> One facet of modern life notably absent from all records and recollections of the Ordfey is any mention of Eclipse or the Shades. Surviving friezes and bas-reliefs from that era never depict the Fey wearing a vamdraech, and human slaves were explicitly forbidden from learning or practicing magic—a prohibition which would have made it much more difficult for the Ordfey to adequately light their dwellings for shadeproofing. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that the Shades first appeared sometime after the empire’s fall. —Denrick Roth, Shades

SUFFERING FROM A SETBACK

Forsaken Citadel, the Unbroken Earthmote 09.06.03.12.12

The first jumbled, slow thought to wallow up in Nils Civorage’s mind was that he was, in fact, not dead.

No, he was in far too much pain for that. Mind had granted him a much closer look at the threshold of death than most men ever got to see without crossing over it themselves, and to die was, it seemed, really quite a peaceful event. Certainly, it didn’t hurt. On the contrary, the last thing ever experienced by the minds he’d watched pass had been a sense of release and relief as all pain and discomfort fell away.

It occured to him, in the sluggish and wallowing way of an overladen airship rising slowly but doggedly under an underinflated bag, that if he was thinking such thoughts, then he must also be conscious. Unconscious people were not so introspective.

He got a grip on himself, flexing the power of his Word to blast out the daze fogging his brain, and lurched back into full and sober clarity with a sharp hiss of pain.

That. Had. Hurt.

“What in the everloving fuck was that?” he asked, as he clambered to his feet, ignoring the seething sting in every muscle and bone.

Within her column of light, Lady Iaka leaned heavily on the back of her throne. She seemed just as pained as he felt, weary and haggard. He’d never have imagined she could ever look so weakened. “I…would have thought…” she croaked, “that you would recognize…a Word of Creation when you saw one.”

“Which one, though?” Nils wondered. He reached out, seeking the disembodied remnants of thought and instinct that would be the slain Left and Right hands and their cadre of Nornfey. Their signatures were familiar to him, as it had been they who first taught him how to steer aside from mortal death. A skill he had never yet actually been called upon to use, but he knew they would benefit from his help in restoring themselves.

Such was Lady Iaka’s gift to her faithful, changed elves. Rather than the whole slow, senselessly inefficient business of rebirth, childhood and recollection, the Nornfey wove new bodies for themselves out of shadow and the very substance of the earthmotes, borrowing from the same deep and obscure magic that sustained the Shades.

He frowned. His thoughts and awareness groped blindly for them, but found nothing.

“…They are dead, aren’t they?” he asked. “I know they are, the backlash—”

“They are gone.”

“Gone?”

Iaka wheezed as she slumped into her throne. “In just the same way as a human. Complete decoherence of their...” she panted, mopped her brow, and then gave Civorage a deeply troubled look. “Fey souls are bound to this reality, held within it; in their case, the bindings were cut. Whatever it is that happens to your kind, has happened to them.” **

Nils gawped at her. “How…which Word could grant that power?”

Iaka shook her head. “I can think of a few candidates. But, I don’t know. For Adrey Mossjoy to have spoken any of them is…a troubling development.” She sighed and looked about her. “…If I had not had the power of this Lodehead to draw from, the backlash through the psychic link might well have destroyed us as well. But…I can feel it has faded. Either the Wordspeaker destroyed herself, or—”

“Or the Crowns stepped in,” Civorage finished glumly. He wandered the room checking on the other fallen figures about him, the blissful few of Iaka’s Circle. All were unconscious, though he was pleased to find none were dead.

“I suspect so. They are no longer as passive as I had counted on.” Iaka massaged her face. “Still…it is done.”

Civorage paused and gave her a sharp look. “You mean…the curse? I thought—you said breaking it would require great sacrifice.”

“We have sacrificed our left and right hands, we have sacrificed all our operation in Auldenheigh. We may have sacrificed our grip on all of Enerlend and all Garanhir if the Crowns’ lackeys are sharp and ready. We have sacrificed very much indeed, beloved.”

“That’s not the sacrifice we wanted to make, though.”

“Not at all. Far more than we intended.” Iaka sat back and took a deep breath. “But the fact the loss was painful makes it a more powerful offering, not less. It was…sufficient, I think.”

Civorage glanced down at his palms. “…You think? You aren’t sure?”

“Magic of this sort is complex and subtle, dear heart. And Thaighn Saoirse practiced it with a skill I can hardly believe. How she mastered the Craft so completely in such a short life, I don’t know…” She opened her eyes and smiled wanly. “But I think I have turned defeat into a victory and bested her. Time will reveal the truth.”

“So…what now?”

“Now, you must step out of my embrace, beloved. I must rest. I must…” a yawn wracked her from face to feet. “—You must take the reins again while I sleep and recover. We aren’t defeated yet. And you’re no longer destined for defeat. But you aren’t destined for victory, either. Do not sit idle: get out there and claim it.”

“You’re just going to sleep?” Nils half asked, half demanded. “Now?”

“I…do not have…any choice in the…” Iaka mumbled. Even as Nils watched, her head drooped to her chest and she sagged in her chair. He stepped forward, but a couple of Nornfey silently intercepted him. He understood from them that they would care for Lady Iaka, and that he would only get in the way and possibly harm her should he try. He glanced at the sleeping Forsaken, then sighed, nodded, and turned to leave.

It was only as he reached the tower’s door that he realized…he had sent the Make Your Own Fortune to Auldenheigh as part of the invasion force. And it was destroyed now. That was a heavy loss indeed. A piece of history, a piece of himself, reduced to splinters and atoms. He had other ships, and one could be here soon, of course…but there would never be another Fortune.

He sighed, reached out with Mind, sent for a new ship, and turned to go back up inside the tower into the guest suite of rooms that had been his home these last few weeks. He would have to plan his next move from there.

Oh well.

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SAFETY AND COMFORT

Unknown safehouse, Auldenheigh, Enerlend 09.06.03.12.13

Adrey woke to the feeling of a warm body cuddled up to her back, and the sound of gentle feminine snoring. Sadie. She’d know that snore anywhere. Crowns and Heralds knew, she’d slept on the opposite side of a thin bedroom wall from it for several weeks.

There was no confusion in her head, which in itself was almost confusing. From the instant she opened her eyes, she knew where she was, and how she had got there. She remembered the bridge, and the destruction she’d wrought, and the comforting embrace of Queen Talvi.

But she didn’t remember it all. The Crown had helped her forget something, something she’d wanted to forget. Something she wasn’t ready to know. She knew she’d known it. She could feel the shape of terrible knowledge as an absence somewhere inside her, locking her off from the full extent of…

…Of Wavefunction. What a peculiar name. Not one she thought she understood, unlike Time, or Mind. But she remembered what it felt like to have the full flourish of its potential coursing through her. She remembered what it felt like to be able to see a thing, decide it should no longer be, at the most fundamental level, a level below all others, and for the universe to listen and obey.

Crowns. She’d done that to people.

She shivered, and extracted herself from under Sadie’s sleeping arm to stand up. She was in one of the Network’s safehouses, that much was instantly and easily certain. Though, it wasn’t one she’d seen before. She guessed it was the back room at a pub somewhere: the air had a certain flavor that spoke of generations of beer, spirits and smoke.

In fact the smoke was really quite immediate, and it belonged to Skinner and Bothroyd. Neither man had apparently noticed Adrey rising from bed, and were instead sitting in elderly high-backed chairs by the fireplace, staring into the embers and wreathing themselves in whispy clouds from Skinner’s short-handled clay pipe, and Bothroyd’s rather fancy round-bowled briar pipe.

Both men made to stand when Adrey murmured. “Hey,” at them: Bothroyd grimaced, groaned, and collapsed back into his chair, and Skinner seemed profoundly relieved when Adrey waved him down.

“You got a spare one of those?” she asked.

“Didn’t know you smoke,” Bothroyd commented. “Ain’t very ladylike.”

“I don’t. But right now, I want to.”

The two men shared a glance, then Bothroyd shrugged and produced his spare, which he kindly set about filling for her.

“Feelin’ better, then?” Skinner asked, with a note of trepidation.

“…Relatively.” Adrey perched in the vacant third chair, and took stock of herself. She was still wearing Mari Pelton’s clothes. She really didn’t want to be, but she doubted there was any alternative. “Is Sadie alright?”

“Poor lass looked after you for hours afore she fell asleep,” Bothroyd said, glancing over at the slumbering young woman. “Reckon she needed summat to distract ‘er.”

“…Are you alright?”

The two men traded a look, then shrugged.

“Upright an’ breathin’,” Skinner said.

“Good start.”

“Aye.”

“An’ Civorage is likely dead,” Bothroyd added. “I’d be jumpin’ up an’ down if I weren’t knackered.”

“…He is?”

“Last I saw of the Make Your Own Fortune, you were smashin’ it to bits wi’ magic. No bugger survived that.”

Adrey shivered, despite the warmth from the fireplace, and Bothroyd handed her a pipe. They set the whole conversation aside for a minute or two while he explained the process of lighting it, and coached her through blowing her first smoke ring, which she managed on her fifth attempt.

It helped rather a lot. It was dark outside, sometime after midnight she guessed, and the only noises in the room were the faint crackle of burning logs, Sadie’s quiet snore, and the soft sounds of smoking.

Eventually, she told them what had happened. She spoke quietly, so as not to wake Sadie, but left nothing out. Keeping anythingl inside, unsaid and secret was unthinkable.

They didn’t interrupt. Though, Skinner did circle back to one point after she was done. “You kissed ‘er?”

“It was…the only distraction I could think of. It was the only weakness she had.” Adrey sipped a little more smoke in hopes that the flavor of it would chase away the hateful memory. “She wanted me for a…a pet. She had it in her head that if she let Kal torture me and then she fed and bathed and cared for me, that I’d…that I’d…fall in love with her, or something. That I’d become hopelessly devoted to her.”

Skinner scoffed. “People don’t work that way.”

“Mari Pelton thought they did.” Adrey sighed, and decided after all that there were some things best left to die rather than kept alive by discussing them. Some thoughts and feelings that she would take to her grave rather than ever admit to.

If Skinner guessed at her inner thoughts, he showed no sign of it. He just nodded “And then…someone just showed up wi’ a Word o’ Creation.”

“Yes.” Adrey’s hands shook as she remembered the encounter. “She seemed…I don’t know. I hardly remember her. She had such…such tired eyes…And gold hair. And she was beautiful, I think. As beautiful as Rheannach! Or she would have been if she hadn’t looked so…”

She couldn’t find the right word. Her mysterious benefactor—if she could really call it a benefaction—had shown only the merest flicker of even being attentive and present, and that only when Adrey herself had been almost panicking. Otherwise, the golden-haired woman had given the distinct impression of just going through the motions somehow. In the resigned, weary way of one who’d trudged through the rain and sleet to the same hard job for year after year and had long since ceased to feel the smallest speck of enthusiasm for it.

But it wasn’t just that. She hadn’t seemed to fit in the world, somehow. She’d seemed…rather like the spectators at a race, or the audience at a play, there to witness events but not be part of them. Until, suddenly, she’d leapt onto the stage to make one small, crucial change to the flow of events.

Adrey tried to picture her. Tried to turn the many and varied powers of her new Word toward thinking about her. Tried to analyze the patterns surrounding her…and found nothing. There was nothing to latch onto about the golden woman, beyond a terrible, all-encompassing depression and a sort of weary hunger.

She took a few deep breaths, then indicated out the window with her head. “What’s happening out there now?”

Bothroyd shrugged. “Not much. Wi’out their ships, the last Guild marines an’ Oneists got surrounded an’ mobbed. Five thousand against five million.” He blew a smoke ring. “Congratulations, lass. We won, thanks to you.”

Adrey blushed hotly. That wasn’t praise she wanted, or deserved. “I…doubt it’s that easy,” she said.

“What? You destroyed the Fortune, you blew up all their other ships, they’ve lost Auldenheigh an’ wi’out Civorage the other dukes should be wakin’ up from his control sometime soon. Sounds like a victory to me,” Bothroyd insisted.

Adrey sighed. “I’ll sleep some more,” she said, and set the pipe aside. She couldn’t quite put into words how she knew for a certainty that Bothroyd was wrong, but…she was too tired to think about it too closely for now. Here and now, though, she did know she was safe.

She climbed back into the narrow cot, and considered Sadie as she pulled the blankets around herself. Crowns, a few short days ago Sadie had just been a fellow lodger and only potentially a friend. But right now, Adrey was gladder to see her than she could believe. Especially knowing what she did about how Sadie had looked after her while she slept.

“…Thank you,” she whispered to her friend, and settled down to sleep. Not fearfully, not fitfully, not to recover from an ordeal, but simply because she was safe, and it was night-time.

That, at least, was a victory.

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> Craenen ſuperſtition claims that an talented practitioner of the so-called “Craft” may open or be ſenſitive to divers ways or paths within woodland, by which the witch may traverſe from one earthmote to another as one might ſtep from the ſtreet into an tea houſe or bakery. Dr. Bothright provides an moſt excellent proof of the impoſſibility of this fanciful notion in his Treatiſe on the Supernal Clavis, which I include below for the reader’s conſideration. (fig. B) —Prof. Enst Beldrade, An Conciſe Summary of Magickal Lore and the Wiſdom of the Art for the Diſcerning Scholar.

A BEAUTIFUL GLADE

Yonguitang Earthmote, several miles outside the City of Emperors. 09.06.03.12.14

“I do not understand. It is a most pleasing glade, Beloved One, but…”

The Empress of the Yunei considered her surroundings with some trepidation. She had never actually walked in the woods all her life. Having been betrothed to the Emperor’s current incarnation at the age of just four, she had spent all her life in palaces and gardens, learning and preparing to surrender her name and be Empress.

There had never been any indication that the duty might bring her out of the palace and deep into the forest. But that was exactly where Lady Dragon had invited her to come. And so she had endured her palanquin being borne many long miles, outside of the familiar palace walls, along the great high road, and then off it along lesser ways and routes. The breeze had carried unfamiliar scents, pleasant and unpleasant alike. She had rarely smelled anything unpleasant before, and when she had inquired as to its nature, Lady Dragon had smilingly informed her that it was the ordure of pigs, from a nearby farm.

No, the Empress was feeling quite out of her environment today. Though she had to admit, the glade in which her palanquin had finally been set down and she had alighted was as beautiful as any a poet might write of, or any artist might capture.

It was beautiful in its simplicity, she decided. The local peasants had certainly recognized it as a place of importance: there was a small shrine and a spirit gate at the top of the hand-cut steps that led up from the village below, and the trail wound between low cliffs of rounded, mossy stones before splitting to pass on either side of a fat, sprawling, many-limbed maple. All was shades of emerald and jade and moss, and the sun shone through a thin, new canopy to dapple and play over the carpet of fallen leaves. Here and there among the rocks were small wooden bowls and clay cups—offerings of food and wine for whichever spirits made their home here, along with chimes and votive papers hung in the maple’s branches.

Other than those ephemera, the place felt timeless and unchanged, as though the Crowns had made it essentially as it was now and it had rested peacefully here down the long millennia, quietly remaining untouched while all of human and elfish drama played out around it.

The Herald smiled warmly. She had declined to be borne by palanquin, preferring to fly on pinions of black and white, and her chosen face seemed strange to the Empress. She was darker of hair and paler of skin even than the Empress herself, but the proportions of her nose and her cheeks were so…foreign.

It was no snub. This was simply who the Herald of Wives chose to be. And the Empress had to allow that Lady Rheannach’s form was a comely one…

“Surely you feel the power and special nature of this place, my lady?” she asked. Her accent was light, adding only a faint lilt to her words.

“Indeed, but I was given to understand we would be meeting somebody here…” The Empress looked around. “I assumed we would find them waiting.”

“She will be here in a just a moment.”

“May I ask how?”

“She knows some of the old and subtle magics.”

The Empress considered this. “My understanding, Beloved One, is that she is as a queen to her people. Or, as close as the Garanese have. Is it deemed Proper in their world for such a woman to practice magic?”

Rheannach covered her mouth to laugh slightly. “Truthfully, no. It was quite a scandal. But in my experience, if you ask most Garanese which they would choose between what is Proper and what is right, most would answer the latter.”

The Empress blinked. She could feel her forehead wanting to crease into a frown. “I…would not consider there to be any distinction, my lady.”

“And that, as one would always anticipate from Her Majesty the Blessed Empress, is a most Proper and Yunei answer,” Rheannach answered.

The Empress bowed slightly in acknowledgment of this compliment. She took a deep breath and savored the tranquility of the setting for a moment, before asking, “Would you please tell me more of Garanhir? Especially of Enerlend?”

Rheannach nodded, smoothed out her long, warm shawl with its grid pattern of thin red lines atop green and deep blue, and explained something of the politics of Garanhir: the vacant throne, the Crown Unworn, the Dukesmoot…

She was just beginning a brief summary of House Banmor’s history when the distinctive rustle of booted feet drew their attention, and a young woman emerged from behind the maple as though she had been hiding there all along, though her stride spoke of a brisk walking pace. She slowed to a halt and blinked at the Herald and the Empress, and said something to Rheannach.

Rheannach laughed, rose to embrace her in a fond hug, and made introductions. “Your Majesty the most Blessed Empress, Wife and Mother to the Enlightened One, Mistress of the Water and Fire gates, keeper of the keys to the Imperial Palace…I present Ellaenie of House Banmor, rightful Duchess of Enerlend, Crownspouse, Maiden of the Herald’s Coven, and Wordspeaker.”

The Empress and the Duchess bowed to each other. Or rather, the Empress bowed: the Duchess inclined her head, crossed one ankle in front of the other, and dipped from the knees. It was a remarkably elegant and dainty gesture.

“Your Majesty,” she said, in flawed and accented but well-intentioned Yunese.

“Your Grace. Welcome to the empire of the students of Yunei.” the Empress replied carefully, as she had been taught in Enerlish. The Duchess was young, though she could not fairly be called a girl. Difficult though it was to tell in a foreign face, she seemed to be in her middle twenties, with a sharp and angular face made entirely of planes and lines. Her jaw, her cheekbones, her brows, even her eyes had a hard and straight quality. She was not un-beautiful, far from it, but she was… discomforting. There was something in her jade-green gaze which suggested she could see right into the Empress’ head and assess her thoughts.

“You have not brought an escort, your Grace?” she asked, trusting the Herald to translate.

Ellaenie shook her head softly. “I am certain I will come to no harm.”

“Of course. Will you accept the protection of a few of my personal guard, however?”

The Duchess and the Herald shared a brief glance. A lot seemed to pass between them in just that one heartbeat of eye contact. “If that is the Proper thing,” Ellaenie said.

“It is certainly expected,” the Empress agreed.

“Then I am grateful to your Majesty for the kind offer, which I am pleased to accept.”

The Empress chided herself internally for being surprised at such graceful manners. A lifetime of only ever hearing of barba—of foreigners as uncouth, uncultured and base had prejudiced her, it seemed. There was, as the Crowns had said, much to un-learn.

“There is a palanquin waiting to bear us to the Palace,” she said, and gestured to where it sat at the top of the stair. “I would be greatly pleased if you would ride with me.”

For a moment she fretted over how to politely insist if Ellaenie declined: the Enerlender apparently walked for herself, to judge by the dust on her sturdy leather boots and the hem of her hard-wearing brown skirts. But Ellaenie dipped another of her strange foreign bows and murmured a polite thank-you.

She also cleaned her clothes with a wave of her hand. The trail dust and mud simply fell off them, leaving her immaculate. Such a practical magic!

“I will fly,” Lady Rheannach declared, and produced a small sphere of polished wood from one of her purses. “My husband made this for you, Empress. It should compensate for my absence.”

“Thank you.” The Empress took it and admired it. “What…exactly does it do?”

“It translates. You two should have no trouble conversing, so long as you hold it.”

Ellaenie said something in her own clipped, staccato tongue, yet somehow the Empress understood it: “He always thinks of everything.”

“He always does,” Rheannach agreed in the same language, then stepped back and spread her wings. “Enjoy your conversation.”

With a hefty flap, she was gone.

The two royals considered each other carefully for a long quiet minute as their palanquin was borne back down the stair toward the road. The Duchess, it seemed, was unused to being borne thus, and she held tight to the handle by her seat

The Empress decided it was an appropriate topic by which to break the ice. “ I confess, I am very curious about you and your people. Do you…not ride in palanquins often?”

Ellaenie gave her a wan smile. “I usually travelled by horse-drawn carriage, before I married Prince Sayf.”

“Indeed? Surely this is a smoother ride? My bearers are skilled and dilligent men. The very finest in all the Empire.”

For some reason, Ellaenie glanced aside as though listening to something only she could hear. Then she smiled. “They certainly take pride in their work. And are highly gratified by your praise.”

“I would hope so. But…you know this?”

“I am a witch, Your Majesty. My Mother in the craft was Lady Rheannach, and my Beldame was the greatest witch to ever live, Thaighn Saoirse Crow-Sight. King Eärrach himself blessed my induction.”

“The Beloved Herald intimated that you courted controversy by studying such magic. May I take it that on Garanhir, as it is here, the magic of witches is mistrusted?”

“It is, yes. It was…quite Improper of me to study it.”

“Then, if I may ask, why do so?”

Ellaenie gave the question some thought. After a second or two she gave a complex little shrug. “Why does a fire burn? Why does a stream flow?”

“I think I understand your meaning. But…” The Empress looked out through the bamboo slats that served as her window, allowing her to see out but nobody to see in. The farms were jogging past steadily. “The reputation of witches and their craft among my people is a dire one. The power to bend minds, to see into hearts and know their most intimate desires. The power to derange, ensnare and ensorcel…”

“The power to heal a troubled soul. the power to advise and guide a restless heart when they do not know themselves. The power to soothe, encourage and empower.”

“…Blossoms leave ripples in a mirror pond; beneath, the morning swimmer has found lasting peace.”

The poem shocked her even as she uttered it. Such grim imagery would have sent whispers around the room at court. But the Duchess of Enerlend inclined her head with a smile.

“I’m glad my husband coached me on your people’s love of poetry,” she said. “I would rather put it the other way around, though. Forgive me if this is clumsy, but…” she frowned in thought for a second then ventured, in halting and careful tones, “Flowing water turns the mill; at dawn, a new blade. But is it for the soldier, or the chef?”

The Empress couldn’t help it: she covered her mouth politely and giggled. “It is…a promising foray,” she ventured. Truthfully it was barely a poem at all, lacking rhyme, meter or elegance in word selection, and only the barest hints of the form. Stick-figure graffiti compared to a bold and vibrant watercolor. But it did carry the sentiment, and that was the first rule the Imperial tutors had ever drilled into her as a child. That it did so without subtlety and interpretation was merely the mark of a beginner.

“I suspect it’s dreadful.” Ellaenie’s strange green eyes glinted in deep amusement. “I would like to be your friend, Your Majesty. To me, that is an invitation to be merciless in your criticism.”

“I would like to be your friend as well, your Grace” the Empress replied. “So I will not call it dreadful. Indeed, it truly was a respectable first foray into an art form foreign to you, in a language you do not speak…it would be unreasonable to expect a perfect polished jewel. That you composed a rough-cut one delights me! I look forward to hearing your verse once you have had more practice.”

Ellaenie’s smile was sober. “It may be a long time coming,” she pointed out. “There is a war to fight, first.”

“Then when I hear your refined verse, I will know the war has passed behind us, and my joy will be doubled. But until then…please. Tell me more of witchcraft as you practice it. If it is not Improper for women of our station to use after all, then…”

Ellaenie was only too happy to oblige, and the conversation that followed contained much that was strange, surprising, even shocking. When she described her ritual rebirth, dancing intoxicated and naked with the Herald in the dark and waking wrapped together like mother and newborn daughter, it should have been scandalous. Instead, the Empress found herself nostalgic for a life she’d never lived and a way of life she’d never known. Now, she was beginning to understand why the Crowns had insisted that Ellaenie should come here for this meeting. There was much to learn from her.

But there was also much to teach. Far more than just poetry.

It was, she hoped and believed, the start of a great friendship.

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> For those fortunate enough to have never looked closely upon one, a brief description is in order: Shades bear broadly the form they had in life, including whatever clothes and possessions they had upon their person at the moment of their taking. All color is gone from them: they are opaque black fading to dark grey at the lightest, and drool or weep an inky liquid constantly from eyes, nose, mouth and ears, which evaporates instantly upon dripping from their flesh. Their faces are locked permanently in whichever expression they wore upon being taken—typically a hideous fearful scream or, at best, resigned despair. Their eyes stare unblinking at the living, and they reach out with grasping fingers, but will not stray upon well-lit ground. No Shade has ever been seen to ambulate: instead they flow from place to place, melting away like a vapour to reform at their destination. They are generally entirely silent, though there are legends of them occasionally being heard to whisper incomprehensibly. I cannot verify this last matter. —Denrick Roth, Shades

CRAE VARTHEN

Varthen Earthmote, The Craenen 09.06.03.12.14

Varthen earthmote was one of those familiar shapes in the sky that Jerl could have pointed to in a heartbeat when asked, but had never seriously expected to visit. It was a broadly ovoid mote, with a little triangular peninsula about a third of the way along its leading-sinister edge and a squarish one on the opposite side, so that the overall shape put him in mind of a bream or a carp. Some kind of coarse river fish, anyway.

According to Amir’s almanac, the Crae’s population was fewer than a fifth of a million, spread in farming communities and little villages across more than a thousand square miles. It was, in the grand scheme of the Nested Worlds, nowhere.

But it turned out to be pretty beyond belief.

From the angle they approached at, the top of the mote’s cliffs were scrubby brown wind-swept moorland, bald of trees and clung to only by purplish heather and rugged sheep. This, however, turned out to be a slim slice of plateau no more than two miles wide, which abruptly plunged down off the heights in a sharp sharp escarpment facing into the leading winds. The resulting updraft created a boil of cloud that spilled over and over like the roller of a laundry mangle, squeezing rain down onto the slopes. Streams laced the cliffsides, running together into lakes—no. Into reservoirs held back by great stone dams, whose overflow spillways were white curtains that marked the source of a long and meandering river.

Downstream, the landscape was green and gorgeous, patchworked by mismatched irregular fields and delineated by hedgerows and stands of trees. The transition from rugged highland to bucolic lowland was so abrupt as to be breathtaking.

At Jerl’s side, Deng-Nah said something low and soft in his own language. It sounded like poetry. It usually was, with Deng-Nah. Composing or quoting a short poetic phrase on instant notice was, apparently, considered to be a highly necessary skill among Yunei nobility, and it was Proper to do so at the slightest provocation.

“How well does this one translate?” Jerl asked him.

Deng-Nah looked up at him, then back out over the rolling fields below and sighed. “Uh…let me think. The words are… ’Before me I see a frozen river—but now the ice breaks—and the stillness shall not heal until year’s end.’ He looked up at Jerl again and gave a wry shrug. “…Doesn’t translate well, I think.”

“Why quote it?”

“It’s so…uh… *guo-xia…*uh, so disorderly down there.” Deng-Nah swept his hand dismissively at the uneven, irregular network of fields. “No Yunei would parcel out land in…lumps like that. Look at them! Like…like…”

“Fields?” Jerl suggested.

“Like dumplings in a basket! Where are the orderly rows? Where are the neat field lines? The terraces? It’s so…foreign.”

“I rather like it,” Jerl said. “It has character.”

“Why does ‘character’ always mean being messy and badly planned with you?”

“Must be cultural, I guess.”

Deng-Nah conceded that with a small harrumph. “Must be.”

“…So you’re feeling a long way from home right now, huh?”

“Don’t you? We’re nearly as far from Garanhir as from Yonguitang.”

“True. But…I mean, my father and I became airshipmen to get away from home and see the worlds and all it has to offer. I’m an adventurer at heart. You left home to protect home.”

A smile crawled up one side of Deng-Nah’s face. “Are you sure you didn’t speak Mind?”

Jerl chuckled. “Pretty sure…”

They watched the river loop and play below them toward their destination, Crae Varthen. Looking up in that direction, Jerl could see the Eclipse coming. Another earthmote, perhaps half Varthen’s size, was looming in the mists, moving in almost the same direction and at almost the same speed. The eclipse was therefore likely to be a long one, but that was exactly why they had come here. The way Jerl saw it, if they were going to use the Shades to try and open the box, they might want all the time they could get. After all, the last time he’d seen it done, it had been Civorage who actually unlocked Time’s vault. And from what Jerl knew, it had taken him weeks to figure out the puzzle.

Sin joined them, trotting up from amidships. “Gebby’s bringing us down for final approach. Does Crae Varthen even have a tower?”

“It does,” Jerl said. He’d confirmed the distant red beacon light with his telescope as soon as they’d swept over the escarpment. “It’s a Keeghan And Sons franchise, if I remember right. They’ve seen us.”

“And if they’re not a Keeghan And Sons tower?” Sin asked. “If they’re, say, Clear Skies?”

Jerl shrugged. “No premonition.”

Sin made a small grumbling noise and hopped up to sit on a barrel. “I…suppose that’s good enough,” she allowed. “Pretty mote, this. Though it’s changed quite a lot since my last visit.”

“When was that?”

“I was reincarnated in Vathmaridu about…a hundred and sixty years before the Ordfey’s fall? It was mostly forest back then.” She looked ahead toward the capitol. “I remember it had an excellent little amphitheatre.”

“Vathmaridu…” Jerl scowled as he attempted to translate. “’City of acceptable water?’”

“Mar-idu, not mar-i-du.” She corrected him. “Fortress on the river.’”

“Oh.”

Sin flashed a small smile, then leaned over to watch the fields roll by. “A lot changes in three thousand years, especially when humans are involved. The forest is is long gone. No doubt the fortress and the amphitheatre are as well…It’d be dizzying if not for the cycle of reincarnation. The Crowns knew what they were doing when they made us serially mortal, rather than immortal.”

“Wonder why you get that, and not us?” Deng-Nah mused.

“Ask Ekve.” Sin shot a glance over her shoulder toward the ship’s stern. The Ordfey’s many-times emperor cut an oddly simple figure in unadorned grey, sitting in meditation in an out-of-the-way corner. He rarely moved from that spot in fact, except for mealtimes and some light exercise. And though he would sit in discussion for hours on end with the Rüwyrdans, the few conversations Jerl had tried to strike up with him had been terse and short-lived.

He and Sin seemed to avoid each other. Ekve and Bekhil, the two surviving monsters of a murderous triumvirate who’d held the very apex of Ordsiwat imperial power. Spouses and lovers through a hundred lives. Jerl would have thought they’d have a lot to say to each other, now that Ekve had come over to the Penitent camp. Instead…

“How would he know?”

“Trust me. He does.”

Jerl considered it, then glanced over the side himself. The conversation would have to wait for later, he realized. Up ahead, the river dog-legged, turning a ninety degree corner where it hugged the foot of a low hill, then sweeping back the other way in a long graceful curve across to meet its original heading again about two miles down the flood plain. Crae Varthen straddled the straight stretch immediately afer the tight bend, dominated by the caisteal atop the hill and a long stone quay. Quite aside from the protection of the terrain, the caisteal had a commanding overwatch of the lone triple-arched stone bridge that cross the water beneath it—the only one Jerl had seen along the river’s entire length.

A classic Craenen move, that. The Thaighn controlled the only crossing along an eighty mile river, and thus controlled the entire earthmote. Any Lairds or Ridires who thought to supplant them would have a gigantic obstacle to contend with, forcing them to send their forces and messengers miles out of their way upriver into the rugged uplands where they could be ambushed and intercepted.

Of course, airships had made such a philosophy quite obsolete. But the Thaighn of Crae Varthen apparently knew it, and had invested in a navy. The mooring mast on the river’s trailing bank sat at the center of a double ring of airship cradles that had pushed back the rich green grazing paddocks by hundreds of yards. Most of the cradles were occupied, and only two of the docked ships sported Keeghan & Sons guild colors: the other dozen were liveried in cardinal red, amber and black

Gebby brought them in to moor at mast-top with his usual deft touch. Ropes were exchanged wtih the mast team, the Queen was tethered, and Derghan spun the engines down until the constant background thrum that lulled Jerl to sleep every night the ship was aloft was entirely gone.

In its place, he could hear the sounds of a town preparing for Eclipse: somewhere in a spire on the caisteal, a bell was plodding through its slow, steady toll, and he could hear the bark and hie of town cryers. The men on the mast all wore magelights, too.

“Cuttin’ et fine ye are, capten!” One of them called, in heavily accented Enerlish. “Sure ye wanna stay? ’Tis a long eclipse comin’!”

“We know!” Jerl called back.

“Sure aye? ‘Tis thy business, ‘en. Ye’ll be want’n a cradle.”

“That we do! Guild rate?”

“An’ two brass. Thaighn’s tax.”

Jerl nodded, counted the coins into a small leather bag, then tossed them to the man. He caught it neatly, secured them, then gabbled something too heavily accented for Jerl to properly understand, but which he took to mean that they were happy to receive the ship and its crew, who should hold tight during the short process of being winched them down into a cradle.

Sure enough, more ropes were exchanged, the ground team took over, and soon they and the rigging crew were shouting back and forth to each other as the coordinated to balance the ship’s buoyancy against the downward pull of the cables. A couple of immense oxen in wooden treadles did the actual hard work of reeling the cables in, and within minutes the Queen’s keel settled into the groove with a heavy wooden thunk, the bolt drove home, and they were secure.

The Eclipse was already marching up the valley.

“Best be hurryin’ up, there!” the ground crew leader called. He and his men were lighting their magelights and grouping up to hustle away toward the sole bridge while up above them the caisteal’s warning bell redoubled its ringing. “Ye’ll be wantin’ the Jolly Tar by there, they’ll have enough room ‘fer all’a yez.” He pointed to a sprawling inn on the far side of the river.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

The crew certainly had no interest in being out during Eclipse, so the work got done double-fast. Within ten minutes, every man and elf on the Queen was sporting a magestone on their breast pocket, another on their back, and a hand-lantern. They jogged across the bridge in a bright little cluster as the huge, ponderous weight of stone turned slowly in overhead like cargo being loaded by an immense crane.

They reached the Jolly Tar Inn with perhaps a minute to spare and bundled through the door to be greeted by a couple of maids bobbing and curtseying on the doormat under the supervision of a round-bellied but strong-armed innkeeper with a thick mustache.

Jerl was the last in. He cast a glance up the street, saw the shadow sweeping down it, and stepped smartly over the threshold. One of the young ladies closed the door and bolted it, hung a red woven tapestry over the doorframe, closed the curtains, then flashed him a bright smile.

“Everyone in?” she asked as the windows darkened.

“I think so,” Jerl agreed. “Sin? Head count?”

Sin gave him a worried look. “Fifty-three, skipper. We’re missing one.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.” She frowned around the room. “I can’t figure out—”

“Oi.” Mouse laughed and touched Sin’s elbow, causing her to jump and her hand to fly to the fighting knife on her belt.

“…Oh. Right. Yes.” Sin shook herself. “…Correction. All present and accounted for, captain.”

“Outstanding.” Jerl gave Mouse a playful swat on the backside for his antics, then strolled on up to the bar, where the innkeeper gave him a gap-toothed grin from behind one of the most splendidly bushy and droopy moustaches he’d ever seen. “Guess we’re here for the duration, sir.”

“An’ fair welcome ye are too, cap’n. Was look to be a lean one there elseways.”

“So I imagine.” They haggled over the price, though for once Jerl found himself getting the worse of it. After all, where were he and the others going to go? There was no malice in the innkeeper’s shrewd bargaining though, and for a small wonder he didn’t comment on the fact of half the crew being elves.

Pretty soon, the place was alive. The staff were juggling preparing beds and serving drinks, the crew were spread out enjoying their drinks, a meal was promised for three hours’ time, and the whole interior was ablaze with so much light that even the undersides of the tables were illuminated.

Jerl, however, couldn’t settle down to enjoy himself. He lurked by the window and smoked his pipe, happy to watch his crew drinking, eating, playing cards, singing and generally unwinding. Marren, Gebby and the twins were even behaving themselves and keeping their flirting with the bar girls to a minimum. It should have ben an opportunity to relax and have little to worry about for the next few days.

But he had never been able to ignore Shades at the best of times. Out in the street, the poor fuckers would be drifting and lurching around aimlessly. With the curtains drawn and the lights up, it was easy to pretend they weren’t there, but Jerl knew that the nearest one might be only inches away, pawing feebly on on the far side of the thin stone and mortar. It ought to have been a horrible feeling.

Instead…

Jerl couldn’t quite put a name to the emotion, but it was some wretched, disowned relative of comfort. One that hurt to feel, but which he couldn’t resist when he had the opportunity, like touching a wound. He rested his head against the cold stone and shut his eyes.

“Will ye be stayin’ up all night there, capt’n Holten?”

Jerl blinked and refocused, realizing he had drifted far away into thought and that Deng-Nah had apparently been too polite to intrude. Or perhaps he had dozed a little. Either way, the innkeeper was standing over them looking thoroughly past his bedtime. “Huh? Oh. Uh, yes. A little longer yet, I think.”

“As ye like, o’ course. I just thought to tell ye, yer rooms’re ready an lit. Got stones in ‘em that’ll burn all week, so we do. Will ye be wantin’ any more from the bar ‘fore I go to me own bed?”

“No, that’s alright. Thank you.”

“G’night, then.”

“Goodnight.”

The innkeeper nodded and blundered away through into the back, yawning expansively. Jerl felt a twing of guilt at keeping him up so late, but it vanished as Deng-Nah sprang to his feet looking nervous and energized. The young Yunei nobleman went digging in his satchel, and after a little rummaging, he produced the Word vault. Runes and letters flickered across its surface, adding an eerie green edge to the room’s illumination

“So…” he said.

“So,” Mouse agreed. He’d been reading in a nearby chair, but the book was discarded for curiosity as he trotted over to take a good look. “What…do we do with this?”

Jerl frowned at the small wooden box. “Civorage opened his by moving the runes around until they formed the correct pattern.”

“Seems…overly simple,” Mouse mused.

“Especially if he went mad in the process,” Deng-Nah agreed. “Seems a strange thing, too. The crowns made a perfect lock, then put the key right on the box?”

“Not all is as they wished it to be…” Jerl mused, remembering Talvi’s words to him at the end of a history he’d erased. “I think from what Lord Sayf and Lady Haust told me, the idea was always that people would open the vaults and learn the words eventually, when we were ready for it. They wanted it to be a controlled, cautious process. Instead…they’re out early. Because of the Shades.”

“The Shades are a mystery, too,” Mouse pointed out. “I don’t really buy the whole ‘they’re an unintended complication’ thing. Why would the Crowns tolerate them?”

“Because removing the Shades would damage something else, even worse?” Jerl suggested. “They keep telling us they’re not perfect.”

Deng-Nah grunted, quoted some Yunei poetry again, then touched an experimental finger to the runes and icons and started sliding them around. A run glowed brighter than the others, detached slightly from the surface of the wood, and slid smoothly into its new spot, trading places with the space’s previous occupant.

Both runes also transformed into completely different runes, and several others in seemingly random places all over the box rotated, or changed, or mirrored themselves. After about a minute of tentative investigation, Jerl was beginning to get an idea of why the puzzle had done such a number on Civorage’s sanity. He felt certain there was a logic to the cascading changes, but what that logic might be…?

Pretty soon they were bickering. And they kept bickering for hours before finally deciding they had better go to bed before the inn’s staff woke up to begin the early morning chores. They had not, so far as Jerl could tell, made any progress at all. Certainly, they went to bed feeling confused and frustrated.

Their rooms were quite nicely furnished and as well-lit as promised, with sleeping masks waiting on the pillows and soft mattresses, but neither comfort helped Jerl to sleep at all. Long after Mouse had dropped off and started snoring, curled up against his arm, he lay there and stared into the dark behind his eyelids.

In the silence, he could hear the Shades whispering.

----------------------------------------

> So airman my love, hold on to me tight, For I’ve never yet mastered the power of flight! If you should let go, it’s a long way to fall— So I’d rather not slip from your arms, not at all! —Ms. Maysey Wells, performing at the Cabaret Enerlese circa 09.05.15

PREPARING FOR THE NEXT FIGHT

Pickler’s Lane, Auldenheigh 09.06.03.12.14

For the first time in years, Auldenheigh was free. No Oneist circles and airships, no Duke’s men, no Clear Skies marines…It wasn’t going to last, and everyone knew it. But the city’s sleepy, scared population had finally been roused and united, now that Civorage and his co-conspirators had shown their hand.

Jed Bothroyd had certainly never seen such public unity before. Everywhere one looked, the city was being fortified. Not just barricades of scrap wood and furniture, but real walls were going up, built with the robbed-out bricks and timbers of broken buildings. Cannons had been salvaged from the airship wrecks, rifles looted from the dead Marines, militias were drilling and training in the parks and plazas under the shouted guidance of whatever veterans were whole enough and body and mind to marshall them.

All futile, of course. The Dukesmoot was united under Civorage’s control, which meant that when their reprisal came it would be in the form of a real army, tens of thousands strong, professionally equipped, delivered by ship and supplied by train. Auldenheigh’s defiance would consist of a second bloody day, and nothing more than that.

The fact that everybody knew it didn’t seem to be weakening anyone’s resolve, though. Jed had always known there was a spine of grim fortitude in his city’s people, buried under the layers of ordinary grime, family, work, politicking and petty concerns that were collectively known as “life.” But now, the fires of battle had burned the city right down to its backbone.

Nobody was busier than the remnants of the Blackdrake Network. Even though Jed’s body still ached awfully from the forced half-marathon he’d run just a couple of days earlier, he was still forcing himself up into the saddle to deliver messages around the city and check the status of agents and safehouses. More were intact than he’d feared, though fewer than he’d wished.

At least Ten Pickler’s Lane was still intact.

He dismounted with a grunt of aching effort, left the horse in the care of one of the volunteers, and groaned and chuffed his way up the steps into what Adrey had taken to calling the “War Cabinet.” There was little point in keeping it mobile and ready to flee now, so things had been set up on a more permanent basis. Skinner’s maps now dominated two large desks in the middle of the study, as well as a tangled web on the blackboard where he’d written a variety of words—codenames, safehouses, routes, code phrases, cells, city districts—on little scraps of paper and strung various bits of it together with lengths of dyed yarn. Whatever he was trying to puzzle out, Jed couldn’t make sense of it. On the other side of the room, Sadie and Adrey were playing chess for some reason. He frowned at them, and plopped down into a wingback chair with a sigh.

Skinner gave him a sympathetic grunt, and poured a large brandy. “How is it out there?”

“Grim. But we’ll give ‘em a fierce bloody fight when they come.”

Skinner nodded, and traded the drink for Jed’s written report, which he unrolled and skimmed in silence before heading over to the map table, where he swapped a couple of map pins for different colors.

“…Be honest, Skinner. We don’t stand a chance, do we?” Jed asked.

“We’ve got a Wordspeaker on our side, now,” Skinner replied, evenly. He turned around and drew a square box around one of the safehouses named on his blackboard.

“That’d be enough if she were still blastin’ airships out t’sky wi’ pink lightning.”

Adrey moved a piece with a prim little click. “Trust me, it’s best for us all that I can’t,” she said. She took up a small notepad and scribbled a brief note in pencil before looking at Sadie expectantly.

The Countess was…well, she was more-or-less recovered. Physically, at least. The branded letter P on the back of her neck was never going away, and neither were the white scars that cut through her left eyebrow and lower lip. Nor, if Jed was any judge, were her eyes ever going to be quite as alive as they had been before. But by Yngmir, what she’d lost in sunshine she’d gained double in tempered hardness.

Not to mention something else. Jed stood up and went to examine the game. As he passed behind Adrey, she showed him the note she’d made: Laird x d6.

He blinked at it…then blinked again as he watched Sadie move her black Laird to d6, taking Adrey’s Laird that was already squatting there. Adrey smiled, recaptured the square with her Huskarl, then jotted g3 in her notepad. Sure enough, a moment later, Sadie advanced one of her peons.

“That’s…” Jed considered the note paper, which was a marching column of moves. “Are you…predictin’ ‘er moves before she makes ‘em?”

Sadie sat back and gave Adrey an accusing look. “She’s what?”

Adrey grinned. “Oh, don’t complain, Sadie dear. You beat me with white every time before today.” She gave Jed a wry look. “She’s a terror. I thought Ellaenie was good at chess, but Sadie here is quite unbeatable.”

“Unless you use the cosmic power of the Crowns themselves to cheat,” Sadie sniffed, but Jed could tell she was amused, and trying not to blush at the praise.

Adrey threw up her hands in surrender, and tipped over her Thaighn to resign the match. “I don’t think I’ll ever get to play chess again, then. It’s impossible for me not to cheat, by that standard.”

“What do y’mean?” Jed asked, as Sadie snorted softly and rose to go brew some tea. “You can…see the future?”

Adrey gave a half-shrug. “Not exactly…here. Toss a coin.”

“…What?”

“Do it,” Skinner said, with a small gap-toothed smile. “This is a neat trick.”

“Arright…” Jed dug around and found a steel. He balanced it on his thumb and flicked it in the air—

“Face.”

Jed shrugged at the correct guess. “…Arright, one point to you, but—”

“Do it again,” Adrey told him.

Every time the coin flicked upwards, Adrey guessed. “Seal, seal, seal, face, face, seal, seal, seal, face, seal, face, face, face…”

Every time it landed, she turned out to be right. She was right twenty times before Jed gave up.

“Well, that’s a neat trick and all, but—” he began, then trailed off as she turned her notepad around again. On it, she’d scribbled the words ‘Well that’s a neat trick and all but’. “…Winter’s tits. So you can see the future?”

“No, it’s not…everything is…to pick a third game out of the air, it’s like I know everyone’s hand, and I know what the flop, turn and river are going to be. So I know what the optimal play is for everyone at the table, and I can even know for sure if another player is bluffing…but even then, I’m not actually guaranteed to win every hand, am I?”

“I s’pose not…”

“Right. Everything is…probability, now. I can see and feel what’s most likely. But also, if all outcomes are equal and I just make a complete naked guess, my guess turns out to be right every time.”

Jed considered that for a moment. “…What bloody Word is that?” he asked.

“Wavefunction.”

“…Come again?”

“Don’t ask, I can’t explain it. It’s…luck and probability and randomness, and how they interact with the very smallest parts of reality at the very lowest level. It’s weird, Jed. So weird it…well. You saw what a state I was in before Queen Talvi helped me.”

“Mm.” Jed remembered clearly. He remembered her desperate plea to the Crown, ‘Make it real again.’

“I’d…rather not understand it again. Not until I’m ready. If I ever can be. Jerl Holten spoke about having to forget part of his Word in order to remain sane. I understand what he meant, now.” Adrey sighed heavily, then stood up and ambled over toward Skinner’s maps. She took in the shape of the pins and little tokens scattered across it at a glance. “We have twelve guns at Finch Park.”

“Yeah?”

“I think they’ll do more good if we move them to Elfcliffe.”

Skinner considered it. “…They would be good there,” he admitted. “But why not Finch Park?”

“False weakness. They’ll land at Finch Park if they think it’s poorly defended. But we can put sharpshooters in the buildings here, here and here.” She tapped the map. Skinner considered the proposal for a moment with a deepening frown, then pulled a face.

“Poor buggers,” he commented. “That’ll be a massacre.”

“We can’t stop them landing everywhere, Skinner. But if we control where they do land…”

“Aye, I’m with ye. If the Word’s tellin’ you so, we’ll go wi’ it.”

“It is. I can…feel the shape of the battle coming together.” Adrey shrugged. “The Word isn’t as…as intense now as it was on the bridge. But I can at least use it this way without it driving me out of my mind.”

“For which I for one am bloody thankful,” Jed commented gruffly.

“You were a bit terrifying,” Sadie agreed as she handed out drinks.

Adrey’s ears turned red, but she nodded solemnly and sipped her tea without comment. for a few seconds, the only sound in the room was the rattle of the tea service, the ticking of the clock, and the soft slurping of four people lost in their thoughts.

“Well…what about this lot?” Skinner asked, breaking the silence to indicate his tangled web of yarn and scribbles. “Got a guess?”

Adrey considered it. “…Give me a minute to think.”

“What even is all that?” Jed asked. He’d been trying to make head or tails of it for hours, without success.

“Well, it started as me tryin’ to figure out how the Peltons saw through Adrey’s cover,” Skinner explained. “They didn’t just take a wild guess, they knew who she was an’ who she works for. An’ then later I was tryin’ to see ‘ow the elves picked us apart so clean. The whole network’s planned so that shouldn’t be possible. You know ‘ow it works. Cells o’ three, safe ‘ouses, compartmentalization, all of it. Even if there’s a leak over ‘ere, it shouldn’t affect owt there…”

“Too bad I killed the Peltons before we could question them…” Adrey commented, gravely.

“Don’t start thinking like that,” Sadie told her. “They didn’t give you the option of being civilized.”

“I know. Still, in an ideal world…”

“If wishes was gold, we’d all ‘ave shiny teeth,” Jed said, quoting one of his grandmother’s favorites. “But alright. I know all about compartmentalization an’ all. So what…?”

Skinner indicated the different colors of yarn. “Green means two-way communication. Blue an’ yellow are one-way communication. Black an’ white are one-way *knowledge—*A knows that B exists, but B doesn’t know A exists, right? An’ red is mutual ignorance.”

Jed gave the tangled web of string and names a thoughtful frown. “…So what’s the problem?”

“The problem is, it doesn’t make any bloody sense! I can’t find a pattern!”

“That’s because you’re assuming nobody cheated at the game,” Adrey said, quietly. “Here…” she drew a couple of other boxes, and ran red, green, black and yellow lines between them and the existing boxes. “There. I bet if you went looking, you’d find these are parts of the Network our cell didn’t know about.”

Skinner ran a hand over his scalp. “You’re sayin’ you can guess at the Network’s cells an’ members with your Word?”

“Not completely wild guesses. Just…very accurate extrapolations from scant evidence. And there’s somebody else who can as well.”

“Who?”

“Ellaenie met him already. The masked man who tried to kill her at Crae Vhannog. Captain of the Aleator.”

“…Remind me.”

“He was a Wordspeaker. He called it Luck, but it’s not. It’s my Word. Luck is just…a crude interpretation of what it can do, and what it does do for him. But like me, all he’d have to do is exert its power and guess, and he’d be right.”

Skinner gave her an appalled look. “…Fuck me with a rake. How in Eärrach’s name are we meant to run a covert network against someone who can do that?”

“We can’t.”

“How come they didn’t pick us apart earlier, then?” Jed asked.

“…This is just a guess, of course—” Adrey began.

“Right, right, but if what you’re sayin’ is true then your guesses are as good as a report. So…?”

“Civorage has a patron of some kind. Somebody that the hag elves belong to. And now I have a patron, the one who gave me the Word. And because it’s the same Word, presumably she’s also the patron of the Aleator’s captain. Except I probably can’t consider her a patron because her behaviour seems erratic: exposing us one moment, then turning around and giving me the power to destroy Civorage’s forces the next.” Adrey thought about it for a moment. “Which…fits what I saw of her. She seemed bored. Terribly bored. And keen to stir up trouble just for a moment’s entertainment.”

“So…what? This masked fella an’ his patron only just got involved?”

“Things only just got interesting enough for them to take notice.”

There was a thoughtful pause, punctuated by Skinner’s fingers rasping through several days’ worth of stubble. He didn’t seem to know what to say. Jed certainly didn’t.

Sadie meanwhile had perched herself on the corner of the desk. “So…who are the patrons?”

Adrey pursed her lips thoughtfully, then scratched at the back of her neck as though it pained her. It probably did. “There are things that don’t add up yet. Threads that aren’t coming together. Like…how did Civorage find his Word in the first place? Are we to believe he just happened to dig in the exact right spot to find one? And he just happened to open it because the Shades just happen to whisper the identity of a vault’s content?”

“Where do the Shades even come from?” Sadie asked. “I’ve always felt like they can’t be part of the plan, surely?”

“…You know what? That might be exactly the right question.” Adrey considered the maps a minute longer, then sighed and stood. Somehow, she seemed more energized and ready than any of them. “But here and now, we have an invasion to plan for.”

“We can’t win,” Skinner said.

“I know. But we don’t have to. We just have to fight a little longer.”

“Until?”

Adrey looked out the window, and smiled.

“Until the cavalry arrives,” she said.

----------------------------------------

> Poetry is to the Yunei as swearing is to the Enerlish—ubiquitous in their conversation, and thoroughly confusing to foreign visitors. —Javeer Alondro Sal de los Fragua, The Outside View

MEETING THE EMPEROR

Imperial Palace, Yonguitang 09.06.03.12.14

Ellaenie had not quite known what to expect of the Enlightened Emperor. She knew from Rheannach’s briefing on the political structure of the Yunei that her host sat at an interesting intersection of power: in theory, his own was absolute and unquestionable. If the Emperor ever issued a decree or command, every one of the Students of Yunei were duty-bound by the Proper Way to do their utmost in realizing his will.

In practice, the Emperor never issued decrees or commands. He was a spiritual being, an enlightened one far above the mundanities of material life. It would have been most Improper for such a one to sully his purity of purpose with anything so base as mere supreme executive authority.

Nor, of course, was it Proper for him to officially welcome a foreign head of state, for centuries of doctrine had it that the Emperor was supreme over all lands, peerless above all barbarian chieftains.

The Crowns had made it very clear that some of Yunei’s teachings about Propriety were now to be reconsidered in light of the changing world, and the Proper Way itself was now undergoing scrutiny and reduction. An unheard-of situation, and one likely to cause great unrest and turmoil if done too aggressively. And of course, the Emperor needed to acknowledge Ellaenie’s rightful rule of Enerlend if he was to be invited by her to send his armies to her country’s aid. Welcoming her as an equal would have been ideal…but an unthinkable humiliation to so many Yunei as to make it impossible. Especially given, as was surely inevitable with barbarian chieftains, the uncouth foreigner’s lack of manners.

The Emperor’s approach to this thorny problem was considered, gentle and sensible: He chose to welcome Ellaenie in the manner of closest friends, with a cozy minimum of ceremony and the expectation that the usual rules of etiquette were somewhat more relaxed between them.

All of which entirely failed to prepare Ellaenie for what she saw when the Empress escorted her into her royal husband’s presence.

He was down on his hands and knees playing rambunctiously with the Crown Prince and a dog.

The Empress suppressed a laugh. “Husband? Our friend the Duchess of Enerlend has arrived. Perhaps a little more dignity, please?”

A nanny swept forward to resume her vigil over the Crown Prince, a cute lad of perhaps six or seven years, who gave Ellaenie a fascinated gawking stare as he was ushered to the edge of the room. The Emperor chuckled and rose from the mat, dusting off his knees and smiling broadly.

“So soon! Your Grace Ellaenie, welcome, welcome!”

They traded bow and curtsey, and then Ellaenie, almost without noticing it, had accepted his arm to take a turn around the garden with him while the Empress attended to tea. on the surface, he came across as affable, calm, untroubled. But with the Sight…

There was no demon. There was no cage. The Emperor was just…who he was. He was the most perfectly integrated man Ellaenie had ever met, which was absurd! Even Sayf and Eärrach had caged demons!

He noticed her astonished interest. “I take it I am not what you expected.”

“I…have a knack for seeing deep into people. It was the first skill my mentor and Beldame taught me.”

He chuckled affably. “Not an easy talent, and I cannot claim to share it. My own efforts have been devoted inwards, rather than outwards.”

“I can tell.”

“Indeed? And what do you see?”

Ellaenie told him. She explained about the Sight, about the demons in the souls of men and the various kinds of cages they were locked in. How even her husband kept his own slothful, lazy demon, and Eärrach had his lustful, dominant one. As she did so, they wound a slow and intricately winding path through a densely planted garden alive as much with green shrubs as with flowers, fountains and lanterns.

The Emperor considered her words as they strolled beneath a stone arch. “…A fascinating insight into the Divine Ones.”

“They’d be the first to say, they made this world and the people within it because they still think there’s much to learn. It seems they’re right…but how have you—?”

“Lifetimes of focused study.” He gave her a serious look. “You know, of course, that our tradition holds that the human soul does reincarnate?”

“Yes?”

“I am privileged to know for a fact that it truly does. I am my father, and my grandfather, and my son all at once. We are…notes in the same song, perhaps we could say? But the Emperor is unique in maintaining such cohesion. Most people—and it is a mere statement of fact without insult that I include you in this, Your Grace—simply…bounce around as the vagaries of their karma dictate. I do not.”

“You are your son?” Ellaenie looked back toward the reception room where the Crown Prince was in animated conversation with his mother. “Then…who is he now?”

“He is me. We are one. A soul is an immaterial thing, Your Grace. Why should it follow the same flow of time as the material shell of our bodies?”

Ellaenie considered this, then considered the boy, exerting the Sight once again. He was a boy, of course. Young, unfinished and raw. But…

“When this body dies, my soul will be reborn as my son, and I shall live for a while in my own presence,” the Emperor said. “Imagine paper folded back upon itself many times, so that instead of one flimsy sheet you have a strong rope.”

“Surely the influence of others besides yourself is important?”

“Of course! Paper cannot fold itself.” The Emperor smiled. “All analogy is imperfect. And I am not perfect either. Not yet. Perhaps I never will be. Lately, I have been reminded of my duty to the temporal and physical…and the fact that attending to it will require war.”

He betrayed a sigh, the first hint of troubled thinking she’d so far seen in him. “How is it we have come to a time when war is the most enlightened option? Or is it just that I am not enlightened enough to see the alternative?”

“It’s comparatively easy to be enlightened in a palace, Your Majesty,” Ellaenie pointed out. “Nils Civorage grew up grubbing and scraping for every mouthful of bread.”

“Very true. And that is why his fall is forgivable. His patron, though…” The Emperor shook his head sadly, and they completed their turn around the garden in silence.

They returned to the reception room and sat down just as the water for tea was boiling. The Empress smiled at her husband, and set about carefully washing and heating the cups, and the smell of fresh tea leaves added to Ellaenie’s sense of cultivated serenity. The Emperor’s gardens reminded her of Sayf’s Oasis, though this place was ascetic where her husband’s was aesthetic. There was a hedonism in Sayf’s appreciation of beauty and sensation that wasn’t present here…and a neatness that Eärrach’s cabin by the lake ostensibly rejected, even though that too was just as much a cultivated and prepared garden.

Ellaenie didn’t sigh as such, but just for a moment she felt a twinge of nostalgia for the brambly, unkempt, untamed, uncivilized depths of the Auld Forest. The uncharitable thought flickered across her thoughts that even the Crowns wouldn’t quite find enlightenment until they learned how to find it in a boggy hole full of nettles and poison ivy.

She set that thought aside. It wasn’t relevant to the much more material concerns of the day, and for that, she was introduced to Lord General O-Jeng Liung, who bowed so low his beard swept the floor. It was a little forced, Ellaenie felt: bowing to a foreigner still didn’t sit comfortable with the general’s view of the world. But it was, nonetheless, an entirely Proper show of deference.

“Your Grace.” The general remained low.

Ellaenie returned the bow at the precise angle dictated by Yunei rules of propriety. “Lord General.”

Liung straightened, tucking his hands into the wide red band that girdled his waist. He was a very square man, Ellaenie thought: his torso was nearly as wide as it was long, with the thick midriff that spoke to a combination of luxurious diet and fearsome strength. He wore the simple brown robes of a soldier, though the fabric was of a much finer quality and cut than any line infantryman’s, and embroidered with his personal seal.

“The armies are mustered, your grace,” he stated with careful formality. “By the decree of my lord the Enlightened Emperor and the will of the Crowns, the Students of Yunei stand ready to march to the liberation of your city and to reinstall you as the rightful ruler of your lands. We await only your invitation…and the method by which we may do so.”

Ellaenie smiled and, again, bowed to him in the form that showed deep gratitude. If not for her training as a witch and the aid of the Sight, memorizing al these rules and customs so quickly would have been beyond her. As it was, she could sense when she’d got it right.

She replied with equal formality. “I, Ellaenie Crownspouse of House Banmor, rightful Duchess of Enerlend, rightful Earl of Vathelan and the Heighlands, rightful Baron of the Old City, witch of the Herald’s Coven, Wordspeaker and Dame-emeritus of the most excellent Order of the Veil, do hereby invite and request the aid of the Students of Yunei in recovering what is mine by right, custom and law. I ask this not for my personal advancement, but for the gain and benefit of all.”

Liung returned her bow, then bowed to the Emperor. “My lord, most Englightened Emperor, the request is made. Your armies await your order to mobilize.”

The Emperor nodded, took up a ceremonial fan, and described a graceful arc through the air with it before snapping it open and laying it before him on the ground. “The order is given.”

“Then, Your Grace, we need only to know our road…” the general repeated. Ellaenie smiled and rose to her feet.

“Your road,” she said, “is through the forest.”

----------------------------------------

OUTSIDE IN ECLIPSE

Crae Varthen, the Craenen 09.06.03.12.18

“This feel…very stupid.”

Deng-Nah shivered as he looked around. He had never in his life contemplated going outside in Eclipse, and now…here he was.

“It’s fine. Garanese nightwatchmen and Eclipse Wardens do this all the time,” Jerl said.

“How many is taken each year?”

“None. They take it very seriously. Relax, will you? I’ve done this before myself…”

“And if we is…are taken…you un-do it?”

“I won’t have to. Trust me.”

Deng-Nah scowled and continued to glance around him, unable to resist the fearful tremor that shook through his limbs with every step.

Jerl was right, he knew. The two of them were, if anything, even better illuminated than they had been inside the Jolly Tar Inn. Jerl’s long coat was sewn here and there with little pockets made of a thin, translucent fabric fronted with a fine wire mesh, into which a lit magestone could be inserted. One on the breast, on in the small of the back, one on each upper arm, just above the elbow. Between them, the lights cast a decent pool of illumination around him, so that the Shades flowed and slithered out of his path as he walked.

He’d helped Deng-Nah modify his own clothes in the same way. It was safe. Deng-Nah could see it was safe. Certainly, this was the exact same protection that had kept him safe for the last twenty hours in the Jolly Tar. Mere stone walls and wooden doors were of no use at all if the lights failed…

But they did at least allow one to pretend the Shades weren’t there.

Not so out in the street. He’d never laid eyes on them before. Never wanted to. Been too much of a coward to.

There weren’t terribly many. This Eclipse would last a long time, but it was not deep. The eclipsing mote was high above, its darkness during the daylight hours more of a twilight than the pitch blackness Jerl had described crashing into down on the Unbroken Mote. Perhaps a dozen, maybe fifteen, stared at Deng-Nah and Jerl, slithering to a new vantage point every so often as the pair of them walked along the higher road above the river bank, below the castle walls. As he and Jerl went past, they would turn their whole bodies to stare, never moving their heads or their eyes. Those last expressions of horror, terror, despair and panic, those wide unblinking eyes, the rivulets of shadow eternally weeping down their cheeks…there was no life in them. No sentience. Not even any malice, really. The poor things were no longer human enough for malice.

He studied them as they went past. There was an old man with a white beard that fell to just above a pleated kilt that still somehow suggested a russet brown tartan even in black and grey. There was a young and pretty woman, her final expression a particularly unbearable wail, which was perhaps explained by the way her hands still wrapped protectively around a round, firm belly. There was a young man in a gambeson, his face snarling in defiance and rage as though he’d been fighting to the last.

There was even a Yunei, a woman with her hair shaved at the front and grown at the back into a braided queue, a style which marked her as having been taken during the second Emperor’s reign. Her eyes were closed and her expression serene. Perhaps she had meditated, seeking peace when she knew her fate was inevitable.

It was so easy to make up stories about these things that had once been people. That was what made it so hard to look away. But the whispering made it impossible.

The locals had certainly commented on it. Those whose business took them outdoors in such times, wearing light coverage similar to their own, had come stomping in to the Jolly Tar with disturbed expressions, and ordered stiff drinks before settling down to gossip about this new and unwelcome behaviour.

“’Tisn’t nat’ral,” one had opined, after tipping an entire pint of beer down his gullet in a series of unnerved gulps and shivering from scalp to sole. He’d then promptly rounded on the Queen’s crew. “It’s no’ ‘yer doin’, is it? You an’ ‘yer damned elves…”

Mouse, fortunately, had talked him down. But they were all fairly certain that the same conclusion was going to spread quickly throughout the people of Crae Varthen. And who could blame them? After all, it was exactly the truth.

Still, the whispering was the only clue they had to work with. Otherwise, the runes on the Word Vault remained utterly impenetrable. Amir had offered a perspective on it that Deng-Nah had honestly struggled to follow, but if he understood it, the navigator had suggested that in addition to up and down, left and right, fore and back, it was possible to think of other directions. And it was possible to “squash” directions down: one could draw a cube on a flat piece of paper as a series of squares and parallelograms. And if all you had was a line, you could even think about what the cube would look like as a series of dots and lengths along the line.

Deng-Nah prided himself on not being a stupid man, but this concept had taken quite a long time for him to grasp given that it was both a very foreign way of thinking, and being explained to him in a language he still did not speak well, via the translation assistance of a man who was himself hearing it for the first time.

It had become especially difficult when Amir started talking about what it would be like if a cube with a whole fourth direction cast its shadow into their world of three directions, but that such a thing could be described with mathematics, in theory. And in short, perhaps it would help to think about the runic puzzle on the vault as being like rotating a more-directions object and watching the way its shadow changed on the six two-direction faces of the vault…

…Deng-Nah had absolutely no idea how that mental image was supposed to be helpful.

It had almost been a relief when Jerl finally suggested they step outside to face the Shades directly and see if the whispering was of any use. Thus far they had strolled in a slow loop up along the old, straight road behind the castle to the site of the ancient elvish amphitheatre. It was still there, and apparently used by the Crae Varthen population for their own entertainments, which seemed to be mercifully short on murder and gratifyingly rich in poetry.

Three hours of sitting in their little private pool of light and listening to the muttering dead all around them had yielded nothing but the desire for a stiff drink, so they were heading back, now.

“…A thing I wonder is…why there are no old Shades?” Deng-Nah mused, out loud.

“Say again?” Jerl frowned at him, and indicated the elderly bearded one.

“No, not age. Old from long ago. Never see Ordfey slaves, or First People.”

“Shades haven’t always been around, mate. The first of them appeared maybe…two thousand years ago?”

“Really? No Shades before then?”

Jerl shrugged and looked again at the poor souls haunting them. “The way Sin tells it, the Nornfey were created when Eärrach punished a Set called the Unelmasa for some terrible, unforgivable crime.”

“Sounds...not like him.”

“Yeah. Sin’s right, I really should get Ekve’s opinion at some point.”

“Why you don’t?”

Jerl shook slightly, as a chill entirely separate and yet much alike to the one the Shades gave him ran up his back. “’Cuz he gives me the fucking willies, mate.”

“…Willies.”

“Heebie-jeebies. Creeps. Uh…he unnerves me and makes me uncomfortable.”

“Oh. Well, yes. Because you’re sane.”

Jerl’s laugh seemed to surprise the Shades: they all took a step away from him, before pushing forward to the edge of the light again. He sobered at the sight, and lowered his voice. “Well…still, he’s living proof, isn’t he? Eärrach punished him, but he fit the punishment perfectly to the crime. You can’t deny, Ekve deserved what he got.”

“Only recent, though. Only now. When he had to.” Deng-Nah slid a few runes listlessly about on the vault’s surface. They both paused and pricked up their ears as something that sounded like it could be a word joined the random babble and susurrus. But it was gone as soon as it was heard.

“...Yeah. Otherwise he lets things go. But everyone felt his anger that day, apparently. And Sin doesn’t lie, at least not to me. Something got him genuinely wrathful.”

Deng nah dragged a rune in a spiral around one face of the vault, ending where it began. It had rotated and changed by the time it finished its orbit. “Something real bad, then. Like making the Shades?”

“Dunno. I figure that’s the sort of level of evil you’d have to do to really seriously piss off King Eärrach of all people. Dammit, I wish Ellaenie was here to ask…”

“…Funny thing. I always thought Shades must be, uh, accident. The Crowns always say, ‘we are not perfect, we are not gods, we make mistakes.’ I thought, Shades must be one of their mistakes. Who else has power to make something like them?”

Jerl shrugged. “A Herald?”

“None would. Except the four you told me about, and their power the Crowns took away.”

“Hmm…”

Jerl turned to look at the nearest shade, a bearded man of perhaps forty years, whose last expression was one of terribly sad resignation. “…What say you, huh?” he asked it. “The name Chathamugah ring any bells?”

The Shade, of course, did not react in any way. It just kept muttering nonsensically.

“No? Nimico? Vedaun? Iaka— fuck!”

In response to her name, the wretched shadow’s mouth had stopped moving, as had every other shade’s. The street fell silent. Slowly and in straight-line movements, they all turned and looked off into the distance, raising their faces toward the distant white arc of the Unbroken Mote. For a second or two they stood there, still and staring and silent.

Then, as suddenly as they’d done it, they returned their horrible hungry attention to Jerl and Deng-Nah and resumed their whispering.

“Let’s go back to the inn,” Deng-Nah pleaded. “I need a drink.”

“…Yeah.” Jerl shook himself “You and me both.”

He rose to his feet, turned back toward the Jolly Tar, then stopped as though a lightning bolt had struck him. He’d already gone pale from the Shades’ discomforting reaction to Iaka’s name, but now the color drained out of him entirely and he stared.

Deng-Nah followed his gaze. There was a Shade standing in the middle of the street, staring at them and muttering.

But unlike every other Shade he’d ever seen, this one was smiling.

----------------------------------------

FITFUL SLEEP

The Jolly Tar, Crae Varthen 09.06.03.12.18

Sinikka blinked and opened her eyes, and considered the expanse of ruddy chest hair in front of her.

It was a good chest. Derghan had the genuinely fearsome strength of a man whose daily life consisted of moving heavy things around in between bouts of hammering on metal. The body under her cheek was hard with just the right sheathing of softness from a healthy appetite. Solid. Dependable. Comforting.

Hers.

“Whuzzat?” she mumbled.

“Said, ‘yer vamdraech’s diggin’ into me…” he rumbled sleepily.

It was digging into her as well, she realized. Quite uncomfortably. “Mm…sorry.” She shifted position, transferring from resting on his belly to tucking herself into the crook of his arm. She touched the reassuring weapon to make sure it was properly situated directly above her heart, and relaxed again. Suicide and safety was only a single swift motion away.

Crowns, she hated Eclipse. She could never sleep properly when it was about. The thought of the light failing while she was unconscious and oblivious to the danger, not having enough time to kill herself before…

Derghan gave her a squeeze. “Gives me the fuckin’ creeps too,” he commented. “Mebbe I should wear a vamdraech as well.”

“It’s always confused me why humans don’t…” she admitted, and sat up. Sleep, unfortunately, was slipping out of her grasp. And between the furnace heat of his body and the fireplace in the corner of the room, she was suddenly acutely aware of being much too warm for comfort. “It’s not like being taken is a desirable fate for you either, nay?”

“True enough. Got no fuckin’ clue where my soul’s bound for when I go, but I’d rather go there. I’ll make one when I get the chance…though, let’s face it. Jerl wouldn’t put up with either of us being taken.”

That, at least, was a comforting thought. Sin relaxed somewhat, smiled, kissed him, then slipped out from under the blankets to go splash on some cold water from a ewer and basin in the corner of their room. The water was only lukewarm, but it was still refreshing enough for her to sigh contentedly and do some of her stretches and contortions. Derghan made love with a rough strength that just about rattled her brains out the top of her head, and that was just how she liked it. But the body needed a certain amount of realigning afterwards.

He sat up to watch her, his eyes roving hungrily over her as she limbered up.

“Enough,” she stated firmly, “Mercy. I can take no more.”

“Bullshit. You can go longer’n me and we both know it,” he said with a grin. “Besides if I ever don’t watch you stretching, you’d better start preparing my pyre. It’s the best sight in all the worlds.”

She snorted and flicked some water at him to his delight. “Ass.”

“And a bloody shapely one, aye.” He grinned at her, then rose from their bed and started sponging himself down. She couldn’t resist glancing down as he did so and taking a moment to appreciate what she saw. He was right: it really was very shapely. “S’pose we’d better check everyone’s alright, though,” he acknowledged.

Sin sighed. “Crowns know, I’ve seen more Eclipse lately than I’m happy with. Between the Thundering Hall and now this…”

Whatever Derghan’s reply might have been, they were interrupted by raised voices from downstairs. They frowned at each other, then scrambled to dress.

Sin managed it first, and took the steps in a single graceful bound even as she knotted up a shirt across her chest. She alighted at the bottom with nary a thump, to find Deng-Nah waving his arms animatedly and trying to make himself understood by some of the Rüwyrdan, whose own grasp of Garanese was even shakier than his own.

“What is it? What’s going on?” she asked. “Where’s Jerl?”

“He saw…He’s out there.” Deng-Nah waved an arm toward the door. “We go out.”

“Red Lady’s arse, why’d you do a thing like that?” Derghan demanded, clomping down the stairs as he fastened up his belt.

“To hear Shades. Hear their whisper. Maybe it will help with the vault! But Jerl…”

“What?” Sin asked. He couldn’t have been taken, she felt it in her bones. Jerl had always said if he was ever killed, then time would wind back. Surely that applied to being taken as well?

“There was…a strange shade. Smiling shade.”

The bottom dropped out of Sin’s stomach. “Smiling?”

“Yes. Big, warm smile. But sorry, too.”

Sin shivered. Her hand moved to her vamdraech. Then she marched to the coat hooks and grabbed her own jacket. “Light! I need stones!”

Deng-Nah obligingly lit some for her, so bright they made several of the crew blink and shield their eyes. In seconds she’d slotted them into their pockets. She took a deep breath to steel herself, gripped the handle of her vamdraech, and surged out through the door into the eclipse beyond.

Groping, babbling figures fled from her ligt as she emerged into the gloom. She gritted her teeth, gripped her escape knife so hard her knuckles creaked, and strode up the quay with Deng-Nah trotting at her heels.

Jerl was easy to find. He was sitting on a bench in a little plaza where four or five narrow alleyways came together outside the caisteal’s barbican. And standing in front of him, staring at him and whispering, was the shade of Arneld Holten.

For a moment, Sin completely lost all sense of her surroundings. She was back on the Queen’s deck twenty years ago, pouring magic into her own limbs to find the strength to overcome young Jerl’s thrashing manic desperation and haul him to safety, helpless to do anything but watch as her friend and oath-holder died.

Arn’s expression was exactly as she remembered it. That sympathetic smile, sorry for the boy but still suffused with glad relief that he would survive. Eyes that radiated love for his son even in the moment he suffered the fate worse than death. Shit, his spirit was even still wearing his wedding band.

She shook herself back to alertness and glanced around. The other shades were still screaming, weeping, wailing and pleading at her as they maintained a respectful distance from the lights. But for some reason, while they clustered around herself and Deng-Nah, reaching and groping toward them, only Arn’s shade was haunting Jerl, and its hands remained by its sides.

Jerl’s eyes were dry, despite an expression of total misery. He glanced up at Sin as she put a hand on his shoulder, reached up and squeezed her fingers gratefully, then looked back up at the shade.

“…I’d almost forgotten his face,” he said. “I can’t remember his voice. Not really.”

Sin didn’t know what to say. The most she could offer was lame and inadequate: “I’m sory, Jerl.”

“Why now, though?” he asked. “Why ever? There are…how many shades? There must be millions. I should have gone my whole life without ever seeing this one. Instead…here he is. Why now?”

She squeezed his hand. “It’s not him, Jerl. It just looks like him.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.”

They both tore their gaze away to look at Mouse, who shivered nervously and pulled his coat tighter around his shoulders as though afraid it would spontaneously fall off. The glow from their own magelights made his pace seem pale and gaunt.

“They’ve never shown any sign of there being anything left of who they used to be…” Sin pointed out.

“But there’s still something. Like…like cut cable flapping loose in a gale. A shred of memory. A whisper of an echo. Minds don’t just vanish. You can cut pieces out of them, but…” Mouse gave the shade a horribly sad look. “…There’s something there, some….shadow, that remembers having a connection to you. Your presence comforts it.”

“…Say that again?” Deng-Nah requested.

“Say what?”

“That word. Cuh…connection.”

They all heard it this time. The whispering around them hitched, or tripped over the word somehow. For a moment there was the sense that it meant something beyond simple mindless utterance. Deng-Nah gave the shades a wide-eyed look, then considered the box in his hand.

“Connection?” he asked, uncertainly.

The world vault remained stubbornly closed.

Jerl looked up at his father’s shade, then sighed, pressed his hands to his knees and used them to push himself upright. “…I love you, Dad,” he said, softly. “I’ll find a way to set you to rest, I promise.”

Arn’s remnant, of course, simply continued to smile at him. They trudged back to the Jolly Tar in silence, filed inside, and shut the Eclipse out with a collective shiver of relief of being somewhere warm and well-lit, even though in every technical sense they were no safer indoors than they had been out there. The warmth of the fireplace and the aroma wafting from the kitchen both created a feeling of security

Sin watched Jerl trudge away upstairs to his room. She’d go check on him later, she decided. Here and now, he needed to be alone.

She glanced over to the corner where Ekve was seated in cross-legged meditation. She sat opposite him and considered the face before her. As always happened with reincarnation, there were features there she recognized from his previous chal. Something about the straightness of the nose, the wide flare of his ears and squareness of his chin were definitely his, and had been across al his lifetimes. A human might miss the subtleties and claim a reincarnated elf bore little resemblance to their previous life, but two fey who knew each other well would never fail to recognize each other.

And Ekve and Bekhil had been long, passionate and intimate lovers across thousands of years and every permutation of their respective genders. And they had both undergone a punishment that no-one else in all the worlds had suffered, or deserved. There was nobody in all of history or creation who knew her better, or whom she knew more intimately.

But that was a conversation she’d been putting off for weeks, and would continue to put off. Here and now, she went to the bar and ordered a very stiff drink.

She needed three.

----------------------------------------

> Professor Enst Beldrade was held in such high regard in his time that his word was (and still is) considered lore and the foundation of all magical study. This should serve as a warning and example to us, as he was, in several important regards and subjects, consistently and remarkably wrong. The veneration in which he was held made it difficult to make progress in those fields for a long time. Indeed, even now, more than three hundred years after his passing, there are still some subjects where the words “but Beldrade says—” forecast a long and heated argument. Alas. It would be so much simpler if the man had had the good decency to just be wrong about everything. —Prof. Zurak at-Tubur, speaking at the annual Navigators’ Symposium, 09.06.01

TO WAR

The forest’s edge, Yonguitang 09.06.03.13.01

Give them some theatre.

That had been Pal’s advice, just before Ellaenie set out to do this, and it had immediately made Sayf grin and nod approvingly. “Give them some theatre, love,” she’d said as she fussed over Ellaenie’s clothes and brushed aside imaginary flecks of lint and dust. “It’s as much for your own benefit as for theirs. When the time comes, be the Crowns’ Witch, as fully and as flagrantly as you can be.”

“But don’t forget to be the returning Duchess as well,” Sayf had added.

Lisze had instantly figured out what balancing those two should mean. It had taken some experimentation, some hasty tailoring and dressmaking, but the result…

When Ellaenie alighted from her palanquin, she did so wearing white. White was the color of her father’s regiment and the Ducal flag of house Banmor. But it was also white for the Craft in its benign, healing form. At its core, the outfit was just the regiment’s dress tunic and riding jodhpurs…but Lisze had expanded on that beginning in a dozen subtle ways.

For a start, there was the half-cloak in the blue and gold tartan of Crae Alltud, a tribute to Thaighn Saoirse. Lisze had chosen just the right fabric so that it billowed dramatically as the wind caught it. Then there were the Craft fetishes, bird skulls and old hard nuts and dropped feathers where a wizard of the Art would have worn magestones and an ordinary commander might have worn medals and brocade rope. Rather than a sword, she bore a wand of antler. And rather than boots, she was barefoot. She’d need to be, for what she was about to do.

In deference to Yunei custom, she had welcomed the aid of the Empress’ maids in painting her face completely white, with a black lip stain which was apparently the Proper combination for a general about to march to war. They had braided and tied her hair up quite elaborately…though she had insisted on using another length of antler to pin it, rather than the lacquered sticks they had first offered her.

The result satisfactorily balanced three forces. The duchess, the witch, and her debt to and respect for the Yunei.

It certainly impressed Lord General Liung, who muttered something to an attendant, which was promptly written down, before giving a bow of greeting that was a good deal more respectful than mere formality required. The Sight told her she’d rather awed him.

“Your Grace.”

“Lord General.”

Liung turned and gestured, taking in the mustered army with a single sweep of his arm. Ellaenie couldn’t deny the chill that rushed through her as the soldiers unanimously sent up a salute, a shout that was smeared out by scale and the speed of sound into a single booming deep-throated cry. She almost shivered.

“The army awaits. We need only our route, your Grace.”

They had marched to the edge of the same forest by which Ellaenie had first arrived. According to maps in the palace, it was some two hundred miles long, packed in among the roots and foothills of the Sho-Eku mountain range. Generations of Yunei farmers had cultivated the land right up to the very edge of what was arable, leaving a neat straight wall of trees bordering a wide plain. It was not the sort of place where a Path Between would usually form.

But Ellaenie was no longer bound by the usual rules that governed the Paths. It had taken some experimentation and a little coaching from Rheannach, but now…

She turned and planted her feet in the rich topsoil of farming country, wriggling her toes and squirming her soles against the bare earth. She closed her eyes and hummed, holding the note and using it to hold herself steady as she wove the magic.

At first, she used a tiny spark from inside her own body. Just enough to reach into the reserves she’d previously channeled into the wand and her fetishes. They were living things, or had been, and the essence of life still lingered inside them, lending vibrancy and color and depth to the power, far more than she’d ever have got from a sterile stone. Not more power…but more richness of power. The difference between a tune scraped out on a fiddle by an amateur, and the same tune played with soul and passion by a master.

Now was not the time to compare the relative merits of Art and Craft, however. She pulled the magic out of her fetishes and directed it down, through the soles of her feet and into the soil, where she sent it questing deeper than taproots, deeper and ever deeper, until deep in its core she found the magic that bound the motes to their orbits and held them steady against the sun’s endless displacing push.

Awareness faded. Some distant, material part of her was chanting sotto voce, though she did not concentrate on the words. She flung herself into the trance, thinking less and less as her consciousness raced outwards to embrace the miles of stone in every direction and the threads of tremendous, familiar will that had set them there.

And inside her, indelibly and permanently a part of her, was the Word. A fragment of Creation itself. Power unfamiliar, foreign and above, somehow. Power, and knowledge. Into it, she poured the shape of what she wanted to do, and the knowledge that it could be done. In it, she found the understanding of how.

Slowly, she raised her arm and described a wide sweep with her wand, as though sweeping clutter off a desk.

Beside her, Lord General Liung gasped. But she barely heard him. Her attention was entirely on the forest as it parted, and parted, and parted. Without moving the trees seemed to slide aside to reveal a path that had somehow always been there. There was no creaking of strained wood, no crackle of protesting roots being broken nor of stone being fractured and shoved aside. There was only…widening. A manifestation in the physical world of something that always could have been and now, through her guidance, was.

For a time.

“…It is ready,” she said.

“You can…hold it?” he asked, nervously.

“As easily as leaving a door open,” she assured him. “It is time, Lord General.”

He nodded, gave the new yawning trail a deeply awed look, then turned and gestured to one of his subordinates, who gestured in turn. Signal flags were raised. Orders were shouted.

As one, the army of the Yunei steeled themselves, and marched forward onto the path.