Book II. Chapter 98 - The Congress (Part 8)

As he was watching Milar lament his fate on the concrete steps of the staircase, Ardi was thinking about... the same thing as always. About the mutant and the documents. As Captain Pnev had observed on the very first day of this mess, the Tazidahians didn’t want to raise a commotion. Otherwise, they would certainly have made an entire spectacle out of the fact that one of their diplomatic mission’s guards had vanished in the very heart of what was, conditionally, an enemy nation.

Of course, Tazidahian had never openly opposed the Empire. Even during the Mercenaries War, only a small fraction of their military—a battalion of mutants and chimeras—had participated in the fighting on the southern coast of the New Monarchy. And during the civil war that the Dark Lord’s Rebellion had started, they’d outright refused to take part in the international group of interventionists.

Why?

This was likely because Tazidahian depended on the import of agricultural goods and Ertalain from the Empire. However, these were not delivered directly to the Brotherhood. The Empire did not trade with Tazidahian, save for the occasional deal related to maritime routes. Where, then, did this dependency come from?

It all came down to N’gia. Despite their sometimes-strained relations, N’gia was always buying a rather broad range of goods at fairly inflated prices from the Empire. And, from what Ardi had learned during his History of Magic lectures at the Grand, in politics, there was no room for sentimentality. Two countries that, several decades ago, had savagely spilled each other’s blood on brutal battlefields could, in the modern world, conduct trade, smile sweetly at one another at conferences, and weave their rail networks into a single entity.

And so, N’gia, which had served as the spearhead of the attack during the Mercenaries War and the Civil War Intervention, was now one of the primary importers of Imperial goods on the western continent.

Why did the Kingdom of N’gia need agricultural imports when it possessed its own rather decent arable lands, even if they didn’t cover much territory? They bought them to pass them along to Tazidahian, which held its western neighbors in an iron grip. As for the Ertalain, the ore veins in the mountain ranges of N’gia, just like the ones in Selkado and Castilia, possessed a far narrower spectrum of purity.

On the whole, the western continent struck Ardan as something that might not have been a proper rat king, but was certainly a nest of vipers. And one couldn’t claim that the Empire was some saintly nation unfamiliar with the concepts of retribution and plain old revenge. Over the years, the Empire had repaid every nation that had participated in the Intervention and the Mercenaries War. With interest. Quite tangible interest.

Such an approach had allowed a country that had survived more in a few centuries than others had weathered throughout their entire history to become one of the pioneers of Star Magic. They’d even managed to keep up with the eastern continent in terms of technological progress as well. As a result, the Empire’s industrial capacity had recently surpassed the combined output of Selkado and the Confederation of Free Cities.

However, such rates of urbanization and modernization required exes. Simply colossal, staggering amounts of exes. And incurring debts with the “planet’s principal bank,” as the Confederation was sometimes called, was something the Empire could not afford. They couldn’t afford it because the entirety of the Confederation’s power had been built on the strength of paper.

The Free Cities, who were exploiting their monopoly on access to the Shallow Seas, had the eastern continent by the throat. They could wield the full host of import duties as their very own “heavy and long lever,” to borrow the Prime Minister’s expression. As a result, the loans issued by the Confederation frequently transformed into either a yoke that gradually siphoned percentages from the debtor nation’s treasury and economy, or into concessions. And no, the Confederation had no interest in foreign territories. Only ports. And terminals. Railway junctions. Power-generation stations. Factories and mills.

The Confederates would simply buy them up or accept them as collateral for their loans. And by doing so, they kept tangling the entire planet in their endless, interest-bearing nets.

Yes, the Empire possessed enormous potential. Human. Military. Scientific. Industrial. However, the money in its treasury amounted to roughly half of what the Confederates spent in a year of their trading operations.

And what did all of this mean in the end? Why had he pondered so many things that were seemingly unrelated to Tazidahian not raising the alarm at the mutant’s death?

Perhaps it meant that he was nervous. It was one thing when a great war was whispered about in the streets, discussed in bars and restaurants, the subject of heated disputes in salons, drawing rooms, and kitchens, even screamed about in flashy newspaper headlines, but... It was quite another when the ambassador of the Kingdom of Kargaam hinted with scarcely any subtlety that the great war was not anyone’s fabrication, and definitely not just a frightening specter lurking somewhere in the dark corners of the imagination.

“Milar,” Ardan said quietly when they had nearly reached the top floor.

The thoughts had raced through his mind in an instant. They’d done so faster than he could even register that several seconds of their rapid climb up that accursed, shabby staircase of concrete and woe had elapsed. Apparently, the renovators’ hands had not reached this far...

“If a war becomes inevitable, will they warn us in advance?”

The captain froze in place. For a time, he said nothing, then answered simply:

“Us specifically? No.”

“Even if they already know for sure?”

“Yes.”

Ardan hadn’t felt those clammy, clawed fingers squeezing his throat in a long time. They were also pressing on his heart and trying to seize his legs and drag him somewhere far below, where the most terrifying horrors a person could imagine swarmed in the dark.

“You heard something at the Prime Minister’s?” Milar guessed.

He was a First-Class Investigator, after all—and a former military detective. Sometimes, Ardi forgot that one’s heart could hide very little from Captain Pnev’s discerning eye. And he didn’t need a Witch’s Gaze or Star Magic to uncover secrets, either.

“Yes,” Ardan answered truthfully.

Milar turned halfway, looked at the young man, and, closing his eyes, sighed. Even behind his mask, it was clear that the captain’s skin was growing pale.

“Fuck,” Milar didn’t restrain himself. He patted his breast pockets, then threw up his hands. “And I can’t even have a smoke... Damn it all... Right. You know, somehow, those mysterious papers don’t get the blood pumping quite so much anymore.”

They fell silent. Ardan looked at the ring on his finger. It was quite nondescript, resembling ordinary costume jewelry one might buy somewhere in the Tend. You would never guess that the Sidhe Allane’Eari had woven it from the night sky...

“All right, Magister, let’s go. We need to think about the present. Otherwise, you could lose your mind.”

Thinking about the present... that sounded rather good to him.

They reached the exit together. A false door, which was successfully masquerading as a wall, had a small peephole hidden behind a painting. It wasn’t intended for spying on the visitors passing through the corridor, but to ensure that the hotel staff could avoid being seen. Such was the policy of the “finest inn in the Empire.”

Milar, gesturing for Ardan to keep quiet, was the first to peer through the partition. Then, stepping aside, he gave Ardi a chance to assess the situation.

Not much had changed since the last time the young man had examined the corridor from the alcove that led to the roof. The Tazidahian mutants, as well as several mages from N’gia and Fatia, were still guarding the quarters of their countries’ ambassadors and diplomats. The only difference was that they weren’t swaying and half-asleep this time, but quite alert.

“There’s around thirty of them out there,” Milar whispered once they had pulled back a little.

Their clothing had been thoroughly saturated with cleaning agents over the past few days to ensure that the mutants would not be able to sniff them out. And the walls had been built thick enough that even Ardan, try as he might, would not be able to hear the rhythm of other hearts beyond them.

“Trust me,” was all Ardan said.

He approached the wall and pressed his hand to the exposed brick. Ardan focused on the way the rough edges lightly scratched his skin. The manmade stones whispered their simple, entirely fleeting, and mostly unintelligible stories to him. It felt as though the young man was trying to speak the language of wild beasts with domesticated animals.

These were halting sounds, distant and unfamiliar to someone who had grown up among the majestic boulders of the Alcade. However, for a little over a year and a half now, he had lived in the Metropolis. He’d lived among its dead Ley-fire and its false stones created not by wind and earth, but by hands and scorching furnaces that breathed black clouds. Ardan knew this voice. He’d heard it before. Sometimes softer, sometimes louder, and three days ago, it had actually called out to him to tell him that “strangers” had crept onto the roof. And while Ardi hadn’t understood what was happening at the time, the buildings surrounding the young man had truly called out to him.

Could it be that the Metropolis had acquired its own Name? And if so, then... what was the true nature of Names in the first place?

Lost in thought, Ardan nearly missed the moment when he managed to catch hold of a barely-discernible voice. He breathed his Will into it and asked it for the simplest thing—to cause a slight tremor. And the stones shook in response.

“Eternal Angels,” Milar exhaled.

It must have been a strange sight—a convex wave rippling across the wall and, a moment later, the sound of shattering glass filling the corridor. Ardan released the miniature fragment of a Name. He swayed. His head hummed, and a murky haze clouded his vision.

Before, he would’ve stopped using the art of the Aean’Hane at this point, but Ardi had grown stronger. And not just because Winter now held dominion.

And so, after gathering his strength, Ardan filled his lungs to bursting with the frost-laden air that had rushed into the corridor. It flooded his lungs with sparkling snow that had come from the branches of the trees in the Dawn Garden. They were crackling with cold and situated on the far bank of the frozen river. Ice and Snow whirled around Ardi, delighted that he had returned to play with them so soon.

The ring on the young man’s finger blazed with white light, and patterns of snow appeared along its surface.

The frost was somewhat saddened that only half of Ardan had come to greet it today. Although, perhaps that was simply how Ardan was interpreting the Name he had just Heard. Atta’nha had taught him that Names feel no emotions, and possess neither reason nor self-awareness. They simply are.

Ardan called them and they came.

A gust of wind drove the blizzard forward and it swept through the shattered frame in a merry whirlwind. Instantly decorating the walls with serpentine patterns of frost, it snuffed out the Ley-lamps and made the guards shiver. They began exchanging words, but Ardan couldn’t hear them. The shard of the Name was still ringing in his ears.

Ardan raised his staff to his lips and blew upon its crown, where the household accumulator was. It sparked and the blizzard intensified. It danced and whirled around the men. It tore off wallpaper, toppled small tables, and piled entire snowdrifts up in an instant. The temperature plummeted so rapidly that the moisture trapped in the bricks solidified, and the walls were laced with a fine web of shallow cracks.

At last, the Fatians spoke up. It seemed like they, along with the N’gians, were the first to give in and retreat to their rooms. The Tazidahian mutants proved slightly hardier, but when their noses turned white and their fingers lost all feeling, they, too, hid behind their doors.

“The path is clear,” Ardan said, and as the words left him, whitish wisps tore from his lips—not vapor, but pure cold.

“Your eyes, Magister.”

“What about them?” The young man asked. He was in no hurry to release the Name of Ice and Snow.

Milar squinted at him and waved his hand.

“Nothing... It’s just that, usually, it passes quickly, but this time, it hasn’t... Let’s go. We shouldn’t waste time.”

And they slipped into the snow-covered corridor together.

* * *

Milar had seen his partner use the art of the Aean’Hane before, but in most cases, Ard hadn’t had much control over it. The enormous young man had often fallen under the sway of the very thing he’d been using to try and help them all.

That was why the captain had asked—very nearly issuing a direct order—Ard to stop using the art. And, had Ard actually listened to him, he would not have been Corporal Egobar, the man who was perpetually stumbling into trouble. And yet, every time, by some miracle, he’d manage to crawl out of it—if not always in one piece, then definitely with a valuable prize in hand.

Why, then, had the captain grown so... timid, one might even say? Perhaps it was because the two-meter-tall mage standing opposite him had suddenly become covered in frost. White streaks had shot out from his right ring finger and, leaving behind what might have been symbols, runes, or simply a meaningless mess of patterns, had decorated his entire body. Including his face. And his eye sockets. Especially his eye sockets, inside which his already-inhuman amber eyes had vanished.

A blue mist had replaced them. Or perhaps it was ice. It had filled the young man’s eyes, replacing his pupils, irises, and even his whites. It was as though a winter spirit had stepped straight out of a fairy tale to gaze upon him. The kind of spirit that belonged in the retinue of the Snow Queen.

“Your eyes, Magister,” the captain said involuntarily.

“What about them?” A crackling, unfamiliar voice asked.

It sounded as though someone was jumping on fresh snow or had leaped gleefully onto newly-formed but already solid ice. And alongside the words spoken, wisps of pure cold escaped Ard’s lips, painting the walls.

Milar had wanted to answer, and even raised his hand to do so, but in the end, he simply waved it off.

“Nothing... It’s just that, usually, it passes quickly, but this time, it hasn’t... Let’s go. We shouldn’t waste time.”

Skirting his partner, the captain lowered his right hand to the grip of his revolver (a faithful companion that had seen him through many hardships, and one that had a calming effect on him; Eternal Angels, how desperately he needed a holiday! One that nobody would interrupt!) and pushed the door open. Frost battered his face, so vicious that it would probably have robbed him of his nose on the spot were it not for his partner’s light touch.

Ard gently tapped his staff against the captain’s back, and Milar felt a surge of warmth. One couldn’t say that the cold had stopped troubling him entirely, but if one compared it to a dog, the wolfhound was no longer straining to bite his face off, and was now huffing contentedly beside him. Even as it did so, it was reminding him with its very presence that if he made one wrong move, Milar was done for.

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“Our footprints!” The captain suddenly realized.

He turned to point at the floor, but saw nothing except a blanket of snow. As soon as he and Ard had taken a step forward, the snow had swept in to cover the boot prints they’d left behind.

“Like something out of a fairy tale,” Milar muttered and turned around to keep going. The peepholes had been sealed by icy shackles, and near-crystalline bolts had likewise secured the latches. This would hardly hold back the diplomats’ guards for long, but given the stationary shields, it would create a sufficient inconvenience.

Already, the captain could hear service bells ringing, demanding attention. By design, no one outside their unit was supposed to know about the operation, so there had been no way to coordinate with their other colleagues.

“Faster,” Milar waved his hand, and before long, they’d ducked into the alcove and climbed up to the roof.

The captain had been here before, on the night when Ard had been brought to the Black House. The young man might not have known about it, but until the Colonel had made his decision, Mshisty and another Senior Magister of Military Magic whose name Milar didn’t know since he’d never seen him before had been standing by on the ground floor.

The Colonel hadn’t wanted to risk the possibility that someone might, at a critical moment, hesitate to... act, shall we say, against a dear colleague. That was why he hadn’t involved Parela, or Klementiy, or Captain Ponskih in the matter.

At the time, Milar hadn’t fully understood why two Senior Magisters were needed to deal with just one Ard, especially since he wholeheartedly trusted his partner and believed that he wouldn’t have abandoned his post without a very good reason. But after hearing the report on the destruction wrought by that strange blizzard, and after what he was seeing now...

Previously, the captain hadn’t believed the legends about how entire groups of Senior and Grand Magisters had been sent out to do battle against Aror and the Dark Lord. And not all of them had returned... Right now, he was less concerned with their veracity and more troubled by the thought of what would happen if, for some unimaginable reason, Ard were to switch sides.

While following his partner, Milar sometimes felt like he wasn’t walking behind a man... or, well, behind a halfbreed mix of a human and a Matabar, but behind something—not even someone—entirely different. Something that belonged in children’s fairy tales and ought to have remained in the history textbooks recounting the age of Gales and Ectassus.

“Wait a moment,” the icy, snow-crunching voice said. “I’ll ask the Ice and Snow to share their memories with me.”

“Right, right,” Milar raised his hands and snorted, acting as though he had just heard an amusing story about his children while eating breakfast with his wife. “Go ahead. Of course. Ask the ice and snow. Request something from them... And don’t mind me. Never mind that I’ll be recuperating not at the Azure Sea, but on an equally-azure, yet somewhat different, bed in a lunatic asylum...”

Milar could have gone on, but he didn’t think that Ard would hear him at this point. He stood in the very center of the roof and, opening his “eyes” wide, raised his staff, then brought it down hard against the wood. The captain had already seen something similar in the underground sanctum of the ancient vampire’s estate, and yet... he was surprised all the same. It wasn’t like one got to see solid ground turn into something resembling the water’s surface and ripple in waves beneath their feet every day.

Icicles chimed. For a moment, Milar felt like he was in a snowy forest where winter birds were singing, children were laughing as they played their snowball wars, and his hand was being warmed by another hand—his wife’s. For a moment, the captain even saw trees that had sprung up from the very air, dressed in white fur coats. They were more beautiful than frightening.

So no, Ard did not frighten him. Quite the opposite, in fact. The young man’s gaze, despite being veiled in a frosty mist, had remained just as gentle as ever. And even the winter that had come at his call seemed somehow... warm. Merry and playful.

Suddenly, the trees vanished in a spray of snow. The blizzard spun into a glittering vortex, inside which shapes gradually materialized. They were very faint and indistinct. It almost looked as though someone had spilled ink on salt and then tried to use it to draw a picture with their finger.

“And what do we have here?” Milar asked, looking around and fighting the urge to touch the spectral figures.

“This is the hotel,” answered the same… not even “icy voice,” but a “voice made of ice.” “But it’s warm. The frost doesn’t remember it well. They try not to let it into the lower floors.”

“The frost doesn’t remember it well,” “they try not to let it”—all of this sounded to Milar like the ravings of a madman, and were it not for the strange things his own eyes were seeing, he would’ve truly been convinced that he had lost his mind. Or that Ard needed a very long and thorough rest... in a room with padded walls.

“Look,” the ice in Ard’s voice chimed.

A hand that had white, glittering lines running through it pointed somewhere into the blizzard.

“And what am I supposed to be seeing?” Milar asked, uncomprehending.

“Look closer,” the voice said.

Milar squinted harder than he had probably ever squinted in his life, as though that could somehow affect this strange situation.

“Listen, Ard, we don’t have much time to-”

The captain fell silent. He really had looked into the blizzard. He’d gone a little deeper into the whirl of snowy mirages, where, at first, he hadn’t noticed any clear silhouettes. He couldn’t see them now, either. He could only catch, fleetingly, from time to time, their general outlines.

“Is that our mutant?” The captain asked, approaching the barely-visible, shimmering outline of a male figure.

“Yes.”

Milar tilted his head to one side and looked more closely. Among the swirling snowflakes, he saw a man stealthily emerging from a room. It was most likely a guest room, though that wasn’t certain, but... No, it was indeed a guest room. He was holding something in his hands and heading toward... the alcove? No. No…

“The staircase,” Milar snapped his fingers and shook his hand. This was a stupid habit that had latched onto him back in military school. “He was heading for the main staircase.”

“Yes,” the voice repeated, but it had grown somewhat duller and quieter, and the chiming of icicles in its intonation was gradually fading away.

“How are you holding up, Magister?” Milar asked with a note of concern.

“It’s hard, but I’ll manage,” Ard answered, honest as always.

Eternal Angels... Milar had already warned his young partner that he ought to lie more. Although, in fairness, when the corporal needed to lie, he used his squirrel tricks quite successfully, strange as that might sound.

“He heard something,” Milar set off after the wobbly mirage, which kept threatening to dissolve into individual snowflakes. “He bolted. He ran back into the corridor and listened at the alcove. But he’s still holding something in his hands. He didn’t throw what he’d stolen away.”

“He was a mutant,” Ard added with obvious strain, his eyes beginning to flicker like the traffic lights in the New City. “He could’ve sensed the Dark One and his henchmen in advance.”

“He could have,” Milar agreed with the logical assumption. “But then what did he do with the documents? They’re still in his hands... Damn it, Ard, there’s a gap in time here! Can you show me more?”

“I’ll try... Ugh...”

Milar spun around sharply. Ard, who was standing at the center of the blizzard—or rather, he was its center—had doubled over and was coughing up blood.

“Magister, you-”

“I’ll manage!” Ard snapped and, after wiping his lips, he straightened up again. “Keep watching.”

Milar ground his teeth, nodded silently, and turned back to the snowy mirages. The mutant, who’d been standing by the alcove, suddenly broke into a run. He tore off like a shadow down the corridor and stopped right beside the same concealed door from which the two partners had recently emerged.

“The garbage chute!” Milar whispered in an urgent hiss. “The bastard dropped the documents into the garbage chute! Damn it! We might’ve guessed...”

Milar wanted to say something else, but snowflakes slashed across his face. The blizzard surged back into Ard’s staff. The young man coughed again, and the symbols on his body began to dim slowly.

The captain rushed to his partner and managed to brace him with a shoulder.

“Thank you.”

“Save the courtesies for later, Magister,” the captain hissed, listening for any sounds coming from the staircase or the alcove. “Our own colleagues are already swarming the corridor!”

“The roof.”

“Can you-”

“I’ll manage,” Ard croaked.

The captain didn’t especially believe the young man, but it wasn’t as though they had much choice. Their operation had to remain hidden from everyone.

Very nearly carrying the far-from-light corporal who had managed to fill out over the past six months, Milar reached the roof. The wind immediately struck them, flinging snow into their hoods. Icy moisture bit at his neck.

“What now?” Milar asked.

“The cornice,” Ardan, whose left eye had returned to its amber color while his right was still drowning in blue mist, pointed toward the edge of the roof. “Hurry, Milar.”

The captain swore and hauled the corporal toward the edge of the abyss with all his strength. When they found themselves directly above the embankment that was being swaddled in the whitish haze of frost gnawing at the granite, Milar involuntarily glanced down and immediately squeezed his eyes shut.

“I want to remind you, Magister, that I have perfectly human bones! I would not survive such a fa-”

The young man slammed his staff against the roof. A fresh ringing came from the very heart of the impenetrable haze that had gripped the hotel and the embankment and a tree rose up to meet them on the roof. It was slender, fragile, and so transparent that it barely refracted the light at all.

Milar decided not to ask whether it could bear their weight. With his right arm, he gripped his partner, and with his left—ignoring the scalding ice-induced pain that seared his hand—he seized the trunk of the tree and wrapped nearly his entire body around it. The moment he did so, the tree began rapidly shrinking, but just a meter above the cobblestones, it cracked and burst into tiny shards of ice. They didn’t even touch the ground before instantly merging with the haze.

The cold crashed down on the captain with all its relentless, merciless force. Milar shuddered involuntarily, and Ard, it seemed, fared far worse.

The symbols had vanished from the young man’s body and he was clearly in a half-doze or some pre-feverish state. Even though he was still on his feet, he was clearly not aware of his surroundings. His gaze had dimmed, and the young man kept swaying. Milar slapped his cheeks and waved a hand in front of his face, but, after getting no response... he grabbed his revolver.

Swiftly drawing it from its holster, he leveled the barrel straight at the mask of a silhouette that had materialized from the milky haze.

Through the leather slits of its mask, two human eyes gazed back at him—and yet, for some reason, they were orange.

“Decent reflexes,” said an unfamiliar voice, though Milar felt like he had heard it somewhere before. “For a human, of course.”

The captain dropped his gaze slightly. A wide knife blade was pressed against his chest.

“A stalemate, then...” The woman began, but immediately fell silent. “Would you really shoot me, Captain? Even knowing that I’d gut you like a fish if you did?”

Milar silently continued to hold the creature standing before him (he wasn’t sure that he was dealing with a human) in his sights. One wrong move from her and he would empty the entire cylinder straight into her forehead. Or he’d at least try to do so. He would certainly get two shots off, at any rate.

The pause stretched on, and the frost kept rolling in, coating his revolver’s iron with a fine web of ice. At last, the stranger sighed and put away her knife so swiftly that the captain didn’t even register what had happened. One second, someone else’s steel had been nuzzling his state-issue clothing, threatening to slash it open, and the next, a figure wrapped in a black fur cloak was standing before him. She looked like a bat that had mistaken the icy expanse for a cozy, dark cave.

“You haven’t changed a bit, Captain Pnev,” she finally said. “You’re the same as back then, during that raid on the criminal ring of Star Mages dabbling in necromancy—the one that flooded the sewers with zombies and got my fiancé exiled from the capital.”

Milar blinked several times and peered closely into the slits of the mask. Quick movements, inhuman orange eyes, clearly a woman… He had seen something like this on one of the nights he would rather forget, but, as so often happened, his memory refused to side with him.

“Captain Aloaeiol?” Milar asked.

“The very same,” the fiancée of Lieutenant Kornosskiy curtsied. In truth, they had never been engaged—it was a joke in their unit. Of course, no one knew just how close to reality the joke was. “Perhaps now you’ll lower your iron? I won’t even make a joke about how you might be expressing your delight at our—I believe—third meeting this way? The second was that time I saved you from those three corpses who were trying very diligently to tear you apart.”

Perhaps, had mutants been permitted to marry and bear children, the joke would have ceased to be one...

Milar tried not to plunge into the abyss of empathy. Mutants and their woes were none of his concern. And, in any case, according to the official records, no mutants resided in the Empire.

“Tell me something that only Captain Aloaeiol would know.”

“Seriously? Is an investigator’s paranoia that potent?” The tone of the captain (or the one passing herself off as her) contained a mild degree of disappointment. “I already mentioned the corpses and how your backside found itself in their clutches, Captain Pnev, but fine, I can add this to the pile: your wife... Elvira, I believe... suffered a miscarriage, after which they had to remove her uterus, and you can no longer have children. This made you weep in the church, and then you got into a fistfight with Lieutenant Kornosskiy, who had the misfortune of making a stupid joke about it. Although, in his defense, Yonatan was merely trying to support you in his own way, but he does have certain problems with socialization. Enormous problems, I would even say, and-”

“Enough,” Milar said through gritted teeth and returned his revolver to its holster.

Captain Aloaeiol, an old woman in the body of a young girl (he remembered her well), was just like that damned Kornosskiy, who was an old man who had forgotten to age. Perhaps that was why they had found one another? Though, according to the rumors, they’d known each other even before Senior Magister Ivan Kornosskiy had vivisected them...

“Pleased to meet you again,” Milar didn’t want to admit it to himself, but Aloaeiol said that with rather genuine warmth.

“Given the context,” the captain sighed, “it’s even mutual... Will you help me?”

“What, did you think that I just showed up here for no reason? Maybe to reminisce about old times?”

Aloaeiol smoothly went around the captain and hoisted the enormous Ard onto her shoulder as though he weighed no more than a sack of potatoes. A modest little sack at that, worth no more than seven kso. It would weigh maybe about half a kilo.

“Let’s go, Captain... Eternal Angels, we’re both captains... That’s awkward somehow...” Aloaeiol waved her free hand; due to her height, she had nearly disappeared beneath the other figure’s bulk. “And please grab his staff. I’d take it myself, but I’d rather not lose my hand.”

“What do you mean?” Milar asked, picking up the stick lying on the ground. When one looked at it, it appeared to be a very plain, whittled oak branch.

“Oh, don’t worry about it, Milar—even if I spent a couple of years explaining it, you still wouldn’t understand a thing.”

Milar wanted to retort with something sharp, but Captain Aloaeiol had already turned around and started heading into the gradually-thinning, frosty haze. He barely suppressed a smile. Due to the difference in height between Aloaeiol and Ard, the latter’s arms and legs were very nearly dragging along the ground.

“Mutants...” The captain whispered and followed her.

They rounded the hotel building and stopped beside... one of the military trucks. There were more of them in the square now, but not so many as to attract undue attention. The Colonel had seen to it that the additional soldiers and Star Mages had been brought in as covertly as possible. They had simply been billeted in the apartments in the neighboring buildings, or the checkpoints had been slightly expanded by adding a vehicle or two to them.

Not standing on ceremony, Aloaeiol quite literally flung Ard, who was completely out of it, onto the rear seat of the truck. She then leapt into the driver’s seat and pointed Milar toward the passenger side. He hesitated. It wasn’t like the captain had never been in a vehicle driven by a woman before (one who was twice his age, no less), but he simply did not, as a general rule, enjoy riding in a car or truck when anyone other than himself was behind the wheel.

But now wasn’t the time to turn up his nose. One had to take the luck that the Face of Light had bestowed upon them. So, adjusting his holster and scabbard for quick access to his weapons, Milar climbed into the cab. Admittedly, his revolver and saber wouldn’t have been of much use against one of Ivan Kornosskiy’s creations...

“They won’t let us through,” Milar remarked curtly, eyeing the checkpoint toward which Aloaeiol was steering the truck.

“And you’re supposed to be an Investigator... First Class... one of the most effective in the Metropolis,” the mutant snorted harmlessly, yet with sufficient bite to sting. “I did manage to get in here somehow...”

To be honest, Milar wasn’t even that interested in how Captain Aloaeiol, who had no connection to the Crown Hotel’s security reinforcements, had gotten past the cordon. He did, however, want to know why she was here at all. And at precisely the right moment, at that. But he could ask about that later. The priority right now was to escape the trap set for them by their own colleagues.

Damn it all—this was getting far too convoluted!

Their truck stopped at the barrier, and a soldier approached them. He was dressed warmly in a greatcoat, with a cap on his head and a scarf wound around his face. Resting on his shoulder was an army rifle with a fixed bayonet, and he had a simple blade, a revolver, and even a hand grenade on his belt.

“Good evening,” he greeted them and extended his hand toward the cab. “Documents.”

Milar had begun to lower his hand toward the grip of his revolver, but caught himself just in time. Would he really shoot a soldier of the Imperial Army, his own army? A man simply doing his job? What inconceivable nonsense that was, and surely born of a restless night.

“Of course.” Captain Aloaeiol, as though nothing were amiss, produced from her inner pocket... the most ordinary, unremarkable sheet of paper. “Here you are, Private First Class. I believe you’ll find everything you need there.”

Milar would never have believed it had he heard such a story from anyone else. But his own eyes, which he was accustomed to trusting, assured him that it was true.

The private, after adjusting his rifle strap, carefully accepted the virginally-blank sheet of paper and... proceeded to read it for a time. His eyes ran across invisible lines, and he even rubbed his thumb against the lower right corner of the paper, where a seal should have been.

“Safe travels, Colonel!” The soldier snapped to attention and returned the paper to Captain Aloaeiol.

“And a peaceful watch to you, soldier,” she nodded and steered the truck along the row of buildings.

The moment they had gotten far enough away to be safe, Milar snatched the sheet of paper. He turned it in his hands, examined it against the light, even sniffed it and licked it, but the answer remained the same—it was just blank paper.

“Damn it!” Milar exclaimed and dropped the sheet back onto the seat.

On the paper, which, seconds ago, had practically gleamed with pearly whiteness, a drawing appeared. Rendered in various crayon colors, very clumsily but with admirable gusto, something amorphous that only vaguely resembled a winged pony in shape was galloping across rainbow clouds.

Milar knew this drawing.

He remembered it well.

It had been drawn by his eldest daughter back when she was still very small.

“This is my mutation, Captain Pnev,” Captain Aloaeiol answered the unspoken question without any particular joy. “Senior Magister Kornosskiy was trying to unravel the properties of the Witch’s Gaze. He didn’t succeed. But, as a side effect of his efforts, he did manage to give me the ability to make people see things that aren’t there—under very specific conditions.”

Milar blinked, and the sheet reacquired its pristine blankness.

“This, by the way, is a secret of the Crown,” Aloaeiol was clearly trying to lighten the mood, but not succeeding.

“How did you know we needed help? And in general-”

“And in general, we can continue our pleasant chat at my hideout,” the mutant cut him off. “In case you were wondering, I’m risking not just my career, but my very life right now. For your information, Milar, I am the head of Loon’s protection detail and, at present, your partner’s direct superior.”

“Isn’t the Prime—Loon’s security handled by Captain Ponskih?”

“The Senior Magister has his own responsibilities,” Aloaeiol answered evasively. Apparently, she was no longer in the mood to share information with him.

They made the rest of the journey to the Tend in total silence, which was broken by... Ard’s quiet snuffling coming from the back seat. The little bastard had simply fallen asleep!