Zenith, First of One, Harvest, 236 CR

Having decided to forgo begging forgiveness and instead ask permission, we cut our shopping short and made as much haste as was seemly.

Kelly had been emphatic about not wanting to wait till after lunch to have our sit-down with the Gods. I, in return, had been equally emphatic—not only was I very much disinclined to do that on an empty stomach, but I also didn’t think there was a rush in the slightest.

I knew that she was going to be, at a minimum, deeply skeptical of my argument that this wasn’t like that second day. I wasn’t returning from a journey; even in the lens of religious and cultural observances that had such a thing, I didn’t have the traveler’s obligation to give thanks for a safe journey. Sure, I could maybe give a blessing on the passage of one Time into the next, or the end of Ease; but those were for God, the absent demiurge of my own faith.

I realized my mistake when I was midway through explaining that yes, my culture of origin had a travel prayer, but it was on leaving on the journey rather than on returning.

When I’d… spoken with, communed with, maybe, Artemis? I had failed to deliver on that obligation, that immediate obligation which was presumably an insult to have put off in her religious context of origin, and honestly, I knew about the practice and Hephaestus had explicitly tipped me off to it. That’d been compounded by the fact that she’d outright told me what would be a good way of saying thanks, and it hadn’t at all been odious! It—my first arrow of every hunt dedicated to her, until I made a perfect shot—had gotten me close to Ketka, and that was a blessing in its own right, and I had no idea whether she’d anticipated that, just on the basis of whom I’d ask to train me.

I’d been focused on that first part, the immediacy of the obligation. We didn’t have one of these, yeah, but it was that second part that I’d almost fucked up again and which Kelly hadn’t thought of.

I already had an active, unfulfilled commitment to all of the Gods we intended to talk with, and it related directly to our request—I’d promised credit where credit was due, and we hadn’t yet followed through.

So I won the argument despite totally being wrong, and we went to the refectory to find whichever Clerk could advise us on how to publicly give that credit.

Technically, it should have been Urlirah we went to, since he was the Crafts Pillar; and if he’d been the first person we’d run into, we’d absolutely have spoken to him about it. But while he was well aware of his shortcomings, he had them, not because he was unwilling to put in the effort but because he’d been promoted upwards into a position he wasn’t even mediocre at.

It wasn’t, for a change, the Peter Principle. He’d been shoved up the chain because of being a pretty good craftsman who hadn’t actually enjoyed having a trade, and he was now a bureaucrat—which, this being Shem, also meant policy analyst, politician, and advisor—who was quite a bit happier; the opposite of what’d happen if you took any other crafter in Kibosh and promoted them. And in a decade or two he’d be competent, I was sure, and I would diligently do my part in bringing that blessed day to fruition.

But in the meantime, it was still with relief that we caught sight of James right away, instead of being a growth and learning opportunity for Urlirah.

James hadn’t been officially aware of the deal we’d made with the, in hindsight, quite large number of Gods—though in my defense, I hadn’t done that deliberately, not that I left it open ended was much of a defense. Kelly and I had made sure he’d overheard the two of us talking about it, though, because as much as it formally wasn’t his business, we wanted him to be in the loop.

That desire was… a bit tricky, given that it was so emphatically primarily a matter for the Thousand and secondarily for the Crafts until such time as we started publishing and it became a matter of policy in a hurry. But Veil practiced a theology that considered the bargains made with Gods to be a private matter, and it was a genuine theology for them, so we gave James the tip-off informally with Veil’s tacit approval.

Politics, in short—which could never be escaped, not for traveling to a new world nor for wanting to live quietly.

The dividends of the careful navigation of those dynamics were immediately obvious when we asked James for his advice. A patent application was coequally in the remit of Writ and Crafts, which meant he wasn’t stepping on any toes by being the point person on it, after all. While what I’d done failed at least three tests for being a standing patent—no novel creations, not an improved process, extremely unlikely to be replicable—there was still a process for a sitting patent. James mentioned that he had quite just so happened to ensure that he had a full understanding of that process, which I understood to be him thanking us for keeping him in the loop, and then I realized that Kelly and I had forgotten yet another thing and started laughing.

Kelly was laughing, too, which suggested she’d made the same connection, which meant James had to wait patiently for us to collect ourselves before he could learn what was going on—which he’d probably appreciate, because it was…

“Clerk Administrator,” Kelly said once she could adopt a neutral mien and formal voice, “Alchemist Nadash and I have come to an agreement that she should begin a course of acclimation via full immersion with regards to her paperwork, inasmuch as her duties to Kibosh and the Thousand permit. I’d like her to take as much responsibility as possible for what would generally be my own job in that regard.”

“I see. Miss Avara.” He paused, and Kelly’s body language shifted in some way I had a momentary trouble interpreting other than it being positive. “Might I prevail upon the both of you,” he continued after a moment, “to join me after lunch?”

“Of course.” I grinned at him as we walked off, suddenly realizing that the body language thing was probably related to the fact that she was Miss Avara to James now. She’d been Kelly when he’d unnecessarily explained her own vocation to her in my first moments in Kibosh, and I’d missed that dynamic entirely at the time, but it made sense that she’d be happy about that dynamic shifting.

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I’d fully intended to take my time with lunch, but when we were walking out the door I realized I hadn’t even noticed what we were eating, only that there had been a lot of it. I had noticed, because of course I had, Kelly’s sparkling, astonished delight at Zitqín Yáng staying to put on a concert along with how perturbed she was by where the concert was being put on, but however much that might have explained my inattention, it still felt rude to the refectory staff.

Kelly chattered at me as we walked, and I consciously basked in it—I couldn’t imagine James permitting such disrespect to something as sacred as paperwork, so I made sure to take it in while I could. She speculated cheerfully about why the songweaver, the threadsinger, was tarrying; the only certain thing was that it wasn’t Hitz or Elaneir, apparently, for all that the one was a phenomenal drummer and the other a highly skilled singer. If it were either of them, Kelly asserted confidently, Zing would have already made plans to stay, or at least mentioned the possibility.

The mirage bet, as the saying had it, was Tizpa. The more likely reason was obvious enough she hadn’t bothered to mention it, and I’d brought it up just to make sure I wasn’t missing something terribly cultural.

What relevance The Chord That Sweeps The Grasslands had to the woman from across the wide ocean, Kelly was almost certain that Zing’s lingering in Kibosh for a day was related to the nascent herder Goddess whom children swarmed and even adults called Tammy.

Alas, the village of Kibosh was too small for us to really stretch the conversation out and enjoy each other’s company, and we were walking into James’s office before long. In the first moments of our having arrived, I considered asking about it outright—

“Clerk Administrator.”

—but Kelly was opening formally, the moment evaporating, and I had already decided to follow her lead.

“First Friend Avara. Sophie.”

I wasn’t sure what it meant that he was first-naming me while he and Kelly were being remarkably, though not extremely, formal with each other. At a guess, it was a position statement about how much of a novice or civilian I was; maybe he was testing me, maybe just making assumptions, but…

“Afternoon’s contentment, Clerk James,” I responded.

I was there in a professional capacity, and this was a step towards me taking full ownership of the paperwork. That meant shifting from being the Traveler who happened to be attached to First Friend Kelly Avara; it meant becoming Alchemist Sophie Nadash, who happened to still be working with Kelly.

It was, of course, entirely possible I was overthinking things, just like how upon automatically including the greeting that he’d omitted I’d immediately regretted having done so. I inclined my head to him in my best attempt at the proper attitude and demeanor anyway, and he gestured to the chair in front of his desk with his standard-issue perfectly genial smile.

I’d spent a fair bit of time in his office, in the fortnight I’d been in Kibosh, though Kelly had spent more. I’d grown accustomed to it, but not enough to spot the changes my First Friend had told me happened every now and then—subtle little changes in the floor, the furniture, and the walls, for the most part. But I was perfectly capable of taking note that there was a chair in front of his desk, which was one more chair than had been there anytime I’d stood in his office.

“Miss Nadash, if you would be so kind. First Friend Avara?”

I mulled over having been promoted from first name to Miss while Kelly took receipt of a piece of paper and a pencil. She stepped to the side to use the absent Captain Morei’s desk as a writing surface, and James waited for me, presumably expecting me to ask questions.

He’s talking at one formality level down from how Kelly is, I thought to myself instead. She’s talking to the office, he’s talking to the person doing the job. That means I’m not the person doing the job, not yet, but I think the formality-increase is a response to my bid? A supportive one. So this is…

“Thank you,” the Clerk Administrator murmured. I jolted a tiny bit—I’d gotten lost enough in thought that I hadn’t noticed Kelly coming up with the piece of paper completed. “Ah, yes, very good. Now, with that necessity discharged! Sophie, Kelly made a request of me not an hour past, and I’d have you express your understanding of it in your own words, along with why.”

“Sure thing.” I took a deep breath, trying to relax suddenly-tense muscles in my neck and back with the exhale. Kelly and I had talked about this, if only briefly, over lunch; I was prepared enough, and if I were too prepared, it would look like I was being coached. “Clerk Ad—James,” I hurriedly corrected myself at the momentary freeze in his expression, and he graced me with a smile and a wince. “James, I don’t know if it’s obvious, but Kelly and I are crushing hard on each other.”

Impressively, his face didn’t budge at that. “I would not speculate as to whether Aliza has drawn the deduction, I admit.”

I barely refrained from snickering audibly out of that. Rude, I thought to myself, but yeah, the five year old might in fact be able to tell. “Ordinarily, the typical path, which holds true even in Kelly’s atypical approach, is that I don’t start tackling the paperwork until I’ve spent a couple of seasons here—one to make friends, one to start making money.”

“A limited truth,” he said in the expectant pause. “When Tagatan adults come from their Confederation to dwell here, they typically integrate socially and begin operating a successful business within their first season; and adults of the Remnant League often find themselves struggling more, and potentially in need of long-term clerical assistance.”

I nodded. “So a couple of seasons would be expected of me, but not universally, okay. Anyway, the short version is that I’ve got friends and I’m enough ahead of the game to start working on the paperwork stuff now. And that means that Kelly and I will get to the point where there isn’t an ethics violation in store if we explore what we want to be to each other, while the novelty’s still nice and intoxicating. So we want me to be involved with the forms and book-keeping and paperwork, inasmuch as I can be, so that I can start the learning process.

“But it’s not just, like, doing the forms that we fill out at the workshop. Kelly’s here in the mornings sometimes, and pretty often in the afternoons. So the request also, I guess, includes shifting around the times so that I can at least follow along and learn. That’s anodyne for a third-season professional, and I’d like to follow that path as I do what the other third-seasoners do—deepen their friendships and explore the boundaries of their understanding.”

“A relatable and commendable desire.” James leaned back in his chair, studying me with a palpable intensity. “I understand it well, and it reflects well upon you, as does your understanding of the path you would typically take.”

“Thank you.” I kept a neutral face, just in case this wasn’t going where I thought it—

“Your request is denied.”

—was going.

Fuck.