“My clan will not be interested in this, but there are others that definitely will,” Haunui said, nodding with his customarily solemn expression. “In particular, the idea that any representative sent will have equal footing with that of the Empire will sell it, alone. I will raise the matter at the next moot.”
“I appreciate it, Haunui,” Tellwyrn replied with a smile.
He nodded again. “It has been good to see the old campus once more. Surprising, how little it has changed. I’m grateful I got this opportunity, since it seems change is about to come in great force.”
She sighed softly. “Yes…it always does. Anyhow, if you’ll give me a few minutes I can take you home…”
“There’s no rush,” he said, finally smiling. “Actually, if you don’t mind, I would like to stay a few days. There are interesting new constructions in the town, and quite a number of people gathered here with whom I would like to have conversations.”
“You’re welcome, of course,” she said. “The guest chambers will be available as long as you need them. Just so you know, teleporting back to Tidecall is the work of seconds, but finding a few spare seconds might be increasingly tricky in the coming days. You may have to wait a bit on my convenience to go home.”
“The wind blows where it wants,” he intoned. “There is no rush.” Turning to go, the shaman paused and bowed politely to each of the others waiting nearby. “Huntsman. Daughter of Naiya.”
“Wavespeaker,” Ingvar replied, bowing with equal respect.
“Yo,” Aspen said, waggling her fingers.
Tellwyrn let out a sigh as Haunui strode down the hall toward the stairs descending to the lobby. She had spent the morning mobbed by people wanting a slice of her attention, dealing with dozens of conversations while slowly retreating toward her office, and even still hadn’t quite made it there. Most of those discussions had been with relative newcomers to the mountain; only Ingvar, Aspen and Haunui had had the foresight to wait in the upper corridors of Helion Hall.
“Well, Ingvar, you’ve certainly been more than patient with me during your time here.”
“We’ve kinda gotten used to being patient,” said the dryad.
“Aspen,” Ingvar said pointedly. She rolled her eyes, but subsided, and he continued more courteously to Tellwyrn. “We haven’t felt put upon in the least, Professor. We did, after all, appear out of the blue with a personal request for your time and attention, and you have clearly had more important things to deal with. We inadvertently picked a very trying time to visit, it seems.”
“Nonetheless, you’ve been quite helpful while you were here, and I’m sorry to keep you waiting for so long. I have given some thought to your questions, mostly while doing other things; I regret that that is as far as I’ve managed. Barring some fresh nonsense, though, things will hopefully be settling down here in the next few days.”
“Seems kinda like you’ve managed to make things more busy in the next few days,” Aspen said, raising an eyebrow.
“Yes,” Tellwyrn replied with a grim little smile, “but with plans. Lots of stuff to do, but stuff that will be done on my schedule, not while I run around willy nilly reacting to whatever fresh idiocy the Sleeper and whoever else throws. As such! Ingvar, this promises to be a somewhat involved conversation. Would you and Aspen join me for lunch tomorrow?”
“Gladly.”
“Perfect. I’m not absolutely certain how germane my insights will be to your quest, but I can describe in detail how I approached Shaath, as well as giving you general strategies for dealing with gods. Naiya might be the hardest to get to, but you have a big advantage, there.” She nodded at Aspen. “Additionally, let me take the rest of today to check some of my old notes; I believe we have quite a few volumes in our library that may be relevant to your search. Some are in the restricted archives, but I don’t think they are necessarily too sensitive to show you. I’ll put together a reading list and have Crystal assist you with it. You are, of course, welcome to stay on campus as long as you need. It’s the least I can do, after the help you’ve already given.”
“That is tremendously helpful, Professor,” he said, bowing. “Thank you very much. We’ll rejoin you tomorrow, then. After this morning I’m sure you’re eager to have a few moments to yourself.”
“Well, you know what they say,” Tellwyrn snorted. “Rest when you’re dead.”
“That’s just silly,” Aspen huffed. “A person needs rest. While alive. That’s the point.”
“It’s just an expression, Aspen,” Ingvar said, gently steering her toward the stairs.
“You keep saying that as if it justifies some of the dumbest ideas people keep spouting,” she complained while following him down the hall. “If someone’s wrong, the fact that it’s an expression doesn’t make them less wrong!”
“In fact, I think you’re onto something, there. My point was, expressions are part of culture. Challenging them isn’t going to get you anywhere; it just makes people dig their heels in, mostly. And anyway, even if someone is wrong, throwing it in their face usually doesn’t help.”
“Who said anything about helping?”
“We talked about persuasion, remember…?”
“Oh, sure, but honestly I don’t all that much care what nonsense people choose to believe. Sometimes, you’ve just gotta tell a bonehead they are one.”
Tellwyrn stood alone in the hall, staring abstractly in the direction they had gone, until their receding voices had departed the building entirely.
“I hope,” she finally said aloud, “you don’t think you’re sneaking up on me.”
“Well, one hates to interrupt,” Inspector Fedora said, materializing from empty space nearby. He was holding two brown bottles, and tossed one to her. “Here—compliments of Raffi Chandrakeran.”
“Mermaid’s Bite?” She raised her eyebrows, studying the label. “Impossible to get outside the Punaji Coast.”
“Can’t imagine why,” Fedora said, grinning and pulling the stopper from his bottle. “Absolutely vile stuff, but it is one of your favorites. Cheers.”
“Now how the hell did you oh never mind, don’t answer that.” She opened her own and took a swig; the drink made her grimace and shudder, but she let out a soft sigh of satisfaction after the first swallow. “Ahh, that takes me back. Well! You clearly want something, but so does everyone else today, and not one of them had the basic courtesy to bring me booze. That earns you the privilege of speaking.”
The Inspector took a more judicious sip of his own. “Bleh. Not the worst thing I’ve ever put in my mouth, to be sure. Well, you know quite a bit about what my kind are like, Professor. And not just due to your age, or long adventuring career, or magical proficiency. I’ve met archmages and ancient elves aplenty who clearly had no clue what they were dealing with. You, though! I know for a fact you’ve got Melaxyna and Rowe squirreled away down in that Crawl of yours. Impressive you managed to ensnare even one, much less both.”
“Just Melaxyna now,” she said sourly. “I failed to keep them separated.”
Fedora barked a laugh. “Aw, those two. I always did think they’d make a lovely pair. Well, anyway, I suspect you understand…the urge.” He began moving, at a slow amble, and Tellwyrn followed gamely along, sipping from her bottle and watching him. “It starts as an itch, right in the back of your head. Like that tickle in the throat that comes when you’re first getting sick. If not indulged, it grows…slowly, at first. Till it’s like ants crawling all over and under your skin, everywhere. The need to sow some chaos, cause a little misery. Flex your wings and your skills and break somebody. Infernal aggression, almost—almost suppressed.”
“Feeling itchy?” she asked in a deceptively mild tone.
He shrugged. “Less now than a week ago. Even if I’ve yet to catch the little fucker, stalking the Sleeper has been most therapeutic. See, when the Empire first picked me up, my new handlers spun this lovely story—it was positively Vesker in its overwrought romanticism. The lone incubus who turned himself to hunting criminals and outwitting those who took advantage of others, on a personal quest for redemption.” He grinned broadly. “I let them think it. Vex, of course, wasn’t fooled, but he of all people recognizes a useful lie; it enabled his spooks to work with me without being too jumpy about it. Truth is, I just found criminals the most satisfying challenge. Sure, you can destabilize a whole country by ensconcing yourself in the capital and pulling the right threads; that’s what most of my kind end up going for. Maximum collateral damage. It’s kind of fundamentally unsatisfying, though, playing a game with people who don’t know the rules. All those scheming aristocrats and priests and bankers and kings—they just can’t grasp that another player in their great game isn’t trying to win it, but just to make sure everyone loses. Almost unfair.”
“Somehow it’s even creepier to hear one of you admit it,” she grunted. They passed the closed door of her office without pausing.
“Crime, though,” Fedora continued, seemingly lost in his thoughts now, “that’s a game. There are laws and customs to form a neat board and a set of rules. The crook is trying to get away with something; I’m trying to stop them. One against one, now that is a challenge. Given a certain level of intelligence on the part of one’s opponent, of course. As I worked out an ever-better method for detective work I had to raise the stakes, till I needed to thwart the schemes of nobles to really get my fix. Those evil bastards are as ruthless as any incubus; I think I could’ve kept on indefinitely that way. Except…”
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Except nobles aren’t the only ones paying attention to themselves,” she said. “That’s a quick way to get Intelligence after you, as you discovered. Fedora, it’s not like you to make long speeches. Or reveal anything about yourself. I trust this is going somewhere relevant to my interests?”
“Oh, quite,” he assured her with a grin. “Indulge me just a moment longer, if you would. You see, Professor, I’ve been sensing a change in the wind, lately, at Imperial Intelligence. Vex made certain to let me indulge myself against real opponents—at first, for a while. Lately, though? It’s been all about administration. Organization. Teaching my methods to other Inspectors, to the Army, the police, his spies… Oh, it’ll be to the overall good of society, having police actually able to solve crimes rather than just grabbing the first likely bloke and clubbing a confession out of him. I’m going stir crazy, though, cooped up in that office, and Vex is far too canny not to fully understand what he’s doing, keeping me on administrative work. The pisser is, even knowing his game, I can’t help it. The pressure builds up, till eventually I’m going to have to do something. Something that’ll give him all the excuse he needs to stick me in a bottle and lose it in a vault somewhere.”
“That sounds like a Vex move,” she agreed.
“So!” Fedora stopped, turning to face her and grinning. “It seems to me it’s a good time for me to seek other employment.”
Tellwyrn faced him as well. “Something tells me the terms of your arrangement with Imperial Intelligence are not the kind of job one simply quits.”
“Oh, quite. Ordinarily? No, utterly out of the question. Matters become different, however, if my new employer, who had just given a speech about how nobody tells her what to do on her campus and could use a convenient excuse to prove it, were to tell Vex to keep his grubby fingers off her new head of campus security.”
She stared at him. “…all right. As thanks for the drink, and largely out of morbid curiosity, I’m willing to hear your pitch.”
“I was very impressed with what I heard at that assembly.” His jocular expression suddenly gone, he stared back intently. “It’s honestly a brilliant move, and all other things being equal, I think it’ll work. You can’t stop the world from changing, so you position yourself to be the administrator of that change. You do realize, of course, that the logical move on the part of all those people you brought here would be to boycott your University, cut you out of the loop and let you remain isolated until it finally puts you out of their misery once and for all?”
Tellwyrn snorted and took a gulp of her drink. “You’re suggesting the great powers of the world might do the sensible thing, when the alternative is to scheme against each other for tiny scraps of advantage? Don’t make me laugh.”
“And that’s it exactly.” He pointed the mouth of his bottle at her. “How those people think. It’s one thing to remind everyone that you’re Arachne goddamn Tellwyrn and they’d better mind their manners. But in your whole life, Professor, when you’ve come up against people intelligent enough they should know better than to test you, yet they didn’t… Who were they?”
There was a pause before she responded. “What, you want a list?”
“Just a category,” he said with a grim little smile. “Because I think you’ll find there’s just one.”
“Quite a few, in fact,” she said slowly. “Largely aristocrats. Kings and queens, which is the same thing, really. Priests—”
“Average priests, or high-ranking ones?” When she didn’t respond, he nodded. “That really is one category, along with all the other sub-groupings you can list. The rich, the powerful. At their core, Professor, powerful people simply cannot accept the idea that they won’t get their way. Even no matter how many times other powerful people thwart them, they keep coming back for more. They don’t know restraint or moderation; they are driven by the unshakable conviction that they are entitled to possess absolutely everything, and the irrational belief that they one day will. It takes a certain amount of adversity to shape someone’s mind into knowing their place in the world. The mighty, the kings and popes and bishops and bankers? They’ll never stop.”
“And?” she drawled.
“And I like what you’re about to do here, Professor. Irrespective, even, of my own need to find different employment, I’d like to be a part of it. But more important to your interests… You do not appreciate what you’ve begun, Tellwyrn. I mean it: they will never stop. In the long term, no matter what rules you lay down or what consequences you impose, the people you’re planning to gather here will scheme and plot and not hesitate to threaten your students if it gets them what they want.”
“I’m well aware they will,” she said irritably. “The point is not to prevent them from scheming but to enforce rules upon how they do.”
“Good!” He pointed the bottle at her again, nodding approvingly. “Then you grasp the basics of the situation—but not the details. Professor, the fact that you can destroy all these people with a wave of your hand isn’t going to deter them. To do that, to really keep this court you’re assembling under control, you need someone cunning. Someone who thinks the way they do, and is tireless and relentless. Someone who needs the challenge.”
“Someone like you.”
“Well, Melaxyna would also do,” he said with a grin, “if you think you can trust her.”
She grunted. “Fortunately, decades of teaching adolescents have burned away any shame I once felt at stating the blazingly obvious. I don’t trust you, Fedora.”
“Well, obviously. Trust is earned; that takes time. I don’t know how you came to be hooked up with someone like Admestus bloody Rafe, but I can’t imagine it was all snuggles and puppies at first sight. And in the shorter term, we have something better than trust!”
“Oh, this should be absolutely priceless,” she muttered.
“Self-awareness!” Fedora held out his arms, beaming. “Nobody can offer me a better deal than what I’m asking from you, Professor. It’s protection from my enemies, and assurance that I will never get bored. I have nothing to gain by screwing you over, and everything to lose by pissing you off. And you, for your part, need someone to do this for you. You couldn’t even control the Sleeper, Tellwyrn. You can’t run your University and herd the cats you’re proposing to. This plan of yours involves filling your campus with people you cannot trust, and who are all working their own angles. Even if you had the right temperament to engage in the necessary conniving, you’re only one person. I, however, am a bloody well avatar of deceit. All you have to do is keep your eye on me, while I keep mine on all the others. It’s simple delegation.”
She just stared in silence. After a moment, he continued.
“I’ve just heard from Tiraas that the situation with the Hands of the Emperor has been resolved. That being the case, I know the perfect staff I’d like you to hire for me! There are three ex-Imperial soldiers who’ll be needing jobs, and are absolutely perfect for it. They’re already known and liked on this campus, and they are clearly, even famously, not useful for damn well anything—the perfect smokescreen to reassure the people I’ll actually need to be watching that campus security is just a token gesture. I know you’re familiar with this strategy, yourself. Good move, having that Sifanese fairy of yours play the fool so he’s free to do things like impersonate you while you’re away to prevent the Sleeper from trying something in your absence. Didn’t exactly work, but it was a good ploy and it did keep him from doing it on the campus.”
“On the subject of the Sleeper,” she said, “I can’t help thinking it doesn’t speak well of your qualifications that you, the big scary agent from Imperial Intelligence, have done fuck all to actually catch him.”
“Unfair and untrue, and you know it,” he countered without ire. “He’s not caught, yet, but we’re closing in. I hate using this phrase because it makes me sound weak, but it’s true: that’s not my fault. Crime is a game of connections, Professor. The victim and the perpetrator are always linked by circumstance and motivation, and that web of threads is what you have to follow and untangle to catch the guilty. Random crimes of passion or opportunity are always harder to solve than premeditated ones. And serial attackers like the Sleeper, the hardest yet. What he’s doing only makes sense inside his own head. With nothing linking him to his victims, I have no threads to follow. Serial killers are caught when they make a mistake—which they always do. We’ll get him, especially with the pressure you’ve just turned up. Hopefully before he does any more damage.”
“Hnh,” she grunted. “This is all starting to sound very reasonable. That alone makes me skeptical.”
“Good! Run with that—you’ll need that outlook. Because let me give you the bad news now.” Fedora folded his arms, the bottle dangling loosely from one hand, and frowned seriously. “You and your University are about to come under attack like you have never been before, Professor. What you’re doing… You are poised to change the world for the better, and that is the most dangerous position anyone can possibly be in. When the world needs change, it’s because the most powerful people in it are profiting from the way it is now—and the one thing they absolutely cannot stand is the grubby little fingers of do-gooders all over their playthings. They have to stop you. Have to. The crucible will come very early in this campaign, Tellwyrn; someone, or likely a consortium of someones, will strike from beyond your sight, using the very system you’re building here. And they don’t even have to beat you, they just have to make you default to your established methods; that’ll lower you to their level, force you to play their games, and from there it’s only a matter of time. Your force against their cunning is just another contest. You need to outfox them on their own terms, and then impose consequences with your superior firepower. Once you’ve won that first battle, you’ll be in the position you need to go forward: not another player in the game, but the arbiter standing above it, enforcing the rules. That is what will secure the future of this University. First, though, you have to win—and don’t forget that your students are going to be right on the front line of this battle. You’re going to need every ally and scrap of influence you’ve got to pull this off, and what you’ve got isn’t going to be enough.
“You need me.”
“You are wildly overstating the danger,” she snapped.
“No,” he said quietly, “I am not. And you’re pissed off now because now that I’ve said it, you realize I’m right.”
They locked eyes, and the silence stretched out. After a long pause, Tellwyrn took another long swig from her bottle, her gaze never leaving his.
“Fah,” she gasped, coming up for breath. “Well, this is usually the point where I’d threaten someone…”
“You’re used to dealing with people who need the reminder,” he said, suddenly grinning. “We’ve already been over that: I know exactly what I’m getting into.”
“And you understand my rules,” she began, but he cut her off.
“Not in any particular detail, but you can fill me in at your leisure. More importantly, I understand your priorities. The students’ safety is the first and foremost concern. After that, securing the University’s position against the onslaught that’s about to come. And once that’s taken care of, well, riding herd on the scheming politicians you’re filling this place with will be rather more low-key, but it’s never going to stop or relent. There’s plenty to do.”
“But the students come first.”
“The students come first.”
She sighed heavily. “Gods help us all… I’ll pick you out an office.”
He cleared his throat. “Actually, just build me one.”
Tellwyrn had turned to head back up the hall, but now swiveled back, pinning him with a gimlet stare. “Is this how it’s going to be? Because you’ll find I have little patience for demands.”
“Oh, to be sure,” he said cheerfully. “But you’re also going to be constructing a whole new extension of the campus to house the research facilities, right? Those are the whole reason we’ll need security; it only makes sense to have that office housed there.”
“Well, damn,” she mused, regarding him thoughtfully. “You actually are going to be sort of good at this, I suppose.”
Fedora grinned widely. “Best you’ve ever had. That’s a promise.”