Book II. Chapter 124. Irony

Before the whirlwind of events swept Ard away, he caught a glimpse of Dagdag’s face and Milar’s. Captain Pnev was human and Dagdag a dwarf half-blood, but with Pnev still in his now slightly scuffed wheelchair, their heads were level. Both had gone quite pale, their mouths hanging slightly open. They stared through Ardan toward the pit, their empty, glassy eyes fixed on some point within it.

Without turning his head, Lieutenant Dagdag slowly passed Milar a crumpled ex bill. Still looking just as detached, the captain quietly accepted it and slipped it into his pocket.

Ardan began to suspect a thing or two. A cold, clammy sweat broke over him, and goosebumps prickled down his spine. But he had no time to dwell on that particular detail. The quicksand collapse had spared the stands, and reporters were already running toward him from that direction. So Ardan pulled his miraculously intact scarf over his face, turned, and... bolted toward the hangar.

The reporters were all human, men and women both; against a young matabar half-blood like Ardan, they had no chance. Some carried microphones with massive Ley-recorders, each the size of Ard’s book bag; others even lugged tripods with cameras mounted on them. Despite his bad leg, his itching, smarting body, and bruising over what felt like every inch of him, Ardan reached the hangar far ahead of them and vanished inside. Dagdag and Milar snapped out of it too, turned, and hurried to copy Ardi’s vanishing trick.

Once all three were in the cramped little locker room, they could still hear shouts beyond the door and requests for an interview or a photograph, but the guards were dealing with the crowd. Under race rules, outsiders weren’t allowed onto the track at all, let alone inside the hangars. After all, every team tried to protect its designs, and old-fashioned industrial espionage was still alive and well, especially when most teams’ machines were designed and built in factories that also made civilian wheeled vehicles.

Ardan breathed hard as he climbed out of his racing suit with Dagdag’s help. The suit had abruptly become loose and was wet enough to squelch. Judging by how he felt, Ardan had lost at least three kilos during the half-hour race. And if the mirror beside the tin lockers was to be believed, he’d lost a full five.

Now wearing nothing but his underclothes, Ardi lowered himself onto the wooden bench and pressed his back against the wall. The cold stone beneath the rough plaster did Ard as much good as a cool shower, making his muscles relax. Ardan exhaled in relief and let his shoulders sink a little lower.

“You didn’t rig the track to collapse, did you?” he asked, too exhausted now to show much emotion.

He wasn’t addressing anyone in particular. With his eyes closed, he seemed to be speaking into the void.

For a few seconds, the cramped locker room was filled with soft, almost cozy silence.

“Collapse?!” Dagdag roared.

“You think the Black House has nothing better to do, Magister?!” Milar echoed him.

“That was epic, Corporal, I’ll give you that.” Judging by the sounds he was making, Dagdag might, just might, have been on the verge of tears. “But you turned my creation into a hunk of scrap metal! Six and a half thousand exes! Do you Egobars have some idiotic family tradition? Wrecking the Empire’s property?! What’s this obsession with destruction?!”

“What was I supposed to do?” Ardan’s voice remained dry and flat. He felt utterly empty as he raised his hands slightly. “Stop and lose the race?”

“We wouldn’t have lost,” Milar wailed. He was probably more upset because of his sheer love for the “art of the wheel” than because of the damage itself. “They would’ve postponed the race, and… did you see that aging ladies’ man Nalensky cozying up to Miss Shpritz? Even if you’d finished seventeenth out of sixteen, he’d still have found some way to rig things so he wound up paired with Taisia.”

“Then what was all this for?” Ardi tried to muster some indignation, but couldn’t.

He felt like an empty glass vessel, all its contents poured out. As a consolation prize, he had been left with nothing but a pleasant weariness and the rhythm of his own calm, peaceful heart.

“Because that little detail wasn’t public knowledge until the very last moment.” Milar grimaced. “Except for Shpritz herself, probably. And if we’d lost, she’d have spun the whole thing afterward…”

“Aside from the wager, she got us to take part,” Ard continued. “And it turned out that the Black House, specifically our department, was a little in her debt.”

Milar gave a stern “mm-hm.” Ardi remembered what the Colonel had said about working with certain civilians who were remarkably crafty and apparently utterly fearless. Only someone like Taisia Shpritz, an investigative journalist, could even think of trying to use the Black House in her scheme. Even after nearly half a century in obscurity, the Second Chancery... remained the Second Chancery.

“In that case, what exactly was your plan?” Ardi steered the conversation in another direction.

“Didn’t you notice, Magister?” There was something far too snide in Milar’s tone as he answered with a question of his own. “When you took what I said about the rules far too literally and nearly ran two drivers off the road at once, did even one judge raise a flag?”

The referee’s voice thundered through Ard’s mind:

“...The rookie’s gone all in, ladies and gentlemen! And now we see number sixteen get past fourteen and nine at the same time. He’s literally squeezing between their cars! Judges, that’s almost a violation! Isn’t it?! But no, they let it go! Beautiful, Eternal Angels. Just beautiful, whatever they say about rookies!”

Sleeping Spirits, it was so obvious and so simple. It would have cost the Black House nothing to exert a little “influence” on the judges so they would “overlook” a few of Ard’s moves.

“So...”

“You’d have won no matter what, Ardi.” Milar let the pause stretch until it was almost theatrical. “The finish line comes right after the sixth turn, with a straightaway leading into the turn. Dagdag built the car specifically to perform at its best on a straightaway. That’s where the fight would’ve gotten fierce, and the judges could’ve slapped every last driver with a penalty. A couple of penalty seconds there, a couple more here, and even if you’d crossed the line in sixth or seventh place, you’d still have won once the penalties were factored into the official times.”

“But why didn’t you tell me?”

With the silence still unbroken, Dagdag and Milar exchanged a glance.

The captain gave a brief sigh, then asked again:

“Would you have taken the wheel if you’d known all the details?”

Ardi answered at once, calmly and honestly:

“No.”

“That’s why we didn’t tell you,” Dagdag concluded, as though it were self-evident. “All we needed was for you not to finish dead last. The Black House would’ve handled everything else.”

“That’s not fair.”

“That’s the job,” Milar disagreed. “Like I already said, you raced in the line of duty and for a very practical reason. Everyone else raced for other reasons. And for the prize, of course.”

Ardi perked up a little.

“There’s a prize?”

“Of course.”

This time the voice belonged neither to Milar, whose smoker’s rasp rang through every word, nor to Dagdag, whose speech sounded almost like the clang of his hammers and wrenches against sheet metal. Unless, of course, one of them had suddenly learned to imitate a woman’s voice. And a very unusual one at that.

Ardan opened his eyes.

Taisia Shpritz stood on the threshold, not of the hangar but of the complex itself, which had been built to accommodate cars and racing teams. She still looked about twenty-seven, perhaps a little older. Thick black hair, broad, bushy brows, high cheekbones, a slender nose, full lips, and bright blue eyes with dark, deep pupils. As always, her heart beat in a calm, steady rhythm.

Until then, Ardi had seen Miss Shpritz only as an “old woman,” the persona she’d created for Trevor Man’s reception aboard the ill-fated airship; in a plain, everyday dress near the Arena; and in a fashionable tailored suit at the Magical Boxing bar and club. Ardi could barely remember how Taisia had looked at the Baliero Concert Hall premiere. That evening, Tess and the deal with Dandy had commanded all his attention.

Now Miss Shpritz looked every bit like one of high society’s heartbreakers. Her figure was hardly stunning, but she knew how to choose clothes that emphasized everything that needed emphasizing and concealed whatever she did not want others to see. She compensated for her short legs with high heels, which lengthened the line from ankle to calf.

Her waist was too high and its curve was too gradual; she countered both flaws with contrasting shades for the bodice and skirt and a wide leather belt. Miss Shpritz generously displayed her small but remarkably high bosom in a décolletage that would have belonged at court two centuries ago. At the time, certain venereal diseases ran rampant at court, so women often bared the tops of their breasts to show that they had no telltale rash or sores.

Naturally, the custom soon gave rise to enormous demand for whitening makeup concocted from mercury and saltpeter, a blend that sometimes claimed even more lives than the diseases it was meant to hide. And Ardi had learned all of this not at school in Evergale or at the Grand, but from his own mother. She loved telling stories about her craft, and Ardan loved listening to her.

Taisia’s narrow, slightly sloping shoulders vanished beneath some sort of lavish embellishment on her dress. Nature, however, had favored Miss Shpritz with a beautifully symmetrical back and face. Those were the very features she left uncovered. No fabric touched her back from her shoulder blades down to just above the first swell of her backside, where the cleft began. Yet a delicate mesh of gold chains artfully covered what needed covering, holding Miss Shpritz’s dress and honor in place.

Miss Shpritz handled her face well enough that with a palette, a brush, and cosmetic pencils, she could almost outdo the makeup artists at Baliero. Her face was beautiful even without makeup, with sharply defined cheekbones, full lips, and a forehead perfectly balanced against the rest of her face. With makeup, her face looked for all the world like a portrait by some rather peculiar painter. And yes, Miss Shpritz might not have been a beauty in the usual sense, or anywhere close to anyone’s ideal, but she radiated another kind of energy entirely.

The kind that made men watch Miss Shpritz go by with hunger in their eyes. It didn’t matter what she was wearing. Ardan had seen the same thing among forest animals during the rut. Whether she meant to or not, Miss Shpritz offered men no real hope, only enough spark to make them imagine taking the conversation to bed. There was no hint of magic or Fae art in any of this. Something inside Taisia herself simply shone with a certain light, visible only to men old enough to shave.

Though Ardan shaved twice a day, morning and evening (otherwise his coarse stubble would scratch Tess), that hunger left him cold; he noticed it only in other men. Oddly enough, he didn’t feel it himself, though he understood it. Dagdag and Milar, however, both went still for a moment. Purely for physiological reasons, not because...

It suddenly dawned on Ardi that he knew nothing about Lieutenant Dagdag’s marital status.

“I’m not sure how they’ll work things out with the insurance company.” Miss Shpritz opened her purse and took out a cigarette case. Then, without using a holder, she lit a cigarette with a match and took a deep drag, all with a man’s easy assurance. “The Hunters’ Guild holds the majority stake in the track, and... something tells me they knew about the crash.”

“That’s quite a claim, Miss—”

“Just Taisia,” she cut Milar off and fanned a cloud of smoke away with her palm. “To answer your question, Ard, there is a prize. But claiming it is up to you. Not me.”

“And... how much is it?” Ardan asked as if it were an afterthought, trying not to seem interested.

“A hundred and fifty, plus a thirty-five percent discount at any participating factory,” Taisia replied, a slightly predatory glint in her eyes.

Ardi didn’t even try to pretend he wasn’t glad to hear it. True, with what he was spending these days, a hundred and fifty exes wasn’t much. It wouldn’t even cover a month of research. But far more important: thirty-five percent off!

“Milar, but—”

“You’ll have to sort that out with the supply department.” This time Milar interrupted him. Maybe there was something in the air making everyone interrupt everyone else. “You raced under a number instead of a pseudonym. If they let the property damage slide and don’t claim your winnings as government revenue, count yourself lucky.”

Ard’s joy dimmed a little. Would the Black House supply department pass up the chance to pocket even a couple of kso? Laughable. The last time he’d turned in a check after a win at Sevens aboard the Airship, he hadn’t received so much as a word of thanks. Never mind a cut.

“That’s exactly why I hate government service.” Taisia pursed her lips slightly. “You do the dirty work, get burned, and someone else walks away with the reward.”

“Did you bring the second part of the prize?” Milar asked, ignoring the remark.

Ah, right. To begin with, it was Mrs. Shpritz herself who needed the race most. Only later did Milar and Ard’s investigation give the Second Chancery reason to suspect direct ties between the Puppeteers and both corruption in the Hunters’ Guild and the rising number of poaching incidents in the anomaly parks.

The anomaly parks, moreover, were under the Crown’s protection. This was because, before industrialization, mages had drawn far too heavily on natural anomalies and creatures from the Dead Lands for purposes now served by Ertalain crystals. Over five centuries, people had coined a whole constellation of names for the Dead Lands, but demand for their monsters never slackened, since the monsters’ numbers never dwindled. The anomalies, meanwhile, were gradually dying out. Especially those classified as “magical beasts,” rather than spawn of the war between Ectassuss and Galess.

Yes, anomalies were still captured and their populations controlled, all of it under the purview of the Anomaly Hunters’ Guild, because even with industrial progress, anomalies could still inflict serious harm on civilization. And if they multiplied unchecked, the way they had thousands of years earlier, then... In ancient times, it was the Firstborns who protected humans from anomalies. Not out of the goodness of their hearts, but simply “while they were at it.” Beasts poisoned by Ley didn’t care whether they sent their victims to the Sleeping Spirits or the Eternal Angels. Thus, by holding the anomalies back, the Firstborns unwittingly gave humans the chance to develop.

Those were some amusing little historical parallels.

Ardan shook his head. The emptiness that had washed over him when the race ended made it hard to keep from wandering off into long, rambling thoughts.

So, back to the original thought: Taisia Shpritz had decided to give Milar in particular, and the Black House as a whole, an incentive to accept her offer.

“Of course, dear Captain.” Taisia’s smile would have looked perfectly at home on a predatory cat. She drew a small but plump envelope from her handbag. “There are letters in there, and several photographs. You’ll like it, Mr. Pnev.”

Captain Pnev took the envelope of incriminating material about Deputy-Baron Stepan Halsky. If what Mrs. Shpritz had promised them several months earlier was anything to go by, Halsky had ties to the opposition party of anarchist-financiers; he was one of their donors and a secret member. To top it off, he had shady dealings with Overseer of the Telkarts.

Of course, this information most likely had no bearing on the investigation Captain Pnev’s department was conducting, but it could help someone else in the Black House. So neither the Colonel nor Milar had any intention of turning down such a “gift.”

“And why do I get the feeling I’m hearing sarcasm in your voice, Taisia?”

“Mockery, more like.” Taisia nodded. With three Second Chancery officials for company, she didn’t merely feel confident. She... simply felt at ease.

Still, considering the circles the country’s foremost journalist sometimes found herself in and the people she sometimes kept company with, her manner was hardly surprising.

Milar muttered something through clenched teeth, opened the envelope, and peered inside. He left the conversation transcripts untouched (their authenticity would still have to be verified by the people most directly involved) and looked at the photographs instead. Captain Pnev turned green and thrust them to one side, far more abruptly than necessary. As it happened, Ardan was sitting on that side.

Without thinking, he took the photographs and spent some time trying to understand exactly what he was looking at. Since Overseer of the Telkarts had visited the Bruce a couple of times (and where else could Arkar get expensive liquor, the genuine article rather than counterfeit, except through the capital’s leading smugglers?), Ardi recognized him. A lean man with a patch over his left eye and half of his left hand missing: both injuries from artillery shrapnel. And yes, a substantial percentage of the major gangsters, as opposed to the petty thugs, had military backgrounds.

In academic circles and in the Non-Stellar Science journals Elena devoured, theories circulated that war could somehow affect the human psyche. Ardan didn’t have a very clear idea what this “psyche” was. Elena understood it far better than he did.

So. Overseer Telkarts always wore several layers of clothing. Shirts and vests; over those, thick knit layers: turtlenecks, pullovers, or sweaters of one kind or another; then a jacket; and on top of it all, a coat or floor-length cloak and, without fail, a long silk scarf. Because of this fixation, people called him “Cabbage” behind his back. The truth was, Overseer Telkarts was always cold.

So Ardi found it a little strange that Overseer Telkarts, a gangster who was always so cold, was completely naked. And he wasn’t the only one. Behind him stood Stepan Halsky, likewise stark naked, and they...

“Sleeping Spirits!” Ardan set the photographs aside abruptly. They had clearly been enlarged and taken from some distance. “Milar, why did you show me that?!”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to,” Milar said, genuinely contrite. He cleared his throat and rubbed his eyes.

“Well, aren’t we delicate,” Miss Shpritz snorted in her usual haughty, hard-edged way. “Oh, that fragile male sexuality...”

All three of them, Milar, Dagdag, and Ardan, said nothing. Dagdag had been a little luckier: he hadn’t been looking at the photographs. Ardan, meanwhile, felt he’d seen something he not only hadn’t wanted to see but shouldn’t have seen at all. No, in Baliero you could buy all kinds of things, including some very peculiar photographs depicting... what men thought about when they watched Miss Shpritz walk away, swaying her hips. But...

Sleeping Spirits.

People!

What was wrong with them?!

“Ard, let me remind you,” Taisia said, turning to him. She flicked her ash into the bin, then sent half her cigarette after it, down into the tin abyss packed with butts. “Five days from now, at six in the evening, our train leaves Central Station. Forgive me, but given the budget situation at the Black House, I made sure the two of us would travel in reasonable comfort. Since you’re my bodyguard, the two of us will share a first-class compartment.”

“I’m married!” Ardan protested.

“You’re far too young for me, Ard.” Taisia raised her eyebrows slightly. “And you have absolutely no idea how to dress. I’ve seen enough naked men in my life that I’ve come to appreciate them with their clothes on. You spend far more time dressed than undressed anyway. Then again, you’re young, so...”

Taisia let the sentence trail off, closed her purse, and headed for the door.

“Miss Shpritz,” Ardan called.

She froze in the doorway.

“You’re making fun of me, aren’t you?”

“Of course, dear Ard,” Taisia replied at once, without a trace of embarrassment. “Because, speaking as a woman, I find you maddeningly irritating. But we don’t get to choose who we’ll have to share a sleeping compartment with for twelve days.”

And she was gone, leaving her three colleagues with the smell of expensive tobacco and Ardan’s sweat for company.

Ardan leaned against the wall again. Twelve days out, twelve back, and fifty-six there. They were going to be the longest two months and nearly three weeks of his life. It would also mean his longest stretch without Tess since the day they started living together.

“Think of something pleasant, Magister,” Milar said without mockery. “The pay for this trip follows a very favorable sliding scale. And the longer you’re outside the capital, the more you’ll earn.”

“Yes, Milar, I know.” Ardan nodded. “But for some reason, that doesn’t make the situation any easier at all.”

“Yes, Ard, I know,” Milar echoed.

***

On the third day after the race, Ardi received a letter. An ordinary envelope made of heavy paper, with a postmark from the Delpas post office and the familiar, slightly slanted handwriting Ardan would have recognized among a thousand others. As always, the letters were neat and rounded, with their distinctive long tails. Those taught to read and write at home wrote that way, unlike those who learned from copybooks at school.

Ard sat at the kitchen table, reading over a cup of cocoa that had gone cold.

“My dear son, so far away.

I’m writing to you late on the third day because I spent the whole day in the garden with Neil, and my hands still smell like earth no matter how much I wash them. You remember Neil, the gardener Kelly hired last year. He decided it was time to transplant the rosebushes. So the two of us spent four hours on our knees, digging up roots and lugging immensely heavy clay pots that, for some reason, he’d ordered twice the usual size.

I told him the regular ones would do just fine. But you know how stubborn these gardeners can be. Neil gave me an oddly stern look and said, ‘Mrs. Egobar, roses aren’t carrots. They need room for their roots and for their souls.’ I didn’t argue, because when a man talks about the soul of a rosebush with that expression on his face, arguing with him is pointless and perhaps even unfair.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

The garden, by the way, looks very different now than it did the last time you were here. Neil planted honeysuckle along the fence, and it is already blooming with tiny, pale yellow flowers. They smell so lovely that in the evenings I open the bedroom window and simply sit there and breathe and do nothing else. Kelly says I’m “dreaming while awake,” and I pretend I know what that means.

My work is moving along slowly, and I’m glad of it. You know I stopped taking every commission offered to me a long time ago. When we first moved to Delpas, I sewed anything people asked me to because I was afraid we wouldn’t have enough money, and because I was used to always having to keep my hands busy. But now, thanks to Kelly, my pension, Hector’s service benefits, and what you send us every month (though I asked you not to, and, as usual, you wouldn’t listen), I can choose only the commissions that genuinely interest me.

Last week, the notary’s wife came to ask me to make her a dress for her husband’s milestone birthday, and I agreed because the fabric she had brought was one of those rare silks from LanDuoH that feel so good in your hands. But I turned down an order for three identical frock coats for some merchant because making three identical frock coats isn’t sewing; it’s hard labor.

Not long ago, I met a very pleasant woman. Her name is Inga, and we met at a garden-supply shop, where I had gone for seeds for Neil while she had come for fertilizer for her violets. We fell into conversation, as women of a certain age do, and the subject of fertilizer slipped unnoticed into the subject of children, then the subject of children into the subject of worries. Inga has a son serving at a military base somewhere in the south, and she waits for a letter every month, just as I do. Now, every fourth day, Inga and I drink tea on our veranda, and I find a strange comfort in it: sitting beside someone who understands what it’s like when your child is far away and there’s nothing you can do for him except wait and have faith.

Ardi, I’m asking you: don’t be angry with Erti.

I know what happened between you. I know you believe you’re right, and perhaps you are. But being right is a cold thing; it leaves no one any warmer. Erti is still sulking. Whenever I mention your name, he turns away to face the window and falls silent. But I can see his chin trembling, and I know he’s waiting for a letter from you. He won’t say so aloud, because he’s a boy, and boys would sooner swallow their own tongues than admit they miss someone. But he’s waiting, Ardi, and I’m asking you: write to him. Just write. No explanations, no apologies, no going over who said what to who or who misunderstood who. Just tell him what life is like for you, what you’re doing, what you’re thinking about. He’ll work out the rest for himself.

“I’m not saying this because I think you’re wrong. I’m saying it because I remember Aror and Hector. I don’t want the hurt between you to run the same course as theirs, Ardi. While this is all still just hurt feelings and misunderstandings, while the anger has yet to take root, write to him.

“Please.

“Kena, by the way, has made friends, and that’s probably the best thing that’s happened to us in months. You know how hard it was for her to be around people after everything she’d been through, and how long she would sit in her room, unwilling to come out for anyone but Erti and me. And now she has two friends, the daughters of the baker on our street, and the three of them have taken up sculpting with clay. Can you imagine? Our Kena, who used to be afraid of getting her hands dirty, now comes home covered in clay: up to her elbows, on her cheeks, even in her hair. Kelly drives her to classes at a studio at the other end of town because he bought a car after his visit to Metropolis.”

Ardan looked up from the letter and let himself smile. A car! Kelly had bought a car! That meant the family really was doing fine financially, because for all his kindness and generosity, Kelly was a practical man. He would never have spent money on a purchase like that if he’d had any doubts about the future. The worry that always sat inside Ard like a tiny thorn (Did they have enough? Should he send more? Was Mom scrimping on herself?) eased a little.

Yes, of course he knew about Kelly’s salary, and about the pension his mother received, which might have been almost as much as Kelly earned at the lyceum.

But still...

He returned to the letter.

“There’s already been quite an adventure with that car, though. Kelly, who, as you know, can fix anything in the world except his own stubbornness, decided on the third day he owned it that the engine was ‘knocking a little wrong.’ How would he even know how that damned engine was supposed to knock?

“He ducked under the hood, unscrewed something, tightened something, and then, when he tried to start the engine, such a cloud of black smoke shot from the exhaust pipe that Neil, who was trimming the honeysuckle by the fence at the time, thought a fire had broken out and poured an entire bucket of water over the car. Kelly emerged from under the hood soaking wet and black with soot, with such a look on his face that I laughed until I cried. Kena then spent the entire evening trying to sculpt a clay ‘portrait of Kelly the mechanic,’ and I must say, the resemblance was frightening.

“By the next morning, though, Kelly had fixed the car, because he really can fix anything in the world. Sometimes it just takes him several tries and one bucket of water from a frightened gardener.

“And now, Ardi, I have something else to tell you about Erti, and I’m asking you not to worry just yet.

“The doctors are delighted with his progress, and that is no exaggeration. The head physician said exactly that at our last checkup. Erti needs almost no medication, and the IV treatments he was receiving three times a week as recently as six months ago are now scheduled only once every two weeks, and even then more for monitoring than out of necessity. His body is coping, Ardi, and every day I thank the Eternal Angels for it, though I know I should be thanking the scientists.

“But there’s something else, too. Erti is growing more and more like Hector. In every way. The way he walks: with broad, sure strides and a slight roll to his gait, as if the ground beneath him were his and his alone. The way he looks at people: straight at them, without reserve, with the same calm defiance that never left your father’s eyes. The way he falls into long, deep silences, then suddenly says something that takes my breath away because in his words I hear the voice of a man who is gone.

Not long ago, Erti wound up at the sheriff’s office.

Please don’t worry: he’s fine, and he wasn’t hurt, and nothing serious came of it. But this is what happened. Out on the street in broad daylight, four bastards tried to rob a girl of about ten who was coming out of a shop carrying a basket. Erti saw them, and... well, you know your brother. He didn’t call for help. He didn’t shout. He didn’t run for a guard. He went up to them and, in his own words, “asked them to step away from the child.” Naturally, they didn’t. So Erti broke one leg apiece.

Every one of them.

All four.

I don’t know, Ardi, whether to be proud of my younger son’s courage or worry about his quick temper and a certain cruelty he inherited from his father. Because Hector, the one you and I know, not the one who... Our Hector also always defended those weaker than himself, and he too never knew when enough was enough. That was both his strength and his misfortune.

Kelly had a talk with Erti after we picked him up from the sheriff’s office. Erti promised that next time he’d manage without maiming anyone. But I saw the look in his eyes when he said it, and I suspect it wasn’t a very... wasn’t the most honest promise, Ardi. Not very at all. Or not the most.

Sorry, I’m losing my thread...

Sometimes Anna comes by.

She brings little hand pies she bakes using her mother-in-law’s recipe. We sit on the veranda, drink tea, and talk about nothing in particular: the weather, the price of flour, how Neil’s honeysuckle has spread so far it’ll soon climb over the fence into the neighbors’ yard. But I notice, Ardi, that Anna always comes alone. Without her husband. He used to visit us with her fairly often, and he always seemed happy to stop in for a few minutes. But now... now only Anna comes, with her pies and a smile that sometimes seems to take a little more effort than a real smile should. I don’t know what happened between them, and I don’t pry into other people’s lives, because life has taught me one important rule: other people’s doors open only from the inside, and knocking on them from the outside is pointless and even cruel.

Anna had a baby, Ardi.

A boy.

A cheerful little red-haired boy whose laugh is so infectious that even Erti can’t help smiling when he takes him in his arms. His name is Thomas, and except for the hair, he looks nothing like his father, Percy. He looks very much like Anna, though, which is probably for the best.

Sometimes Anna and I joke that our children will make us family. Because I have happy news of my own too, Ardi.

I do too...

I had a baby girl.

We named her Ethilly, after Kelly’s mother, and she is so small, so quiet, so warm that when I hold her in my arms and she falls asleep, her cheek pressed to my shoulder, I forget everything. Worries, hurts, distances. She smells like milk and something else, the way only newborn babies do: that sweet, barely perceptible scent no words can describe, but every mother can recognize in the dark, with her eyes closed, among a thousand others.

You smelled like that too.

And Erti.

And Kena.

I can’t wait for you and Tess to visit us this summer. Kelly’s already cleared out the guest room, and Kena made a clay vase for flowers and put it on the windowsill especially for you (the vase is admittedly a little crooked, but Kena says that’s her “signature style,” and I didn’t argue). I want to hug you, Ardi. I want to see Tess. I want her to hold Ethilly in her arms. I want to bake you a blueberry pie.

I often look east, Ardi.

I stand on the veranda as evening softens and the sun slips behind the rooftops, and look out beyond the hills, beyond the fields, beyond hundreds of kilometers of roads and rivers, toward the capital where my son lives.

Then I turn north.

And sometimes, when the wind comes from the north, I think I hear a rustling. Quiet and distant, like a whisper carried through the air by someone unseen. The rustle of the treetops in the Alcade forests. The very trees you grew up beneath. But Erti never learned to climb their trunks, never fell and cried, and I never held him close and blew on his scraped knees.

I hear that rustling, Ardi, and it sounds like a melody: a strange song about what never happened. The leaves rustle against one another with a dry, gentle sound, like the pages of the old books your great-grandfather treasured so dearly. And in that rustle I hear a stream. Our stream, the one that ran through the clearing where we lived, where I hung laundry between two birches while you sat on a rock and watched the water finger the pebbles on the streambed.

I miss that clearing, Ardi.

Not the house, no. You can build a house anywhere, and we did. I miss the feeling we had there. The way the earth smelled after rain. The way our kitchen sounded. The way the world, vast and frightening, couldn’t reach us, because...

But that was long ago, and we’ve outgrown that clearing the way children outgrow their clothes. Now we have a different house, a different garden, and a different gardener who argues with me about the soul of rosebushes.

And that’s good too, Ardi.

That, too, is life.

I love you, my boy.

I love you as best I can. Perhaps I can’t give very much, but everything I can give is yours. Spend more time in the sun and in the Light. Beware the darkness, my kind little boy.

Eat properly, not that awful stuff you call ‘snacking on the go.’ Listen to your wife, because Tess is a wise woman. And remember this: no matter where you are, what you’re doing, or how far you may wander, there is always a light burning here, on this porch, in this house, in this garden with its crooked vases and wet cars.

Just as it burns in the house beside a winding mountain stream.

And it burns for you.

Your mom.”

For a long while, Ardan sat at the table with the letter in his hands. The cocoa had long since frozen into a murky brown lump of ice.

Rain fell outside the window.

Warm spring rain, tapping a quick, delicate beat against the eaves like applause from a distant, unseen audience.

He folded the letter, slipped it back into the envelope, and laid it beside the grimoire. Then he pulled a clean sheet of paper, a pen, and an inkwell from the desk drawer.

Ardi dipped the iron nib into the thick black ink. Every so often, he considered buying a new pen with a gold nib. Then he would remember that he used pencils far more often.

“Dear Erti...”

Ardi paused. He studied the words. They seemed a little indifferent, or perhaps the opposite: haughty.

He crossed out “Dear,” because Erti was sure to grimace at a greeting like that. Then he crumpled the whole sheet into a ball, tossed it in the wastebasket, and pulled out a fresh one.

“Erti. Hi. I was told about the robbers. Four legs is overkill, of course, but...

Ard smiled, dipped his pen in the ink, and went on writing. Rain rustled beyond the window, and if you listened closely, it sounded something like distant Alcade treetops rustling.

***

“Is it just me, or are you scared?” Tess winked as she straightened the tie around Ard’s neck.

“Terrified, darling,” Ardi confirmed.

Tess said nothing. She simply adjusted the knot once more. Ardi stood in a formal black suit and a bright white shirt. Tess, by contrast, wore an airy snow-white dress with a black belt around her waist.

At celebrations like this, Church of the Face of Light tradition required everyone to wear only black and white. A symbol of the Light’s eternal victory over the Dark.

What, exactly, were they celebrating?

Today, the day before he was due to leave on a mission to the north, Ardi had to fulfill his promise to Boris and Elena. He was to become the spiritual mentor of little Agness, his friends’ daughter. He was to “bathe her in fire” and, in doing so, “bring her to the Light.”

He and Tess went downstairs together, exchanged a few pleasant words with the concierge, and got into the car. The old Derks lurched, rattled, and set off along Markov Canal toward the small church where they’d already celebrated two weddings: their own and Din and Plamena’s. Now Ardi was to become a spiritual mentor to a human child.

Ardan came out of his thoughts and realized he was alone with the priest. Only then did he understand that he’d spent the half-hour journey in silence, listening to nothing but the motor, and the Derks hadn’t stalled once.

Tess and the handful of other guests had gathered in the same hall where Ardi had only recently waited at the altar for his then-fiancée, now his wife. And here he was again in the priest’s cell, if one could call a perfectly secular office a cell.

“Is something troubling you, Ard?” The priest was thin, with hair the color of rye, an open gaze, and a chin angled slightly to one side. As always, Ardan had mixed feelings about him.

“I don’t believe in the Face of Light,” Ardan answered honestly.

“I suppose you don’t believe in the Sleeping Spirits either,” the priest remarked.

He spoke calmly and evenly. No preaching, no lecturing. More like an old acquaintance, a good friend, the sort of person you could simply sit with in silence.

Ardan kept silent. It felt wrong to admit aloud that he didn’t believe in the Sleeping Spirits either.

“Then regard this rite as a gesture of respect and an expression of love for your friends and their child,” the priest added just as calmly.

“But Boris and Elena are practicing believers. This is important to them.”

The priest nodded.

“But then I’d be a hypocrite,” Ardan insisted.

“A hypocrite... how so, Ard?”

“Because I’d be bringing their child to the Light even though I don’t believe in their god.”

The priest pulled out a hard candy almost identical to the Colonel’s, popped it into his mouth, and tucked it into his cheek.

“And how is that hypocritical?”

“It’s... it’s...” Ardan couldn’t find the words he needed. “It’s that... that’s how I feel.”

The priest smiled. Somehow, his smile was nothing like anyone else’s, as if he knew and had seen more than Ardan would ever know or see in his entire life.

“Let me ask you, Ard: don’t you love your friends?”

“I... I...” Ardan faltered and shook his head. “Love is a complicated word, Mr....”

“People usually call me ‘Holy Father.’”

“I have a father,” Ardan snapped, more rudely than necessary. Then he added quietly, “Had a father... and I can’t say he was holy. Not even close...”

“Then you can simply call me George,” the priest replied as if nothing had just happened. “So where is the hypocrisy, Ard, if that complicated word, ‘love,’ describes what you feel for your friends and you may feel exactly the same way about their child? That is quite enough to bring their child to the Light.”

“Even if I don’t believe in it?”

“That doesn’t matter.” George shrugged.

“It doesn’t matter whether you believe or not?” Ardan asked in surprise.

“Sometimes it matters.” George nodded, and Ardi felt as if his head might burst at any moment from all the contradictions. “It’s different for everyone: every Spark of the Light, every soul, every creation of the Face of Light, whatever you want to call it. Some express it through faith; others, in different ways. And sometimes you don’t need to believe in the Light in order to serve it, or to make it stronger through your deeds.”

Ardan frowned.

“I don’t understand, Mr. George...”

“To tell the truth, Ard, there are times when I don’t understand a thing either.” The priest spread his arms in a shrug. “At times like that, faith helps me.”

“But you just...” Ardan began, then fell silent. “Nothing but contradictions.”

“That’s right,” the priest agreed readily. He bit into his hard candy with a crunch and winked at Ard. “Shall we go? Let’s not hold up the celebration.”

They went out into the hall together: the priest in front, Ardan half a step behind. The tiny church’s silence embraced them both, the way an old house embraces you when you return after a long absence. Light fell through the narrow stained-glass windows, painting colored patches across the stone floor: golden, blue, and scarlet. Dust motes whirled through the beams in tiny pairs, performing their endless, silent dance.

They were all here.

Tess stood beside the first row of pews, a small bouquet in her hands: white lilies of the valley tied with a plain ribbon. She looked at Ard and gave him that smile, the one that made something inside him go still.

Arkar stood beside her, leaning on a crutch with a broad, foolish, orcish grin. His left arm was in a sling. He wore an unbuttoned vest directly over his bandages, and the edge of a gauze dressing poked out from beneath it. Fresh scars now stood out over the old ones on his face: pink lines not yet fully healed. They made his already none-too-refined mug look like it belonged to someone life had knocked around pretty thoroughly. A... bandit. The new head of the Orc Jackets had only recently been discharged from the hospital, and the doctors probably wouldn’t have approved of his presence here. But as always, Arkar believed the doctors’ opinion was one thing and Arkar’s own something else entirely.

Bazhen stood a little apart, his hands tucked into the pockets of a suit that fit him impeccably, studying the stained-glass windows with the expression of a man appraising real estate. As though he were calculating whether he could buy windows like those for their pharmacy. He noticed Ard, winked, and raised his chin a fraction: Come on, cowboy. Don’t blow it.

And Boris and Elena, of course.

Boris wore a black suit that was a little too big across the shoulders, making him look younger and somehow more vulnerable than usual. He kept fiddling nervously with the cuff link on his left cuff and smiling as though the happiness swelling inside him was more than he knew what to do with. Elena stood beside him.

And no one else.

Every so often, their whole strange company looked like a family every bit as strange: a half-orc gangster and a womanizing lawyer had somehow ended up at the same table as an Investigator of the Black House and his singer wife. Their whole absurd, impossible family, which fit no mold and had been formed not by blood but by choice, was here.

Oh, right. It wasn’t just them.

Elena cradled a small bundle wrapped in a warm blanket and soft layers, and that bundle was the most important person in the room, though it probably weighed no more than a sack of flour.

Father Georgy made his unhurried way to the altar. A wooden box stood there, old and darkened by time, its sides carved with patterns depicting flames. He opened the lid, drew a long match from the folds of his cassock, and struck it against a matchbox. A tiny flame flared and trembled, then caught on the candle wick. Georgy hastily set the candle inside the box. The flame quivered like a warm petal.

Ardan went over to Elena. She looked tired: drawn, with dark bags beneath her eyes, chapped lips, and hair gathered into a hastily twisted knot. Elena had lost weight, and the cheekbones that had once been soft and rounded now stood out beneath her skin, sharper and more distinct than before. Yet she was happy, happy as only a mother can be: a mother who hasn’t slept in weeks, forgets to eat, and can’t remember the last time she looked in a mirror, yet who, every second, feels like the happiest person on earth.

Elena looked at Ard, nodded, and held the bundle out to him.

He took it, and the world around him changed.

The bundle felt so light... So light that for a moment Ard was afraid. It seemed to him there was nothing inside, as though the blankets and covers were empty, as if someone had played a joke and everyone was about to laugh, and then it would turn out there was no baby here at all. But then he felt the warmth. A tiny warmth, very soft and incredibly alive, radiating from deep within the fabric. It seemed so real, so genuine, that Ard’s throat tightened.

He had never in his life held anything so fragile.

He carried the bundle to the altar slowly, cautiously, tenderly, as he would carry a vessel made of the thinnest glass along the edge of a cliff. He calculated every step with a precision no formula could match and kept tighter control over every movement of his hands than over his own Ley. Any careless shift, it seemed, could shatter what he held.

His rational mind understood that babies don’t break, that they’re sturdier than they look, that... But reason was silent, and something else spoke to Ard, something ancient and deep: the very thing that makes anyone who takes a newborn into their arms suddenly stop breathing.

He looked at her face.

The baby girl slept. Little Agnes, Boris and Elena’s daughter, slept with the peace known only to those who don’t yet know that the waking world can be frightening, too. Her plump cheeks, pink and smooth, nestled into the sheets tucked around her, and she snuffled sweetly, wrinkling her tiny button nose. Her dark, thick lashes, disproportionately long for so small a face, quivered faintly, and Ard thought she might be dreaming of something good. Something adults no longer know how to see in their own complicated, tangled dreams.

So tiny. Utterly weightless. Yet at the same time, the most precious thing Ardi had ever held in his hands. Not a grimoire, not accumulators worth a thousand exes, not his father’s knife, not the ancient scrolls and books of Atta’nha. A child. Alive and warm.

He could hear her tiny heart, the size of a pastry, beating fast, so fast, like a little hammer striking an equally tiny anvil. To Ard, that tapping seemed the loudest sound in the entire church.

Father Georgy stood beside the chest and looked at Ard. Calmly, without solemnity, without the unctuous expression Ard had seen on the faces of other priests, the same expression that always stirred a vague irritation in him. Georgy looked at him the way a friend does when he understands how hard this is for you and isn’t about to pretend it isn’t.

“Repeat after me, Ard,” he said quietly.

The words of the prayer flowed from his lips, sometimes lengthy and sometimes ornate. They were words born before the Empire, yet he could not remember them. In truth, he couldn’t even hear his own voice. He saw no walls, no stained glass, no motes of dust in the sunbeams.

All he saw was Agnes’s face: her plump cheeks, her button nose, her quivering lashes. And all he heard was her heart.

Tap-tap.

Tap-tap.

Like someone knocking very softly on a door, yet with desperate persistence, begging to be let inside, into a house that was sometimes frightening, sometimes steeped in pain, but so beautiful.

Georgy nodded. Ardan lifted the bundle and leaned over the chest. He lowered the child toward the flame for a moment, for the briefest instant, only long enough for the candle’s warmth to touch the blanket and not a moment longer. The flame swayed as though reaching out to meet her, and a golden glow fell across Agnes’s face. In that glow, her cheeks grew rosier still and her lashes darker still. She wrinkled her nose but didn’t wake.

Ard drew the bundle from the chest and pressed it to his chest.

Maybe everyone applauded. Boris and Elena seemed to come flying over at once, and Elena reached out both arms toward her daughter. Boris probably embraced them both, and his eyes shone so brightly that Ard turned away, because it was too much, too much happiness for one small room. Apparently, Father Georgy traced the sacred symbol of the Face of Light over them all. Maybe Arkar even bellowed something from the back rows, his bass voice rolling like thunder beneath the church vaults. Tess likely laughed, clear and light. And Bazhen surely said something foolish, but harmless...

But Ardan remembered none of it.

He still couldn’t look away from the child. Even when Elena took Agnes from his arms, even when the bundle passed into her mother’s hands and its tiny warmth left his palms, Ard kept watching. The tiny face, the fluttering lashes, the button nose.

And of course, he might only have imagined it, but after he pulled his hands from the chest with its single candle, the smell of blood on them had faded. Only a little. Barely enough to notice. Even if no one but him could smell it at all.

***

In the empty jazz bar called Bruce, music played almost inaudibly from a gramophone. The record crackled, the needle scraped the grooves, and a soft, slow melody from a trumpet, a double bass, and someone’s distant piano floated across the room, following the contours of smoke from an extinguished candle. The chairs had been set atop the tables, and the bar was closed; the only people there sat at a single table in the corner, beneath a dim Ley-lamp.

Their strange family.

Elena and Tess danced onstage. They moved slowly and awkwardly, laughing and often getting tangled in the hems of their dresses. At the table, Boris was having a heated debate with Bazhen and Arkar about something. Lord Fahtov’s gestures grew broader and broader, his voice louder and louder. Bazhen nodded with the air of a man who knew the answer to every question in creation (and most likely found that answer solely beneath women’s skirts), while Arkar, leaning on his crutch, occasionally interjected short, hoarse remarks that made Boris go pale one moment and flush the next.

They seemed to be arguing about raising children, and every one of them was absolutely convinced he was right, including Bazhen and Arkar, who were both childless and whose entire approach to pedagogy amounted to a cuff on the back of the head.

Ardi sat a little apart from the argument, with little Agnes in his arms. Elena had handed her to him while she danced with Tess. The child slept, and Ard gently rocked the bundle of blankets. The Sleeping Spirits could see it: this “rocking” had suddenly become the most natural motion his hands had ever made. Easier than fixing a generator. Easier than Guta’s wrestling or Ergar’s hunting. Easier than anything he’d ever been taught at the Grand or the Black House.

Just to rock the child fate had now bound him to, even if only in the eyes of the Church of the Face of Light.

Tess and Elena came over to the table, flushed and still laughing. Tess, red-haired and lovely, looked at Ard as he bent over sleeping Agnes. She shook her head and smiled.

“Ardi, hand the baby back to her mother,” she said cheerfully. “Or Elena will decide that a spiritual guide isn’t someone who leads others to the Light, but someone who steals children.”

Elena laughed softly so she wouldn’t wake her daughter, then held out her arms. Ard handed her the bundle carefully and tenderly, with the slow precision he reserved only for the most important things. Elena took her daughter, pressed her close, and immediately sank into that peculiar, incomparable... concentration. Yes, “concentration” was probably exactly the right word.

Ardi smiled at his own thoughts. It had been a long time since he’d had one of those moments when he couldn’t call to mind the term he needed.

Elena tipped her head slightly, listening to Agnes breathe, adjusted the blanket, and smoothed an invisible crease out of the sheet. Everything else in the world ceased to exist for her: the bar, the music, the argument at the table, Bazhen, Arkar, all of them.

Tess offered Ard her hand.

“Dance with me.”

They stepped onto the floor in front of the stage. Ard rested a hand on her waist, and she rested hers on his shoulder. Their fingers intertwined, as they had so many times before. Ard had lost count. The gramophone played something slow and lyrical while they swayed in time with the music. Hardly moving, hardly breathing.

Ard looked over Tess’s shoulder toward their table. At Boris, who had stopped arguing and now sat beside Elena with one arm around his wife’s shoulders, watching his daughter with a slightly foolish expression of quiet happiness. At Elena, who leaned against his shoulder, eyes closed, still rocking Agnes. At Arkar, who, despite his crutch and bandages, had managed to reach the bar and was now pouring himself something from a dark bottle. At Bazhen, standing beside the gramophone and changing the record with the focused expression of a man choosing his legal arguments for an upcoming hearing.

And Ardi wanted so badly for this moment, this instant filled with happiness so strange and yet so warm, to stand still. To freeze. To hang in the air like a note from the record Bazhen had put on. To last forever.

As if she’d sensed it, Tess squeezed his fingers a little tighter.

“I know,” she whispered.

And Ard didn’t ask what, exactly, she knew. She knew everything, after all. She always knew everything.

The gramophone played. Agnes slept. Boris and Elena sat with their arms around each other, utterly still. They looked exhausted and happy, and seemed part of a painting no one would ever paint, yet everyone who saw it would remember forever.

And Ard danced with Tess in the empty bar, and dusk gathered outside the windows, and the city’s lights were coming on, and tomorrow he would leave, and ahead lay two months without her, and the north, and the expedition, and another round of adventures he had no love for, but now, right now, at this minute, this second, everything was all right.

***

“Well now, dear Ard, I hope you smell better than you dress, because I can survive two weeks in a compartment with an uncouth cowboy.” Mrs. Shpritz was taking things from her traveling bag and putting them into one of the cabinets in their compartment. “But two weeks in the company of an uncouth cowboy who also stinks is clearly too much.”

She went on talking, but Ardi wasn’t listening. He watched the Metropolis dwindle in the distance.

To think: just under two years ago, he would have given anything not to have come here. Now, perhaps, he would give even more not to leave.

Irony.

Or maybe.

Simply.

That was the dream of the Sleeping Spirits...

Or it was all the will of the Light.