[Closed] This Meeting Never Happened

[Tom Cooke]

Stainthorpe Hall • Uptown

Evening on the 31st of Dentis, 2719

A
nd a good evening to you as well, Alexander,” he says, keeping his face as smooth and indectal as his field, no matter how vividly he’d like to be cursing through his teeth. He smiles, pleasant and warm – conspiratorial, even – as he clasps Incumbent Burbridge’s shoulder and guides him toward the door.

Burbridge is shaking his head, making faces like a dog that’s just got a taste of something it doesn’t much like. “But I say,” he repeats, pulling at his mustache, “I say – it simply is not right.” He blinks down at Incumbent Vauquelin through his thick glasses.

He breathes in deep, putters a sigh. “It will be what it will be.” He shrugs. “What else can it be?”

“What else, indeed.” Burbridge pauses.

His hand’s slipped the elderly incumbent’s shoulder, and his other’s found the doorknob; he strains at the end of the leash, hoping he won’t have to shove the man out with both hands.

He’s already learned that I really must be going doesn’t do the trick. I wouldn’t keep you from Diana, the dagka will say, then he’ll pause, as if he’s just discovered some more mortar to brick you in with. How is that lovely wife of yours, Anatole? He’ll ask, plucking delightedly at his goatee.

Or maybe he stops there, a faintly guilty look twitching in his hoary whiskers, and you’ve nothing but to say – oh, no, Alexander, it’s a pleasure; it’s so rare we get the chance to catch up. And instead of placation, it is invitation, and the flood gates open up.

Either way, his feet will be like roots in the carpet of your office, and somehow you’ll find yourself pouring more twemlaugh, like he’s holding a gun to your head.

There are no guns tonight, and no riffs, neither. Tom Cooke is not in the best of moods, and as the sun’s slinking below the rooftops, his work’s only begun.

There is a door just down the hall, in the shadow of a crook in the wall, bolstered with more locks than a bank vault. Tom knows what’s behind it; it’s lingered in the back of his mind like a pulse since two nights ago, since the afternoon when Ava Weaver took her case and he shut the study door behind her.

It’s been a busy work day, perhaps fortuitously, where suspicions’re concerned. He hasn’t seen Mr. Shrikeweed since that snowy dream of a couple nights ago; he hears it still, those two words on the Shrike’s tongue, and more. His red-rimmed eyes, the turning of the wine in the glass.

Plamondon Hall. Fifteen minutes after the twenty-third hour. The Shrike, always a meticulous timekeeper. He glances at the clock over the desk – thirteen – then back at Incumbent Burbridge’s plump, innocent smile.

“Indeed.,” He lets a little sharpness seep into his expression; the older Incumbent’s mouth wobbles into a frown, and his brow is deeply lined. “Forgive me, Alexander, but I have some work to do, and I really must—”

Burbridge makes a little noise. “You work much too hard, Anatole!”

Tom’s opening the door, now, stepping to the side. “It will be what it will be, I’m afraid,” he says, not bothering to soften his tone. Burbridge finds himself floated out the door, and his lips are now a puckered frown.

“Well – if you say so – I say—”

“The burden of our kind, I’m afraid. Good evening, Alexander,” he says firmly.

“G-Good evening, Anatole.”

The door shuts.

He stands there, breathing, eyes shut. If he tries hard, he can imagine the clock ticking. He opens them. Fourteen –

He opens the door again, when he can’t hear the dagka’s boots creaking anymore. He steps out into the dimly-lit entryway, to the nook where their kofi is now made by one of the Elephant’s lasses; he breathes in the lingering scents. Behind him, the clock strikes the quarter hour, a little snippet of a melody. It echoes ghostly through the empty offices, quiet against the dusty wood and the drawn blinds and the night-dark glass, and dies before it’s barely begun.

He then looks to Mr. Shrikeweed’s door.

[Basil Ambrose Shrikeweed]

Vienda - In Stainthorpe Hall
The 31st of Dentis, Nine Minutes to Fifteen Minutes past the twenty-third hour

E

ven the clocks have fallen silent. All sound has ceased save for the scratching of a too-sharp pen upon paper. In thin, precise lines and careful whorls, the pen travels; words occurring in its wake. Their shape is precise, practiced, perhaps elegant, but the words themselves are unlovely things. Treason is an unlovely thing. He looks at the names of men and one woman, enumerates their titles and honors. The weight of them threatens to consume the page, drag all the ink downward into some bottomless pit. Treason. And who is it that could be named traitor? In his bones and in the blood that flows through his veins, his own private ink, it must be those named upon the page. Look at them again Shrikeweed. The High Judge presides over that list, a court of his creatures. Can such a man commit treason? He looks at the names, tallies them, tries to make sense of them. They make all too much sense. Can they truly commit treason? Can he? Yes, and no.

It is required of him, a necessary chaos, a necessary evil. Now is not the time for virtue. Virtuous men are praised for their noble failures, for their lost causes. History is littered with the too-early graves of the virtuous. So he will discard virtue, it is a luxury, one he cannot afford. What virtue he had, he has committed to paper and to ink. Signed and sealed in memos and legal documents that no one will bother to read. He has committed them to his attorney, to his protege, and to the man who lived a quiet life behind an indigo door with its bright new locks. To the man he once was.

His door is wine-dark now, its locks new but less bright. In Stainthorpe Hall nothing seems so bright, so clear. Not even the names he is setting down for all time in memoranda.

The Black Protocols demand cyphers and key words. He has tried them, constructed layers upon layers of nested keys, poured his mind and his magic into each. He is unsatisfied. He should not be. The cyphers are sound. He is no longer sure if the man who makes them, if Basil Ambrose Shrikeweed, remains so.

The Incumbent is not sound.

The words follow him, shape his actions and his council. What good has it done? Nothing is sound. Not any longer. The word has become meaningless. Perhaps it was always so.

He sets down his pen. The names, all the names he has, have been set down. What crimes he can ascribe to them have been recorded. No, not quite. There is one name still to record. He sets it down.


Basil Ambrose Shrikeweed - Conspiracy Against the State, accomplice after the fact. Criminal Ignorance. Abuse of Office. Dereliction of Duty.

It is a strange thing, to be damned by his own hand. Strangely, it is a relief. The man he was before, the man he wishes he still was, condemning the man he is becoming. The man he needs to become.

The coffee in his cup has gone untouched, grown cold. He will leave it, let it congeal. He needs no coffee this evening. His mind, his field, will be stretched to their limits, spun up like some difference engine, ready to provide answers to tear itself to pieces. He takes slow, deep breaths, easing himself into the state of mind he needs. He draws his field in close, feels it slither against his skin, hears the dry and papery rustle, the metallic clicks, to which he has grown accustomed. The fell and the sounds of his magic, of his mind, his desires, pouring out from him and into the world. Pouring out to be made manifest in the mona. Yet it is still him, amplified and folded in upon himself. A mind in echo of his own. He will need it tonight, he will have to let it expand beyond its usual close slither.

He will have to let another man enter into that field. Let another man feel the shape of his thoughts.

Out in the corridor he can hear the Incumbent detaching himself from Burbridge. A sound to break the silence of his office. He checks his watch. Fourteen minutes past the twenty-third hour. It is time.
And so he rises. He has no mirror here, no place to check his public mask. He needs a rather different mask this evening. Unformed, nascent, a face he does not quite know. There is no point in composing it. What is there to compose?

On his desk lie pens and paper and vials of ink. All to the ready, to be rolled up in a length of oxblood leather. A butcher has his knives. A butcherbird has his pens. He claims them now, slips them into his satchel, and turns the handle of his office door. Clockwise, anti-clockwise, and clockwise again. A predictable gesture. A necessary gesture.

The Incumbent, standing alone now, face still pale and wan. He is not the only one to feel the gravity of the evening.

“Well sir,” he checks his watch. Fifteen minutes past the twenty-third hour. “It is time.”

[Tom Cooke]

Stainthorpe Hall • Uptown

Evening on the 31st of Dentis, 2719

T
ime indeed,” he replies, frowning.

He doesn’t know what he can make of Mr. Shrikeweed’s face in the half-light of those lamps still lit. He wasn’t sure who it was he expected to come through that dark blue door with all its locks; not, he thinks now, the man who stands before him, satchel on his arm, securing the door behind him. He studies him, catches the glint of the whites of his eyes in the dark.

Nor can he be sure what Mr. Shrikeweed sees when he looks at him. Unsound, he remembers from that night at the Elephant. A feeble-minded old parliament pigeon with secrets he can’t handle? Him, or I? Monstrous, he remembers, a word that’s thundered through his head as if it were his own pulse. He heard it at the Elephant; he heard it the following afternoon, in the study. He heard it at the conference this morning, sipping his kofi in a room full of liars, and he heard it with Burbridge.

Other men’s eyes are mirrors, he heard once; he’s afraid he may have to give up the practice of looking in the mirror. He thought he knew what he saw in her eyes, once – and he doesn’t know, now, what she sees.

The brush of Shrikweed’s dry indectal field brings Tom back to himself.

Setting it all aside for now, he moves across the creaky floorboards to snuff out the remaining oil lamps. The flickering flames die in their glass bulbs, like trapped ghosts set free; he takes mercy on the last of them, over by Mr. Cardinal’s desk, and then finds the coatrack in the dark. Strange, how familiar this place has become.

The incumbent’s long dark coat is round his shoulders, then. “Let’s hope my memory has served us right, Mr. Shrikeweed,” he says softly, shaky hands fumbling with the last of his coat buttons. “It’s 318C in Plamondon Hall that’s reserved for the incumbent, eh?”

They’re shuffled out into the narrow hall, then, the faint smell of kofi petering out behind them. It’s a damn sight warmer in hulking old Stainthorpe than it is outside, but you can still feel the chill in your fingers and your toes; he’s been shivering at his desk all day, and he buries his hands deep in his pockets now as they make their way to the staircase. Or maybe, he thinks wryly, it’s just his conscience.

It’s not so late that there aren’t still secretaries moving about the courtyard, dignified-looking gentlemen peering at their stopwatches as they clatter down the steps and into the Vienda mists, in search of carriages.

His own satchel is slung round his shoulder, and he carries a folio tucked under his arm. In the satchel he’s tucked a few extra books that morning – a dusty old quantitative grimoire he’s found among Anatole’s things, and two of his own clairvoyant books. He remembers the tightness in his throat as he took them from the shelf; he wishes he could say he has done more research, more meditation and preparation, for this, but he could not quite bring himself to it.

Plamondon Hall is just across the courtyard from Stainthorpe. It’s a short walk along cobbles scattered with curling dry leaves, winding round shrubs and dead grass still piled with snow. There’s still color in the sky, draining into the west; the equinox is still some months distant, and it is not so late. The acid-bitten statue of Low Judge Bonheur still stands proud on its plinth in the center of the quadrangle, gathering its robes about it, the folds of which are limned with frost.

The building itself, looming up ahead, is not unlike Stainthorpe, though it is in the process of being renovated. The east wing is still a mess of wooden frameworks, bundled-up natt climbing on the planks, calling to each other and hammering. Benny timing for concentration, Tom thinks, raising an eyebrow. He doesn’t remember it; rubbish like this seems to get put up overnight, and always when you need it the least.

He takes care for ice on the stones; from the window of his office today, he’s watched at least two functionaries slip and fall on their erses out here.

If one of them falls, he thinks, both of them fall. For now. He remembers Drezda’s words again in the summer; a friend is someone who knows enough about you to destroy you.

“Mr. Shrikeweed,” he says quietly, cheerfully enough, despite his pinched look. “More and more of late, I find myself thinking of that old story – the one about the scorpion and the frog. D’you know it?”

[Basil Ambrose Shrikeweed]

Vienda - In Plamondon Hall
The 31st of Dentis, Twenty-one minutes past the twenty-third hour

H

ow many times has he crossed this square, felt its cobbles under his feet? He has never bothered to count. Not quite every day since the sixth of Intas, only most. A familiar place, with its always-shabby plantings and benignly neglected statue to a magistrate more remembered for casting shadows on passers-by than for his legal career. It seems a proper place for a night in Dentis, an autumnal place even in the riot of spring or the height of summer. A place of fadings and inevitabilities. How many more times will he cross it? Perhaps a thousand. Perhaps only a handful more.

In his office, in the confidential safe, he has collected all his notes, all his cyphers. Ledgers upon ledgers, all cross-referenced and annotated. The days-books of the last year. Now, a hasty, half-mad jumble of notes follows. The opera, the conversation at the Elephant, the last few days made real, made raw, in unedited ink.. It is not neat, it is not tidy. He had had no time. Later, he will make time to find some sense in that erratic stack of notes. And next to them, in a pale grey envelope the color of a faded winter sky he has placed his final instructions. His revised will and all the procedures needed to either carry on this matter in secret or leak it all for publication in half-a-dozen papers and periodicals. He has all the connections he needs in such places. A benefit of having a journalist for a mother. For all the times he ‘could not possibly comment’ he has left behind reams of commentary. A belated offering.

The instructions are specific. He had planned out a number of scenarios, tried to foresee the myriad-fold ways that he might come to an early end. He does not wish to die, to be thrown off some bridge into the Arova by bloody-minded men. He does not relish to wear one final hempen cravat before being made to dance a last jig. He has never been a great dancer, has never seen the point. Not until now.

A faint breeze swirls around their feet, tugs at the hems of coats and the fringes of scarves. The cold air and dry leaves, the fading light and the sounds of traffic and people, the field of the city in the twilight of the year. The breeze still tugs at his scarf. He feels it all too keenly about his neck. What magics is the city working tonight? What small sorcery is this that is tugging at him? A warning? A cruel jest? Perhaps it is nothing at all. Not for the first time he unfurls the ragged edges of his own field, trying to skim along the great field that must be there, the will and soul of the city. It gives no answers. The city has its own Black Protocols.

The Incumbent, all wrapped in dark wool, is too cold and too frail-seeming for so short a walk. Will he be able to endure what is to come? It is not easy magic, and no easy thing to be made to recall things you had thought forgotten. He is thankful his scarf and his hat obscure his expression somewhat. It would not do for the Incumbent to see him so concerned. “Memory is a strange thing, sir. It is not like a stenographer’s notes or an image in a scrying stone. It comes in jumbles and in waves, all out of order. It will take some time to put your recollections into order. But it can be done. I cannot promise it will be easy, quick, or at all pleasant. But then nothing worthwhile can be all of these things at once.” And many worthwile things are none of them at all.

Plamondon Hall and the steps frosting over. Bits of debris from the workmen on the easy wing scattered about. Fragments of stone cladding, drips of mortar, scraps of newsprint in which the workmen have wrapped their dinners. The ordinary detritus of an ordinary scene. There is comfort in that. Real comfort. Would that everything were as ordinary, as predictable. Who is to say that is not so? Is it so strange for the powerful and the arrogant to plot in secret to further their own ends? It is as common as the workmen above, and inevitable as the stars in their courses.

He can see no stars overhead, the phosphor lamps are too bright, the clouds too high and dense. It does not matter. He knows they are there. Uncaring, remote. Bright sentinels of the great truth that nothing here below truly matters. Whatever happens in Plamondon Hall this night, whatever comes of it, it will affect the stars not at all. To perdition with the stars.

The Incumbent has said something. Scorpions? Frogs? For a moment confusion reigns, then resolves. “I believe I follow you, sir, with the tale. Perhaps we will all go down together, to drown in the Arova for all our striving. In such a telling, I fear we are the frog. Still, at least we know the sting will come, and can ensure the scorpion drowns.” It is not the version of the tale he knows, but the shape of it is clear enough. “However, we might do well to consider the tale of the Scorpion and the Turtle. In that telling, the scorpion tries to sting the turtle, but the turtle’s shell protects it from the venom. That was the story I learned sir.” He pats his satchel. “Here, I think, is our shell. Let us hope it proves to be enough to cross the river, and show everyone the wickedness of scorpions.”

A feeble hope and a dangerous one. Better to leave hope aside. There is work to be done. Work is far more solid than hope.

Past the door now, and into the warm fug of another Hall. It is already too hot for coat and hat and scarf. He doffs his woolen noose first, breaths all the clearer. The hat and coat soon follow. He will not hand them to the functionary in the entrance hall. He wishes to leave as little of himself in this place. He is here only to observe. It will require the lightest of touches. He cannot afford to change too much of the Incumbent’s memory by his own presence.

Three flights of stairs, a wrong turn in a narrow corridor, a correction, and the door is before them. He hesitates. Thinks it nerves for a moment. Realizes it is fear. He bites the inner side of his lower lip. Not hard enough to draw blood, but the pain is sharp and clear. He hope it will be enough. A breath, and he reaches for the door-handle. He turns it, clockwise. He stops. The other turns will not help now. They will be a hindrance. He bites still harder, this time tasting iron and copper. His hand is still, unmoving. Gods he wants to make the other turns. They fail to occur, and he pushes the door open.

A plain enough room, comfortable and unremarkable, dominated by a great table and chairs. “Sir,” he says, trying to keep his voice level, “please, take your seat. The seat you took before.” He looks around the table, at the empty chairs. In a moment they will no longer be empty. Hand still unsteady, still crying out to complete the necessary gesture , he lays it upon the back of a chair. “Who was it that sat here?” He touches another chair, then another. “And here. And here. Take your time sir. There is no rush. Think of it as an opera. Set the scene. Name the players.”

[Tom Cooke]

Stainthorpe Hall • Uptown

Evening on the 31st of Dentis, 2719

I
t comes in jumbles and waves, all out of order.

They’re in the icy shadow of Plamondon then, and a chill takes him, but it’s not one of the cold. He wonders, then – the what ifs fill his mind, though he has tried to hold them back, like through cracks in dam, like through cracks between your fingers. He hasn’t quite allowed himself to think it, not since the afternoon he can’t think about, the gasp he’s afraid to account for. He names it: what if I, he thinks, am him?

He lets it settle into his bones, cold and aching. The wind picks up, stirs round their hems; it tosses a snatch of a voice in their direction, snaps it away just as quick.

We, he thinks then, are the frog?

Down the entry corridor of Plamondon Hall, he thinks about it. Shrikeweed doesn’t give the porter his coat; he thinks he understands, from the other caster’s brief explanation, why. To that same end, he sheds his own coat and hands it off, remembering the motion from months ago. It comes easy, though he’s only been in Plamondon once or twice since then.

These halls are familiar in the way that a place once-visited always is. He couldn’t find his way in it, if his life depended on it. But he recognizes the contours; he recognizes the smells, the slivers of offices half-glimpsed passing doors ajar, the pressure of the air around them and the muffle of their voices in the space, slightly different from Stainthorpe.

This place, he remembers thinking, is like Stainthorpe’s brother. Stainthorpe Hall has dozens of brothers and sisters scattered about Ro Hill. It’s the sort of place he’d never’ve been in, in life. Now, he knows them by the warmth in the air, close dark walls, the creak of the boards under the carpeting under his expensive shoes.

We’re neither the frog nor the turtle, he wants to protest. I’m the swimmer and you’re the scorpion; either that, or you’re the scorpion and I’m the swimmer. Where is your shell, Mr. Shrikeweed? Where is mine? Where is – hers?

Or maybe, he thinks sourly, we’re all scorpions. Uptown’s full of scorpions stinging their frogs and drowning themselves. Your nature means you sting whether you mean to or not. He doesn’t know whether or not he’d prefer a ride with a shell; it depends on whether you want to get to the other side of the river, or drown the frog. You can’t do both.

Instead, he asks, half-wry, “Is that a Mugrobi variant? I’m afraid I’ve never heard it.”

They get lost once; it’s not heartening. He searches for Shrikeweed’s expression in his half-lit profile, but he can’t make anything out. He wonders if he’s the only one having second thoughts about this vodundun.

But they make it to the conference room, finally. He watches Mr. Shrikeweed lay a hand on the knob, the hand that’s not holding his bundled coat and scarf and hat. He watches, out of the corner of his eye – waits. He thinks there might be a breath of a pause, between the reaching and the turn. Between the turn and the click.

Whatever he’s waiting for Shrikeweed to do, it doesn’t happen.

The room he recognizes, but he’s been in many conference rooms, this last year. The long table, the chairs. He breathes in deep, looks at the two small, high-set windows, showing nothing but a slowly-darkening sky. An oil lamp is lit, then.

Which chair did he take?

There’s no precision in this, at least; it’s not what happened that Shrikeweed’s aiming to reconstruct, just what he remembers. He tries not to think too hard about it. His eyes skitter round the chairs, and when he finds one that he feels in his gut, he picks it, right away. It’s on the far right, facing the door, though not at the head of the table.

He settles himself in it, arranges himself in it like he’s attending any old meeting. His back is straight. He looks around at each chair. Think of it as an opera. He tries not to laugh.

“No names we’ve discussed,” he says carefully. “Not for this meeting. And not many; the table was barely half-full. Maybe four, five men.” There is a pause. He can’t say how long, but he sits with his eyes shut, then he opens them, looks at each chair in turn. He tries not to look at the presence in the corner; he can’t feel the quantitative field anymore.

He takes a breath. In, out. One, two, three, four; one, two, three, four.

He lifts a finger. “A member of the assembly there,” he says. Thin, reedy voice. Droopy mustache. Formerly associated with – which bank? Molyneux-Wathelet? “Apoll… Apollinaire,” he says, “Prudhomme.”

He frowns. The seat across from him, he remembers a vague wisp of a face, shock-white hair; he can’t summon up anything more. But the seat beside that one – “Sergeant Verdier. I can’t – remember his first name. Antoine? Arthur? D’Arthe’s stand-in. And there, in the corner – he didn’t talk much – shady kov, but I’ve seen him around; I’ve heard he’s Oculus.”

He shuts his eyes again, frowns even deeper.

“I don’t know how much more I can remember, Mr. Shrikeweed,” he says. “I know things now I – didn’t know, back then.”

[Basil Ambrose Shrikeweed]

Vienda - In Plamondon Hall
The 31st of Dentis, Thirty-nine minutes past the twenty-third hour

H

e is not fit to be either scorpion or frog. He has no sting, no fondness for singing aloud on spring nights. Perhaps most days he is a magpie, collecting shiny bits of information, arranging them, perhaps to choke on a piece of broken glass or to be cut on a too-sharp piece of metal. The cut from this current collection still smarts, still feels too raw. It has only been days, he thinks, the pain is still fresh. The blood has not dried. No scar has formed.

Will there ever be a scar. Or will he keep picking at the wound, trying to keep the pain fresh and vibrant, a memento of failure? His and others.

“No,” he says, matching the wry tone, as if it were a time for amusement, “I do not think the fable of the turtle comes from Mugroba. It was the version my father told to me when I was a small, ink-stained child. A lawyer’s story.” He had been a child, once. Or, at least he had once been small. The memories were there, some still bright and vivid, but most seemed dull and grey. Not a time of being, but a time of waiting. Waiting for what? For this? Living in dim offices and quiet meeting rooms, carrying out myriad functions? He draws in a long breath. Perhaps it is so. Perhaps it is not. This is neither the place nor the time. The work waits. The work is all.

The light in the room is feeble. Yet even by that pale and wan flicker he can see all he needs to know of the room. It is a nothing, a room like a hundred others. It has no character, no identity. A space, and nothing more. That is proper. He suppresses a laugh. Why, amidst all the improprieties, all the unsoundness, was this one protocol followed? Policy is best decided in such places. A reminder that it is not romantic or grand. A reminder that it must be circumspect and sober. Nothing about what happened in this anonymous space has been sound or sober or circumspect.

That, at least, he will change. It will happen by slow degrees.

The Incumbent takes his seat, uncomfortable, but assured. Good. First player has taken the stage. A pin has been put in the map. A point of origin described. He gives no especial weight to that point. It is merely the one he has to start with. What flows from that, what shapes he will discover, will give it is proper weighting. Its proper influence in the larger network. Preconceptions are poison. Lies and half-truths are venom. He looks at the frail-seeming man in the chair, regards his fine features in the pitiful light. And are you the scorpion, he thinks, bringing me here to strike at me? It seems unlikely. It cannot be discounted. The Incumbent has shown fear, says that he feared even such a man as Shrikeweed. What better way to obscure the truth than by turning it on its head?

So, strike if you desire, Incumbent. What good will it do you? I am but one man, and one man does not matter.

He casts the thought aside. The time for speculation has come and gone.

A deep, close scratching traverses his skin. It prickles and stabs with gentle agony. He has no tattoos, has little need of them, and yet this always feels like some invisible needles are drawing ink away from his skin, stealing the words and images of his thoughts away, making something more of them that he alone can muster. Then, the sensation fades, his field slips loose and flows around him. Like water. Like ink.

The Incumbent, eyes closed for a moment, now staring open and bright, gives the first of the names. They do not come easily. The man struggles with the names, pauses, and now they come pouring out. Prudhomme. A singularly inappropriate name for one so tied into to imprudent a matter. Verdier, a sergeant. That is the second Seventen tied up in this. Then another name. D’Arthe. That name at least he knows. It draws in other thoughts, other angles. How much of the Seventen were in this? Were they all? No. It would be madness. There are already too many names in this conspiracy, too many points of failure. A few thousand more would make it untenable. And, to date, only the man at this table has broken and failed.

At each of the indicated chairs, with each name, he extends his field further, tendrils of mona, the flow of his thoughts carried along with them, encircle the chairs. They flow on, breaking just short of the Incumbent. The man must be willing, he must invite Shrikeweed’s field to touch his own, to share in the flowering of thought.

Now the man is frowning, pulling back. Memory, he thinks, is failing him. It has not. Not yet. “Do not think, sir, that you memories of this meeting must remain only in this room. What is it you know now that can make sense of what came before? I need your full memory. Of this meeting, yes, of the names and the words, but just as surely I need the connections you have made, the thoughts that arise from this place. All your thoughts are needed.” Time is an arrow, its path ever onward into the unknown, but its passage is less clear. The past is the past, but even that changes with thought and recollection. The past is a tissue of lies told to make sense of the insenable. The lies are necessary, they are the shape of things remembered. “Keep the main line of your thought here, in this meeting, but do not confine them. There are connexions here, and ones you may not have understood at the time.” It is no easy thing to uncouple memory from narrative, to view old events with all the knowledge of the present, to experience them as though you are the man of today, and not the man of the past. Yet it is all there, in the mind. It can be aided, shaped, inferred. “This is the difficult part. There are magics I must do. The strains of thoughts, your memories. I have to encode them in many dimensions, reduce them to points in space. To arrays of numbers.” His field again flows toward the incumbent. Dark and wet as ink, ready to record, to encode, to discover what is embedded in the thoughts of the man, of ‘He’ and of ‘I’. Whose memories are these? Which man is seated here now? “With your leave, sir, I have to pass my field over you, know the shape and form of your own. Then, I will need you to tell me another fable. The one about the frightened man and the meeting that never happened.”

[Tom Cooke]

Stainthorpe Hall • Uptown

Evening on the 31st of Dentis, 2719

C
ontext.

It shouldn’t’ve surprised him that the turtle-shelled strain of the tale was lawyers’ talk; it’s a lawyer’s way, he thinks bitterly, still full up with memories of Lionshead Beach and third-rate Old Rose solicitors, to complicate things until they’re mystifying. If the frog’s a shell, then what’s the point of the tale? There’s no danger; the turtle doesn’t even know, he reflects, whether the scorpion used its stinger or not. The scorpion can stab at it with impunity, and the two of them climb onto the other bank and go about their merry ways.

A hell of a story to tell a small, ink-stained child. He turns the phrase over in his head; he keeps picturing baby Basil with sidewhiskers and a penchant for sinister smiles.

He realizes just how little he knows. He doesn’t think that Mr. Shrikeweed grew up in some capacious Ro Hill mansion with a cavalcade of courtly governesses. But he doesn’t know what else there is for a golly. He wonders what would breed the sort of man who shrugs contempt at parliament and wryly throws his Tek back at him.

“My thoughts, Mr. Shrikeweed,” he replies, frowning, “depend largely on what we’re looking for.” His glance flicks aside, to the small man half-lit by the oil lamp, his expression interminable.

On what you’re looking for, he doesn’t say.

The prospect of letting that field merge with his is uncomfortable. Has he ever experienced a merging of fields? He doesn’t think he has; fields have brushed with his, have even mingled deeply, but never wholly merged.

There’s so much buzzing about his head – so much he doesn’t know if Shrikeweed knows – how close the other man has gotten to finding Ava, how close he is to learning more of him. Or if, as he has long suspected, Shrikeweed is a player to end the game; if he is in service to some shadowy master, if he will, after all, be the last nail in the coffin. He knows the quantitative conversation can’t reach into your mind and pluck out your suspicions, but it can find other objective, external truths, can parse and configure whatever can be observed.

He pushes down a prickling wave of discomfort. Steady, he straightens his back, lifts his chin, and nods.

He knows how to do it; it is like letting go the hilt of a knife. He breathes in, out, and he does not force his field to be indectal. He feels more of himself shiver into it, yellow-shift with anxiety, red-shift with irritation. He tastes the colors on the air, strange, so very unlike anything from Before.

And he feels the other field creep into his, quantitative mona mingling with clairvoyant.

At first, it’s like a whiff of paper and ink; then, it’s like the taste of ink, irongall bitter. The sensation of merging is stronger and stranger than he was prepared for, and for a moment, he’s overwhelmed with it. The dry-ink whispering-papers feel of the brush of Mr. Shrikeweed’s field – only a caprise, before – envelops him, and he begins to feel it properly.

He thinks through this. He lets go the hilt; he doesn’t try to confine his thoughts, or direct them. He shuts his eyes, then opens them, glances over the room.

Not the words; the connections, the thoughts. Tell me a fable, he says. The meeting that never happened. The frightened man.

A little red-shift crackles out into his field. I’m not frightened, he wants to lie, the bitterest lie that’s ever graced his rotten tongue. I’m not frightened – “Not everyone present,” he begins, “knew what they were on about. I can’t remember what they said, but I can remember – Prudhomme looked scared. Prudhomme looked damned scared, the whole time; he kept looking at that man of Megiro’s, that Oculus man, as if he hadn’t expected…

“There was a lot of tension; not everybody was in the same boat, headed up the same river. To pull this off, they needed a lot of ging and a lot of backup, and a good cover – I remember thinking, to do something this chroveshit mung, this blatant, they have to be confident.” He remembers the curl of Verdier’s lip. “And Verdier and Megiro’s man, they were confident, as confident as d’Arthe was at the first meeting. No mention of Morde.”

No mention of Hawke, then, either. His brow furrows. He remembers his first sight of the King better than anything else about that first meeting in Intas. Cocky as he was, he’d looked surprised at Azmus and d’Arthe; they hadn’t already been acquainted.

He shakes his head, waves a hand. “Verdier said something – something about someone connected to the project, some name that froze the blood in Prudhomme’s veins. It was a lot of arm-twisting, not a lot of negotiating.”

[Basil Ambrose Shrikeweed]

Vienda - In Plamondon Hall
The 31st of Dentis, Forty-four minutes past the twenty-third hour

F

rog and scorpion. Scorpion and turtle. The tales are different. Their meanings diverge. For the former, ‘no good deed goes unpunished’, ‘wickedness sows the seeds of its own destruction’. Valuable lessons. Timeless. And the turtle? ‘One can tolerate the wickedness of others, if one has the right defenses.’ Does he have those defenses now? Yes, and no. The papers, the notes, the instructions, they will serve for now, but they are a thin shell. He will still need to watch for stings.

No. Not here and not now. There is no virtue in fear, in apprehension. His thoughts, his sorcereries must flow outward untainted by any habit of mind, and tinge of fear. Both are poison, a sting he can avoid. An analytical engine knows neither care nor fear. It performs its tasks, its gears turning in accordance with their design. So it will be with him. It must be. Degree by slow degree, his field appraises, probes, calculates that of the Incumbent. Ebb and flow of clairvoyance, of seeing away and afar measured, decomposed, rendered anew. He feels the tang of equations upon his tongue, hears of the roar of calculations in his ears. Like the drone of a viol. Like the surging of the sea.

There are other sounds. Whispers, the distant memory of the scratching of pens across parchment. Aimless, formless things. Voice without meaning, writing without sense. The orchestra is tuning. A necessary thing. It remains to be seen what they will play.

“I do not know what I am looking for, sir. That is the conundrum. That is the advantage. We let facts, and your recollection of facts, guide us where they may.” And what is he looking for? Some confirmation that the man he has come to know, the man he has become strangely fond of, is nothing more than a frightened pawn? A part of it, yes, but not the whole. The turtle and the scorpion rise again in his mind. Yes, that it is. He is looking for all the ways he might armor his shell. In Ophus there will be the ‘caoja’. He cannot go to such a meeting naked and vulnerable as a frog. “Tell me what you recall, no matter how trivial. Tell yourself. It will be messy, disjointed, raw. Let it be so.” He tries to smile, a genuine smile, not some knife-edged imitation. He fails. Perhaps all he has now is imitation. “Events are written in drafts. History is the great editor. The drafts are all that matter now.”

The Incumbent is still holding back, still reticent, still creeping around the edges of his memory. Are you afraid, sir, that you might say the wrong thing? No wrong thing can be said. The finding of facts does not presuppose an end. Still, the tension remains, the reticence, the obfuscation. He can feel it through the man’s field. He can feel something altogether different. Unsettling. There is fear and reticence, even the reactive shame that so many feel when fields merge and sorcereries become entwined. Is it a fear of loss of self? A strange and uncomfortable echo of something fleshly and carnal? He has nothing to compare it to. Such matters are beyond his experience, beyond his nature. The merging is a tool, a means to an end, nothing more. In the flow and transformation he derives no pleasure, no calm. Quite the reverse. His thoughts are labored, heavy, unwieldy. They carry the memories of the other man like bricks in a hod, ferrying them to and fro.

The Incumbent, speaking now, laying the scene. He listens, nodding, forming lines of reasoning, placing new nodes in new chairs. The meeting takes its shape. A provisional shape, likely inaccurate in detail. Likely accurate in sentiment. At the mention of Prudhomme, the man with the inappropriate name, Shrikeweed slows his reasoning, his calculations. Focus on that man, the appearance of his fear, his actions and reactions. “Tell me about Prudhomme, tell me what he said.”

Then, the question falls away in the current. The Incumbent spills yet more names, more details. “Why, sir, are you speaking of Morde?” The Seventen leader has not been spoken of before. This is a new addition. Significant? Likely. “Has he given his ascent? Or are his underlings acting without his aegis?” Either is deadly. He is not sure which is the more unsettling. Factions upon factions. The Seventen, the conspirators, the Reformists, the Oculus. All the little cabals, so certain of their power, of their virtue.

And now the hammer drops. A name, unspoken. A name, a specter of dread. “Leave off the others, sir, for now. Verdier, focus in on him, focus on his words.” He can feel the Incumbents thoughts, racing, reticent. He does not want to remember, does not want to give full shape to this meeting. Shrikeweed’s field modulates, pulls back in its insistent probing. It skims along the surface of the Incumbents, gathering words, sentiments, phrases. A gentle skimming, almost a caress. It is an unfamiliar sensation, uncomfortable. For himself he has never been so gentle, has never found it useful. Better to pull the recollections from his mind quick and knife-sharp and gleaming. He cannot do this to the Incumbent, to Anatole. The man does not respond to the sweet-hot surety of pain. He has pain enough in his mind. That much is clear from the shape and hum of his field. A music all discord and discomfort, a field disturbed and untried.

Untried? What manner of man is not at home with his own field? Shrikeweed cannot understand. His field is like a second skin, an extension of his thoughts, a self outside his body. The Incumbent has no such ease, so such comfort.

Yet amid that continuo, that drone, he can sense spikes of even greater discomfort, of obfuscation. The shape of names unsaid, of thoughts unvoiced, still thrums within that clairvoyant field. It will take more than mere cajoling to draw them to the surface.

“What was the name Verdier spoke? Try and recall the sounds in your mind, the taste of the word in your ears, the bitterness of Prudhomme’s face. Even one small sound will help. It will be a beginning. If the name alludes you, speak its first sound. The rest will come. All in good time.”

And so will the other names. So will all the names.

[Tom Cooke]

Stainthorpe Hall • Uptown

Evening on the 31st of Dentis, 2719

F
acts – he doesn’t know, not really, which is worse; the thought of Shrikeweed finding something, or the thought of him not finding anything at all. It had seemed an easy diversion, this, before. Now, he’s assailed by all the quantitative particles mingling with his, sliding and tangling among the clairvoyant, picking up every whiff and taste and breath of a color-shift. He shuts his eyes, relaxing the tightening in the muscles of his back. He does not succeed.

I cannot tell you, he does not say, his lip twisting. I cannot spill right and left. I must be an editor, too, Mr. Shrikeweed. I’ve to edit and re-edit; I’ve to scramble, to cover up the pieces you can’t know. You know the game we’re playing, surely, you know that I can never open all the doors; some of the doors are closed even to me –

“Messy,” he repeats, eyes fluttering open, “disjointed, raw. When have I ever been otherwise?”

He sees Shrikeweed’s face half-lit, lit from the side by the low lamp. There’s something like a smile playing on his lips. It unsettles him, in the dry-ink quantitative wash, the scrutiny. It doesn’t seem like much of a smile to him; he wonders what the other man means by it. The light nearly makes it into a leer, something worse even than the narrow, calculating smiles that the Shrike’s worn in the office at Stainthorpe.

Better, perhaps, with his eyes closed. No, he’s to look round one last time, to study each seat, to fill each with the ghost of its occupant. He can’t; he’s never been good at visualization. But he tries, nonetheless, tries to imagine Verdier slumped back in his seat, his green uniform crisp in the afternoon light. He tries to imagine Prudhomme sweating into his high collar, glancing from man to man.

“He said – he – it wasn’t so much what he said,” he says, shutting his eyes again; “as Verdier – the brigk was reminding him of some favor he owed the Low Judge, some civil case that was dropped, some kind of – he laughed, and asked Prudhomme whether he’d embezzled Ogden’s trust in him…”

His lip twists. He forces himself to relax, again. The questions are coming fast; they scatter his thoughts as they come. Shrikeweed is not keeping him on point – he’s driving him to pieces, and then picking them up, examining them.

He has the strange feeling, suddenly, of being out of control. If he knows what the Shrike is looking for, he can shape the story; if he doesn’t, he’s a turtle with no clue what he’s ferrying.

Morde. He must think. He must speak. “Without,” he blurts, then furrows his brow. “I don’t know. I don’t know the kov” – he slurs; his accent broadens, leans sometimes toward the Rose, sometimes toward the Dives, sometimes toward the Uptown politician’s drawl, and never predictably. “But he never came up once. Is he in on it? Is he not? Brigk of brigks, I’ve heard, and a laoso one at that, but not a Pendulum man in the least. Old money, him, not up to their snuff.”

The name. He sifts through it in his mind. The taste of the word in your ears, Shrikeweed says; a wince spasms across his face. Nobody has never said it so plainly, this.

“It’s not a bitter name,” he says, unbidden. “It wasn’t a name with the taste of something important; that’s why I can’t remember it. It wasn’t a name like –”

Hawke, he doesn’t say. He clamps his mouth shut, grits his teeth tightly.

There is something brutal about the softness of Shrikeweed’s voice, for all it’s there – ever there – trickling like ink, a spur in the shape of a feather. He has nearly said it three times, for all it was absent from the meeting itself. Hawke, he thinks, Hawke was at the meeting in Intas, but not at this meeting. There’s another force here, not-Hawke –

He shakes his head. “Some names carry weight just from the speaking; some names carry weight from the absence,” he says. “It was Bastian – Anto… Antonio, Antonacchi… It wasn’t him, I thought, but somebody he was connected to, somebody who stood behind him. I kept thinking, if the High Judge is behind all this, it doesn’t make any sense; if he’s in thrall to Trevisani, if…”

His words are getting away from him. Trevisani – the name sends a ripple through his field, not yellow-shift embarrassment, but deep regret. He thinks of her, picking up her bag, of shutting the study doors behind her.

You know the man, he remembers her saying. He wanted to protest, even then: he is not my partner. He feels a lance of fear. She was right; you can’t control this vodundun, not half well enough to trust yourself around it. Shrikeweed hasn’t even started casting yet – when he does, what can he find? Quantitative can’t access the mind, but what can it find between the lines?

“I can’t remember anything more,” he says, jerking his chin. “I can’t even be sure I was sober, that afternoon. That’s all I can remember, Mr. Shrikeweed.”

[Basil Ambrose Shrikeweed]

Vienda - In Plamondon Hall
The 31st of Dentis, Forty-nine minutes past the twenty-third hour

T

hat is all he can remember. A lie. It is all he thinks he can remember. All he wants to remember. There are too many walls in the Incumbent’s mind, too many hiding places. Is ‘He’ still in there, somewhere? Lurking in some recess all hastily bricked over? Buried alive and best left forgotten? For the health of a mind, forgetting is a necessity. A salve. It purges away unnecessary information, allows the passage of time to smooth over the roughness of events, to grow pearls of delusion around the sharp-edged irritation of facts. Here there is no time for such niceties. He does not need beauty tonight. Neither does he need truth. Something in between is the best he can hope for.

To be forewarned is to be forearmed. A correct sentiment. A sound one. Can he build soundness on such shifty ground as the Incumbent ? Upon a mind that still hides away in corners, pretending it is not who it once was? He can feel the shapes of reticence and deceit flowing just under the surface of the man’s thoughts, he can hear its echoes in the combined fields. It thrums and drones, rises and falls, along with the man’s words.

His words.

They move in ways altogether differently that the man’s thoughts. They reveal more than they should. More than the Incumbent perhaps might wish? The old accent, the one that slips out when the man is not thinking, the accent that has nothing to do with Ro Hill or great country estates. Better in waterside dives and in underground boxing rings.

He has heard all the words there, spoken by flash men with aims above their station, by women who keep books as tidy and any in the Exchequer, and by rough men with heavy fists who he fancies he can outbox. He is not the only one with aims above his station. There are still aches in his ribs from the last fight. A loss, as is usual, but a sporting one. It knocked some cobwebs out of his head, made him see a little sense. Perhaps that is what the Incumbent needs. Something to occupy his whole mind, something real and present and inevitable. Shrikeweed nearly laughs. He cannot see that frail form in the ring, not even the most genteel.

Along the threads of thought, the harmonics of reason, he sends some small fragment of his own thoughts. The sounds and smells of the boxing rings. The shouts of rough ben and rough language. Threads of words, ghosts of sensation. An offering, a glimpse of those matters he himself might wish to conceal. His rage and delight at violence and pain, all prescribed by rules and by custom. The facts that a man of status, of breeding could never quite understand.

And yet, there are the words.

So he reaches out, probing gently at the words, taking their measure. What returns makes little sense. The mind that speaks them is comfortable with them, speaks them of old. The mona are clear on this. Bright and sharp and unmistakable. But the voice? The man?

SpoilerShow

1d6 = (6) = 6 Quantitative [Age and familiarity of the utterances]

Somehow that is new. A man somehow new, a man who did not exist more than perhaps a year ago. ‘He’ and ‘I’. ‘I’ and ‘He’. Can a man be other than himself? Can he be so broken, so shattered, that what arises from the shards is not at all what was there before? Perhaps so. It makes little sense. Yet the mona do not lie. ‘He’ is a new man in every sense of the matter. A new man in an old body. And who is ‘I’? How did he become?

Unknown. Unknowable? Perhaps. Perhaps not. A line of reasoning for another day. Already the Incumbent, this New Man, is agitated. No use in probing in yet another unwelcome direction.

Under the field-flow the Incumbent’s thoughts still move, half-hidden and skittish. He increases the speed of his calculations, the tide of his field. Swirls and vortices, angles and measures. A tale forms. Pudhomme is speaking now, somewhere in the Incumbent’s thoughts. There is a new and brazen jangle of nerves. Borrowed agitation. Borrowed words. The Incumbent is still paraphrasing, still speaking in summary. A memorandum of a memory. It is not enough. “Tell me,” he says. “Tell me what you remember of their words. Speak as though you are they, say their words as you think they may have been.” Reticence, caution, they will not serve. Not tonight. He needs the flow, the jumble of thoughts, the inaccuracies. He needs to feel the dimensions of the words, take their measure. Angles upon angles. The geometry of meaning. “It does not matter if you think you have forgotten or if you are mistaken at first. The fields will know, they will adjust, and we will adjust along with them. Focus on the words. What is Verdier saying to Prudhomme? As best you can recall. What is the case that was dropped? What is the tone of the remark?”

Another ripple in the Incumbent’s thoughts. Sharp and sudden, a dagger-recollection. Confusion. Fear?

Do you still fear me, Incumbent? Do you still think I am the butcherbird to tear you to pieces? I could have done that long ago. He has not. There is little point and less joy in destroying a man who went along with the current of his fellows, down the drain into obscenity. Better to use him as a tool. Let him be the thorns on which others more deserving will be impaled. And, in spite of reason and sense, he rather likes the Incumbent.

The man goes on, skimming over the meeting, over names. The name of Morde, the Seventen head, rises and falls. Not a man of the conspiracy. This is a conspiracy of New Men. It is conspiracy of Shrikeweed’s own class and ilk. It is a conspiracy he does not, cannot, understand.

There is another name, a name he has not heard. Antonacchi? Meaningless until tonight. No longer. “Who is Antonacchi? What is he to you, or you to him? Tell me the words around the name. Give me the shape of the utterances in which that name was embedded.” Still seated, the Incumbent looks small and withdrawn. Drained. Perhaps this is all too much for him. Perhaps there is another way. A way around the Incumbent’s fear.

“Hold for just a while, and let your mind relax. This is trying at the best of times, even to me, and I know this magic well. You have no need to fear me sir, or what I may discover in your memories. I already know the worst. You may not think so, but nothing you, or ‘He’, could have done will rise to the evil of Dorehaven.” Bile rising in his throat. The bitterness of a failure he had not known until that night at the Elephant. A bitterness which is all he can taste. “And that is my evil too, sir. Do not forget that. I am too far down this path to avoid implication. My hands are as bloody as any. The conspirators are members of the Pendulum Club, of my club. My blindness alone indicts me, makes me party to this monstrosity.”

He pulls his field back, dimensions reducing, ink flowing back into the bottle of his mind. Not wholly. The magic is far from complete. “Please sir, try and recall more. It is necessary, perhaps for our survival. Neither you nor I can afford to go blindly into the coaja. If ever you might trust me, trust me in this.”

The Incumbent, the new Incumbent. The ‘I’ who has never been ‘He’ still struggles, still fights against revealing what he knows. It cannot be allowed. “If you were not entirely sober when this meeting did not happen, then neither of us should be. Memory is best recalled in harmony with the events.” The field retreats a little more, ink rises from the pages, words undone. “I will get us what is required. I will even suffer Gioran whisky, if that is what is necessary.”