Green Bridge, December 20th

“I detest holes in a story, Mr. Smallhat. Do you know that? I mean when the writer jumps ahead and skips over a whole mess of details that he thinks are boring, or just take up too much space, and pops on ahead to some conversation that seems mundane and makes you work out where you are and who’s talking and what happened in between. Starting out in the middle, like—what’s that called in the theatre, Professor?”

“In medias res I believe, Captain Vigg,” supplied Cyrus.

“Thank you, Professor. Immediate rest. I can’t abide it, Mr. Smallhat. Stories have no business with holes in them. And do you know what your story has? It has holes. It has more holes than a tray of doughnuts.”

(The doughnut, dear reader, is a pastry of comparatively ancient provenance, having been invented quite by accident during a sabre duel at M. Lafrobe’s pastry shop in Ville Carel during the reign of Louise the Questionable. However, as the printer’s views on the subject of page limits are unyielding, we have omitted a substantially enriching diversion into the lineage and development of the Carolese dough-not, and its gradual migration northward into Uelland. We will include it in an appendix to this volume. Let us return, then, to Professor Stoat and Captain Vigg.)

“You claim that you had a conversation about mathematics with Mr. Gorp early in the evening on the twenty-seventh of September,” continued Captain Vigg. “You went to supper with Herberta. And then you returned to Mr. Gorp’s office after supper to have another conversation about mathematics, but found Mr. Gorp dead.”

Obilly Smallhat, looking small and wretched behind the bars of his jail cell, nodded silently. In the dim, gray light filtering in through a barred slot near the ceiling, he appeared nearly invisible.

“Mr. Filtch,” Vigg carried on, “saw you go into the office after supper. He said you came out, wiped your hands, and walked calmly but quickly to the stair. Did you see Mr. Filtch?”

Smallhat shook his head. His hat—which had indeed once been small—was now entirely absent, leaving him looking strangely naked despite the jail-issued shirt and hose.

“And after you alerted Dean Comland to the crime, you fled the city, rather than waiting to answer questions. You went back to the Gray Kingdom, because you wanted to visit your King and tell him about what you were doing in the College of Mathematics. And you did all this immediately after discovering that your close friend Mr. Gorp had been killed.”

Cyrus gave Vigg a sidelong glance. In two and a half months of interrogations, there was much that Smallhat hadn’t said to any of the Billies. Cyrus hadn’t said any of it either—and that made him nervous.

“Now Mr. Smallhat,” announced Captain Vigg with all the severity his rotund form could muster, “the Queen expects from me an answer on whether to prosecute you for the murder of Rolland Gorp. Professor Stoat and I have been more than patient with you, but I’m sorry to say the Queen’s patience with us is wearing thin. If you can’t supply a better account of yourself on that night, or a witness who can corroborate your story, then I’m afraid I’m going to have to give Her Majesty an answer that you’re not going to like.”

Smallhat sat back on his bench at the far corner of the cell.

“I didn’t kill Rolly,” was all he said. Vigg shook his head in disgust.

Cyrus rubbed his whiskers thoughtfully, then gestured with his head at Vigg. The two men walked up the narrow hallway of the jails below William Hall and spoke in whispers.

“Would you give me a minute or two alone with him, Captain?”

Vigg narrowed his eyes. “You’ve had plenty of talks with Mr. Smallhat already, Professor. What are you going to say that you haven’t said before?”

I want to ask him what Rolly and Professor Pie were working on, thought Cyrus. And I don’t want you to know I’m asking him.

“I want to appeal to his sense of self-preservation,” was what he said aloud. “And I want to do it in his native tongue, without anyone else there to make him feel nervous.”

Vigg scowled. “I don’t like it when you talk to him in that jabber-language, Professor. And he never talks back to you in it. But if you think one last try will make a difference, go ahead. If it doesn’t work, you and I both know what’s next. I’ll be up the hall.”

Cyrus sat down again on the bench outside the jail cell and looked in at Smallhat. The goblin sat hunched in one corner, his knees pressed up against his chest. He didn’t look at Cyrus.

“I need to know why someone stuck knives in Rolly, Festering-Squirrel-Guts,” he asked quietly. He’d persuaded Herberta to tell him Smallhat’s old goblin name some weeks ago, assuring her that it would help him free her friend. So far, it hadn’t.

“I don’t speak that language,” said Smallhat, quietly.

“You talk the goblin-tongue,” replied Cyrus acidly. “Do not pretend that what is not real is real. Fake stories are for big-threats and youngsters.”

“I don’t speak that language,” Smallhat repeated. “Goblin-talk is for savages and idiots. I am a mathematician. I speak Uellish.” He said it with a stiff pride.

Cyrus paused and thought. This had to be handled delicately.

“If you do not talk to me about Rolly, Festering-Squirrel-Guts, then they will stop giving you food to eat.”

Now, Goblins appreciated a good threat, and the more colorful the better. But this was the one threat that would stop any goblin cold. It was practically never used—an act of vileness and hatred so black that most grayskins were afraid to speak it out loud. He could see Smallhat shiver slightly.

“I do not think you are a monster, Cyrus Stoat,” said the goblin at last. “I do not think you will force me to go hunger-mad.”

“I will not,” agreed Cyrus, “but the other big-folk are impatient. They want to punish someone for sticking knives in Rolly. You are the easiest to punish.”

“Why are we speaking in this dirty-talk?” hissed Smallhat sharply. “I have said all that I can say in your man-talk, in sixty-four days of sitting in this prison-cave, except only words that would stick more knives into Rolly’s bloated-rotting-corpse if I say them.” Goblin-speech was not notably subtle, but it had an impressive vocabulary for violence and its consequences. Cyrus understood—there were things that Smallhat couldn’t say to Vigg, because they would betray Rolly’s trust.

“Because only you and I know the goblin-speech,” Cyrus replied. “You know that is real. I need to know why Rolly got knives in him, or you will be made hunger-mad.”

“I do not know why Rolly got the stick-stick,” answered the small grayskin wearily. “I already told you all I do know.”

Now they were getting somewhere, thought Cyrus.

“What was in the encrypted notes he sent to Weisseberg?” Cyrus had to fill in Uellish words and names that didn’t exist in the goblin-speech, but he took care to hide them with fake, heavy inflection.

“His work with Professor Pie,” answered Smallhat softly. “From before the big-man disappeared. I already told you this.”

Cyrus glanced up the corridor. He could see Vigg at the guard station, sitting quietly and watching him intently down the corridor.

“I need to know about the…” he struggled for a word in goblin-speech that wouldn’t give him away if Vigg overheard them. “I need to know about the magic-words of the big-man.” A fair approximation of Natural Mathematics, he reflected. ‘Magic-words.’

“I already told you this too, in the Gray Kingdom,” answered the goblin petulantly. “I only understood little bits of his magic-words. They were of the sun and the ground and lightning. He was…” The goblin concentrated, trying to bend abstract concepts into a speech that was never meant for them. Sweat broke out on his brow. “Professor Pie was trying to use magic-words to tell how a thing could be real and not-real at the same time. How the light-stuff in lightning affects tiny things like crumbs of crumbs bread.”

Cyrus absorbed that and filed it away. “When did they start to use the magic-words?”

Smallhat thought that over. “It was… just after I came to the house of magic-words last year. In the fall. They got a thing from their friends, and it had magic-words that they had never seen before. They were trying to understand the magic-words.”

Cyrus looked at him sharply. “What was the thing they got from their friends?” he demanded, as softly as he could manage. “You never said this before.”

“I don’t know!” answered Smallhat desperately. “Rolly didn’t tell me everything! I skulked and scrounged and spied and listened! Ach, I am filling in the spear holes in a dead boar to give you what you want in this dirty-talk. I can feel my squishy-brain-bits crawling out of my ears when I say these words.”

Cyrus looked up the hallway. Vigg had stood up, and was looking at them closely.

“Who are the friends he got the magic-words from?” whispered Cyrus intently. “Tell me or I will take off your head and use it for a ball-game and then put it back.”

Smallhat smiled. “Your threats are weak, Cyrus Stoat. When I get free, I will eat your fingers and stuff carrots in the holes. You will be Cyrus carrot-hands.”

Vigg was walking down the hallway toward them.

“What friends gave Rolly and Pie the magic-words, Festering-Squirrel-Guts?” he asked desperately.

“The same friends that gave him small round metal bits for his secret-words,” said the little goblin. And then he faded back into the corner of the cell as Captain Vigg appeared behind Cyrus.

Secret-words—cryptography. Round metal bits—coins. That meant…

“What did he say?” asked the lawman.

Cyrus stood up and turned around slowly.

“He said he would eat my fingers and stick carrots in the holes,” answered Cyrus with a feigned shrug. “The goblin tongue is a useless mess. Waste of my time. Walk me out, Captain.”

✽✽✽

“Do you think he’s guilty?”

Captain Vigg looked down into his cup of tea, as though the answer might be lurking in there somewhere.

“It doesn’t much matter what I think, Professor,” he muttered at last.

“How does it not matter? You are in the business of justice, are you not?”

“Justice?” Vigg snorted. “You tell me what justice is, Professor, and I’ll tell you whether I’m in it or not. The business I am in, that I know of, is the business of keeping order. Where there’s order, people stay calm, and safe, and get about their business.”

“Does order require you to prosecute a… person… of whose guilt you have serious doubts?”

“Do I have serious doubts?” asked Vigg with a raised eyebrow. “Do you? Smallhat admits he went to Gorp’s office right at the time of the murder, and a witness sees him coming out nice and calm, wiping his hands, and make off for the Dean’s office. Then once he’s tipped off the Dean, he flees town.”

“Why would he tell the Dean at all?” demanded Cyrus. “He could have just made his move right there, if he’d wanted to escape so badly. They wouldn’t have found Rolly until the next day. And why would he have returned to Green Bridge when I asked? He could have just stayed in the Gray Kingdom, and nobody could have touched him.”

Vigg shrugged. “People do all kinds of things with a guilty conscience. Now look, Professor. I said it doesn’t matter, and it really doesn’t. Snugg and Queen Anne are both riding us to name someone they can prosecute. He’ll have a trial, and a jury, and a lawyer if someone will pay for it. But it’s been nearly three months since Rolland Gorp was killed, and this needs to be closed. You know as well as I that it’s a distraction and an embarrassment to the Queen, and those are the last things she needs with the Moot starting up soon in Roosterfoot.”

And Snugg? thought Cyrus. Why does Nicola Snugg want the case closed and a goblin hanged? No one knows how deep those coal veins run, out there in the remote forest. With the goblins in disarray, a good company of mercenaries would have little trouble making the Gray Kingdom one more piece of the Snugg empire. He wished Merrily were here to help him think through it; she had been absent for two months now on some secret project for Queen Anne. He ground his teeth. He didn’t need Merrily Hunter.

“Can you wait another week?” he asked Vigg hopefully.

“I can wait another day,” answered the portly officer. “I’ll have to go to the Snow Ball tomorrow night, and I can’t avoid the Queen or Mrs. Snugg there. I’m too big a target,” he added, patting his belly. “You’re going to the Snow Ball aren’t you, Professor? Maybe you can talk to them across the banquet table.”

He stood up. Dry, flat words echoed again in his mind.

Dead end, Cyrus Stoat.

Stop it! he thought.

Who was he talking to? He could feel his grasp on reason starting to shake loose.

Dead end. Well—it was somebody’s dead end.

✽✽✽

He would have to go and see Veridia. His mind immediately produced five terribly important things he must do first, but he squashed them. There it was. He had to go and see Veridia.

Cyrus retrieved Daisy from the stables at William Hall, saddled the horse, and rode grimly out into the snowy streets. Winter had come early to Green Bridge, and the drifts were already high on either side of him. Continual traffic from the city’s many sleighs made most of the city’s ways passable on horseback, but citizens who had to get around on foot generally took to skis or broad, wood-framed snowshoes shaped like teardrops. Even the occasional Billy could be seen here and there on skis, poling along and making sure the snow was well behaved.

The homes and shops of the city were colorfully decorated in anticipation of Mother’s Night, with abundant boughs of holly and spruce framing doors and windows. Defying the growing cold and dark of Midwinter, the burghers lit their windows with as many candles and oil lamps as they could afford. Cyrus noted, as he passed, that there were fewer bright red lanterns in the windows than in previous years; a consequence of dwindling oil supplies and no fresh deliveries coming from the south. A consequence of war.

The gay decorations did little to lift Cyrus’s mood. He was riding away from one bad conversation and toward another. At last, though, a jolly snatch of song coming through a briefly opened tavern door pulled him out of his gloom, and he moved Daisy over to the side of the street. Stabling the horse inside the small, attached barn, he stumped into the warm interior of the tavern and shook the snow from his cloak. A smile spread over his face as the patrons turned to welcome him into their song with raised mugs and ruddy faces. Surely it would be wrong not to raise a glass or two at Midwinter! After all, people who didn’t celebrate the holiday with good friends—or at least a collection of inebriated strangers—tended to be visited by moralizing ghosts.

Two mugs of beer, a few friendly swigs of whiskey, a substantial meal, and two further rounds of whiskey later, Cyrus stumbled back out to the stable. Daisy looked at him with disgust as he fumbled with the cinch and crawled pitifully into the saddle. He blearily guided the horse out into the darkness and continued on his way to see Veridia, feeling most jolly indeed.

The feeling did not last long once he arrived.

“You’re drunk, Cyrus,” she announced waspishly.

“I was drunk at one point,” he parried. “And I sincerely wish I were drunk right now.”

The conversation did not improve from there.

“Let me see Marius,” he announced.

“No. He’s sleeping, for once. Did you come to see me, or to see Marius?”

“Well. Both,” he said, trying to make it sound convincing. “But since he’s sleeping… well, you look well, Veridia.”

She gazed at him in the way one might at an unexpected mess left by a horse in the street, nearly trodden upon.

“I look, Cyrus, like I have had two hours of sleep each night for the past week—which is a reflection of actual reality.”

He rolled his eyes. “Why don’t you hire a wet nurse or two, Veridia? We both know you can afford it. You’ll be happier, and I’ll be healthier.” This was a well-trodden argument by now, but he went through the motions anyway.

“Because I am not contracting out the rearing of my son,” she retorted. “If you were ever here, Cyrus, then I would be happy for you to hold him for half the night while he wails, and would then be equally happy to hold him myself for the other half. But you aren’t ever here, are you? Instead you are late, drunk, and—”

“—quite curious about the mathematical formulas you gave to Professor Foulwart Pie and Rolland Gorp,” he interrupted her suddenly.

There was a silence in her study so deep that the coal stove in the corner seemed to shrink in on itself in confusion and shame.

“What mathematics? If you are referring to our new encryption—”

“No,” he interrupted. “I asked you, back in October, what you took out of his office. I see now it was the wrong question; I should have asked what you put in. Rolly and Pie were working on some kind of… Natural Mathematics for Snugg. And it wasn’t your new whatever-it-is—cipher machine. It was something else, and it had them both scared. And then Pie vanished, and Rolly was killed. Now Obilly Smallhat is sitting in jail—and will likely be indicted—for a murder that makes no sense for him to have committed. So I need you, Veridia, to tell me what you gave Rolly and Pie!” He raised his voice at the end, pounding his fist angrily on the table.

She delicately picked up a small, silver bell near at hand and rang it twice. Cyrus, his chest still heaving in anger, looked down at it in confusion.

“Now is hardly the time to summon tea, Veridia,” he snapped. A detached part of him observed that his blood was up, he was drunk, and he was behaving like a jackass. But that part was sitting high in the stands, watching the action with field glasses.

The door to Veridia’s study opened, and two very large men came inside. They were not visibly armed; they were weapons themselves.

“Take Mr. Stoat outside,” Veridia instructed quietly. “And tell the security people not to allow him to set his foot—or any other body part—on this property until he has adequately mitigated his character flaws.” She put on her spectacles and picked up the top piece of paper from a neat pile on her desk.

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

Cyrus rose to his feet, his face flushed and his heart racing.

“We have a child together, Veridia!” he snarled. “You can’t—”

A heavy hand clamped onto his shoulder. He turned his head to peer down at it.

“Come along, Mr. Stoat,” said a deep voice behind him. “This is a dead end.”

✽✽✽

As he rode back through the dark, cold, snowy streets of Green Bridge toward Farley Island, Cyrus’s mind cycled helplessly between a few simple thoughts.

Veridia doesn’t love me anymore.

It was like this with Mari and Wigglus.

I’ll never see either of my sons again.

Smallhat will be executed for killing Rolly.

Whoever actually killed Rolly is still out there.

What did Veridia give Rolly and Pie to work on?

Veridia doesn’t love me anymore.

This circle carried on inescapably, as he stared dumbly out at the darkness. The Mother’s Night decorations were mocking, hateful, garish. He didn’t feel the bitter cold, and neglected to button his cloak. Daisy plodded along stoically, knowing the way home better than his master. The world seemed unreal. It couldn’t be real, could it? No. This was just one more dream; soon enough, the dry, flat voice would say again the hated words, just as it had for months now.

“Dead end,” he whispered. “Dead end, Cyrus Stoat.”

Daisy stopped moving. Cyrus dragged his attention back from the realms of self-pity and looked around him.

They were in Bramble Square, still a mile from Three Fish Bridge. The broad square was flat, motionless, empty. Except—there was a line of figures in the snow. In the dim light of the stars reflected on the white ground, he could see they were the figures or men; or perhaps men and women. They wore narrow snowshoes, and he could see they were armed with a variety of weapons. Most had crossbows, while some had long daggers.

He sighed. Yes, he thought. Let it end like this. He put on his best crooked smile, and tried to come up with a last, cutting remark.

Then the light on the snow changed. It took on a yellow tinge, and began to flicker. The light grew brighter from the edges of the square, slowly creeping into the cold, blue-white dimness of the reflected stars. The armed people before him noticed the change in light as well, and turned this way and that in confusion.

From all sides of the square, from the broad main street and the little alleys both, emerged a ring of riders on horseback. They formed a rough circle around the edge of the open space, slowly drawing tighter together. Each rider carried a torch held high before him, and this was the source of the yellow light now flooding into the center of Bramble Square. Each rider wore a cloak and a hood, and their faces could not be seen. As the ring drew inward, the armed people in the center drew close together, pointing their weapons outward.

By some gesture unseen by Cyrus, the riders reached under their cloaks and drew forth long, broad swords of gleaming steel. These they held forward, the torches still elevated in their other hands.

The armed people in the center of the square, now obviously terrified at this unsettling display, crowded together in a clump. Cyrus, mystified beyond all cognition, simply watched, and wondered when it would be his turn to die.

Silently, two of the riders pulled forward through the snow and then turned aside, opening a space in the ring. Beyond it was a narrow alley, just visible in the darkness. The implication was obvious, and the people in the center of the square needed no further prompting. They stumbled and ran, as fast as their snowshoes would permit, for the opening. Passing beyond it, they disappeared into the darkness.

Daisy snorted, and Cyrus patted his neck reassuringly. He looked around at the ring of torch-bearing riders, wondering what would happen next. But the ring of riders drew no closer. Instead, the two who had opened a way out of the circle rode forward to stand their horses before Cyrus in the snow. They threw back their hoods, and he saw their faces.

One was a man with shoulder-length brown hair and a short, well-trimmed beard. Clearly visible against his dark cloak was a silver pendant, in the shape of two crossed bars with a small circle at their center. Cyrus recognized him immediately from Rolly’s funeral.

The other rider was Sheria. In the light of the torches around them, her black eyes seemed to sparkle and glow. Her thin face was grave beneath the swirling, painted designs, and her long hair was tied back in a tight knot. She also wore the pendant.

Cyrus swallowed and nudged Daisy forward to be closer to them.

“You Advocates have a real flair for melodrama,” he remarked, keeping his voice steadier than he felt. “This business with the circle and the torches and the swords was perfectly choreographed. Do you practice it, out there in the little villages?”

The man with the short beard smiled briefly. “All religion is illusion, Cyrus Stoat,” he remarked. “We treat our illusions as seriously as the Ecclesia or their masters in the Holy Empire. But no. Our faith is in choice and action, not in ceremony. Mr. Gorp believed that, you know. So in this matter, tonight, our actions are guided by our… well, by our guide.” He turned and looked at Sheria.

“I thought better of you than to get mixed up with fools and traitors,” he said, some of his confidence returning.

She turned her head slightly to one side, looking past him. He turned around and looked over his shoulder; there was nothing there but a couple of melodramatic cultists. What was she looking at?

“Follow the Bright Path, Cyrus Stoat,” she said quietly.

He rolled his eyes. “Now you’ve traded your old sack of nonsense for this new one. What do you—”

She spurred her horse forward quickly, drew up next to him, and grabbed him by the collar. Drawing him close, she put her face next to his. He noted, perversely, that she smelled of spruce needles.

“Your choices in the next day and night split the Bright Path, Cyrus Stoat. Lives of people you love flower or wither when you choose one way or another. So—I think you should listen carefully.” Those black, alien eyes drilled into his brain. He swallowed, and nodded slightly.

“All paths are real, but only one is correct. When I tell you what you must do, the Bright Path is dead. My sisters taught you some of our speech, though you use it now only to mock us. Use it instead when your logic reaches a dead end.”

He stared at her, his eyes bulging. She didn’t smile, but did raise one eyebrow slightly.

“Some paths die sooner than others, Cyrus Stoat,” she whispered, drawing back. Then she spoke in her own tongue—a language Cyrus had learned only feebly, many years ago.

“Our lines are crossed, and I am your friend. Follow the Bright Path.”

✽✽✽

The next day, Cyrus taught his lecture in the morning. The hall seemed small and gray without Merrily in it to answer his questions. Then he went directly back to his office. He read his notes on Rolly’s murder; then he read them again. He had a cup of tea. His read his notes out loud to Gmork, who nodded at all the wrong times, having no idea what Cyrus was saying. He translated them into the goblin tongue as best he could, but Gmork still nodded at all the wrong times.

He made a list of all the people who knew something about the murder, what they said about it, and what he thought of them, and put them all on the floor of the office. He considered putting them up on the wall and tying bits of string between them, but ruled it out as tacky and pointless. He shuffled them around on the floor instead, trying to make some visual sense of the disorder before him.

There was a knock on the door as the afternoon sun was growing weaker. A small piece of his mind hoped wildly that it was Merrily, come back from her secret mission to help him unravel this mess. Gmork answered the door, and the man on the other side of the door was not Merrily, but Vicod Rayth. The tall, black-skinned Carolese walked into Cyrus’s office and sat in Cyrus’s own chair behind his desk, while Cyrus ignored him and stared at his bits of paper on the floor.

“I brought you something,” said Vicod at last.

Cyrus looked up hopefully. “Is it a clue?”

Vicod smiled and shook his head. “No. Sorry, Cyrus. It’s your dinner suit. The Snow Ball begins in three hours. I thought you’d want some time to clean up. You need a shave, and you smell.”

Cyrus flopped back against the desk and stared at the ceiling.

“I don’t know what to do, Vicod,” he said. “I’m at a…” he swallowed. “I’m at an impasse. Smallhat looks guilty, but it’s not watertight and I don’t believe he did it. A jury shouldn’t convict—they’re supposed to require proof beyond all doubt. But with the Queen and Nicola Snugg whispering in their ears, I have a feeling they’ll find Vigg’s evidence compelling. Filtch is suspicious, but he’s old and feeble. I don’t think he could have killed Rolly, and I don’t know why he would. None of the other mathematicians make any sense as a murderer, and Rolly didn’t have any enemies. All I have to go on is a whiff of a hint of a suspicion that he might have been working on something complicated and scary with Foulwart Pie—and the fact that Pie himself has been missing since September.” He glanced down at the papers on the floor. “Oh—Agaberth Tentimes has buggered off as well. Rolly was doing some drudge work for her. Two senior faculty at Redbun, both working with Rolly, both missing indefinitely.”

There was silence from behind him.

“Maybe a banquet will jiggle something loose Cyrus. Give it a chance. And I brought you something else—I found it at the bottom of the receiving bin in the chief librarian’s office.”

A black-skinned hand dangled in front of Cyrus’s face, and in the hand was a newly-pressed, neatly-bound book. The imprint on the cover read:

Excerpts of Oral Folklore of the Uells in the Reign of Yardax I

Collected and transcribed by Balthan

Trans. C. Stoat

Cyrus took it in his hands and chuckled. “The printer finally got around to sending me a copy,” he remarked. “I’d never have published this if I’d thought it would be any use to Leeland and Hobb. But it turned out to be a pile of nonsense. Do you know, Vicod, I asked old Groob to send me the Balthan volume in the hope I could hunt down another Imperial-era industrial site full of lost treasures and ancient knowledge? That finery in the northern wastes was the find of a lifetime. And instead of another one of those—and after all the trouble you and Wigglus and Merrily and Rolly and I went through to get the book back here—all Balthan gave me was… ghost stories.” He shook his head in disgust. “Still, it was good exercise to keep my Old Brassen sharp. Balthan’s grammar was atrocious, or else he was living in a world where the regular rules…”

His brain became stuck. He flipped open the book and turned pages furiously toward the back. He found a particular passage in one of the transcribed folktales.

> …The priests took him into the temple at the center of the ruins, among the great making-places of the old ones. And they showed him the metal god, who would give him wisdom. When he came back from the temple, it was that he had been wealthier than any other man, and it was that he had known the secrets of the making from the old ones. But he was mad, and talked to people who no one else could see and walked through the farm fields and mud as if they were great roads.

He flipped a few more pages.

> …She walked into the ruins of Naridium, where the old men kept their make-places, and there she met a ghost. The ghost came into her, and when she returned the next morning her mind was clear, but it belonged to one of the old ones, and the grandmother was gone. Before the body died, it said that it was from the great place of change in the north, the Kaples Wethan Mekoth [trans. uncertain], and asked to be taken back to the priests in Naridium to be returned to its own land.

He turned the page, and stared at his own translation.

> …But they were found out, and the Emperor had Semvee thrown in prison, and made it known that he would be mutilated and killed in the morning. Semvee was cunning, and so before he was captured [sic] he snuck into the great Kaples Wethan Mekoth in Naridium and entered the sanctum of the metal god. There he entreated the metal god with the most terrible offering. When dawn came, Semvee was the Emperor of the South, and the old Emperor was Semvee. The Emperor had himself mutilated and killed, and went back to the South with his favorite wife. Before he left, he ordered his slaves to destroy the Kaples Wethan Mekoth in Naridium. Thereafter the only remaining homes of the god were in Krotsium and Vicarium.

“Vicod,” Cyrus stated flatly. “I’m going insane.”

✽✽✽

Snow was falling heavily on the evening of the twenty-first of December, but the citizens of Green Bridge, undaunted, gathered in their homes and halls to make the customary observances of Mother’s Night. Gentle songs drifted through the streets, sung by untrained but confident voices. Candles in windows cast their yellow light out into the snow, and green boughs of spruce and sprigs of bright-berried holly decorated doorways, mantels, and windows. Through an oddity of the old Ecclesial calendar, Mother’s Night was not officially the end of one year and the beginning of a new one—but for one and all in the town and country, it was a night of dark, calm, quiet magic that set off a closing of old things and an opening of new ones. They remembered the light of summer and looked forward to the magic of winter.

In his cluttered office on the second floor of Peacock Hall, Cyrus carefully adjusted his cravat and stared at himself in the mirror. Forty-seven years showed heavily in his face, the lines deeper than they had been two years ago. The few old scars he’d endured in his life as an adventurer hadn’t faded, but a few new ones had joined them. If he’d still been wearing a week’s growth of whiskers, they would be nearly white. He resolved to shave more frequently in the near year.

There was a tap on the door. “Come,” he announced brusquely.

The door opened, and a small person entered; Cyrus turned away from the mirror. The newcomer was Gmork. His assistant was dressed in goblin-sized, black-dyed hose, a puffy white shirt, a rather loud tweed vest, and a blazing pink cravat. Cyrus smiled; he had picked out the clothes himself. But Gmork had added his own touch as well. Somewhere, he had found himself a felt top hat and had carefully transferred the miscellany that decorated his straw and twig cap onto the new vessel. It was an oddly poetic alteration, Cyrus felt.

“You look like a big-man chief, Gmork,” he remarked bemusedly. “If you start jabbering about magic-words and nonsense, I won’t be able to tell you apart from the Dean of the College.”

The little grayskin puffed out his chest with pride. “You are a good mate, Cyrus Stoat,” he effused. “This Mother’s Night is a fine idea of big-men. When King Simon conquers your tribes and we feast on your bones and flesh, we shall take Mother’s Night back to the Gray Kingdom and do it every day. And look, I brought you a present.”

Cyrus shrugged on his dinner coat and looked down at Gmork. The little fellow was holding up in both hands a small parcel, carefully wrapped in a bit of bright red cloth that he must have scavenged from someplace. It was tied with yellow ribbon, arranged in some approximation of a bow. A decomposing human toe was tucked thoughtfully in between the bow and the wrapping. Cyrus didn’t let himself consider where it might have come from.

He pulled the ribbon, carefully set aside the toe, and unwrapped the parcel. Inside was a shabby tobacco box, and inside the box was a small, slightly dented gold ring. It was unadorned, but it was gold; gold is never ugly.

“Where did you get this shiny?” he asked curiously. “This is a shiny worth many bones, but it looks like it went in one end of a Snorl and out the other.”

Gmork smiled broadly, obviously pleased with himself. “I got it from the same guy who gave me the toe,” he announced. “See, Cyrus, I can make like a big-man too.” And then he switched to Uellish, and said, carefully: “Happy Mother’s Night, Professor Stoat.”

“Thank you, Gmork,” he answered in Uellish, speaking slowly. “It is a fine gift. Happy Mother’s Night.” Then he tossed the toe back to the well-dressed goblin, who had been eyeing it hopefully. “I’m not hungry yet,” he lied. “You can have this. Come on—you’ll be my guest at the Snow Ball. They’ll have more food there than even you can eat.”

Cyrus gave himself another look in the mirror. He couldn’t avoid seeing the bags under his eyes, or the haunted stare that came back from within them.

Dead end. The words would not let him rest.

I am going insane.

He walked hand in hand with Gmork across the broad square and up to the gates of Bastings Hall, where well-heeled guests were already arriving in sleigh coaches. Along the way, he passed a group of singers filling the open air of the plaza with joyful song. It was one of those ancient, deceptively simple tunes that gets handed down from generation to generation for so long that the words no longer make sense; but the tune still stuck somewhere deep inside Cyrus from Mother’s Nights of his childhood in Uellodon. Sentimental nonsense, he told himself, dropping an entire King’s Crown into the hat before the singers.

As he and Gmork slowly ascended the steps before Bastings Hall, Cyrus caught sight of a familiar tall, thin figure in sober ecclesiastical dress. Bishop Wildrick had arrived at the same time, and was making his way up the stairs alone. Cyrus tried earnestly to hide behind his diminutive manservant, but gave it up as the churchman recognized him.

“Professor Stoat!” the Bishop of Green Bridge greeted him. “God has blessed us with fine, cold weather on this Feast of the First King. I am pleased to see you have come to join the light and warmth of brotherhood—”

Reaching the top of the stairs, Cyrus deliberately fell on his face, feigning an accident with his wooden leg. This had the desired effect of cutting off the blossoming sermon, as Wildrick was compelled by good form to stop and help him up again.

“Thank you, Bish,” huffed Cyrus, spitting out snow and a bit of something nasty tracked up from the horses in the street below. “This damned leg will be a curse for the rest of my life. If I could go back in time to that night in March, I’d tell myself to bring a flask of oil up to the rooftop and fight dirtier. Or perhaps I’d just go and have a nice glass of wine instead. No sense living through all that political huff-and-puff twice. You remember the night, don’t you, Bish? ‘Freedom means you must let your neighbor fail to obey God,’ and all that? Anne made such a lovely speech out there in the square. You were there, weren’t you?”

Bishop Wildrick flushed. They both knew he had been there—he was at the front of the mob that Queen Anne had been compelled to talk down. Had Anne been more vindictive or less desperate for allies, the good Bishop would be one head shorter today, and considerably decomposed.

“Let us enter the Snow Ball together,” answered Wildrick awkwardly, offering Cyrus his hand. “The Academy and the Church should be friends now. Or, anyway, we’ll both be hanged together as traitors if Leeland takes the North. After we both die for our principles, God can sort out which of them was—”

“DON’T SAY IT!” snapped Cyrus, a bit more heatedly than he’d meant to. Seeing Wildrick’s hurt look, he took the man’s proffered hand and walked with him and Gmork into the open lower floor of Bastings. As they entered, smiling attendants placed wreaths of woven holly leaves on their heads, bright with red berries.

Cyrus endured the lengthy gaiety of small talk before dinner, hiding as best he could behind tables laden with wine and those little appetizers that you really wished were the entire meal. Gmork provoked more than a few angry stares and whispered conversations, but Cyrus kept him close and glared ferociously at anyone who whispered too loudly. Anyway—nobody wanted to start shouting on Mother’s Night.

Though the decorations were bright, the music cheerful, and the people around him sociable, Cyrus could feel a tension both around him and within him. Lurking beneath the gaiety and color was the gray, unyielding certainty that slowly, day by day, their city and its leaders slipped closer to a reckoning. And within Cyrus, the mounting desperation and futility of the past months created a wash of cognitive dissonance in his mind. He forced himself to draw a beer, and toasted the health of his little assistant.

The goblin, for his part, looked as though he had walked into a waking dream and wanted never to cease dreaming.

After an excruciating hour, the guests were led to long, white-draped tables, decorated with spruce boughs and more holly. Cyrus drifted through the meal, and the toasts, and the songs. He kept the wine glass drained, and the servants kept it full. Queen Anne made some sort of speech.

And then the servants circulated through the halls bearing large bowls, mischievous twinkles in their eyes. In each cup was a small mound of fresh snow from outside. The servants set the cups down before each guest, in the place where dessert would have gone. Queen Anne rose to her feet.

“Friends,” she began. But before she could continue with another speech, a large, round ball of snow hit her squarely in the chest, spreading across her heavily jeweled gown of white silk.

Heads swiveled, and horrified faces looked in the direction the snowball had come from. Cyrus realized they were looking at him. Could he have thrown the ball, he asked himself? No—surely he hadn’t consumed that many glasses of wine. Then he looked to one side, and found Gmork there, his hands covered in dripping snow.

The goblin didn’t say a word, but gave Cyrus a look that said: Isn’t this what you’re supposed to do with snow? And Cyrus gave him a look back that said: Only if you want what’s left of your body to be buried in it.

And then, to Cyrus’s enduring amazement, a snowball hit him directly in the face.

He wiped off the frigid slush and looked around. He found that the faces around him had turned away from Gmork, and were now looking in a new direction. They were looking at the Queen.

Her next snowball knocked Gmork’s hat off his head.

Cyrus later could not quite explain what possessed him in that moment. It was, however, without hesitation or compromise that he scooped up a handful of snow from his bowl and threw it, with all his strength and with surprising accuracy, directly into the face of the Chief Librarian of Triad University, sitting across the table several chairs away.

Snowballs were soon flying all over the room, knocking down decorations, spilling wine glasses, coating faces and bodies. Guests shouted and whooped, some hiding behind chairs or pillars, but most manfully taking their lumps and flinging them back with exuberance and glee. The servants rushed out into the courtyard and came back with large buckets full of fresh snow, and the fight raged on. Queen Anne briefly lent her tiara to Ernbert Ablecock of the Charter Council, who wrapped a bit of purple drapery around himself and stood on the table, shouting that he was King Leeland; his cloak was soon white with snow. Smiles—real, genuine smiles that defied gloom, pessimism, and doubt—lit the face of every person in the hall.

Cyrus, however, witnessed the snowballs floating through the air with an eerie sense of detachment. Something was tickling his wine-soaked brain. As he watched, the balls seemed to draw toward each other in patterns and orbits. He slipped away from the mundane reality of an unexpected snowball fight, and saw the white missiles instead as planets turning in the void around a fiery, angry star.

He suddenly rounded on Gmork. Pulling the goblin out of the melee, he hissed sharply in his ear:

“We must find Herberta!”

✽✽✽

“I don’t understand, Professor,” said the confused astronomer. “You want me to show you Professor Tentimes’ star? Now? Why?”

They stood in the frigid, clear night air at the top of Redbun hall. The flat roof of this section of the building was cleared of snow, and a number of telescopes of varying shapes and sizes were set up, pointing here and there. It was several hours after he and Gmork had fled the Snow Ball, but Cyrus still absently wore his crown of holly.

“I don’t know,” said Cyrus. He was dead sober, but his mind was oddly detached. “I don’t know why I need to see it. I don’t have a logical explanation. But everything else has been a dead end. The snowballs were stars.” He trailed off lamely. This was embarrassing. Cyrus Stoat had lived a life dedicated to the discovery and application of reason and fact. To know a thing, but not know why, would normally have infuriated him. In his altered state, though, he simply accepted it with a bit of sheepishness.

Herberta went over to one of the largest telescopes and peered through the finder. She carefully adjusted the controls to direct the main lens to the southern sky.

“There,” she said. “Put your eye to the small lens at the bottom. Don’t touch the cylinder or you’ll lose it.”

Cyrus looked in.

At first, he could see only blackness. Then he relaxed his eye, and a starfield came into view. It was brilliant; he had never looked through a telescope before, and was unprepared for the intensity of the magnification and the sense of having slipped away from the earth. Herberta had focused the instrument on a particularly vivid pinpoint of light. It seemed to flicker, as stars do, and was oddly irregular, as if the light source were perhaps an asymmetrical shape. Its magnificence took his breath away, but nothing about it screamed out the answer to who had killed Rolland Gorp, or why.

Cyrus stared at it for many minutes. He felt certain that he was supposed to look at this star—but beyond that, nothing came to him.

There was a meowing sound behind him, and the low rumble of a cat’s purr. He stood up and looked over his shoulder. Gmork and Herberta were crouched by a wooden file box, passing something into it. Curious, Cyrus stumped over, navigating the icy roof carefully on one good leg.

An old, mottled brown and white tabby cat lay in the box, gratefully accepting food scraps from the two goblins. Cyrus wondered at this; giving away food was not common behavior among their kind.

“Whose cat is this?” he asked.

“Nobody’s cat,” answered Herberta. “She lives right here in this box. She comes inside, sometimes, when it’s really cold. The astronomers bring her food and fresh water every night when they come up here to work. But they’re all home with their families tonight, so I brought some food.” She went back to passing in scraps of cold roast chicken and crumbs of bread.

“Cat in a box,” he muttered wryly. “Reminds me of a particularly obtuse Svegnian philosopher. He had this thought experiment with a cat in a box that was both alive and dead… until you looked at it…”

His mind stopped. Then it remembered.

Professor Pie was trying to use magic-words to tell how a thing could be real and not-real at the same time. How the light-stuff in lightning affects tiny things like crumbs of crumbs bread.

Dead end, came the dry voice. It was emotionless, but somehow more urgent, more intense. Dead end, Cyrus Stoat.

He struggled to remember what Sheria had said to him last night in Bramble Square. What was it? When your logic reaches a dead end…

Follow the bright path, he thought, dredging up his very shabby vocabulary in the fey-tongue. But then he caught a glimpse of it, like a winding thread of bright light stretching out before him, from this rooftop to—

“Gmork,” he said softly. “Would you please go over to Peacock Hall and pack up our belongings for a trip. Do it tonight. Tomorrow we’re leaving for Weisseberg. We’re going to find Rolly’s notes, and Rolly himself is going to tell us who killed him.”