She knows she is supposed to feel shame at her debasement, but she is still alive. And if life were less dismayingly confusing, she could actually be happy.
The pale-haired catspaw of the conqueror’s All-Highest (the All-Highest who is now perforce her own lord) is the source of much of Yarisol’s confusion. That the urük routinely employ female mages is bizarre. That this one is high in the confidence of the All-Highest, and apparently a high leader of their Guild of Spies and Liars, is even stranger. But what the urük mage told Yarisol to do is strangest of all, and admits of no understanding. Perhaps one who was not face blind (like Yarisol) would know if this was all an awful joke, but Yarisol—who is used to being the butt of japes and pranks among her own kindred—can see no reason why the urük would wish to make sport of her so. To exsanguinate her unto death, certainly: she is their slave-of-war and her life belongs to them, to do with as they wish according to law and tradition among her kind. To torment her for their amusement, or to express their indignation at her existence, mayhap. But this…? She raises her chin in brief denial. Maybe I will understand afterwards, she thinks, then falls back into the comfortable repetition of counting mayfly souls as they snap through her mind and are lost to the road unrolling beneath the wheels of the speeding police car.
The car carries her away from the prison on the plain and joins a gigantic path full of cars and other, larger, vehicles, all flowing in one direction. They pass homes and labor camps—so many urük!—and gradually the greenery to either side of the road is replaced by more and more buildings, endless buildings, a sea of round-eared mana-less urük, more than she had imagined the entire world could hold. She loses count somewhere past eighteen thousand nine hundred and three souls when a huge, segmented vehicle running on cold iron rails whizzes past the side of the car-track, carrying hundreds of passengers so fast that her own speeding carriage might as well be stationary. Frustrated, Yarisol bows her head over her lap and tries to shut out their bewildering, ever-changing world.
When next she dares look up, the car has slowed and is wending its way through the narrow streets of a hive-city so vast it hammers her soul with the roar of a million minds. Terrified, Yarisol tries to make sense of the faceless torrent of life around her. The All-Highest who sought to conquer this chaos was clearly mad, she apprehends. This one city alone must contain as many lives as the Morningstar Empire, uncountable millions of urük swarming and breeding like insects! And the chosen of the new All-Highest wants her to, to—
They stop, and her keepers ruthlessly open the car door beside her. Eyes screwed tightly shut, head down and shoulders rocking, Yarisol does not resist as the constables take her arms and pull her out of their metallic oyster shell. They march her across an open courtyard, then in through a door that leads to a confusing, busy lobby area where a number of urük are engaged in tasks that make no sense. Many of them are uniformed, and their minds are all inedibly warded.
A succession of rooms, waits, and faces ensues. The urük babble at each other barbarously. Unlike most of the Host, she hasn’t bothered to pick up any of their speech. Words are hard and knobbly and don’t get on with her tongue at the best of times, except when she’s telling her servitors what she wants them to do—and none of them speak urük, or even the Low alfär Tongue, so why bother to learn?
Finally she’s brought into another room with chairs and a table. It’s a lot like the interrogation suite back at the camp, except her chair is more comfortable and there are fussy decorations everywhere. No windows, which is good. The door opens and two urük come in: the urük mage who was nice to her, and another. She doesn’t like the other urük. It’s a female with straw-colored hair like the mage, but there is no smell of clean blood magic about her. Instead there is an air of meanness, a miasma of malice, and a taste of ancient sorcery that boils and smolders around her head like a halo of death. She bares her teeth at the mage. Words are spoken that mean nothing to Yarisol. “Is this the one you wanted me to see?”
The urük mage pulls out a chair. “Sit down, Jonquil, please.” There is some meaningless chatter, then both the urük females are seated across the table from her. The one who reeks of ancient death and sorcery bares her teeth at Yarisol, who cringes. Is she going to bite me?
“Don’t smile at her, she doesn’t understand,” the mage says. Then, in words Yarisol knows: “Nobody is going to hurt you.” Her lips curl but there are no bared fangs. To the other urük: “Do you know how unusual she is?”
“I thought all the alfär PHANGs were male?”
“They are—except for this one. Who turns out to have some very interesting psychological test scores. Serious executive function deficit, face blindness—not just the PHANG variety—and linguistic processing anomalies: if she were human we’d say she had autism spectrum disorder. Almost all alfär have deficient empathy—they default to sociopath, by human standards—but Yarisol is different. What does this tell you about her?”
The straw-haired female makes faces that, if Yarisol could parse them, she might interpret as disgust. “I have no idea?! Except she’s got PHANG? I thought the alfär sacrificed all their defectives?”
“They do.” The human mage smiles. “So it follows that she’s not defective—or that she has considerable utility to them. But either way, her existence is an anomaly. Bears further investigation, wouldn’t you say? Introspection, even?”
“Yes, but while I’m sure this is all very interesting it’s not my department—”
“Oh, but it is, Jonquil!” To Yarisol, she adds: “This is the one I want you to take.”
Yarisol doesn’t nod, or smile, or hesitate. She simply reaches across the table and touches Jonquil’s wrist, as the urük mage grabs the woman by the neck and yanks a leather cord up and over her head. They are both magi and they move as one, with lightning-fast reflexes. The merely urük woman stands no chance. Her face contorts and her mouth opens as she tries to stand, but Yarisol has not been idle in the days since the urük mage came to visit her. She has consulted her colleagues, risking their disdain and contempt, double-checked her invocation, and prepared the Ritual of the Spies and Liars with precision. At the urük mage’s orders she has been permitted to feed, and to feed more deeply than the others. She has plenty of mana for this task.
And so she drinks again, but differently, opening herself to Jonquil’s memories and face and identity and name—the urük do not guard their true names wisely—and loses herself in the other’s mind.
After a fractured, chaotic period, Jar—Jonquil—opens her eyes.
Mhari anxiously peers at her over the slumped body of the other woman. “Did it work?” she asks in English.
Jonquil raises her arm and stares at the back of her hand. “Fuck me,” she says, her voice heavy with astonishment and disbelief.
“I’ll take that as a yes, it worked, not as an invitation, shall I?” the urük mage says drily.
So that was a joke? Jonquil blinks. Her donor is still out, lying facedown across the desk. Her thoughts race: everything is weirdly clear in places that were fogged before, distant and inchoate where once there was comfort and routine. She doesn’t like this newfound sensitivity to nuance much: it itches. “You’ve got to kill her now,” she thinks aloud, “otherwise she’ll tell—”
Mhari smiles. Yarisol wouldn’t have recognized the expression in a million years before she stole Jonquil’s memories and face, but Jonquil knows enough to recoil from Mhari’s venomous grin. “Think I’m going to let her off that easily?” Mhari asks easily.
“No! But—”
“Relax. This is all going to plan. Look at me.” Mhari peers at the alfär mage’s face. “Yes, that’s good enough to pass. You got it right first time.” Her gaze tracks over the stunned, unconscious victim. “Spin up a glamour and give her your old face. We’re sending her back in your stead.”
“But they’ll spot the substitution right away?!” Jonquil-as-is finds swerving in mid-thought far easier than Yarisol-as-
was ever could. “You want me to make her look like me? But she’s not a—”
“That’s stage three. First, you give her your old face. Second, I’m going to put her under a geas to keep her fat gob shut. And third”—Mhari extracts a tablet from her handbag—“she may not have PHANG syndrome yet, but I’ve got an app for that.”
FOUR
AWAKENINGS
There must be a law that civil service offices be as drab and unpleasant as it is humanly possible to achieve on budget, however much money is available, Gil thinks. The improvised summoning lab he and his co-workers have assembled in the basement of the GSA office building certainly supports the theory. It’s not that it’s cheaply and drably furnished: it’s expensively and unpleasantly furnished, conveying “we’re the government, we’re required to be miserable at work.” The widespread belief among some politicians that government can’t do anything right—that the private sector is always better—becomes a corrosive, self-fulfilling prophecy. Government isn’t allowed to be bright and cheerful, helpful and efficient. Thus, he and his teammates work in a windowless basement room with vomit-colored carpet tiles and a drop ceiling stained by plumbing leaks. To free up floor space they’ve pushed the original contents to one side, forming a pile of beige office chairs and battered green desks that rises halfway to the ceiling.
“Are you with us? Gil?” K.J., his boss, is getting twitchy.
He yawns. “Yeah, I’m ready.” He shuffles to his place at one corner of the red pentacle Big Al from Facilities splatter-sprayed on the carpet with an airbrush. “How about you?”
K.J. sniffs. “Let’s keep this on track. Brian? Mindy?” she calls. Middle-aged, dumpy, and as tightly locked down as a teacher from a tough inner-city school, she takes a roll call of those present. Half a dozen assorted government workers from the former Comstock Office of the US Postal Service Inspectorate, now scattered to the four winds but working for other departments—vehicle licensing, FAA, or, like K.J. herself, bedded in at the GSA under deep cover—they continue the mission. They’re the lucky ones who transferred out before the shit hit the fan. Gil has spotted a few of his former colleagues across crowded subway platforms or civil service canteens. They didn’t notice him, for which he is very grateful. The prickling of his ward and the faint green glow behind their eyelids tells him all he needs to know.
“Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here. Mindy? The printout, if you please?”
Mindy huffs as she steps over one of the spray-painted lines and carefully lowers a stack of laser-printed pages facedown on the floor, positioning it carefully in the middle of the grid. It’s the contents of a memory stick containing a series of photographs that dropped into K.J.’s inbox a couple of weeks ago, the day after Gil’s exciting and unpleasant trip to the library. Viewing such scans is not recommended. Opening the files on a computer with an internet connection isn’t recommended either. But sometimes there are advantages to working for the government, like having a wide selection of laughably obsolete office equipment to play with, and Big Al has set the team up with an ancient PowerPC Macintosh with a USB interface so sluggish that it took two hours to slurp a gigabyte of scans onto the machine’s whirring hard disk, and a processor so obsolete and weird that any modern malware that lands on it dies instantly, unable to even run. One brainless, non-networked laser printer later, they have a printout. The most difficult part of the process was stealing the paper without anybody noticing.
“Places, people. Let’s start.” Mindy steps smartly out of the pentacle—the summoning space—and goes to stand at her corner of the grid. K.J. peers at the screen of her bulky, trailing-edge laptop. “Interface has gone into safe mode.” She scowls furiously.
“Let me see…”
Gil bends down and peers at the bulky armored flight case of electronics that is connected to each corner of the pentacle by a trailing cable. “Here’s your culprit,” he says. One of the serial plugs isn’t seated correctly. “Let me power cycle it, and try again?”
Brian snorts quietly. Short, balding, and fussy looking, he’s the only one of them who still works for the Post Office—but not as an inspector. “Ten to one it’s just another variant Bible, with extra Apocrypha,” he opines, peering at the stack of papers on the floor. “Fifty to one it’s a history of the Rosy Cross, eighty to one it’s another joke Necronomicon—”
“That’s enough,” K.J. says sharply. “Let’s not get distracted, people.” She’s a stickler, which is actually a good thing in her line of work. “Gil?”
Gil flicks the power switch. “Back on. Showtime, folks.”
“Going live.”
The red pentacle begins to fluoresce, almost imperceptibly in the light cast by the buzzing fly-specked tubes overhead. “I’m getting—” K.J. pauses. “—what was that?”
Gil feels a ripple pass through the walls of the world. His ward stings him sharply, and heats up. “I’m getting anomalous thaum flux,” he says, reading off the LED display on the front of the repurposed spectrum analyzer that the Occult Texts Division used as a magical bomb detector. “How the heck does a copy of a copy get so hot that—”
“It’s external!” Mindy flaps excitedly. “Look, there’s nothing inside the grid! The paper is fine, the flux is coming from—” she trails off.
Something nags at Gil’s memory, a word on the tip of his tongue that will change everything if he can just give voice to it. “It was disguised as a history book,” he says, thinking aloud, “but a history of our country, nothing really ancient. Talking about—” The word slides into place behind his lips, muscle memory clearing a path for it. “Presidents.”
“Pre—” K.J. screws her face up. “What?”
“Presidents are, are—” He lurches. “I forget?” A dizzying moment of sensory recalibration. “No, something is making me forget. The presidency. It’s, it’s really important?”
Brian looks up. Green rectangles of light from the overhead lights reflect off his spectacles. “You’re talking about a geas,” he says.
“You.” K.J. points a dagger-straight finger at Gil. “You said a word. I did not hear that word.” She looks outraged. “And my ward”—her fingers rise to touch the plain-looking cross she wears on a silver chain—“it’s live! Ow!”
“We’re being blocked.” Gil twitches. “Better power down before—” There’s a loud click from the back of the spectrum analyzer and its digital display blanks. Simultaneously, the containment grid loses its fluorescent glow. “Shit.”
K.J. looks around. “We’re done here, let’s pack up and go, people. Go now. If the other side are standing watch on DC we just sent up a signal flare. Tear down and get out.”
Mindy grabs the manuscript, K.J. takes the laptop, Big Al unplugs the burned-out analyzer and carries it away. Within two minutes there is no sign that anything untoward took place in the storeroom, aside from spray-painted graffiti in the middle of the carpet. And tomorrow morning a crew of contractors is due to rip up and replace the floor tiles.
Gil leaves, turning over the word in his mind. Who or what is a President? he wonders—and, equally important, who or what doesn’t want him to find out? It’s a mystery, but one he and his team intend to get to the bottom of.
* * *
It’s the Thursday after the fire of unknown origin visited Crested Butte, Colorado, and Gaby Carson is eating a microwave meal in the WOCZ break room—she eats her lunch late on program evenings, then a serving of mac and cheese to settle her stomach right before she goes on-air—when the doorbell rings.
“I’ll get it,” she volunteers, before Glenn can scowl at her. (Glenn has sore knees and gets grumpy if he has to stand too soon after he’s just sat down: right now he’s clutching a full mug of coffee in one hand and a hard copy of the playlist in the other.) She pauses at the office door and eyeballs the security camera screen, then hits the button on the entryphone. “Yes?” she demands.
“Who’s there?” Glenn echoes at her. She ignores him. Lookin
g at the screen, her first reaction is that a pair of Blues Brothers cosplayers are visiting. Two men in black suits and shades stand on the front stoop. One is tall and skinny, the other short and plump: only they’ve got no hats and no guitars. One of them looks at the camera directly and for an instant she wonders, frightened, if there are eyes behind the Ray-Bans.
The short, fat one holds up a wallet and a badge. “Federal agents. Open up.”
They’re leading with a badge, not a battering ram, so Gaby buzzes them in. “Feds,” she tells Glenn as the door opens.
“Don’t give them anything!” he says frantically. “Fucking FCC…”
The Blues Brothers reach the front desk (which is unattended outside office hours), and walk past it. There’s something oddly disjointed about them, as if they’re aliens wearing human skinsuits. The tall, thin one addresses Gaby and Glenn: “I am Agent Smith. This is Agent Jones. We are here to observe.”
Observe? What? Gaby blinks. She hears a toilet flushing: Must be Danni.
“Who are you again?” she asks. “Why are you here?”
“We are from the Department of Homeland Security,” says Agent Jones. His voice is flat, affectless, almost robotic. Definitely Men in Black, not Blues Brothers. “We are here to help you.”
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