SANITY LINE

VI. The Surge              

The Fate Mill was a comfortable place, as comfort went, and one could never fault it for that. It would always have those amenities most looked-for in study – comfortable seating (damasked wing-backs, in fact), agreeable auditory stimulation in the form of its Works, and, quite naturally, work from which to study. Its comforts, however, could not excuse its surrealism.

 

The Mill was improbable, to say the least. The Millwrite sat in his aforementioned chair, stiff-backed and cautious; the wine glass filled to the hips with its dark fluid more an ornament of office than an object of luxury. From this place atop a high, slowly revolving dais, he had a full view of the works, of row on row of gleaming brass-and-iron typewriter churning out the works of invisible ghost-writers, of the machinery behind that collating the pages, of the binding-mills and the chain-iterating shelves thus fed.

 

As the truly focused often were, the disruption from his reading placed everything he could see under new light. The veneer of banality had been stripped from the scene, and fresh eyes had full view of each detail. There, on the lintel, was the scratch where one of the Coleopterous Host had scraped his horned crest when he had delivered the Millwrite from Pnakotus.

 

The Millwrite shared a casual relationship with time. From birth, all are married intimately to that special property of time, stuck under inexorable direction. Divorced of time completely, the Millwrite had no recourse to it. His mill, then, was whirring clockwork, not just in terms of the precision of its automation, but in actual, practical meaning.

 

Clocks abounded in the mill, driven by it as much as they were driving it. Clocks that counted all the usual units we would expect. Clocks for the aeons and clocks for the Planck Time, and a whole host of units for which even he did not know the proper name.

 

The Millwrite paused, looking appraisingly at the glass in his hand, and sipped delicately of the dark ink which stained, briefly, his alabaster lips. For an instant, there was silence. The Mill had stopped turning.

 

He rose from his seat, perusing the stacks. Row upon row of books with uninteresting names, each as uncreative as the last, loomed at him. The Alabaster Man folded his free hand behind is back. There was no order to these books – none save that given to them by the time of their production. Unless you knew to a high degree of precision when a book was made, you would never find it again, once it disappeared onto the stacks.

 

That was, of course, what he himself was here for. He frowned, ascending his dais once more, and set the glass down, to have both hands to use in turning the myriad hands of the dazzlingly large Planck Clock. Such was the precision in the balance of the hands that the whole of the works behind it could be driven by a minimum of effort; if you knew what you were doing.

 

As he turned them, the stacks themselves reversed along the paths they had once been travelling, coming to rest in the position they had been in, at the time he had set. To do this from the Planck Clock was a matter of his own pride. He was showing off, if only to himself.

 

Why would I do that?

 

Another pass of the stacks, and he found the first truly interesting title he'd been looking for. Vidcund Därk was promptly drawn from the shelves, and taken up to the dais, laid open on the desk while he looked for the relevant passage.

 

With a delicate silver pen, the Alabaster Man purged several lines from the end of a page, and tore out all the subsequent pages. He then returned to the front cover, removing an index card marked “Amendments”.

 

Changed “Assigned to Agency Operations in Galba Dea” to “Assigned to Agency Operations in Figaro”. Subsequently resubmitted for remilling.

 

He set the book into a slot below one of the typewriters, locking it into place. Adjustments, in the form of stops on the pedestal that supported the device, set it to the correct revision mode. Still, simply extrapolating forward across one book would not be dramatic enough a change to satisfy the need for change the Alabaster Man was feeling. He made note of a figure on the book's spine, and headed around the circular room to another console.

“Set function to rework,” he muttered to himself, “Range: Unlimited, mode radial from origin of...” He fell silent, consulting his copy of the figure as he painstakingly dialed it in. At a touch, the console, and then the clocks, and then the whole mill whirred back to life.

 

The Alabaster Man was again struck by the surreal of the ordinary, as cascades of books fell from the stacks. Some, he knew, were destined to feed the fires of his mill in some small way. Others, he was certain, had to be revised by the mill itself. Anything after the change he made would have to be recalculated.

 

He checked the watch in his vest pocket against the Planck Clock. The universe was a massive clock with perfect precision, whirring away precisely as its laws dictated. Sometimes, though, if you were watching closely, you could see it skip a beat.

 

He returned to his chair, picked up his wine glass, and waited out the eternity between the instants. Aeons would need recalculation to save perhaps a few short days.

 

“Sir, forgive the interruption. Your guest is awake.”

 

---

 

“Jesus. And I thought the damage would look better from up here.”

 

The exclamation – barely above the ambient sound level in the aircraft, brought the attention of everyone in the cabin. James’s words – calm and even – had brought every other Grey Angel flying to his side. That, he mused, was authority.

 

They all looked out the small windows in the sides of the Lear, and frowned. The silence was palpable. Niles was the first to break it, clearing his throat. “How is it, an hour out of Zvanesburg Airport, I have no fucking idea where we are?”

 

“Headed roughly west-north-west over what used to be the Salt Cove residential district,” one of the newer faces muttered.

 

It was an impressive vista. Where once the edge of the Terrwald blended down into the flowing foothills of the Northern Guardians, and then the lowland fens of the overall Kraterburg precinct, there was now a seeming-boundless expanse of water. A new Bay, so fresh in the Zaxtonian experience that no name had yet solidified in the lexicon. Kraterburg Bay, some called it. The Blasted Bay, New Bay, a plethora of new names.

 

Prodigal shifted his molars around the sucker he’d been nursing in a halfhearted attempt to stop smoking gracefully. A shortage of tobacco forecasted in the morning paper would likely force his hand, in that regard. “Fuck, now’d be a good time to buy a fishing boat or three.”

“Good a gamble as any,” Banker supposed. “Though, frankly, you’d have better luck buying a cannery or two.”

The crowd dispersed, leaving only Niles and the newcomers standing around Scion, who looked up. “Why don’t you three have a seat? Prince, you’ve already met Locuna, right?”

Niles glanced at the other – the man with the half-mask and the harlequin jumpsuit. “Yeah, a while ago. Before.”
Locuna gave him a nod as he sank lithely into a seat. “Hell of a baptism. Archangel must’ve liked you or something.”

 

Scion continued to write on his legal pad, scarcely glancing up. “Prince sits on the council because I decided I’d rather have the counsel of a highly skilled police detective than a highly talented art thief.” He looked up coolly, somehow projecting his expression of uncaring in spite of being masked. “This young woman is Diana, Prince.”

 

“I know who she is,” Prince said bluntly. He’d figured it out while they were being snuck onto the airfield to board the private jet. She was tall, solidly built, cleanly cut. Her long hair she wore in a tight bun suggestive of a military or law enforcement background. Her mask covered only the lower half of her face, and this was a failure, from Prince’s view, since her most distinctive feature was now exposed – heterochromia. Her bent and clothing was suggestive enough of a military career, and the eyes a clue, but the sight of her distinctive rifle was concrete, as far as circumstantial evidence went. Still, if Niles had learned one thing, it was that it was polite not to out his fellow Angels. It helped preserve the security of the cell structure the gang once operated under. “And if I may, I would remind her I have a low tolerance for oathbreaking.”

 

“You needn’t worry, Detective.” Diana spoke for perhaps the second time since Niles had met her. “I only work with the Angels under very special conditions.”

“Diana is here for us when we’re working abroad,” Scion explained bluntly. “And it’s high time the two of you were brought up to speed, right Prince?”

Prince nodded, and reached into the overhead for a couple of folders. The idea that the gang was organized enough to have paperwork-briefings baffled him. No investigation of the group had ever found a shred of a remainder of such things. “Right, here’s the deal. We’re headed to Galba Dea on an investigative contract under Louis Rainwright.”

“The Viscount? The King’s Bulldog?” Locuna was frowning from the side of his face that was exposed. “The fuck does he want with us?”

“He himself is under contract,” Scion interjected. “Crown Princess Laurel ordered him to contract us to investigate a break-in that happened at the palace.”
“My briefing books must be outdated,” Diana said, choosing her words carefully. “I was under the impression that the ranking monarch in Galba Dea is Crown Prince Valerian.”

“That,” Niles said, “is where we come in.”

 

---

 

You had to hand it to Edward Coultier – he always knew the wrong thing to say.

“I don’t care about individual blocks.”

 

At his words, a number of faces turned toward Edward as though he had said some nasty thing, perhaps delving into racist undertones, or speaking in praise of fascism. Those gathered were his club commanders – an organizational tier below Francis and his fellow Lieutenants. They had men fighting on those blocks right now, men and women both, that they knew personally.

 

Edward knew many of those men and women himself, and was already mentally resenting their unvoiced implication. “If people are going to die because of a decision I made, I want to minimize that number.  The ongoing battle is not a tournament ladder. The blocks are not capture points in some video game that we’re all trying to hold to maximize our score at the end of the fight.”

 

He dug his laser pointer out of his pocket, indicating a vessel on a satellite photo from half an hour ago that was projected onto the wall. “This is the MDS Justicar, the latest and greatest guided missile cruiser in the entirety of the Maritime Self Defense Force, and so help me Mary, Mother of God, if I am not the most trigger happy bastard in the Pacific. We are going to hold these five bridges over the old River Rawls. Anything moves toward any of them that we don’t like vanishes in a puff of modern technology the like of which every one of us wishes never got invented.”

 

A laugh filtered through the room. “Bonne chance, you crazy bastards. And make sure I know exactly where even the littlest, spriest bastard in each of your clubs is. Hades missiles don’t care what they burn.”

 

As the commanders began to gather their equipment, Edward sensed movement beside him, and stopped chewing the inside of his lip long enough to glance at Francis. “… Alex?”

“Nothing yet, Eddy.” Francis thumbed the side of his nose, glancing at the black-and-chain rosary that was incongruously lying on top of the man’s paperwork. “MDS Catherwood. The Special Advisor is landing in ten minutes.”

 

“Call them back,” Edward wrapped the rosary around his left wrist, up against his watch. “I’m there in ten. Oversee the maneuver.”

“You sure you’re okay to do this, Eddy?”

 

Edward paused in the door, resting his hand on the hilt of his sword. The pause was pregnant, but after a subtle breath, Edward squared his jaw and moved on.

 

---

 

Holly had to admit she was impressed. From her lofty position in a ground control tower that may well have otherwise been a tree-house, she had a very good view of the best airfield money could buy, in her estimation. Even knowing what they were going to, she’d been surprised when they’d pulled off the marked road, and again when they stopped. Now, with a moment’s study passed, she could spot the various service buildings… and she was very good at such things. From the air, or from any further away, you wouldn’t have a chance.

 

“This one didn’t think you could make a plane disappear, what with radar, and transponders and all…”
“ You doubted me?”

 

Rainwright was being uncharacteristically curious about their new visitors. He stood nearby Holly – she could count his breaths – peering down at the unloading aircraft, as it disgorged his newest set of guests. In a way, Holly admired the Grey Angels. They had a sense of the theatric rarely seen, a reputation to kill for in her line of work, and, as far as she had heard, a perfect record of operational security. No member had ever been exposed. Nobody ever caught. It was absolutely unheard of.

 

When she did not answer him at length, the Viscount lowered his binoculars. “I don’t like this.”

“The Prince’s mistrust of you infests his sister like a plague. It’s natural she would want a second opinion.” Holly couldn’t help herself. She was entering the phase of her story where she would become a thorn in the Viscount’s side, constantly advocating against him in spite of herself. True to the ragabash form. Inside, she was just as conflicted about it as he was. The Grey Angels made a quiet name for themselves prosecuting a private war against anything they considered outside the natural order of things. They were exactly the right enemy to pit against her, or the viscount for that matter, and they had the numbers. “I make it… seven, including the pilot and co-pilot.”

 

“Seven. The pilots are the ones they call Banker and Driver.” Rainwright pointed them out as he spoke. “That’s the one they call Scion. He’s Archangel’s second in command, and the one we’ll be dealing with. I’m this close to knowing who he is.  The others… I’m not sure.”

Holly had no need for the binoculars. “The two with the half-masks. The woman is called Diana. She’s the one that killed that Deep One out in Nighholme last summer. The papers wrote it up as a military operation, and credited it to a Ground Force commander.”

 

Rainwright frowned slightly. “Good memory. Remind me to have Walter pull up that article when we get back. It might have a clue as to who she really is.”

 

Holly privately doubted it. “The other half-mask, the man, his name is Locuna. He is a thief. More show than brains. It’s a surprise to see him working with them.”

“A thief?”
“A good one,” Holly said. “Taken the National Library in Kraterburg a couple times. Probably one of two other people who could have gotten into the Curiosity Room.”

 

Rainwright nodded slowly, scanning the crowd again. His nerves began to subside. Holly was his insurance policy, and nobody was in as good as a position to make them disappear as he was, should it come to it. “How about the gentleman in the hood?”

 

“That’s Prodigal. He’s… a nobody.” Holly hadn’t quite figured out his role just yet. “He shows up at Grey Angels functions and makes much ado, and often about nothing. This one thinks he might run their cons, or something in the back, like Banker.”

 

“And the last one?”
“… This one does not recognize them.”

 

Rainwright glared down at the last man in the set, with his long grey coat and nondescript mask. Until today, the uniqueness of the masks the Angels wore served as a sort of street-heraldry, a way to tell them apart. The blandness of this mask was unique, to be sure… but if it was a sign of things to come, that game could get a lot harder.

 

“A professional assassin has a plan to kill everyone she meets.”

 

“Yes, your lordship.”

 

Rainwright looked to her. “Let’s go shake some hands.”

 

---

 

 The full significance of the vista before him was not yet lost, Vidcund had to remind himself. The temptation of the windows to either side was great, but he had the greater problem of getting up to speed to deal with. An autofile in his hands featured information about his own past, records of his dealings with an individual he knew only from file photographs – extensive dealings, at that.

 

Ah, the powers of the powers that be.

 

Geometric patterns around the edges of the document swam in his peripheral, purportedly there to stimulate memory retention and the reactivation of dormant memories blocked by his former amnesiac medication. For his own eyes, he couldn’t tell if the motion of the patterns was an illusion caused by their shape and the motion of his eyes across the page, or if it was down to simple animation. Either way, the more he read, the more this detail seemed strange to him. It was dangerous just to be around this Edward Coultier, the newly-minted Lord Protector of Figaro. They had worked together at Slipher, closely from the sound of it. A sort of mentor-student relationship with Edward as his understudy.

 

Slipher Corporation. The name was burned forever into some part of his neurology responsible for trepidation. By the old Project Moses files, Slipher was where it began for him. Where he was made, if that was really what happened.

 

At last, since taking flight, he finally reached a point where he couldn’t bear the temptation any more, and looked out over the expanse of sea beneath him. The bay was not overly deep – in places you could see rubble just beneath the surface, and in others, even some old structure exposed above it. Even from altitude, he could only see a dozen kilometers. It was water, as far as the eye could see.

 

“Must’ve been a hell of a bang, eh, agent?”

Vidcund looked to the pilot. A military man, he wasn’t privy to knowing the cause of the explosion. Hell, most people outside of Kether and the Agents in White weren’t privy to that knowledge. “When they figure out who’s responsible for it, there’ll be hell to pay.”

 

Privately, though, Vidcund wondered. He’d been assigned to a punishment unit, and then immediately detached from it, sent on assignment hundreds of kilometers from where the rest of his team planned to operate. He was being punished, sure, but one had to wonder if his usefulness gave him immunity to anything truly dangerous.

 

Besides, he thought, look what I’ve done.

 

Beneath his feet, the helicopter began its descent. Vidcund set aside the autofile, standing up to button his blazer. He was travelling light – what weapons he could hide under the jacket, and a spare suit in a backpack with a few spare autofile pages and two boxes of nine-by-nineteen, though truth be told if things were going so far south that he was going to need more than the rounds already in his handguns, somebody somewhere on the military side of things had fucked up.

 

It was windy enough on the deck of the Catherwood without the downdraft of the rotor blades that nobody was out apart from a token number of crew to tether down the aircraft. Undaunted, Vidcund slid the door open and sprang out, trusting in both his own sense of balance and in the quality of his shoes as he strode across the rain-slicked decking toward the open hangar door and the small gaggle of people there. When he closed to speaking distance, he smiled slightly, extending the hand that wasn’t holding the strap of his pack out to the side in greeting. “Lord Protector.”

 

Edward’s handshake was firm, and solid. Vidcund could see in his eyes the man’s surprise. “Christ, they sent you? I don’t have it that bad.”

 

Vidcund laughed, and was pleased somewhat to find, for once, that it wasn’t unforced. Being able to show some friendliness without working at it was going to be a nice break. “I’ll be the judge of that. Let’s go see what you’re working with, Mister Title-Man.”

 

---

 

Niles always found the infrastructure-spaces in old buildings like this fascinating. They were the gritty, coelacanthine guts of the urban jungle, with the same reverential and undisturbed feeling as he imagine the deeper woods of the Northern Terrwald to have. Even with modernized lighting, this particular room had that same effect – the same deep shadows, the same ventilation and drainage grates he was sure existed nowhere but here – unrecorded and unfettered.

 

Cities had histories and secrets that could run deep.

 

“Penny for your thoughts, Prince?”

Prince folded his arms, sucking air hard through the filtration in his mask. “This place is a goddamn security nightmare, is what I’m thinking.”

 

“No human could break in through here,” Prodigal said, dismissively. “And there’s nowhere to go from here, either.”

 

Niles let his gaze track its own path around the room – to the voluminous and abandoned boiler-chambers from the old steam system before the city was centralized, to the deep shadows, to the old coal-chests and open-mouthed cistern. There was more to security than preventing entry - Prodigal was flatly wrong, and this room could hide a secret for years before anyone even came looking for it. Locuna could probably do it. “Paranoia’s an occupational hazard.”

 

The other three Horsemen looked at him, and he smirked, invisibly, behind his mask. “I hear.”

The door swung open, and a woman strode into the room, closing it behind her. She was richly dressed – everything that Niles could see was bespoke and not within ten degrees of the rack. Conservatively so, however. Nothing gaudy, no jewels. Reflexively, he stood to something like attention. It was the least he could do for visiting Royalty. “Your Royal Highness.”

 

“So easy to get lost down here. It’s no wonder a genteel young lady such as myself could get lost in the basement for an hour or so.” She offered a faint smirk, mostly to Scion, who Niles’s practiced eye could see was entirely unmoved. “Or a group of Zaxtonian tourists.”

 

“Charming,” Scion said, with some earnestness in his voice. “Madam, you are a woman who needs no introduction. As you might understand, introductions among ourselves are few and far between. I do not know these men beyond a name and a face, and that is the same name and face you yourself might guess.”

 

Crown Princess Laurel nodded. “I understand implicitly. Fortunately, we don’t have to know each other to deal with this problem. In fact, for our part, it’s better if I don’t know you’re here at all.”
Banker’s voice clicked at the back of his throat – it was a tick Niles had noticed. He was chewing something, somehow, behind that mask of his. “It’s a large basement. Many people could be in it at once, without ever crossing each other’s paths.”

 

“Exactly.”

Scion returned his gaze to the woman, slow and inexorable as the dawn. “If I may, your Royal Highness, exposure is exposure however fervently we lie about it. The papers have your brother on a retreat in Vale Drak-Azul, with rumours of his possible abdication. The papers, as always, lie.”

 

At Scion’s mental prod, Niles raised his gaze slightly. “The rumours in the constabulary say that your brother is missing. This is not euphemistic.”

 

“No,” The Crown Princess said. “It is not. I have lost a flash drive – just there – which has the information from whatever sort of security passes muster in this place. I am told you, in particular, have some skill with investigation. You bear the recommendation of your companions.”

“Thank you.”

 

The Crown Princess sighed. “I don’t care how… I just… need to know.”

Scion bowed deeply. “Of course. Good day.”

 

As soon as Laurel turned to leave, Scion gestured, causing the small drive to leap from the top of the old radiator it was resting on and into Niles’ hand. There were some nods and murmors of approval, as the catch had been down to the former detective’s reflexes and hand-eye co-ordination, and it wasn’t as though he was warned.

 

Prodigal was the first to speak. He almost always was. “Someone want to tell me how in the hell you lose a king-to-be?”

“I thought you’d be used to this supernatural, ghosts in the shadows bullshit by now, son.”

As they walked, Scion pulled Niles close, while they vanished into the various elevators and stairwells they were going to use to leave. Each had to change to plain clothes before emerging, and most, as had been said, were ignorant even of each other. Keeping things separate by Archangel’s original design was still the order of the day.

“She knew you were on her.”

Niles frowned, puzzled as he slipped his mask into the back of his pants. “Who?”
“The girl, Rainwright’s assassin, what’s her name… You looked at her twice. I thought you knew.”
“Bell was there?” Niles stopped in his tracks, glaring at the freshly-unmasked James. “How?”

“You think Locuna’s the only good thief in the universe?”

 

---

 

The for-rent Board Room at the Crown Princeton Hotel was a far cry from the salon at the Coultier’s Azulwald Estate or the hallowed halls of the old executive council cabinet, but so far as Great Justice Michael Scamwell was concerned, meetings were conducted by people, not places.

 

Well, so far as his wife reminded him to be concerned every day, anyway. He cast the latest briefing document aside, and scooped up his cup of coffee. It was finely roasted, dearly blended, and, if the naysayers were right, on the brink of extinction in the open market, at least at this level of quality. “What’s next?”

 

“A very in-depth project proposal was delivered to my office today.”

So rare was the occasion of Stamatia Dowd speaking at an Executive Council meeting without prior prompting that even cynical old Michael had to look up. The young woman was new – his recently-designated Agent-Liaison – and seemed, unlike most given the role, to be intimidated by their fellow councilors. That was just as well, to the judge-executive. Agency had done enough damage, lately. “To your office?”

 

“By a courier straight from the source. It’s a reconstruction proposal for Kraterburg. Everything from the engineering of draining the bay to the funding and logistics of building a city to order.”

“Who has the byline?”

“Gabrielle Angelini.”

 

Michael looked up and down the table. “Gabrielle Angelini, formerly of Slipher Corporation and Tortuous Wrongful Death?”

“That’s the one. I understood that he came up clear of all charges.”

 

“Honey,” Michael leaned forward, gesturing with his pen. “I sat that trial, and I am telling you, anyone that can crawl through Richard Cluny’s river of shit and come out clean on the other side is dirtier than the devil himself.”

 

He thought, sipping his coffee. “We should all speak to him. Make it happen, and get me a copy of that document. What’s next?”

Vincent Coultier cleared his throat. “Language from our collective press office on tonight’s speech. It stands to be read.”

“Let’s hear it.”

 

Vincent sighed, standing. His brow was deeply furrowed. To Michael, who’d known the man on and off again since they were both in High School, he suddenly looked twice his age. The past months had greyed him, and the past days seemed primed to push him into an early grave, if they could. But, the Lord Field Marshal was nothing if not stolid. He had to have been worried about his daughter, about his sons, but he showed none of it.

 

Michael had to respect that. Politician that he was, he would never have done that himself.

 

“Good Morning, Citizens of the Union. Two days ago, a vessel of the Maritime Self Defense Force succumbed to the inclement weather conditions of Kraterburg Bay. This nation has suffered days of mourning over the lives lost at sea. A contingent of survivors – officers and crew of the vessel itself together with the members of the Ground Self Defense Force – were rescued at sea by the Dean Royal Navy and returned to port at Galba Roy. We had hoped, yesterday, to announce this good news as the silver lining on a dark and stormy night. Something worth a word or two of celebration, in a season of strife and uncertainty.

 

It is my sad duty to tell you that this is not the case. The survivors of the sinking of MDS Hall are not being safely returned to the soil they risked their lives to protect. The sacrifice of their fellows is being dishonoured, the tragedy of their circumstance multiplied, by the paranoia of the Dean. Today, on the very day our great nation was founded, it is my sad duty to inform you that the brave men and women once aboard that ship are being held by our neighbours, our friends, as prisoners of war. Today, we as a people are betrayed.

 

We shall stand together. Today we, as our forefathers, are beset by challenges too numerous to name. Then, as now, a bold few gathered, and staked their names on a simple but provocative idea. Zaxti, Terik, or Lipan, we are one people. Then, as now, the Deans rebuffed. They stood alone, as they stand alone now. But today, I tell you, we are one nation, indivisible, as concrete and unchanging a union as the very rock upon which we stand.

 

We did not invite this war, we did not seek this war, but we will stand together.”

 

The silence that followed this reading of the address was profound. It buzzed in Michael’s ears. Vincent’s delivery was flat and monotone. Trying too hard to keep the personal element out. Sipping his coffee, he looked down the table to Stamatia. “What do you think?”

 

Stamatia looked to Vincent. “It should be your speech.”

 

“Thank you,” Vincent slid the paper down the table. “But we are a democracy, not a junta. It is enough for me to know I wrote it.”

 

He held Michael’s gaze, staring through the man with the eyes only a man who had killed could bring to bear. “Your honour, we’ve known each other since we were young. Went to school together, the whole Norman Rockwell shtick. You don’t sell this-“

 

“I know, I know.” Michael put the script in a folder, and handed it off to an assistant. “Trust me, Vincent, I’ll be dead before you find me.”

 

---

 

“Shit’s about to get interesting.”

The comment stirred Edward from his laconic study of the digital map. These toys – taken from GSDF stores, no less – were new to him. The ability to know exactly (well, by GLONASS standards, anyway) where each and every man was at any given point in time was extraordinary, and watching everyone move around and be calm was soothingly distracting from his own worries and cares.

 

The comment from his father – little more than a “watch the news tomorrow” with everything that was going on – made him preternaturally uneasy. This was about to be about more than just Figaro’s problems.

 

He joined Francis as the pair stood beside a window, taking the offered second set of binoculars. “What am I looking for?”

 

“Enemy’s making a move on the far bridge. Might be time for you to move off the line.”

Edward huffed under his breath, glancing down the bridge. “Safe here as we would be back at HQ, if they’re going to try for the far bridge.”

 

“You put too much faith in that agency stooge.”

 

Edward tore his gaze from the bridge, fixing his lieutenant with a smirl – outside of his current mood, but fitting the history he had with Agent Därk. “Keep six on him, then. I have a history with this particular stooge.”

 

---

 

Fuck, you gone and landed yourself a real backwater posting now, eh?

 

Vidcund adjusted his position again, shifting his weight heavily in the back of the banged-up eight-year-old Grand Am as he tried to find a position that accommodated his height, the scale of the laptop he was trying to use, the weight of his equipment harness and the structure of the vest he wore under his jacket. The way he saw it, the kind of open rioting being reported in Figaro constituted at least a minor warzone, and that necessitated a step up from his stab-and-riccochet-resistant spidersilk to something less elegant.

 

As the wireless signal dropped – again – he slammed the laptop shut, casting it aside as he stepped out of the vehicle. “Mister Lowell!”

 

One of the Knights – a man with a military bearing suggestive of some years in the service before he’d joined this militia – turned immediately and began to hustle over to him. “Agent?”

Vidcund paused, gesturing for the same with his hand, mouth slightly parted, like a cat trying to find a scent. A familiar tingle ran up his spine, lending an itch to the fingers as his eyes flicked from position to position on the far side of the bridge. Abruptly, the suggestive flickers of motion just at the edge of his awareness clicked. “Tactical cover!”

 

The moment he shouted, the enemy fired, though the nature of the attack took Vidcund off balance, and added some slowness to his own movements. It was not every day, after all, in cities of cement and steel, you witnessed a volley of arrows.

 

Still, Vidcund moved, taking step after measured step sideways. Volleys were imprecise attacks – nobody was aiming for him directly, and most of the shots were falling shorter – at the middle of the bridge, where the Knights had erected their barricade. It was time to see what he could do to change that.

 

He drew slowly, considering his options as time crawled. Shots of any distance were not, strictly, what handguns were for, but then again, fighting wars were not what Agency Division was for. He only drew one of his firearms, snug in a two-handed grip that snapped up into a tracking position on his targets like a pointer-dog. He fired in the heartbeat between strides, cooking off a round only when both feet were on the ground, and then only twice before he had the cover of a concrete barricade, and took to a knee.

He tapped the receiver in his ear, taking the microphone off of mute. “I’m not sure I like their attitude, Mister Lowell. Are your men in cover?”

 

“Roger.”

 

Vidcund nodded, and switched channels on the radio.

 

---

 

The voice that issued from the radio was cold as ice, flat and monotone to the point that Francis wondered if Vidcund was using a filter on his handset. “What is taking so long?”

 

Edward picked up the handset from the desk. “Danger close, isn’t it?”

 

There was scarce distance from the building to the bridge itself, which Edward was given to understand was less than the amount by which a missile fired from the ship could be expected to miss by.  Vidcund seemed less inclined to mind than Edward would have liked. “Eddy, if you don’t call it in, I will.”

 

“Insubordinate little bastard, isn’t he,” Francis muttered, scanning the firing positions with his glasses. “… I think he made that shot.”

 

“Of course he made that shot,” Edward muttered, as he switched the radio channel.

 

The pause that followed was intolerable. Edward moved away from the radio, standing by the window with binoculars in hand. He scanned the bridge with his binoculars, tracking backward from where his men were clustered behind their barricades, to the empty car, then further back, where he spotted Vidcund in a low crouch, moving swiftly not backward but forward, toward the car again. “Not a single casualty.”

“Yet,” Francis muttered, “… He’s a cold fish.”

 

With little more than a zip, too fast to do much more than look, the missiles took into the heart of the buildings either side of the street, bursting their walls outward and dropping them nearly to street level. Francis gave a low whistle, as Edward scanned back to the troop positions. “If so much as a hair is out of place I’ll do the man myself.”

 

“I thought you liked the guy.”

 

Edward took Vidcund in his sights, watching the man calmly walk down the bridge and through the barricade. “… Things change. Get me Lowell when the shift changes. And call back to HQ and get me an astral fix on that building. I make it… 853 Franklin Ave.”

 

Francis looked up. An astral fix meant that Edward was going hunting.

 

---

 

Niles had slept in worse positions than this, though he was surprised to some degree that a seedy motel in the slummiest section of Galba Roy was the best either House Sussex or the Angels could do. Still, as he looked around the room, taking in the token signs of recent cleaning, he reasoned it was better than foster homes in Kraterburg, or group homes in Tererra, or (if we’re being honest) residence at the Academy.

 

He smirked, pouring himself more of the stale coffee (bless coffee shops and their cardboard-box carafes) that was fueling his late-night delving. He opened his laptop, booting into the secondary OS, with its double-safety of encrypted drive partition and separate-password-locked user account. Going over the footage of the crime he was here to investigate could wait for the morning, for rested eyes and the input of his fellows. For now, he was chiefly concerned with his study of some scans taken from the book he and Scion had found in the Sepulchre.

 

The passage had caught his interest for two reasons – it was the last section of the book to be written in (visibly, anyway – he made a mental note to look for signs of invisible ink in the later pages), but also to be written in cipher, though his work thus far had revealed it to be a simple keyed Caesar. Eli, evidentially, had a healthy dose of paranoia, but not much knowledge in how to satisfy it.

 

He’d worked out the key playing with the first paragraph, and now all he had to do was get the text into a fully digital form and run it through any of a number of internet tools for decoding such things.

The passage, in its entirety, was horrifying in its proper context. If Niles had simply found it tucked away in a library, or even as evidence at a crime scene, it would speak of a head stuck in a fantasy world, or something pulled from an overly-dry novella. It detailed the properties of a class of creature called a lich, in keeping with Sharona’s fixation on necromancy.

 

Had Niles not had a first-hand glimpse behind the veil, and felt the cold burn of the grave himself, he would still have dismissed the passage as Lunacy. A Lich, Archangel wrote, was a special class of the undead, a monster returned from the grave by the darkest of rites – the closest to immortality a necromancer could bring himself. They were composed of and empowered by the dark magic they once practiced, their disembodied souls forever in a dual state of inhabiting both their own reanimated body, and residing in a phylactery, which Sharona had described as a cage for the soul, of particular construction and containing writings of dark magic that formed the contract or testament that the soul used to anchor itself in material reality.

 

He went so far as to hint at understanding the nature of the rites required – apparently, more needed doing than simply making the phylactery – but didn’t bother to illuminate the reader as to the specifics, for which Niles felt privately grateful.

 

… I should have grabbed that fucking box.

 

---

 

Vidcund did not rise to his lofty position before the Eruption without being thorough. Spending an extra hour or two doing his own mopping up wasn’t even a choice – it was the job. Still, to him, there was something especially unnerving about empty office towers, particularly bombed-out husks such as these. He had put it down, once, to incongruity of experience. This stood outside the paradigm.

 

Flickers of memory and pseudomemory shot through his mind as he picked his way through what was left of the second tower the missiles had hit. He was moving slowly, quietly, weapons sheathed under his jacket, relying on stealth, sense, and vest to protect him long enough to get to them if he needed them. He remembered a place like this, standing once, in Anfangsburg. Remembered destroying it.

 

The funny feeling had returned. He had as many questions as his masters did about the affair. How had he known there was a self-destruct mechanism hidden in the basement? How did he know how to bypass its natural delay, or the security placed upon it? Why did he feel, now, as though that day had been merely a revisit of an old memory, a return to a former haunt.

 

Why did he feel as though he had destroyed the building the first time, too?

 

“No, please, I-“

 

The hair on the back of the agent’s neck pricked, and without really thinking about it, he drew his sidearm. The sound had come from the level above him, unmuffled by flooring thanks to a section of which had collapsed. He was, unknowingly, standing directly beneath something dramatic.

 

He eyed the section of collapsed floor thoughtfully. It drooped down, still connected, tenuously, at one upper edge, as a very steep and likely very flimsy ramp. Weighing his options, he came, within seconds, to the right conclusion – whether he scaled it or not, he was going to be seeing at least one of the figures upstairs. If someone was roving through the building doing away with witnesses, survivors, or whoever else, they would surely come to find whoever was alert enough to collapse part of the ceiling.

 

As it happened, he needn’t worry. He scaled the surface easily, turning as he ran to cover his own approach. There, on the level above, lying on the floor, was yet another dead man, with the same lingering glow of a slightly unusual auric signature registering on Vidcund’s AR overlay. And there, standing over him, expressionless, was the familiar face he’d inferred from reports and hoped to be wrong about.

 

Il Fantoma remained still, steel-grey eyes pinning Vidcund in place beneath his bizarrely-featureless mask. Regarding, no doubt, the weapon Vidcund held. This time, the agent suspected, things would go a bit differently than they had at the National Library.

 

“You,” he said, gently, “should be dead.”

“I didn’t die at Carcosa, now, did I?” Vidcund adjusted his aim. At this range, a headshot could be relied upon – and he did not trust the man’s vest to yield to mundane ammunition, however ordinary the textiles might appear. “Why should it be different on your blade, hmm? Why should it be different in this place?”

 

There was a profound stillness. The dying man breathed his last. Il Fantoma seemed not to breathe at all, and Vidcund, well… the agent already had his shot. “It is time for you to unmask, sir.”

 

A soft chuckle, behind the disguise. “Mask? I wear no mask.”

 

Vidcund frowned, and as though that small change was enough to break the spell of stillness that had fallen over the encounter, the Phantom moved in a blur. He bounded over the opening in the floor – a ten or twelve foot leap at a standing bound, and Vidcund had little choice but to step backward to allow him landing or allow the man and his weapon to fall upon him. He fired, walking calmly backward. Again, and again, calm round after calm round. After the first miss he dropped his hand a few degrees, directing his will against the more reliable target of the man’s torso, and freeing his left hand to accept the other firearm. The man’s sword blurred before him, and he continued his relentless, deliberate advance amid a shower of sparks.

 

By rights, parrying gunshots should be impossible. The window of opportunity was too small at this distance, the precision required too great. Even the perception, the ability to see where the bullet was headed as it left Vidcund’s muzzle and became subject to the laws of ballistic motion, should have been impossible. But it was happening anyway, and the Agent’s heart rate began to elevate beyond its usual, active level.

 

His right-hand weapon fired its last by the time the Phantom was closing with him, and for the time being, he simply discarded it. Its peculiar features rendered the weapon practically useless to anyone but him, and its complete lack of ammunition rendered it harmless in the hands that one asshole in 64 million that could have operated it. That same hand flourished a collapsible baton to its full length in time to catch the fencer’s first real strike, and Vidcund unloaded the last two rounds from his left-hand weapon into the man’s chest with nothing to block them.

 

The phantom stumbled back a pace or two, ridge of his brow rising slightly, perhaps in surprise. Last time they had met, he had struck Vidcund down with impunity, while the agent stood between his own bodies in paralyzed fear of that unseen world-between-places Tillinghast once wrote on. Vidcund liked to think the bastard hadn’t counted the agent as a threat this time, either. He liked to think that had given him an upper hand.

 

When the man’s gait stabilized, Vidcund resigned himself to strangeness, and turned around the handgun in his left, gripping it by the barrel in order to more effectively use it as an improvised weapon. The Phantom steadied himself, adjusting his stance, bringing his own weapon up more defensively, or so was Vidcund’s read. Swordplay was not his specialty, and his experience in a melee was mostly left up to breaking up the odd bar-fight in his downtime.

 

Behind him, there was a sound like tearing fabric, and he shifted his position, standing side on to the sound and the Phantom, taking up a posture that let him have a weapon either side. He was about to risk a look at this new interruption when a familiar voice told him all he needed to know.

 

Edward was, in spite of a sour mood, subtly impressed with his own joke. “Mind if I cut in?”

 

Vidcund glanced. The famous Ghost Fencer had seemingly emerged from a shimmering disturbance in the air behind him, the ragged edges of which constrained a mirage of such severity it was difficult to see what lay beyond it. He had arrived spoiling for the fight, by the look – his eponymous crimson cape draped over his left side strongly, elegant and modern-constructed blade to hand in his right. Behind the cape, Vidcund knew as the Phantom surely did, would lie some other blade, naked and waiting. Le main gauche.

 

For Vidcund’s sundered memory, it was a poignant summary of Edward as a whole. The honorable, never to ambush, yet subtle, secretly armed. Unwilling to cheat his way into a fight, but perfectly happy to fight as dirty as he had to in order to come out clean on the other side.

 

The Phantom regarded Edward for a silent moment, and gave the slightest of nods. There was a mournful whistle, the sound of flutes. Vidcund thought it had come from the masked Phantom, but no human throat could have birthed the sound. A buzzing filled the air, permeating Vidcund’s very being, and in through the open and absent north wall scurried a tenebrous, para-corporeal creature with the look of familiarity but the utter lack of clear memory, at least for the agent. In some ways it resembled life with which he was familiar. In others, it was altogether alien, and as the limpid creature flopped over to its master, Vidcund took no action, save to mark the pair’s every move as the Phantom sprang on top of it, and the creature bounded up, impossibly far and fast, into the sky that filtered in through what was left of the ceiling.

 

“… Coward,” Edward said, voicing the word as foulest expletive.

Vidcund lowered his gaze to his old and increasingly well-remembered friend, slowly removing his sunglasses. “Not in my experience. You must know how to make an entrance.”