[Closed] This Meeting Never Happened

[Tom Cooke]

Plamondon Hall • Uptown

Evening on the 31st of Dentis, 2719

H
e’s never merged fields with anybody. It’s like waking up for the first time in this body, all over again – a press of sensations from all angles, everything at once, except now, he can feel it; he can differentiate. It’s not, at first, anything but a cacophony of impressions, of colors he can hear and smells he can taste, of the mona’s will just out of sight, so heavy on his tongue it almost calls to mind a verse of monite. His hammering sober head feels as if it will explode.

Sensations translate themselves. His mind adjusts, as it did once; it makes itself alien to him once again. He didn’t have the space or the learning to wonder then how much of it’s his mind and how much of it’s – his, how much wiring got left over when he slid his way into the skull. He knows that he’s never felt this before; it’s like suddenly, and against your will, understanding a language you’ve never heard in your life. Only it’s not a language as men speak with their tongues, and he’s helpless to its tide.

He can taste blood in his mouth suddenly, or at least, that’s what the shift of Shrikeweed’s field is telling him; it’s a sort of redshift that tastes like blood. If it’s sigiled, it’s warm like a pounding heart. He can’t tell if it’s anger; it doesn’t feel like anger, not exactly. It feels like anger and wanting, all at once.

His eyes are shut, because he doesn’t think he can bear to open them and see the whiskered clerk across the table. There’s something almost painful about it, this redshift, but it’s not a bad sort of pain.

He wants, suddenly, to fill himself to the brim with it. He wants to swing his fists. He misses it. His own field is sigiled; he only knows this because he feels the heat in the air around him, and all the hairs on the backs of his arms prickling. He pushes back with a redshift of his own, tinged bitter black.

He wants to swing his old fists, with the strength – the inertia – that used to be behind them. He doesn’t know if he’s lost that inertia, if he’s regained it, if it was never strength in the first place. His field flexes, cracking white hot against Shrikeweed’s. He jerks his chin up, gritting his teeth, and realizes that his fist is tight on the table. He can still taste blood in his teeth, and he feels the wanting worse than anything he’s felt in a year.

Is this what you want? he wants to demand. Are you taunting me?

Shrikeweed’s anger is as organized and dry as his field, but it’s anger, and it’s pleasure, most horribly – familiarly – of all. He feels suddenly as if he is himself again, sitting scarred and crooked-toothed and crooked-nosed and human at the table. He opens his eyes and looks down at the hand on the table, and spreads its fingers against the dark wood, shaking.

His stomach lurches. The anger mixes with fear in his field; it all spills out into the mingling mona, static and clairvoyant, trapped-animal trapped-man-in–this. He breathes in sharply before he breathes himself indectal, counting four, and only then does he realize that he can hear the curl of a spell on Shrikeweed’s tongue, through the roaring in his ears.

What the hell did you cast? he wants to demand. He stays himself, because the civil servant speaks again.

If he can do anything, it is mimic; she has taught him this. She has made him this. He has made himself this. It is even easier when he is angry, and he is angry now.

He draws himself up like Prudhomme; his face twists into a fearful expression. “There simply aren’t the resources,” he says, “and we must move carefully; for the love of the Circle” – for the love of the Lady? He screws up his nose; he can’t remember, but he improvises – “I don’t care if Mr. Antonacchi has returned from the Harbor with bells upon his shoes, Verdier, you are playing with fire if you expect… if you expect to court both of these demons at once.”

Hawke, and – who? Hawke and the Order? Azmus? But if Trevisani has Azmus on a leash, then why? Who’s holding all the leashes?

Hold still a while, the Shrike says, and he does. He empties his mind. It isn’t Azmus, is all he has said, he knows. It may have been the High Judge’s idea this time, but it isn’t him at the end of the leash, not all the way down all the leashes.

You know the worst of it, he wants to laugh, suddenly. His peace of mind didn’t last long.

He stops, pressing his lips very thin. “Mr. Shrikeweed,” he says, “if I must drink with you, I – I will.” His lips twist. “Your hands are not bloody,” he breathes finally, spluttering, opening his eyes. He still feels the taste of blood on his tongue, and the rage and delight that are not his. “Who the hell are you?”

[Basil Ambrose Shrikeweed]

Vienda - In Plamondon Hall

The 31st of Dentis, Fifty-seven minutes past the twenty-third hour

A

nd now the words are forming. The Incumbent is speaking in the voices of other men. Imitating them. His vowels change, his cadence and prosody. Damn. The man should have been an actor. Who is to say he is not?

Prudhomme speaking now. Mouse-timid and closed off. A man of no character and less sense. The cadence is right, that at least he can tell. But the words? Not quite, though near the mark. Trepidation in the Incumbent’s voice, the kind a man has when giving a speech without notes. Rehearsed just enough to give the right sense, even if the words fall short. It is an oath that jostled the Incumbent’s flow. ‘For the love of the Circle.’ There are a dozen more similar expressions. A dozen empty pieties.

Still the trepidation remains, amplified by the man who is not here, by Prudhomme. He cannot allow so small a man to bring down this fragile tower of inquiry. More surety, more determination. A little more of the boxing match, and little more of the flow of broken resolution. Redshift and white hot. A fortification. For himself and for the Incumbent. Like wine. Like coffee.

Stock phrases, idioms, epithets. Useful, not for meaning but for the shape of the utterances. Tedious conversations queue up in his mind, dull grey clerks carrying dull grey words. Papers shuffling now, and each illusory functionary presents their cargo of words. ‘For the love of all the Circle’, the first document reads, ‘By all the Gods’, reads another. They are followed on, thick and and fast by ‘For the Love of the Lady’, ‘For the Lady’s sake’, and on and on. A catalogue of possibilities.

In turn he renders each into its array of numbers, its vectors and angles, and passes them through the machine of the still too much merged fields. The gears turn, the cogwheels tick off their measures. Can numbers be felt? How else to describe it? The susserations of the threes, the soft slithers of the nines, the great heavy silence of the zeros. He can feel the Incumbent’s field too, under all the clicks and hums, painting its own shapes. It is unlike any sensation he can name. Strange, uncomfortable, all redshift and slant. All proven and dashing. It is not the field of a man well-versed in magic. It is not the field expected of an Incumbent. An unsound field. And yet it all hangs together, stitched and cobbled and jury rigged as it is. As is the man.

A vibration now, and something in his mind winds up, a clockspring, ready to drive the mechanism. A turn, and the Incumbent is speaking again, passing by his hesitations. The mechanism measures, corrects, substitutes one word, one phrase for another.

SpoilerShow

1d6 = (6) = 6 (word embeddings and prediction via quantitative magic)

There is no surety in this, not guarantee of success. Yet the mechanism hums along, cogs turning one word into another, making connections and predictions he has not anticipated. There are words on the edge of this thoughts, and almost he can hear the voices of the conspirators. The Incumbent’s acting, no, his remembering, improves. Transforms.

A name waits on the edge of speaking. The construct of Prudhomme trying to usher it along. No name is forthcoming, but a sound, ‘H’. Perhaps it is nothing, perhaps it is merely the anticipation of the word ‘Harbor’. And that is a new entrant. ‘Antonacchi has returned from the Harbor’. What is the Harbor to these creatures of the Capitol? He had thought the matter closer to home, a local cabal. The Harbor changes things. There are more lines to follow. More chances for mistakes, theirs, and his own.

“Tell me about the Harbor. Tell me what Prudhomme and Verdier said about the two demons. Tell me what you said.” Two demons? The Harbor brings one at least to his mind. But what are these genteel traitors doing with the crosstraders and criminals? Resources? Agents? And free agents or tied to some syndicate or other?

Perhaps he can name one demon. The other escapes him. It escapes the Incumbent as well, he can see confusion on the man’s face. Confusion now a bright clear mirror of confusion then. There are clues here, scattered like crumbs over this table and many others. In the Paper Tiger, in the Pendulum Club, in private offices. And now, in the Harbor.

Antonacchi. The man will have to be found. He is about to ask, to press on with it all. And now it collapses. If but for a moment. The Incumbent is looking up at him, eyes red and full of rage. Rage Shrikeweed knows too well. He has seen it enough in the mirror. A man may wear many masks. He had not expected to see his own turned upon him.

Who the hell are you?

That is not the Incumbent’s question. It is his own, spat back at him, made clear in the words of the man still seated at the table. It is the right question. The question he should have been asking since Intas. ‘He’ and ‘I’. ‘I’ and ‘He’. The question he has been seeking. So simple. So simple he very nearly missed it. The man told him as much, has been telling it to him for months in that sly and cautious way of his. He might have well been screaming it. Shrikeweed has not known how to listen, not until tonight.

He hears it clearly now, howling in the passages of his thoughts, pounding in his ears. It has always been there. Of that at least he is sure. One small surety amidst so much that cannot be explained.

The rest will require delicacy. He has already pushed the Incumbent too far tonight. There are too many more questions. He could stand in this place and ask them until the end of time and he would not be satisfied. It wells up inside him, he can hear the whirring of gears and the hum of unwinding springs. He will push again.

No. Not now, not here, and not with this man. It is ‘He’ that is detestable. ‘I’ is something different. Both more fragile and more enduring. Still, it will not serve to break the man again.

SpoilerShow

1d6 = (4) = 4 (piecing things together, magic and mundane data)

What can unmake a man? What arises in its place? In the field-thrum there are answers, but they almost exceed his grasp. Some things he can glean, and it is little enough. ‘He’ and ‘I’ are two men. Two men who share the same face, the same position. The same mind? No. And yes. The mind is not divorced from the flesh, even he knows that. It arises, at least in part, from that tangled mass of folds and involutions within the skull. Something of ‘He’ must be left. Something of the man who entered into the conspiracy, who was happy to be a midwife to chaos. A man happy to have his strings pulled from some unknown quarter.

A man to be discovered, to be studied. He is not the man here now. Who the hell are you?

“I am, sir,” he says, voice ragged from magic, washed out with memories, “who I have always been. Nothing less. Though perhaps a bit more. We are all of us more than we seem.” He bites his lower lip, not hard, there is no pain. Merely a gesture of thinking. “What I sent to you, well, think of that as surety in two parts. As collateral. You recall that back eye? Well, that was a sliver of that fight, of the state of my mind before the blow landed.” It was the safest fight he knew. Merely an occasion for the purging of stress and loss of control. Other such bouts cannot be sent, no matter how cautious. Those are for him alone. “I lost that fight sir. I usually do. I am neither a large man, nor am I over strong. A six-foot dockhand without so much as the semblance of a neck has half a foot on me, and I cannot say how much more force. Still, I try the fight. I learn, sir, from my failures.” And that is the purpose, the meaning of it all. Well, at least of the part he can show. The pain, the narrowing of thought down to a single, white-hot line, the burning away of the dross of scattered threads of reason, the focus. The calm. Those are the other reasons. Reasons all his own. “I will not say I do not fear failure. That would be a useless lie. Still, I am not so proud as to think I cannot suffer it, or that the threat of it keeps me from acting. We may well fail, sir. And so we will learn, rise again, dust ourselves off, and try again. Fail again. And we will press on.” He slides into a chair, Prudhomme’s. For an instant he feels as though he should ask the pardon of the shade of that timid man. Does not. “That, sir, is who I am. A determined man. Will you say the same?”

[Tom Cooke]

Plamondon Hall • Uptown

Evening on the 31st of Dentis, 2719

T
ell me about the Harbor.

His headache pounds. His hands, which had relaxed on the table – for all their tremors – now clench again into fists; he tries to will his fingers uncurled again and he can’t. Mr. Shrikeweed says something else about Prudhomme and Verdier and demons. Which demons? Whose? Everything else is drowned by it, by the sharp tang of pleasure-rage that isn’t his but might’ve once been, and by that one statement: tell me about the Harbor.

“The Harbor has only one King,” he slurs, his voice raw; he cannot think, “but before, I… Once, I…”

The edge of his knife, shoved against a tender throat, biting in deep; the memory is dizzying. That was my job, he wants to say, to root out them that weren’t ours, to bring all I had to bear against his enemies. The Drain, he wants to say, the Drain, we thought it was the business of the ocean, then; we thought they were Mugrobi, or more likely Hessean, or even more likely some small-time crime family that didn’t like the way the Harbor had fallen under the King’s jurisdiction. That’s what we thought.

This isn’t the Drain, he wants to say. I’d be willing to bet on it – what? He saw Hawke at the table with the other men, in Intas; he’s never told the Shrike as much, and he’s not a clue if the clever clerk has guessed. The Drain has nothing to do with Vienda, he wants to say, nothing to do with these men or with Trevisani, or with any of them. This conspiracy is political; if anyone is pulling the strings, it’s…

Underneath the roaring of his blood, the still-whispering Monite, the etheric flex of quantitative mona in the air around them.

Everything that comes out of his mouth will be filed and compared and contrasted, he thinks. He’s always wondered what quantitative conversation could do – measure the size of a room, he told Ava a few days ago, as if that were the best thing he could think of. Now he thinks he knows what Mr. Shrikeweed is doing. It’s not just his words; it’s his emotions, every pulse or color-shift of his field, tied to the words to parse for significance. It’s not like a perceptive conversationalist, reaching into a man’s mind: everything Shrikeweed processes can be observed.

It’s sensitivity sharpened like a thorn. It’s every possibility for what the tiniest expression might mean, and he’s a bug under an eyeglass, or a fly caught in a web.

He doesn’t expect Mr. Shrikeweed to answer his question; he’s terrified to listen, for all that soft, even voice, with all its hidden rage, wraps him up in itself and pulls him along into saying things he hasn’t meant to say. His eyes open again, and he looks at Shrikeweed opposite him. He thinks the low wavering shadows of the lamps cast a shadow like a black eye. He is biting his lip; he wonders if he feels any pain from it.

It’s the thought of Shrikeweed flinging himself at some six-foot, neckless dockhand that breaks him, finally.

The ring, he’d said, and he’d thought he’d meant a ring full of gollies in fine little suits made for pugilism. Those aren’t rings in which natt dockhands fight.

He thinks of the last and only time he threw one of the Incumbent’s bony fists, in a dive bar in the Rose in Roalis, one of the last times he ever really felt like himself. No, he doesn’t think Mr. Shrikeweed much likes a barfight; it’s organized chaos that Mr. Shrikeweed likes, not the throwing down of cards and the flipping of tables and the throwing of unexpected fists.

But he still goes and pits himself against natt and tekaa and gods know, in the sorts of places he used to frequent.

Collateral. The bitter ache of it. Shrikeweed sits in the chair he’s assigned to Prudhomme, though he can now no longer remember which man sat in it.

Can he say the same? “I used to be,” he says. “I used to be strong.”

He knows he’s said too much; he’s dazed by it, and hasn’t a single inkling what the man will do with it. He has courted this strange bedfellow too closely. She’s right, he thinks, about all of it: this was too dangerous an undertaking to begin with. All of this was too godsdamn dangerous.

“I am not afraid of failure,” he says, looking up sharply, “but I can say no more of worth to us.” His lip twitches. It’s nowhere near a smile on his face, but it has some of the same shapes. “And what do you think? What do your – calibrations,” his lips twitch, “tell you, Mr. Shrikeweed?”

[Basil Ambrose Shrikeweed]

Vienda - In Plamondon Hall

The 31st of Dentis, Ten minutes past the twenty-fourth hour

B

efore.

More sighed than spoken. A hiss of a word, yet bright and gleaming and razor-sharp. Before. In all this he has not considered before. He has had no reason. He had thought that the past was known. That ‘He’ was before, and ‘I’ was after. It had been logical, reasonable, the simplest explanation that fit the facts. The facts he had at hand. There are more facts now, they form a pattern whose genesis he cannot see, whose arc he cannot quite make out.

A split mind? He has heard of such things. Of more than one mind dwelling within one skull, each perhaps unaware of the others. Two lifetimes ago, when he has been before the bar, he has prosecuted a man who claimed to be just such a one. A ruse, it turned out, to try and escape the noose. Ingenious though,to claim that while it was your body that committed the murders, it was not your mind. The doctors at the Sanitarium had studies the man and found him a fraud. They never denied the disorder was real. Are you one such, sir? Did ‘He’ make ‘I’ as a protection, as an escape? A little shard of humanity amidst the harsher realities of duty and privilege?

Hard treatment as a child, cruelty, deprivation, and more unspeakable depravities were the usual causes. Were you a tormented child, Incumbent? Did you escape into some other mind? A mind that was yours and yet not your own? A line of inquiry worth exploring. The doctors he had consulted all those years ago were likely still in practice. Perhaps they could shed some light on the case. It would need to be a careful affair, a hypothetical affair. He could not bring the Incumbent to that madhouse and subject him to tests and evaluations. An affront to his dignity. An insult. He cannot afford to offend this man, no now. He needs the Incumbent as much as the Incumbent needs Shrikeweed. Perhaps more.

“Before, sir? Were you assigned to the Harbor once? An overseer of some kind? A magisterial posting?” Nothing in the records indicated as such. The records of the Incumbent, of all the Incumbents it seems, are deplorable. Full of holes and little falsities. Records of the people they wish to be, not the beings which they are. No, that seems not quite right. There is something like shame on the man’s face. Shame and remembrance. “Or did you, did ‘He’ have to serve the Harbor’s King in some fashion? Bribes and the turning of blind eyes, to serve some necessary end?” He tries to put on a sympathetic face, is not sure he manages that. It is not a mask he wears well. “I cannot promise that at least some part of me will not judge you for whatever you had to do. I can, however, do my level best to let the past be nothing but prologue. Data to be tabulated and stored away. Scandals are a tally a dozen, and we all have to do unpleasant things for the greater good.”

There is tension in the man’s thin face, new tension. Expectation. A quiver of the lips, as though he means to say something, wants to say something. The Incumbent is silent. The fields are silent. He has nothing like the data to draw words out from mere supposition and expression. Yet he can sense the shape of utterances unspoken, feel their emptiness in the air. There are words, expressions, fragments. So he tries to fit them into that waiting silence.

SpoilerShow

1d6 = (3) = 3 (quantitative n-gram embeddings and predictions)

”but before, I . . . Once , I . . .” what comes next? The words slide into place, probabilities arise, and he can feel the ripple of the numbers along his skin, values picked out in the shuddering of his flesh, the particular raising of the hairs on the back of his neck.

• Once, I [crossed the king] - Prediction 0.431, possible but unlikely
• Once, I [had to do Hawke’s dirty-work] - Prediction 0.722, more likely, still no certainty
• Once, I [worked for him] - Prediction 0.762, possible again, but still too much uncertainty

. . .

He trys other combinations, slotting them in place. Values ebb and flow, yet still nothing sings in his ears. He can feel the back of his eyes now, a dull but growing pain. The magic cannot last much longer. He will have to let it go, let it melt away. Tick by tick the machine winds down, the gears cease their turning, and the tabulating engines fall silent. There is only the room now. The room and two men and silence.

It breaks now. The Incumbent finishes his statement, fills the vacant spaces. He used to be strong? A truth, but even without the great machine and its turns, he can sense this is a substitution, an evasion. He has no energy to pursue it, not tonight. The pain behind his eyes grows. He knows the sensation. Tomorrow will be a misery. All he will desire is to lie still and quiet in the cool dark of his rooms, eating nothing and drinking only water, ice cold. His stomach will churn and his head will throb. A useless husk of a man.

At last he collapses in his chair, leaning now upon the table, head in his hands. “It will take some time for me to make full sense of the matter, sir. Still, there are matters here beyond this little conspiracy. You know that. I know that now. I think you are all puppets, meant to dance on strings pulled from altogether unexpected quarters. I grow convinced that this is why nothing has come of the Dorehaven bombing. It was meant as a distraction, and as a trap. You and yours have taken the bait, and already it the trap has snapped shut.” What he will say next is deadly, to himself most of all. A thorn on which he might be impaled and torn apart. “Someone will come you sir, or to some of you at any rate. Of that I am reasonably sure. They will make demands of you, demands you cannot but fulfill. You will have become useful. You will have abdicated your will.” He bites his lip, hard and long. “I am not that man sir. Though perhaps I have been made out to appear so. Perhaps that is something to our advantage.”

He lowers his head still more, pressing his temples until he can see the phantom stars in his eyes. “That is all I can see now sir.” A lie of omission. It is a night for such things. It is the immemorial custom between them. Eyes closed and blinded with the colorless flashes of his mounting headache he speak low and soft and slow. “I cannot go on. Not tonight. We are the both of us spent. I thank you for agreeing to this. I cannot have been pleasant or easy. Yet I think I have enough to compose something like the minutes to all these conversations that did not happen. I will correct that error. But not tonight. And not tomorrow. With your permission sir, I believe I will require a few days off. There is a great deal for us both to consider.”

[Tom Cooke]

Plamondon Hall • Uptown

Evening on the 31st of Dentis, 2719

A
magisterial posting!

Flooding fuck. He barely stifles it – it’s somewhere between a snort and a sneer, and ends with his lips twisting and his eyes staring down at the table. A magisterial posting, he thinks, drawing in breath, letting out breath, easing himself into the idea.

What he’s let slip wasn’t wise, but he doesn’t dislike where the Shrike has gone with it; he’s found a thorn, as shrikes do. He knows there’ll be no record of it, since – to his knowledge – Anatole may well have never set foot in the Harbor. He suspects Shrikeweed knows this, too, but he’s a man acquainted with records and their gaps; he meets the bureaucrat’s colorless eyes and thinks.

Wheeling and dealing would be more likely for such a man as the Incumbent. He lets the story begin to weave itself together in his mind. For all he’s rattled, he can think more clearly now. Votes, money – there are many ways such a man could serve the King. A helpless laugh threatens to bubble up at I cannot promise, but he manages to stifle it, this time, and his lip only twitches.

‘He’, Shrikeweed says, and he knows he doesn’t have to think of it yet. A posting, ging, dirty work in the Council. It doesn’t matter right now; whatever it is, he’ll think of it, and he’ll hope to the gods it doesn’t contradict any one of the other lies he’s piled high, like pulling out jackstraws. He thinks wistfully of Ava’s advice, and he thinks of the study doors shut tight.

He can handle himself, he tells himself. If she’s taught him anything, it’s that everything can be turned; everything can be drawn out and spun, spun and woven into cloth. He’ll weave this.

The Shrike is still weaving something of his own. The white-hot anger is gone, replaced by the airy swell of an etheric field. More monite; more – nothing. He swallows tightly, waiting in the silence as the mona settle. Shrikeweed’s field shivers and shifts, rustles like old paper, and he can taste a color almost without color, the color of papers and files and pages and ink in no particular light. He yields to it. Let him extrapolate with what he has, he thinks; it can’t come close to the truth.

When Shrikeweed speaks, he opens his eyes. He sees a head sunk in a pair of hands across the table from him, auburn hair poking through fingers, skin slack and pale and ghoulish in the lamplight. He listens, frowns, blinks, eyes widening only slightly.

His lip twitches again. “I believe you, now,” he admits, creaking back in his own seat, “at least.” It’s nowhere near an apology. “And I do believe you’re right about that. As usual. I’ve been waiting for the jaws to clamp for months; I suspect all we’ve to do is keep waiting.”

His own voice is hoarse, hollow. He looks at Mr. Shrikeweed and wonders, for the first time, that this casting’s taken a toll on him. He’s never thought of the quantitative conversation this way, as a thing that taxes and strains.

He smiles faintly, though, looking away. “Lies in lies. Maybe there’s something to that, Mr. Shrikeweed. They’re interested in you, at least – Megiro and his ilk – maybe they think you’re that man. Maybe we can encourage that.”

Masks, he doesn’t say, on masks. He thinks of Ava on his arm in Roalis, of that hideous puppet show. They’ve one of their own ahead of them, now, him and Mr. Shrikeweed, and still neither of them can see each others’ cards. He hasn’t seen all of Ava’s, either. He has a creeping sense of unease; there’s a glue that holds all of them together, and he’s afraid if one drowns, they all do. Unless one of them drowns the others.

Right now, Shrikeweed looks a tired man. Slowly, he rises to his own feet; he takes a deep breath, leaning heavily on the desk. The civil servant’s sunk even further. There’s a weariness even in his field, even in the etheric tang in the air. “I daresay you can take the week off, Mr. Shrikeweed,” he says. He pauses. “For what it’s worth, I’m grateful.”

The minutes. More gaps filled. Let him extrapolate, he thinks again; let him fill the minutes with his extrapolation.

He wasn’t lying. He needs him, for all he fears him; he prefers the frying-pan to the open flame. He weaves his way round the table, hollow-eyed but steady on his feet. When he reaches Prudhomme’s chair – Mr. Shrikeweed’s, now – he pauses, and extends a hand, bracing his other on the desk. He will hold sturdy; he has no choice.

[Basil Ambrose Shrikeweed]

Vienda - In Plamondon Hall


The 31st of Dentis, Thirteen minutes past the twenty-fourth hour

H

is head is full of words. Words and their ghosts. They cling about like cobwebs, like a shroud. There is nothing left in him. Nothing save the clawing hunger for more data. Blood burning in his veins, roaring in his ears, clamoring for more, more, more. He has nothing left, his force is spent and worn thin. Yet still the chorus is there, wanting, reaching, grasping. There is much he could gather, devour. The Incumbent still holds too much back. There are too many secrets, even now. Now, at least, he can see the shape of them, glimpses of possibilities. Things to be processed and checked, outside data to be verified.

To what end? What does he hope to accomplish? Satisfying that perpetual hunger, giving it a surfeit of information so that it might, at last, go silent? A selfish desire. And that is part of it. He has been presented with an enigma. Enigmas must be worked out, unraveled. That is their purpose. That is necessary. It is not sufficient. Some part of the Incumbent’s fear has soaked into him. He shares it now, but cannot name all its causes. Unsettling. Intolerable.

And then there are the conspirators. Gods above and ghosts abroad, he needs to see them brought down, crushed by the laws and customs they think they are protecting. That will take time. Time and evidence. And still the man before him is his best source. You know more than you want to say, he thinks. Yet you hold is close, almost to smother it. Is it pride? Fear? It may be all of these things.

Only now does he realize what he is, what he is becoming. Counsel. In all senses of the word. His credentials before the bar are still valid, his membership in the Inns of Court still in good standing. When did he start acting at the Incumbent’s defender? The man has become his client. Counsel needs to know everything. Every piece of evidence, every recollection, every scandal and incrimination. But the Incumbent is not his client, and he is no longer a lawyer. There are other ways of offering protection. Protocols for even the darkest of courses.

“You will keep me informed, sir, of any private guests you entertain from unusual quarters. I will keep you apprised of the same on the official schedule. We must be cautious, but open. Whoever it is that will come for you, for each of you, cannot be easily turned aside.” And from what quarter will the requests come? Unknowable as of yet.

But they will come.

The Incumbent and all the others are dancing on the end of too many strings. Some have been cut now, and the ends are in Shrikeweed’s hands. He dare not pull them. Not yet. That will come in time.

For now, he has new names, new words, and new places to explore. Antonacchi, Verdier, Prudhoome. The King. Each will be followed up in turn. Can he save the King for last? No. The matter of the Harbor seems too central, too close to the secrets the Incumbent is keeping. Will he have to leave the city, his city? It has been seventeen years since he set foot outside Vienda. He had hoped to never leave again. This is his place, where he belongs. He can feel the soul of the place on the wind and in the stones of the streets. They are his and he is theirs.

Can he send Sneed in his stead? The wick boy would attract far less attention in that place. He could slip in and around the King’s men, barely raising even the most sensitive of alarms. It may be possible. He fears it is not. Leave Vienda. He shudders at the thought.

Unsteady now he rises, grips the Incumbent’s outstretched hand, a friendly gesture, and gains his footing. “I have peaked their interest, yes. And they have mine. I shall make myself more available. I shall be seen in all the right places. Perhaps they will try and draw me in. It is worth a try.” He tries again to smile, but feels instead a grimace. “Good night sir. I will see you in a week. If you have need of me, I shall be at my Club.” He can see the place now, see the faces of the men he must cultivate, and which must cultivate him. And what evil will they have him commit to buy his cooperation? What does it matter? He can bear a little evil upon himself. He has his shell, he can risk the scorpion.