Afternoon, First of One, Harvest, 236 CR

Shem was going to win in the multi-millennium war that predated its existence, and it was going to die as a result.

That’s what I’d just claimed, at least, and Meredith was enough of an ass to leave me hanging for long seconds before she laughed, a mirthless noise as harsh as she was.

“Personally,” she rasped, “my money’s on Sudh invading after four centuries to the day. Fuckers thought we were all talk; turns out you build better houses with a trowel than with a shovel. But we won’t sacrifice the vision of what Shem should be on the altar of security, so they’ll wait until what they think is the heart of Shem is dead, then eat the corpse.”

“Vivid.” Repulsive, I thought to myself, but vivid. Trowels instead of shovels, houses instead of graves; but she’s implying that without the Forest, Shem will have to choose between its civics and its might, and if it did the latter, it wouldn’t be Shem, would it? “So what are you going to do? Kill the rockwyrm thing, ascend to Godhood, and then cancel the apocalypse?”

Meredith’s expression cracked into a low, savage snickering. “If I thought you were joking,” she said quietly, “I might be mad. You know, that’s almost exactly what Esse said we should do, me and her?”

“The woman who’s the Delve Pillar?”

“Yeah.” Meredith leaned back in her chair again, staring at the ceiling. “Esse’s a bloodthirsty battle-maniac,” she said softly, fingers twitching at her side. “But she ain’t wrong that there’s an outside chance we could take it, if we took everyone worth taking. Veil, they think if we put you in a room with the right people, we could kill it with just a nieve—a fist, five people.”

“Even without magic,” I admitted, “I can make acids that eat through glass and which explode violently when touching water—into byproducts which are also explosive.”

“I knew I liked you for a reason.” She smiled faintly, not shifting her fixed upwards stare. “So, sure. But then what? Let’s say I walk down into the darkness with the best you and the rest of Kibosh can offer. Let’s say I kill something that’ll split dirt down to magma in its death throes, and on that legend I take the last step to being something more without being something less. And then what?”

I snorted. “And then you do policy, I guess. I thought the whole point of the Theurgist’s Path is that you don’t give a shit about the rules, like the ones that say don’t tell someone not to go a particular Path or immortals shouldn’t do policy?”

“Walking the Theurgist’s Path is a lot of things.” Meredith breathed out a slow sigh, feet coming up onto her desk. Eventually, she shook her head. “I’m too Shemmai for that, in the end. They’re right that we shouldn’t be in charge. It’s enough that Edicts don’t apply to us—”

“—wait, what?”

“—but society’s a neat trick, and I will not break it.” Her smile got less faint, and her feet came down as she came back to vertical, back straight. “You know they made a form for me?”

“I’m… not surprised,” I said slowly, “but your tone of voice implies that I should be.”

“They let me name it. I called it the Application Of Policy Execution form.”

I chewed on that for a bit, thinking it through. “It’s a pun? It’s totally a pun, isn’t it. It’s a form for applying for an execution of policy, and it’s… why did you need a form that makes a pun out of being executed for applying policy?”

“I killed a lot of people without asking for permission, because they were doing something I thought was loathsome,” Meredith said with a vague handwave. “Then I started killing everyone who should have stopped them and didn’t, but Mala—Queen Ka—got ahead of me and had the rest tried and executed, along with everyone who got in the way of my reports.”

“Really not a fan of just following orders as a defense, huh.”

Meredith gave me a flat look, putting enough oomph into it that I had to struggle to remain composed instead of shitting myself in terror. Spark got it worse, in a way—I reached out to it as best I could, somehow managing to keep myself between it and Meredith’s intent. “Sun’ll freeze sooner,” she said after a long moment.

My brain had caught up to what I’d heard by then, and I had to take a moment not to say something unwise. “But wait, what? You—why did you kill them?” I wound up spluttering, and apparently that was fine, judging by Meredith’s shrug.

“I see something that needs cutting out,” she explained, “I cut it out. That’s what walking the Theurgist’s Path is—you tell the world it’s going to be shaped differently, and then you make it. But this is Shem, girl; ain’t nobody got that right.”

She stopped there, obviously intending that I should figure out the implications, and the effort of doing so calmed me down more than anything else might have. “And what could give you the right to have killed them,” I murmured after a long moment, “other than putting the decision of justification in the hands of mortal Clerks? If they approve, you didn’t kill them because you’re a vigilante, you killed them because you’re an authorized agent of the law.”

“Society’s a neat trick,” she agreed mildly. “Clerks in particular.”

“So what do we do, then?” I cast my mind around, trying to figure out where this was going—had been going, until we’d gotten sidetracked about… about the difference between Meredith killing people and Meredith making policy of her own cognizance. “You aren’t going to preempt the problems and you’re not going to do the usurpation thing.” I paused for a moment, a sudden awful suspicion hitting me. “You’d better not be about to say ‘ah, but Sophie, you’re a mortal’ and throw the whole thing onto me.”

“Ah, but Sophie,” the utter asshole I was talking to said, “you’re a mortal! And connected to the Remnants of the Forest. Clearly you could fix everything.”

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I shuddered. “Even with an eat-shit-level smirk, that’s a horrible joke. Please don’t.”

The faint, self-indulgent smile on her face faded into seriousness. “Then don’t.”

“Don’t what?” I found myself leaning forward, glaring at her with my palms flat on her desk. “If there’s something you want me to do or not do, just tell me, don’t try to get me to figure it out by drip-feeding me bits of information I don’t have the context to interpret!”

“Don’t make waves,” Meredith said calmly. “Don’t do unprecedented things. Be a little bit unusual, you’re a Traveler and it would be weird as shit if you started being normal, but… whatever wild shit you were going to do next, just don’t. That’s the plan, as much as you need to know—barely less’n what I know, for what it’s worth. Survive, let the eyes go elsewhere, fix what we can, mitigate what we can’t. Even James isn’t doing much more than that, not till notice drifts away.”

My mouth opened and shut a couple of times as I lapsed into thought. It was obvious enough what the strategic vision was, with a little bit of thought; the focus on managing things, on stability, gave it away. They wanted to buy time for a new equilibrium to emerge, something that James could sell… or someone above James, even.

Who, I thought to myself, assigned James here? How powerful, how influential, is James?

“I was just gonna do something cool,” I muttered dismally, tacitly accepting Meredith’s only-notionally-a-suggestion. “I mean, shit, pun not intended, but I had this idea to use supercritical carbon dioxide as a way to apply single-molecule layers of mana-infused ceramics to stuff. Bam, invisible runes, engraved by me! Get fucked, my inability to use mana in crafting!”

“See, that?” Meredith leaned forwards, pointing a finger at me. “That is exactly the kind of thing we need you to not do. It’d be one thing if you were doing something totally absurd like what Piyazta did—don’t worry, you don’t know her, I killed her just under fifty years ago. She—if you made a grenade that sucked in essence from as far as it could and then turned around and squeezed some hydrogen into helium?

“I’m sure that would be harder than what you just said, but people would just say well, that’s nice, she made a better fire grenade, because they have no idea what to think of it. They have no idea how hard it is, they don’t have any context! An entire new school of runecrafting would go out to every Clerk in the country as a special bulletin!”

“Who is we here? And how do you know about fusion, when—oh, right. Immune to Edicts.”

“That one’s got more reasons than you think—knowledge Edicts don’t apply when everyone’s already past the threshold of knowledge.”

“God grant me patience as every single thing I learn brings with it ten more questions.” I sighed, rubbing my forehead. “Fuck. Fuck! I liked that idea! Solve all my problems in one go; money, limits on what I can do, whatever else. Guess that’s just another way yesterday was a nicer day than today. Shit, even this morning was a lot nicer than this afternoon, despite the fact that I got ditched for work without even a kiss goodbye.”

“Always sucks, that.”

I glanced up to see a look from her that actually looked borderline sympathetic. “Right, right, married. You two, uh.” I shook my head minutely. “Never mind. I mean, you two dance like you’re super into each other, is all.”

“Man’s got a clever mouth and cleverer fingers.” A smug smirk made its fleeting way across her face, but something more wistful and endearing replaced it after a bare heartbeat. “But the mind’s the cleverest thing about him, and that heart of his burns like someone switched it out for the sun.”

I took a moment to appreciate that, and to appreciate the smile on her face. It was… well, it was adorable, but I was definitely not going to say that to her. “So, no mono-molecular deposition techniques till I’ve been here a year, don’t pass the clerical competency exam for a couple of seasons, and no more divine bargains? Am I missing anything else?”

“Eh.” Meredith waved a hand in a good-humored dismissal. “Do your divine bargain shit, that’s your thing at this point. It’d be weirder if you stopped.” She shot me a narrow-eyed look. “Don’t be weird about things, that’ll attract attention.”

“Right,” I sighed. “Don’t be weird about it. Just suddenly be less weird, without being weird about the less-weirdness. Because not being weird is the plan.”

“Exactly!” Meredith smiled beatifically at me. “Now fuck off, unless Spark is gonna get its shit together enough to ask its question.”

I raised my eyebrows, first in surprise and then higher in something closer to shock, my jaw going slack. I could hear, faintly, the ringing chime of a sword coming out of a sheath—how did I even know what that sounded like?—and, less faintly, I heard the non-sound of a performatively casual cut through a space more notional than real.

Even so, Spark fell short when it reached out. Instinctively, I leaned into those metaphysical muscles I’d been trying to develop—not to give it more reach, but to give it more stability and precision in aligning its efforts along that narrow slice of severed unreality.

The connection snapped into place, and Meredith smirked momentarily as I collapsed back into my chair. The look on her face faded as I felt something going back and forth between her and Spark, feeling more like a conceptual exchange than speech, and the moment stretched as the seconds ticked by.

There was a sense of grudging contentment, or maybe resignation, as Spark sort of detached and withdrew into itself. It slipped a feeling of gratitude into my thoughts, something that brought to mind some of the moments in my life when I’d been most sore and exhausted from over-exertion, and then that faded into silence.

I giggled at that, gravity of the situation notwithstanding.

“Alright. Thank you for answering Spark’s question.” I stood up without a wince or a grumble of pain, deliberately not saying anything like whatever its question was—it would tell me, or it wouldn’t. “Gonna have to find something more boring to work on than what I’d planned, I guess. I’ll work on that.”

“Poor girl,” Meredith mocked mercilessly, “having to lower your sights to just deeply surprising instead of tremble, O World. I bet you’re already going through your list. How long is it?”

“Oh, fuck off.” I tried to scowl at her, but the grin was too stubborn to vacate the facial real estate—Captain Meredith Morei was not prone to giving even elliptical compliments lightly. “Double digits, and Kelly liked Project Quill better anyway. And it would be nice to make Kartom eat his words.”

Soft humor glinted in her eyes. “There is nothing you could do that would make him happier. Either of them, for that matter.”

“So long as you aren’t asking me to learn how to relax and set my worries aside,” I said. Challenge—impossible, my gremlin brain provided, but I had enough self-control to know that some jokes don’t work without the shared cultural context, and I was distracted by what Meredith had just said.

Realizing a moment later that we were done, I got up, giving Meredith my best shot at the gesture of respect I’d seen Tseizal give her. I mimicked the Guardsman’s set of his shoulders, the inclination of his head, and the angle of his arms as I tapped my right thumb to my heart, and Meredith threw her head back in a cackle as I walked out of the room.

“Keep practicing, girlie,” she called at my back. “That was some sad-sack shit. But you sure tried.”

Grinning—two compliments from her! In one conversation!—I left, letting her have the last word.