Book II. Chapter 120. What I want

“A Tremendous Success for Mrs Tess Egobar at the Magical Boxing Arena!

One mystery remains: who designed the revolutionary sound system?”

Ardi folded the newspaper and set it aside. Nearly two weeks had passed since Tess’s solo concert with her jazz band had thundered to a close before twenty thousand spectators.

Two weeks...

And throughout those two weeks, the capital never stopped buzzing. As far as Ardi knew, lines had formed outside John’s door. And not just other performers with far bigger names than Tess’s, all of them ready to settle for the lowest cut imaginable if it meant repeating her success.

The bankers came too, beating a path to John’s door in what Tatiana, the governess in the household of the Dukes Anorsky, had once called “shoes not meant for the streets.” They offered loans at unusually favorable rates, all for “the opportunity to develop the enterprise.” Not out of the goodness of their hearts, of course, but because a loan for such purposes would require John to grant full access for an audit. And hidden behind “full access” was something perfectly mundane: “we want to see how your sound system is put together and check whether we can reverse-engineer it.”

Ardi didn’t suffer from an inflated opinion of himself. If he had managed to build such a system, then sooner or later imitations would appear. Maybe without his homemade “multiple-space seals” approach, but something similar would surface all the same. The very fact that the undertaking was possible would send plenty of Star Engineers, more experienced and more knowledgeable than he was, diving into the problem.

This was, of course, far from John’s first time in a race like this, so he rubbed his hands with a delighted grin and counted his future exes. He’d have to pay off the loan by the end of the year regardless, and the line of musicians alone, at a rate of one concert every two weeks, already stretched not just to the end of this year, but the next.

The bankers, though, had to be turned away: the patent, sealed by the Crown, forbade disclosing its details to outsiders. If John had let anyone inspect the very equipment Mr Brolid’s future budget was built on, he would have been shooting himself in the foot.

Ardi himself had struck a deal with John: he would collect two and a half percent from every event that made use of his equipment in any way. And once the loan taken out to buy that equipment was paid off, Ardan’s cut would climb to five.

The same contract with Mr Brolid also obligated Ard to upgrade the installation once a year, and to train the people John provided so they could run the console in the control booth.

That last clause was Ardi’s own addition. Even for insane money, the prospect of losing precious time at the Arena every two weeks held no appeal for him. Especially since, right now, his work at the Black House was moving at a snail’s pace, and if everything went back to the way it had been, then... He might not even have the chance simply to be there at all, which made the option of setting everything up himself not much of an... option.

As for his modest percentage, Ardan felt he’d fleeced John badly enough as it was. The cost of keeping the Arena running wouldn’t just rise; it would go through the roof. Every two weeks, maybe not twenty thousand spectators, but ten thousand and up. The wear on the sewage system alone, and on everything tied to it, would accelerate until John needed not one caretaker but an entire maintenance crew.

To say nothing, naturally, of a personnel department, the personnel themselves, security, taxes, accounting, and everything else that ought to occupy the owner of a large, if entertainment-oriented... structure? You couldn’t call the Arena a theater; you couldn’t call it an enterprise in the usual sense either. Some new, comprehensive term was needed, but Ardan didn’t much care either way, and John hadn’t come up with one yet.

So two and a half percent (and a full five, down the road) amounted to nearly a quarter of the profit John was counting on. And yes, you could hold forth all you liked about how none of it would have happened without Ardi, but there was another side to it: John had believed in him. The building belonged to John. The equipment was Mr Brolid’s risk, and his alone. And whoever risks more gets more.

So Ardan was quite content. An average ticket ran twenty-five kso, and if twelve thousand five hundred people showed up every two weeks, that meant an extra hundred fifty-six exes and twenty-five kso a month in steady, all-but-guaranteed income (and with a full house, as much as two hundred fifty exes!).

“All but guaranteed,” because fewer seats might sell. But! But! John was already building castles in the air: changing the price, varying it depending on the seat, or, say, according to the performer’s draw. So the total could end up even bigger.

Yes, if the Crown hadn’t shut the patent down with its “veto,” Ardan might have made a fortune in a couple of years by selling the technology. And he wouldn’t have ended up in a position where, once somebody replicated his creation (and that was bound to happen; it was only a matter of time), all he’d have left was a ten-year contract with John Brolid.

Except that, for one thing, history didn’t deal in what-ifs, and for another, Ardi wouldn’t have made the patent public anyway, because it relied on “multiple spaces,” which he wasn’t yet ready to share with the scientific community. The reason was the same, at once simple and complicated: the tenth ray in his Blue Star.

The day he found a way to express “multiple spaces” without leaning on the tenth ray of the initial load, that was the day he’d think about writing up the research. And even then, probably not. Because he’d need “multiple spaces” to finish his “transmutational runic bonds.”

“Order forty-seven!” someone shouted from behind the counter. “Order forty-seven!”

Ardi glanced at his ticket, rose from his table, crossed the packed cafeteria of the Grand, and walked up to the counter. It looked more like the bar in a halfway-decent saloon. Workers in white aprons and matching white caps toiled behind it.

On days when scheduling quirks brought an unusually large crowd of students to the Grand, orders didn’t come out right away. The kitchen couldn’t keep up. So instead of food, the students got tickets and waited their turn.

“Your order,” the worker said, weary and a little indifferent, as she held out a tin tray to Ard.

“Thank you very much,” he said, and took his lunch.

Lately he’d begun allowing himself not just the free food that came with his stipend but also cafeteria dishes he had to pay for. The cafeteria didn’t rival the Pelican in scope, but it could hold its own against cafés and midrange restaurants.

Ardi had an entire young duck in front of him, roasted over coals and stuffed with wild figs. On the side: cattail roots marinated in nettle sauce. Especially tender and sweet in spring.

Incidentally, a year earlier the Grand’s cafeteria hadn’t even had side dishes Ardan could eat in peace, without dreading an unscheduled hour-long visit to the restroom. The menu had grown a little more varied only after the university got a new dean of the Faculty of General Knowledge, Senior Magister Stefan Dittmar. Who also happened to be a major in the Black House, and in its division tied to the Daggers, no less.

Whether he’d had a direct hand in it, an indirect one, or whether it was all one big coincidence, Ardi had no idea. But he wolfed down the cattail roots with relish and drank his slightly too-strong tea from Kargaama. The meal had set him back eighty-four kso, which was, essentially, an exorbitant sum for a single lunch.

“I’d throw myself off the roof of the Central Building out of shame.” The speaker was none other than Baron Zahatkin, laughing loudly enough to make sure everyone heard him. Still the same frail figure with narrow gold-rimmed glasses and ratlike teeth. A regular fixture in Great Prince Iolai Agrov’s retinue. “If a woman were keeping me, I’d simply refuse to live.”

“Mm-hm,” Baron Kerimov mumbled, glancing nervously at Ard.

After spending six months in the hospital and being left with health problems that would follow him for the rest of his life, he was careful not to say anything unnecessary around Ard, if he said anything at all.

“Any normal man would’ve done the same, my friend,” said Baron Shestov, a man of average build and equally average intelligence, with hair that always gleamed with styling product. Taking advantage of the cafeteria’s rules (which permitted smoking on the premises), he tapped the ash from his cigar straight into his empty glass. “But in the end, it’s a matter of basic human decency.”

For some time now, Iolai Agrov’s party had been lunching at the table next to Ard’s, with the great “whatever-number-in-line pretender” himself at its head. And these days, of course, they were joined by Tina Eveless: an exceptionally gifted elf in Ardan’s own Faculty of General Knowledge cohort, and no fool.

So...

“I’d drop the comments about humans and Firstborns,” Iolai said with a slight yawn. He had abruptly warmed to the notion of equality between the two races.

“Ah, yes, of course.” Shestov backed down at once.

Not that some revelation had struck Iolai, or that something had clicked in his head after that ill-fated night at the museum. It was simply that the one keeping him company these days, especially for the newspaper flashbulbs, was no longer Lady Polina Erkerovsky but Tina Eveless. An elf. So Iolai had abruptly changed his rhetoric. In public, at any rate, and in the presence of his new companion.

“When some citizen of the Empire has a mongrel where an honorable soul should be, the fault doesn’t lie in his blood but in his lack of honor,” Iolai declared, louder than the occasion called for. “To say nothing of stripping your own wife of her noble title... my distant ancestor would never have allowed such a thing.”

Ardan calmly ate his duck and gazed out the window. Star Square and the adjoining Star Avenue had thawed completely by now. The snow had given way to something that was no longer even slush but mud, trampled under boots and smeared around by tires. The street sweepers waged a tireless war against it, and now and then the fire crews joined in, flushing all the accumulated slush down into the sewers.

Spring promised to arrive in the city any day now. And with it, the race. After which Ard would have to pack his bags and head off on assignment. His third since joining the service, and unlike his solo journey to the Larand Monastery of the Sisters of Light, and unlike his visit to the shores of the Angel’s Tear as part of Major Mshisty’s group, this new adventure promised to drag on. And he’d be lucky if it lasted only six weeks and not a full two months.

Tess already knew, of course. They rarely discussed it, but now and then both of them would glance at the calendar and silently beg it not to hurry. Alas, calendars, like clocks, share one especially spiteful trait. When you want them to move faster, they all but freeze in place. But wish they’d slow down, ask them to stretch a moment out, and the hands of the clock spin faster than the spokes of a car’s wheels, while the pages of the calendar drop away like leaves in autumn.

“And that, my friends, is how the aristocracy dissolves into the ranks of ordinary citizens of the Empire,” Iolai continued his grandiloquent speech.

He’d been holding forth on the subject since before Ardi went off to fetch his order. Ardi simply hadn’t been listening to the pompous Great Prince. But even now, he felt... some small measure of gratitude toward Iolai.

A slightly twisted gratitude, admittedly.

Gratitude rooted in the fact that Ardan would rather endure Iolai trying to needle him, smear him, or somehow get under his skin than deal with mutants, vampires, demons, and that idiotic clutch and gearshift lever.

The race was drawing closer too, after all.

As for why the newspaper headline read “Mrs. Tess Egobar” rather than “Baroness Tess Egobar,” it all came down to tradition. A tradition rooted (and here Iolai hadn’t lied) in an old law the Empire had abolished more than a century ago.

In the old days, when a noblewoman married beneath her rank, that is, when a woman of high noble title married a man with a lower one, both of them lost their titles. If, say, a lady married a baron, then the moment they stepped out of the church they became... commoners, to use the language of the time.

There was a restriction on men as well, though a slightly less severe one. A nobleman or aristocrat could marry a woman of lesser title, but never a commoner. If even a baron, the lowest of the noble ranks, married a commoner, he became a commoner himself.

What’s more, where a woman merely lost her title, a man forfeited his right of inheritance (if he was the eldest son), every other right he held, legal and proprietary alike, and nine-tenths of his property, movable and immovable. The law had stood in the Empire for nearly four centuries, and before that, through thousands of years of Galessian history.

In all that time it had spawned countless romantic tales, and now and then even epic ones. It turned up, among other places, in one version of the legend of Princess Verensa, the youngest daughter of the Last King and First Emperor. If she married a farmer’s son, a commoner, she would lose her title of Great Princess, and every descendant of their union would forfeit any legal claim to the throne.

By now the law had long since lost all force. The aristocracy, out of habit, tried to prevent marriages outside their rank. And when one happened anyway, the press, by tradition, omitted the titles of those who had broken the unwritten rule.

“And perhaps it isn’t even a matter of honor,” Iolai pressed on, “but of cowardice. How puny does a man have to be, gentlemen, to skip his Art of War classes month after month and hide behind a rustling skirt? Though if the newspaper photographs are to be believed, I can’t say Mrs. Egobar has put much thought into what she wears. You’d think she was wearing nothing but a nightgown instead of a dress. Unbecoming behavior for the aristocracy. Ah, forgive me. Commoners are allowed that sort of thing. Then again, considering the state of her husband, or rather his complete absence, perhaps the Fatians did some damage to the brain of the celebrated Governor-General of Shamtur, if he lets his daughter carry on like this.”

Ardi looked at the photograph on the newspaper spread. Tess looked magnificent. And she’d looked magnificent on every spread of the Empire’s leading “heralds” for weeks now. Meanwhile, music stores had flooded the Baliero Concert Hall, which had bought the rights to press Tess’s records, with orders for new pressings. Tess herself had spent the last few days hiding in their apartment, because on her way to the Concert Hall she was besieged by reporters begging for interviews.

Even so, whoever took the stage at John Brolid’s Arena from now on, whatever price their tickets sold for, and even if, someday, they built arenas twice, three times, ten times the size, Tess would remain the first. The first to perform for an audience of more than a few thousand people.

And that was all in the future.

For the moment, though, she was not only the first but also the only one.

As for the reporters...

Ardan pulled an automobile catalog printed on newsprint from his bag. At once, the profiles of every conceivable product of the Empire’s endlessly varied, tirelessly growing automobile industry stared up at him, from the Derkses and the Shvenliks to the Entio, the model that Bazhen Eorsky drove and Lord Boris Fahtov was still waiting his turn to pick up from the factory.

This variety came down to several factors. For one, the domestic market demanded a constant expansion of production capacity, not just for work vehicles but for private cars as well. On top of that, the eastern continent kept the Empire’s factories flush with orders.

Urdavan and Skaldavin, of course, remained the chief importers of the Empire’s automobiles. Their climate, so like the Empire’s own, thanks to the anomalies of the Paarlax Field, kept cars made in Selkado and Castilia from capturing those markets. The countries of the “Northern Mainland” had almost no passenger-car industry of their own, for perfectly predictable reasons.

But over the previous five to seven years, they had suddenly begun losing ground, in percentage terms, to... the Confederates. There was one caveat, though: Castilia’s population was growing considerably richer, thanks to the railroads built through the mountains, the Zaphir Desert, the Kargaam jungles, and the savanna, all the way to the Confederation of Free Cities.

Cities grew. New roads were laid. The distances citizens had to travel kept increasing, and demand for civilian transport rose along with them. The Castilians built factories, but they built them in such a rush that the quality of their products suffered.

So the Confederates, in the finest tradition of their knack for surviving the brutal world of market economics, made their move. They served as a buffer for the Castilians. They ordered automobiles from the Empire, ferried them across the Shallow Sea, where they effectively controlled the eastern routes, and then resold them to Castilia. Along the very same railroads that Castilia was building at its own expense.

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The Confederates...

And if it weren’t for the Reverse Ocean, the Empire could have traded with Castilia directly; by sea, measured on a map, the trip took only a week and a half. Except the Reverse Ocean would sink the madmen’s ship before they realized what a mistake they’d made. All of it, once again, because of the anomalies of the Paarlax Field.

“And here I thought I’d started making good money,” Ardan all but howled. “Are these prices, or serial numbers off a production line?”

He and Tess really did need a car of their own, and preferably as soon as possible. Otherwise the taxi fares would bankrupt them. And in the Underground (as the residents of the Metropolis had now taken to calling it for short), it wasn’t just the newshounds who gave Tess no breathing room anymore, but ordinary people too. Her photograph had claimed every front page far too often and for far too long.

“The Derks, model Itop-43.” Ardi ran his pencil down the catalog. “Six hundred ninety-nine exes. And that’s a Derks! The Shvenlik, model Sams-17. One thousand one hundred ninety-nine exes. And come winter, every one of them will be languishing under a blanket. And a model with winter engines...”

Ardi flipped the page, and this time he was ready to howl.

“Anaklov and Partners, model Aktok-6... What is it with these models, all named from bits of the designers’ surnames plus a serial number...” Ardan underlined another price tag. “One thousand nine hundred ninety-nine exes. Then how come all of New City is so jammed with cars you can’t squeeze through?!”

Ardan could answer his own question right away. There was also the used-car market, where you could pick up an older model for far less than a brand-new one. But if Star and Non-Star engineering agreed on anything, it was the quality of their products.

Endlessly resurrecting some old clunker with wrenches, screwdrivers, and a hammer might be good for the nerves (if you believed Boris), but it was a losing proposition once you counted the hours. Every hour Ardan spent nursing an elderly car back to life was an hour he couldn’t put toward his research, which meant that in the long run he’d lose out to his own penny-pinching.

As for new cars, you could get a bank loan for one these days. Loans used to be issued only for work vehicles and only to big companies, but just a couple of years ago the banks had started offering interest-bearing loans to ordinary citizens too.

And so the cities filled up with cars the way a forest fills with mushrooms after a rain.

But taking out a loan for a car...

After several months with the pharmacy’s bank debt hanging over him, Ardan did not exactly want to put himself through that particular discomfort again. Metaphorically speaking.

“Thoughts for tomorrow.” For the umpteenth time, Ardan rolled up the catalog and tucked it back into his bag.

As if looking at it several times a day could change anything. As if the price tags might tire of his nitpicking, which reeked of the cloying cologne of Timofey Polskih (the greatest miser in all of Foothill Province), and shave off the last digit.

According to Tess, Arthur “Dandy” Belsky had promised to provide a car and a driver for her rehearsals and performances at the Baliero Concert Hall. Especially since tickets to her upcoming performances were now being snapped up... before the performances themselves were even announced.

Apparently, with demand running wild, the box offices had cooked up some sort of “pre-order” system, or something along those lines.

But it wasn’t as if Tess left the house only for the Concert Hall! So they would have to buy a car one way or another. And Ardan might well have spent all his savings right here and now, especially since he’d already stocked up for his research: the accumulators he’d bought, along with paper, ink, and tools, including an adding machine and several pricey research volumes, but...

“The Brotherhood of Tazidahian and the Kingdom of Urdavan, under the Charter of the North, announce the start of construction on a joint military shipyard in Whale Bay.”

Ardan didn’t want to be caught without exes in his account if things went sideways. Of course, the last thing he wanted was for anything to go sideways, but then his mind went back to the drive with Arkar out to Ordargar’s estate. Sometimes, no matter what choices a man made in his life, the big things were decided for him.

Ardi wiped his mouth and leaned heavily on his staff. After what he’d done at the Arena, his leg had started aching more than usual. As if in mockery, reminding him that he still didn’t recover as quickly as he once had.

Passing Iolai’s table, Ardan heard the tongue of the elves of the northern forests.

“Only a true coward would talk about his own wife in that tone,” Eveless said without even glancing his way.

“Only a simpleton reacts to a fool’s babbling,” Ardan countered calmly with a well-known elven proverb, and just as calmly walked out through the cafeteria doors.

Through the slowly closing doors, Ard’s inhuman hearing caught the exchange.

“What were you two talking about, Tina?”

“He called you a fool, Iolai.”

Oh, so the Great Prince and the elf were on a first-name basis now? And judging by the sharp screech of chair legs scraping the tile, the Great Prince had shot to his feet. But Ardan was already out of sight, walking up to the elevators.

Ardan glanced longingly at the stairs, steeled himself, and addressed the attendant in a scarlet jacket styled after a military uniform.

“The Library.”

His last lecture of the day, Star Healing Arts, was still an hour off, so Ard hurried to make use of a Faculty of General Knowledge privilege. Free access to the Library and a desk of his own. What could be better?

* * *

Perhaps better still would have been solitude among the books he’d requested, already stacked along the wall in veritable pre-Imperial towers (Ardan had claimed a desk in the farthest corner of the vast labyrinth of books). But the dream of the Sleeping Spirits had other plans for him.

A woman sat at his desk, as if she’d known Ardan himself would soon be arriving. Although... why “as if”?

Perhaps his unexpected visitor really had known in advance...

There she sat, among the towers of books Ard had requested, in a plain, full skirt and a slightly worn knit sweater, soft azure and patterned with wildflowers. Forty, maybe a little older.

Her chestnut hair was piled into an odd, voluminous style that resembled an upside-down strawberry, and she was reading one of Ard’s books, now and then giving a careless tug at the cloak that hung awkwardly on her.

A black cloak...

The woman herself was short, just shy of 160 centimeters. And yet her cheeks glowed with a youthful scarlet flush. Though maybe that had to do with her ample build. No, no, she didn’t look fat or heavy at all. More like... solid. Or soft. Cozy, somehow. Or was that just the sweater?

A simple thing, but made with care, flaws and all. The woman had clearly knitted it herself. Her sweater, that is.

“Good afternoon, Grand Magister Emergold,” said Ardan, tightening his grip on his staff and, without quite meaning to, touching his grimoire.

His gaze slid down to his fingers. Sensibly enough, Ardi always took off his accumulator rings before stepping down from the tram’s running board at Star Square. Where would a Faculty of General Knowledge student get military accumulators, after all?

“Good afternoon, Mr Egobar,” replied one of Aror’s twelve disciples without turning to face him, a woman who, at that moment, was nearing her two hundred and fifth birthday.

Ardan didn’t dare move from where he stood. And it wasn’t a matter of her monstrous epaulettes at all. Six points, eight, eight again... eight once more, five, and two. Over the past year and a half, and then some, Ard had come to grasp, far better and far more concretely, the unthinkable power hidden behind regalia like hers. But no, his hesitation didn’t lie in the epaulettes.

It lay in how finely a Star Mage who had lived for two centuries could hone her craft. And even if Velena Emergold, Head Librarian of the Imperial Magical University and great-aunt of Thea Emergold, who was famous for her act of defiance, had never specialized in the Art of War, well... over two hundred years, sheer time alone could have brought her, if not to Aversky’s level, then somewhere close behind him.

In other words, at that moment Ardan had become, to put it in Arkar’s parlance, a “little half-man.” Simply because his entire life now hung on Velena Emergold’s mood. And in a situation like that, Ardi was glad they lived in a secular Empire and not a magocracy, where strength, rather than a constitution, laws, and the state’s monopoly on violence, decided who ruled.

“I seem to recall you saying you had no intention of ever meeting me again.” Ard was thinking back to their first and only conversation.

Velena closed the book, set it aside, and turned halfway around. She looked... surprised.

“Now why would that be, Ard?” she asked... in a perfectly normal voice, one that held no threat at all, veiled or open.

Ardi remembered their meeting.

“And remember, too, that by no means all of Aror’s surviving students are as restrained as I am. So, for your own good, do your best never to cross paths with them. And now, please, let us proceed to the exit. You’ve received what you came for, and with that, any justification for your presence here is at an end.”

Ah, right. Grand Magister Emergold had never said anything of the sort directly. Ardan himself had drawn the conclusion that Aror’s student, who clearly harbored less-than-warm feelings for his great-grandfather, no longer wished to see him.

“I’ll admit,” Miss Emergold said, taking off her glasses and wiping them... on the hem of her sweater, “your visit caught me off guard and made me remember things I would rather not remember. But you, thankfully, are not Aror. And I, alas, am far too old by now to try to take it out on you.”

“But we haven’t seen each other in a year and a half!”

Velena smiled the way only a two-hundred-year-old woman can smile. As though the very memory of memory were smiling at him.

“My dear Ard, some go through six years as students and four years of Magister training without meeting me even once.” Velena settled the glasses back on her nose and carefully adjusted them at the bridge. “Alas, I’m not particularly fond of idle chatter, and over those same two hundred years, I seem to have run out of things to say.”

Even so, Ardan was in no hurry to move. If he was being completely honest, he was still weighing the idea of turning on his heel and bolting back to the elevators as fast as his legs would carry him.

“Have a seat, Ard.” Velena patted his chair; the Grand Magister herself was sitting in one that had not been there the day before. “No sense standing around. Especially with that leg of yours, and in your... delicate condition. Oh. That came out sounding rather ambiguous, don’t you think? As if you were pregnant.”

Velena Emergold’s manner of speech was as strange as it had been at their first meeting. As if, in the middle of a conversation, she was dwelling on some private thought, and only at the very last moment before speaking did she surface from it long enough to shape the words.

And of course, Velena Emergold knew what went on in the Black House. Maybe not all of it, but enough to know about Ard’s leg and his calculations involving the Paarlax Field.

How could he be so sure?

Because she was holding a sheet of paper, and Ardi recognized his own handwriting on it. The very sheet His Imperial Majesty had carried off with him.

Ardan sighed, leaned his wooden staff against the Grand Magister’s staff, made of Ertalain alloy, and sat down at the table.

“Good math, Ard.” Miss Emergold waved the sheet, then tucked it into a thick folder whose title said it all: Methods of Long-Range Communication. “That’s what a fresh pair of eyes will do for you. We had these formulas in front of us for decades and looked straight past the obvious.”

She was apparently talking about the research of Palada Angova, Grand Magister of Star Engineering and, on top of that, rector of the Grand. Grand Magister Paarlax had built on her research to discover the Ley Field.

“Thank you, Grand Magister,” Ardan said.

Miss Emergold smiled again. A simpler smile this time. Perhaps that was how grandmothers smiled at their grandchildren; Ardi had never seen it himself, but he’d heard it described in his grandfather’s stories. And the description fit what Velena had just shown him.

Velena...

Somehow, even thinking of a two-hundred-year-old Black Mage and Grand Magister “by her first name” felt uncomfortable.

“But I’m afraid we really will stop seeing each other soon. And not because I feel uneasy around you, Ard,” the Grand Magister went on, turning slightly away from Ardan but not breaking eye contact. “You resemble him. Not in your build, your face, or even your eyes. It’s more... the look itself.”

“You have the same look in your eyes as Aror did, Mr. Egobar.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Ardan said with a nod.

Miss Emergold’s smile dimmed a little.

“And believe me, it brings me no more comfort than it brings you,” Ardi added, to clear things up.

He remembered a good-natured old man who’d loved fairy tales, mountain air, and strong, unprintable little words. That was a man Ardi wouldn’t have minded being compared to. But Emergold was talking about a different Aror entirely, one whom, thank the Sleeping Spirits, Ardan had never known.

“Sometimes we don’t choose the way we look at the world, Ard. Sometimes life chooses it for us...” she said quietly, then went on, much louder. “Today I’m here as a messenger, Ard.”

She pulled another sheet from her folder. A standard confidentiality form, the kind Ard had already signed several dozen of.

“Your autograph, please,” the Grand Magister said.

Ardan took a small bottle of ink and a pen from his bag, licked the iron nib, and dashed off his signature then and there. Standard procedure.

“Thank you,” the Grand Magister said, and slipped the sheet back into the folder. “Soon, my dear Ard, I’ll have to leave the Metropolis. And go... honestly, I don’t even know where. We weren’t told. Not even those of us with the highest clearance. I know that for a fact, because I have that clearance. Or did I sign a confidentiality form about having Imperial-level security clearance? Honestly, I don’t remember.”

Ardan said nothing. This hardly seemed like a conversation that required any comment from him. Then again, he hadn’t even known such a thing existed: Imperial secrecy.

“His Imperial Majesty is assembling a research group. It will be under the Black House’s oversight, naturally,” the Grand Magister continued. “The offer has gone out to the brightest and... most trustworthy minds in the country. For now, only to the first names on the list. But if we have some initial success, then... I’m afraid that next year, you may well find yourself with a new Star Engineering instructor.”

“Professor Convel?” Ardan asked.

Miss Emergold nodded.

“Young Erik is hardly one to turn down... oh. Though to you, I suppose, he isn’t young at all.” The Grand Magister caught herself. “It makes no difference, in any case. When this offer reaches him, or if it does, he’s not likely to refuse.”

Once again, Ardan said nothing. That was the best strategy for dealing with the powers that be, and it had never once let him down.

“The rest don’t even know what the offer entails.” The Grand Magister laid a plump palm over the folder, hiding its title. “They’re simply invited to work on the project of the century in the utmost secrecy. Some agree. Some don’t. Those who do leave with their families and go off to... forgive me, I don’t know myself.”

Even the destination was classified? Remarkable... And given the scale of the thing, seeing as even Professor Convel might be headed there, they had to be talking about hundreds of scholars. One makeshift field camp wasn’t going to cut it.

“Would you like to join, Ard?”

Ardan started, caught off guard.

“I’m sorry, Madam Grand Magister?”

“Come with me,” Velena Emergold clarified. “I’m offering you a place in my own research group. The Crown’s pay is more than generous, Ard. Seven hundred exes a month for research staff, plus bonuses, room, and board. And another hundred and fifty exes for each member of your family. So Mrs. Egobar won’t feel the pinch.”

Ardan nearly choked at the figures. Almost a thousand exes a month? But factor in even a hundred scholars... And the Empire, with the ex pegged to Ertalain, couldn’t simply print more money. Issuing currency, as far as Ardan understood from his lectures at the Grand, was a fiendishly complicated process.

Had the Crown dug up buried treasure somewhere? Or had the trial ended, giving the Crown access to Trevor Man’s accounts?

“But my service...”

“This offer comes from Pavlusha... oh, forgive me.” The Grand Magister caught herself. “From His Imperial Majesty. Your service would be put on hold. Should you wish it later, and demonstrate success, you’d be offered an honorable discharge, with an early promotion to captain in recognition of your service record. And you could continue your studies by auditing courses alongside the brightest minds in the country... at least the ones who accept the offer.”

An honorable discharge meant a larger pension. And the larger pension of a Second Chancery captain came to even more than the salary of a Second Chancery captain still on active duty. It might seem foolish, but all too often such pensions were granted to the officers’ families. That was because a great many in the Black House left the service not because they had grown old or served their time, but because they had met the Eternal Angels.

“I’m not—”

“Think it over, Ard. Think it over,” the Grand Magister interrupted him again. “You have until the end of next week. Then I leave. And my offer goes with me. But do think about it. No more of those... peculiarities of your service. An office with a fine view. Fresh air. A little house of your own, for you and your lovely wife. Medical care. Meals. And, of course,” Mrs. Emergold said, patting the folder again, “the chance to continue your research. I won’t promise you a laboratory of your own, not yet, but who knows... And better still, you’ll be able to continue that other research of yours as well. I confess, I don’t doubt for a moment that it exists.”

Ardan would have liked to say that he’d found the strength to refuse at once. That he’d immediately put the fight first, the fight against that clawed, hungry darkness scratching at their door. But one simple, utterly obvious thought had lodged itself in his head.

What if... what if he could do far more for that fight by joining the research into Methods of Long-Range Communication, a project the Crown meant to pour a century’s fortune into? What if his greatest help, his greatest contribution, lay precisely there, and not on bloodied streets, on fields plowed up by gunpowder and magic, or in the ghastly, stomach-turning papers of Driba and Tazidahian?

And Tess... she had suggested he leave, after all. To Alcade. And that had been before the performance that made her dream come true. Maybe now she... No. Ardan had to ask. Besides, after the performance at the Arena, Tess’s opinion might have changed.

“I’ll have to talk it all over with my wife.” Ard’s voice came out far less certain than he would have liked.

The Grand Magister smiled once again, but this time with her eyes alone.

“You have a kind heart, Ard,” said Mrs Emergold. For a moment her hand drifted toward his chest; then she caught herself. “As I said, you have time. If you should decide to accept the offer, just leave a note at the book-orders counter with the word ‘agreed.’ And now I’ll leave you to your books. Good day, Mr Egobar. And, honestly, to my own surprise, I mean this sincerely: I hope we meet again soon.”

She truly did mean it.

Grand Magister Velena Emergold collected the folder and her staff and withdrew into the depths of the library.

Ardan was left alone with the books, which he never did touch. And as for the lecture, he never made it there either.

* * *

Passersby didn’t just glance sideways at Ard; they stared, dumbfounded. He paid them no attention at all. Pants rolled up, shoes and socks off, he had lowered his feet into the icy water of the Markov Canal and was peering at his own reflection.

Anyone else would have gotten frostbite by now, but in the three hours that had passed, Ardi hadn’t felt so much as a hint of discomfort. A sliver of the Ices and Snows lived inside him, along with something like black water, icy and dark, floes drifting over its surface. The canal’s cold didn’t bother him in the least.

If anything, it was the opposite.

His staff and grimoire lay across his knees. Overhead, a streetlamp had been flickering for some time now. It winked at him comically, throwing a huge pancake of soft, warm light across the embankment. Cars droned past, throaty, even smug; having shaken off their winter sleep, they now showed off their lacquered flanks like models on a Baliero runway.

Passersby rustled along in their coats, each competing to look more important and exalted than the next, but the moment they splashed into some nasty little slush puddle, they invariably lost their swagger on the spot.

And Ardan sat and watched the ice floes drift by. Off to somewhere, for some reason. They reminded him of the cattle herds on the distant Polskih farm. It felt distant now, less because of the miles he had walked than because of everything that separated him from Evergale.

He sat and watched the floes.

His heart was beating. So fast. So ragged. So maddeningly loud that at times it made Ard sick. His stomach churned. Cold, clammy sweat broke out across his back.

A car pulled up nearby. A familiar voice grunted. Another familiar scent reached him as someone opened the trunk and hauled out a folding wheelchair.

“Hey, Magister, did they shut off your water at home, or do your feet just sweat that bad?”

Ardan turned around. Nearby, at the top of the granite steps leading up from the little pier to the embankment, stood three people. Ursky, in his ever-present bandana, the one that hid his Armondo tribal tattoos. Beside him was Din Arnson in a plain cap, the kind fashionable among factory and mill workers. His hands steadied the wheelchair where Milar sat resting.

“What’s wrong... Ardi?” Din asked. He looked Ard in the eye, worry plain in his voice.

“What happened?” Ursky rumbled. His voice was heavy as he lowered his hands to the rivets that fastened his brass knuckles to his belt.

“Ardi?” was all Milar said. “Are you all right?”

His heart was pounding so fast.

How... how afraid he was. For the first time since he’d woken in Ergar’s cave, Ardan felt such fear that he couldn’t even breathe. And for the first time since he’d realized he’d be able to protect Tess, a panic attack racked him.

“I don’t know...” Ardan barely forced out, gasping, his head spinning so badly that he was struggling not to topple into the canal. “I don’t know what I want from my life, Milar.”