1 THE PROFESSOR

I leaned my head back and watched the smoke from my pipe rise to the arched beams above. Orange sunlight streamed through the glass window and set the wisps on fire. From outside, I heard the clatter of feet and the drawl of young confident voices punctuated by girlish laughter.

Footsteps fell softly on the carpet then the chair on the other side of the desk squeaked as the professor sat down. I moved my head to face him while the rest of me stayed put. He was already glaring which took some of the softness out of his apology.

“Sorry to keep you waiting. My last class was freshmen and they all feel their questions are of lethal importance.” I knew the feeling.

“That’s all right. I was admiring the architecture.”

“Yes, so what can I do for you?”

He was hunched over his hands with his fingers wound together. His doughy face had been clean-shaven a few days ago and his eyes were pushed into it like nuts on a Dellon cookie. If he had chosen any work besides school teaching people would have called him professor anyway.

“As I said in the hallway I’m looking for a student of yours.” I said.

“And under what authority are you asking about her?” I hadn’t said it was a girl, but I let it slide.

“No authority. This is a personal matter.” I said.

He sighed. “I can't get in the middle of lovers quarrels. I must ask you to leave.”

“Nothing like that either. I've been hired…”

“I thought you said it was a personal matter?”

“Personal to someone.” I said. He wasn’t amused.

“Sir, this Institution is funded from the public grant. Thus, we keep strict records of all known relatives of our students. If any information is to be given out regarding a student it must be given directly to the families or their authorized representatives noted in the tables.”

“This person hasn’t got any family.” That stopped him. Now that we were sure who we were talking about he quit playing apathetic.

“If this student has no family then who hired you?” He said.

“An interested party, someone who has been in their life for a while, a kind of adoptive parent if you like.” He didn’t.

“If they are the guardian of this student they would be on the books and you would need…”

“They’re not. I said a kind of adoptive parent, nothing official.”

He blew air out of his nose sharply and straightened up, or I should say he lifted his head to look down on me.

“This won’t do. I can’t discuss students with outside parties.”

“Not even if there’s a life at stake?”

He paused a bit.

“If you think this student’s in trouble then go to the police.”

“I want her found safe, not entered into the table of missing persons and forgotten.”

“You want her found?” He lay on the first word like it might get away.

“Or else I don’t get paid.” I said.

“Ah, and what about me? Do I get some kind of compensation for risking my job?” His disgust poured out with the question.

“You don’t want anything.”

“Ha, No?”

“No.”

“So I'd just risk my job for nothing?”

“And your life too, I’d wager.”

“And why is that?”

“Because she’s in trouble and you’re the type of person that won’t let it stay that way if you can help it.” I said.

It was a lie, but he leaned back and looked out the window like I had just let out a secret truth. I did a very good job of not smiling.

“Let's say that I am. Then what?” He said.

“I need the names of any students who were close to Liana.” The name struck him harder than I thought it would. Maybe he did care, or maybe he was afraid someone else would be coming to question him soon, someone with eyes stitched on their shoulders.

“I can't do that.” He said.

“Can't help me find her?”

“I can't give you the names of any other students. I can tell you where she lived, at least the dormitory.”

“I know that already, the number too.” He didn’t like that.

“Then why come to me? What else could I give you? I'm just her Professor.”

“I heard you two were close and I’d rather not rely on the testimonies of students if I don’t have to.” I said.

“Heard we were close? Close how? Who said that?”

“I just heard it around.” I said.

He stared at me a bit then he sighed again.

“I think this is a waste of time. I think you’re not who you say you are and tomorrow I’m going to the Police and I’ll report her missing myself. I think they’ll do more than just put her name on the tables and I think you know that.”

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“Who do you think I am?” I said.

“What?”

“You said I’m not who I claim to be so who am I?” I said.

“A thug! Or worse! Someone she got mixed up with and now that she’s not around you’re worried about the police getting involved. Maybe it’s you she’s running from and that’s why she ran off!” He was standing up now and playing the part real well.

“Well, if that was the case why meet you here? Why not just wait till you’re outside your apartment? I could find it easy. Plenty of street urchins sell that kind of info for a copper button.”

“Get out.” He said.

I stood up and reached in my coat. He backed up and the chair dragged on the floor loudly.

“I’m gonna leave you my info.” I said.

“I don’t want it. Leave.”

“I’ll leave it just the same. If you know of any friends of hers have them come see me.”

“Are you out of your mind? Why would I do that?”

I set the square of stiff letter paper on his desk and gathered my coat around me, then looked him in the eye.

“Because you know what it means when they put a name on the table of missing persons.”

I turned and left. I didn’t hear him move to take my card but I knew he did, and I knew why. Same reason he hadn’t just sent me away the moment I approached him, or the five times after that when it would have been called for. He had to know why she hadn’t run to him when things went bad, had to know who I was to her. I’d let enough spill out my face when I talked about her to raise that question in him and he’d risk a lot to know. Someone else might call it love, but I’d call it pride. Pride, or whatever you call the feeling of owning someone.

2 HEADING HOME

Outside the college grounds were drowning in the orange sunlight. Students skipped across the pale pebbled paths like puppies while locals lounged in the shade, often in pairs joined at the head and waist. The young laughter cracked harder in the open air and the feminine chirps stung my ears like wasps. I stood on the stone porch of the college building just long enough to take a dipped paper stick out of my pocket, light it on a smoker’s lamp nearby and hold it to my pipe.  I took off down the path before the ember had started.

The Garden City is home to the best universities in the Empire. The grounds had been river floodplain a thousand years ago till the first emperor built his sprawling pleasure gardens and canals. Successive rulers, from king to republican to feudal lord had carved their own terraces and ponds and built their own manors and bathhouses. The second and current Empire built the universities in the same way it did everything else, massive and final.

I made my way to the broad tree-lined avenue between the Civic College behind me and the Masons University to the north. As I followed it at an even pace I finished my pipe and moved onto the flask. By the time I reached the canal I had drank half the brandy and felt about as warm and orange as the sky.

I paid a ferryman and had the rest of the flask as the small craft took me and a handful of clamoring students towards the Sauban river. I watched the gardens and schoolhouses pass on the land, saw the water carrying little razors of light the same gold and pink as the sky, heard the voices of the students, though not the words, and felt the dull soreness of my feet and the hum of the liquor in my chest. It all sang together distractingly but my memory had to ruin it.

The last time I had seen Liana was in some dingy inn room. I left her there on the bed in a mess of blankets and bottles with the dull sunlight coming through the paper shutters and lighting up the smoke from the cheap fat candles. She smiled at me as I walked out the door and said something I didn’t hear. I can't remember the night before beyond a few flashes and I can't remember the previous months of our relationship beyond the fact that it happened and we enjoyed it. There were none of those fights I had had with so many others, the ones that feel like a part of you is stuck on a part of them, like gears moving in opposite directions, and the only way to move forward is to cut off a piece of yourself and expose what’s underneath. Or else just give up and move their direction until next time.

With her, the few disagreements had been about when and where to meet or caused by those brief moments of panic where one of us wondered if the other was just as possessed as we were. It had all been so simple, which made it impossible to remember. Now as I tried to drag my mind across those months to find some clue to where she would have gone and why, I found nothing to hold on to, just a solid clean line of bliss, as if those months had dissolved out of memory and melted cleanly into my soul.

I brought the flask to my mouth habitually and its emptiness jolted me out of my thoughts. We were halfway across the Sauban river with hundreds of yards of water on all sides. I spent the rest of the trip across counting boats and looking at the clouds. A squad of draconians flew overhead. Their winged humanoid shapes glided towards the great tower on the peninsula of the Imperial City to the south.

I had lived in Throne for three years and like anyone else in the city I had stopped noticing the tower, but today it seemed freshly made. A massive obelisk of singular white stone unblemished in the centuries since it was built. The only marks were the great shapes of solid shadow near the top, where the Dragons of the first empire had roosted, where the draconians flew in now like flies into a doorway. It had terrified me when I had first seen it and it terrified me again now. Dragon towers always did, even those I had seen in the sea, but where those had been jagged and marked forever in the method of their making this one seemed summoned whole from hell. It reminded me painfully of my ignorance. An ignorance that I was especially regretting recently.

The tower stopped moving and I got out of the boat. Its power seemed to fall away as I moved of my own effort across the pier. The north city sprawled before me and the sky behind it was darkening with the evening. I weaved through the docks and warehouses till I found the main road and an hour after that I was walking up to the apartment. It was near dark now and the noodle shop in the front of the building was already closed down with the last diners long gone.

I went down the side alley where a few idlers stood out talking and smoking and turned into the entryway. I greeted Sid the door guard and made it halfway to the stairwell before I remembered and turned back. I took out the pearlfruit I had picked in the gardens on my way to the college and handed them to him. They were wrapped in a newspaper and he thanked me smiling and invited me to a drink with the shake of a brown bottle but I declined and went upstairs. I took the stairs slowly keeping one eye closed to get it used to the dark. When I turned off the landing to my hall, which was almost black despite the slim grimy window at the end of it, I unbuttoned my knife and rested my right hand on it. I got to my doorway and inside without seeing any signs of anyone else.

The dim light of the room was almost blinding after the dark of the hall. The windows were larger inside and I kept them clean. The main room had a sofa, an old chair, and a low thin table in the middle. The walls were covered with shelves filled with books, bottles, papers, and drawers. In the counter on the right wall that served as the kitchen was a wood stove, a basin, and a bread board. The left wall was more shelves and a cloth curtain that served as a door to the other room.

I hung my coat on a hook in a shelf and put my boots up against the door. I went in the bedroom with knife in hand and pulled back the curtain. Inside was a faucet and basin stand, a mirror, a cloth wardrobe, and a mattress. The only window was next to the basin and with the curtain closed it was almost cave dark.

No one was there waiting for me so I set the knife in the belt and hung it on the wall, stripped down to my cottons, and ran some water into the basin out of the faucet. As the water ran in the wall I heard the click of the counter. The first water out was cold from sitting in the pipes and I saved that in a small cup, then used the warmer water from the sun baked roof tower to wash myself. I shut the faucet and finished with the colder water. After that I shut the curtain and got into bed, making sure the long knife, bare and leaning against the wall, was in quick reach.

I slept dreamlessly until past midnight then I got up and drank some water from the basin and had a few swallows of brandy from the bottle near the bed. I sat in the dark and drank some more while the wind rattled some unknown loose part of the building and voices from all ranges of human emotion smacked against the walls. When I slept again I dreamed.

Liana was in a house out in the woods. I ran through it trying to find her. I knew she was there but I never saw her.

In the morning I woke up by habit before dawn, stretched and threw a few kicks and punches in the dark until I felt the start of a sweat. I lit the lamp next to the basin and shaved, washed, and went into the main room. I opened the curtains and let in a dull pre-dawn glow. When I opened the window I smelled a touch of rain.

I took a few handfuls of the black berries off the vine that I had trained from a pot up the window grate and tested the soil under the tea leaves. It was still damp a few fingers width down so I left it. I got dressed and put on my old oilskin sleeved cloak. It was patched and stitched. I know a lot of veterans that threw them away because they always spoke to the violence of Novera or some other battlefield wherever you wore it, and I know others that keep them and wear them everywhere for the same reason. I preferred to wear it only as needed, and because some old fool part of me refused to buy another raincoat.