To his list of reasons why he needed to find Farisa, Pann added one more: having a witch in tow would make it much easier to do something about Kayla, the Patriarch’s new assistant whom he hated with volcanic fury. He hated her stupid ponytail. He hated the space between her eyes. He hated her collarbone for some reason. He hated the sound of her voice. He hated the way Hampus Bell actually listened whenever she stupidly expressed whatever stupid thing had stupided itself into existence inside her stupid head.

This rage made Pann pace. It led him to open drawers and close them, loudly. It had him looking under his desk, as if he would find a magical bludgeon unaccountably there, a sign from the heavens that his moment had come. He punched the palm of his own hand. He paced, and paced some more.

Kayla had seen him in Hampus Bell’s office at the time of his flatulent prank, and there was more risk than he could accept of her telling the boss about it, and this meant now that the woman’s existence had no purpose but some kind of blackmail of Pann by the universe, and he refused to be extorted.

He opened and drawer and violently shook the papers therein. He slammed it shut. He paced.

On a sunny mid-May day, late in the morning, the Patriarch put a hand on the rim of Pann’s office door. “Mind if I come in?”

Pann, as he shut a drawer, smiled. “What would it mean if I did?”

Hampus closed the door behind himself. “I would prefer it if you stopped looking for Farisa.”

“Oh, I was just pacing.” He smiled. “If I were looking for her, I wouldn’t expect to find her in this office.”

“This is no time for jokes. I know you’ve been sending wires to Exmore, asking about her. Please stop. Farisa is dead, Pann. We benefit by prolonging the mystery, perhaps, but the real Farisa has been gone for years—the girl in Cait Forest is almost certainly an impostor.”

Pann spread his feet, and his stomach muscles tightened, slightly lifting his huge belly. “I will comply with your order, but I remind you that nobody is sure—”

Bell raised his voice. “I am sure. Call the search off.”

“I owe you nothing but gratitude, Hiero Bell, but I ask you this in respect. Why was a fire set in Cait Forest?”

“Forest fires happen all the time. Blame it on nature. The gods, if you believe in that.”

A Z-6 who looked too young to work here arrived, holding a yellow envelope. “Am I coming at a bad time?”

Bell said, “No, we’re finished.” He walked away.

Pann swiped the Z-6’s envelope. This was the kind of paper that dried out his hands. “Banana pulp. Why do we use this cheap tropical garbage?”

“I don’t know, Hiero.”

Pann opened the envelope and checked the contents. “Thank,” he said.

“Thank whom?”

“When you get to a certain age and level, you get to drop the S. It’s just ‘thank.’”

Pann returned to his office. Nothing made him happier than a stiff envelope in the morning. There was probably half a ream of paper in there. This was what he loved about the Global Company: there was always more work to be done. Telegraphy was now coming from Exmore in heroic volume—the past three days’ reports, if bound together in a book, would have been a tome big enough to kill a small dog.

Before dealing with any of that, though, he had to stop by the office of the Z-5 he had assigned to find Farisa.

“I need complete silence on Farisa, for now. Continue the project, but pretend you’ve been told to call it off. Warming up the boss is taking longer than I expected.”

“Will note,” he said. “Anything else you need?”

“In fact, there is.” He had loathed Kayla every minute since meeting her, and his suspicions about her intentions were multiplying like mushrooms in a bathhouse. “Kayla. Bell’s new assistant. I want you to follow every move of hers. Report everything to me, at once, but don’t tell anyone you’re doing it.”

#

A report arrived from the Office of Statistics late in the afternoon.

The official explanation of Farisa’s fate had reverted to the one initially believed—the woman in Cait Forest had been an impostor, Farisa Parthendi, a barmaid’s daughter from one of those nameless port cities on Lorania’s northern coast, and it did not make sense to investigate either woman by this name, because both were dead. Suspecting no Farisa Parthendi existed, Pann had asked Statistics to give him birth records for every girl named Farisa born in such a port city between ‘70 and ‘75, finding 827 such records. Not one allowed for the existence of a person fitting the necessary description, and the intensity of confidence in the coverup suggested strongly that the woman who torched Cait Forest was, in fact, the notorious child witch.

“You’re a fucking genius, Hiero Bell.”

The Patriarch had been sabotaging efforts to find Farisa. At first glance, this seemed at odds with the man’s true interests, given the history between his family and hers, as an ordinary idiot would have committed every resource to finding the girl, but this Patriarch, an extraordinary idiot, was the kind who had flashes of brilliance in spite of himself. He had been obstructing efforts to find Farisa, not out of a desire not to have it done, but because he refused to have it done by an unworthy man, some lance corporal or hireling bounty hunter.

He wants Farisa captured, but he wants me to be the one to do it.

Telling Pann to stop the search for Farisa was, in fact, Hampus’s roundabout way of assigning the job singularly to him. Once Pann completed the task, he’d finally get his long-deserved promotion to Z-2. The denial of permission was not made to prevent an action, but to raise the stakes and ensure it was done right, since no one would announce completion of a forbidden task unless the work proved excellent in all ways.

He looked again at his map of Exmore, moving the various tokens—coins, paperclips, bits of sock lint—that represented Company troops on the city’s perimeter. Soldats had surely grumbled about what must have seemed like unnecessary movement, but his bottle was now airtight. Somewhere inside it was his fairy.

“Now, the vyrim,” he said with anger in his voice.

The Vehu of Exmore, as they had in Moyenne until ‘87, practiced self-governance, with their own laws and police. Worse, they still had courts which, due to Vehu superstitions forbidding the taking of bribes, were difficult to control. Knocking over the District’s barricades would be easy work—he didn’t doubt his men already completed the task—but taking the city in totality had become more complicated just now, due to the Patriarch’s “official” disinterest in the task. He had planned to use six hundred troops; instead, he could only marshal a few dozen. This would not be enough force to take and keep the District.

Pann called for his assistant, a Z-6. He used to have a Z-5, but whenever Pann promoted a secretary that high, some Z-2 would swipe him for himself so, having learned better, he now promoted incompetents and held back the ones he didn’t want to lose.

“Good morning, Hiero,” said the gaunt Z-6.

“I need you to fetch Edmund and Amy.”

“Roger.”

“No. I don’t need Roger for this. Just Edmund and Amy. “

“I mean, ‘yes, sir.’”

“We don’t have a Yesir. We wouldn’t hire a nyrr—never mind. Just get those two.”

Edmund arrived first, of course. Men were dumb and eager and always a few minutes early. Women, who liked to test rules, were usually on time (at the Global Company, on time was late). A dab of mustard sat on Edmund’s chin. Amy did not seem to notice.

Pann leaned back in his chair. “Edmund, did you have anything to do with the fire in Cait Forest?”

“No.”

“Let me ask you again. Did you have anything to do with the fire in Cait Forest?”

“To be honest, Hiero Grackenheit”—he traded a nervous glance with Amy—“I didn’t even know there had been a fire out there until everyone here started talking about it.”

“I’m offering you a promotion. Fucking take it. I ask again. Did you have anything to do with the fire in Cait Forest?”

Edmund said, “Umm…”

As if embarrassed by the diffidence of the man beside him, Amy fidgeted.

She had been here for more than a year, but still had a strange innocence about her. This was another reason Pann disliked hiring women: They weren’t built for Company work. It wasn’t their fault. The gods—speaking loosely, because everyone of sound mind knew no god but grot existed—had put two genders in natural balance: one strong and rational and hideous, the other beautiful and gentle and soft. On the other hand, if power and beauty could exist in one human creature, it would create a monster. Amy did not seem to be a monster, but she did seem odd. She could follow a line of reasoning or argue a case better than most men; she could even do math. The hormone-belching baby-making parts must have been taken out of her before puberty, but she hadn’t suffered for it—she was not at all ugly. That said, Pann couldn’t imagine sleeping with her—not even with her consent. Amy was a woman, but she was also one of the few truly competent people Headquarters had. Dipping in would make her stupid—possibly, make them both stupid—and that would cost the Company far too much money.

Stolen novel; please report.

“Let’s step back,” Pann said. “We need to pay someone for setting the fire.”

Amy replied, “We don’t really know who set the fire.”

“Correct. We do not know. It could have been Farisa, but we’re not going to pay her, obviously. If we reward this sort of work, though, we’ll see more of it. We want total chaos in Exmore. Mayhem, from street to street.”

“Why?” Amy held her skirt down as she moved her leg. “Chaos is harder to control than order.”

“It is, of course.” Pann stood, and began to pace, as he had been doing a lot of late, but this time he felt the world sway with him as he walked. “In regard to Exmore, we must be creative. Chaos is what we want. Chaos will do work for us that we can’t do for ourselves.”

“What’s in Exmore?”

“The fairy. My fairy.”

Amy’s eyebrows moved. “Your what?”

“Pann’s obsessed with Farisa,” Edmund said.

Pann licked his lips. “I sure am.”

Amy said, “Because?”

Edmund said, “She’s a mage.”

“I thought mages were—”

“You’re correct,” Pann said to Amy. “A total dead end, the way we were using them. This is all about... this other thing. You were in grammar school when Loran fell, but she’s a part of our history. We tried for years to find her, even when the world thought she was dead, and we haven’t had much success.”

Amy looked aside. “Didn’t Hiero Bell say—?”

“Bell is my boss, not yours, and he’s a busy man.”

Edmund and Amy looked at each other.

Pann sat back down. “She is a top priority, but he can’t say it because he doesn’t want to fail in front of the whole Company. So, I have to pretend to be running around him, and yes, I’m glad you brought that up because I need discretion from both of you, because this mission cannot be talked about to anyone outside my office. Got it?”

They both nodded.

“Edmund, we know that Farisa’s in Exmore. We can spend a hundred thousand—”

Amy asked, “Is that enough?”

“No, but it’s all I can cut away without raising questions. Edmund, how would you catch this bottled Fay?”

Amy would give a better answer, Pann knew, but he was a gentleman at heart. Giving Edmund some spotlight time would allow him to impress Amy, and if Pann could get Edmund laid, it would be good for morale.

“Thirty thousand for police,” Edmund said.

“Police?” Amy said.

Pann replied, “Bribes, honey. Great call, Edmund. Very smart. We’ve already put fifty into it.”

“We already have troops in there for, uh…” Edmund scratched his head.

“Food riots,” Amy said.

“Good observation, Edmund. You’ll be doing my job in no time, and yes, you are correct. We’ve had a presence there for months, and Exmore is now surrounded. How do we flush our fairy out?”

“Scare the place up.” Edmund was talking with his hands, which, in the Global Company, made a person seem smart and decisive. “Get an old-fashioned Loranian-style witch hunt—”

“Kiddo, you were in diapers then.”

Edmund seemed not to know what to say.

“What? You’re young. You’re handsome. It’s a compliment.”

“Search every house, of course.”

“Of course. We’ve gone door-to-door through the lowlands, but haven’t found her.” On his map, he scribbled out the sections of the city that had been searched. “There’s not a whole lot left. Where, based on this, do you think she’d be hiding?”

Edmund said, “She could be in the Vehu District.”

“Correct, and the vyrim have all kinds of tricks and traps.”

Amy wrote, on a notepad, Vehu—learn more about them.

Edmund stared blankly, not sure what to say next.

Pann leaned back in his chair. “We can’t simply attack the Vehu District. It would be too obvious, and it would draw public sympathy in the wrong direction, which might lead to a hole in our bottle. So?”

“The answer could be....” Edmund twirled a pen with his fingers. “No, not that.”

Pann traced his finger along the double line on his map that represented Andor Street.

“I wonder.... No, that wouldn’t work either.”

“What do we do in Exmore that no one knows about?”

“Chaff,” said Amy. “We write most of the graffiti, don’t we?”

“We do. We’ve trained the pessimou and the vyrim to hate each other. It’s ironic, because it was only a few decades ago that Vehu tried to outlaw the caste system that makes pessimou, pessimou. But people have short memories, everywhere you go. Excellent observation, Amy. So, what’s next?”

Edmund stared with a blank face. Amy’s eyes showed a bit more light and focus, but she hadn’t yet built the confidence to blurt out her first thoughts.

“I can’t be the only one who sees this.” Pann stood up again to retrieve a blackboard on which he’d drawn a flowchart of strategies and counterstrategies. “We control the graffiti. We’ve already stirred up hatred between two ethnic groups—we’ve been doing that for years now—and it would only take a little nudge to bring about—”

Amy raised her hand as if she were still in school. Her brown eyes had this studious look, as if longing for a professor’s approval. Pann adjusted his pants to accommodate an erection.

She said, “Civil war.”

“Right, and in the chaos”—Pann grabbed an invisible fly—“we get ourselves a fairy.”

#

The day was giving out, but this was the time of year when the sun shone late, and nobody who wanted a career could leave during daylight hours, so workers lingered like the undead. Little was getting done, but everyone had to pretend to be productive. Pann loved summer for that reason. Watching people frown and pretend to work as their children’s bedtimes passed, well… that alone was worth all the sweat stains and heat rashes and odd smells the season brought with it.

He decided that he would sleep in his office tonight. He didn’t much like his apartment. He still remembered that time ten years ago when he had fired all his maids, forgotten to replace them, and ended up with an infestation of mice. The filthy rodents didn’t know they were in a million-grot apartment. Although a decade had passed since then, he still saw a shadow sometimes, usually in the evening, that made cause for worry. Others might have considered it sad, had they known how often he slept at Headquarters, but he would start his real living once he made Z-2. You couldn’t do much these days on a measly half million grot per year.

Thinking on this, on how much everything cost, he wondered why the workers here bothered to procreate at all. An average person’s life was a long watch of the clock, and endless gaze at the slow-to-die summer sky, a long spell of work followed by recovery from work, only to return to work. What was the point of having a family if it meant one got five minutes to watch one’s child sleep, then a drink or two to clear the nerves of the office, followed by a rushed breakfast before returning to work at eight o’clock the next morning? Did the poor not realize that, if they developed the foresight to stop breeding like cats, they could make themselves the last generation to live so badly?

Hampus Bell, eyeglasses reddened by twilight, poked his head into Pann’s office. “What’s the status of the Hegemon?”

“She sails tomorrow at dawn.”

“Very good,” Hiero Bell said.

The steam-powered ironclad would sail to Bezelia, then south along the coast, into oceans where the temperature reached seven, eight flags. The voyage was doomed, of course. The Company, having run out of world to conquer, had tried every possible path to a Southern Hemisphere that must exist, as a matter of geometric inevitability, but that had proven itself inaccessible. The Mountain Road, beyond Switch Cave, fell into the Ivory Ashes, with scorching heat and sandstorms that could strip a man to the bone—an uninhabitable desert with no end. An ocean voyage, Pann knew, would fare no better. The records of Smitz Bell’s experiments on the human tolerance of heat and humidity were still available to anyone, Z-4 or higher, who wanted to read them—a sea-level venture through the equatorial region would have every sailor steamed to death, regardless of fitness, within twelve hours.

Pann said, “The vessel will hold up under a force-ten wind.”

Hampus looked out Pann’s window. “That’s great news.”

“The ship’ll survive, even if you cook everything in it.”

“Fantastic.”

One hid emotions at work, of course, but Pann found it unusually difficult to hide his glee. The Hegemon’s journey would fail—of that, he was sure—and the office was a place where someone else’s failure, in addition to being entertaining, presented opportunities. Engineering—it is an eternal truth of Company life that engineers can be blamed without consequence—answered to Z-2 Michael Poor and, although Pann had nothing against the man, it would justify Pann’s own elevation to the rank if it could be shown that Hiero Poor was not, in fact, perfect.

“To be honest,” Bell said, “I think this talk about going farther south is nonsense—sixteen degrees latitude, fifteen degrees, who cares?—but it gets the diddly scientists off my back.”

“You should send them on the voyage.”

“I’ll consider it.” Hampus tapped a finger on the windowpane. “Good work, Pann. Very good work.”

Pann smiled. A feeling of warmth crossed his body and overlapped itself.

“You should hear their newest idea, these scientists.”

“Oh?”

“They tell me that, even at the equator, it’s cold in the deep sea because there’s no light. Half a flag above freezing, they say. So they want to build a ship that goes under the water.”

Pann laughed. “That’s an innovation? Ships go underwater all the time.”

“It didn’t make sense to me either. They come up with so much frapping nonsense to justify their salaries, but really, I’m just paying these people not to start another Reverie. You want my opinion, all our researchers belong in a madhouse.”

“Twenty years of education to end up in a dungeon with vagrants and spent mages.”

Hiero Bell laughed. “One of Poor’s men—a Z-6 who hasn’t figured out he’s not allowed to have ideas yet—showed me his design for indoor cooling, which we know is thermodynamically impossible.” He slapped Z-3 Pann on the back. “You know, you’ve been working quite hard, which I appreciate, but you should feel free to take a few days off, if you’d like. It’s almost summer.”

“I’m happy here.” What use were vacations to a man whose work involved plunging cities into violent unrest? “Truly, I am.”

“That’s good. I’m glad you’re happy. Let me know if there’s anything you need.”

“Actually, there is one thing.”

“What?”

Pann drew a deep breath. “I manage the G-Fund, which—as you know, Hampus—exceeds two hundred billion grot per year.”

“And you do a great job of it.”

“When you travel, I keep this office afloat.”

Hampus rounded his shoulders up. “You do.”

“So…” Pann’s neck tightened. Was Hiero Bell really going to make him grovel for something he had deserved five years ago?

“Oh, I get it.” Hampus smiled. “I get it. You’re absolutely right. I’ve asked too much of you. I’ll lighten your load. There are a lot of tasks you get stuck with that Kayla could probably handle.”

“No! It’s not that at all. I love the work. What I mean is, well… it’s not me who says this, but…”

Hampus Bell’s eyebrow moved.

“People ask me why I haven’t made Z-2. Things would get done faster if I had the credibility that comes with the title.”

“You manage the dog-fanged G-Fund. Shouldn’t that be credibility enough?”

“It is, it is, but you know how people are.” Was this about money? Was the world’s only trillionaire keeping him down at Z-3, just to pinch pennies? He broke down and said, “Can I ask when I’ll be made a Z-2?”

Hampus Bell smiled. “I’m still in the room, so yes, it is physically feasible for you to ask.”

“May I ask when I’ll be made a Z-2?”

“It seems a harmless question. Yes, you have my permission.”

“I’m asking.”

“Go ahead. Ask.”

“When will I be made a Z-2?”

Hampus Bell rapped a knuckle on Pann’s desk. “When your performance merits it.”