Last First Snow (10 page)

Temoc crossed his arms, unimpressed.

“Explain.”

She pointed with her knife. “That language defines the space where we'll meet.”

“We agreed to meet here. What remains to define?”

“Where ‘here' is, for starters.”

“These few yards of Chakal Square.”

“Ten seconds ago these few yards of Chakal Square were several hundred miles back on our planet's orbit. They've traveled even further relative to galactic center.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean, but the Craft only knows what I tell it. That's why we use circles. Geometry's dependable. Most of the time, a point is either inside a sphere defined by a given great circle, or outside.”

“Most of the time?”

“Geometry's tricky. That's why I added the spiraling language: to establish that I'm warding the sphere described by this great circle, as interpreted through standard fifth-postulate spatial geometry.”

“This isn't assumed?”

She looked at him sideways. “Standard fifth isn't even true on the surface of a sphere, but we define it to be true for present purposes.” The sun beat down, even through the writhing shadows her Craft cast. “Could someone fetch me water?”

He waved to a red-arm, who returned bearing a canteen. She accepted it with thanks, careful not to touch his hand. Frost spread across the metal from her fingertips. She drank until her lips froze the water within, then set down the ice-filled canteen.

She surrounded her first circle with a second, also open, to bind and limit the warded space.

“Why do some symbols fade?”

“They stay where I carve them. But I'm not always carving into rock.”

“Into what, then?”

“Notional space, where the ward lives. We don't compose a new ward every time we need one—it's easier to use pre-existing forms. Those lines connect this circle to a ward we Crafted decades back, which will remove us”—she winced as she sliced a vicious wound in the fabric of reality—“from the Square. This way I don't have to fight the crowd's faith directly. Instead, I establish that the space inside these circles is not part of Chakal Square, so your people's beliefs about the square will not interfere with us.” The last cut was always the hardest, when exhaustion dulled will's edge. There. She stood, and with a wave banished the dust from her trousers and reinstated their crease. “A drop of blood from each of us, and I'm done.”

He didn't flinch as she cut between his scars. The skin resisted more than it should have, but at last blood flowed. She caught it with Craft, a red globe in air, drew a drop from her own arm, mixed the two, made her blade long and curved like a calligrapher's brush, and, kneeling, painted the circles closed. Blood smoked and sank into stone. Beneath the daylit world, large gears ground, counterweights fell. Circle, curved runes, spiderweb lines, all shone for a glorious, terrifying instant.

Elayne didn't blink, but someone did, somewhere, and the light died. She crossed the circle, and did not stumble. After decades of slipping from world to world, one found one's sea legs quickly.

The rest of her business was mundane by comparison, concerned with format and food, security and the spacing of bathroom breaks. They ate after, Temoc and Elayne and Chel, a rough hearty lunch of roast pork and rice delivered by red-arms with the Kemals' complements. Temoc did not mention Mina or Caleb. Elayne didn't, either. They were present nonetheless, uninvoked, in the silence.

For all Temoc's scars and strength, she thought, he needed a ward of his own around Chakal Square, or around his heart, or around that courtyard with the cactus flowers and the screen windows and the boy who played solitaire in the dust.

*   *   *

After lunch, Temoc and Chel escorted her to the square's edge. They were near the border when the fight broke out.

First she heard the scream, followed by curses in Low Quechal, and fists striking flesh. Temoc moved, fast. Chel ran after him and Elayne followed, arriving almost too late to see.

A crowd pried two pairs of Quechal men apart. A boy lay between them, clutching his leg. Temoc's arrival shocked everyone but the brawlers, too set on their fight to notice. One took advantage of his captors' shock to fight free. His arm came around to strike—

And stopped.

Temoc had grabbed the man's wrist. The assailant's arm wrenched at an odd angle, and he cried out. Temoc caught him before he fell.

“What happened here?” Temoc said.

One of the men on the right shouted in Low Quechal, and pointed to the boy on the ground. Temoc replied, earnest, slow, calm.

Neither noticed the Wardens crossing the street, or the red-arms who blocked the Wardens' path, shoulders square, jaws jutting. Chel shouted, “Stand down!” but the red-arms didn't listen. A Warden drew her club.

Elayne moved without moving.

Shadow boiled from the ground. Solid winds thrust red-arms and Wardens apart.

Elayne tossed one of the red-arms six feet into the air and passed beneath him into the road. She blazed, grown large in glyphlight. The Wardens recoiled from her, and raised their weapons with the uncertainty of foxes before a bear.

She let her shadows fade. Frost on stone sublimated to steam. Sunlight slunk back like a kicked dog. “There is no trouble here.” She floated them a business card. “I work for the King in Red. A boy was hurt in an accident. Send for a doctor.”

Their blank eyes reflected her. A Warden wearing officer's bars recovered his composure first. “We need to see for ourselves.”

“Follow me, then,” she said. “You alone. The situation is tense.”

The officer waved his fellows back, and followed Elayne. A scarred giant with a red armband blocked their way. Elayne was about to make the giant move, before Chel grabbed his arm. “Zip. Don't.”

He stepped aside.

A rumble of distant thunder followed the Warden through the crowd. Temoc turned to meet him. “There is no crime here.”

“I'll judge that.”

“The boy fell,” he said. “This man shoved him by accident, and broke his leg. These two are his parents. A fight ensued. That is all.”

The Warden stepped past Temoc to address the men. “Is this true?”

Veins stood out on Temoc's neck, but he kept quiet. Elayne marveled to see such control so near to breaking.

But it held.

Wardens wheeled a stretcher through the crowd. Elayne did not like how fast the stretcher came—it implied the Wardens expected trouble. No one wanted to press charges with Temoc watching. The boy and his fathers went with the Wardens, and Temoc turned to the remaining brawlers with a gaze that drained color from their faces.

But Elayne saw the fear under Temoc's rage. This might have been the breaking point. A brawl between red-arms and Wardens would spread, and the whole square catch fire.

She took that fear with her when she left. And she took, too, a broadsheet she found near the fight, which bore an etching of Chakal Square beneath a blocky one-word headline: “Rise.”

 

14

In the heart of Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao's office pyramid, a golem sat in a steel chair behind a steel desk in a cork-walled room and sipped a mug of steaming coffee through a straw. False stars shone around him: light from the ghostlamp on his desk glittered off tacks pinning alchemical prints to the walls. Yarn and wire tied pins to pins, pictures to pictures: a bridge in Shikaw to a Southern Gleb tribesman bleeding out from a lion attack, the claw marks in the tribesman's back to a teenage girl in a floral print dress with white lace at collar and cuffs, her right eye to a reproduction of a Schwarzwald painting a century and a half old, some ancient family standing before a castle in the depths of a wood—three bearded elders, a small round woman carved from ivory, a young man in a billowing shirt with a smile bent as an old druid's sickle. And another twenty lines spread from that man, from the curve of his smile, some weaving back to Shikaw and the bridge, and others off to still more distant lands and interlocking wheels of yarn. Thousands of pictures, and these were only the top layer: more beneath, long faded, the string in some cases thrice rotted and replaced by wire.

In that cork-lined room, silent and swift, the golem worked. Four-armed, with its upper limbs it lifted newspapers in many languages from the stack beside the desk, and with its thick manipulators turned the pages. Lower arms, scissor-fingered, sliced scraps from their context: pictures, lines of text, a three-word excerpt from a breath mint ad. Lenses realigned to read. Every few minutes the golem paused for coffee, or for a drag from the cigarette that smoldered in the ashtray. Thin smoke rose from its tip to coil against the ceiling, a dragon pondering the paper hoard. Already the evening's work had yielded a four-inch stack of clippings. Shifting gears, pumping pistons, unwinding and winding of clockwork and spring, opening and closing switches, all merged into the babble of a mechanical brook through a metal forest. And underneath it all, always, lay the sound of scissors parting paper.

“Zack,” Elayne said from the door, once she'd waited long enough. “I have something for you.”

The cutting, and all other visible movement, stopped. The metal brook trickled on.

She walked to his desk. Dead eyes stared up from the top clipping. A woman, her throat slit. Elayne could not read the caption of old-style Shining Empire glyphs. “You can't add this many every night. You'd have filled the entire room with paper by now.”

A clock wound as the shield of Zack's head turned right and tilted back to face her. Lenses realigned for focus, and as they shifted she glimpsed the furnace inside him. “I edit.” A cello's voice, the music of strings made words by processes she did not understand. She was only a passing student of golemetrics, which required more dealing with demons than she liked. Not that Elayne had anything against demons per se—but her conversations with them often reminded her of a vicious joke in which she herself might well be the punchline. Perhaps the demons felt the same.

Zack hefted the clippings in one manipulator arm. “First cut, most relevant of the day's news. So I believe now. Initial processing complete, I compare. Lotus Gang execution, or Grimwald incursions into Shining Empire territory? Method suggests Khelids, Dhistran death cult from eighteenth century, though current scholarship indicates Khelids were in fact a cover for Camlaander occupationist priests' attempts to reconsecrate Dhistran territory to Undying Queen and Eternal Monarchy.”

“Or someone knifed the girl because she had something they wanted. Or was something they wanted.”

“Hence: editing. Does new content fit with emergent patterns?”

“Accept facts that fit the theory, throw out those that don't?”

A narrowing of aperture, for him, was a narrowing of the eyes. “A death may be a death, or early warning of existential threat or out-of-context problem. Nothing occurs in isolation. The world's doom ripples back and forth through time.” That last word a vibrating chord. “Did you come to mock my methods, Elayne?”

“I came to ask your help.”

“You have strange protocols for asking.”

“You'll like this.” She unfolded the broadsheet and held it before his lenses.

Clicks and realignments, scrape of a needle on a spinning wheel. “Simple propaganda leaflet. This political affair holds no interest for me.”

“An army gathering in the Skittersill holds no interest?”

“I have no defined life span,” he said. “Nor will you, once you shed that skin shell. We are both difficult to kill. The greatest dangers to us are dangers to our world system. Therefore we may divide all threats into two kinds: global-existential, and trivial. Trivial threats deserve no time or thought. This protest does not threaten the fundamental coherence of reality. It is of no importance.”

“What if it causes a demon outbreak?”

“It will not. Too many central decision-makers have nothing to gain from widespread destruction. Even if it did, such events can be contained—we might lose Dresediel Lex, but not the planet.”

“Accidents happen.”

“Accidents, by their nature, are stubbornly resistant to prevention. The same is not true of conscious threat. This demonstration may inconvenience our clients, but it is not relevant to my extracurricular work.”

“What if I told you someone had been printing and distributing these leaflets throughout the Skittersill, for free, since before details of our work on the old wards became public? That no one knows who prints them, or what their angle might be?”

Zack took the paper—a scythe-arc through the air, and it was gone. Her fingertips stung with the speed of its departure. The golem pressed the broadsheet flat and scanned its front page with lenses and knife-tipped fingers. The shield-face opened, revealing a forest of wires, lenses, and hydraulics. Eyepieces telescoped out for greater magnification, and secondary lenses rotated into place. “No further leads?”

“None.”

A toneless hum was her only acknowledgment. No nods, of course, while Zack was so close to the paper. Without moving his head—it gimbaled gyroscopically—he took a binder from a low shelf beside the desk, fanned its pages by touch, and found a section that seemed to satisfy. Only then did he retract his eyes and close his face. “Here.” He offered her the binder.

“Garabaldi Brothers Printing and Engraving.”

“The shop that composed this item. A family outfit in the Vale. Do you have other samples?”

“No.”

“Unfortunate. Unlikely the object of your inquiry would use a single printer. Combination of sources preserves supply, anonymity. Though anonymity requires effort. How much effort do you believe this person is likely to spare?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “What do I owe you?”

He offered her the broadsheet back. “Tell me what pattern emerges. May bear on my work.”