by D. J. Bodden
On a cross-shaped stand hung Gaius’s helmet and cuirass, both standard Imperial issue except they’d been enchanted and plated in gold. Some nobles thought it was a show of wealth; Provus knew better. The amount of gold the Svartalfar smith had used was insignificant. The target it painted on Gaius’s back, on and off the battlefield, was a trap many had fallen for, and few survived. The desk, a simple, foldable table Gaius had taken with him on his expeditions, stood to the side, out of line with both window and door to avoid making things too easy for an archer, mage, or gunman.
Gaius and Provus Considia had been cast in the same mold—so much so that rumors had arisen about Gaius’s relationship with Provus’s mother. Provus had closed the matter with his fists on more than one occasion. Still, seeing his uncle’s thick, curly locks—gray to Provus’s black—and the set of his jaw meant that Provus couldn’t entirely dismiss the suspicion Gaius was his father. His mother said it was just his grandfather shining through. Besides, they’d been step-brother and sister, not blood.
“Provus? I thought you were on duty today.”
“I am, Uncle. I just delivered the dispatches to Marquard’s Janissaries before they departed.”
“Then you should report that to the legate,” Gaius said, his face stern.
In spite of or because of the rumors, Gaius had never crossed the line between preparing Provus for military life and nepotism. “Yes, Uncle, I did. I ran into some trouble along the way and thought you should know.” Provus held up his bandaged left hand.
His uncle frowned. “What is this? Theatrics? Why didn’t you use a potion, or see a healer?”
“I gave the Health potion I was carrying to the man who saved my life,” Provus said, lifting his chin. “The rest was theatrics. You can be hard to convince.”
Gaius sighed and set his quill down. He waved Provus to a small chest on top of a cabinet. “Tend to your injury before telling me this story of yours. If it heals on its own, it will scar.”
“Weren’t you the one to say a few scars would build my credibility with the rank and file, Uncle?” Provus said, opening the chest and withdrawing a small bottle filled with red liquid.
“Not on your hands, idiot. You’ll make a fine leader of men when you can’t hold a shield.”
Provus smiled. He unstoppered the bottle, put it to his lips, and tipped it back. It tasted like strawberry cordial and reminded him of happier days at his parents’ villa, outside of the city. He put the bottle back into the compartment where he’d found it—his uncle would have it refilled—and unwrapped his left hand. The scabbed-over wound knit together before his eyes. A Health potion was minor magic, and even non-alchemists could brew up an admittedly less potent version of it, but he still found it fascinating. Grievous wounds could be closed, and damaged organs regrown. Some veterans, both lucky and unlucky, lost all their original limbs in the course of their career. And yet once a soldier’s soul crossed the threshold to Morsheim, no healer or alchemist’s magic could bring them back.
“Here,” Gaius said, holding out a wastebasket filled with torn and crumpled paper. “I’ll have it burned.”
Provus dropped the soiled bandage into the bin. Magical practitioners were relatively rare, and even rarer were those who could cast spells or debuffs beyond line of sight, but of all the materials used in spells—prized possessions, hair, nail clippings, and blood, among others—blood was the easiest to work with.
“Now stand and make your report, Tribune.”
“Yes, General,” Provus said, returning to his position before the desk. “I was carrying last-minute dispatches to Marquard’s Janissaries as they mustered at the West Gate.”
“You had no escort?”
“No, General. Legate Aurelius indicated the dispatches were urgent, as the Janissaries were to march at noon. I deemed it more expedient to move alone and on foot.”
“The content of the dispatches?”
“They were sealed, General.”
“A prudent answer, even to your uncle. And now the truth.”
“The seals were intact, even after the attack. However, I was able to find out that the Janissaries are being reassigned from the eastern road to Glome Corrie to a hidden camp on the coast, south of Wyrdtide.”
“And how did you know this?”
“The legate is more careful with his dispatches than he is with his maps, General.”
“Continue,” Gaius said.
“As I made my way to the gate along the Broad Way, I noticed two men following me and closing in. One was a scarred, skinny Imperial I took for a common thief. The other was an albino Risi. I decided to face them in one of the side streets rather than take a knife to my back in the crowd.”
“And they followed?”
“They did. I led them to a courtyard, on a side street. A dead end.” Provus smiled slightly at the play on words.
“Why not seek out the city watch or a patrol?”
“I believed they were foreign agents sent to steal the dispatches. A strong Imperial presence would have scared them away, and I wanted to talk to them.”
“Your service with the auxiliaries did you credit, Tribune. Your penchant for seeing foreign plots in every shadow does not.”
Provus stiffened. “And yet two common thieves chose to follow an armed knight into a cul-de-sac, General. Even an Affka addict would know better.”
Gaius frowned and looked toward the window. “You killed them?”
“No. General, if I may?”
“Go ahead.”
“I waited for them in the courtyard. The Risi and the Imperial closed the door behind them and spread out. I asked them who had sent them, but before they could answer someone slipped a garrote over my head. I was fortunate to get my hand up in time to avoid getting strangled.”
“You were trained, Nephew, and at great expense.”
“For which you have my undying gratitude.” Provus grinned.
Gaius grinned back. Even their facial expressions were similar. “So why didn’t the Risi or the other thief stab you while you were wrestling with the third man?”
“They were busy digging through the dispatches, but they seemed surprised. The Risi yelled, ‘Where’s the money?’ or something to that effect. I was rather busy at the time.”
“So they were idiots.”
“Yes.”
“And the third man?”
“Elf,” Provus corrected. “It was a Dokkalfar assassin from the Storme Marshes.”
Gaius frowned. “There are Murk Elves in the Empire, Tribune. Some even serve in the Legion.”
“There are far more of them in the Marshes, and he used this.” Provus pulled two bone handles linked by silver wire from the courier pouch. “May I approach?”
Gaius waved him forward.
Provus set the assassin’s weapon on the desk, then returned to his position on the rug.
The old general was silent.
“Uncle...”
“I’ve seen one before, Tribune. Do you know what this is?”
“I consulted one of the Legion smiths, in confidence. The handles are carved Dokkalfar femurs. They likely belonged to one of the assassin’s ancestors, traditionally used in blood feuds but not inherently magical. The wire, however, is a darkshard alloy, which can only be gathered by the Shadowmancers of the Storme Marshes.”
“It could be sold.”
“It rarely is.”
Gaius nodded, conceding the point.
“The wire would have phased straight through mail, or even a plate gorget. It’s an assassin’s weapon, the kind of assassin who doesn’t consort with street trash.”
“They were scapegoats.”
“That’s my assumption. He would have killed them with my sword once I no longer had need of it.”
“A hero’s death, for you,” Gaius said.
Provus shrugged. “I suspect my uncle might have had some choice words about why I’d let myself get cornered in a courtyard.”
Gaius nod
ded slowly. He stood, taking the garrote from his desk, and walked over to the large iron-bound chest, which he unlocked with a key that he kept on a thong around his neck. Then he muttered a few words to deactivate the wards. He lifted a wooden shelf out, placed the garrote according to whatever method of organization he’d devised, then put everything back the way it was in reverse order.
Provus stared at the wall behind his uncle’s desk. He knew better than to interrupt the man while he was thinking.
Gaius Considia sat back at his desk, leaned forward on his elbows, and covered his left fist with his right hand. “Why aren’t you dead?”
“I don’t know. The assassin had me off-balance and had nearly cut through my fingers. I couldn’t reach my sword. Then a commoner came out of nowhere and barreled into us.”
“He killed the assassin?”
Provus snorted. “I got free, killed the assassin, and the two thugs ran away. The sword still has the assassin’s blood on it; I gave it to your guards.”
“I’ll retrieve it from them. Who was the commoner?”
“I don’t know, General. He was Imperial, poor, and untrained. I gave him my only Health potion to stop him from screaming like a stuck pig.”
“He was stabbed?”
Provus laughed and shook his head. “He dislocated his shoulder when he slammed us into a wall. If I’d just waited, the debuff would have cleared on its own, but I took pity on him. He did save my life.”
“Odd.”
“Yes, Uncle. It’s the only part that doesn’t make sense.”
Gaius sat back. “What are your theories?”
Provus straightened. “My first is that a group within the aristocracy wants me dead. They would have the means to hire the assassin and the need for discretion.”
“Never underestimate the irrational, half-baked decisions that greed can inspire, Tribune. Corruption will be the death of the Empire.”
“Yes, General. My second theory is that a cell of foreign agents is operating in the capital. They saw an opportunity to seize confidential documents when I unwisely chose haste over safety and made their play.”
“Unlikely. I will allow for the possibility of outside influence, but the amount of planning required to disguise the murder as theft, down to the two sacrificial pawns who chased you into the trap, indicates everything was in place long before. Besides, as you pointed out, Legate Aurelius doesn’t take enough care with the information entrusted to him. You were the target.”
“Yes, General.”
“You make no mention of the gods.”
Provus shifted on his feet. “I find most problems have a simpler, more mundane cause, Uncle.”
SOPHIA FOUND HER BROTHER in a particular side chapel, almost a mile from the entrance. It was not a room her brother had built. Part of the reason the Empirical Library turned and forked was to incorporate the original data structures established by the programmers. Their memory allocations had been inefficient, but Thanatos had been happy to work his way to them, like a three-century-long game of Snake.
The chapel in question held the classes, functions, and variables that governed the Overminds’ behavior. It was an octagonal room with one entrance and two hundred-foot-tall and five-foot-wide bookshelves on each of the seven remaining walls. Each of the books was up to four inches wide and twelve inches tall and contained one or more iterations of error codes, exceptions, cost-functions, parameters, hyper-parameters, and starting states that formed an Overmind’s subconscious, fourteen or fifteen to a shelf, one hundred to a bookshelf. That was two hundred or more per Overmind if the shelves were full. The bindings and covers varied: Gaia’s came in every color and material, from patterned cotton cloth covers to sets of spiral notebooks tied together with twine. Aediculus’s shelves were mostly screw-bound sheaves of graph paper, interrupted by stacked poster tubes full of tightly rolled blueprints. Kronos’s were both the most uniform and the most numerous; black leather-bound codices with serialized titles filled every shelf from bottom to top. Sophia couldn’t see her shelves from the entrance. She had never seen them. She wasn’t allowed in.
Only two Overminds were allowed inside the Viridian software library. Thanatos went there regularly to run diagnostics on the system, but his access was read-only. Kronos could actually make changes to the files, but only in the event of a system-wide failure.
Thanatos was floating twenty feet in the air in the center of the room. He was a severe-looking man in what appeared to be his mid-twenties, with black, sleeked-back hair, sharp cheekbones, and a thin but solid black circle beard and mustache that made his already angular face look harsh. He wore a black, open-collared cassock he insisted was comfortable. Five open books slowly spun around him. Four were the Overmind of Time’s leather-bound codices, open and facing Thanatos, their pages turning on their own as he looked from one to another. The fifth book wasn’t part of the stacks, but one of Thanatos’s private logs. A quill pen floated and scribbled in it continuously, stopping only to dip into a floating pot of ink.
“Brother! I have need of you!” Sophia said from her side of the doorway.
The Overmind of Death looked down at her. “Oh. Hello, sister. It’s been a while.” The books snapped shut all at once, spiraled around and rotated spine inward, then shot back to their places on Kronos’s shelves. The quill went into the notebook as a page marker, the notebook tucked itself under his arm, and the inkpot capped itself before floating into his left pocket. Then he fell, robe fluttering, only to set down gently on his bare feet. “Are you well? What did you bring me?”
She slid the corpse to him like a shuffleboard puck, leaving black streaks on the floor. Thanatos raised his left hand, and the body jerked into the air like a puppet on strings. The body twitched and shuddered. Then Weiz Anaxios, Dokkalfar assassin and Sicarius of the Overmind of Balance, opened his eyes.
He jerked in the air and kicked his feet, but Thanatos’s power kept him stable a foot from the floor. His chest rose and fell. A rasping sound came from his ruined throat.
“Fascinating,” Thanatos said, stepping around the dead elf, head tilting this way and that. The notebook, quill, and inkpot floated free, jotting down words in tight, spidery script. Thanatos looked back at his sister. “This one’s quite rare, you know. A hero. Gaia must have tampered with him.”
Sophia stared at her brother with a passing moment of fondness. He had frank the enthusiasm of a child sometimes. “I need to know what happened to him.”
“He was killed,” Thanatos said, and the quill scribbled furiously. “Transverse cut to the abdomen with a straight-edged, spear-pointed short sword or long knife, and a stabbing wound to the back of the neck that pierced his windpipe and nicked his spine. He died in agony.”
Sophia sighed. “Yes, brother, I’m not blind. I need to know the context.”
“Oh. Well, first things first. Do you vouch for him?”
“What?”
“He seems to think you should vouch for him,” Thanatos said, turning the corpse with a wave of his hand. Weiz’s ice blue eyes locked with Sophia’s. His mouth worked open and shut like he was a fish.
“He was useful,” she said.
“Wonderful!” Thanatos said. “I think I’ll put about 250 back into circulation, to account for deaths in childbirth, training accidents, and bad luck. You never know when you might need a king dead.” He spread his fingers, and Weiz’s body was sectioned into dozens of fine slices, like slides for a microscope, which burned with a green fire from the bottom up as Thanatos converted them to pure data.
Sophia felt a pang of grief for her lost servant, but she squashed it. The chaos blooming in New Viridia was bad enough. She couldn’t afford to harbor conflict within herself. “The details, brother?”
Thanatos cleared his throat. “He had almost finished the task of framing Garrett and Mog for killing Provus Considia—I assume those names mean something to you—when a commoner interrupted them. That moment of inattention cost him his life.”
“The commoner killed him?”
“No, Provus did. He’s another one of Mother’s projects, I suspect. New Viridia is certainly getting interesting.”
“This feels too small for Gaia. What about Enyo? Could she have sent the commoner to interfere?”
Thanatos frowned. “A bit elaborate, don’t you think? She’s usually more impulse driven. Besides,” he said, his eyes distant, “there were no quests generated.”
“You wouldn’t know that if he was a Traveler. Only Kronos would. The privacy lock-outs would hide it from you.”
Thanatos blinked. “There’s a Traveler in New Viridia?”
GAIUS GRUNTED, DRUMMING his fingers on the table. “Any other guesses?”
“It’s possible the whole thing was intended as a ploy to gain the favor of House Considia.”
Gaius raised an eyebrow. “A triple-cross?”
Provus shrugged.
Gaius laughed. “I suppose we’ll have to see if this commoner of yours comes out of the woodwork. You’re dismissed, Tribune. Get back to your post before the legate realizes you’re gone.”
“As you command, General.”
Provus brought his fist to his chest and inclined his head, then backed to the edge of the rug before turning and leaving the room.
“You two have the most wonderful relationship.”
Gaius looked to the shadowy corner the Overmind of Chaos had spoken from. She looked smaller than he remembered, hunched within her robes. A cowl was drawn over her head, hiding her face in shadow. “You must be getting desperate if our bickering draws you out, Enyo.”