“Gregor? Explain this to me.” Mildred was stooped, looking at an advertisement on a folding sign with rapturous scrutiny. All around, the machine of civilisation churned loud. Evidently, late morning was a busy time in big cities. A tram clamoured by, but Mildred’s attention was unmoved.
Upon the sign was a very familiar face, superscribed ‘Our Imperial Patron’. Gregor recognised this to be the previously encountered prince, though he knew that the identity of the man was not the cause for Mildred’s intense interest.
“That is a photograph.”
“A photograph? Rather unimaginative name.”
“As I understand it, the photographist exposes a slate of light-reactive material to a scene, and later uses the transformed slate as a kind of imprint to create a picture, hence the name.”
“It’s an etching.”
“It’s in the spirit of an etching, I suppose.”
Mildred began to make the same expression she made when she looked at trains. It was something between scrutiny and awe, but not really full of awe, it just had some awe. It was an awe-some kind of expression, not an awe-full one.
“It’s a very good etching. Almost as if he’s been trapped inside this sign, which would be very good.”
“The process captures things as they are, rather than producing an approximation.”
“Is it expensive?”
“Not particularly.”
“Does it take a while?”
“Not overly. Not for the customer, at least. You can have your photograph taken and come back to collect it after not too long.”
“Less than three hours?”
“Likely.”
“Our train leaves in three hours.”
It was thereafter inevitable that the pair proved the advertisement effective, and made a visit to the photography store on their way to the embassy.
It was a cluttered place, with a small reception area crowded in by equipment of mysterious purpose – on display to promote sale or lease – and examples of the various kinds of photograph a customer might like to commission.
A woman who looked like she’d been old for most of her life greeted Mildred with a smile, but faltered in her joviality when Gregor hobbled in after her.
In the following interaction, she was notably taciturn, likely as a strategy to conceal her nervousness, which both Gregor and Mildred independently figured to be a consequence of the now-public news that a murderous wizard had recently rampaged nearby.
Thankfully, smiling Mildred brushed through pleasantries quickly enough that the secretary didn’t ask for Gregor’s name, which Mildred suspected he wouldn’t bother to conceal, even despite his new status as a known villain. He might even be proactive in supplying it for the sake of some perverse pleasure found in notoriety. She could imagine him saying something like ‘the measure of fear a wizard can elicit is a quantitative measure of his worth’, or some other statement intentionally at odds with regular sensibilities.
The secretary directed them through a small door in the back, eyeing Gregor discretely as he passed, and they found that the place had been so cramped because the greater majority of the store’s area was occupied by a kind of studio, filled with props and costumes for hire and clever false backdrops which rolled on wheels.
Here, they found a rather diminutive photographist.
“Wow Miss, you’re tall!” Said the little boy from behind his camera, standing on a stool but still a head shorter than Mildred.
“I certainly am. Will that be a problem?”
“Notatall! See, look here!” He fiddled a knob on the side of the camera’s stand, advancing a ratchet and raising the box. “It goes up’n down! And tilts and turns!”
“Why, that sure is clever.”
Time being a consideration, they made use of none of the set-pieces and got straight to the photoing in front of a plain cream dropsheet. In the moments surrounding the process, the boy enthusiastically badgered Mildred with the unsolicited (but appreciated) particulars of photographism and mostly ignored Gregor, save for asking if he could turn people into toads, which was really not a wizard’s particular area of business. His name was Wenceslaus, which was a poor thing for a young boy to be called.
Under the diplomatic wiles of Mildred, Wenceslaus committed to a turnover of less than two hours, and they departed thereafter to make use of a nearby horsecar.
Apparently, somewhere in the city was a section of tramline driven by electricity, rather than horses, but they didn’t have the time to go and see it, being that their allowance of three hours was quite small when in a place so large and dense, and besides the matter of time, Mildred felt that their small detour into the wonders of photography had already overdrawn her quota for non-serious activities.
She and Gregor were (mostly) serious people, she figured, and they were in a serious situation with serious goals that seriously needed to be met, lest their extremely serious enemies find benefit from their inaction, so it only made sense that they also needed to act seriously. To this end, she decided that the sightseeing and the regular-girl-out-exploring-the-world-type activities needed to be sensibly regulated.
For, though Gregor had tacitly and explicitly supported her indulgence in the wonders of the future, she knew that this largess came from Gregor’s boundless confidence in his ability to pick up whatever slack her non-seriousness introduced into the matter of her safety, no matter the problem or opponent. Mildred not forgotten her epiphany on the train.
It was her job to do what Gregor could not, and he was entirely incapable of planning for the possibility of his own limitation. She figured that there was probably a limit to Gregor’s abilities – though she hoped that there wasn’t – and so she intended to avoid putting him in a situation where he was forced to realise what that limit was.
Hence, the day’s allowance of non-seriousness all spent, the duty of prudence was now hers, as was the burden of reasonableness.
She had serious things to do.
***
The embassy was a grand compound, and very little else needed to be said about it. No other summation of its qualities was so complete.
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The main structure was a white-and-gold behemoth, crowned by antiquated towers and mock-turrets. An elder building, bearing a facade of venerable refinement after an easy life standing atop a foundation of pure money. The others in the compound were visibly newer, but no less impressive.
Surrounding the place was a thin garden of roses, blooming conspicuously under a dusting of snow despite the season, and girding this was a tall fence of runed iron, which was topped by tastefully dull spikes that were also very definitely magical in some unknown way.
Up above, few steeplejacks could be seen spidering around the metal bits that decorated the exterior of the structure, hammering gold flashing into the contours of scrollwork here and there on windowsills and ornamental girouettes and other places that it didn’t make too much sense to decorate so expensively.
Seeing them, Gregor reflected their work must be endless. Gold was soft, and thin layers would not survive too well encounters with harsh weather. It was like the upkeep of paint on a bridge, or on the hull of a large ship. In these cases, maintenance merely gave the elements more material to eat away, and thus the replacement could never stop.
Unlike paint on bridges and boats, however, which served as protection against rot and rust, this gold was not important for anything other than appearances. It was an intentional extravagance. A not-so-subtle reminder of economic might.
Staring at Gregor because he was exactly the kind of person they were meant to stare at, a pair of guards stood stiffly outside the gatehouse, which looked to be large enough to very admirably serve the purposes of both gate and house. The two soldiers wore foreign uniforms – not the muted navy of the empire upon whose soil they stood, but the gleaming and unmissable white-and-gold of the empire from whence they had come.
They had swords of ceremony and pistols of practicality both hanging from their hips, and over their cream coats were golden sections of seemingly anachronistic armour, which Gregor knew to be actually quite functional, being that gold was a terrific conductor of magic.
They were also identical. Not identical like Wilhelm’s trabant pair, who bore the resemblance of blood, but identical entirely.
They had the same chiselled jaws and tall noses and firm expressions, and the one on the left was exactly as tall and as broad as the one on the right. The only minute difference to be found was in posture, though it was a minor enough fault to count as a merit to the perception of the observer rather than as a mark against the soldier.
As such, it did not take someone of Gregor’s expertise to realise that the pair were practically soaked in enchantment. Nor did it take someone with particular political or economic savvy to extrapolate from this small sample that, even if this were not standard, quite a few of the Empire’s soldiers must be similarly outfitted, and from there it required little effort to arrive at certain conclusions about the budget of their military.
This was intentional, because everything that the Golden Empire did was intentional. The queen was filled with endless intention.
Steel eyes followed the approach of Mildred and Gregor, but particularly Gregor, who was walking to the rear, hoping to give the impression that Mildred was in charge, and that he was just along for the ride. It would be inconvenient if they were too interested in him. It had Mildred nervous.
According to the wizard, there was a non-zero chance he’d be recognised as the apprentice of Kaius, and then things would become unnecessarily complicated.
This was all her idea, and if it went wrong, she’d be quite embarrassed.
Fortunately, they didn’t seem to be immediately alarmed that Gregor existed in their presence.
There was a third soldier, also identical, but presumably more important for the fact that he wore a slightly different uniform and was sitting inside a little open booth cut into the gatehouse, while the others stood out in the snow.
“Good morning,” this third man offered curtly in the local language. “Please sate your business.”
Here came the tricky part.
“Well,” Mildred replied, not in the local language, “I have a letter for my aunt in Belrose Park.”
Belrose Park, she knew, was where the Golden Empire had administered their spooks seventy years ago. Evidently her information wasn’t too old, because the officer stood a little straighter and looked at her much more seriously (the standard soldiery tend to hold certain attitudes toward spycraft).
Having obtained a desirable assumption toward her identity, she continued. “I’ve been holidaying nearby, you see, and I promised my aunt that I’d write regularly, but you know how people on the continent are. I don’t want to trust them with something so important. I was wondering if the embassy might handle it for me.” At this, she held out her letter, and the officer took it gingerly, saying nothing, quite uncomfortable that he was being trusted with something that he, not being an intelligence office, certainly didn’t have the authority to handle.
This feeling of unease increased when he looked at the letter, despite being unsure if that was even okay for him to do.
It was not addressed to Belrose Park, as someone listening to Mildred might assume. It was instead addressed to the imperial palace, and had ‘Open under Article Four scrutiny’ printed in neat letters above the much more flowery words ‘From Mildred’. He had no idea what ‘Article Four scrutiny’ was, but he was fairly certain that it meant big things, especially when in proximity to the words ‘Imperial Palace’, and he was also fairly certain that, generally, when spies say something which is visually evident to be untrue, it is likely because an unfriendly third party may be listening.
The Belrose spooks definitely had their own secure channels for trafficking this kind of sensitive communique, so it seemed to him all the more urgent for this ‘Mildred’ to come under the escort of a wizard (likely on loan from the inquisition) to the embassy. It suggested that she didn’t have time for the regular channels or that they were somehow insufficient, and that she needed to get this letter somewhere safe quickly, despite how non-secretive this public handover was.
Thus, the officer convinced himself that this letter was probably quite important, which it actually was, and that he was now entrusted with its temporary custody.
“Ahem, uh, certainly,” he said, trying to stop himself from looking around the street in search of some unseen foreign agent, “I’ll see it off to your aunt at once.” It was hard not to wink in support of this statement, but he managed.
***
They were late for the train, but some mysterious influence had forced it to wait in the station until they boarded. That same mysterious influence had somehow also given them a rather luxurious carriage all to themselves near the caboose, and had left a bottle of good wine with the note ‘From your favourite prince.’ It was quite confusing.
“Are you fond of any princes?”
“None.”
“Me neither. I wonder who it could be.”
The train was underway shortly, chugging westward through the city as Mildred sat looking at the photograph. It was a postcard-sized vision of herself beside Gregor, and she just couldn’t stop examining it.
She’d seen herself before, of course, but not like this. This wasn’t like a mirror. It looked different somehow. She looked different. It was enrapturing, both in practice and in concept – it was the crystallisation of a moment in time, or a memory become physical. And she looked quite good in it, if she was honest, which she supposed was part of the appeal. The vain masses must have celebrated uproariously when photography was invented, for it allowed them to never stop looking at their handsome selves, even after the passage of time had changed those selves irreparably.
Mildred planned to keep it forever as important proof of the Worldeater’s inability to strip away her joy, and that, for all the deadly difficulty of her journey, she’d be fine as long as she had Gregor. Pleasant little moments and artefacts of joy would continue to be created.
When next Mildred peered out the window, there was no city, and she wondered if she’d ever go back to see the electric tram. Probably. Hopefully. Though perhaps she wouldn’t need to. Perhaps her aunt had one.
Up above, a sea of gentle grey had hidden the downward-trending sun, and soft wind blew snow across the hilly land and sparse trees as they drew near a range of mountains.
She felt extra happy, for today had been a personal success. She had been useful to the partnership – really, truly beginning to pull her own weight – and now she had a letter on the way to one of the most powerful people in the world. The delivery of this letter being hopefully assured, things were looking quite positive.
With thoughts of this nature occupying her mind, she dozed off at sundown while Gregor kept watch, working at a half-formed solution to the problem of his eye.
Then, at precisely three in the morning, the locked doors were unlatched from the outside and blasting sticks were thrown into the carriage.