Book II. Chapter 89 - The aftermath

Chapter 89

“To be honest, I don’t even know what exactly I need, Mr....”

“Egobar,” Ardi supplied, and, trying to conceal the pain in his wounded shoulder, he adjusted his sling.

Before him stood a young woman of about nineteen. On her left ring finger, a cheap but not yet tarnished gold band glinted. She had married very recently. Perhaps not even half a year had passed since her wedding.

She had pursed lips, dark circles beneath her eyes, callused fingertips, and the smell of laundry powder seemed to follow her like a pet. She was most likely a washerwoman in a tenement house. Her skirt and faded sweater were too worn and threadbare, and her blouse was starched to the point it was as stiff as the washboard upon which it had been scrubbed. The girl was defending herself against the cold with several scarves she’d knitted from old clothing and an autumn coat.

“Mr. Egobar,” she shifted from foot to foot, fiddling with a hat that had a hole at the top. She’d stuffed some newspaper into it to cover it up. “The little one’s ill.”

She also smelled of diesel and coal. She had probably come here from the Tend, where most workers lived in the shadow of towering factory giants. She might’ve even walked… Despite shivering in the cold, this girl who’d received her documents only three years ago had traversed an unthinkable distance in minus twenty degree weather.

All because...

“The little one’s ill,” she repeated, and then, with a slightly sad smile, caught herself. “Forgive me.”

“How does the illness manifest?” Ardan asked, already forming a rough picture of what had caused the problem.

“He coughs in the mornings and evenings,” the girl began to explain. “He spits up mucus.”

“Is it dark yellow, green, clear? Or perhaps brown?”

“Clear,” the girl answered at once.

The young man hoped that he had managed to conceal not only the pain in his wounded shoulder, but also his sigh of relief. The mucus being clear was the best of all possible outcomes. Green was worse but still tolerable; yellow meant the clock was counting down in terms of days; and brown... Brown meant that the Eternal Angels had decided to return a young spark to the Face of Light.

But, given how the young mother’s face lit up in response, Ardi hadn’t quite managed to conceal his joy at the answer.

“He can’t sleep at night—we position him so he’s half-upright, placing pillows and clothing behind his back so he doesn’t curl up.”

“You prop him up?” Ardan asked. “And how old is he?”

“Four... oh, no, three, yes, three years old,” the girl’s heart started beating faster.

She was lying.

The child was likely four years old. Which meant only one thing: his father, the girl’s husband, had broken a law that carried a sentence of many years of hard labor.

Yes, it was harsh. Yes, many suffered because of it. Not a lot of time had passed since the education reform, which required every citizen of the Empire to attend school from the ages of six to sixteen. Along with the reform, a slew of additional laws had been enacted, forbidding things like parents marrying off a daughter before she received her documents (this was punishable by a fine of up to one hundred and fifty exes and nineteen years of hard labor for the father). And, accordingly, a girl who had not yet received her documents birthing a child out of wedlock was treated as an equivalent violation. Or something to that effect. The document contained numerous subtleties. But one way or another, the state was waging an intensive campaign against both illiteracy and some old customs.

Bazhen had put it best: if the cost of every one hundred thousand literate, educated young people was dozens of unfortunate souls being sent to the mines, the state was prepared to make that sacrifice. To Ardan, subjectively speaking, such measures seemed to border on the radical methods of Tazidahian or the Enario Theocracy, but... he was no statesman. He wasn’t even a fully-fledged Imperial Mage. It was not within his purview to decide what was best for the Empire.

How, then, did he know about such a law at all? He’d heard about it because it didn’t apply to mages and the aristocracy, and was therefore studied in lectures on Star Jurisprudence. As for why those two strata of society were exempted—that was an entirely different story.

“Of course,” Ardi smiled and continued questioning her. “Is there a fever?”

“It’s around thirty-six degrees in the morning, and goes up to thirty-seven and a half by evening.”

That was high... The standard temperature for a human at rest was 34.4 degrees…

“Has there been severe weakness and loss of appetite?”

The girl nodded.

“Wheezing and a whistling in the chest?”

She nodded again.

“A doctor from the Crown clinic came...”

Ardan was about to ask what sort of Crown clinic this was, but then he remembered a newspaper article he’d read over the summer. His Imperial Majesty Pavel IV had moved to undercut the system of private insurance companies that had mandatory contracts with manufacturing enterprises. Every business that reached a taxable threshold of five hundred exes per quarter now signed the same mandatory contract, but with the Crown instead.

Across the country, including the Metropolis, the construction of thousands of small clinics and hundreds of hospitals was nearing completion. All of this—including doctors and pharmaceuticals—was to become conditionally free for citizens. The term “conditionally” applied here because, as Bazhen had explained to Ardan, the final cost of state insurance would still be included in the price of goods produced in the country.

“...he said that there was wheezing, but he wasn’t certain it was pneumonia,” the girl continued, “because-”

“Because your child doesn’t suffer from excessive sweating,” Ardan began to list. “He has no headaches, and while breathing deeply is uncomfortable for him, it isn’t painful.”

“Y-yes,” the girl confirmed with a slight stammer, as though surprised that the enormous young man behind the counter had been able to discern everything the Crown doctor had noted.

“Allow me to guess—you live near the ‘Mankov and Partners’ factory, which produces Ley-accumulators.”

“Yes,” the young mother repeated more firmly, clearly still surprised.

“Then it truly isn’t pneumonia,” Ardan explained, now fully convinced of his diagnosis. “Or rather—it is an inflammation, but not the ordinary kind. A cold virus-”

“A virus? What’s that?” The girl interrupted. “Oh, forgive me, Mr. Egobar.”

“No harm done,” the young man shook his head. “The word is quite new. It’s what they began calling infectious diseases about ten years ago. So, on top of the cold virus, there’s dust from the Ertalain manufacturing. Because of the severe frost and wind, it settles on the windows of buildings. I’d venture to guess that you live on the third or fourth floor.”

“We rent a small room in the attic.”

“Even worse,” Ardi nodded. “Give me just a moment.”

Leaning on his staff with his left hand and trying not to move his right, Ardan hobbled over to the splendid glass display case (Bazhen accepting Boris’ offer hadn’t surprised anyone), where he very nearly slapped himself on the forehead.

How was he going to carry the medications back if he had only one working arm? In the end, propping his staff against the wall clad in spruce panels (the latest fashion for commercial premises), Ardan gathered several vials.

“Tanavin, to bring down the fever.” Ardi shook ten capsules out onto the scales. “He needs to take these one at a time, with plenty of fluids, every morning before breakfast. Please don’t overdo it. The myth that a high temperature can be the cause of death is only partially a myth, but if your child feels normal at thirty-six degrees, it’s better not to forcefully lower it.”

“But-”

“A higher temperature helps the body fight the virus,” Ardi interrupted, trying not to let any harshness creep into his tone. “It slows the multipli—the spread of the illness through the body. You should only bring it down aggressively if it reaches thirty-seven degrees or above, which is two and a half degrees above normal.”

The girl nodded. The Empire might’ve been fighting illiteracy, but, first of all, science never stood still—quite the contrary—and secondly, the teachers in schools varied tremendously.

“Now, since this is Ley-poisoning, you’ll need the following.” Arming himself with small measuring weights and a deep spoon with a sharpened edge, Ardan tore open the cardboard packets with his teeth, wincing occasionally from the pain in his wounded shoulder. “Three grams of Breathing Licorice root, the Ley-analogue of ordinary licorice, will help him expel the phlegm, and Royal Coltsfoot will make his cough less raw when the Ertalain dust is leaving his throat. Do you have dried linden blossoms, pine buds, or rose hips at home?”

“Yes, of course—my husband and I always prepare for the cold season, Mr. Egobar.”

“Excellent, then…” After weighing the doses, Ardan mixed the powders of the two Ley-plants. “Brew a simple cough remedy from linden, rose hips, and so on, but while it’s steeping after boiling, add this powder to it. And then stir it until it smells of cardamom.”

“Card... cardo... car...”

Ardan, who was watching the girl struggle to repeat the complex word, very nearly slapped his own forehead. After all, how would a resident of the Tend know what cardamom smelled like, however sad that truth seemed?

“Stir until a spicy, warm, slightly sour, floral scent appears,” Ardan listed the main components of the very complex aroma. This was what a Strong Lungs concoction—the remedy that helped with Ley-inflammation of the organ in question—smelled like.

“Will this help?” The girl asked cautiously.

Ardi didn’t understand the nature of her question at first, then reminded himself of something else. To the overwhelming, even absolute, majority of the Empire’s inhabitants, Star Magic was closer to a tall tale or a horror story.

Some people, especially those living outside the capital, might go their entire lives without encountering a single mage or Firstborn. This was perfectly logical, too, given that, according to the census, only around one hundred and fifteen thousand mages lived in the entire country. And a good third of them resided either in the Metropolis or its environs.

“After the very first dose, his cough will disappear and his appetite will return. After that, simply continue giving him the linden and rose hip remedy,” Ardi assured her with as warm a smile as he could manage.

The girl flinched and stepped back. Ardan immediately pressed his lips together. Right. Of course. His fangs...

“How... how much will this cost?” The girl asked, clutching the strings that served as handles on a simple cloth bag that had been embroidered with colored thread so as to look more presentable than its fellows.

Ardan looked at the Ley-plant powders. For that amount, the cartel’s pharmacies would charge roughly four and a half exes. As for the plain Tanavin—ten pills cost a mere thirty kso.

And, given her comment about the Crown doctor, it was quite possible that the girl already knew the answer to her question. She had likely visited one of the pharmacies already, where they had told her roughly the same thing Ardi had. Only, instead of the simple solution, they might have tried to sell her a complex ointment based on Kargaam Sticky Mint—an insanely expensive Ley-plant whose price per gram could reach twelve exes.

And while Sticky Mint extract could handle Ley-inflammation of the lungs far more effectively, the Strong Lungs could manage the task as well—it would just take longer.

“Did another pharmacy tell you about us?”

“Yes, the ‘Lumarsky’ company’s pharmacy,” the girl confirmed.

It was just as Ardan had thought—they were part of the cartel that had carved out the Tend and part of Tendari for themselves. It was actually ironic that the pharmaceutical cartel, due to its division of territories, somewhat resembled the criminal Six of the Metropolis.

The Five, now, actually.

Although, if one counted the Narikhman...

Thoughts for tomorrow.

“Then all you owe us is one story.”

“A story?” The girl frowned.

Ardan smiled again. This time, he carefully raised only the very corners of his lips.

“You are, after all, in the Firstborn Quarter, miss. Everything here is like something from a fairy tale. So, you owe us one story. A very beautiful, sincere story about the pharmacy that helped you in a difficult hour.”

“I have money,” the young mother said firmly, even proudly. “Not much, but I have some. Perhaps if you give me a smaller amount, I’ll have enough to cover it.”

“Of course you do,” Ardi nodded eagerly. “You have money, and you need medicine. And we have medicine, and we need your story. That’s the deal.”

The girl looked at Ardi with a skeptical squint. It wasn’t hard to guess that she had survived no fewer misfortunes in her life than Ardan himself had. They’d simply been a different kind of bad luck. And those trials had made her own character hard. Hard enough to cross the capital on foot in freezing weather.

A young mother...

Thanks to his great-grandfather’s stories, Ardan knew that neither the Face of Light nor the Sleeping Spirits had ever managed to devise a trial that a mother would not face for the sake of her child.

“A-all right,” the girl replied hesitantly.

“Wonderful,” Ardan nodded even more eagerly than before and began arranging the pills and powder into some paper envelopes.

After sealing the paper with wax heated in a mortar, he placed the medicines into a small cardboard box. And when it was all done, Ardi looked up and was momentarily taken aback.

“What are you doing?” He asked, staring at her outstretched hand.

Her hand wasn’t waiting to receive the box. Instead, it was trembling and pale. Pale not from the cold, but from fear. The girl’s heart was beating so fast it very nearly struck the bones of her ribcage.

“You need my blood, don’t you?” The mother of the sick child asked, hiding what was nearly primal terror behind a show of resolve. “To seal the deal. Like in the fairy tales.”

Ardan sighed and closed his eyes for a moment. The Grand and the Black House had truly distorted his perception. Magic and ordinary folk existed in entirely different worlds.

“Your words will be quite enough,” Ardan answered as he exhaled.

The girl studied his face for several seconds, then said:

“I, Oneshka Shilova, give you my word that I will tell others about how your pharmacy helped me.”

Something rang out faintly in Ardan’s mind. He was absolutely certain that he could now do anything at all to Mrs. Shilova. She had, of her own free will, given him her True Name.

It was an utterly intoxicating feeling and...

An utterly terrifying feeling.

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“Good day, and may the Light protect you,” Ardan said, hoping that invoking a faith that was alien to the Aean’Hane might somehow affect the unpleasant sensation he was feeling.

“And you, Mr. Egobar,” Mrs. Shilova blinked in bewilderment. “May the Light protect you.”

She took the box and, causing the doorbell to ring on her way out, stepped out into the snow-covered street.

Ardan looked at his reflection in the nearby display case.

“This is what it means to be an Aean’Hane. To possess great power and the even greater wisdom not to use it.”

The voice of the wise she-wolf echoed in his mind. Perhaps Ardi had just understood the meaning of her words a little better. And a little more deeply.

“Cowboy.”

Pulling himself away from his memories, Ardi turned toward his invariably caustic and unquestionably hungover business partner. Only Bazhen’s skill at exploiting the laws of the Empire to his own advantage could rival his talent for finding parties in Baliero and companions unencumbered by morality for a single night.

At present, he was inspecting some shipping documents in the company of a slightly nervous deliveryman. Between the somewhat rumpled mage and the loader stood a wooden crate of rather imposing dimensions. In black stencil paint, it read: “Inti Cash Registers.”

The crate’s lid lay beside it, and they had extracted a cardboard-wrapped iron monster from the felt lining. This was the creation of a mechanical genius. Arithmometers were, of course, far more complex, but modern cash registers still commanded their own kind of respect.

It had a double-sided display upon which, following a clockwork principle, digits shifted for both buyer and seller, assembling into numbers. Twenty cylinders, alternating in sequence, ensured that the total was always visible beneath the glass.

The seller, meanwhile, would be freed from the duty of wielding an abacus and keeping ledgers. The former task was accomplished by four rows of levers in long grooves marked in tens and units—two rows each for “exes” and “kso.” And, depending on the position of the switches, the machine would independently calculate “money received” and “change due,” then open an initially-locked cash drawer. Moreover, if one pulled a separate handle connected to a side compartment, a press with extending pins would punch the appropriate cells in a card, which the seller could then retrieve from the drawer.

This was far simpler than keeping a ledger permanently open before you and making entries by hand. At the end of the day, one could easily tally the number of punched cards, their values, the remaining stock, and the sum of cash in the drawer.

Naturally, without Boris’ involvement, he and Bazhen couldn’t have even dreamed of owning such a brass monster adorned with all manner of forged monograms and flourishes. “Inti” cash registers, which had earned a reputation as the finest specimens of their kind, cost around seventy exes.

“If you keep up with the charity, even Boris’ entire fortune won’t be able to save us,” Bazhen wrote his name in a broad flourish on the clipboard sheet and bid farewell to the relieved deliveryman.

Ardan frowned and watched the rapidly retreating worker.

“I don’t do what you call charity all that often,” he grumbled. “Besides! We still need advertising. Our customer count is growing, but the pace is still nearly one and a half times slower than our original projections.”

“Your original projections,” Bazhen corrected him, heading for the straps and hoisting frame. “And don’t deceive yourself or me. If you’d charged her the one ex and ten kso she owed you, she’d have still told everyone that she’d visited a cheap pharmacy that saved her son’s life.”

As Ardan watched Bazhen strap the harness to two crossbars and then hook it to the specialized mount beneath the register, he cast a disgruntled glance at his sling. If not for his injury, he could have lifted the machine onto the counter himself.

“Don’t you find it strange that the Crown opened state hospitals and clinics, but the cartel still supplies the medicines?”

“State insurance doesn’t cover Ley-medicines,” Bazhen said, cranking the gear-driven handle that tightened the harness straps and lifted the load up. “What’s strange about that, Ard? Ley-diseases are extremely rare. Their medicines cost more than ordinary ones, even if it’s not quite as much as the pharmaceutical cartel charges for them. The Crown already has enough to worry about without straining itself to stock state hospitals with Ley-medicines as well.”

Ardan recalled the Fatian border. Arguing with Bazhen’s last remark would be pointless. And with the rest of them, too...

“The Emperor already bit off an enormous piece of the cartel’s pie,” Bazhen slid the register from the platform and onto its prepared spot on the counter. “If he’d also gone after the cartel’s monopoly on the manufacturing and distribution of pharmaceutical products, we’d have had an open conflict between the Crown and the pharmacies. And does anyone need that right now? No, Ard. They don’t.”

Ardan understood everything Bazhen was telling him. But the truthfulness and reasonableness of the arguments did nothing to ease his soul. If anything, it was quite the opposite.

“I don’t help people for free all that often,” Ardi remarked in an effort to return to the previous topic.

“Is that so?” Bazhen clicked his tongue and, leaning across the counter, pulled their ledger off a shelf. “Let’s have a look... Over the past month, you dispensed goods worth sixty exes, of which... you collected only eighteen in the register. That’s less than a third, cowboy. I understand that the check issued by Lord Fahtov has inspired you to do good deeds, but you’re going too far!”

“You can deduct it from my share of the profits later,” Ardan replied and, turning on his heel, strode toward the staircase leading to the second floor, which they had only recently finished adding.

“At this rate, we won’t have any profits left!” Came the disgruntled shout at his back.

Ardan tried to wave it off but, forgetting himself, jerked his injured arm. Growling softly from the pain, he recalled what had happened that night…

A week and a half ago, in a snow-covered square next to the History of Magic Museum…

Ardan came to because of the light but increasingly insistent pats on his cheeks. Reluctantly, fighting against eyelids that felt full of lead, he opened his eyes.

Snow was falling from the sky. It was fluffy, sprawling, slightly wet, and for some reason, amusing. It swirled and fell, settling upon the cobblestones of the square. All around him, the red and yellow lights of guard trucks and automobiles blinked. Medical personnel were loading bandage-wrapped bodies onto sleds. Grim, black “Derks” lurked off to one side, and people in black fur coats and cloaks were continually disappearing into the building and emerging from it again.

The crowd of gawkers, punctuated by the endless flashes of the reporters’ cameras, was being driven back by the guards. At that particular moment, only their cone-shaped sheets of tin—crude megaphones—and the fact that their fur coats were a vivid scarlet made it possible to tell them apart from the Second Chancery’s operatives.

“Move along, good people!”

“Nothing to see here!”

“Move along!”

“If you refuse to obey the orders of the Guard Corps, you will spend the night in a cold cell at the precinct!”

And yet, even as the guards strained their voices, even as they aggressively brandished their truncheons, the citizenry still pressed against the wooden barriers. How could they not? Whispers were surging through their ranks that none other than the daughter of Duke Erkerovsky and the Great Prince Iolai Agrov, son of the celebrated Arkadiy Agrov, were currently being treated.

And the gawkers weren’t wrong. Through the snow and the throngs of the Emperor’s men buzzing around the scaffold-clad museum building, Ardi made out both Polina and Iolai.

The former was shivering despite being wrapped in a thick woolen blanket, and was already climbing the drop-down ladder into the back of a medical truck. And Iolai, who was wrapped in that same kind of blanket, stood proudly in the very center of the chaos. For a brief moment, his gaze met Ardi’s.

By the Sleeping Spirits… Within the young man, not burning brightly, but smoldering all the same, a spark of hope flickered to life. He hoped that Iolai, even if he didn’t change his attitude, might at least calm down a little after this.

But then one heartbeat passed, followed by another, and the Great Prince’s face was adorned with a haughty smile, as though he were saying: “Don’t think this changes anything.” The whatever-number-in-line claimant to the throne mouthed:

“Stupid subhuman,” and turned to one of the Black House’s agents.

Ardan sighed and shook his head.

“Young man, stop fidgeting,” one of the doctors bandaging Ardi’s shoulder hissed. “If you think your wound is a simple matter, you are sorely mistaken.”

“He rarely thinks at all,” Milar exhaled a cloud of smoke, hunching beneath the raised collar of his government-issue coat. “Are you finished?”

The doctor, after securing the bandages with an iron pin, straightened up and gave his handiwork a skeptical once-over.

“He needs to be taken to the hospital,” he delivered his discouraging verdict. “There’s nothing urgent—no risk of needing to amputate the arm—but the bone was shattered by a Blue Star spell, so even his Matabar blood won’t be able to easily handle this one.”

“Then let’s go,” Milar shrugged.

“In your dreams, Captain,” the doctor grimaced and nodded toward the crush of people and service vehicles. “No one has any urgent wounds. The effects of the elven poison have already been mitigated. So, we’ll finish with all the wounded, collect all the corpses, and only then will we ask the guards to clear us a path.”

“I hope no one resists so much they get shot,” Milar attempted to joke, but it clearly fell flat.

The doctor responded to the dark humor with a despairing shake of his head and, closing his medical bag, headed back to his colleagues. Ardan and Milar were left alone. The young man occasionally glimpsed the familiar faces of Din Arnson and Alexander Ursky among the other Black House operatives bustling to and from the museum.

“Congratulations, Magister.”

Ardan produced a strangled, questioning sound.

“At the very least, the Crown won’t need to rebuild the museum after your practicum,” Milar explained, gesturing at the whole and undamaged building. “Aside from replacing a missing...”

“Estenyen’s diary,” Ardan finished for his partner.

Captain Pnev nodded and took another drag. The ember of his cheap cigarette glowed crimson, stubbornly arguing with the lifeless yellow of the streetlamps.

“Who could’ve possibly wanted that thing?” Ardi ran a hand over his face. “It’s a useless historical artifact. There are so many copies of it across the Empire that you could open a separate library to store just them.”

Milar gestured for Ard to move over and then sat beside him, pulling the flaps of his coat closed.

“You know, partner,” Milar rumbled, “there are two possibilities. The first one is utterly foolish, and in some ways, even funny: this is all a simple coincidence.”

“A coincidence?” Ardan echoed incredulously.

Milar nodded.

“How can it possibly be a coincidence!” Ardi started to throw up his hands in a bewildered gesture but groaned from the sharp pain in his shoulder. “Tavsers, Tazidahians, thieves... When you factor in all the other variables, it looks as though the Tazidahians used the Tavsers, and that all the noise was just a cover for their main objective, which was to steal the diary!”

“Everything you’ve said is correct, Ard,” Milar answered after a brief pause. “And I even understand the chain of cause and effect that led you to those conclusions, but... Tell me this, partner. What makes you so certain they were Tazidahians?”

Ardan had already opened his mouth to answer heatedly, but then promptly closed it again.

Indeed.

If he stepped back from the nightmare that had unfolded that night, if he stopped being its subject and became an objective observer, what had actually led Ardi to trust his own deductions?

The fact that the saboteurs (or perhaps they’d been terrorists, or even Narikhman gangsters) had conversed in the language of Tazidahian proved only that they’d done so. The fact that they’d brought their captives’ staves along, trying to stage the scene in a way that made it seem like a battle had occurred—that, too, conveyed nothing beyond the sheer existence of that event.

Yes, they’d spoken Tazidahian.

Yes, they’d wanted to stage everything so it looked like a tragedy to both the Tavsers and the Conclave. But everything else...

“This has to be proven, Ard,” Milar flicked some ash away and rested his chin glumly on his fist. “Before we can be confident that these were Tazidahians specifically, rather than people who wished to frame Tazidahian, we need to be absolutely certain of their involvement.”

“But they discussed the embassy incident.”

“Which adds weight to the probability that the Elder Brothers were involved.”

“And that’s...”

“The Brotherhood’s equivalent of the Black House,” Milar reminded him and continued: “But it’s best not to approach the Colonel with that kind of argument. It would be like the Emperor summoning a foreign ambassador because he’d read some unpleasant article in the newspapers that had talked about arms trading between Fatia and, let’s say… Lintelar. Shall I explain why that’s absurd?”

“Because anyone could have written and commissioned the article.”

“Exactly, Magister!” Milar chuckled mirthlessly. “It’s the same thing here. You saw the drugged orcs and the enchanted thieves, didn’t you? Well, the same thing could have been done to the mage and the mutant. They could’ve been drugged. Enchanted. Or even just blackmailed and forced to do what they did. Maybe they said what they said just to make sure that we Cloaks would suspect Tazidahian.”

“That seems far-fetched, Milar,” Ardan disagreed nonetheless. “Why would they discuss something without an audience? They didn’t know I was behind that door.”

“That’s what you think—that they didn’t know,” Captain Pnev held firm. “That’s what you believe—that you’ve drawn the correct threads from the embassy to the museum. That’s what you assume—that the answer lies on the surface. And, don’t take this the wrong way, partner, maybe it truly does lie there. Maybe, by the will of the Face of Light who guards our country, you, even while suspended, managed to stumble into trouble. Although, speaking of coincidences, there isn’t much of one here. You study alongside Great Prince Iolai Agrov, after all. And if this was indeed aimed at him, the probability that you and Boris would be here as well is extremely high. He, by the way, has been resting over there for quite a while now.”

Milar, pinching his cigarette between his ring and index fingers, waved toward one of the medical transport trucks.

Boris... If he hadn’t managed to bring down the shield, everything might have gone far worse. Ardan would most likely have lost his arm and walked with a wooden prosthesis for the rest of his life, and as for Iolai Agrov and Polina Erkerovsky… who knows what sort of damage the strong elven tea might have done to them.

“So what now?” Ardi asked.

“As always, we investigate,” Milar answered matter-of-factly. “Because, as I said, there’s the second possibility. The first is that it’s simply a coincidence. Or maybe the Elder Brothers, or terrorists impersonating them, carried out the sabotage, and someone who may have known about it in advance decided to steal Estenyen’s diary in the chaos. Maybe they did it for the sake of someone’s collection of artifacts connected to Sergeant Mendera. Does that remind you of anything—or rather, anyone?”

“The Ragman,” Ardan said flatly.

“Precisely,” Milar snapped his fingers and took a drag. “And the fourth thief, who actually took the diary, still hasn’t been found, Magister. So he’s someone we have to look for. And that, once more, supports the first possibility. And that one is, frankly, the most preferable in my opinion. Because...”

Milar exhaled a cloud of acrid smoke and massaged the bridge of his nose. He was tired, bleary, with short but thick stubble. Ardi had rarely seen the captain in recent weeks, but the man’s appearance all but screamed that this First-Rank Investigator had not been sitting around the Black House writing endless reports.

“Because the second possibility, Ard,” Milar continued. “The second one makes me tense up. Can you guess why?”

“Vaguely,” the young man admitted honestly.

He had been so focused on his own theory that he had committed the most basic error—failing to consider other ways of solving the problem.

“Because if this isn’t a foolish coincidence, then everything becomes very grim and incredibly complex,” Milar tilted his head back and directed his gaze toward the stars that were hiding behind the clouds and the light pollution of the shimmering city. “Just imagine that some organization—presumably the Puppeteers—has influence over Tazidahian, the most closed off and militarized country in the world. They’re even more isolationist than the Enario Theocracy. And these Puppeteers organize a sabotage operation in the heart of the Metropolis using the Elder Brothers. All while simultaneously trying to pit several radical movements against one another so they might fracture that society. They also try to kill the sole heiress of Duke Erkerovsky, who may not engage in politics right now, but possesses an enormous capacity to do so. And the only son of Arkadiy Agrov as well, who is one of the highest-ranking claimants to the throne. And they set this entire bloody nightmare up for the sake of... stealing Estenyen’s diary? Which, as you rightfully pointed out, is a useless historical trinket that some textbooks reprint in its entirety?”

Milar smirked, and Ardi genuinely felt unsettled. Yes, they knew—without a doubt—that the Puppeteers were connected to Tazidahian. They also knew that the Puppeteers possessed staggering capabilities, and that members of their organization might include the most powerful citizens of several countries at once, but...

What Milar was describing resembled... resembled... Ardi couldn’t even find the right word for it. Bandaged and exhausted, he sat in the cold air and felt clammy fingers scratching at his heart.

“The only thing stopping me from believing that we’re dealing with the latest move of our precious opponents, Magister…” Milar flicked his cigarette butt with a snap of his fingers and it landed right in the snow-dusted garbage can. “…is that, in the past, the Puppeteers have always acted subtly. Only their proxies, the Spiders, were fond of grand gestures. The Puppeteers themselves... I believe that they would’ve intercepted the diary somewhere along the road to the museum if they needed it so badly.”

“Then... the Elder Brothers?” Ardan asked somewhat hopefully.

“Maybe it really is them... Maybe they’re settling the score for the incident at the embassy and trying to derail the Congress, or at least expose the Empire as weakened and incapable of ensuring the security of the planet’s most important political event,” Milar snorted and flexed his numb, frozen fingers. “Or it’s someone other than the Puppeteers trying to pass themselves off as them. Or it’s a coincidence, and the thieves were just horribly unlucky.”

“And the fact that they shot themselves?”

“The client could’ve taken care to remain unknown in the event of the poor wretches’ capture,” Milar waved it off as something insignificant. “There are plenty of possibilities. We’ll investigate this, Ard... But it’ll likely have to wait another three weeks.”

“Because of the Congress?”

Milar nodded.

“Right now, every resource of the capital’s Guard Corps, the Black House, and all the Army’s local detachments are devoted to preparing for the gathering of those pompous ambassadors and ministers.” Milar probably disliked politics more than anyone else in Ardi’s circle of friends. “Too much is at stake, Magister. Too much... And who knows? Perhaps our fates will be decided for many years to come in three weeks.”

Ardan directed his gaze toward the museum building once again. The Emperor’s men were still bustling about. The reporters’ cameras continued to flare like the sparks of a human conflagration. Gawkers whispered. The wounded were being helped up into the snow-white medical trucks.

Ardi finally found the right word to describe what was unfolding. And that dreadful word fed those same frozen, clawed fingers of cackling fear.

“Do you think there’s a war coming?” He asked quietly, far more quietly than before.

“Definitely,” Milar answered without hesitation. “Someday, Magister, we will have war. Only naive romantics and utter fools believe in a world without wars. Wars will always exist, Ard. I only hope that it’s not within my lifetime, or my children’s lifetime. I pray we never experience something that would make us look back on the Fatian Massacre with nostalgia. I simply don’t want to see, hear, or—least of all—take part in anything comparable in scale to the Mercenaries’ War. And I hope the Congress will see to it that my wish comes true.”

Ardan closed his eyes. For some reason, he saw images of that cozy apartment in the building on Markov Canal, and the way the chimneys on Stonemasons’ Street in Delpas had billowed with thick smoke.

He heard Tess and Kena’s laughter. He heard Kelly whispering quietly about something with Shaia, and he heard Erti, absorbed in his school books, struggling with the desperately-resistant Lintelarian lexicon. That was the language being taught in his younger brother’s school.

Ard thought of nothing else.

Not his friends. Not his service in the Black House. Not Star Magic or the art of the Aean’Hane. He didn’t even think about the Alcade’s peaks and his forest friends. Not even the she-wolf and the snow leopard entered his thoughts.

When the word “war” was spoken, the only thing the young man could think of was his family. His loved ones. Everything else suddenly became so insubstantial, so unimportant, so fleeting…

“We’re building military shipyards, expanding the army, and fortifying our borders,” Ardan spoke with an odd sort of detachment, as though he were listing variables in an equation. “Tazidahian has uncoupled the Tah from Ertalain and is importing thousands of tons of raw materials for its military industry. The tribes of the Armondo are uniting around their new leader. Fatia is buying up every warship it can find in foreign shipyards. The Island Union is discussing the possibility of a blockade of Whale Bay and the Grainy Strait. The Selkado League and Castilia are laying down railroads at ten times their normal pace.”

Milar was silent for several seconds.

“Yes, Ard, I read the news as well. Though I can’t say it gives me any particular pleasure to do so.”

“It really will be a war, Milar? An enormous war. A world war?”

The captain said nothing. He suddenly looked older. Heavier. His usually sparkling, cheerful gaze grew dark and dull. Sleeping Spirits... How hard it must have been for him to think of such things when his children were waiting for him at home.

“Let’s not despair, Magister,” Milar reached out to clap Ardan on the shoulder but stopped himself in time. “Let’s believe that the clever heads in the ministries will find a way to preserve the peace. And if not, then...” The captain reached for his faithful companion—the crumpled pack of cigarettes—opened it, but didn’t take out another one. “There’s a saying that you can’t get your fill of breathing before you die. But at least we’ll get a couple of years, Ard. At least a couple more years of peace... And who knows, maybe something will change.”

They fell silent as they sat beneath the cold kisses of sprawling snowflakes and looked at the History of Magic Museum. Its scaffold-clad walls shone with the multicolored lights of the guards’ and medics’ signal lanterns.

Ardi didn’t need to hear Milar’s heartbeat, nor his own, to realize a simple truth.

They were deceiving themselves. And, by the Sleeping Spirits, how fervently they wanted to believe that they were telling the truth.

Snow fell from the sky.