How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse--Book One of the Thorne Chronicles

by K. Eason

  The Princess herself appeared unconcerned. Rory flicked the half-undone braid aside and leaned forward onto her elbows. “No joke. No game. You’re the one who told me that the best plans don’t survive contact with the enemy.”

  Grytt appeared to consider the classification of Jaed Moss as enemy. “You’re telling me you had a plan. Well. That’s something.”

  “I’m telling you Jaed was hostile. Charming him—which was the plan—wouldn’t’ve worked.”

  “And now?”

  “Now he’s agreed to cooperate.”

  Grytt chewed that information over, rolling it from cheek to cheek, flesh to metal, before swallowing it. “And that will explain why you’re hexing this turing?”

  “I’m not,” said Rory. “At least, I haven’t yet. But I do have Jaed’s pass-string.”

  “You have—” Grytt squinted through her flesh eye. The metal one, lacking an eyelid, whined in its socket. “We’re all going to end up neighbors to Rupert. You think his father doesn’t spy on him, too?”

  Rory smiled with the minimum possible number of muscles necessary for the expression. “No. And neither does he. But he’d like to be . . . unspied upon. So I volunteered to look over his pass-string for hexes. Which I found, and removed.”

  “And what do you get, in return for this labor?”

  “Another pass-string. Preferably the Regent’s. Maybe one of his Ministers’.”

  “Hm. He’s stealing for you, now?”

  “He is.”

  “Fascinating.”

  “Not as fascinating as what I found out with only his set of clearances.”

  Rory paused, for half a beat. Grytt raised her eyebrow. The princess added another pair of muscles to her smile.

  “The royal apartment is not drawing sufficient power for any inhabitants, unless Ivar likes it dark. Nor is it drawing any water from the system. Therefore, the Crown Prince is no longer on Urse.”

  “You found that out with Jaed’s pass-string.”

  Rory inclined her head. “Resource consumption isn’t top-secret information. It’s just restricted to government ministers and certain mid-level employees, which happens to include the Regent and his sons. That’s . . .” She glanced at the screen. “Approximately two thousand people, give or take. Besides. It’s a simple hex to make my access just now, with Jaed’s string, look like the third-shift clerk in charge of tracking water consumption in the first through fifth levels. The significant information is that Ivar’s not here. Nor can I find any records of a shuttle—military or otherwise—departing for Beo.”

  “If it was a royal shuttle, there may be no records.”

  “I thought of that. But there is a regular supply run that goes from here to Beo. It’s dependent on celestial motion and local atmospheric conditions. The last supply run was cancelled because of the storms. Nothing has left Urse for Beo because nothing can land on Beo right now. Not supplies. Not Ivar. So where is he, Grytt?”

  “How should I know? I can almost keep track of you.” Grytt side-eyed Thorsdottir. Then she crossed toward the portholes and glared out. Cherno had wandered out of sight, leaving only a carpet of stars and a great deal of unbreathable void to absorb Grytt’s scowl.

  “I suppose whatever pass-string you get from Jaed will help you find out where Ivar is. Is that the plan?”

  “That is the plan.”

  “And then what?”

  Rory shrugged. “Then we continue with the terms of our bargain.”

  Thorsdottir braced her hands on the counter, prepared for the mother of all eruptions. She was surprised, therefore, when Grytt did not ask, and in fact only shrugged.

  It was Grytt’s experience that diplomacy, which was a nice way of saying politics, was a lot like war, except the enemy could not be dispatched by a well-aimed bolt. Political methods, Grytt thought, were uglier and more damaging, particularly to the wielder; she would have spared Rory that experience a while longer, if she had been able, but necessity dictated otherwise. Grytt saw no point in fretting over it, or in asking questions the answer to which she might not like. She and Rupert had done their best with the girl. Best let her get on with it, and trust her to handle herself. She turned her attention to the kitchen, to Thorsdottir’s soup and the serving of supper. Soldier or politician, mecha or princess, everyone needed to eat, and she was hungry.

  * * *

  • • •

  Had anyone inquired of the Vizier his opinion of the multiverse’s sense of humor before his incarceration, he would have waxed enthusiastic on the subject, citing multiple obscure texts and authors, and very likely enjoyed himself. Now, however, confined as he was in a detention block somewhere in the nether regions of Urse’s municipal complex, he found his opinion distilled to the more pragmatic there is no bad luck, only bad choices, which he’d read on a poster in a professor’s office once during his undergraduate studies. He had thought that notion absurd at the time. Now, he was less certain.

  His choices had landed him here, after all, where here meant locked in a cell with a bunk, a sink and a toilet, and four blank, deliberately depressive bulkheads in dimensions just a shade too close to be comfortable. Through the single, small window in the door, he could observe another depressingly blank bulkhead across the corridor; over which lurked a single, obvious camera, a black globular eye that almost certainly had its twin in one over his door, and probably several less visible cousins besides. The cell had no ’caster, no terminals, no tablets. The guards had divested him of all personal belongings, including his robes, and given him a set of coveralls, just the wrong side of scratchy and the same color as his breakfast porridge.

  So his choices, he thought, might require a little scrutiny.

  In the first few days of his incarceration, the Vizier balanced his time between examining those choices and dreading the future. Rupert did not suppose Moss meant to torture him, exactly; there were statutes against that, to which every human collective, empire, kingdom, and corporation was signatory, and besides, torture didn’t work especially well unless the goal was to inflict suffering. While Rupert suspected Moss possessed the cruelty sufficient to order pain for its own sake, he did not think the Regent would be inclined to expend that effort just to hear someone scream.

  No one came.

  Rupert’s meals—the aforementioned porridge at what he thought must be first shift, and some twelve hours later, a sandwich of dubious origins, or a bowl of something edible with spoons (no knives or forks here)—arrived through a slot in the door (at the bottom, so that he must crouch to retrieve the tray, like a supplicant or a servant), and later departed the same way. He attempted once to crouch down and peer out the slot; he saw only a mecha’s chassis.

  And still, no one came to see him. No one asked him any questions. No one arrived to present themselves as his solicitor. He might have, except for the meals, been entirely forgotten. Rupert could think of at least three statutes to which the Free Worlds of Tadesh were signatories that forbade solitary confinement of exactly this sort, except in the cases of pathogenic contagions or persons so dangerous that they could be classified as pathogens themselves.

  Perhaps he should be flattered the Regent considered him such a danger. Instead, he felt unequal measures of self-pity, regret, and grim vindication. It had indeed been his choices that had landed him here. He could have accepted the offer for post-graduate studies in arithmancy instead of choosing the serve his Consortium, been a researcher instead of a diplomat. He might’ve managed to convince Samur to forego the alliance with Moss and to marry Rory to Larish instead, in which case the Consortium might have won the war with the Free Worlds (but, ugly but, Rory would be wedded to the Larish boy and travelling the void with the Larish fleet and he’d never see her again except by quantum-hex viewing ball). And of course he could have refused Rory’s request to hack the station turing, but then it would be her
here in this cell, not him.

  Grytt would have told him to quit whining, he thought. Grytt would have insisted he get off his sorry, narrow backside and do something. He wished she were here to tell him that, so that he could point at the blank bulkheads and the brazenly staring ’bot and demand of her how, exactly, he was supposed to do anything, should he beat things with his fists, like she would? And she would say—

  The Vizier blinked. She would say, Do what you’re good at, Rupert.

  So the Vizier attempted arithmancy.

  It was a small hex, simple, meant only to discover if there were, in fact, other auras present in the corridor (guards) or the other four cells (other prisoners) or, as he was beginning to suspect, if it was only mecha and ’bots in the vicinity. But as he closed his eyes and slipped past that first aetheric layer, he encountered—not unexpectedly—a layer of counter-hexes, not only on the bulkheads, the door, and the deck, but also woven thick in the aether of the cell itself. He could see them plainly enough, like a minefield of equations that would alert someone if he attempted to bypass them. He tried a deeper layer, and another after that (and so on, until he knew he’d reached his limit) with the same result. Then he withdrew into his body and the first pressings of a headache. At least none of the hexes was actively attempting to breach his defenses, which was curious, and a bit of a relief, since he had not yet thought to put any into place.

  So he did that next: laid a bulwark of hexes designed to deflect simple readings of auras, to conceal his own, to alert him if someone attempted to remove them. And then, no one having yet arrived to challenge him, Rupert made an attempt at the enemy hexes. First to brush them aside, and then, when that (predictably) failed, to counter them outright.

  To his credit, he managed to disable one before the rest converged on him like a swarm of angry hornets. The subsequent shock-stings of counter-hexes startled him out of his usual composure, eliciting a yelp and a short, profane expletive. Then, breathing a bit faster now, and sure he had amused whoever was watching the ’bot feeds of his cell, he dabbed the blood off his nose, settled onto his bunk, and laid his palms on his crossed thighs. Surely now, someone would come, and the isolated waiting would end.

  And still, no one came.

  It was at this point that Rupert realized the solitude was the torture, and that he was in real trouble.

  We will not linger on the details of the Vizier’s suffering endured in the subsequent days: how his mind, deprived of external stimulation, invented scenarios in which terrible things had befallen Rory, or—even worse, because they were even more impossible—scenarios in which he was rescued by Samur herself appearing at his cell door.

  In truth, Rupert suspected that Samur did not even know what had happened. Moss controlled the station’s communications, and so could determine what information left Urse, and he almost certainly would not send Samur a message, nor allow Rory or the Thorne Embassy to do so (or intercept one if they did). A ship might carry the news, but it would have to be going toward Consortium territory, and Rupert knew that Urse was at least two tesser-hex gates from the Consortium border by the most direct route. And even if she did hear of his plight, what could Samur do? He had broken Tadeshi law. He might be subject to recall under treaty and diplomatic immunity, but he could just as easily be reported dead in custody, or in transit (and what if Moss had done so already?). He was also not sure Samur would invoke treaty on his behalf, not when he had been so careless. Except he had not been careless: the hex that had eluded him on the Ursan turing had been first-rate, the sort of thing he wished he could have encountered in an arithmantic trade journal, dissected and discussed in theory. He had been out-hexed, that was all. It happened. But the multiverse has never been conceived of by anyone, xeno or human, as forgiving.

  As for other sorts of rescue, well. Grytt was too smart to use force on a station in which she and the guards were entirely outnumbered. He knew that Rory would continue to try to get him out by whatever means available to her. He did not hold out much hope that she would be able to do so. And so, given no alternative, he sat on his bunk and meditated in between fantasies of rescue and bouts of self-recrimination.

  Then, finally, someone came. Rupert was unsure of the exact day or hour—he had no way to mark time’s passage except by meals, and he’d lost track of those—but he knew it was more than ten days, and less than, oh, twenty.

  He had only a few moments between the pneumatic hiss of the door’s mechanisms and its subsequent opening to prepare. His mind leapt first to the certainty that it would be guards and that his time for interrogation had finally arrived. His heart, spurred by grim anticipation, galloped around the confines of his chest. He stood up, under some half-formed instinct that it was better to meet one’s fate upright.

  The door opened. A single individual stepped through the open gap neatly, quickly, and the door whisked closed so quickly that the gust of its passing disturbed the otherwise pristine drape of his tunic. His clothing was typical stationer, unremarkable in its style, though its superior tailoring marked the wearer as rather well-off. He bore no obvious weapons.

  An assassin, thought Rupert, and on the heels of that, how dramatic, followed by a conviction that the multiverse might possess, if not a sense of humor, at least a sense of the absurd. But then a hex attempted to breach Rupert’s own hedge of defenses. It was tiny and innocuous, intended to probe and map defenses rather than to breach them. After a few frustrated moments of finding no gaps in Rupert’s defenses, the hex withdrew.

  It was then that Rupert concluded the multiverse had a genuine sense of humor after all. The attacking hex had be so stealthy and well-designed that, had Rupert been beset by distractions (such as, oh, anything else), he would have overlooked it completely. But because he had noticed it, he had also noticed its basic structural similarity to the hex in the turing which he’d overlooked and which had resulted in his current predicament.

  Rupert gazed at his visitor with new interest. He was a smallish man, trim and tidy, possessed of a thin mustache and an even thinner pair of lips. Thoroughly unremarkable, if one were to pass him in the corridors. Rupert wondered idly if he had done so, and simply failed—again—to identify the threat. One’s attention just slid off the man. Or would have, if there had been anyone or anything else in the cell to look at.

  Like hex, like arithmancer.

  Rupert’s voice rasped from so many days of disuse. He hoped his wits were not similarly disposed. “I must congratulate you. It was an excellent hex, the one in the turing. I almost did not see it at all. Was it your creation?”

  The arithmancer (whose name was Ashtet-Sun, which he did not share with Rupert but which we shall reveal here to give us something to call him besides the arithmancer) gazed at Rupert with a combination of irritation and incredulity. “Yes.”

  “Then you are here to gloat, perhaps? Well. You have earned it. I am not sure how you managed to divide the sum of the first two variables without—”

  “I am not here to discuss hex-string theory with you.”

  “A pity, since that is the only thing I am prepared to discuss with you.”

  Ashtet-Sun regarded Rupert through narrowed eyes. “I told the Regent that this wasn’t the right approach to take with you. This cell. Solitary confinement. I said it would make you defiant.”

  In that, you are wrong, thought Rupert. The solitude had been well on its way to cracking him. Ashtet-Sun’s appearance now was an unintended boon for his sanity, but it also bespoke, well, something else, which he might turn to his advantage. Impatience, perhaps. Curiosity. Something that brought the Regent’s arithmancer here, deep in second shift, without armed escort, and if it was not vanity—

  Ashtet-Sun hissed through his teeth. Impatience, then. Rupert felt another sally against his hexes, another attempt to read his aura, which his defenses repelled. He waited for his visitor to attempt to break his hexes down
with force. That attempt did not come. Instead, the other man shifted unhappily from one foot to the other, as if the deck beneath his soles were growing warm.

  “My countermeasures remain intact. So how are you getting past them?”

  Rupert raised his eyebrows. “I assure you, I have no idea what you are talking about. I understand that response is cliché and expected in these circumstances. Nonetheless, it is true.”

  The reader may here be suspecting—correctly—the correlation of Ashtet-Sun’s arrival with the discovery that someone using Jaed’s pass-string was rooting around in the turing. Ashtet-Sun was certain that someone was not Jaed, since Jaed was not the sort to take an interest in water consumption in the Prince’s apartments. Rupert harbored no suspicions of Jaed, but he was certain that whatever had alarmed Ashtet-Sun, it was Rory’s doing, and the very idea filled him with dread. This man was a skilled arithmancer, and Rory was not his equal. She was going to get herself caught—

  Rupert gave himself a mental shake. Whatever Rory was about, she was succeeding so far. His visitor appeared to be in a state of some agitation, asking vague and unformed questions the way a man might if he was thinking aloud. He was also alone, without guards. That begged asking why, but Rupert already knew the answer. His work as Vizier had taught him the reading of people, with or without the corroboration of an aura or a convenient Kreshti fern.

  “You’re afraid.”

  Ashtet-Sun stared at him. “Why would I be?” he asked in a brittle voice that said that Rupert had gotten it exactly right.

  “Because if it is not me responsible for whatever is happening, then you don’t know who it is.”

  “Of course it’s you. You and that body-maid, somehow.”

  “You mean Grytt? I haven’t seen her. You know that.” Rupert gestured at the bulkhead, the deck, the overhead, the presumed surveillance ’bots. “Besides. She is no arithmancer.”

  “She doesn’t need to be. All that hexwork on her prosthetics.” Ashtet-Sun’s fingers flicked vaguely at his face and head. “She could be transmitting something. Or receiving it. Or hexed to explode.”