by M. K. Hobson
“Ammunition?” Emily lifted an eyebrow.
“Damaging information, slanderous assertions with basis in fact, things of that nature. We collect it on everyone who might be a potential threat. It’s standard procedure for any credomantic institution.” Miss Jesczenka paused, glancing back at Dmitri, who was still sitting by the door. He did not seem to be listening, but Miss Jesczenka lowered her voice anyway. “Unfortunately, the information we’ve collected on Fortissimus is nowhere near damaging enough to destroy and discredit him, not with the level of power he currently enjoys. Unless”—Miss Jesczenka lifted a finger—“it is leveraged.”
“And how does expediting Mr. Stanton’s inevitable defeat make you better able to leverage this damaging information?”
“On n’aime point le tyran, petit connard,” Miss Jesczenka said.
“What’s a petit connard?” Emily asked.
“Never mind,” Miss Jesczenka said. “I was quoting something Talleyrand is famously attributed as having said to Napoléon once, over dinner. Napoléon responded by throwing a glass of wine in his face. Translated, the sentiment is simply this: ‘No one likes a bully.’ This statement was made at about the time Talleyrand had decided to sell out le Petit Caporal to Russia and Austria. Talleyrand was not out for glory, nor for gain, but rather for the good of France. Napoléon was destroying it with his savage dreams of conquest. Talleyrand knew that he had to be stopped.”
“So … wait. That means Fortissimus is Napoléon?” Emily was beginning to wish she had a pencil and paper.
“You’re taking this all far too literally,” Miss Jesczenka said. “The point is, in the end, everyone wants to see a bully get his just deserts. A bully who pushes things too far—like Napoléon, or Fortissimus—is laying the groundwork for his own defeat.”
A glimmer of understanding kindled in Emily. She inclined a thinking finger at Miss Jesczenka. “But you knew that Fortissimus wasn’t stupid enough to push things far enough. Not on his own.”
Miss Jesczenka smiled at her. “Very good, Miss Edwards,” she said. “I had to add a little extra malice to the mix. I had to make Fortissimus look even more of a bully than he already is. By making it seem that Fortissimus is behind these relentless, merciless attacks, he comes to be seen as the kind of fellow who’ll kick a man when he’s down. He becomes every villain the Dreadnought Stanton of the pulp novels has ever battled against. And thus, when the information is brought to bear against him, it will be more damaging than it would be otherwise, because the prevailing attitude will be that he deserves what he gets. If all goes as it should, the attack should be sufficient to nullify him as a threat forever.”
“All right, so you destroy Napoléon,” Emily said. “But you tear France apart in the process. I don’t see how this is a good thing.”
“Ah, but France was not destroyed,” Miss Jesczenka said. “Indeed, after the demon Napoléon was exorcized from the poor unwilling body of France, the Bourbons were restored, the country was allowed to retain its original borders, and Monsieur Talleyrand went on to some of the greatest political victories of his career. Napoléon bore the full brunt of disgrace. All the damage was reflected back onto him. Every imperial aspiration, every greedy barbarism, every expansionist impulse. They lashed back and crushed him.” There was a particular relish in Miss Jesczenka’s voice when speaking these last words that made Emily feel surprised at exactly how passionately the woman hated Napoléon. But of course, Napoléon wasn’t Napoléon. He was Fortissimus.
“All right,” Emily said, summarizing for herself. “Mr. Stanton is France. Fortissimus is Napoléon. The more of a despot Napoléon is made to seem, the more brutal the retribution when he is finally discredited.”
“Exactly,” Miss Jesczenka said. “But there’s one more character in this credomantic drama that I’ve left out. The victim. The martyr. Someone who has been specifically and terribly damaged by the actions of the cruel bully.”
“Well, that would be Mr. Stanton, wouldn’t it?”
“Certainly, he is the logical choice, but he cannot be cast in that role. He must be fit to rule once Napoléon is exiled to Elba, and he cannot do that if he is seen as pitiable or pathetic.”
Emily looked at her warily. She was aware of an uncomfortable certainty growing in the pit of her stomach. “If not Mr. Stanton, then who?”
Miss Jesczenka said nothing, but looked at her for a long time.
“The innocent, blushing virgin with dreams of a happy future, crushed under the loathesome weight of indecent suggestion,” Miss Jesczenka said at last.
Emily let out a long sigh. Miss Jesczenka nodded a confirmation.
“You’re going to be the martyr, Miss Edwards. You’re going to save the Institute.”
“You’ve got to be kidding!”
“I’ve never been more serious.”
“But you said it yourself, I don’t have a dissembling bone in my body!”
“Good,” Miss Jesczenka said curtly. “The more truthful you can be, the more powerful you will be. Remember that.”
“But how can I do that?” Emily said. “I don’t know what the truth is. I don’t know what Mr. Stanton did, or didn’t do … I don’t know what’s true at all, anymore!”
“I didn’t say this was going to be easy,” Miss Jesczenka said.
A long silence hung between them. They stared at each other, calm brown eyes looking into troubled violet ones.
“What if I can’t pull it off?” Emily whispered. “What if the Talleyrand Maneuver isn’t successful? What if Mr. Stanton can’t regain control of the Institute?”
Miss Jesczenka smiled at her. “Of course it will succeed, Miss Edwards—” but Emily cut her off with a curt gesture.
“Spare me the credomancy,” Emily said. “What happens if the Talleyrand Maneuver doesn’t work? Will it hurt him?”
“Mr. Stanton is the Institute. He is the physical body of the Institute as much as the white marble mansion. And you have seen what’s been happening to the mansion.” Miss Jesczenka’s face became serious. “As the power of the Institute crumbles, so does he. As long as the power of the Institute is in decline, he will continue to decline with it. If the Institute is destroyed …”
Miss Jesczenka did not need to finish the sentence.
Stanton regaining control of the Institute was a matter of life and death—not just for the world, but for him as well. She had to save the Institute—save the very thing that would take him away from her. She had to help him become a man who could never really be hers, ever again.
She shook her head and smiled at the neat horror of it, but her smile was small and bitter.
“Checkmate,” she whispered to herself.
Miss Jesczenka was right about one thing. A single day was not nearly enough to satisfactorily execute the coup de grâce of an intricate Talleyrand Maneuver. But it was all the time they had.
“The first thing is the press conference,” Miss Jesczenka said. Sitting at the makeshift desk with paper, pen, and ink, she wrote furiously as she spoke. Emily stood at her shoulder, watching the woman’s steel-nibbed pen move swiftly over the paper. Quite amazingly, Miss Jesczenka was writing a catering menu, an order for a dressmaker, and a list of names while she spoke. “We will hold it at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. It’s the nicest in town, and I am good friends with the manager. He will see that we’re given the Imperial Suite. It’s got wonderful acoustics.” Miss Jesczenka paused momentarily, signed her name with a flourish, then lifted the piece of paper and wafted it in the air to let the ink dry. She looked at Emily. “We will invite every newspaperman not in thrall to Fortissimus.”
Copies of all the morning newspapers were spread out before Miss Jesczenka. Emily reached over and pulled out The New York Times and scanned the headlines.
“Javanese Regent Declares Mass Evacuation of Batavia,” that morning’s headline read. “Aberrancies Swarm the City. Stadhuis Reported Destroyed.”
Emily sighed, pushing the paper back. Tema
mauhti’s inexorable march. But she had enough to worry about at the moment without adding Java to the list.
Miss Jesczenka turned a disdainful gaze on Dmitri, who was watching from his accustomed place by the door. “Dmitri!”
Dmitri lifted an eyebrow, but said nothing.
Miss Jesczenka glanced at the paper, deemed it dry enough to fold and tuck into an envelope. She wrote a name and address on it and handed the envelope to him.
“See that it’s delivered immediately,” she said tersely. “And hurry back. I’ll have quite a lot more for you very soon.”
“I shall give it to one of my men,” Dmitri said pointedly, turning to step out of the room.
“Russians! There’s no getting rid of them,” Miss Jesczenka muttered under her breath. “For pity’s sake, I might as well be back in Poland.”
“So what’s going to happen at this press conference?” Emily asked.
Miss Jesczenka slid a fresh sheet of paper before herself, then dipped her pen into ink again.
“You, Miss Edwards, are going to put on a show like no one’s ever seen before.”
“I gathered that much,” Emily said, “but I don’t understand why anyone’s going to care. No one knows who I am. And if they do, their whole notion of me is built around a lie, that I’m some kind of cattle baron’s daughter. You said that we had to be truthful!”
“It wasn’t my idea to make you a cattle baron’s daughter,” Miss Jesczenka said, chewing the end of her pen thoughtfully. “And of course, Fortissimus engineered that ridiculous cover story with just this kind of situation in mind. He’s always known just how powerful a weapon you could be, if someone took it in their mind to use you. So he made sure to hobble you well in advance.”
Emily lifted her hands in astonishment. “How far ahead do you people think?”
Miss Jesczenka smiled.
“It’s like chess, Miss Edwards. The current move is of no importance. It’s how the current move relates to the moves yet to come. And to answer your question, just for my own personal amusement, I’ve strategized your future out as far as the birth of your fifth child. After that, I’ll admit, it gets a bit hazy.”
Emily blinked at her. “Five?”
“As for no one knowing who you really are, it doesn’t matter all that much, really. Fortissimus hoped that in trying to live up to his cattle baron’s daughter story, you’d make some kind of hideous blunder. Once the truth about your background was revealed, you’d end up looking like a lying little gold digger, and you’d be nullified as a threat forever. He hoped, in short, that you’d cut your own throat. The tactic might have worked, if you’d gone around in society a bit more. But as you’ve done such a very good job of avoiding society, you’ve evaded his trap.” Miss Jesczenka gave Emily a little look that recalled her old exasperation about Mrs. Stanton’s lunch. Emily suddenly felt very pleased—quite undeservedly—with her own cleverness.
“Even if the Institute had been completely open and above-board about your background,” Miss Jesczenka continued, ignoring the self-satisfied look on Emily’s face, “that would have presented its own set of challenges. Ultimately, the specifics of who you are matter less than the truth of what you are.”
“And what am I?”
“You are a young woman. You are pretty, and when I’m done with you, you’ll be prettier still. And, most important, you are in love. Those are the ultimate truths that we will use to our advantage.”
Emily said nothing, but wrinkled her nose. Three such simple components. A young woman. Pretty. In love. Each individually might be said to have truth in it, she supposed. But there were so many caveats, so many shades of meaning and doubt and conflict in each one. Taken together, they added up to a truth so oversimplified and abstract as to be nearly meaningless. How could such a truth have any power in it at all?
“It’s a matter of symbology, Miss Edwards,” Miss Jesczenka said, as if she could read the doubt on the curve of Emily’s brow. “You signify something that people treasure, an ideal that they cherish. That is what is important. That is why you will be able to play this role, and why you will succeed in it.”
“But it’s still not the truth,” Emily muttered. But if Miss Jesczenka heard, she did not comment.
“The good news is, your path has already been well prepared. You remember the photos that were taken before the Investment? They’ve proven as popular as I’d hoped they would be,” Miss Jesczenka said with some satisfaction. “You did not notice, but I placed a subtle glamour on you while I was helping you prepare. You have no idea how lovely you looked. I was quite proud of the effect.”
“I’ve seen the pictures,” Emily said. “I saw one in a shop window in the Bowery. They didn’t look like me at all, but the counterman said that they were selling well.”
“Excellent,” Miss Jesczenka said, and whether she was pleased that the pictures didn’t look like Emily or that they were selling well was hard to discern.
“You really did have this all planned out, didn’t you?” Emily looked closely at the woman.
“Someone had to keep a level head on their shoulders,” Miss Jesczenka said. “Zeno and Stanton were larking around like a couple of schoolboys, with all their credomancer’s assurance and bravado. It is a great weakness of credomancers, Miss Edwards. They often believe their own press.”
“You’re a credomancer, too,” Emily said.
“I’m also a woman. Failure, struggle, and doubt are my constant companions. They are not always pleasant, but they inoculate me against overconfidence. As such, I would not trade them for all the arrogant bravado in the world.”
There was the sound of the key scraping in the lock, and the door opening. Emily pressed her lips together and Miss Jesczenka turned back to her writing desk, resuming her elegant scribbling.
Emily expected Dmitri to take his chair, but instead he came to stand behind Miss Jesczenka, arms crossed.
“Yes?” Miss Jesczenka said without turning.
“You’re going to present Miss Edwards to reporters at a press conference at the Fifth Avenue Hotel?”
“What of it?” Miss Jesczenka snapped, pen hovering briefly over the paper.
“Every Temple Warlock in the service of the Black Glass Goddess wants her dead,” Dmitri growled. “And you’re going to parade her around in front of reporters in a public place?”
Miss Jesczenka turned, fixed Dmitri with a blazing glare. “Well, that must be your lookout, mustn’t it? I can hardly arrange for Institute security if you aren’t going to let me contact them.”
Dmitri said nothing. His jaw flexed uneasily.
“If you will keep me informed as to the arrangements, I will see that there is sufficient security.”
He caught Emily’s gaze. And for the first time, instead of something disapproving, she thought she saw a warning.
Miss Jesczenka worked unflaggingly into the night. By the time the small clock on the table chimed 1 a.m., Emily sat drowsing in a chair, her body quiescent but her mind feverishly active. She was remembering everything Ososolyeh had shown her, rubbing vision against vision, trying to strike the meanest spark of understanding. The Temple, a cold terrifying place of bones and blood; the Black Glass Goddess, ancient and malicious; twelve men, cut to ribbons … Why twelve? she wondered. Twelve was such a strange number. Twelve astrological signs, twelve disciples, twelve dancing princesses—Emily abandoned the line of contemplation as it went from promising to preposterous.
I can give him one last chance.
Emily shivered, remembering the horrible hunk of slimy flesh on which Zeno had died. What had Zeno’s dying thoughts meant? Him who? Perun? The sly white-haired Russian had said that he and Zeno had been friends, and Emily believed it; she had seen the real sadness in his eyes when she’d told him that Zeno was dead. But how could Zeno’s wasting the last bit of his strength on destroying that … thing, whatever it was, help Perun?
“Miss Edwards needs to rest,” Dmitri said, as if intuiti
ng the frenzy of Emily’s thoughts. “I will escort her to her room.”
“Well, don’t be long about it,” Miss Jesczenka said, not looking up. “We’re working through the night, and I need you.”
With dull complaisance, Emily followed Dmitri. When they reached her room, he followed her in and closed the door behind himself.
“I want to speak with you,” he said brusquely, answering the question in her eyes. “There may not be another chance.”
Emily settled herself on the edge of the bed. Dmitri sat on a chair against the wall, his straight back pressed hard against the wood. He frowned for some moments before speaking, finally shaking his head in frustration.
“I am not a man of schemes, like Perun. Nor of language, like Zeno. But I am a man who listens. I am a man who hears.” He looked at the floor, at his feet on it. “I am a man who believes in good, and in evil.”
He drew a deep breath.
“I do not believe you are evil, Miss Edwards,” he said, glancing up at her. “Perhaps I have been too unkind. But after my father was murdered, I hated everyone who practiced magic. Everyone.” He sighed heavily. “It does not do to hate everyone. Only those who do wrong. Who do evil.”
Dmitri looked up at her, his face tight as a fist. “This man … Dreadnought Stanton. You love him very much?”
Emily drew a deep breath, her whole body tensing. She nodded, once.
Dmitri shook his head bleakly, as if he had just watched her put her signature to a confession of treason. “You have no idea what he is.”
“I know what he is,” Emily said.
“He is no better than a Temple Warlock. No better than the men who killed my father.”
“If you’re going to outline my fiancé’s errors to me, at least keep your facts straight,” Emily hissed. “Yes, he studied sangrimancy at the Maelstrom Academy—but he never had anything to do with the Temple.”
“The Temple draws Initiates from Erebus Academy cadets all the time,” Dmitri countered harshly. “Did you know that? No, I am sure you didn’t. Why should anyone tell you that?”