by K. Eason
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• • •
It is not for nothing that arithmancers were once called wizards, before Jabir Ibn Hayyan transcribed the treatises of Trismegistus, and imposed reason on superstition. It is also not for nothing that arithmancers tend to gauntness, poor nutrition, and (historically) the keeping of apprentices in lieu of proper caretakers. And it is not for nothing that said apprentices believed their masters (and occasional mistresses) to be wiser than they were: for although the eyes, and the body, and the bulk of an arithmancer’s attention is engaged in whatever aetheric layer he inhabits, he can—and does—still experience the physical world. Aural and olfactory senses are unimpeded, although the importance assigned to their reports is at the arithmancer’s discretion.
Thus, the Vizier was aware of Rory’s presence, and of Grytt’s. He was not half so oblivious as he pretended, or as Rory imagined, which, if one did the math (which the Vizier did, being an arithmancer), meant he could hear roughly all of what happened, even if his visual faculties were otherwise engaged. This is the drawback of arithmancy (if one can coax an arithmancer into calling it that; there are those who insist that it is no drawback, but rather a feature, albeit an occasionally inconvenient one): to see the mathematical structure which underlies the universe, one must shift one’s perception into the layers of the aether where that structure is visible. The Vizier liked to imagine the process as analogous to taking steps. One step to see auras, two for a simple hex (the sort that might help an industrious young princess to shift her own aura, for instance), three for more complex hexes (the sort an industrious, devious princess might employ to open a locked keypad, or which a diligent, dutiful Vizier might use to destroy a spybot).
The Vizier had never taught Rory arithmancy requiring more than three steps, although he fully expected she could work out for herself how to do it. She was exactly the right kind of stubborn for arithmancy.
The Vizier himself was many, many more steps than three into the aether, so far that his physical body seemed to belong to someone else entirely. This meant that his fingers on the keypad were abominably slow to obey. It also meant that he had sunk through enough aetheric layers that he could talk to the turing, for some version of the word. Their dialogue was algorithmic, numeric, arcane.
Rory and Grytt’s audible return was insufficient to tempt the Vizier to respond to them; but the smell of frying spices reminded him that the Princess made very good curries, and he had not eaten in a long time, by a body’s reckoning. And so, thus reminded of his mortality, the Vizier began the process of stepping back out.
It was during this process—tedious, complicated, and largely uninteresting except to other arithmancers—that the Vizier discovered a tiny line of code lying on his path. It looked like a shadow, or a smear, or the imaginings of tired eyes. Except that he had no actual eyes in the aether, and whatever the fatigue of his body, the Vizier’s mind was sharp and aware. He paused to examine the code-line. Faced with his full attention, it vanished.
He reconsidered his self-assessed exhaustion. Began to turn away, to step through another layer of aether—and spotted the code-line again, in the corner of his perception.
The resulting surge of adrenaline made his distant body twitch and gasp, and his face turned an alarming shade of red. The Vizier, unaware of the physical changes, heard only Rory’s alarmed, “Grytt! What’s wrong with him?”
And Grytt’s cool, grinding, “He’s coming out of it, that’s all. Make him some tea—that stuff in the green and brown box. Two scoops of it.”
A dozen aetheric steps away, the Vizier rose and backed away from the code fragment. He continued on his path. This time, he paid attention to the edges, where the turing’s architecture gave shape to the aether. Another code-fragment lurked in the crack. And another. Translucent from the corners of his perception, transparent when he looked right at them. Very, very tiny, like single threads. And, as he pretended not to look too closely—mobile, too, eeling along the borders, dipping into the turing. Following him.
The Vizier paused, while the kitchen erupted in metallic banging—cabinets, teapots—and the sound of running water, and indulged a surge of despair. Then he turned his aetheric head sidelong, and shot his hand out, snatching one of the code-fragments from its perch on a corner of mainframe, where the entertainment datastream ducked under the wide tube of personal communications. He pinched it between his not-fingers. Peered at its sequence of hexes.
Then he queried the turing. It insisted there was no fragment. There was nothing at all, where the Vizier wanted it to look. It suggested that the Vizier was imagining the fragment. It asked if he wouldn’t rather play a nice game of chess.
The Vizier sighed. Then, patiently, he directed the turing to find and eliminate any samples of code that looked like this. He repeated himself seven times before he realized that the turing was not being especially obtuse; it actually could not see that particular series of hexes, even if he broke them out of sequence, even if he asked for separate elimination of each portion of the code.
This indicated that a very talented arithmancer had overwritten the turing’s quantum collective at the root level. It also indicated several other unfortunate corollaries, the most pressing of which was the probable limit on the Vizier’s continued corporeal freedom and the measures which station security might take to curtail it, since he had almost certainly alerted that same talented arithmancer to his trespass already.
So the Vizier hurried back, faster than was wise. The nearest analogy might be jumping from a very tall bridge into a very deep lake, only backward, while inhaling water and hoping to achieve the bridge’s apex before he drowned.
It was, in short, exactly how an arithmancer was not supposed to traverse the aether.
The Vizier slammed up into his body with sufficient force to break several blood vessels in his nose, compress his lungs to empty, and bring his teeth together unpleasantly hard.
“Oh, look who it is.”
The Vizier grunted at Grytt. His head swiveled toward the kitchen noises, and he commanded his body to follow. His shoulders attempted to obey, thrusting his palms onto the desk and propelling him out of the chair. His knees mutinied. His hips simply ignored him, and continued taking up space between his thighs and his pelvis.
The chair squirted out from behind him, squealing across the decking before fetching up on the rug. The table might have bolted in the other direction, except that Grytt caught it on her thigh.
“Careful.” Grytt steadied him with her metal hand under his elbow. The Vizier had the impression she could have carried him if necessary. His perceptions, still stretched from his aetheric journey, marveled at the unforgiving metal fingertips, and the pattern his sleeves made in his skin where those fingertips gripped. He felt the tiny capillaries in the crease of his elbow break, and the slow leak of tiny bruises—
Grytt shook him, not a bit gently. He blinked back to himself, and found his eyes and hers uncomfortably close.
“Rupert. You’re scaring her. Focus.”
He squinted at the kitchen. There was a new smell layering the ambient. Something green, and bitter, and noxious.
“Uh,” he said.
“Tea,” said Grytt. “I had Rory start it, when you blanked out. Said it would help you. Don’t know if it will, but it gave her something to do.”
The Vizier blinked. He became conscious of something wet running from his nose to his lips. He probed at it with the tip of his tongue. Salty. Metallic. Red-tasting.
Grytt made a face at him. “Oh, ancestors. Stop that.”
She lowered him into the seat far more gently than the expression on her face indicated and dabbed at the blood on his face with the edge of her sleeve, ignoring his monosyllabic protests about staining the fabric.
“It’s black, Rupert, that’s why I wear this color.” She guided his own left hand up to his nose, pinch
ed his fingers together over the bridge, and squeezed. “Hold that.”
After a moment’s critical observation, she decided he could be trusted to follow directions, and left him. The Vizier heard her voice, pitched too low for comprehension, buzzing counterpoint with Rory’s lighter tones. He decided to take advantage of the moment’s respite to summon his scattered wits, give them a stern scolding, and send them back to their posts.
In the meantime, he rediscovered the fingers of his right hand, and sent them to calling up onto the turing’s screen the fruits of his arithmancy. By the time Rory and Grytt arrived from the kitchen, the Vizier had half a dozen windows stacked on the screen, each with a file already saved to hard memory. His nose had also stopped bleeding, which was fortunate, as he did not want to try to conduct a conversation with his nostrils pinched shut. He checked for blood and, finding none on his skin, nor in the immediately visible vicinity, rested his hands on the edge of the desk and hoped no one noticed their trembling.
The Kreshti ancestors may have been listening to his prayers, just this once. Rory, for all her perspicacity, did not remark on the Vizier’s unstable appendages; never one to ignore available reading material, she instead turned her attention to the contents of the screen. She leaned down, sending her braid slithering dangerously close to the teacup she cradled in both hands.
The Vizier eyed the steam rising out of it. He misliked the smell.
Rory hooked a nearby chair with one foot, dragged it over, and navigated her backside into the seat, all without looking. The Vizier, who had not yet reestablished speaking terms with his lower extremities, found himself a little envious of her casual athleticism. He pretended to lean back to grant the Princess better vantage; in truth, he could manage either that, or slumping; and as the slumping brought him closer to the noxious cup in her hands, he chose the former option.
“Who are these people?” Rory scrolled down the list. She paid no particular attention when Grytt came and stood behind her, except to note the gleam off her brushed metal skull reflected in the tablet’s screen.
The Vizier’s desiccated voice crumbled around the syllables. “Research scientists. An alchemist, a physicist, a biologist—”
“Oh! Wait. Here. I’m sorry. This is for you.” Rory pressed a teacup into his hands, filled to dangerous volumes and spewing foul odors. He looked past his reflection to the bottom of the cup. It was obscured by the silty sludge already collected there, undoubtedly from whatever toxins had sloughed off during brewing.
He sighed, and sipped without comment.
“Wait.” Grytt reached for the screen. Her metal hand hovered, unmoving, a precise quarter centimeter away from the alchemist’s name. The screen’s glow leapt into the cracks and crevices of her fingers, greening the metal where the gleam was brightest. The Vizier could just make out the mecha hex whispering to itself at the joints, and where metal married flesh.
“Wait,” Grytt said again, although the screen had not moved. “I know her. She’s one of the refugees. On Kreshti. She’s one of the people who asked for asylum. She’s one of the damn reasons we had a war.”
The Vizier nodded and swallowed his mouthful of tea. It tasted exactly like it smelled.
“Yes. So are the others. All of them were involved in cryostatic research at the same facility in Tadeshi territory, and all of them had their projects terminated by then-Minister Moss just prior to King Sergei’s assassination.” The Vizier paused for another swallow. His stomach muttered and shifted, like an old cat wanting nothing more than a nap in the sun and finding himself beset by kittens. “When I first discovered the connection—and I made your mother aware, Rory—I did not know that these researchers shared more than a physical location. I, and she, assumed they were the Regent’s political enemies, or otherwise inconvenient to him, and he was maneuvering to take them out of play, first by exile, and then by accusing them of regicide.”
The Vizier paused for breath. For once, neither Rory nor Grytt had anything to interject, and he realized with a quiet shock that they were waiting patiently for him to continue.
So he did. “It turns out, the researchers also shared a project: a type of cryogenic stasis unit, presumably for medical applications, with an obvious appeal to the commercial sector as well. I thought it was odd that Moss would scrap such a potentially lucrative project, and indeed, he did not. He appropriated it to Defense, after removing the original researchers and assigning new personnel. The records indicate that Defense has continued its development.”
Another pause. Another breath. The noxious tea had chased the aether chill out of his bones, which was pleasant; but its apparent intention to declare war on his digestive stability was far less so. The Vizier measured the distance to the lavatory against the obedience of his limbs, and hoped his stomach was more stoic than current impressions indicated.
Rory leaned in until her nose—entirely her mother’s, the Vizier thought, aquiline, on the lovely edge of that category—nearly touched the screen.
“Okay, so Defense—that was at the beginning of the war. What happened with the research?”
“As far as I am able to discern, it was relocated to the facilities on Beo, and there it has remained.”
Rory jerked so violently that her elbow endangered the teacup, clutched as it was in the Vizier’s hands. “That’s where Ivar’s supposedly stationed.”
“Indeed,” said the Vizier. “That does not seem coincidental.”
“It’s supposed to be medical cryostatic research.” Grytt frowned. “That makes no sense at a top-secret military base. Research of any kind doesn’t make sense there. It’s a training facility.”
“I concur. And the layer of hexes surrounding the data was far beyond simple security.”
Rory had sat back in her chair and curled up, arms wrapped around her drawn-up legs, chin balanced on her knees. She squinted at nothing in particular.
“That’s where Ivar is, isn’t it? In cryostasis. They’re holding him there, on Beo, in suspension.”
“Perhaps. Although I am hesitant to assign any certainty to that conclusion. We don’t know, Rory. He might be on Beo, in cryostasis or otherwise. But that does not explain the young man currently on Urse, nor does it explain Moss’s motives in initiating this alleged deception in the first place.”
Rory pursed her lips at the word alleged. The Vizier anticipated an argument: saw, in fact, the flash of defiance in her eyes. Then she blinked, and took a pair of breaths, and although the skin around her lips was tight, when she spoke, her tone was even, reasonable, cool.
“So why didn’t the exiled researchers tell the Kreshti about their project?”
“Perhaps they did not know what Moss intended to do with their research.”
“Or they didn’t want us to have it, either,” Grytt said. “They’re Tadeshi refugees out of favor with the current administration. They haven’t given up being Tadeshi.”
“Grytt.”
“What? You think that old bit about the enemy of my enemy is my friend is true? Bah. Just means you have more enemies. Besides. We wouldn’t know if they did tell. Not like the Prime tells your mother everything. Maybe the Kreshti do know about it. Maybe they’ve got it, too.” Grytt shook her head slowly. “Whatever it is. Rupert. What is it?”
“You are assuming I overcame the security hexes.”
“I am assuming you managed something for all your lounging around.”
“You mean, besides the information I have already delivered?”
Grytt glanced at Rory. “I mean—”
“I know what you mean.” The Vizier did not often interrupt; the event was so novel, it startled Grytt into quiet. The Vizier took a heartbeat or two to revel in that small victory. Then, as his stomach performed another maneuver better left to zero-g, he winced, sighed, and told the truth. “I was not entirely successful. Although I did retrieve the inform
ation, the probability is high that I was detected while doing so.”
Rory stared at him. Although her jaw dropped wide enough to liberate any exclamations of horror or accusations that he was not being entirely honest, no sounds emerged.
The Vizier gave her a small smile, in thanks, and inclined his head a finger’s width. “There is a very skilled arithmancer on the Regent’s staff. Perhaps several. Better, I fear, than I am.”
“Hell,” said Grytt. It was the mildest of her expletives. She then added to it with several others less tame.
As vivid (and anatomically unlikely) as some of the expressions were, the Vizier had to concur with their sentiment. He nodded at Grytt until he caught her gaze. “If I was identified, they will arrest me.”
Grytt made a noise in her throat that the Vizier decided to classify as a snarl, although it held more menace than any animal’s utterance that he had ever heard, including the Kreshti ice-banshee, whose aggressive vocalizations could actually cause the human neural net to overload, leading to a temporary paralysis (a very unfortunate discovery for the first film crews attempting to document its breeding habits, as was the subsequent realization of what exactly the ice-banshee eats).
“Well,” said Grytt. “They can try.”
“Grytt,” the Vizier began. He was going to tell her that her priority was Rory, that she could not risk an interplanetary incident, that the situation was fragile. What came out instead was, “Thank you.”
Improbably, that silenced her. She stared at him, her brown eye round and distressed.
“They may not realize it was you,” said Rory. She had lowered her chin until she was peering up from under her brows, as if she meant to head-butt the universe if it thwarted her. “Moss already suspects me of hexing the system.”
“It is more likely he blames me for that, as well. I do not believe he considers you a capable enough arithmancer. I also don’t think they will come here, since it is Thorne sovereign territory. Most likely, they will apprehend me while I am in transit to the embassy.”