It’s a surreal meal, surrounded by people who are my peers and in some ways my enemies. Not directly my peers in the same way that I’d grown used to, the broad circle of enthusiasts of puzzles and cryptography and patterns in mathematics or the narrow circle of Voidnavs, but I’m hardly going to be contemptuous of Easy after she just handily handed me my ass in a battle of wits.
Not an unpleasant meal, though. I’d been worried for a moment about formalities that I might not be aware of or social mores that I’d no doubt violate, but nobody’s sparing more than a glance my way. Pat and Easy seem like they’re having a competition for who’s going to finish their bowl of soup faster, with Easy leading the way by virtue of being a blur of motion when she moves, and Knives, well, his eyes are focused elsewhere whenever they leave his bowl.
On Sara, judging by the angle of his glances, and I don’t know what to think, much less do, about that.
The food’s good, too. It’s some sort of thick purée, very much the kind of thing that we might have made in the kitchens on the Spirit, though we wouldn’t have had the same range of spices and herbs to add in. There’s maybe some vegetables in the purée that we don’t have analogues for, but overall the texture is fundamentally familiar and the taste is dominated by the beans either way.
The bread is less familiar. There’s a sourness to it and a chewyness, to a degree that would normally be off-putting, but dipped into the soup it becomes a counterpoint and a vehicle. The structure of the loaf turns out to soak up and carry a tremendous concentration of liquid, transforming as it does, and the flavors meld.
So I eat.
Unsurprisingly, the other three all finish their food before I do. Knives seems more or less satisfied, but Easy already has what must be a second bowl and second loaf in front of her, and I see Pat tap the tips of his fingers, pinched into a shape like a claw, together twice with deliberate intent.
I’m unsurprised when his bowl of soup is suddenly full again, and a new loaf is in place.
It makes sense, I suppose. Knives probably did something physical for his placement challenge, and both of the others fought an actual battle this morning. The kind of intellectual striving that I’ve been mostly doing today burns some energy and provokes some hunger, sure, and it’s not like I didn’t do anything physical—a warm heat flows through me at the memory of exactly what highly physical thing the day included—but nothing on that level.
By the time I finish my bowl of soup, despite a general lack of dallying on my part, a genuine hunger, and my appreciation for the quality of the meal, the other three are not only done but shooting glances at me when they think I’m not looking. It’s immediately clear why, because the moment I sit back with an empty bowl, there’s a flare of magic and the snapping, cracking sound of displaced air.
There’s no bowls left on the table. Instead, the four of us have small plates in front of us, each with a narrow wedge of something dark-brown edging onto black, drizzled with a stark red sauce and placed next to a small hemisphere of equally stark white. It’s a beautiful tableau of contrasts, and I have no idea what any of it is, but I’m fairly confident that it’s going to be good.
Pat and Easy—Knives, I realize, is mirroring me in waiting to see what they do—take a small spoonful of the wedge and add a sliver of the white. The result of the bite of food is that their faces go slack and relaxed in a number of subtle and unsubtle ways, and my eyebrows go up despite my best efforts on seeing it.
Knives grunts, I chuckle softly, and we both follow suit.
The dessert is, as seems narratively proper, impossibly, almost overwhelmingly good. The dark brown is bitter and rich, dense in its simplicity; the red sauce, made with some kind of acid-tart berry base, and the cold sweetness of the white make for superlative contrasts. It’s not particularly challenging, texture-wise, at least, but I have to stop after the second bite and just wait for a while, letting the tastes sort of cycle through my sensorium until they fade.
I take a third bite, and then a fourth, because like I said, it’s good.
The proportions are basically perfect. The white stuff, which I now recognize to be cream-based, melts slowly and soaks into the cake as the red sauce drips onto the plate and makes little puddles. I use the pieces of cake to absorb the one and mop up the other, and keep making slow, steady progress through the serving, vacillating between being absorbed by the sheer explosive intensity of the flavors and trying to puzzle out all of the different notes of it. The salt is obvious, as are the sugar and eggs, and I recognize vanilla; there isn’t a ship of the Fleet that grows it at scale, but it’s not an uncommon thing for a family to grow in their garden allotment, in part because of how far just a small amount of it goes in transforming an act of cookery.
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I don’t have any expectation that I could possibly recreate it even if I could figure out the last few ingredients. I was never much of a baker, which should have been surprising—baking being something where I should have expected to follow instructions exactly and get the exact correct result—but wasn’t, not to anyone, and nobody could really explain why. But I try anyway, until I find myself playing with a spoon on an empty plate and look up to see that I’m the last to finish my dessert.
The plate and spoon fade, blowing away like smoke in an unseen wind, a magic so subtle it barely registers to the Visor. I dismiss it in embarrassment, as everyone glances my way; it had been a matter of reflex to pull it out, to invoke it, a reflex that has only grown as I’ve seen more and more wonders and wanted to record them so that I can analyze them at my leisure.
“Fuck.”
“One of my favorites.” Pat nods at Easy, a lazy smile crossing his face as he looks over at Knives. “Mark these words; that cake will be the best you’ll eat.”
Knives eyes where his plate was, eyes Easy, and then shrugs. “He’s not wrong,” she says serenely, eyes half-lidded and body relaxed back into her chair. “This was not made by mortal hands. The Lady is rarely so spendthrift as to directly instantiate cake.”
All three pairs of their eyes are on me, and I raise my hands reflexively, like I’m going to ward them off or something; I barely resist the urge to make the salt-toss gesture over my shoulder on top of it. “I don’t know why Lily would do something like that. It’s not like I’ve been hard to impress with the food you have here.”
Knives snorts, and light leaks out of Pat’s eyes as he barks a soft laugh. The light spins, whirling into little spirals at the corners of his sockets. “Magelord,” Easy says softly, shaking her head, “you are on a first name basis with the Lady of the Crossroads. This is not her trying to impress you; this is her showing a personal touch as a public act of reciprocation of that intimacy.”
I blink a few times, because that is a dynamic that I’m not unfamiliar with. “Lady Lillit Sheid is courting me.” The sentence fails to come out as a question. “That’s what you’re trying to imply. That the closest this blighted pocket dimension has to a single supreme power other than the metaphorical bedrock you all build on is being profligate as a romantic gesture.”
“So begins a new age of power.” Pat’s voice is dust-dry with sarcasm, and I almost snap at him, but he holds up a hand as if to stop me. “You are new, Magelord James. You are different, and full of potential. In your wake, the Sed Spark bobs, filled with inspiration for new mathematics and magical theorems. If only for that alone, change will come in your wake; but if you lose, if you are killed?”
“You’ll be sticking around, if you die.” Easy’s contralto is huskier than usual, deliberately so. “The Temple itself will deconstruct you, bit by bit, even as it rebuilds you to be just the same, as a living rune-pattern instead of as first-order matter and ensouled Systemic connections. And the Lady will keep you by her side, if so, and make sport of you until she’s shaped you to be what she wants from you, so that when you’re written into glyphs and so much less malleable…”
“Maybe.” I cut Easy off with a smile. I try not to show the effects that her description has on my heart rate, the way my body responds to her tone and her words. “Maybe. But you’d have to beat me, for that to happen.”
“So confident, Magelord.”
“Not any more confident than Lily is.” That shakes her a little bit, I think; there’s a tightness around her eyes and her mouth, and it’s pretty fucked that this, of all things, I know how to read peoples’ faces for. “Let’s be real. You have no idea what we can do, and no idea how we’re going to play this together, and you’ve lost your primary shotcaller. Who exactly has the advantage here?”
“The team without the novice,” she hisses. “I have two entire tiers on you. Outsider or not, you’re going to find out what that means.”
“I’d say we’ll make a bet of it, but there isn’t really a forfeit you can offer me, is there.” I grin at her, leaning back in my hair. “If you win, I wind up sticking around, and you can collect. But if I win?”
It takes a moment for her to collect herself, a moment in which Knives clinks a tankard back onto the table. He makes a performance of leaning back in his chair, fingers woven together behind his head, the picture of heavily-scarred, leanly-muscled leisure, and I snicker at the image. A clone of the same tankard is in front of my plate; it proves to be filled with refreshingly cold water with a hint of lemon and more than a hint of mint, and I feel my body loosen as I drink it.
Easy’s trying to wind me up, I know that, knew it when our conversation started. So I drink my mint-and-lemon water, making a show of ignoring her.
Bit by bit, I relax, and bit by bit, I start to realize how tense I’d gotten just in that short exchange, and I start to realize how worried I have been.
How worried I still am.