[PM to Join] Every Stumble and Each Misfire

[Tom Cooke]

The Long Gallery • The Vauquelin House

Late Evening on the 40th of Ophus, 2719

L
onely,” he repeats. He bites off the word, and he can feel the bitter clench in his jaw, the souring, souring twist of his lips. He looks down; he looks away, out again over the floor. He’s not sure why he said it. He felt it through all of him, as he can still feel it. Shame mingled with anger mingled with sadness.

He’s managed to keep his field indectal, at least. He sees a woman, whose name he can vaguely recall, laughing. Her face is very red; she’s barely managing to pinch her flute glass between her fingers. Her coppery hair is braided back in a shimmery sweep, pinned into place with a flurry of black-and-white ornaments, made to look like the twisted elaborate hands of a clock. Another young woman, tall for a galdor, thin and towheaded, is grinning.

People everywhere. Galdori everywhere, rather; fields everywhere. A woman sweeps by, just out of range, but he can feel the edges of her field, slippery perceptive, brush his own. His gaze catches for a moment on a shimmer of vivid white silk, a spill of black roses on the warp. He feels a jolt, because he thinks for a moment it might be Diana. It isn’t; there are many such dresses tonight.

He finds the lasses again, a little further away from their quiet section by the windows. The redhead is taking a glass of champagne from a passing tray; he recognizes the human’s face, but he can’t put a name to it. She turns away, glancing out over the gallery like she’s looking for someone, and he gets a good look at her profile.

Proulx. He realizes why she’s jumped out at him. Annabelle Proulx, who’s studying the culinary arts at Brunnhold. He doesn’t know her friend. He half wishes he didn’t know her, though he’s spent so many nights clinking snifters with Incumbent Proulx, so many empty decanters, so many sickly-sweet cigars in his place that should smell like sage.

She looks happy. She won’t graduate for a year or so, he knows. Back to red-brick Brunnhold in Intas, he supposes, to learn the ins and outs of cooking.

Cooking.

In the corner of his eye, Niccolette has crossed her arms. The set of her shoulders and the cross of her arms is as closed as a vault. Something tightens in his chest. He remembers the lick of bastly warmth that scattered through his field at her caprise, and the little smile she couldn’t seem to keep from creeping up.

Do you think, he wants to ask, do you think Etienne Merenniano knows how to fry a fucking egg? He wishes he had the strength to laugh. The anger he feels this time is tangled up with a warmth he can’t explain. He wants to say something, to say anything.

He remembers how once, a very long time ago, Aremu described it to him as a dream of freedom – just a dream; maybe he knew, then, better than anybody, how all dreams ended.

He remembers looking at the sleek black hull of it, waiting for two silhouettes to appear above the gunwale. He’s not a man who can picture things, but if he thinks hard enough, he can remember the taste of the coming rain on the breeze. The ache of it in his scars. He remembers the creaking of the Eqe Aqawe, and the ladder he climbed with the blood-taste of fear on his tongue, and the tightening in his throat, and then the feel of the deck underneath his boots.

It wasn’t his life, but he can feel it – as if it might’ve been, maybe, as if he might’ve chosen it, and if he had, he imagines – he doesn’t know what to name the feeling, but it aches. He can still see her in the corner of his eye, and he still doesn’t know what to say.

One more second. He watches the towhead loop her arm through the Proulx girl’s, drag her off into the press. At the other end of the hall, there’s still dancing; they disappear. Not the most well-behaved of schoolgirls, he thinks.

“I believe it was a Clock’s Eve,” he drawls, in his perfect imitation of Anatole’s accent, “that I set a Seventen’s coat on fire. When I was a boy.” He doesn’t look at her, but he smiles a little. “I don’t think I would get away with that at a party like this. Rather more sober is right.”

[Niccolette Ibutatu]

Late Evening, 40 Ophus, 2719
The Long Gallery, The Vauquelin House

Lonely,” Anatole repeats it back to her, his deep voice strange.

Niccolette still does not look at him; she does not think he has looked at her either. She thinks – absurdly, she thinks he is saying it too, that he is saying it not for her, but for himself. It is an absurd thought; she cannot shake it, and she does not think to voice it. She watches a brighter scatter of fireworks in the distance, somewhere out of the city; they flash against the side of an airship, and she presses her lips together, more amused than worried.

They are not so flammable as people think; she remembers being in the Eqe Aqawe above Thul Ka with fireworks going off, laughing, standing in the circle of Uzoji’s arms with his hands on the wheel, watching the chimes flutter in the breeze and the sky full of bursting lights, his voice whispering into his ear; she cannot remember what he said, only beloved – beloved –

Niccolette brings herself back, slowly, and settles down into herself once more. It takes, she knows, quite a good deal of effort to burn an airship. She breathes deeply; she glances around. She catches the eye of one of the liveried humans, and raises the faintest edge of an eyebrow, holding still for just a moment.

The man hurries over, fast enough that the champagne bobs in the glasses. It laps up to the edge, threatening, but does not quite spill. He stops smoothly just short of her, with a gesture that implies a bow; Niccolette takes one of the glasses with the faintest of nods. She takes a little sip, and the man retreats, and tray in hand, and makes his way back into the crush. She takes another sip, a little deeper; the champagne ripples pleasantly going down. Not, she thinks, finding something like amusement once more, half as bad as it feels coming back up. She should know.

Niccolette glances sideways at Anatole when he speaks. She is not quite sure how long the silence has been; it has been some time since she has slipped this badly. Uzoji, she thinks, would have liked Jacqueline; he always adored babies. The worst is not that she cannot picture it; the worst is that she can, altogether too easily.

Jacqueline, Niccolette thinks, very slowly, is perhaps the first person she will care about who Uzoji has not met – who Uzoji can never meet.

She is not quite listening, at first, and so the twist in the story startles a laugh out of her, short and sharp; it does not descend into giggles, but it is rather nearer than she might have liked. Nicolette had not quite set her glass to her lips, so she does not snort the champagne from her nose – that too, tragically, she knows to be quite painful. She grins a little wider, blinking the moisture from the edges of her eyelashes, and tilts her glass in a faint impression of a toast. “You should make their night - perhaps their year, even,” Niccolette says. “It would be the talk of all Vienda for – oh – at least a season.”

Her field has relaxed, a little; it did not slip abruptly with surprised. She is too controlled for that. But, like the careful stretching of her neck, she has loosened it – just a little – and the bastly tide rises through it, warm enough to be felt shivering through Anatole’s field. She does not gold shift – she has not had nearly even champagne for that – but the smile on her face is bastly too.

Niccolette does take another sip of champagne, smaller this time. She thinks it over; she decides. “I spent a night in the drunk tank once,” she says, smiling, the pronunciation of the phrase drunk tank careful and deliberate in her sharp accent, “for assaulting a Seventen, as it was termed.” She shrugs slim, silver-clad shoulders, and turns more towards her Brother, raising her eyebrows. “I should be glad to share the rest of the story,” a pause, and a wider smile, red lips curving mischievously, “if you would offer yours first.”

[Tom Cooke]

The Long Gallery • The Vauquelin House

Late Evening on the 40th of Ophus, 2719

I
t catches her unawares. There’s a staccato clip of a laugh, not quite a snort; he flicks a glance sideways – he can’t quite help it – just long enough to see whether she’s spilt her champagne. His voice wavers slightly, grows cramped with the smile he’s trying to push down. It’s a damned effort not to laugh himself, but he manages, somehow, though he’s grinning by the time he looks back at Niccolette.

He sees the littlest glimmer on her dark lashes. She raises her glass; he inclines his head humbly.

He looks back over the floor as she speaks, searching for any tell-tale green. He doesn’t see any, though he remembers through the swim of brandy meeting a red mustache in a dress uniform, much earlier that night. Sergeant Something-something Brouzet, some cousin on Diana’s side who called him by his first name. If he had to set anyone’s coat on fire tonight – maybe.

He sees the natt that brought Niccolette’s champagne; his platter, which was looking a pina sparse when he came bobbing over, has been repopulated. Try as he might, he still can’t put a finger on the name. The man dips in another almost-bow as a Mrs. Deloffre takes a flute. Again, he watches the motion in wonder; not a one of the glasses spills, but the lady isn’t even looking at him.

Niccolette’s field isn’t bastly, but he can feel the touch of gold; it warms through his field, infectious as the laughter. Drunk tank, she says, and he blinks over at her, raising both his eyebrows.

He’s said those words a dozen times, and heard them more; he doesn’t think he’s ever heard them like this. Like a bit of wick Monite on a magister’s tongue.

What’s he to picture? He keeps his quizzical, faintly surprised smile in place, even as he pictures an uncle spitting blood. He can’t remotely picture Niccolette Ibutatu in a drunk tank.

He faintly remembers a bar in Voedale, and Uzoji’s jacket – one slender arm outstretched, holding a barfight at arm’s length like you’d hold a bloody kerchief pinched between two fingers. A big man skittering out the door like a frightened mouse.

He blinks, and blinks again. Godsdamn, but he’s got to know. “Fair enough,” he says, grinning, and he can’t bring himself to look as reluctant as he’d like to.

Both are gifts – the listening, and the telling, too. He’s still smiling as he looks out over the floor again, breathes in deep, thinks what he can say and what he can’t. Not a lie from his lips tonight, not if he can help it.

“I was fourteen,” he muses. “It was in the Rose.”

He finds himself leaning back against the window-frame, looking up toward the chandeliers, like waterfalls of broken glass. “I’d run off, on the pretense of seeing the Falling Stone performers that had set up kint in the Court that year.”

But Clock’s Eve in the Rose is a dizzying paradise of gunpowder and charcoal and other chemical reeks, dusty unlabeled bottles full of such stuff as’ll black you out just from smelling of them. Alcohol-soaked rags and matches.

“It was me and a couple of other boys, scampering through the streets, making Stacks specials and trying to figure out which windows to throw them through.” There’d been a sort of truce before the King’s – the families, he remembers, managed to keep from cutting each other’s throats at least one night of the year – but no truce in the Rose ever extended to mischief, and mischief covered a whole lot of ground.

“We got bored of abandoned shopfronts, and we came across a bored-looking patrol on the corner of Whistlewill and Jermyn…” He looks over at her, shrugging. “They weren’t on blackback. One of the boys dared me to throw one, not at the uncle, but close enough to startle him. I wasn’t going to, but then he called me a chicken. And some other things.”

He takes a long drink of brandy, finishing off the snifter. It’s not so cloying, now, the twemlaugh, though he’s thinking of Low Tide and aching. But there’s still bastly color in the mona around them.

“You know those long, heavy winter uniforms. The other boys scattered, and I wasn’t exactly an inconspicuous lad, so I got chased – after he was finished yelping and putting out the fire. I lost him in the crowd.”

In the corner of his eye, out the window, he can see the distant pop and fizzle of more fireworks. The night draws on; they get more elaborate. “I got away – that time,” he adds. “The drunk tank,” he drawls, “is not, I am afraid, unfamiliar to me.”

He pauses – and smiles, finally, one eyebrow a curious arc.

[Niccolette Ibutatu]

Late Evening, 40 Ophus, 2719
The Long Gallery, The Vauquelin House

Anatole’s pinched politician face broadens in a grin. Even if he had not already reminded her, Niccolette thinks, she would know him now. He settles himself, still with one hand behind his back like an orator, the other holding his glass of gin, and begins.

Niccolette, despite herself, tries to picture it. Anatole cannot have been more than pint-sized, as a boy, with all that bright red hair. She wonders at his set – she imagines him with a bunch of other Brunnhold boys, roaming the streets with their eddles pulsing bastly and goldenshift with excitement. It’s not so easy to find him, exactly – she has never been terribly good at the making of such pictures – but she finds she is smiling at the attempt, at what she can see of them.

“I should have felt sorry for the chrove,” Niccolette says at the mention of blackback, smiling, thinking of Rhys Valentin and his enormous mount. She pauses, and shrugs, delicately, “perhaps you as well.”

One show is winding up, still, coming towards its peak, out the window. Anatole has turned in, mostly, looking at the chandeliers overhead; Niccolette is half-towards him, and half-towards the window, watching it. She takes another sip of her champagne. There is burst after burst after burst, sparking gold against the sky, one after the next, each reaching just – just! – a little higher.

They fizz and fade, trailing smoke through the air; one long streak of smoke stretches of through them, and bursts open, the highest of them all, gleaming, dazzling red.

Niccolette watches it descend, burning itself out brilliantly. She turns back to Anatole, and smiles. “My story is rather more recent,” she says, casually. She does not wish to watch the fireworks any longer; she settles herself back against the other side of the windowframe, comfortable, watching the distant room swirl black and white, putting faces and voices to the chatter and the clink of glasses.

“It was 2714,” Niccolette says, smiling, “and I was visiting Vienda.” She leaves out the screaming, shouting fight; she leaves out pulling her ring off her finger, jerking it painfully over the knuckle and hurling it at Uzoji – it went wide, she remembers, bounced and rolled into some dark corner. He found it, of course, before he came for her. She leaves out stalking on to an airship with nothing in the way of luggage, and the way her heart had plummeted, as if tied to the ground, as the ship began to ascend.

“I was alone in a bar Uptown, waiting to meet a friend,” Niccolette says with a smile. “Rather a reputable place; I doubt very much they should have me back,” she grins, a little wider, and takes a little sip of champagne. “A man came up; he wished to become better acquainted. I made my objections known,” Niccolette raises her eyebrows, “but he was quite insistent.”

The Bastian shrugs; she remembers the clamp of a hand which felt like iron on her upper arm, and the bruise. It had been quite effective, in front of the judge, although it had taken some work to have a dress made with ribbon-let sleeves, which could be slid down and discretely back up.

“Naturally, I objected rather more strongly,” Niccolette continues; nothing changes on her face, but – just for him – there is a sudden sharp pulse of her field, not so much a flex as a flash of undampening, the full strength of it for just a moment holding in the air around them. “A harmless little pain spell. He did not like that,” she grins, now, wicked.

“It turns out he was a Seventen,” Niccolette makes a little pout. “He returned with some uniformed friends. I was, perhaps… uncooperative,” she flicks her gaze up to Anatole, somewhere between amused and coy. “The later report called my vocabulary impressive,” Niccolette says, smugly.

“I was deemed rather too drunk to release, and send to pass the night in a holding cell,” Niccolette grins. “Rather undignified, I should admit, though I did manage some sleep. I burned my dress and all my underthings the next day; it was thoroughly satisfying.” She tilts her head to the side, thoughtful; she swirls her champagne once more, and takes another sip.

“If I could return to that moment,” Niccolette says, lips pursed, “I should not do the same.” She smiles. “I feel, knowing all I do now, that the right sort of sting spell, or else a spell to loosen control over the functionality of the bladder, would have been a much wiser choice."

[Tom Cooke]

The Long Gallery • The Vauquelin House

Late Evening on the 40th of Ophus, 2719

S
orrier for me, he thinks, wrinkling his nose. Those big slavering beasts. He used to have nightmares about them, and Deirdre used to tell him how one could tear a human up like a cat plays with a mouse. Good riddance to the lot of them, he’d say. Still, they don’t have many in the Rose, chroven; he’s never run afoul of one, not yet anyway. He doubts he’s likely to soon, given his current nom (visage) de plume.

That thought’s not one he’s any wish to hold onto. Thankfully, he doesn’t have to.

He watches her out of the corner of his eye, easing back against the window frame. He’s set his empty snifter on one of the small tables that intersperses the windows; he’s clasping both his hands behind his back. As she goes on, he tilts his head, studying her pleasant smile. Slowly, the eyebrow that’s raised floats higher. Then, his brows furrow, one deep line between them.

Brigk. His lip twitches; he must be drunk, because he just about says it. Flood them all, he wants to say, but holds his tongue, because this isn’t about him.

He doesn’t share in her smile – not yet – not until he feels, not the flex, but the fullness of her field. The air shivers round them, so much more than just woobly: vivid, strong, every monic particle organized but palpable. The distant teardrop lights of the chandeliers might be brighter; the lights reflecting through her champagne glass, refracting through the bubbly pale liquid as she swirls it, might glow.

It’s the sharpness, now, too, he feels; not just the color. He tastes it, like the edge of a blade against your throat, like a sting or a papercut – unexpected, not altogether pleasant, but – like the burn of whisky going down, bracing.

He doesn’t smile, but the knit of his brow relaxes. When she comes to it, he thinks he can guess what’s coming. He’s not wrong; at the thought of it, some plainclothes bully-brute brigk pissing himself in the middle of an Uptown bar, his lip twists, and he looks away and nods once. Sharply.

“The place should be lucky to have you back,” he says after a moment. “Not a patron’s job to take out the trash.” He shrugs again.

He knows it, like a shadow in the corner of his eye, the way she drifted sharply through quite insistent, the burning of the dress.

He’s spent enough nights in the drunk tank, too, even in the Rose, to know that they keep them separate, for gollies and for natt. This, too, he chooses not to dwell on. You can’t hold all these things together, not at once. He’s learned to stop trying.

The empty glass on the table has him restless. He can feel the ache at the back of his neck, the one that tells him he’d rather be getting drunker than sobering up.

He knows he ought to stop there, but he shouldn’t’ve started in the first place. It’s Clock’s Eve, for fuck’s sake; can’t a man have a drink on Clock’s Eve? It’s not as if he’d’ve escaped it, not tonight, not at his own party.

He looks out, toward where he remembers a table with dill-garnished canapes and more champagne. He swallows tightly, catching a spark of light off elaborately-braided blond hair. The bar is in the other direction, anyway, and not too crowded; he doesn’t want to chase brandy with champagne, after all.

Restless, he eases up from the wall, hands still clasped behind his back. Knowing all I do now, he remembers, and is reminded of the strength of her field. He smiles at her, again his narrow smile.

“Tough choice,” he says. “I remember – Tsabiyi had a whole chapter on a variety of sting spell he drafted as a young man. I’m not sure how much sense I made of it.” He raises his brows, turns, gestures slightly; he won’t insist, but he makes to start drifting down the long wall, past the windows. “Much of it was him reminiscing about dueling at Thul’amat.”

[Niccolette Ibutatu]

Late Evening, 40 Ophus, 2719
The Long Gallery, The Vauquelin House

There are stories one tells men, and stories one tells women, as a general rule. Like all rules, Niccolette does not shy from the breaking of it, if she has good reason, and Anatole’s story was reason enough. This rule, she thinks, is rooted in sense; this rule she has too often understood all too well in its breaking. She has made the mistake – with this story and others – of mixed company, more than once.

There is a moment, when Anatole’s brow knits together, that Niccolette supposes she has made a mistake. She finishes the story regardless, because nothing he can say will make her ashamed, not if she chooses not to be; and she does choose, all the time, not to be.

Niccolette smiles when he continues, slow and wide and bright. She shrugs, lightly, as if to say she, too, thinks they are fools.

Anatole comes off the wall, and gestures, taking a careful step and then another along the wall.

Niccolette thinks it over, although only briefly; she comes along beside him, champagne glass still in hand. Tsabiyi, Anatole says, and Niccolette glances sidelong at him. She remembers recommending Tsabiyi to him, several months ago; not for the chapters on dueling or sting spells, but for the descriptions of the experiments Tsabiyi did with an unnamed clairvoyant on sanguimancy. The clairvoyant – likely Utúla, of course, and Tsabiyi’s experiments very likely the cause of her lengthy research on monic reconciliation, although none of it is known, in a historical sense – was the caster, but Tsabiyi was the experimenter.

In, Niccolette thinks, idly, a variety of ways.

“Typical stuff,” The Bastian says with a little shrug. “Rather amateur, in truth. I have no doubt Tsabiyi was a formidable duelist, but it would have been his raw skill, and not his strategy, although perhaps he was sufficient for Thul’Amat. It is rather a boyish way of dueling, to fling pain at one another and hope one’s opponent succumbs. Inelegant, messy,” Niccolette pauses, and smiles, faintly and not kindly, “but admittedly satisfying, if it does work.”

They have drifted too close to the bar for Niccolette to ask any more. She takes another sip of her champagne; she has more than half left, still, and does not bother with another drink, leaving Anatole to his brandy.

Blood does something for a ward, Niccolette remembers, looking across the room at the slight man sitting in Uzoji’s chair. Anyone who says otherwise, he had said, lifting those slim red eyebrows, has never used blood in a ward.

She remembers more than that; she remembers the sadness and the sorrow of that trip to the island, and the stinging satisfaction of a very different kind of duel – one not fought with the childish insistence on rules and turns so favored at Brunnhold, nor with mere sting spells.

She waits, almost patient, as he refreshes his drink. She, perhaps, notices the trembling of his hand on the glass - it is hard not to, when the liquid jumps about so. They drift away once more, along one of the outer walls, to where quiet conversation shall not be so easily overhead.

“And the rest?” Niccolette asks, neutrally. She might be asking about his thoughts on the Rose once more, rather than sanguimancy. She does not force him to come to it first, this time. “What do you make of his theory that the blood of one’s body calls to the leylines, and heightens them?” She looks at him, gleaming in silver; she takes another sip of her champagne, nonchalant, as if the bright whirl of the party is not only a few feet away.

Tsabiyi is careful – in the book where he discusses dueling at Thul’Amat, at least – to speak directly only of one’s relation to their own blood. It is why, she thinks, this book was approved for publication by Thul’Amat, albeit with warnings, in what few printed editions remain to be found. She has heard that Drekkur rejected it, first; she supposes Tsabiyi thought Thul’Amat would be more sympathetic, with the clairvoyant implications. It is strictly legal, though hardly conventional.

[Tom Cooke]

The Long Gallery • The Vauquelin House

Late Evening on the 40th of Ophus, 2719

I
t’s curious, but he thinks he might understand what she means.

He’s been the target of pain spells. He remembers half a dozen nights curled like a silverfish on some bar or warehouse floor, when an unexpected gollymancer reared its red head – on the job and off. He supposes, now he thinks back, it’s the sort of spell you’d use on a big human you wanted out of the way.

Sting spells, not so much, but he’s seen them in action. He remembers once during a deal gone wrong – he doesn’t remember the kov’s name; some Hessean turned a King’s man – the rasp of then-alien monite, and then blooms of red weals crawling over the poor natt’s skin. More humiliating than lethal; a punishment, but one that would stick in the mind. An example, too.

That was the sort of thing he thought serious poetry did, before he saw Niccolette cast. Now, he thinks of the lawn, and of university bochi cutting their teeth on this shit.

He’s thinking of all this as they start to turn from the bar. She’s still there, silver-sharp, taking a sip of champagne; her calm, suppressed indectal never drifts too far from his.

A towhead of about Anatole’s age – assembly, something in his memory tells him – catches his eye and starts to smile; he shoots a sideways glance to Niccolette, and a few little lines mark his brow. They pass from the crowd untroubled.

And the rest?

He can see their shadows in each window they pass, drifting one to the next.

He smiles, still. He’s weighing his options – wondering what she’ll do, if he picks up one thread instead of another; wondering if this is as much a dare as an asking, and knowing, now, she knows what he thinks of dares. But this match he doesn’t have to light; she speaks again.

He doesn’t look at her, not right away, but one eyebrow lifts.

“I think Tsabiyi’s interest in the – physicality of the arcane,” he says carefully, after some thought, “is commendable. But – well, you said it yourself. Formidable, but blunt. He’s quick to… take it as a heightening.”

Quick to figure out how to use it, he might’ve said. To see the blood in service to the ley lines. He’s only read Red Like Blood, and not in its entirety; Tsabiyi’s tangents sometimes bore him, he’s ashamed to admit, and sometimes disturb him too much.

He’s heard tell of other works, in which Tsabiyi is less oblique about application. “He can say – confidently enough – the mona recognize a sorcerer’s blood, as well as his ley lines and his mind.” So can I, he doesn’t say. Can you? He wonders. “But how can we know what the relationship is? Where, indeed, are the ley lines?” he quotes. “One may as well find the soul in the body.”

Ada’na Utúla, that time. A familiar prickle of discomfort at the back of his neck. He resists the urge to look down at his hand, to spread the fingers and study the veins; he pushes down the cold fear that rises in his throat. All of this, he feels. Is it his?

One of his oldest ghosts, this. He looks out the window at a spray of color over the rooftops, past the strange face whose mouth moves with his words. “I don’t know if ada’xa Tsabiyi accounts for some of the – stranger – effects. When applied.”

The face still wears its customary thin smile, as if he hasn’t just lit another match.

“Perhaps,” he says nonchalantly, “you’ve read him more widely than I have.” The incumbent takes a drink of brandy, and past him, a silver satin dress sparks in the light.

[Niccolette Ibutatu]

Late Evening, 40 Ophus, 2719
The Long Gallery, The Vauquelin House

Imagine, Tsabiyi wrote, the blood of the body like Hulali’s waters flowing through the desert. We can see the little tributaries which branch off from the main lines, the channels through which our essential lifestuff flows. This was the vision I had as a student, long before I ever held a dissecter’s knife; this was the vision I had in my boyhood, the body stretched out before me like a map, all its rivers and steams laid out along the skin.

And imagine, Tsabiyi wrote, cupping your hands into Hulali’s waters and lifting up a precious palmful of the Turga. Is it any less His for having been disconnected? Why should it be so? This, too, I saw from a young age, although it was many years before I found the words to articulate it: once spilled, my blood was still mine.

Niccolette can see the page, if she pictures it; she can hold Tsabiyi’s words in her mind. She remembers all the rest, too; she could recite his stinging spell here, if she wished to do so. Formidable but blunt, Anatole says. Niccolette takes a little sip of champagne. It is Utúla he quotes, not Tsabiyi, and she smiles, somehow unsurprised.

The physicality of the arcane. Niccolette thinks idly of some of Tsabiyi’s other experiments, the ones not published in Red Like Blood. In later years, she supposes, he put these imaginings to the test; he searched for the connection between the blood, the ley lines and the mind, between living, clairvoyant and perceptive conversation. “I suppose Tsabiyi might have said that if the ley lines can be said to exist anywhere, they exist in the blood,” Niccolette says, thoughtful. “Androstoupolous, writing centuries earlier, describes the ley lines as that which exists between, the bindings of the world.”

Niccolette remembers reading those words as a girl, sitting cross-legged on her dorm room bed, bent over a book. She remembers the shape of them on the page; the sentence broke between two lines, the words bindings stretching out into the column on the far end of the page, and wrapping around to of the world on the beginning of the next. Years later she tracked down the source text, curiously; it was a disappointment, and she understood why they had offered only that quote, like a diamond plucked from a heap of coal.

Anatole picks his thread back up. The stranger effects, he says, when applied. This catches Niccolette’s attention more sharply; she turns more fully to face him now, reflexively, her eyebrows lifting lightly. She takes another little sip of champagne. “He wrote quite extensively,” the Bastian says lightly, musingly, not coming at the content of Anatole’s dare yet. It is a dare; she is pleased by it. It sparks in her – in her blood? In her leylines? She knows better than to think she understands.

Niccolette breathes in the air all around her, and breathes it back out. Something shivers faintly through her bright, suppressed field, some reaching out, or perhaps a reaching in.

“He builds himself a roadmap in Red Like Blood,” Niccolette says. “He writes of the results of early experiments in clairvoyance; he extends them outwards. He does not ask the reader to imagine, then, even what such experiments could mean in living and perceptive conversations, but the thoughts are there; I can rather imagine him writing, and rewriting, careful, believing that the so-inclined mind will stumble upon these implications.”

“Later, one understands, he follows these paths himself, more directly,” Niccolette murmurs. Dark in the Veins is Tsabiyi's infamous, controversial magnum opus, illegal and easier to find than Niccolette had expected. “If so for scrying, why not so for any plot?” She raises her eyebrows at Anatole. “Blood, therefore, must be as much the language of the mona as monite,” she quotes. “Does it not make sense to reach to them in their own language?”

“What would you ask him, if you could?” Niccolette asks. “Only if he learned more of these… stranger effects?”

[Tom Cooke]

The Long Gallery • The Vauquelin House

Late Evening on the 40th of Ophus, 2719

H
e thinks of ley lines in his blood. He thinks of them, physical and real, rather than the mystical soulstuff of some leymancists; they are, he knows, better than anybody save others of his kind. He thinks of the feeling of being lit from the inside that comes from casting, warmer and stranger than being drunk, as if the whole of him – rather than just his field – is etheric.

The thought tilts over; he finds some darkness in its folds. He remembers trying to read Tsabiyi in early Vortas, to prepare for Ezre’s prodigium. It had made his skin crawl, then. To think there was something inside him that hadn’t been there before; to think, as he’d thought many times before, that if he spoke to them, then they were speaking back, in small and secret and strange ways. That he’s different, now, for being a thread in this weave, that he isn’t as separate from these ley lines and this blood than he thinks.

Utula doesn’t reject Tsabiyi’s idea any more than she accepts it. He finds Utula, when his skin begins to crawl. He finds the place where he can bear to start over, and puts everything else aside, because Utula knew better than to seek it out.

“The bindings of the world,” he repeats, smiling faintly, looking up at the whirl of chandeliers. “Ley couverture. Yes.”

It’s hard not to grin at her reply. One understands, she says casually. It’s not a backing-down; it’s a flourish, he thinks. She’s taking her time lighting the match, as they wind their way down the hall, where distant dresses whirl in black and white.

He feels it through her field, like an inhale, or an exhale. He remembers feeling them stir around him as he went through the motions of Ezre’s meditation – the ache in his muscles, the feeling of oneness. He breathes, one, two, three, four, and takes the moment to feel his own mona, clairvoyant, soft and easy around him.

They move with him, and it’s not unpleasant; he just wonders if he moves with them.

He looks over at her when she looks at him. His face is carefully controlled, the bland, pleasant expression not having moved an inch. The so-inclined mind, he thinks, studying her.

A roadmap, he wants to argue, in more ways than one. If so for scrying, why not so for any plot? If so for one caster, then why not for Vita – Vita, with its own blood, with its own ley lines? Everyone, everything, connected? (If a vial of blood still belongs to its body, then does a soul still belong to its Cycle?)

At the question, he can’t help it. He does grin, brief, surprised and a little sheepish. He looks aside, again, at the narrow window they pass, and catches that grin in the mirrorlike dark.

He blinks and looks away, sucking at a tooth. “Ada’na Utula – hypothetically,” he says dryly, with a little frown. “Ada’na Utula would’ve, I believe, cautioned him against… overextension. Reaching out to the mona in their own language, as he says, with, say, a ward…”

He pauses, thinking over the wording. It’s strange – strangely exciting – to be speaking of such things in the middle of the long gallery, with the chatter and laughter and lights all around. He’s drunk enough for it to feel natural; he wonders if it’ll feel like a dream, when he’s not.

“It calls out to the caster’s ley lines, he’d say, appeases the mona, strengthens – lengthens – the ward. But it’s more important to Utula that the warder is connected to the warded. It’s not just the mona’s language, blood; it’s the caster’s.” Another drink; his consonants are softening at the edges, but his voice isn’t. “So I’d ask: what’s the caster giving of himself? Or herself.”

I’d ask him, he thinks, if my blood, if my ley lines, belong to my soul. I’d ask him just how long he thinks the mona’s memories are. He doesn’t imagine what Tsabiyi would do with a raen.

He glances across Niccolette, then, out over the floor; something – he can’t say what – some tension ripples through the party. His brow furrows, but he looks at Niccolette and smiles again.

[Niccolette Ibutatu]

Late Evening, 40 Ophus, 2719
The Long Gallery, The Vauquelin House

Niccolette nods, thoughtfully, at Anatole’s response. “Rather a clairvoyantist's perspective, is it not?” She asks, eyebrows raising. She feels the soft brush of his clairvoyant field – not so much around her as mingled with the bright, vibrant living mona of her own. It is not quite intimate – the fields are not so belike as to settle into one another easily, without will – but it is a deeper caprise than they’ve had before.

“I should say all living conversationalists know the balance of asking and giving,” Niccolette says. She takes another sip of her champagne; she does not glance around the party again, not directly, but she is aware of it all around them, the bright shimmering of the lights, the flashing of black and skirt skirts and jackets as revelers bend and bob in a dance, the quiet tinkling of laughter and glasses.

“Tsabiyi saw it another way, I think,” Niccolette says. “He understood himself as giving, I would say, when he thought of reaching out to the mona. He asked,” the Bastian pauses, and she thinks the word over. It is rare that she doubles back on herself like this, but she glances at Anatole, and arches an eyebrow, and makes a correction. “He demanded,” she says, with a little smile of her own, “that what he could offer should be able to be stronger – to lengthen, as it were.”

Niccolette knows the balance, herself. Unbidden, the fingers of her left hand lift and brush lightly over her upper lip, as if checking for blood; the ring gleams in the light. She has had nosebleeds from overcasting since she was a girl. The first she remembers with pride; she had chanted the syllables for a push spell, again and again, until she could roll the pen from one end of the table to another, and by the time she stopped her face was smeared with blood. It had quite upset her governess at the time, the last she had had before Brunnhold, and that, too, she had been proud of.

It takes more than that to make her bleed, now, and she has learned how to cast through it, the bitter coppery tang of blood on her lips.

Adrenaline spells are used to teach the balance of it; the energy, their instructors caution, must come from somewhere. There are all sorts of ways of doing it; one could pull the strength from themselves, or from the target of the spell. One could offer a quick burst and a quicker crash, or a long, slow burn which, in time, would exhaust the fuel of the target utterly, and plunge them into a deep recovery.

It is not so different in any combat situation – in any true duel, Niccolette thinks. The pacing of spells is rather often overlooked, when it comes to strategy. Most duelists wish to overwhelm their opponents entirely on the first turn. There are, naturally, advantages to this in a real fight, and they are ones Niccolette is well-aware of. But many duelists – whether playing at one another in clubs, fighting on the Lawn, or dueling over matters of honor – exhaust themselves too early in what is a contest of stamina as much as skill and strength, and crash, hard, and lose the duel themselves.

Niccolette catches her fingers on her lip, and lowers her hand with a little grimace. “His was as the dream of a child, in some ways,” Niccolette says, thoughtful, to the man next to her, who has rebuilt his proven from a shuddering ruin to a respectable field, to whom, once, she spoke of her own backlash, “to cast and cast and never fail. I suppose he thought blood could make it so.”

There is a sharp raised voice from the party; a woman shrieks, a glass shatters. Everything stops – something like silence ripples out from the center of it. Niccolette turns, tilting her head, curious.

“I challenge you!” furious and panting, it rings out over the suddenly slowing music, out through the bubble of silence, echoing amidst the chandeliers.

“A duel on Clock’s Eve,” Niccolette says, smiling. “Is it auspicious or inauspicious?” She takes another sip of her champagne.