FTA: The Road Most Travelled

XIV. The Road Most Travelled

For Niles, the biggest change was also the most insidious, with the shock coming only on those rare occasions he took notice of it. The Blasted Bay, or New Bay, or whichever name the media of the moment was trying to force upon it, had become normal. Here, far away from any country he was familiar with, the new coastline was a coast like any other. He didn’t even know if the bay had fish in it yet, but he could look over it and feel as though it were any other coastline Zaxti had to offer. This was just one of a thousand symptoms of what he was calling his Normality Disorder.

When you spent your whole life feeling as though nothing was truly real, it became a little too easy to just accept every stimulus as normal.

Sort of like how it was becoming increasingly normal to have Scion’s subtle, calming tone slip between the cars of his train of thought. “There’s really only the now. Nothing before or after can be trusted.”

Further down the trail the group was plying, Francis paused, turning to look back over his shoulder at the masked mercenaries that were bringing up the rear of the party. “Come again?”

“Just a pithy observation,” starry-faced Scion responded. “I’m becoming rather fond of those.”

Just further ahead, Edward threw his own two cents in. “Did you know, Francis? Edgy social mal-adjustment is a requirement for advancement in the Grey Angels.”

“Boys.” Alexis Coultier’s sharp and martial word was enough. The men at the back of the pack fell silent, emulating the no-nonsense silence of her and the surviving Union officers.

The trek was not far, which to Niles’ limited understanding of tradecraft, was both a surprise and a cause for concern. The small, recently-established wharf could be seen from the country road that serviced it. There were signs of attempts to expand the road down to the shore along the same line as this trail. In this age of unmanned aerial surveillance and satellite observation, using an undocumented-but-well-known berth for their escape hardly seemed to be a worthwhile approach.

He had argued hard against it, in fact, two nights ago, in a planning session already marred by thickening tensions between the stubborn Coultier boy and the Four Horsemen. Shouted at Banker with uncharacteristic animosity that wasn’t helped by the other man’s booming tones and stubbornness. In the end, it had been, to his great surprise, Major Coultier who had settled the argument, wading in after hours of indifference.

“The few of us on a civilian ship simply wouldn’t be worth an intervention to stop.”

The party reached the wharf long before their charter had, and set about the business of waiting. They had papers in hand – the very best of reporting from Galba Dea, Tererra, and abroad, printed out hastily at the business-centers of the various motels the divided party had overnighted at. It had been important to figure out where they could expect to make landfall, now that Edward had determined to return home and assist with the war directly.

Now it seemed important to know what they were walking into. So Prodigal must have thought, as he passed one of the sheets of inkjet paper to Prince. The newest Grey Angel had paid no mind to the news-reading until now, instead watching the progress of their Wherry as it tracked inward from the horizon. He held it up somewhat, to have a better view through his mask.

“Is this a joke,” he asked, turning around to the others and brandishing the offending sheet as though some student had scrawled a naughty invective upon it.

“Hardly,” Prodigal countered. “I think Casper here printed some ads out by mistake.”

“That’s not an ad, there’s two other copies here, from both the Dean and Union press.”

Niles accepted the offered sheets, examining both of them carefully through the lenses of his mask. He had modified it extensively over the time it had been his, and though the impassive, featureless outer face remained the same, the inside was totally changed. Graven with calculated symbolism, fitted with mild filtration, the mask was a rather uncomfortable second face. The first in a long series of items he intended to arm and armour himself with.

Thoughts of embracing the native magic of his heritage, or the acquired magic of Archangel’s providence, were set aside by the repeated pictures, showing over and over the same grainy, distant photo, the same yellow-caped figure, with a distinctive mask of his own.

Behind his mask, he smirked. “… It’s not the Deans.”

Scion, who had taken his place watching the Wherry pull alongside, turned. “… You’ve got something.”

The junior handed the papers off to the senior. “You’re the one who was snooping around my computer the night we all met. You tell me.”

The old bloodhound had his scent. It never had felt right, to leave the matter of this peculiar phantom behind. He turned, inspired, to the Lord Protector. “Do you feel much like hunting, Knight Captain?”

---

After tonight, Greta would never again understand why people so romanticized sleeping under the stars. There was nothing left on her that didn’t hurt – between the magic re-compositing her internals and the roots and rocks beneath this particular elm trying to add joints to her body where joints weren’t, there was nothing good.

The morning view in the Terrwald just about made it worth it. It was a misty, grey morning, which had the spectacular effect of making the morning sun seem to come from every direction. She inspected her surroundings much more closely this morning than she had the night before. The leaves had gone prematurely gold and amber, chilled by the same unseasonal weather that threatened to kill her, if she didn’t find shelter soon.

She was amazed she’d slept at all. As sense of place returned, so too did the customary paranoia of the hunted party. If the hair on the back of her neck was any indication, the enemy was close. A hand lowered into her bag, pensively thumbing the edge of a ritual knife she’d stored there. It was dull, as most ritual tools were.

But it was going to have to do.

---

It was rare that the thought crossed his mind, but Vidcund had to admit that he was enjoying himself. In the wake of all that had transpired, his presence had been all but forgotten. Lingering in a corner of the boardroom, he had the ideal view of the separate dramas that were unfolding there. Alone near a window, Asmodeus was giving animated exposition to Zephyr, gesturing enthusiastically through some story or another that held the hommonculous’s rapt attention. Vidcund supposed the awe was probably deserved. Asmodeus had been a Prince of Hell, the leader of a powerful gang of the lawless Demons who lived on the other side of the Divide. He probably had some interesting stories, but, like most of Team Kether, the circumstances of his recruitment had been classified. Privately, Vidcund wondered if Athena had bothered to record them at all, which was a shame, because he wasn’t about to just ask.

Around the table, what was left of the Executive Council had all but shouted itself hoarse in argument. Great Justice Scamwell, a publically-devout Catholic, had hung himself up on some matter of process or nomenclature that had given him the right to look a gift hoarse in the mouth, and together with the Lord Field Marshall, he was currently trying to browbeat Stamatia into joining their hardline approach against remaining here any longer than it would take “to catch the next flight out”. Vidcund didn’t see the sense in that. The college was effectively routed, the Self Defense Forces in shambles and outmatched by the Carcosan Host. It was time to face that reality and, for the council, to admit any sort of meaningful return to power would require great subtlty and every compromise on morality to be made. There was power in such faustian bargains.

Dagonovich, who, having found a cup of something that passed for coffee, had joined Vidcund in his corner, stared at the agent for an uncomfortably long moment. “Vidcund, I do believe you’re enjoying this.”

The agent allowed himself a small smirk. “Every once in a while, I can muster the effort to have fun.”

The door opened, and this simple action was enough to bring silence, even out of Asmodeus. Valkoinen strode quickly into the room, walking toward Vidcund and Dagonovic, with a gesture that brought the other agents to her, too. Behind her, before any of the members of the huddle could prompt for answers, came Aaron Cluny.

If Aaron had been expecting his entrance to make an impact, he was to be disappointed, though he showed no sign of either, remaining his typically-impassive self. He walked to the head of the table, deftly claiming it with a hand on the back of his seat, and forcing Michael to awkwardly side-step to the next seat, without either man having had to say a word.

“Agent Därk,” the teifling intoned. “Would you and your fellows please excuse us?”

Vidcund nodded at once, and lead the others away. His strong opinions on the matter aside, he wasn’t an elected official.

---

One of the strangest senses that had come with being dead (or undead, one had to suppose) was an acute awareness of the passage of time. It wasn’t to say that some portion of Eli’s mind was dedicated to marking the passage of the seconds, but that moments had suddenly and irrevocably become of fixed length. Nothing dragged on, and nothing flew by. It had empowered the Lich to operate impassively, remaining in the present moment, as opposed to flying off in different directions, agonizing over the past or concerning himself with the future.

And at present, there was plenty to be concerned about. The world outside the coffin in which he had been carefully packed lurched suddenly, as though in collision, and being as he was airborne at the moment this was worrisome. That the physical destruction of his body was no longer a pressing concern was a difficult reality to absorb. He knew in the abstract that this plane could crash without doing him lasting harm, but his mind was the product of the neural architecture that had once informed it, and the long history of evolving with feet on the ground that had informed that.

His casket skittered across the decking of the back of the aircraft as it listed more and more firmly to the left, and when it came to an abrupt stop, presumably against the wall of the compartment, the Lich decided he had had enough, kicked out the foot of the coffin where it had been weakened by design, and slipped out. The aircraft was almost completely up on its side, and through the windows in what was now the floor, Eli could see that it had begun to spin downward.

He sighed, and dug through the various other items of cargo until he found a familiar case, picking it up with his only present hand, for it contained the raiment proper to Archangel. Knowing he didn’t have time to don it, he headed forward, into the cockpit, where he was confused (but not entirely surprised) to find the windscreen smashed, and a long lance sticking out of the chest of the pilot, who was grappling to come to terms with this new appliance. Eli had about long enough to admire the lancer who could throw a javelin and bring down a plane in flight when the wingtip dragged on the needled canopy of the Terrwald below and dragged the plane all the more sharply downward, throwing the lich and the pilot about like ragdolls.

A few moments passed, for the duration of which Eli calmly lay across the co-pilot’s console, vacant as it was, wondering how his body composited itself without soft tissues or concern for the completeness or structural soundness of his skeleton. The impact had been a mercy for the pilot, killing him more or less instantly, though admittedly the several moments he had been dying, waiting for his aircraft to crash, had probably been more hellish than anything the Lich himself had experienced, with the possible exception of his resurrection.

For a brief moment he felt a pang of sympathy, not for the pilot (whose death had, clearly, been necessary, if he was doomed to die from the moment he had selected this route), but for Niles Clayton. The two had had their differences, but Eli now knew precisely what it was he had done to Niles, and wasn’t sure he could ever put someone through that again.

So, though the pilot was now doomed to a lasting death, it wasn’t a death to be left in vain. Fresh death thinned the wall between the roads the dead could walk and the roads of the living, and being neither, Eli could naturally set his path down both.

Stepping through the veil, he could cover much more ground than he would have, if he had remained purely material.

---

“We’re terribly sorry,” Michael was saying, with typical and dripping sarcasm, “if our coming was an inconvenience.”

Aaron marked the sarcasm, adding it instinctively to an evolving mental profile of the Great Justice, for whom he had already decided he did not much care – not that he was the sort to make decisions on such inescapably personal reasons. He did not, however, descend to the older man’s level. “On the contrary, your honour, your presence is a splendid opportunity. As it happens, those excise fees, permitless transit fines, and the levy have all been covered for you.”

“How generous,” Vincent quipped, with even less of an attempt at veiling his scorn than Michael.

Aaron offered a bland, mirthless, but generally magnanimous smile. “Thank you. We’re also prepared to do so for your immediate families, where necessary. As I understand, Agent-Liaison Dowd has no such need. Lord Field Marshall, you’ll be pleased to learn that your eldest children are both alive and well, according to some of my contacts. However, their position and intention put them beyond my reach to retrieve.”

Vincent’s tone softened somewhat. Alexis being alive had come as only the slightest surprise, and was more of a relief for having been confirmed. “… What about Malvolio?”

“Malvolio doesn’t need our help in fleeing to the Infernal City if he should so need,” Aaron explained. “He has an active Worker’s Visa and is under contract as a Provisional Investment Seeker.”

Michael leaned forward. “What about my family?”

“Your wife, Melissa, has been collected by the Justice Guard, and her unit is negotiating with Magnussun Security, whereupon she’ll be brought here – though your authorization would probably help in that matter, as the Justice Guard quite rightly aren’t taking our offer at face value.” Aaron winced, showing the first miscomfort of the meeting. “Your son, Kalan, is more complicated. We can’t confirm his position. We think he might be with Edward and Alexis.”

Michael and Vincent exchanged puzzled glances, and it was the politician who, quite predictably, spoke. “And why’s that?”

“The Lord Protector and Major Coultier are traveling in the company with the supposed leaders of the Grey Angels. We believe the Grey Angel known as ‘Prodigal’ is Kalan Scamwell.”

This earned a deep frown from Michael. “On what grounds?”

“None that would stand up in court, I can quite assure you.” Aaron knew this was the Great Justice’s principle concern. The other’s lack of shock did more to confirm his suspicions about Prodigal than all the best work his intelligence teams had done.

The door behind Aaron opened, and Malvolio Coultier entered the room. He was rough and roadworn – like nearly everyone present apart from Aaron, though he joined Aaron in seeming comfortable with his surroundings, familiarly bored with the unusual void of the Infernal skyline, and even, if possible, unsurprised at the composition of the audience. “Sorry I’m late, Aaron.”

“Not at all professor. I wasn’t expecting you for several hours.”

Malvolio, enigmatically, answered the unspoken question in similar counter-expositive obliqueness, easing into a chair beside his father. “I thought I would take longer at the bank.”

It was Vincent, whose distrust for devils ran deeper than most (which was saying something), that had yet to find comfort in the accounting-for of his family, and so it was Vincent that resumed the confrontational tone that Malvolio’s arrival had disrupted. “What, exactly, is the cost of all this generosity, Mister Cluny?”

“I only want two things. The first is official permission for Magnussun Armed Services to operate in a paramilitary capacity in Archieplago until such time as your new enemy is routed. Such military aid is provided gratis. We both stand to lose greatly if the Carcosan Host is allowed to persist in the so-called mortal world.”

Vincent retained a poker face that showed no promises, though Michael, long practiced at reading his ally in the armed forces, could see some relief. Since the siege, Vincent did not speak of victory. Only minimizing loss. “And the second?”

“A promissory note, to be backed up with an eventual Order of the Executive Council to be considered by the Jury of Peers, to award us the permit for the reconstruction of Kraterburg.”

Michael’s outrage was practically reflexive. “Reconstructing Kraterburg is a massive expense, and certainly not a priority when we have actual, operating cities with actual residents that will be in greater need of redevelopment.”

Aaron blinked, twice in fact. “Our consortium is not interested in having government funding for the reconstruction of the city. That funding has already been provided for, and the city will be turned back over to the College of Judges upon its completion to do with as they see fit.”

Malvolio spoke, dispelling the unspoken question of the composition of ‘us’. “Magnussun’s heavy engineering divisions are partnering with Panopticon Digital and quite a few Lipan merchantile concerns under the banner of Dynamo Special Enterprise Group to dike the Blasted Bay and rebuild the city as it once was. More or less.”

Stamatia Dowd had a suspicious expression on her face, brow furrowed and words carefully, and haltingly, considered. “What, may I ask, does this consortium hope to gain from the act?”

Malvolio shrugged. “For my part, it allowed me to secure the funding to start Panopticon Digital, which proved to be a helpful safety-net, as the Saffron Academy has been destroyed, and isn’t the sort of thing you can just rebuild.”

Realizing he would not avoid answering himself, Aaron sighed. “Magnussun’s contracts have been severely limited since Slipher Corporation’s collapse and my takeover. Even at the sort of discounted rates that are to be expected in these situations, I stand to make a great deal of money here.”

The honesty, frankly, was rather refreshing. The room relaxed, and Aaron took a sip from a glass of water that had been set at his place. “… Shall I take it we have a deal?”

---

While the attack had come as a complete surprise, its coming had not been, and Greta was, for once in what felt like a lifetime, fully prepared. The fan of needles that had arced through the air caught her unawares but not off guard, and their toxin was met in her blood by antivenin and alkyloids. Fae brought down better than her on guile alone, but her assailant would have to be determined, because few things were as potent as a natural-born mage with their goals fixed.

Holly, the Duke’s latest assassin, burst from the canopy of a nearby tree, whose needled branches had offered increasingly rare cover. Greta was quick to move out of her way, letting the mothlike slaugh to land near, rather than on her. The mage was timid, unused to wielding her athame as a weapon, whereas Holly was long inured to the physical and mental obstacles to killing. For a moment, they were a spectacle, dueling clumsily about one another. Greta’s luck had held out, forcing the slaugh to cast aside one of her weapons on an unlucky jam, but turned in the same moment, as the Slaugh pounced upon her, pinning the witch beneath her and assuring victory.

Or it would have. In two great strides, Archangel sprang, roaring as though slain, casting aside the shroud of the deadlands as easily as he had the shadow of the tree under which he seemed to suddenly materialize, catching even the sensitive slaugh by surprise, as he seized her by the furry hump between her mothlike wings, fully materialized upon the attack, and leaving her vulnerable to his icy touch as she was cast aside like an angry terrier.

For Greta, this shock was palpable. The sun-blotting and passionately homicidal rictus of Holly’s face had been suddenly replaced by no less imposing a figure, tenebrous and solid beneath a heavy coat and cowl, who wore an aura of fear and loathing like a magician might wear his cape. The witch lay on the ground transfixed, daring only to let her hand wander enough to collect Holly’s dropped knife. If this third party (she daren’t count him as an ally yet, however fortunate the interruption had been) noticed, he paid her no mind, merely advancing in his slow and staring way upon the assassin, who had rolled into a sort of recovering crouch, remaining low and behind her remaining knife.

“I believe,” the strange man said, voice somewhat resonant behind the mask. “That you have something that belongs to me.”

In seeming response, Holly moved, sweeping her free arm outward from her middle, a flourish of fire in hand as she seemingly summoned a fresh knife to it from thin air, and the motion itself scattering the needles hidden behind brass pins in her belt, which she had worked loose with her nails and long practice. Such practice had made her extremely proficient with the unusual weapons, which sailed through the air and struck the man quite neatly in the chest, through the breast of his half-closed jacket, striking so deep that they vanished completely behind the cloth.

That unearthly voice sighed, and the Lich moved. Though he had looked imposingly bulky, he was light, and quick, and thought well on his feet. Greta realized in the early blows of the closer conflict that the left sleeve of his jacket was empty. Still, he made an excellent account of himself, and Holly found she was quickly on the defensive, unable to land the strike she would need to set the man ablaze, which seemed necessary the longer her drugs failed to take effect, and after the second time she managed to strike him, with her knife bringing away nothing but loose threads and the sound of tearing cloth.

She left herself open, and a kick from a rough-shod boot sent the unusually light Slaugh airborn, as her manifest wings seized the air and bore her higher still, away from direct conflict. She would need time to plan around this unexpected development.

The masked lich watched the slaugh carefully for a while, until the forest had obscured her entirely from view. His gaze lowered slowly, deliberately, and turned itself upon Greta. The witch thought she could see a dim blue glow behind the eyes of the mask, though they also seemed so hollow, which would imply the space behind them was vacant as well.

“I believe you have something that belongs to me.”

Greta’s voice cracked uncomfortably when she managed to speak at all. “… Yes.”

The figure held out a hand. It was skeletal and deformed, as though withering. The too-pale skin was greasy and too close-fit to the joints to seem real. Greta’s hand shook as she handed him, grip-first, the unusual knife Holly had dropped, whose jet-black blade felt so oddly cold to her touch. He took it, examining it carefully in the mid-morning light, before nodding with some satisfaction, and tucking it under his jacket, presumably in some pocket meant for the purpose.

She watched him, for a moment, as he moved off, without helping her, standing closer to the middle of the clearing as he seemed to gather his bearings. The unnatural pall of fear was passing, leaving a coppery taste of adrenaline and the after-effects of adrenaline and the other fear hormones. Greta was consequentially braver, and grateful. “Those darts she threw at you would have been poisoned. I can prepare you an antidote.”

“That won’t be necessary.” The figure turned back toward her. “… I believe you have something else that belongs to me.”

---

It was a pleasantly welcome surprise how familiar this neighborhood in the busy Diabolical Quarter was to Vidcund, who more and more was not just realizing he knew the streets and vendors, but in fact fondly remembered quite a few of them, during his half-remembered term of service in the Infernal City, in some half-remembered, half-reminded past. The small, hole-in-the-wall restaurant he’d lead Valkoinen to had that strong patina of memory laid across it, and was so familiar to him that he didn’t merely recognize the details, but even went so far as to be annoyed by some of the changes.

Valkoinen, across him at the tiny corner booth they’d taken, smirked. She was clearly enjoying this. “Think you remember the place well enough to make a recommendation?”

The junior agent allowed a derisive, dismissive snort through his nose, as he lifted a small cup of faintly-scented tea to it, and then his lips. “No. Memory isn’t like a disk directory. The connections don’t always make sense.”

“So I am coming to understand.”

To judge by the throngs at the take-out counter and the general distaste on the faces of the other patrons, mostly mortal expats (which the locals half-fondly and half-derisively referred to as ‘imps’, in the vein of the mortal nomenclature forced upon the Infernals, as they preferred to be known over Devil and Demon), the pair had some time to kill. Vidcund watched the wheels turning behind Valkoinen’s eyes as she scanned the crowd, coming to this very assessment. “You seem to be settling in with the rest of the team better, now that you are a bit more yourself.”

“Now that I’m not addled by medication, you mean.”

Valkoinen retained an impassive coolness, a too-easy serenity that screamed to Vidcund she was attempting to manipulate him. It irritated him to no end that knowing he was manipulated was no insulation against it. “Yes.”

Vidcund drained his small cup of tea, pouring more for the both of them. “I get along well with the other members of the team. And, if I can be honest, I am beginning to appreciate the accuracy of the appointment.”

Valkoinen gestured vaguely with her cup as some token of thanks before sipping from it. Vidcund had good taste for boiled grass water. “You no longer think of Team Kether as the a dumping ground for monsters?”

“On the contrary,” Vidcund countered, passive-aggressively moving their menus closer to the edge of the table. It was exactly the right nudge for their server, who the pair watched change tack mid-task to empty her hands enough to come back to them. “I no longer think of myself as entirely human.”

Valkoinen was forced to let that point hang, to digest it and determine its precise meaning, for Vidcund had timed his gesture perfectly, and the server arrived too soon after his remark for an immediate comment. She instead ordered, some perfunctory dish which every such vaguely-asian restaurant carried, which neither of them would remember long enough for the cooks to prepare. The server looked to him, next.

Warmly, to dispel any lingering annoyance at the head-fake with the menus, Vidcund smiled. “White pork char siu and bak bon dzhow.”

“An excellent choice, sir.”

Vidcund made a point of ignoring the senior agent staring at him, half-impressed and half-aghast, while he drained and refilled his tea cup once again. “… Vidcund, that’s-”

“I know what it is.”

Valkoinen seemed to take this as a sort of confirmation. Her posture in her seat softened, and she relaxed, unbuttoning her blouse a level and placing her further arm across the back of the bench. “… I’m glad you’ve made some kind of acceptance of all this. I was hoping that when your term with the unit concluded, you’d be willing to remain with it.”

Vidcund was a surprisingly useful tool – the man who could be in two or twenty places at once. Weaponized plausible deniability, among other things. He wasn’t surprised. “In what capacity?”

“Well, as the only other full agent in the unit, I was hoping to recommend you for the grey exams. I could use a lieutenant… may I?”

Their food had arrived with startling swiftness, and Vidcund gestured with his palm that he was perfectly happy to let Valkoinen steal a taste of his meal. They were each other’s kind of monster after all, it seemed.

---

As the sun began to sink, Greta felt her ongoing nerves regarding her unlikely guide and guardian subsiding. He had made himself highly useful, if not cold and blunt, along their way, pointing out which plants made for decent forage, and even, at one point, snagging a low-hanging pear from a tree near the trail for her.

The light was still strong when he broke their progress, leading her off the deer-trail they were following and into a nook of a few boulders, worn from the side of the foothill they were skirting around, rather than climbing. The ground was dry there (by the standards of boreal rainforest, anyway), and bare of the worst of cover. He kept her busy, then, clearing the ground more, making use of the extra hands to dig a small bowl in the ground and clear the underbrush away while he gathered wood from a dead tree within sight.

“… Am I a prisoner?”

For Archangel, frankly, the concept was ridiculous. He wasn’t in the habit of taking prisoners even when he had the manpower to handle it for him, and, at present, it was just the two of them. “I wanted you to follow me because we are being followed ourselves.”

Greta craned her neck to see the rest of the skyline, letting him build the fire himself, setting it with… well, actually, she didn’t see. The fire took a pale and ghastly white tone for a few moments before the wood itself caught, and the flames took on that more familiar orangish tune, filling the air with a fresh and smoky smell that masked some yet-unidentified odor which had dogged the couple all day.

Frankincense maybe, or natron. It was curious.

She soaked the heat of the fire readily, letting it permeate her, surprised how quickly it warmed and banished the chill of the day. To her surprise, he unlikely guardian stayed well away from the fire, perhaps out of concern for his coat catching an ember.

The sun had set before Greta dared to speak again, or drag her attention far from the edges of what she could see from here. She was unenthusiastic about facing the slaugh again. “… Were you with Adron’s people? Or the Carcosans?”

“Neither.” Without a visual cue, Archangel’s gaze seemed to shift to her, though not for long. “I was born here.”

“What, in Tererra?”

“No. The Terrwald.”

The conversation fell to silence again. Greta dug another foraged pear from her bag. “… Are you certain you don’t want something to eat?”

“I don’t need anything to eat.” Archangel shifted his posture, giving the witch his undivided attention. His faintly resonant voice could be jarring.

Greta resolved to force herself to eat anyway. “… Just what exactly are you?”

“I am Archangel, leader of the Grey Angels.”

Greta frowned. “That’s… not an answer.”

“There can be no better answer than a name. You lived among fae, I would expect you to know this.”

“Ah,” the witch gestured with a haughty index, “but you are not fae.”

She had earned herself a faint chuckle from the would-be archangel. “No. I am not fae.”

A silence evolved again, around his obstinate refusal to answer, and her unwillingness to press so clearly dangerous a figure on an answer. He had ignored Holly’s venom with impunity, absorbed blows from knives of steel and fire, and fought off an assassin prized enough to have risen meteorically through the ranks of a wartime court less one of his own hands.

It was Archangel who ultimately broke the silence. “With the Fae, names are everything. They’re your nature.”

“Sure, with true names.”

“What if I told you someone had found a way to change True Names. At least, those of fae.”

Greta considered that for a moment, before frowning. “You mean, me?”

“No, the slaugh.”

“Well, I mean… if you change the name, you change the being.”

Archangel leaned back in his place, thinking, and Greta would eventually succumb to sleep, watching the firelight glint off of the contours of his skeletal mask. For the Lich, the night provided an opportunity to ponder the curious incident of Holly, whose name was not her name.

---

Profiling ability was one of the prerequisites for the Grey Exams, as the qualifying tests for promotion beyond Special Agent were known. It had never been Vidcund's strong point, and as a result, he had made a hobby of the practice of it. It was a casual thing, the kind of distraction he imagined social media consumption passed for among the Masses. Nothing aggressive, nothing consuming, just a casual habit as pervasive as checking your phone when it buzzes.

Naturally, he had noticed that not once, in their entire time here, and with plenty of opportunity, had a drop of liquor ever ended up anywhere near Aaron Cluny's hand, let alone his mouth. It was a curiosity – even the Agent drank – and had a few possible interesting interpretations. Alcoholic? Purist? The cushion in the corner made its own suggestions, tempered by the minimalist tastes the man showed in the face of Infernal avarice.

Here he was, thinking the pattern was broken, but no; that was a tumbler of ice water, in Aaron's hand, as the young man leaned in the window-frame, staring down on the Infernal City.

“I hate to say it, Mister Cluny, but I'm starting to enjoy our little talks.”

Aaron smiled, slightly, considering the glass before he drank from it. “... It's high time I told you about the third project.”

“You mean, after having two project Moses experiments blow up in his face, Richard Cluny decided he wanted another?”

“Not quite so foolish,” Aaron countered, extending a glass to the Agent. “Moses II and Moses III ran concurrently, more or less, with slightly different goals. Moses II set out to create the perfect soldier, in a sense.”

Vidcund considered that silently, taking a long sip of water. The taste of his dinner lingered on the back of his pallet, and it was beginning to grow tiresome. “I would be good for a great many other things. Lack of communication lag is… an interesting property.”

“Or imagine a government department with mental immortality. Perfect institutional memory.”

Vidcund had considered it. The realization that he was now very, very difficult to kill, even by the simple passage of time, had weighed a lot on his mind. “Possibilities are limited only by energy. What was Moses III for?”

“That, I don’t know,” Aaron said, with refreshing candor. “When I figure it out, you will be the first to know. But it is enough to say that Moses III happened, and that its product is still with us.”

Vidcund glanced to his host coyly. “… There hasn’t been a new Infernal born in over two thousand years.”

Aaron blinked in surprise, before a slow smile dawned on his face. “For various definitions of the word born.”

“I find it almost comforting.” Vidcund paced nearer the windows, looking out over the neon-lit Devil’s Quarter, toward the Brass Tower and its emissaries. “Knowing I’m not the only one, I mean.”

Unsurprisingly, Aaron’s glacial composure did not thaw for long, nor did it thaw all that deep to begin with. The teifling gave a noncommital noise, moving back to the small side-table where the water waited, to refill his glass. It helped to have a prop. “I suppose it might. It might also help to have someone who can fill in the blanks in a… considered way.”

Vidcund turned to face him. “My memory will repair itself in time. The human brain is irritatingly robust in that respect.”

“True. But the right word here and there can accelerate the process dramatically.” Aaron held the glass for a moment, and the two watched as the water along the edges of the glass dramatically crystallized. Infernals, it was known, had special affinities for elements or aspects of nature. Vidcund supposed making ice from water was fairly basic magic, as magic must have gone. “I am burning a confidential line of inquiry by telling you this, but my sources in the Terrwald told me that you had begun to explore your little gift.”

Vidcund considered that – and not only because someone Aaron knew had witnessed something perhaps thirty living people had – before answering. “… Unless I am missing some aspect of it, I’m not certain my gift will be as useful on the battlefield as it was intended to be.”

Aaron considered that, shrugging. “It used to be easier for you.”

He offered the agent a small, black case. “You’re missing something, Agent Därk.”