found it hilarious, and she had to gulp down lungfuls of air to regain her composure. “Sorry… sorry about that. Getting a bit… oh, gods… a bit excited.”
“Are we ready?” Timesnatcher grunted. “I can’t hold this forever on my own, not like this. Half a second’s spent.”
“Patience,” she soothed, her voice finally settled. “Garone needs us to turn our backs, for all the good it’s worth. He isn’t used to getting changed in front of people who can see him moving.”
She must’ve had a demiskin there, at her belt or under the folds of her clothing, but he hadn’t a hope of seeing it as she produced his robe from out of nowhere. In the same motion she hurled the cloth garment at him with such eager alacrity that it smacked heavily into him, almost bowling him over.
“There.” She spun about, folding her arms, and Timesnatcher silently copied her.
Garone ground his teeth together, but he did his duty, stripping out of the lawyer’s robe to his undergarments, the thin cotton smock and loose pants that were his custom. He pulled the wide neck of the champion’s robe over his head and slid his hands in the loose sleeves, donning his true work-clothes, becoming Starsight.
Not for you, Timesnatcher. Not for you, Killstop.
For you, Glaif. For you, Illodin.
For Mund.
He‘d retrieved his mask from its hiding-spot at the bottom of the deep hood, and now had the white robe with its faint stars almost in place – he shrugged, getting his shoulders into place –
“So – Starsight – we were just wondering. Well… Timesnatcher here was wondering, really, given his… priorities. How long have you been meeting him?”
She didn’t turn, and he didn’t sense danger in her voice. Just plain curiosity.
“Meeting who?”
He made his final adjustments to the gleaming fabric, and lifted his eyes to regard them once more.
Nightfell’s head twisted about, her cruel eyes impaling him worse than any ensorcelled dagger. Her smile was glorious in its cruelty, its animal enjoyment.
“Why, Neverwish of course!”
* * *