Shadowplay

She's going to fall.

    Not because of the dirt her boots have churned to bloody mud.  She's up to her ankles in it, rooted like a tree, couldn't be more stable.  In fact, it's going to take the blow of the hammer headed for her back to even knock her free of the muck.  She goes to her knees, and she's going to fall, but not yet.  Gets up, swipes mud and hair out of her eyes, looks around.

    The man with the hammer was just passing, giving her a lively little tap for a hello.  Now he's going, and now she’s following, and now he's falling and his blood’s on her face.  There's a face beyond him she knows.  Breath comes back into her lungs, clots of smoke and screams.  For a moment she's human again.  Then the burly knight ahead is no longer smiling, but taking her arm and turning her, giving her a mighty shove - she's going to fall.  But not yet.  Back to work.

    She stumbles with foolish grace, ducks a slash, puts her weight behind the sword in her right hand.  Sliding it in is easy - the tip finds the joint in a Blackguard's plate and nuzzles into warm, wet depths.  She can't dodge the frisson that runs across her skin, a satisfaction more sensual than sadistic.  It's driven out first by shame, and then by the unbalancing jerk of her arm when the blade catches in his chain.  Stupid girl, clumsy girl, dead girl.  He turns, baring bleeding gums and shoving his shoulder into her chest.  She's going to fall.

    Instead of toppling back, she leans in, pulling on one blade to bring the other around opposite it.  Blind, she finds the corresponding joint on his other side, and tightens her embrace until her swords cross in his gut.  The weight of his body crashes into her and she howls as she throws him off, though she doesn’t know it and can’t hear her own voice.  This time her swords come free.  The blood soaking her sleeves is red.  That one was human.

    She straightens up and snaps her wrists, sluicing blood from the fullers.  She's looking for her company, for any sense of structure in this melee.  Plans go to shit out here.  A battlefield looks nothing like a map; she can't remember anything but the faces she should see nearby, and she doesn't see them.

    Except her knight.  His head is high, his gold hair dark with sweat, his face muddy and teeth clenched.  There is no battle-joy in his face, only grim serenity, and his steady eye takes her in as he counts heads and matches them to necks.  Not far away, but he doesn’t need her closer.  Concentrate.  Give him room to swing.  He's not going to fall.

    She scales the bloody scree ahead onto a low rise and finds that from the top, dim through morning’s fog, she can see the White City's minarets in the east, bathed in the sunlight that should have prevented this rout.  She moves toward them, scanning the corpses she steps over for the sellswords of Seventh Company.  Now there you are.  Pain as remote as the sun-drenched spires, only a cold inventory at this distance, crossing off names.  Too many.  Far too many.

    "SHENA!"

    Wet curls fly and her head comes up, an unwonted lovely curve to her neck as she turns, and the start of a smile that is more than reflex.  Her knight is just in sight.  His face is so pale!  She opens her mouth to call out in answer... and tastes the axe now crashing into her face as it opens her from lash to lip.  Can't smile anymore.  Can't see.

    She's going to fall.

Act I

She feels nothing as her husband’s swollen, purple-lipped face disappears into the dark water.  Another corpse in a heap of hundreds, whatever the fish haven’t eaten.  This old wreck was a graveyard for its crew long before it became the preferred dumping-ground of the sly and murderous in the area of Capria, and that long before she ever stumbled upon it.  Long before she became sly and murderous herself.  Was just murderous then, she thinks, and still feels nothing.  A little tired.

    One small, silk-slippered foot pushes the stained sheets he died in after him, and then a tighter bundle, tied up as if to bind a vicious beast, weighted heavy enough to drag the sheets to the bottom with it.  The water below the wreck’s broken second deck is seawater, rising and falling about four feet with the tides, but it’s not the same ocean as the warm green sea that wears Capria’s coast for a crown.  This ocean is cold and black, and knows her well.  It drowned her once, and for a moment she looks down into the shifting darkness and weighs the percentage in letting it try again.  Still she feels nothing.  That seems altogether the wrong mood in which to kill oneself.  The thought is almost prim.  And then from another quarter of her mind comes another voice, this one like velvet and gravel: it was good enough for killing him, eh?

    Before another round of an eternal internal argument can get rolling, she shudders with a sudden creeping terror.  Her drifting gaze across the black water below has snagged on a pale, moving apparition in the depths.  It’s an impossibly aged human face, raddled and wrinkled, and it’s staring back at her.  She grits her teeth on a rising shriek as the thing below her opens its own mouth, so much bigger than hers, and growing every second as it rises toward the surface - 

With an ugly sob of revulsion, she staggers back from the ragged edge of the deck and seizes the doorframe for balance, driving antique splinters into her palm.  She feels nothing, every sense devoted either to listening behind her for… that… to break the surface, or to the little cabin ahead, where her other hand plunges into nothingness and disappears.  It’s much warmer than the rest of her body, but not for long - she hurls herself at the wreck’s hull, through the tear in the air, and falls to her knees in sand still warm from Capria’s long afternoon.

Her head’s spinning, but she scrambles away, fetches up hard against the cave’s wall, and for a few minutes just watches the empty spot she came from, gripping her knees and trembling.  There’s no sign of the portal there but an unpleasant little sound, a tinny vibration that makes her teeth itch and her gorge rise.  

When she notices the blade hovering next to her ear, it’s probably been there for a minute already, and her violent jerk damn near does the assassin’s job for them.  The person holding the knife at eye level stands herself on eye level.  She’s a temple imp, full-grown at no more than three feet tall, with pointed ears and teeth.  She’s dressed in dark grey, her skin pale grey, her eyes paler still.  Her tone, too, is grey when she asks, “Meet the Old Man?  I’m surprised it’s taken you this long to see him.  When did you find the thread, and how?”

“T-thread?”  It’s hard to gather her thoughts, let alone focus her eyes - too many shocks tonight.

The imp looks impatient.  “The portal you just passed through, to the wrecked ship, where I presume you’ve been dumping all those husbands I’ve been helping you murder.”

This is so plainly and simply the truth that there’s nothing at all to say in response.  She recognizes the imp now - the proprietress of the tea shop on the docks, the one that doesn’t sell tea.  This woman, not much better-dressed during the day, deals in its actual product, the grease that keeps Capria’s government moving: poison.  

The imp’s impatience deepens as her quarry stares like a cow, but then she turns her wrist and tucks her knife away.  “You’ve been pulling this stunt every ten years or so for nearly a century, by my books, so you can’t possibly be as stupid - or as young - as you look.  Keshena, isn’t it?  Mrs.... excuse me, I suppose it’s Miss again now, hmm?  Miss Keshena Kelly?”

Keshena glances down at herself.  The slippers are Kelly’s.  The silk nightgown is the one her husband bought her for his birthday.  Her late husband.  “Just… just Keshena now,” she murmurs.

“Very well, Just Keshena - when and how did you find this thread?”

    “I… it was an accident.  When I first came to Capria.  In the winter.  Was lost on the beach when I heard it, the - thread?”

    The imp nods.  Her huge eyes scan Keshena up and down, what little there is.  “I’ve never met a human who could hear that sound.  But then, you’re not entirely human any longer, are you?  When were you Called?”

    Keshena feels old reflex making her muscles tense.  Most places she’s been, that’s a word people throw like a punch.  But the imp has her pinned from almost every angle at the moment.  Besides, looking into those ageless eyes, she knows lying won’t help.  Takes one to know one.  The imp has a geas too.

“When I was twenty-five, about two hundred years ago.”

“Haven’t found your purpose in all that time, hmm?”  

There’s something contemptuous in the sharp little face, and Keshena curls her lip with sudden rage quite unbecoming in this nightgown.  “Are you here to turn me in for murder, or just having a romantic midnight stroll with your favorite knife?”

“That would be fairly stupid of me, wouldn’t it?” the imp drawls.  “And pointless.  There’s at least one man in each house of government who could be executed on the evidence in there, which means there’s not a one of them who’d let you get that far.  You’re not a bad little assassin - well, you used to be more clever; this one is a bit of a mess, isn’t it? - but you’re not good enough to survive what would happen if either one of us opened up this open secret any further.”

Flattening her hands against the wall, gritty with wet sand, Keshena pushes herself upright.  Now she’s looking down at the imp, but somehow the imp still manages to look down her nose at Keshena.

“You have become a bit of a liability, though.  It’s a classic moment - the student distinguishes herself such that the Master must either put her down as a threat… or take her on and train her obvious talent, putting off the threat until much later, making it much greater.”  The imp grins, showing a great number of pointed teeth.  “You’ve played it beautifully.  You were an actress, weren’t you?”

She feels the same cold fear in her belly that the monster brought up from the depths of the sea.

“How…”

“You’ll save us both time if you don’t get into the habit of asking me how I know things.”  The imp offers a hand that looks oversized on her short arm.  “Villi Selannor.  I recruit for the Kumani on occasion.  Rarely.  How do you feel about being recruited?”

Keshena examines the imp’s hand thoroughly before shaking it.  Her own looks small on her much longer arms, making them oddly of a size.  “As opposed to being stabbed and dumped in that hole?”

“It’s called a thread, and yes, that is a fair description of your options at the moment.”  The imp hasn’t stopped grinning, and it’s not making either option any more enticing.  

Still… an old fatalism rises inside, and Keshena raises her chin.  “How d’you know I’ll die?  Drowning didn’t do it.  Fire didn’t do it.  Two battleaxes, two hammers, six separate swords and a bear didn’t do it.  I might not know who’s keeping me alive, but I’m willing to keep gambling on it.”

The imp’s ageless eyes don’t stop smiling, but her mouth does.  “You’d rather make me show you what a curse immortality can be?”

Keshena shakes her head, and shakes the imp’s hand again before releasing it.  The resistance was token, part of the game.  She’s already decided.  “In that case, I believe I’ll feel flattered by being recruited.”

“Excellent choice.”  The imp extracts a small notebook from somewhere about her extravagantly pocketed person, and a pencil from somewhere else.  Her moment’s intense scribbling allows Keshena to attend herself, brushing sand from her hands, nightgown not riding up around the hips; gods forbid we be indecent during our midnight murder-conscription escapade.

Villi tears the page from her book and passes it to Keshena.  “I assume you meant to leave Capria fairly soon?  The state you left that house in, this one won’t stay quiet.  You won’t get his money.”

Keshena nods.  “I know.  I was going to... I don’t know what I was going to do, but I didn’t intend to stay.”

“Well, good; now you have a useful destination, I have a clever recruit who will stop committing messy murders near my summer home, and Mr. Kelly has been delivered to his eternal resting place.  I call this meeting a success, and adjourn.”  Villi unearths her knife again and gives it a twirl before aiming it at Keshena.  “Our Speaker Lin will see you in the Kumani guildhall in Lion’s Reach - follow those directions - in three days’ time.  Go on now, and don’t wait for me to follow, there’s a good girl.”

Keshena curls her lip at the imp, but since she’s already turning to leave, Villi doesn’t see it.  Kelly’s quick little mind is already planning her flight from town.  If she runs, she can get back to the estate for her jewelry before the guards arrive.  Enough for the train.  It means running again, but... she’s never had a destination before.  That’s something.

The fourth-class Tanor train wheezes as it drops off the usual assortment of students, livestock and thugs, and one gnarled creature so stooped that its species and profession can only be guessed. The clerk with the naked knife on his desk takes note of the students and livestock, nods at the thugs, and turns to scrutinize the ancient.

Lumps of spine jostle on the bent back as the cloaked creature raises its head. Its cloudy eyes don’t seem to find the clerk, and it produces a querulous creaking sound. When the rattling voice drops the word “Kumani” among other questions, the clerk tenses up and finishes the rest of their business in quiet haste. 

The creature wants to know which way is Lion’s Reach, and how far, and he tells them. They want a carriage and he tells them what a carriage costs, and then they don’t want one anymore. They hobble toward the door and the clerk squints after, nonplussed. What a geezer might want with the Kumani would be more interesting to ponder if they looked at all likely to survive the trip up the mountain.

The old woman’s filthy toenails finally tear through her shoes as she makes her way up the pitted, winding track. She started out shivering for show, but before she passes the first guardpost the snow begins again. At the switchback she pauses to heave and hack a bit - also for show, a show with no audience but the crows. But someone’s always watching. The eyes that take in the bleak, grey-brown foothills are clouded but not vague, eating up a grim view with a young woman’s hunger. For a moment her spine straightens, and the knotted stick in her hand hovers an inch above the road, its purpose forgotten. Then the old woman doubles up again, shrivels up again, and plods on up the hill.  It’s colder than she’s been in a while, and she’s never been this far north, but that’s all right. The cold feels clean, and she takes great gulping breaths of it, as if she’s been drowning for decades.

She’s looking for the guards long before she spots one. As fallow farmlands turn to the rambling outer estates of the city, she’s joined by others coming and going on the road. They’re ordinary enough -   farmers with carts, merchants and scientists in contentious caravans, students, engineers, mercenaries. The Kumani guards are among them, and they don’t have anything particular in common; there’s no uniform, no insignia, and only household weapons in sight. But Keshena has worn others’ faces too long to miss the way people move when they’re pretending, the subconscious consciousness of being watched. She’s seized by a wild impulse to reach out and twist the wrist of the sloppy young man twirling a knife with his foot up on a fencepost, to see how quickly and from where he’ll produce all the other knives. She swallows the urge, only gives him a wandering smile when he looks her way. His eyes slide off her and she grins into her cloak. The Kumani can be fooled.  Good to know.

When the mounted traffic veers off and the road underfoot changes from pitted, ancient stone to cut pavers, the going gets less painful but more treacherous. Several times she skids on a puddle and has to jab her walking stick into a crevice to keep from toppling over. Pretending to break a hip would take time out of the day, but by god she’ll do it if she has to. 

The guards at the Inner Gate watch her much more obviously than those before, and these young people do wear uniforms, grey and green and gold, as well as shining blades probably not as sharp as the ones hidden in their boots. They squint at her as she draws into the shelter of the wall to fumble a crumpled page out of her cloak. It doesn’t matter. Her destination isn’t something she can hide now, and her other secrets will keep themselves. With a bitter smile, she thumbs the last few coins in her pocket. It’s not enough for another train ticket.  There’s nothing to go back to in Capria anyway.

She mumbles through the directions in the letter just above a discreet volume. The sharp-eared fellows at the Gate overhear, as she means them to, and their scrutiny slacks, but it never entirely fades. The sense of being watched is usually her private hell; it’s not reassuring to be certain for once that it’s not paranoia. The citizens all seem to feel it - this is not a city where a person strolls, or promenades with head held high, although that might have as much to do with the vicious weather.

“Northwest on Axiom Road, down to the end of the western atrium, then south before the last shopfront…” She shuffles on. Pale granite walls hem passersby together until the heat of their combined commercial exertions melts the falling snow at shoulder level. The shopkeepers offer the same blandishments as everywhere else - clothes, candies, gifts for your lady - but as she peeks into crates and over counters in her way, she sees that these clothes are clotted with fur; these ladies seem to like knives as gifts. One of the trays held before her nose offers colorful lumps of sugar with fat black spiders entombed inside.

All roads in Lion’s Reach end up inside, by one archway or another; mottled grey sky gives way to arches and lamplit naves. The facade of the ancient cathedral was long ago subsumed by encroaching development on every side, new towers and wings growing steadily more modern in style as they climb. The city doesn’t have avenues and boulevards within the Basilica, but stairs and hallways honored to be called “streets,” endless concentric interiors burrowing deeper into the mountains beneath and behind. They say people get lost in Lion’s Reach, never see the sun again, and then others say, “Never seen the sun in the Reach yet,” and everyone laughs and drinks to that.

The intersection of Axiom Road and the Basilica, and every other intersection along Basilica Street, is smoky, noisy, and clogged at all hours: short-term hawkers shouting from carts, booths and stands; trainees from the Numerologists’ guild checking vendor permits and setting the Wolves on infractors; busy establishments serving food and drink in the chapels and disgorging drunken Reach farmers arm-in-arm with lecturers from the Academy too drunk themselves to argue with their colleagues holding forth about new numbers and the rights of harpies from the hallway.  The Academy of the Apse (yes, thank you, very droll for an academic) caps Axiom Road on the north end with half an acre of grand staircase leading up to a library that has claimed more lives than plague, or so they like to tell you in first-year classes. It’s true that the Lions’ Library stacks are the second-deepest catacomb in the Citadel, but no one has ever been proven to have died there, excepting members of the city’s guilds. And guild work is dangerous, any physician will tell you that; that’s why the Kumani have the best pension plan in the world, because they never have to pay it.

An Engineer is crawling along the scaffolding that mars the Academy’s elaborate facade. In other cities scholars might tend toward the paunchy, but no job in the Reach is less than aggressively physical, and those whom the elements obey must also be sure climbers.  Mezzanines alternate with clerestory windows for many stories above the Basilica floor, and crossing the yawning void between them, the Engineers’ wire and girder webs. They maintain the electric lines that fill the Citadel’s halls with blazing light right through the sunless winter, making it a wonder of the world. Though Lion’s Reach exports toys and machinework, and sun-lamps now decorate the finest houses in every city, the Reach is still the only place where the common man can read by electric light in his own home. Above the Engineer on the mezzanine, a broad-shouldered man with a square black beard leans out at a precarious angle, shouting down numbers and things that definitely aren’t among the numbers Keshena knows. They let Numerologists be foremen here? No wonder the spires curve.

Shop doors siphon off portions of the crowd all along the western atrium as she works her way out of the intersection and down Basilica Street. She smells sausage and beer and bread, and tries to remember the last time she ate. In some roadhouse outside Capria, just before catching the train to Tanor - two days ago, then.  The jewelry she’d been able to grab didn’t sell well - didn’t have time to not get cheated - but she’d taken more time to load up the battered leather case knocking against her knees as she goes.  It’s heavier than it’s ever been before, and that’s worth a lot more than gold to her.

The second-to-last shopfront is a stuffy tailor’s, ill-lit and deserted but inexplicably solvent. Keshena turns left down what would be an alley in an outdoor city - here, little better than a crawlspace. No more electric lights; she sees two oil lamps and then that’s done with, and she’s groping her way by torchlight. None too many of those either. The crawlspace turns, and there are some stairs, and another turn, widening all the while, and then her hand skimming along the wall detects a change in texture. It isn’t the same ancient granite as the rest of the Citadel. Ahead of her the hallway is black, floors and walls giving back a dull gleam in the inconstant light of one torch. She rubs at the wall, her thumb smearing decades of dust and smoke to expose a surface like glass. Obsidian.

The Basilica that became the city of Lion’s Reach was built, over a thousand years ago, on a granite crag at the base of Glass Mountain, and this is why. The Lions reinforced the obsidian caves they found and then bored further into the black glass depths. When their civilization fell, they left their worst excesses and experiments in their labs down here in the dark, and no-one living knows the barest fraction of these catacombs - except the Kumani. When the Lions fell, the Kumani moved in, and turned the cruel technology they found to the protection of the city’s people.

Keshena passes through three hallways, all torch-lit but less than you’d like, and otherwise identical but for the crates and debris that obstruct her path. She pauses to lift the lid of an unsecured box and finds a colony of spiders living among what would seem to be… the complete tax and tithe records for three generations of Tanor grain merchants named “Spinesman.” She grins. The Kumani hide, as she often does, beneath the insufferably boring.

She flattens out the note that’s been in and out of her pocket about two hundred times since Capria, and turns it toward a torch’s light.  Selannor’s writing is regimented, like an architect’s, a terse series of directions, divided from the bottom portion by a large scrawled symbol. Above the symbol it reads, “When you see this sign, enter. Meet Speaker Lin al-Akir in the library.”

What follows is meant for Lin, presumably, because Keshena can’t read it; it’s more geometric symbols. She’s starting to spot them on the walls around her, etched into the obsidian and hard to discern through the years’ detritus. They don’t seem to be connected to anything in particular, single characters out alone in the middle of the wall, clusters in formal arrangements at odd intervals, whole strings without spaces marching around doorways, and this makes it frustratingly slow to make sure she’s not missing the one she’s looking for. In the end, it’s more clear than she fears - the symbol in the letter appears only once, part of a long inscription along the ceiling on her right, and directly beneath it there’s a door. It looks just like all the other doors she’s passed, metal and rusty, but when she pushes it, it swings silently out of her way. The passage on the other side looks utterly dark, and Keshena pauses, not afraid but rather wondering, vaguely, if this is the sort of thing a person should be afraid of. Then she steps through and closes the heavy iron door behind her.

The walls of this passage are natural stone, obsidian unworked by any hand except where it was necessary to support the roof or clear the path. This is visible because it’s not utterly dark in here, it’s just much darker than the torchlight in the hall. The light is a sickly phosphorescence that seems to emanate from the fungus on the walls. Keshena looks down at her hands and curls her lip. Something about this light makes the makeup on her skin, every bump, every scar, every hair stand out, makes her look ghastly. It gets better as she moves on - the fungus is joined by a few other varieties with kinder shades of bioluminescence, and then she turns a corner and there are electric lights again, winking in corners, tucked into clever carved hollows in the black glass walls. The cave is abruptly beautiful, a flickering labyrinth of light and shadow that widens, some way ahead, to a cavern whose enormous size she can hear in the echoes of falling water ricocheting off the walls.

She wants to go on, to see where the water’s coming from, where it’s going, but her destination is maddeningly convenient, the first door on her left if its stamped label doesn’t lie. When she opens that door, a gust of air hits her like the breath of an oven, scorching and dry. Keeping books down here in these caves must be a constant battle against mold and damp. 

The library is large and unexpectedly busy with young people, mostly, dressed in grey. She knows the librarian not by his smock - it’s also grey - but by his reproving look at Keshena letting out all his hot air. They learn that look in librarian school. It’s true, and when you leave the profession, they pluck out an eye so you can never perform the Librarian Look again. She hastily shuts the door.

If he’s going to glare at her, he might as well be useful. Keshena approaches the librarian and inquires after Lin in her creakiest voice. Now he’s suspicious as well as irritated, but the old lady foxes everyone - she doesn’t look like she could stand up to a stiff breeze, so she’s often permitted to do outrageous things, just because she appears harmless. Being Madame makes Keshena feel safe.

The librarian points through an archway into the next room where a circular firepit ten feet across occupies the center of the floor. Around it, more Kumani sprawl in ancient, battered chairs, talking quietly, reading, sleeping in at least one case. As she turns away the librarian adds, “You want the underdressed girl with one eye.”

Pale as milk and skeletally thin, the very hand of Death, Keshena’s hand looks a fright on the girl’s brown skin when she finds her. The girl with one eye sits on a chaise close to the fire, legs crossed, a pile of notes filling the bowl of her skirt. She’s not dressed in grey like nearly everyone else, but sky blue, a wrapped garment that leaves her shoulders bare, and that’s where Keshena’s hand lands.

Lin whips around wearing a scowl that looks habitual, already beginning to leave its tracks on the woman’s youthful face.  Her right eye is a brown so dark it’s nearly black, the same color as her hair, and the left one is a black stone, a polished sphere of onyx set into her socket.  The operation couldn’t be done anywhere else in the world, not and leave the girl use of her face.  Beautiful work, barely scarred at all.

    “This is a private guildhall, ma’am,” the girl snaps.

    Keshena offers Villi’s torn page.  Lin double-takes at the symbol and scans the incomprehensible mess below, her frown only deepening.  When she reaches the end, she growls in her throat and turns a skeptical eye on Keshena.  “You must be the new recruit.  Or a joke.  Villi might be playing another prank on me.  Are you a joke?”

    Her manner is harsh; another Keshena might wilt.  Madame is amused.  “Not professionally, it’s more of a lifestyle.  I am your new recruit, though.  Not what you were expecting?”

    Lin purses her lips, visibly trying to control her tone.  “I don’t mean any disrespect, ma’am, but our work and training requires a great deal of physical activity, and -”

    “Does your entrance examination feature a timed jog?  Shall we head out to the fields?”

    The girl’s temper lives close to the surface, and flares again.  “It features whatever I decide to require, and as of this moment, the best recommendation I have of you comes from Villi, who tells me you’re a murderer!”  She doesn’t take care to lower her voice this time, and gets a few glances, but the word ‘murderer’ certainly provokes less of a stir here than it would in most libraries.

    Keshena grins, showing off Madame’s yellowing teeth.  “If that’s not a testament to my physical qualifications, what is?”

    Lin scoffs and looks to the letter for guidance.  “Murder can be terrifyingly easy,” she mutters, “But I suppose I don’t have anything to teach you about that.”  She frowns for a long moment, then leans forward to drag the chaise clear of her strewn paperwork.  “...All right, if you genuinely want to work for us, sit down.  Explain yourself to me.”

    Keshena sits with more gratitude than she shows, gathering her ragged coat tight about her to keep it from brushing against Lin’s sky-blue silk.  “How much time have you got?”

    She sees the Speaker’s temper rise again, and sees the girl control it this time, with grace.  “Not a great deal, so I hope you’ll begin giving me straight answers fairly soon.  You come from…?”

    “Most recently, Capria.  I was born, to the best of my knowledge, in Blackwell.”

Lin’s changing face almost makes Keshena laugh, as she tries on various forms of shock, suspicion and confusion.  “Blackwell was destroyed almost -”

“Two hundred years ago, yes.  By a plague.”

“A war,” Lin corrects her.

Keshena smiles an ancient, tired smile.  “It was a plague, but never mind.  Yes, I was born in Blackwell before it was destroyed.”

“How old are you?”

“Isn’t that rude to say to a lady?”

Lin grins in answer, and her smile makes her look older, wickeder, wilder.  “Are you a lady?”

Keshena laughs, startling herself.  Suddenly she realizes that she hasn’t enjoyed a conversation this much in seventy years or more.  “Well, no, I wouldn’t say that by any means.  Fair enough; I’m two-hundred and twenty-one years old, or near as I can reckon.  My memories of childhood are a little vague these days.”

Lin digests this for some time.  When she speaks again her tone is more respectful, almost reverent, and Keshena likes that no better than when they greet the Called with stones.  “And, ah… whom do you serve?”

Always that same question, with no good answer.  She grits her teeth.  “No one.”

The Speaker doesn’t look disgusted, merely puzzled.  “But… then who Called you back from the Halls?  Who protects your life?”

Her innocent confusion is infuriatingly adorable, so it’s hard to get annoyed with her for making Keshena spell it out.  Voice flat, her words dropping like stones into a well, she says,  “I… don’t… know.”

Another subtle wave of emotions passes over Lin’s face, and Keshena can’t help but be captivated.  It’s like watching flames, or fish, something incapable of stillness, constantly in elegant motion.  There’s a great deal of sorrow in this sea.  The girl reaches out and lays her fingers on Keshena’s wrist.

“I didn’t know that could happen.  You must be so lonely.”

Startled, Keshena looks up from the hand on her wrist to meet Lin’s great dark eye.  She forgets Madame’s characteristic squint, and the eyes that reflect in the black gem are blurred - a kind of ink she made herself, dripped in the eye, only stings a little bit - but not remotely aged.  “What makes you say that?” she murmurs.

“I just - well, because I was, before I came here.  I can’t imagine being lost for so long.”  Lin smiles again, and the frozen tension Keshena has held since the hand touched her wrist melts just a bit.  “Perhaps your recruitment method was a little… non-standard, but that’s actually quite standard for Villi’s recruits.  It seems as if, whether or not this is where you intended to end up, it might be where you need to be… at least for a while.”

Keshena grins to cover her own disarmament.  “Why does it sound like you’re trying to convince me to join up?”

With a sigh, Lin slumps back against the chaise.  “Because I am, let’s be frank.  There was a time when the Kumani ruled this city, and there wasn’t a thing that went on anywhere in the world we didn’t know about.  Now we’re little better than cut-rate city guards and an easy path to civil service for the lazy children of other civil servants.”  Her tone is venomous, her dark face alive with outrage as she jerks a hand at the grey-clad bodies reclined throughout the library.  “We’re flooded with incompetent novices, with not enough hands to train them, barely enough to keep ahead of the trouble they cause in the city… the rest of the Hand doesn’t care; Hanna and the others are all either on the city Council or part of Nieran’s order, so the guild is just an afterthought.  And this guild is the reason the city still exists at all!  It used to be legendary!  Even in Lochria they’ve heard of the spies who toppled kings and ended wars, Akal, Nahasa, Anfini, Missari!”

Her rage turns to rapturous reminiscence so quickly that Keshena bursts out laughing.  “Look at you!  Girlish hero-worship and all.  This really matters to you.  Why?  What do they pay you?”

Lin snorts.  “Oh, don’t get excited, it’s got nothing to do with that.  It’s just…”  She drops her hands into the sky-blue pool of her folded knees and looks up at the obsidian ceiling, the same depthless black as her eyes.  “I grew up in this city, and I can’t remember a time when I felt anything like the kind of pride in it that those old stories made me feel.  I went looking for it, and when I got down here, I realized there’s something more profound wrong with the city.  It’s not just me.”  She shakes her head, her troubled eyes narrow.  “It’s like the people at the top think it’s all a big game, and they can’t even see things falling apart down here.  This guild used to represent the common people of this city!  The Kumani were born protecting farmers and builders with pitchforks and horsewhips!  Against the kind of people -”  Suddenly she realizes that her volume has been climbing to an un-library-like level, and drops her voice considerably before finishing, “- the kind of people who rule this city now.  People like the Lions.  Our guildmaster and her cronies sit at their tables every day.  Haven’t deigned to even visit the guildhall in months.”

In the silence following this rant, Keshena is thankful that Madame is her traveling face.  Wearing all her years on her skin makes it easier to hide the kind of emotion that moves across Lin’s face like lightning over the sea.  She feels it moving through her too, a slow charge awakening numb nerves for the first time in decades.

“All right, then.  If you want to change that, it sounds like something I’d be proud to be a part of.  I accept.”

Lin glances down at her paperwork.  “Oh!  Well, that’s good, because Villi said to issue you a three-year contract, and I don’t… believe… hm, no, there’s no option to decline it.”

“Indentured, am I?”

Lin winces.  “Nnnot exactly?  I mean, you’re welcome to leave, I certainly won’t stop you.  But Villi enforces her contracts herself.”

With a grin, Keshena asks, “How are my chances, d’you think?”

Lin opens her mouth, then closes it, then laughs.  “Well, ah… I hope you like Lion’s Reach, because they’ll bury you here.”

Keshena nods.  “That’s what I figured.  It’s all right, I understood what this was before I got on the train.  I can give you three years.  What’s three when I just wasted seventy-five?”  She clicks lumpy fingers.  “Where do I sign?”

Suddenly Lin is all business, tucking the other papers away to flatten out the contract, and bringing a small, ornate case from a pocket of her dress.  “The terms are laid out here; much of it’s standard for guilds in the Citadel - can you read?”

“Yes.”

“Oh yes, of course you can, you read Villi’s writing.  None of this should be surprising to someone who’s been around as long as you have.  This document is witnessed by our Father Nieran, so it requires a sacrifice to complete.  Least favorite finger, please!”

Keshena hesitates on the verge of presenting the smallest finger on her right hand.  “Am I getting it back?”

“Yes, I just need a small amount of blood.”  From the case comes a needle, with which Lin jabs Keshena’s fingertip before it can escape.  As blood wells up, Lin opens a small inkbottle labeled in spidery symbols, and lets a single black drop fall on the line at the bottom of the page.  Taking hold of Keshena’s hand, she tips it, dripping blood into the ink.  Instead of swallowing the red into the black, the ink fizzes, bubbling over the line.  Lin looks surprised, but turns Keshena’s hand over and aims her fingertip to smear the bloody drop over the line in a broad stroke.

“...That’s it?”

“That’s it.”  Lin smiles and leans down to blow on the mark, encouraging it to dry.  “Do you have any questions for me?”

“Is there accommodation for your novices?”

Lin nods.  “We have a barracks in the guildhall; it’s the first hallway on your right as you circle the cavern.”  Her eye flashes with enthusiasm as she jumps up, only just catching her paperwork before it spills from her lap onto the floor.  “I should give you a tour!”

Smiling, Keshena rises more slowly.  “I’d love that.”  As they gather Lin’s things and exit the library, she adds, “Not meaning any disrespect at all by the question, but… ‘Speaker’ here means you’re in charge of novices and training, yes?  How long have you had the job?”

Another nod from Lin.  “If only that were all I have to manage, these days, but yes.  I’ve been Speaker for about two years.”

“And how old are you, assuming you are yourself not a lady?”  Keshena winks, and Lin grins at her.

“Twenty-six.  I know I’m young for the job.  That’s the trouble; most of the old-timers aren’t interested in the drudgery of running the guild anymore, so anyone who looks like they want to work gets slapped with a title and a decade’s worth of unfinished projects.”

“They’re lucky they found you, then,” Madame murmurs, and the smile she offers Lin is sincere.  Lin looks embarrassed, and then grateful as they reach the place where the hallway opens out.

The cave is staggeringly large; Keshena can’t see the far wall or the roof for the darkness.  Before them, a cataract of white water falls from the gloom to crash into a small lake bordered by clusters of luminescent mushrooms.  The mushrooms grow first huge, then man-sized and more abundant toward the eastern end of the cavern, where a copse of them like bulbous trees nearly obscures a little domed folly.  On the west end, a knot of obsidian structures, glittering in the luminescent light and that of cleverly hidden electric lamps.  And to the north, across the lake, she can see the end of the smooth shelf they stand on, and the lake’s outflow falling into a truly unfathomable abyss, the black heart of the mountain.

“So this is the main cavern.  Offices are in those buildings - technically that’s where I’m meant to work, but I prefer to be more available if anyone has questions, so mostly you’ll find me in the library.  That building’s empty most of the time these days.  Over there is the mushroom garden and the lake; we hold gatherings in the Retreat.  Or try to.  The novices attend, anyway.”

They move along the curving black wall to one of several passageways branching off into the mountain.  “Barracks is through here; you’re welcome to stay there as long as you’re a novice.”  Lin turns a handle, activating a small electric lamp shaped like a fist-sized beetle clinging to the wall.  “It’s… basic.”

The barracks certainly is “basic” - Madame would rather say “cell-like.”  The bunks are bolted to the walls, dressed in bedding the same dingy grey as the uniforms strewn around the floor.  There’s a table spread with books and notes, but no chairs to sit at it, and no light but for the insectile lamp at the door.  Phlegm-colored wax drips from guttered candles in little alcoves here and there, evidence of the novices’ attempts to study, but it seems few wish to linger here - the place is deserted, barely any personal touches to indicate which bunks might be taken.  Keshena automatically moves toward the dimmest corner of the room, and selects a still-made bunk to test with a sit.  It’s dreadfully uncomfortable.  She bounces a little and grins at Lin’s chagrined expression.

“Oh, don’t worry, dearie, I’ve slept in worse.”

“I’m honestly intending to have it fixed up some; funds are limited and the Hand feels that these… arrangements… will promote resilience and alertness among the novices.”

“Alertness indeed; I’d have to be drunk as a lord to sleep deeply on this.”

“Well, that is how most of the novices manage,” Lin says with a sigh.  “The guild makes its own whiskey, if that’s something you’re interested in.  One of our few remaining streams of revenue.”

“Oh, do you.  That is interesting.”  Keshena casts around and then ducks to peer between her feet under the bunk.  “Regarding my personal effects…”  She taps the leather case currently resting on her insteps.  “Do I need to be concerned about thieves?”

The Speaker’s face darkens and she shakes her head.  “No.  Absolutely not.  Kumani do not steal from one another.”

    “Lie, spy, and murder one another, yes,” says a deep male voice, “But not steal.”

    Lin rolls her eyes but doesn’t turn as a short man pokes a balding head around her and grins at her less-than-amused face.  “We don’t lie to one another either, Ishin,” she says in a warning tone.

    “Yes, yes, of course.”  The old man straightens up next to her and folds his hands.  “You must never lie to your superiors,” he says sternly to Keshena.  “Only your superiors are permitted to lie, for your own good.”  His eyes glitter at the bottom of wrinkled pits, and Keshena finds herself grinning back at him.

    “Of course.  I understand completely.”

    Ishin winks at her and claps his hands, turning to Lin.  “I like your new recruit!  We need more geezers with guts down here.”

    “She’s Villi’s new recruit, actually.”

    “Oh, my sympathies.”

    “Ishin is our weaponsmaster; he’ll train you in blades,” Lin says.

    “Mostly which wrinkles you can hide them in,” Ishin stage-whispers behind his hand, then turns to leave.  “Come round to the sparring ring tomorrow afternoon and we’ll have a go.”

    “Right, the ring.  Come on, there’s more to show you.  You can leave that case here.”

    Keshena stands, the case still clasped at her side.  “It’s no trouble,” she says, keeping her tone light.  Don’t argue with me, girl.  Lin doesn’t argue, only gives her a curious glance and shrugs.

    “Villi will be back in the city tomorrow as well,” she says as they return to the main cavern and continue their trek around its outer edge.  “She spends about half her time in Capria or on assignment, but you’ll see her regularly for training.”

    “And what does Villi teach, besides best practices for murder?”

    Lin laughs.  “Well, that, certainly.  Illusions, too, and the construction and maintenance of threads.”

    “Tell me about these illusions?”

They’re just south of the mushroom garden now, and the blue-green light emanating from the largest specimens makes Lin’s skin almost black, gleaming along the smooth lines of her face.  “It’s one of our Father’s gifts to us - a way of shaping light.”  Turning to Keshena, Lin cups her hands between them, creating a pool of shade.  She closes her hands around it and squeezes as if trying to crush an apple.  Then she opens her hands, and each finger looks as if dipped in oil, dripping darkness that dissipates like smoke before it hits the ground.  Tilting her palm so that Keshena can see the effect, she murmurs, “Go ahead and touch it.  Illusions can be tactile, although it takes more skill to make something that will stand up to a lot of touching.”

Keshena feels something cold and liquid on her fingertips when she touches Lin’s palm.  “This is… magic?”

Lin nods.  “Nieran’s magic.  That’s why Villi’s the best at it.”  She sees Keshena’s confused glance, and adds, “Villi is Nieran’s Eyes, leader of His order.”

“Are all Kumani part of the order?”

    Lin’s frown returns.  She shakes the gloom off her hand, leaving nothing behind.  “No.  The guild is not the martial arm of the order, much as Villi might like that.  Your contract is with the city, and your service is to Lion’s Reach and its people.  You are in no way obligated to serve Nieran to work with us.  Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, okay?  And tell me if anyone tries.  Including Villi.”

    The invisible roof of the great cavern comes very low at the eastern end, creating a looming overhang that shelters half of a long building, the other half carved back into the cave wall.  It opens on a ring, cut into the obsidian underfoot and padded with sawdust stained to greyish-brown over months or years of scuffing.  “Armory, and sparring ring.  There’s a small forge that Ishin uses time to time, but we also requisition equipment from smiths in the city - talk to him about anything you need and he’ll get you a good price.”

    The black folly among the mushrooms is never more than half visible as they circle the fungal garden and come to the north verge of the lake.  Toward the lip of the obsidian shelf, the darkness beyond that unprotected brink grows seemingly deeper and more magnetic with each breath, each step, a yawning mouth that Keshena reminds herself is almost certainly not whispering imprecations to her.  A tooth of stone stands right at the edge, eight or so feet of ragged, unworked obsidian.  The nearest side is smooth and etched with line after line of silvered words.  Approaching, Keshena squints and tilts her head to make out a few:

Trust is the death of insight. 
- Cita Teras

We swim in the dark sea of Your vanity.  Bless us, Father - let us be Your reflections. 
- Rayn Rogers

Make love loudly.  Make war silently. 
- Lin al’Akir

Even the brightest light casts a shadow.  That is why we will prevail. 
- Konnorn Ket’Heth

    Keshena grins.  “Does everyone get to make their mark on this rock?  I must say I like yours.”

    Lin blushes and smiles.  “When you pass your trial and become a full Kumani, I’ll bring you back here to write whatever you think future Kumani should know.”

    “Oh, gracious, that’s dangerous.”  Keshena turns from contemplating the etched stone to look over the edge of the shelf.  Her spine and neck prickle, and she stays well back, tilting her head to keep Lin at the corner of her eye at the same time.  Trust is the death of insight, is it?

A cataract of water rushes out of the clean-cut channel flowing from the lake to the cliff.  Half of it turns to mist, drifting out into nothingness, and the rest is swallowed so utterly by the dark below that it looks like an illusion.  No sound, no sign of the stone walls that must enclose the cave... the black heart of Glass Mountain is empty.

“How far down does it go?” she murmurs.  Even the flat sound of her own voice makes it feel like she’s outside, the sound dying long before it finds a surface to bounce off.

Lin approaches and peers over herself, no sign of fear as she regards the depthless void.  “You know the myth of the Artificer?”

Raising an eyebrow, Keshena steps away from the edge.  “Haven’t heard Him called that in centuries.  Not since I lived in Blackwall.  I think I remember the story, may even have played a part in it a time or two.”  Catching Lin’s glance, she adds, “I was an actress.  Once upon a time.”

With a grin, Lin says, “I believe you.  But I doubt you acted in this one; it’d have to be a one-man show.  The Artificer was a worker in the Citadel, a thousand years ago when the Lions were at the height of their power.  They were offended by his art, found him insufficiently reverent.  So they threw him into the obsidian mines below their laboratories, and sealed him in the cave.”

“Let me guess - this was the first Kumani?”

“Far from it.  I’m getting there!”  Lin laughs at her impatience.  The sound is crystalline and bright, echoing back from the walls around the compound and then swallowed as it spills out into the dark, like the water.  “So the Artificer turned away from the exit they closed against him, and began to explore the cave.  He had no light, so he had to imagine everything, and he built glorious, scintillating galleries, halls of unimaginable sincerity and beauty in his mind.  His designs lead him deep into the dark, to the heart of the mountain, where he found another stone like the one that sealed him in.  He dreamed for nine days and nights, filling the space with his vivid thoughts, until he dreamed that the stone cracked and fell to pieces with a sound like the hammer of a world-sized heart.  He knelt in the darkness and felt the shards on the ground at his feet.  The black-glass shards cut his hands to ribbons, and he cried out, not in pain, but in loss, for he could not move his hands, could not build or shape or paint or carve.”

Lin sways a little at her side, swept away by her story.  The words seem like a recitation, and along with her clear joy in the tale, Lin looks proud to know it well - it’s a performance.  Something in Keshena’s chest turns over painfully, watching the girl’s fragile grace.  Like a deer.  Something wild and new.  For a moment it feels as if she wants to step closer, or to stand where Lin stands, see through those eyes.  Feel the lift of the hand, if the bones really are as light as they look.  As if she could almost fly.  The voices in her head nearly crowd out Lin’s as she resumes the telling, and Keshena shakes her head hard, shedding a little brownish powder from the raddled slope of her cheek.

“...he felt suddenly that he was not alone in that blackness.  There were hands on his head and shoulders, lifting him from his knees.  His visions, strong enough to lead him all the way here, where men were never meant to come, suddenly bloomed around him into shattering reality, blinding light pouring from his mind into his eyes.  All around him the world changed, and he saw that it was not exactly as he’d imagined it - it was inspired by his creations, certainly, but stranger, an elusive abstraction that seemed constantly on the verge of shifting when he looked away from it.  And then he saw the being that had raised him to his feet.”

Lin glances at her, then holds out a hand, palm out and flat, her fingers widely spread.  She curls her other palm around the spread fingers, shading the wedge-shaped gaps between them, then parts her hands to spill three hard-edged gouts of gloomy fog through her fingers.  Following its movement with her left hand, Lin tugs and kneads the mist, something like baking, something like weaving, and the light percolating through it from the mushroom garden and the luminescent lanterns begins to discolor and blend.  Keshena can see intricate caves forming in the smoke, glittering walls of crystal and stone, black pools of obsidian, like being trapped inside a geode.  When Lin speaks again, she is still flexing her fingertips, held loosely before her, but the illusion seems to obey her words more than her movements.

“It was a great beast, a man twenty feet tall and strong enough to shake the mountain.  His shoulders were each the size of horses, his arms like great trees, and his head was that of a black bull, a beast with horns so broad they curved beyond the limits of his mountain prison and drove holes in the fabric of the earth.  When he spoke, his voice deafened the Artificer, but the Artificer found that he could not escape that voice, not ever again, for it was in his own head, in his own throat.  His bleeding hands were healed, and he saw that they were vast and stronger than they had ever been.  His darkened eyes were clear, and he saw further than he had ever seen.  He realized, as the minotaur spoke to him, that it was he who spoke.

“For my freedom… I give you yours.  We will depart this place together, and build a new world.”

Keshena blinks at this turn of events, and Lin’s mouth twitches at her expression, but she continues, concentrating on her illusion.  The great minotaur disappears, and then the flourishing caves grow even more elaborate as the Artificer makes His way back out of the mountain, His feet replaced by great hooves, His torn fingers by the hairy and dextrous hands of the beast.  Those hands push the dark back, and when they find the stone the Lions thought would contain him, they shatter it with a touch.

“The light that poured out of the cave was brighter than the winter sun, but in that light only one man stepped forth.  One monster.  An Artificer went into the cave, and the Minotaur came out.  The Lions tried to imprison Him again, and for their hubris He changed their city about them, set them quarreling amongst themselves.  When they fell, the Artificer protected the laborers and the builders, the common people of the city He loved, the city that had been His cage and His womb.  He gave them His gifts, to shape light, to conceal themselves and see to the heart of things, to create beauty from nothing.  He bid them - bid us - to protect Lion’s Reach as long as it stood.  And that’s where the Kumani began.”

    Surprised, Keshena laughs.  “I see.  So you’re saying that Nieran is a giant minotaur with the brain of an artist, and He was at one point imprisoned somewhere far down there in that hole, and then He got out and gave you the power to create pretty lights.  So when I asked, ‘how far down does it go?’...”

    Lin’s lips curve with a mysterious smile.  “To the bottom of the world, as far as I know,” she murmurs.  She wiggles her fingers, and the smoky images before them disintegrate in the wan green light of the mushrooms.  “I have to get some work done, but I’ll check in on you soon, see how you’re getting settled.  Feel free to explore.  Maybe you’ll find another god.”

    There’s no welcoming jingle to usher her into the shop, and it’s dim enough that for a moment Keshena thinks perhaps the place is closed, or she’s mistaken its purpose - perhaps it’s not a leather-goods store, but a leather-goods warehouse with poor security.  She weaves between racks of armor and tack, and finds a living creature manning the counter, an aging fellow who is altogether startled to be taking terse orders of hunting and sparring gear from a doddering old woman.  He’s even more surprised when she writes the symbol Lin showed her on his order form, and he’s forced to knock eighty percent off the price.  The symbol means “Kumani,” and it’s the only one of the Kumani signs that everyone in Lion’s Reach can read.

    He has what she wants in stock, fortunately, although he first guides her to the racks dyed a uniform slate grey, the color of all those drab novices strewn about the library.  She gives him a dark look and turns away, toward a similar ensemble in black.

    “I’m not specifically required to wear grey, I hope,” she’d said to Lin this morning.

    “No, no.  I never do.  You wear whatever you like; if you get good enough at illusions, you could go out naked and nobody would know it!”

    “...Have you done that?”

    “No, but it does sound fun, doesn’t it?”

    Keshena represses a smile as she concludes her dealing with the leatherworker, including the surrender of a handful of coins Lin gave her to get herself equipped.  “Save me hearing about it later, please, just put on something to keep Ishin from impaling you.  His depth perception isn’t that good.”  Keshena isn’t particularly concerned that Ishin will do her harm, but she’s ready to shed her traveling face and put on something with more range of motion.  Aye, let’s show Lin what we can do.

    The barracks isn’t a good dressing room.  No privacy at all.  But she hasn’t seen a worthy hiding-spot in the Citadel either, and she’s been looking.  Nowhere that a clever Kumani or a dumb Engineer might not stumble in, all innocence, and catch her undressed.  Better that she not have to leave the guildhall anyway.  Taking her new leather gear along with the heavy case she’s been knocking against her knees since Capria, she trudges down into the dark catacombs again.

    She wastes a few minutes exploring the official buildings at the west end of the lake.  As Lin predicted, she finds no official people in residence, though she spots plaques assigning rooms to the “Speaker,” “Index,” “Inquirer,” and, at the end of a long upstairs hallway featuring the world’s largest portrait collection of people with knives who take themselves too seriously, “Champion.”  All the doors are locked, but she does try them all.  Always try doors. It’s an ideological perspective as well as practical advice.  How can you know the limits of your environment unless you constantly test them?

    All privacy lives behind locked doors in this house, it seems.  One rule for the lions, another for the sheep, eh?  Keshena curls her lip as she exits the building.  Lin has that much right: there’s something in common between the folks running the city now and those who nearly ran it into the ground.  It’s something about pride.

    Her feet take her toward the water and the edge of the shelf.  By the time she starts paying any real attention to where she’s going - woolgathering, dammit - she has to mind her footing well to avoid slipping on the wet stone and sliding straight into the black.  And there it is, like a great eye she can’t look away from.  That great void.

    The voices that bid her “jump” are mundane, more so than most of the voices in her head.  She knows everyone hears those little demons.  The demons she brought with her to this place have a different tone, and different suggestions.  She seems to hear them less and see the most when she’s staring into nothingness like this.  It’s a trick she can pull anywhere.  There’s nothingness to be found in everything, for one who’s seen it before.

        She knows that her eyes are taking in more than she consciously notes when, at length, she perceives a shimmer beyond the edge, a patch of black with more shine than the velvet dark ahead.  It’s narrow, right against the cliffside, requiring her to stand at the lip of the precipice to see it.  The voices grow louder, and she sits down, letting her feet dangle as she peers past them.  A few scoots to the left brings her above the shiny spot.  From one of Madame’s many pockets, she pulls a flat metal box as long as her hand, stuffed with tools on top of the flint and tinder it was originally intended for.  She unwraps an oily cloth to reveal a shard of mirror, narrow and jagged, only wide enough to catch the reflection of one eye as she holds it out in front of her face.  She turns it to catch the lights of the complex over her shoulder, then tilts it down, casting a single shivering shaft of light onto the obstruction.  It’s a ledge.  Not much of a drop from where she’s sitting, perhaps four feet, but the surface is obsidian, like the rest of the cave, and slick with the spray of the waterfall.  Stupid, you’ll slide right off and then never stop falling.  Kelly is always the voice of self-preservation.  Unfortunate, because she’s not in a mood to listen to Kelly at the moment.  Keshena pushes herself forward with both hands and slips off the edge.

    She lands a little harder than she wants to, but lets herself crumple down instead of resisting, till she finds herself on hands and knees on stone she can’t see, mist already beading on her clothes.  With one hand she feels along the ground, measuring the ledge.  It’s about as wide as her arm is long, enough that she’d feel confident about walking on it if she could see it.  As it is, she keeps one hand on the rough edge of the stone as she creeps forward on her knees, keeping her left shoulder pressed firmly against the cliff wall.  Though agonizingly slow, this takes her around a little jog in the cliffside, and then the light from above is blocked and she’s in utter darkness, no longer even able to see her hands before her face.  But at the same time, she slumps sideways, the wall abruptly falling away at her left side, so that she makes a strangled sound and clutches helplessly at the stone below for a moment, fearing she’s now on a knife’s edge above the abyss - but no.  The wall has opened up, and she can feel a wider space to her left where the sound of water doesn’t bounce back.  She begins to move into it, and then her left hand curls around a corner in the floor.  Reaching a little further finds a surface a few inches below the corner - stairs.  Keshena pulls herself up to the stairs and perches on the top one, feeling the width and extent of the stairwell with both hands.  Narrow and steep, but not wet - the spray doesn’t reach here.  Gingerly she slides her feet forward, and moves down at first like a child, sitting on one step as she finds her footing on the next.

Six or seven stairs down, she finds a landing a few feet square, and the turn of the staircase where it opens further, the walls moving away from her as she descends.  She begins to feel a new kind of fear, fear of the blind space opening around her, in which anything could lurk.  The voices in her head are gibbering, demanding she go back, but she carries on, letting Madame’s focus on the moment carry her down.  Nothing closed behind us.  Can still reach the ledge if we jump.  We can go back.  But right now we go on.

    She descends for a minute or two until a step that expects another startles her by hitting the floor instead, sending a painful shock up her leg.  She pauses, then experimentally tries curling her hands the way Lin did, wondering if the illusions require even a little bit of light to work.  Or maybe she’s doing it wrong.  Either way, nothing manifests, and she pulls out her tinderbox again.  Fumbling blind, she brushes aside the tinder and striker and finds instead a small collection of lucifer matches, carefully wrapped in cloth.  Three silvers apiece, mumbles someone in her head, but she puts it out of her mind and strikes one against the rough stone.  An explosion of sparks pours over her hand and sleeve, and she hisses but raises the burning match high to see what she can see in its brief light.

    It’s a cavern, then, not as large as the one above, but longer than she can see, and strewn with objects.  The walls are decorated with weapons and armor, most of it ancient, older than her from the styles, and the way forward is a maze of boxes and tables covered in more relics.  Treasures that glitter, dust-covered books and bolts of cloth, a storehouse of trophies from a hundred wars, a thousand robberies and assassinations, the plunder of nations piled around her in the dark.

    The match burns down as she stares and memorizes what she sees, until it scorches her fingertips and she throws it to the ground.  It’s too hazardous to carry on without a better light, and this won’t serve her for a changing room, not if she has to risk that fall every time she comes in, but she catalogues the things she’s seen as she carefully climbs the stairs again, wondering if Lin knows about this hidden trove.

    Back in the empty barracks, she strips her wet rags and sets them aside, mentally replacing the things that are too damaged to use with slightly less damaged remnants of other costumes.  Madame wears everyone’s cast-offs.  When she’s stripped, she looks a real fright, she knows - cosmetics running down in brown and grey streaks from her face, the time-worn, wrinkled mug of the ancient stopping at the neck and giving way to the fragile form beneath, the bare body of a twenty-five year old girl who died two hundred years ago.  The sight of herself uncovered is more horrible even than the thought of being interrupted like this, and she hurries to don the clothes and armor she bought this morning.

    The touch of clean, well-made clothing is comforting, as is the weight of the armor.  She feels her muscles stretching and loosening, freeing themselves from the restraint of an old woman’s posture.  She jumps to her feet, just to feel her thighs ache with the force of it, and does a few vigorous squats, swinging her arms and turning her wrists.  She hasn’t used her muscles in decades, decades of being a rich man’s plaything and believing it would keep her safe.

    Didn’t really believe that, did we?  

No.  But we tried.

    Opening the case on her bunk, she sits by it and builds the mercenary Den Roth’s tanned skin in layers of paint and powder.  She lays down scars made of thin cloth and wax, and layers cosmetics over them to make them seamless.  Pushing back the lid of the case reveals a silvered panel, not exactly a mirror but it’ll do, into which she peers as she dabs at her face and adjusts her wig, finger-combing Den Roth’s ruddy curls.  The centerpiece is a long shred of cloth attached to a small wooden bit that fits under her lip, pulling it into a perpetual sneer.  With the help of the pots and pouches in her case, it becomes a disfiguring scar that splits the left side of her face from temple to lip, a wound that should have killed her.  When it’s in place, and blended in, Keshena Den Roth stares back at her from the warped silver surface.  Then the torn mouth splits, and she bares her teeth in a ferocious grin.  Hello, coward.

    She’s stepping into the knee-length boots Den Roth favors when she’s interrupted.  The boots have hidden lifts that make her several inches taller than most of Keshena’s faces, but they don’t begin to approach the height of the woman who enters the barracks now, ducking her head to miss the doorframe.  She can’t stand upright anywhere in the room, but hunches her enormous shoulders until she can sit on a bunk, and hails Keshena with a raised hand that could palm Keshena’s head.

    “Afternoon, sister.  B’lieve we haven’t met?  Brynn.  ‘Prentice to Ishin.”

    It takes Keshena a moment to dredge up Den Roth’s gravelly voice.  She covers it by shaking Brynn’s hand, which swallows her own.  “Keshena Den Roth.  Villi’s apprentice, or prisoner, depending on how you look at it.”

    Brynn laughs.  “Aye, that sounds about right.  Welcome!  Good to see another novice who looks ready for a fight.  You gonna spar with Ishin today?”

    Keshena nods.  “I was about to head over there.  I don’t expect I’ll win, but -”

    “Nah, probably not, but that’s okay, y’learn more from losing.  What’s your weapon?”  Brynn rises and begins to shuck her armor, replacing it with grey livery she pulls between her feet from under her bunk.  Keshena turns her eyes away, but the giantess evidences no modesty whatsoever.

    “Longsword.  Two, if I can get them, or a short blade.”

    “That’s a knight’s style; you train with the Blackguards?”

    “The Ashen, actually.”

    Brynn gives her a lopsided grin.  “That’s funny.  We got a couple ex-knights right now.  Ser Kang was Ashen too.  Guess their new guildmaster is making some enemies!”

    Keshena shrugs.  “Maybe.  I was never part of the guild, just trained with their men during the Quiet War.”

    Brynn’s grin fades.  “Ah… that was an ugly business.  Long time ago too.  A real long time.”

    Keshena nods, watching her face to see how this revelation will be received, but Brynn appears unconcerned, merely looking Keshena over with the same measuring eye with which she might examine a weapon.  “You’re in good shape for an immortal.”

    Laughing, Keshena moves toward the door.  “Wait until you see me fight before you say that.”

    Taking that as an invitation, Brynn jumps up - with some care for her head - and follows her out to the ring.  When they arrive, they find Ishin watching a novice test a new blade, the formerly deserted arena now lined with Kumani come to see if anyone will liven up the afternoon by getting stabbed.  Lin isn’t among them.

Keshena feels their eyes on her, measuring her.  Some want to fight you, some want to fuck you… either way, to get inside you.  Some parts of her feel it as a violation, a demand, shrinking from their lust as if it will warp her body instantly into one they’d like better.  Some parts of her bloom under any kind of regard, kind or cruel, and fear only their indifference.

    “Reminds me of when I was an actress.  I mean, I’d rather they look than not look, I guess, but do they have to look like that?”  she says to Brynn, half in jest, and catches the giantess giving her a sympathetic look as she takes up a post at the fence.

    “That’s not bein’ an actress, that’s bein’ a woman,” Brynn answers.  She stares down at the grey-clad young man leaning nearby, who is staring at Keshena’s leather-wrapped torso, and he rapidly straightens up to focus his attention on the ring.  Looking along the line of spectators, Keshena sees a bare handful of women, most of them dressed in the grey livery as if it will protect them from the same leering scrutiny.  Picking up on her frown, Brynn says, “It’s better once you get out of novicehood.  Most of the Hand are women.  And most of these will wash out before they get much further.”  She raises her voice to make sure the targets of her scorn hear her assessment of their prospects, and though there are a lot of surly faces squinting down the line at her, none of them dares say a word.

    Keshena grins up at her.  “Tell us what you really think.”

    Brynn rolls her eyes.  “What’re they gonna do, slit my throat?  They’d need a stepladder.”

    “Hard to sneak around with one of those.”

    Chuckling, Brynn nods and taps her temple.

    “All right, where’s Keshena?  Front and center!”

    Keshena watches Ishin scan the fenceline and pass right over her, looking for Madame’s wrinkles.  She waits a theatrically appropriate few seconds and then steps into the ring, throwing curls back from a younger woman’s face.  “Keshena Den Roth, at your service,” she says.

    Ishin frowns suspiciously at her for a long moment.  “All right, then,” he says quietly.  “Guess there is a little more to you.  Like to show it to me?”  He draws a dagger and points at the weapon racks, where Keshena selects a pair of well-worn practice swords.  Hefting them, she finds them ill-balanced but serviceable.  As she turns back toward Ishin, a restrained sound comes from the crowd, and then she has to duck as Ishin’s arm nearly catches her by the throat.

    She stumbles aside and scrambles away from the wall.  “Oh, I see how it is here!” she snaps.  Ishin’s grin doesn’t fade as he advances with deadly speed and no evident intention of adhering to formal dueling protocols.  The dirk in his left hand is paired with a whip, nothing that has ever touched the hide of a beast, but a short, slightly stiff length of braided leather, spiked at both the tip and the grip.  He brings it forward as he comes at her, and Keshena retreats toward the center of the ring to give herself room.  She parries a few swings of his blade, and then the whip leaves her field of view to hit the back of her neck with a blinding snap of pain.  The old man grabs both ends and jerks her forward, bringing his dirk up to her unprotected side.  It’s a half inch from her armpit when he stops and lets her go with a little shove.  “Slow.  You want more scars, girl?”

    Den Roth grins and squares off.  “Yes.”

    “You and Lin are a pair, ain’tcha.”  He scoffs.  “Plannin’ to lose an eye next?”  He lunges again, the whip making a low sound as it spins over his head.  It strikes her wrist, just incidentally, and feels like she’s been cut to the bone, but when she looks, there’s no blood.  Twisting aside, she ducks the next swing of his blade and slashes at his leg.  Though she pulls the blow a moment before it would make contact, Ishin jerks into her and her sword glances off his cuisse.  She’s too close for him to swing the whip fluidly, though, and she catches his ankle with hers and brings her other sword over as he stumbles.  They both fall to the ground, but she meant to, and a roll brings her back to her feet again fast enough to step on his whip and pin it to the sawdust.  She strikes aside the dagger that comes up to slash at her ankle, and aims her sword at his neck.

    “Was it you who took her eye, then?” she asks.  There’s some chatter and laughter among the spectators, who seem pleased to see their weaponsmaster on his back.  Ishin doesn’t look put out - he lightly pushes her blade away and holds out a hand for her to help him up.  

“If I’d a use for her eyes, I’d’ve taken both,” he says, grunting and dusting off his backside.  “She came that way.  Not bad, there.  Looks like you studied with a knight, eh?”

    “Ashen, during the last war in Shiel.”

    “You’re good at keeping track of both your hands, I’ll say that for you.  Better’n most.  Hear that, Kalkas?  How many hands you got, eh?  Show ‘em to me!”

    A novice at the fenceline raises both his hands without much raising his head, avoiding the laughing eyes of his fellows around him.  Ishin makes a show of counting with his dirk.  “One, and… two.  Good!  Don’t lose ‘em.”

    As he’s distracted, Keshena moves forward as quietly as she knows how, a foot behind him ready to trip him as she strikes.  Then his whip snaps back and wraps around her arm.  Ishin turns left, driving an elbow into her gut, and then yanks on the whip, sending her sword spinning into the dust at her feet.  When she bends to reach for it, a heavy fist hits the top of her spine and lays her flat on her face.

    “Thought you were a soldier!  Don’ show me your neck, girl, or I’ll take away yer neck privileges!”  His boot comes down on her fingers, covering the hilt of her weapon, and she freezes.

    “Y’know why Lin lost that eye?”  His tone is conversational.  Keshena grits her teeth on an answer far too flippant to address to someone with a knife, and he continues.  “I don’ know the man who took it, mind, so I’m just goin’ off of what I’ve seen since she’s been with us.  Lin lets what she wants blind her t’everything that stands in the way, like you just did.  It’s why she’ll be Champion, like as not - seein’ the destination and damn the cost is the kind of blindness people call ‘leadership potential.’  But you’ll find the cost always gets paid one way or another.”

    “I was a mercenary; I know plenty about the cost of leaders’ decisions,” she growls.  Ishin’s foot isn’t as heavy when he’s talking, and her fingers loosen on the hilt of her sword as she slowly pushes off the ground and gets her knees under her.

    “Aye, you’n me both.  Lot of things you can see real clearly from the underside, eh?  Not so easy to see from the top.”

    “What else do you see from where you are?” Keshena mutters.

    “I see a hired sword who wants to be a spy, and I’m gonna be honest with you - I don’t see it happenin’.”

    “See this?” she growls, and jerks her hand out from under his boot to grab the back of his knee.  Her shoulder crashes into his crotch as he falls forward and she rises.  Ishin goes down, and down comes her blade after him, stabbing into the ground a half-inch from his leather codpiece.  Before it sinks more than a few inches, though, it skids off the stone underneath the sawdust, and her weight following it snaps the practice sword in half.  The tip bounces off Ishin’s leathers, the hilt remains in her hand, vibrating gently, and Keshena stares at it, nonplussed at the sudden cheers from the spectating novices.

    “Dammit, girl!  That’s another sword I gotta forge!”

    Turning over the intact sword in her left hand, Keshena offers the old man another hand off the floor.  “Shouldn’t take you long.  At least I hope you didn’t spend too much time on these, because they’re terrible.”  Another shout of laughter from their audience, which Ishin takes with grumbling grace.

    “Ain’t a real blacksmith anyway; y’all should be grateful I letcha break my blades instead of buyin’ yer own!”  Aiming his dirk at her, he adds, “Good enough show for now.  Next time we’ll try with the dirk and whip, see if you can learn our way as well.  You oughta be able to fight with whatever comes to hand.  Now pick up those bits an’ throw ‘em back by the wall there, I’ll clear ‘em up later.”

    As Keshena clears away the marks of their skirmish, Ishin calls out names and the novices pour into the arena, selecting weapons and pairing off.  “Come with me, girl,” he says to Keshena.  “Got somethin’ t’explain to you.”  He leads her out of the ring, and as the sounds of sparring begin behind them, he continues, “I’ll give you the name of the smith we use, and you can get some decent weaponry once we’ve done a little training and you’ve decided what you want to stick with long-term.”

    A blue-green glow rises around them as Ishin leads her through the verges of the mushroom garden and up the steps of the black stone folly.  A smoke-clouded tapestry covers the open archway, and keeps in the heat from a large brazier in the middle of the room.  Cushions and chairs are scattered around it, and the place feels comfortable, almost unnaturally so - there’s a feeling of stillness and security here that Keshena can almost touch, so that stepping through the doorway is like passing through the skin of a bubble.  It’s much hotter than the eternal chilly stasis of the cave, and she instantly begins to sweat in the warmth.  

Ishin strips off his dusty gloves.  “This’s the Retreat.  Y’ever come in here?”

    “Not till now.”

    He takes some care that the tapestry falls back to cover the doorway completely, then throws his gloves down on a table and offers his callused palms to the brazier.  “Well, you’re welcome to.  Place is yours.  I mean novices especially - they put it up so there’d be a warm place to gather down here.”

    Keshena nods.  “It’s… nice.”

    The old man rolls his eyes.  “Nice, she says.  Like I brought her here t’admire the upholstery.  It’s more’n nice, girl, it’s safe.  Safest place you’ll ever be.”  Seeing her skeptical look, he demands, “Up in the Basilica, say, how safe are you?”

    Rubbing her arms and cataloguing her new bruises, Keshena frowns.  “Relatively, I suppose.  The Kumani are around.  Nobody’s going to knife people in corners unless it’s us?”

    “Fair enough.  Same down here, then?  Safe as houses?”

    “Safe from everybody but you,” Keshena grins.

    Ishin aims a finger at her.  “That’s my point.  One of ‘em.  The Kumani can find you, always.  We’re always watchin’ you.  That might come as a comfort someday.  But we’re not the only ones.”  His finger tilts until it points at the arched ceiling.

    Keshena’s eyes follow his finger, but finding nothing there, return to look for clarification on his face.

    “Put it this way.  When you speak in the Retreat, nobody can hear you who isn’ right here with you.  Nobody.  Not even a god.”

    She looks around the little lounge with new interest.  “Don’t you all have your own god?  Why should you want to hide from Him?”

    Ishin gives her a slow, wry smile.  “You never know, do you?  Fact is, the Kumani protect the city, that’s our charge.  We do it with Nieran’s magic because He gave it to us, and we’re practical folk, besides bein’ polite - we don’t turn down gifts.  But if it comes to protecting this place with whips and pitchforks and kitchen knives, we can do that again, an’ we will.  A wise man don’t depend too much on the gods’ generosity.”  He squints at her.  “You’re Called, aye?  Takes one to know one.  Whose?”

    She shakes her head.  “No one’s,” she says for what feels like the hundredth time in two days.

    Ishin is the first person to not look surprised.  Nor does he give her pity.  “Ah.  That’s a rare and lonely destiny you’ve stumbled into,” he murmurs, and Keshena is moved to laugh.

    “Aye, isn’t it?  At least here they don’t treat the Called like lepers.”

    “Eh, there are a couple bastards around, but no, like I say, Northmen are practical.  We know the use of an immortal, even one with questionable loyalties.  And I don’t see any point in despising somebody the gods have picked out for special punishment.  Seems like you got all the trouble you need already.”

    Keshena laughs again.  “You don’t like the gods much, I take it.”

    “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”  Ishin groans as he stretches, his joints popping like the fire before him.  It looks as though he was Called somewhere around seventy years old, and hasn’t been permitted to accrue any more wrinkles in the time since.  As he takes a seat on a chaise and brings out a pipe, he says, “I would say that I have a perfectly reasonable wariness of anybody I can’t stab in the kidney.  Our Father does right by this guild, an’ He’s done right by me, else I wouldn’ be here now.  But I don’t expect my plans will always align with His, necessarily, and I don’t expect Him to extend me any more kindness than He’s given already, keepin’ me from the Halls.  Even that, He did for His own reasons.  That’s the thing you gotta remember.  Gods - shit, all of us - do what they do for their own reasons.  If it turns out good for you, you might think it’s because they wanted to help you, but ultimately, helpin’ you will always be reason number two.  Because reason number one is about them an’ what they want.”

    “That’s a pretty cynical way to look at your guildmates,” Keshena says.  At Ishin’s look, she adds, “I didn’t say I disagree.  But you have to trust somebody, at some point.”

    “Sure!  I trust people; I trust every goddamn one of ‘em.  I trust ‘em to take care of themselves, like I would, an’ to fight for their own lives, like I would, an’ to chase their own happiness, like I would.  Trust isn’t about not havin’ any doubts, girl.  It’s about makin’ sure you got doubts about reasons, not about actions.  You can depend on someone without ever really understanding their reasons for bein’ there, so long as you give them a personal stake in what you’re doin’.  And that’s why you can’t ever trust the gods, not really.  You can’t give Them anything They want.  They’ll use you for Their own ends, and when They’re done, They’ll cut you loose, an’ it’ll be your own damnfool fault if you built your whole life around Them.”

    Keshena digests this for a bit as Ishin packs his pipe and tongs a coal out of the brazier to light it.  The smoke that clouds around his head smells sharp, like pines, and rises straight up, untroubled by air currents.  When he’s got the thing properly glowing, Ishin takes a deep drag off it and speaks with his voice constricted by the smoke in his lungs, “You don’ have to agree with me, doesn’t matter.  The point is, if you need to talk quiet with someone, do it here.  Kumani can’t go unseen here, or eavesdrop from outside, an’ neither can anyone else.  Time might come when you’ll be glad the only person spyin’ on you is me.”

    “Who else would bother?”

    “Lin, for a start, if she weren’ poorly.  Know she’s keepin’ an eye on you more’n she needs to.”

    “How is she poorly?  She was fine yesterday.”

    “Got in a fight with a wolf late last night, what I hear.”

    Keshena’s face shows more than she means to at this, and Ishin leers at her.  “Gonna rush off an’ take care of her?  Go on, then.  Said all I’ve got to say.  Tell her she’s got one week of bein’ lazy before I come and tan the side of her the wolf didn’ get.”

  Had Ishin not just assured her that nothing said in the Retreat can be overheard, she would be disturbed by Villi’s sudden appearance as she steps out into the mushroom garden.  As it is, she’s merely startled, and this seems to please the imp, whose grin has an unpleasantly hungry edge.

    “Keshena, yes?  What a fine new outfit you’ve got.”  Villi circles her, and Keshena feels once again as if she’s on display.  The imp’s eyes are even more ravenous than the other novices’, and unlike them, Keshena doesn’t know what these eyes want from her.  And she recognized me.  No, she didn’t, she can’t have.

    “How did you -”

    “What did I say about that?”  Villi comes back around to her front and adds, “Though in this case, it’s nothing mysterious - I was told you were speaking with Ishin in the Retreat, and as you look nothing like Ishin, I can only conclude that you must be my face-changing little recruit.  You do have talent.  This creature you’ve become is nothing like Miss Keshena Kelly.”

    Keshena winces.  “Can we not say that name anymore?  Even if it won’t get me strung up, I’d rather not hear it.”

    “If you wish.  Come, let’s have a sit and a chat of our own.  There’s a lovely spot over by the lake.”

    As the imp leads, Keshena frowns at her back.  She can’t get a grip on Villi’s intentions.  But maybe you don’t need to, to trust her?  If Ishin is correct.  He trusts Villi, and that’s something.

    They find a bench close to the water, where the sound of the falls washes out their voices, and Villi boosts herself up to its seat, which is roughly level with her shoulders.  The sight of her swinging her feet like a little girl is just one more incongruous detail.  The imp seems to be composed entirely of mismatched parts, which Keshena finds disturbing because it’s far too similar to how she feels herself.

    “So!  Tell me how you’re settling in, hmm?”  Villi’s tone is gratingly cheery, and Den Roth growls in response.

    “Like a wheel into a pothole, I guess,” she says.  “Nice place you’ve got here, though.  When was all this built?”

    “About fifty years ago the caverns were reinforced and expanded quite substantially, but the Kumani have lived in these catacombs since we drove the Lions out of them at the point of pitchforks.”

    “Were you there?”

    Villi gives her a sharp-toothed grin.  “No, rudeness.  I’m a sprightly two-hundred and seventy-six, thank you very much.”

    “So, me, Ishin, and you - is that all the Called in the guild?”

    “At present, yes.  We have had others.  Some are dead, their duty done, and some found their destinies leading them elsewhere.  I wonder if you’ll find yours here.”

    “I don’t believe in destiny.”

    “Do you think that’s why no god wants you?”  Keshena stares at the imp, astonished by her matter-of-fact cruelty, and Villi chuckles.  “A lot of misbegotten things wash up in these caverns.  All things in time, Father would say.  Even if this isn’t your final destination, you’ll be useful to us, and we can teach you a few things.”

    Though the impulse to stalk away from the insufferable imp is strong, Keshena finds that she does want to learn at least one thing Villi has to teach.  “Lin says you’re the best in the guild at illusions.”

    “Aye, that’s so,” Villi says.  She lifts a tiny hand and turns it over, and there’s a glittering black apple in it, seemingly made of obsidian.  There was no word, no gesture that Keshena could see - the thing is simply there.  She reaches out and touches it, and the surface is cool, silky, exactly as it should be.

    “Illusions are not bent light, no matter what others in the guild will tell you.  That is a rudimentary way of understanding our Father’s magic.”  Villi slips down off the bench to stand before her, holding the apple out as she begins to lecture.  “Illusions are magic that works on the mind, not on the eyes or fingers.  The mind can be made to experience anything, even physical sensation, with a little prodding.  Thus, your mind will need priming to assume the postures required to produce an illusion.  We use hypnosis to achieve this state.”

    Keshena blanches.  “You’re going to hypnotize me?”

    Villi smiles.  “I’m going to teach you to hypnotize yourself.  I understand the reticence to have someone tinkering in your head.  It’s a good instinct, and I recommend you nurture that paranoia; it will keep you safe.”  She drops the stone apple and it vanishes before it hits the ground.  Pulling a single gold piece from her pocket, she says, “I assume some of your costuming talent comes from your training as an actress.  Is it too much to hope they taught you some sleight of hand as well?”  Rolling her fingers, Villi makes the gold coin walk across her knuckles, first one way, then the other.

    “Aye, I can do that.”  Keshena doesn’t have any gold, but she has a couple of copper bits, stamped with the bust of Capria’s last merchant-king but one.  She walks one across her knuckles and back, and Villi nods.

    “Focus on the coin.  Watch how the light slips off the edge, across the face, like water.”  Villi lowers her voice to a drone, and Keshena obediently watches the light passing over the rolling coin, trying to take slow breaths.

    “Gather all the threads of your attention here.  Those that touch the past, draw them in, draw them back.  Those that reach for the future, draw them back.  Only here, only now, only this moving coin matters.  What you see is all that exists.  In your eyes, all things in time.  From this vision, all worlds, all possible ends.”

    The dark at the corners of her eyes deepens, becomes velvety and charged with sparks that seem to spin off the edges of the copper piece.  Its repetitive motion soothes her without allowing her attention to wander - just enough stimulation to keep her eyes fixed, while behind their dull regard her mind begins to open like a flower, layer upon layer organizing itself in an array that feels natural, inevitable.  The chattering in her head that never seems to cease is draining away, and she feels those fragmented selves aligning with one another almost by accident as they all focus on the same thing.

    “There are no fingers.  There are no hands, no arms, no mouth or feet - only the coin is, rolling in darkness.  Here, no names, no past, no future.  From this seed, a world of your own making.  What do you see?  Tell me what you see.”

    Keshena can’t find her voice for a moment, and for another isn’t sure which voice will come out when she opens her mouth.  It’s a low murmur, as deep as Den Roth’s gravelly tone, but softer, almost a whisper.  A voice she hasn’t used in a long time.  “Sparks flying.  They leave shadows behind, more dense even than what came before.  The shadows spread - the light only burns away more of the world, leaving more room for the darkness.”

    She can’t see Villi’s face anymore, or the mushroom garden, or anything but the light sparkling off the edge of the coin, throwing shards into the velvet black that vanish almost immediately.  Each one that disappears takes some of her with it, some of the world that she now carefully erases.  Willingly she lets go of her sight, herself, as if her eyes and mind were merely a sensing instrument, taking in this one moment with no judgment or understanding.  Each light that is born dies, and as it does, it washes away the barriers between her thoughts and the world.

    “Good.  In this darkness, the dark of the womb, our Father created the world.  What will you create?”

    “A mask.  A shroud.  A name no one can remember.”  Keshena isn’t sure if she answers or only thinks about answering.  The coin seems to be floating in air now, bouncing back and forth as if its motion were the only thing holding together this little universe.  Her hand is gone, and so are her legs, and so are her feet.

    “As you say, so it is.  Look.  This shroud, this darkness is yours.  You bid it come and go as you please, and in it, you create what you wish.  If you never touched the world before this moment, you do so now, and it melts beneath your fingers.”

    Blinking, many parts of her still clinging to the peace of that darkened place, Keshena looks around, and finds the obsidian cavern exactly where she left it - but now, she’s not in it.  The bench beneath her is visible through the place where she can still feel her legs to be, and the coin rolls in midair - I thought that was a - but… As you say, so it is.  She has disappeared.  She looks at the imp standing before her, and Villi is grinning.

    “Excellent job.  You have talent.  Now, attend to the shape of your mind at this moment, the points at which you’ve drawn your focus.  Remember this posture.  If you dismiss it, let your focus wander, can you return to this place?  Can you envision the moving coin and come back into this mutable moment?”

    It’s hard to let her attention shift now that she’s fixed it - there’s a reluctance inside, the mental version of the lassitude that keeps her in bed of a morning.  This place is comfortable, and warm, and she has such power here.  Then Villi’s hand shoots forward and grabs her nose, hard, and she jolts and pulls away, stars scattering in her eyes at the suddenness of her movement.  The copper coin rings as it bounces off the stones, light spinning around her.  Her hands, her legs are back, and seem huge, her consciousness rattling unmoored in a body that seems all the wrong size to house it now.  She feels dizzy, and her gorge starts to rise.

    Then she catches the gleam off the coin at her feet, a sinuous crescent, and uses it to hook herself back into that place of warmth and mastery, to draw the shroud around herself again.  She can feel the expression on her face changing, and now this trick reminds her of the way she alters her movements and her thoughts to take on a new face, a new role… she can step back into this performance, and when she does, all the subtle features of it are just where she left them, familiar in their foreignness, a change that feels inevitable from the moment it begins, like an avalanche that reshapes a mountain.  

    As Villi watches, Keshena slowly disappears again.  The imp laughs, and claps in delight, like a child.  “Beautiful!  You’re a natural.  You have it now, the way of it?  From that place you can create anything.  While you hold it in your mind, what you create will remain, and grow.  Like our Father, you build upon your vision with your faith that it exists, your certainty.  If your certainty is stronger than that of your audience, they will see the world you wish them to see.  And most people aren’t very certain most of the time, are they?”

    Keshena shakes her head.  She’s only barely attending to the imp’s words, instead feeling the edge of that mental focus, letting herself slip in and out of it.  Her hand flickers before her eyes, blurring repeatedly as if submerged in water.

    “People see what they want to see.  You have only to convince them that what you want is what they want.”

    Smiling, Keshena blinks a few times and finally lets go, sinking back into herself.  The subtle sounds of the cavern rush back in, and before long so do the distracted, ricocheting voices that clutter her mind, and she is real again.  “That… that was incredible.”

    “Yes.  Vanishing is the easiest first step.  You can fool the body as easily as the mind - more easily, in fact.  With practice, a man could walk into you while you’re cloaked and wouldn’t even notice that he’d done so.”

    She feels energetic, as if just waking from a nap.  “If you can do things like this, how have the Kumani not taken over the world by now?”  Keshena can’t stop grinning, and Villi gives her back a grin full of very sharp teeth.

    “Oh, we have.  Many times.  But what’s the world worth, really?  It’s simply a space in which to work.  It’s the work you do there that matters.”

    “What else can you show me?”

    Her excitement seems to please the imp, who climbs up to sit beside her on the bench again.  “If this… costume game of yours is important to you, you can use illusions to supplement it.  Tie an illusion to a physical reinforcement, no matter how basic, and it will be more stable, and require less from you to maintain.  Our minds require only the barest seed of truth to grow a forest of lies.”

    Villi touches Keshena’s wrist, and the powders and cosmetics that color her skin seem to melt a little, to take on imperfections and variations too subtle to paint with human hands.  The scar on her arm, a smear of different-colored inks and wax putty to give it definition, first flattens and then deepens, until she can feel only the faint, taut pull of an old scar, not as pliable as the skin around it.  That elusive quality that makes performances always feel the slightest bit false - it’s gone.  This body is realer than real, more true than whatever true self the costume buries.  Keshena feels dizzy for a moment, unmoored, and relishes it.  Freedom.  Freedom from herself.

    Her eyes slightly unfocused, she can feel how the changes the imp forces upon her are drawn from the same loose attention, and Keshena pushes back, trying to take over the process.  Her strength comes easily - reshaping herself is second nature, and the more adroit she becomes at the mental flip, the more eagerly her body seems to respond.  She blinks, and Den Roth’s dark tan spreads like moss, from her wrist up her arm, down her chest, past the places under her clothes where she always stops painting the cosmetics.  So much cheaper, this!  It’ll save her so much in materials!

    “A wig is an excellent pin to hang an illusion on…” Villi murmurs, and then Keshena feels small hands on her head.  She twists away and stands, hands flying up automatically to readjust the wig.  She needs to practice, to play with this, and she needs to do it out of sight.  Especially out of this untrustworthy sight.

    “Thank you, Lady Selannor.  I’ll work with what you’ve taught me and be sure to find you if I have questions.”

    Villi opens her mouth, perhaps to protest the title, perhaps to get Keshena to stay, but Keshena doesn’t linger to find out - this time, she twists her mind and her body at the same time and manages to occlude herself between one eyeblink and the next.  So this is how you disappear so quickly.  It makes for a theatrical exit, say that much for it.

*******

    She needs a better place to change.  That’s becoming irresistibly clear.  Somewhere to store her supplies… somewhere to hide.  That too.  Back in the barracks, she feels her coin pouch for what’s left.  The Kumani pay a stipend, but it’s not remotely enough to rent a room in the Citadel, even considering how much illusions could save her in spending on cosmetics.

    For a few minutes she works at her costume, building the same face out of light and air and just a little bit of powder.  When she strips off the prosthetic scars, far more realistic-looking ones now appear beneath them, the largest following her finger as she trails it down her face.  It traces the path of the axe that once split the left side of her face from brow to lip, and as it goes she remembers the confusion and blindness of that moment, but not the pain.  Pain fades.  It's what allows us to keep fighting, that we forget how much dying hurts.

    There are no mirrors in the barracks, but the silvered panel in the lid of her case works well enough.  Den Roth looks better than ever.  The illusion hangs easily on the wig, which looks more lush, softer and healthier, than it has since the day she cut the hair from the head of a fallen soldier, a woman she loved for a moment.  The mercenary's one vanity, Den Roth's hair falls in loose red curls to her shoulders.  She often pulls it forward to hide her face, most notably the ugly scar that twists her mouth.  It's another kind of armor - the hair, and the scar both.  Makeup is armor for the parlor and the bedroom.  Who told her that?  Some actor, long dead now.

    She quizzes the novices she passes on her way out of the complex, and though none of them know for certain where Lin is, one knows that she lives in an apartment at the east end of the Atrium, with her husband.  Keshena hesitates when she hears this, wondering if she'll be unwelcome, but Den Roth doesn't hold on to self-consciousness well; it's one of the things that Keshena loves about being the mercenary.  She's making her way through the crowds in the hallway before she's quite finished internally debating whether she should.

    The door she's aiming for is at the southern end of a hallway branching off the eastern Atrium.  This wing is rougher than the one that leads to the Kumani catacombs, the hall lined with taverns and weapon-shops, and even a brothel capping the hall, doing fairly roaring business for an early afternoon.  Beside a small door down a side-street is a plaque inscribed with the address - #4 Thea Way - and a name - Nathaniel Den Bolin.  Keshena knocks, though a voice inside her is certain she's made a mistake.  Maybe more than one.

    There's a long delay before the door opens, revealing a hallway, a staircase, and a very short man in a threadbare tunic and heavy gloves.  "He'p you?" he mutters, squinting up at her face.

    "I'm... looking for Lin al-Akir."

    He nods and steps aside, holding the door ajar and gesturing toward the staircase.  "Sunroom, top o' the stairs."  When she's passed, he closes the door and follows her to the stair, but descends as she begins to ascend, apparently uninterested in where she ends up.

    At the top of the short staircase is a trapdoor opening straight up.  Keshena lifts it aside and enters a warm loft, long on pale sunlight and short on furnishings.  The room must occupy the entire floor, with enormous mullioned windows covering the southern wall from floor to ceiling fifteen feet above.  The view of the spires and, beyond them, the dim fall of the land away to the south is breathtaking, but many of the panes in the bottom eight feet or so are occluded with markings from a wax pencil, mathematical equations Keshena doesn't even try to understand - they're full of Numerological operators, which are numbers, but don't behave like proper numbers should.  The stair continues up in a spiral to an opening that pours sun down a few steps, and Keshena is blinded for a moment as she reaches the top.

    The solarium is empty of furniture except for a faded chaise in the center of the wood floor, baking in the sunlight that pours in from every direction - the roof here is replaced by a glass dome, and the wan northern sun seems to collect in it, achieving an almost oppressive warmth and brightness.  Lin is laid up on the chaise, absorbed in a book and companioned by a stack of them as well as a small cluster of medical accoutrements.  Her bandages glare in the light, wrapped fully around her hips and right thigh, and making her right hand into a fat mitten that lays limp in her lap.  She looks up as Keshena enters, then frowns and painfully straightens.  "Hello, can I help you?  Did Wolfram let you in?"

    "Meaning the squat fellow downstairs?  Aye."  She strides forward, and Lin's expression grows more hostile with each step until Keshena holds out her hand.  "Keshena Den Roth, at your service."

    Something dangerous flashes over Lin's face, and the tiny reflection of herself Keshena sees in the black glass eye looks surrounded by shining knives.  "Wh-what in the..."  She pulls her bandaged hand back, and seems about to rise, but her incautious movement twists her hip, and her brown skin goes a little grey as pain makes her blanch.  Then she digs beneath the pillow behind her back with her left hand, and aims a small dagger - or a paring knife? - at Keshena, the loose grip of her non-dominant hand on the handle just begging to be disarmed.

    Keshena crouches, putting them on a level, and at the same time holds up both hands.  "Only came here to talk, Speaker.  At any rate, it looks like you've lost enough blood already."

    "Is this some kind of joke?" Lin demands.  "If you're Keshena, why were you pretending to be an old lady?"

    Keshena can't keep herself from chuckling.  "Was I?  Or was the old lady pretending to be me?  Or is someone pretending to be both of us?"  She settles both elbows on her knees and leans forward to speak in a conspiratorial tone.  "Tell ya this for free though: I really am two-hundred and twenty-one."

    Lin's frown doesn't soften.  "I don't know who you are, but I've been stuck in this chair for the last two days and I'm very much ready to cut someone, so you'd better start making some sense."

    "Well, that's what Kumani novices are for, right?  Getting stabbed by their superiors?"

    The reproving look Lin aims at her is better than open hostility, at least.  "No.  Not anymore, anyway."  She sighs and twirls the knife around her finger, then slides it back between the cushions of the chaise.  "I'm being inhospitable.  There's tea in that pitcher down there.  Use the other mug; that one’s had medicine in it, tastes terrible."

    Keshena shifts from crouching to cross-legged, and pours herself a cup of tea.  It's quite cold, but the solarium is hot enough that it's actually rather refreshing.  "So what happened?  Ishin said you got attacked by a wolf."

    "Oh no, you're explaining yourself, that's what's happening now.  Explain well enough, and maybe I'll tell you what happened to me."

    Keshena shrugs.  "All right.  What do you want to know?  I'm an open book."  It's not true, and she says it because she knows it's not true, and she knows Lin knows it's not true.  Even to someone who's seen more shifty folks than most, her face is opaque.

    Lin doesn't seem amused by the irony.  "Is Keshena your real name?"

    Nodding, Keshena says, "Sure is.  You might hear me referred to differently from time to time, but when I was born, they called me Keshena.  Or so I'm told.  Don't really remember that part."

    "Are you really from Blackwall?"

    "Yes.  I haven't lied to you, Lin.  And I don't intend to."

    "What do you call... this, then?"  Lin's gesture takes in Den Roth's leathers, her scar, and her slipshod posture, as well as everything else.

    “Not lying.  Acting.”  In response to Lin’s raised eyebrow, she adds, “There’s a subtle difference, trust me.”

    “I don’t trust anything you say, at this point.”

    Keshena shrugs.  “You’re Kumani, I’m Kumani.  From what I understand, mistrust is kind of how we get along, right?”

    “No,” Lin says.

    Keshena regards Lin with an expectant look, and Lin jabs two fingers at her.

    “The goal is a community of honorable professionals serving the people of this city.  You served with the Ashen in Shiel, you said?  Like that.  We’re goddamned knights, Keshena.  Knights in our own context.  We use different tools, but that doesn’t alter our commitment to our duty or to one another.”

    Keshena raises her cup at that.  “That’s certainly not the popular perception of the guild, but go on.  Please.”

    “I don’t doubt it.  We deliberately create an atmosphere of suspicion, and we teach you to eavesdrop, to hide and sneak around.  We expect you to screw over everyone but us.  I don’t mean to rant at you, it’s just that this is so rarely expressed.  Previous administrators of the guild - halls, even our current one - were more concerned with using the guild to advance their position in the city.  I'm trying, with what power I have as Speaker, to bring the Kumani back to our original ideals, not simply train thugs to serve the latest little despot to rule the Council or Nieran's order.  I mean, if we can’t trust one another, whom can we trust?  You can’t live like that.”

    “You can’t live like that,” Keshena echoes.  Though she watches Lin steadily, her eyes are thoughtful, turned inward.  After a long moment, she begins to pick at her face, thumbing the top end of the ugly scar.  With a jerk of her hand, it comes away, the illusion that weaves it into the rest of the work shredding in an instant, leaving a pale but unscarred streak down the left side of her face.  She holds out a little strip of cloth ending in a small bit, her lip uncurling from its perpetual sneer.

    "All right," she murmurs.  "I might need to start slow, but I can trust you."

    Lin runs a hand through her hair, examining Keshena's face with new interest.  "I don't need you to tell me anything that will put you in danger.  There are a lot of troubled pasts between all our novices.  I just don't want to see you become another problem.  Someone who takes what we teach them as a predator's license, sanction to prey upon people, in this city or out of it.  We do what we must with the abilities we have, but it's not because we want to rule the world."

    Keshena smiles.  Even without the scar's bit warping her mouth, her smile is lopsided.  Both eyes curve with it, but only the right side of her mouth follows through.  "That's what Villi said too.  The world is a place, not a prize.  What matters is the work you do there."

    Lin grins in answer.  "Villi, now... I don't always agree with her, but she's got the right priorities.  We're lucky she's leading the order; I'd have no hope of shifting the guild's direction if she was against it.  One of the few old-timers who sees the necessity to improve our culture and attitude, as well as our swordplay."

    "Well, swordplay I know.  Trust is another thing again.  Not something anybody's tried to teach me in the last few hundred years."

    The last of her pent-up aggression has dissipated - Lin's voice is gentle now.  "I like who you are, what I can see of it.  How long have you been doing this... acting?"

    "Ohh, that's a difficult question."  Keshena laughs and scratches at her head, fingers combing through the red curls.  "All my life?  I was raised in a theater.  This face, though, Den Roth - she's old.  I first wore this face in Morrihm before the Quiet War."

    "No wonder you're so good at it.  Is that illusion-work?  It looks so real!"  Lin takes the little prosthetic from Keshena's hand and spreads it out to examine it.

    "Villi showed me a few things about illusions this morning; I was just trying it out."

    "Did you have a scar like this then?  Before you made - er, became?  Den Roth."  Lin hands back the painted wound.

    "No, that one I got in the war.  A battleaxe to the face."

    Frowning, Lin says, "That's a nasty one; looks like it should have killed you."

    Keshena nods.  "Aye.  Should have done.  Lots of 'should have died' behind me, you'll find.  I imagine most of the Called have stories conspicuously not ending in that same way."

    "Not as many as you."  Lin gives her an amused look.

    "I do tend to do the stupid thing.  It's been said that I play the game to lose," Den Roth drawls.

    "It's a game, is it?"

    Another nod.  "Aye, that's a better way of putting it.  Not a lie, a game.  There are rules, and I keep to them because it keeps me sane.  After the first hundred years, your brain starts to devour itself.  You've got to find some structure for your days.  This is mine.  One of mine."

    Lin doesn't seem to understand this.  She's young.  She'll find out.  Hardest thing about living so long is enduring your own company day after day.  After a moment, the Speaker ventures, "How many faces do you have?"

    Pleased by the question, Keshena ponders it.  "At the moment... four.  Three I wear regularly, and one I left in Capria with her murder charges.  I make new ones occasionally."

    "I'd like to see another, sometime, if you're up for it."

    Keshena's face is transformed by delight, and for a moment Lin can see something past the cosmetics and illusions, a ghost of the girl buried by masks and years.  "I'd be happy to.  Nobody ever asks."

    "You want people to ask you to change?"

    Uncomfortable with scrutiny on her face as she reveals herself, Keshena rises and paces a bit along the sun-drenched boards.  "People see what they want to see, and mostly what they want to see is themselves.  Nobody cares enough to even understand what I'm doing, let alone ask for a particular face.  I don't change on my own whim - that's one of the rules - but I'll change at my audience's request, and if you're asking, it means you're paying attention.  Means you give a goddamn."  She meets Lin's eyes shyly.

    "I give a lot of goddamns, about a lot of stuff that I probably shouldn’t," Lin answers, laughing.  "That's why I'm stuck here for the next week."  She gestures to her bandaged hip with her swaddled hand.

    "So you met a wolf who took exception to your attitude?"

    "More or less."  Lin pulls away the wrap that covers her legs, then carefully lifts the bandage to expose the wounds beneath: a savage mess of raking gashes around her hip and upper thigh, the work of enormous claws, and a series of punctures below them, delineating a pair of jaws no less than eight inches across.  

    "Not a wolf from the mountains.  A Wolf, big ‘W,’ from the guild.”  Lin draws a large ‘w’ in the air with her forefinger.

    "I... thought they were men.  The Wolves.  Aren't they the city guards?"

    "The Wolves and the Kumani both serve in the guard, yes.  And they are men, strictly speaking.  Men who serve the Engineer.  She's been improving them ever since the Lions fell.  Now..."  Lin settles the bandage back in place with a wince.  "Now, they're nobody you want to get in a bar fight with, put it that way."

    "This is the result of a bar fight in this town?  I think I just quit drinking."

    Laughing, Lin says, "I won't argue with that!  But no, this is the result of politics in this town.  I told the leader of the Wolves that the Council didn't think much of his new bride, and he informed me that it was none of my business."

    "Is this how he usually communicates his boundaries?"

    Lin nods.  "Again, more or less.  I should have known better."  Meeting Keshena's eyes, she smiles.  "But I also tend to do the stupid thing.  And that's why I'll trust you."

    Though her costume is flawed, the scar still curled in her hand, Keshena feels safer than she has in decades.  This room, those words, these still black eyes.  She smiles back and answers, "And that's why I’ll trust you."

    The silence lasts for a companionable moment or two, and then Keshena remembers why she came.  "Oh - on that subject.  Perhaps you can help me.  I'm... having trouble changing in the barracks."

    "Oh!  Yes, that makes sense.  It's not the most fun place to strip off, even if you weren't stripping the whole of your person."

    "Where should I look for a room in this town?"  Glancing out the window, she winces.  "Where's the poor people's part of the Reach?"

    Lin laughs, then looks chagrined.  "Sorry, ah... well, I don't know that there is one; there aren't many places in the Citadel that often have rooms to let, and outside the walls are mostly estates and farms... the farmers hire hands sometimes, but they wouldn't hire a Kumani just on principle.  You really have to know someone."  She shakes her head, then brightens up some.  "But hey, you know me!  We have a couple of rooms downstairs, off the entry hall, and my husband has been talking about renting them - I could talk him round to a price you can afford with your stipend, if you wouldn't mind seeing that much of me."

    Grinning, Keshena says, "I think I could handle that.  I can’t pay anything like what it’s worth, though."

    "It's not a large space, just the one room, not even as big as this one."

    "That's fine.  All I really want is a safe place to store some things and a door I can lock while I'm changing."

    "I can give you that much.  How's... hmm.  Ten silvers a month?"

    It's incredibly generous, is what it is, even for a single room.  "The novices' stipend is twelve silvers a week."

    "I know what it is; I set it up."  Lin looks quite pleased at Keshena's surprise.

    "All right, if you say so.  I guess you'll expect a lot of me, then - is this a professional investment?"

    "It's an investment, but more personal than professional."  The Speaker’s sincerity cuts past Keshena’s wary awkwardness, making it hard to dissemble while she's looking.  "I like you.  I'd like to understand this... performance better.  If you’ll pay me for the privilege of getting to know you, all the better.  What, nobody's ever done anything nice for you before?"

    Keshena turns away, disarmed.  "I, ah - well, not in a long time, I suppose.  Fine, fine.  I'm not arguing.  You talk to your husband and let me know.  At least then I'll be around if you need anything while you're recovering."

    With a stretch, Lin answers, "Ohh, trust me, I get myself in trouble often enough that you'll never run short of wounds to tend, if you enjoy that kind of thing.  But I'm not hiring you as a maidservant, I'm renting you a room as a friend.  That said..."  She peers down at the pitcher on the floor.  "Now that you've drunk all my tea, you could refill the pitcher on your way out."

    Laughing, Keshena returns to pick up the pitcher.  "Glad to.  This wing have plumbing?"

    "There’s a tap in our kitchen, downstairs.  There's also a washroom on the ground floor."

    "Ooh, y'don't say.  A novice could shit indoors in the Reach; imagine the luxury!"  Trooping down the stairs, Keshena hears a snort of laughter behind her.

The room is indeed quite small, and has a cell-like quality, the windows little more than hand's-width slits framed by the Citadel's foot-thick stone sills, the floor smooth, cold granite.  Keshena waves off Lin's offer to help move in her things - she came here with only what she could carry, and in this little room it looks like even less: the fat costume case, a pouch that housed the last of her gold coins and now holds only a handful of silver, and a brace of weapons and tools she couldn't bring herself to run off into the wilderness without. They’re mostly kitchen implements.

She spreads her few belongings out on the floor and makes a heap of clothing in a corner as she strings up some lines to hang things.  There's a round electric fixture on the wall by the door; she turns the knob with some trepidation, but it doesn't shock her or explode, just fizzes a little as it comes to life with a strong yellowish light.  Keshena flinches at it, then adjusts a few of her clotheslines to block sight and light from that direction.  Have to get some kind of shade.  She sleeps in the pile of clothes.  It's not Miss Kelly's silk-draped boudoir, but she sleeps better in this cold cell than she ever did in those sweet-smelling rooms full of corpses.

When she wakes, she doesn't open her eyes, because the back of her neck is prickling with Den Roth's old instincts, the certainty that someone has moved nearby.  Then a heavy knock shakes the door.

Quick-change costuming was the first thing she learned as a child, and illusions make it easier.  She leaps out of bed, adjusts her wig, takes three quiet seconds to center herself and smooth over her hasty work, and peeks around the door.  Blocking much of the light from Lin's entryway is a burly fellow who has to stoop to avoid knocking out the light fixture on the ceiling; he offers her a very toothy grin.

"G'morning!  Keshena, yeah?  Lin said t'bring ya along on my rounds today, teach ya something maybe."  Presenting a huge, callused hand, he adds, "Klonk Gnarlstone the Fourth, my pleasure."

She squints up at him, quite sure for a moment that this must be a dream.  "Kl - " nope, that's not going to work, not with a straight face - "Mr. Gnarlstone.  I'd be delighted; can you give me five minutes to make myself presentable?"

"Yup; be waiting outside."  He stumps off, revealing Wolfram the caretaker holding the hallway door ajar and looking with extreme skepticism at the giant struggling to negotiate it.  She shuts her own door before he has a chance to turn to her for explanations.  Got fewer of those even than usual.

Klonk seems to approve of the properly-assembled Den Roth who appears at his elbow four minutes and twenty seconds later.  "Nice t'meet yer knives.  This ain't an assassination we're goin' on, though that ain't to say it couldn't happen - always be ready for the situation to go south, y'know?"

"So when you say 'rounds,' what do you mean?"

Though she expects him to lead her out of the city, instead Klonk climbs several staircases to a landing she's never seen before, and then to a deserted balcony, home only to a desiccated plant in an oversized urn.  "I mean collectin' payments from those as need t'pay, delivering messages to folks in the field, and keepin' an eye in the various places an eye's gotta be kept.  In the area of Capria, Pyclas, Green Lake, and Lack, tha’s my territory."

Keshena blanches.  "Do we have to go to Capria?"

Klonk looks down at her with a face as blank as the granite underfoot.  "Yeah, we got lots of business dealings in Capria.  Why, you famous there?"

"Famous isn't the word."

"Great, don't care then.  Got work to do.  You hear that?"

Gritting her teeth, Keshena checks her costume and murmurs, "I hear you."

"Not me.  Hear that little sound?  Whiny, ear-itchy kinda sound?"

Keshena stands still and listens.  She does hear it, and what's more, she recognizes it.  "It's... isn't that a portal?  I heard that in Capria, in the cave on the beach."

"Thread, it's called.  We've got a couple in Capria.  This'n leads to the arbor behind the Juniper Tree Inn."

Outside the town.  It's not likely anyone will be out in Capria at this hour, besides city guardsmen, and none of them could recognize Den Roth... she tells herself this with great conviction, and tries hard to believe it.  "All right, so we just jump through?"

“Wouldn' recommend jumping," Klonk says.  He ducks his head and approaches the far corner of the balcony gingerly, as if trying to detect a spider-web across his path.  "They make me a bit sick at the best o' times; jumpin'd probably make it worse.  There we go."  He twitches, then sidles a few steps before vanishing.  A little surprised, Keshena quickly follows.

When she comes to the corner of the balcony, there's a vertiginous sensation in her stomach, a momentary confusion as to which way is up, and a cacophonous clash of colors, like falling through a kaleidoscope.  She finds herself on all fours, gasping around a rising gorge, with Klonk standing nearby, hands on his knees.  The grass under her hands is thick and dewy, and the air is warm.  The salt-sweet smell of Capria is still too familiar.

"You... use those all the time?"

"Yeah."  Klonk helps her up.  "Kumani maintain four-hundred-thirty-eight threads t'everywhere y'might want to go on this continent.  Our work'd be impossible otherwise; imagine riding all the way to the Reach every day.  If ya run into one, and it don't work, tell Lin or me or one o' the others."

"By 'don’t work,' do you mean it just won't do anything?  No danger it'll strand me in a mind-shattering between-place from which I'll never return?"

Klonk snorts with laughter.  "No promises, but I've never heard of a Kumani gettin' stuck in a thread.  Lose a civilian that way, time to time, when someone's dumb enough to tinker with one.  I don' think they stay anywhere, though.  Smart money says they die."

Not exactly reassured, Keshena follows him to the back entrance of the Juniper Tree Inn, its keeper and guests still in their beds.  He points at the upper left corner of the door, and she squints to see a few symbols scratched into the lintel.

Under his breath, Klonk says, "First one means this's a safehouse.  They won't reveal Kumani to the guard, so long's you don't make an ass of yerself.  Second one means 'pitcher' - we pay somebody here to keep their ears open and report anything interestin'.  Usually, place like this, it's their minstrel.  Any bar or lodging east of Termini, you can talk to the minstrel if you need information."

Klonk taps on the window next to the kitchen door.  While they wait for a response, Keshena asks, "And the other symbol?"

"Means 'poison'.  Y'can buy poisons here, from the chef as it happens.  You'll see that a lot in Capria.  But you'll get the best price -"

"At the teahouse on the docks," Keshena finishes, and he squints at her.

"Aye, you're one o' Villi's, aren't ya?  So y'know about her shop.  Good."

The kitchen door opens a crack and a skinny young girl slips out, barefoot in a threadbare tunic and leggings.  She wiggles her fingers and grins up at Klonk, who pats her shoulder with a hand that could flatten her to the ground.

"Dania, Keshena - new recruit.  Keshena, this's Dania; she's our pitcher here."

Keshena shakes her head.  "'Pitcher?'"

Dania smiles.  "Little pitchers have big ears," she says.  "Never heard that one?"  Then she turns back to Klonk, who thumbs coins into her hand from the pouch on his belt.  When five silvers have vanished into her pocket, and Klonk has assumed a studious posture with a notebook and pencil made for much smaller hands than his, Dania begins to talk in a high-speed whisper.

"Cariv Dayle took the second seat of his house after Ehlana Dayle stepped down earlier this week, which puts the Council at thirteen Blues and seventeen Greens; Greens still can't put together a quorum on their own but they're getting close enough that it's making the Blue houses nervous.  Arzellyn, Malek, and Marharet Flori are at the greatest risk at the moment, way I figure it, but any Green Prata could end up sunk by next week."

Klonk nods vigorously as he makes notes.  Dania appears to keep all this trivia in her head, and she rattles on without pause for some minutes.  Keshena first attends carefully, and then her mind wanders - it's so similar to the way her husbands used to talk; the eternal, vicious game of seats and Houses and political pull in Capria is a topic that can sustain whole days of gossip and speculation.  She checks back in abruptly when she hears a name she recognizes.

" - at the Kelly estate, but they haven't found his young bride.  The estate is closed until the Kellys have it cleared and cleaned, likely next week - there'll be an auction for whatever they don't want to keep.  Landra Kelly wants the matter closed in haste, and I'd imagine she'd like to blame the Greens for it if she can."

"It was poison, aye?" Klonk asks, and Dania nods.  Keshena looks hard at Klonk's hands as he writes, focusing on his moving knuckles to maintain her concentration through the rising lump of terror and guilt in her chest.

"For sure, but nothing they can pin down without seeing the body.  They won't look hard; Kelly wasn't even third in line for his family’s seat.  Everyone can see it was something personal.  I think the girl killed him, took what she could carry and lit out for Shiel; that's what I'd do."

Keshena grips her elbows with both hands, wrapping arms hard across her chest as if the feelings could be crushed back down into her belly.  Klonk doesn't appear to notice her distress.

"Anythin' else?"

"Got the latest list of wine imports if you want that."

Klonk grins.  "If you ain't usin' it," he drawls, and the girl offers a twice-folded page with a ragged edge.

"You know I don't smuggle anymore."  Dania - who looks about fifteen - winks at Keshena and then slips back through the kitchen door into the dark inn.  Klonk pockets his notes and beckons.

"That'll do.  Next stop."

The wide streets of Capria are mostly deserted, as she hoped.  The burning knot in Keshena's chest doesn't subside as they pass a few sleepy guards blinking in the pre-dawn gloom, but none of them look twice at her.  A half-giant with an ugly grin and a scarred woman in black leather are both distinctly in the category of "things Capria's guards are well-paid to ignore."  Besides, neither of the city's jails could hold Klonk.  They're not much for imprisonment here; they prefer permanent solutions in Capria.

"So... are we gonna go to that auction?"

Klonk shrugs.  "Might send someone.  Probably not, don't see as it'll be much of a profit opportunity."

"Would... could I go?"

He peers at her.  "Aye, that's about the level of investment it deserves I suppose.  If you want.  Why?"

She tries to keep her voice light and offhand as she says, "Oh, I just haven't furnished my new room yet.  Might pick up some nice things cheap; folks'll think it's all haunted."

He nods and doesn't say anything as they continue down the street and turn in behind a brassworks.  "I guess that's why they say you're a murderer then?" he asks in the dimness of the alley, and Keshena startles badly even though his tone is no more than curious.  While she's trying to think of something to say, he stops outside the workshop's back door.  "See the marks?  Quiz now, what's that one?"

Scattered, Keshena says, "I - ah, it's the pitcher.  I mean, the informant one."

Klonk nods.  "Ayup, and that one next to it is 'business' - means we contract with this craftsman.  Y'don't steal here, or disrupt his work."

Keshena nods in answer.  Petty theft was never her style anyway.  What could a person steal at a brassworks that'd be worth trying to hide it in your coat?

The man who answers Klonk's knock is a tired-looking apprentice much older than Keshena looks, and there's no discussion here - this man gives Klonk a pouch of coin and rattles off an order of machined parts, chemicals, and electric wiring from Lion’s Reach.  Klonk takes this down in his book, along with a few names of prominent recent buyers, and the prentice goes back inside.

"Guessin' you looked a little different when you lived here," Klonk murmurs after the door shuts.  "That's good.  Don't give a damn about your past so long as it don't muck up your work, got that?"

Keshena nods.  "It won't.”

*******

Keshena savors the look on Lin's face a few days later when she opens her studio door and reveals an entirely new face to the Speaker.  Laughing, Lin shakes her head.  "I guess I'm going to have to get used to this!  Is that what you're wearing to the auction?  Who are we this time?"

Closing her door behind her, Keshena spreads her arms and turns to allow Lin the full view of her getup, including the folded wings arching above her shoulders.

"Kianari Larchol, harpy Numerologist.  Seen him in the library a few times.  I took some liberties with the clothes; I don't like fur as much as he seems to."  She curls her tongue around the accent, tightening her cheeks to narrow the airway - harpy tongues are less flexible than hers, but their throats can produce sounds she can't match.

"Are those actual wings?  They look so real!"

Keshena feels Lin's fingers brushing the feathers as she turns back around.  "That's because they are.  Did you know this city used to do a seasonal trade in severed harpy wings?"

"What?"

Chuckling, Keshena leads the way to the thread Klonk showed her, on the upper balcony behind the stairs to the rookery.  "These days the only ones you can find are in salvage shops, but a hundred years ago, there weren't any kind of transport laws about body parts, certainly not about harpies.  The Kumani were in on it, from what I understand - I knew some folks in Morrihm who bought specimens from them."

"That's disgusting; what happened to the harpies they took the wings from?"

Keshena glances at Lin.  "If they're lucky, they died," she says gently, and sees grim understanding dawn on Lin's face.

"Lion's Reach has a lot to answer for over the years," Lin murmurs, and Keshena nods.

"Aye, but so does everywhere else.  People are the same barbaric bastards no matter where you go, Lin; don't let 'em fool you."  Then she steps through the thread, and endures a timeless moment of sensory madness.  This time she manages to keep her feet on the other end, staggering against a tree and holding her gorge down as Lin bursts out of thin air behind her.

"S-so you found those wings in an antique shop, I hope?" Lin asks when she's caught her breath.

Keshena raises her head to look up at the Juniper Tree Inn basking in Capria's late-morning sunshine.  Lin, dressed in her usual brightly-colored silk with no consideration for the Reach's climate, sighs in gratitude at the warmth.

"Yep, here in Capria actually.  They don't move terribly well, but they'll do if no one asks me to fly."

Lin grins.  "Is it strange pretending to be a harpy?"

"The accent is tough, but apart from that, not really."

"Is it strange pretending to be a man?"

Keshena laughs, pitching it low so that the people on Capria's busy main street don't look sideways at her.  "Not as much as you'd think.  I don't know, I've never really... felt like a woman, particularly?  I become whatever face I'm wearing, and that's comfortable for me.  When it's a man, I'm a man.  When it's a woman, I'm a woman.  The parts I was born with don't do much for me but get in the way."

Lin thinks this over, and nods.  "That makes sense.  Perhaps if you prayed - " and then she stops, remembering Keshena's geas.  "Well.  The gods have been known to change their followers' bodies according to their need or desire."

Keshena shrugs.  "Unless they could change me into a shapeshifter, it wouldn't be any better than the body I'm living in now.  It's the limitations on my ability to change that I dislike, not any specific configuration."

"Maybe!  That sounds like something our Father would do.  The Artificer reshapes people into whatever form is most useful to His ends.  He'd probably be delighted at someone who wants that."

The auction house in Capria is at the end of Accarn Avenue, where goldsmiths, appraisers and jewelers do business.  Keshena navigates to it almost without thinking; after seventy years in the town, the comfort of being here is painful, knowing she's no longer very welcome.  There's a small crowd milling in and out of the open doors, examining the items on offer, and Keshena takes a moment to decide where in the hall she should linger, opting for the far side toward the back, to minimize eyes on her. 

Lin sits down on the bench beside her and leans over to whisper, then seems to think better of it.  Instead, she taps Keshena's arm to draw her eyes to Lin's hands, and begins slowly shaping the Kumani hand-signs.  Keshena hasn't learned enough to hold a conversation this way, but with whispered hints and the occasional nudge, Lin uses the opportunity to make her practice.

-You know this family?-

Keshena notes that the sign for "family" is almost the same as the one for "Kumani," and smiles at this.

-Yes.  I married their- drat it.  "Youngest?  How do we do ages?" she whispers. 

Lin runs through four signs.  "Old.  Adult.  Young.  Child.  If he's the youngest, it's 'young' with this little hook in it, see?"

Keshena nods and resumes signing.  -I married their youngest son.  And killed him.-

Lin doesn't flinch, but looks thoughtful.  -Did you-  The shape she makes then is strange, held against her body, and Keshena tilts her head. 

"Love," Lin murmurs, and asks alongside her moving hands, "Did... you... love... him?"

Keshena sighs, turning her eyes to the front of the room, where the house's porters are arranging a podium and gavel.  She watches this process without seeing it for a minute, then signs, -No.  But I didn’t hate him until recently.-

-Why?-

A big fellow is stopped on his way to the podium by the well-dressed patrons in the front row, whom Keshena recognizes as the deceased Kelly's relatives.  They hold a brief but fervent consultation, and the auctioneer doesn't appear entirely pleased with the results, but he carries on to his position and with a bang of his gavel spares Keshena from answering the question.

The auction will take all day, that's clear from the list of items on display.  Keshena watches her late husband's personal effects being pawed over and sold off with a weary lack of interest, while inside her head, little Miss Kelly helpfully conjures memories of every item's arrival in their home.  It makes her grit her teeth, and she feels a headache beginning above and behind her left eye.

"This is a sterling silver flatware set by Pearce of Shiel, stamped and dated 1388.  We'll start the bidding at - "

Fifty-eight sovereigns new, though I shouldn't know the price - it was a gift from the Beynons at that banquet last winter.  Phyllis Beynon made a terrible scene and then ran off with - Keshena clamps her hands over her ears for a moment, but this does nothing to silence the voices inside, only traps her in with them, like always.  She lowers her hands before Lin notices the twitch.

"We move now to a mid-century wheeled serving cart in exquisite cherrywood, a Cadwallder design, but as you'll note from the shopmarks here on the underside, this item was not assembled in Cadwallder's workshop - this is a Caprian original based on his catalogue.  An exceedingly rare item."

It's not rare.  Kelly's friend's sister... or sister's friend? - was the joiner, and he didn't pay for the Cadwallder catalogue, just copied an old Cadwallder cart he had in the studio.  Technically a fake, but no one will ever know.  Kelly liked the price.

It's worse than she expected, seeing all these things.  It's worse because they're all so meaningless, just discarded objects with nothing attached to them, not even grief, not even rage.  A pile of worthless things that were worth more than me.  The house belonged to them... I was just a guest.  A ghost.  She feels empty, and wishes she could find an emotion to fill the space, but all she can find are echoes, the sound of a hollow space where voices repeat and pile up into a deafening cacophony that, when it resolves, leaves nothing behind.  Dizzied and sick, Keshena looks down at her lap and finds Lin's hand resting on hers, Lin's great dark eye peering at her.

"You're pretty pale," Lin whispers.  "Do you need a break?  Could step outside."

The only item Keshena cares to see is about half a page down.  They won't get to it within the hour.  Keshena nods and squeezes Lin's hand, and they get up and quietly exit the hall as the auctioneer bangs his gavel and calls the number of the fake Cadwallder's lucky new owner.  Got cheated, that one, Kelly whispers in her head.  That's six times what it's worth, at least.

Outside, she slips around the corner and leans against the stone wall, warmed by a sun that's almost reached its zenith overhead.  The wall is festooned with honeysuckles, and their scent is almost chokingly sweet, not helping to settle Keshena's stomach one bit.  She wraps her arms around herself and closes her eyes, breathing shallowly.  The false wings on her back make her sweat and itch, and she rolls her shoulders to shift them, looking like nothing so much as a disgruntled black hawk crouched on the walkway.

"It's got to be hard for you," Lin murmurs at her elbow.  "I can't imagine all the different things you must be feeling about this."

Keshena lightly dabs at the sweat on her face with her sleeve, checking it each time for dislodged cosmetics, and focuses on maintaining the illusions that support the costume, searching for that steady place inside.  A bark of helpless laughter comes out without her permission.  "Yeah, that's... that's about the size of it.  So many things, or nothing - I'm not even sure I know the difference anymore."  Vague images arise out of the morass of memory, and she continues talking without attending much to her own words.  "When I met him, I hated him.  But Kelly didn't.  She liked his grace, and his gifts."

"Do... do your faces often disagree with you like that?"  Lin seems a little hesitant to ask about it, concerned she'll stumble into rudeness.

Keshena's smile is more of a grimace.  "Constantly."  Her fingers tremble as she resists the urge to clasp them over her ears again.

"It's not some kind of curse, or spirit...?"

She shakes her head.  "No.  I play games in the mirror because I can't touch the grass, but I do know the difference.  I never lose time, or forget what I’m doing.  Kelly is me.  So is Den Roth, so is Madame, and so is Kianari Larchol, for however long I wear him.  It's like... it's like a filter, like they put on lights in the theater, you understand?  Like a stained-glass window.  Bits of colored glass that turn the light different colors, and when the light changes, you can see things you couldn't see before.  These are all filters, different ways of looking at myself.  I take... parts of myself, things I want to understand or change, and allow those things to be embodied by a person I can talk to and get to know.  Does that make any kind of sense?"

Lin slides down the wall and sits cross-legged next to her.  "Yes, actually.  It seems like a very good technique for analyzing yourself.  Reminds me of some things Villi's told me, though I've never met anyone with your level of... commitment to the idea."

Shrugging, Keshena tries on a grin.  "Well, I've had a lot of time.  Things escalate, y’know?  After the first couple of lifetimes, your brain sort of starts to eat itself unless you find something to focus on.  And since nobody ever asks about it, it's just me going in circles internally for decades, getting weirder and weirder."

"That surprises me."

Keshena, surprised herself, glances at Lin.  "What does?"

"That nobody asks about it.  You seem incredibly interesting; I can't understand why no one's paid any attention to you."

Keshena is blinded by sudden tears, can't speak for a moment.  She looks at her hands.  "I... thank you."  Then she coughs, and grins again.  "I mean, people aren't interested in much besides themselves.  That's why wearing someone's face is a great way to hide."

"Have you ever worn someone's face to their face?  I mean -"

"Yes.  Yeah, I understand.  Have I met someone in person while wearing their face?  I have, often.  People don't love it."

Lin laughs.  "I wouldn't think so!"  She exhales through her nose and props her chin on one hand.  "You are a very strange person, Keshena.  You never use your real voice or real face, but you're more honest than most people I've ever met."  Then she reaches out and lays a hand on Keshena's knee.  "Is it okay if we're friends?"

Keshena looks pleased at first, then runs her fingers into her hair and looks as if her head's trying to escape on its own.  "I..." she says slowly.  "Trying to think through you being friends with me... or with people you don't know who are also me... or with someone I don't know who is who I really am... is... challenging?"  Her face works on it for a stressful moment, then she shakes her head.  "Let's make it simple.  I don't have any friends.  I'd like to have one.  And I trust you."  She offers Lin her hand.

Lin shakes it, then pulls her to her feet.  "You overthink everything!"

"Well, there are a lot of us thinking in here," Keshena murmurs.  She takes a few deep breaths.  "Okay.  We can go back in."

The barker is working at a good clip, in spite of the occasional highhanded interruption from the front row, and is getting near the lot Keshena wants.  The porters have brought it out already; she can see it, swaddled in padding, at the back of the stage with a pile of other things.  Strong emotion arises at the sight; for once every part of her is in agreement on something: this is mine.  Of all the possessions she's acquired and lost in two centuries, this one feels like hers, no matter which face she wears.

When Lin taps her wrist, wishing to resume their signed conversation, Keshena points at the swaddled item being wrestled up to the podium by a porter.  -We're here for that.-

-What is it?-

-It's mine.-

"It's a genuine pre-war relic, this, stamped with a maker's mark that originated in Morrihm over a century ago."  When he mentions the City of the Dead, the room gets quiet.  Not that Morrihm's goods are banned anywhere except Shiel, but most people won’t buy them - they assume anything built there must carry a curse.

"An arresting item, to be sure, a display piece for the foyer or ballroom, perhaps - a triptych mirror, three exquisite silvered-glass panels - yes, open it up there, man - in a wrought-iron frame embossed with some very interesting motifs."

The porter pulls down the swaddling, and the people in the front row recoil a little.  Two black iron panels lock over the central one with a little latch.  Every inch, back and front, of the mirror’s frame is worked with faces, as if one were looking down into a pool of oil that drowned hundreds, their agonized last expressions bubbling up and then smearing away.  Their emotions run the gamut - some are joyous, some wrathful, some fearful - but all are embossed with such skill as to chill the blood, as if real human faces were smothered in molten iron and used to decorate the mirror's backing.  They frame the silver sheets that appear when the porter lifts the latch, and the faces stare or cry or snarl at the plump, empty looks of the assembled bidders.  Keshena greets them with recognition and raises her numbered card when the gavel starts the bidding.  She's been looking at them for over a century now, and there isn't one among them that isn't more familiar to her than her own face.

"That looks heavy!" Lin whispers. 

The barker acknowledges Keshena's bid.  It takes a long few seconds for anyone to match it, during which Keshena nods.  "It is.  I think we can handle it between us, but getting it down the stairs from the thread might be tricky."

"Nat's working at home today; I'll get him out to help us when we get back to the Reach."  Lin pauses while Keshena throws up another bid.  The price is staying comfortingly low.  No one wants the creepy old thing.  "Did you actually get it in Morrihm?" Lin continues, and Keshena nods again.

"I lived there for a short time before the Quiet War.  Left before it got nasty.  Well, nastier."  Keshena raises her hand once more, and this time no higher bid answers her.

"Sold, for fifteen sovs, to number seven!"  The gavel falls again, and the porter closes up the mirror, then comes round to hand Keshena the ticket.  Another few items pass the podium before the mirror is shifted off to make room for more, and Keshena nudges Lin, who follows her out the door and around the building to the porters' entrance.

Exchanging the ticket for the mirror occasions a brief conflict with a clerk, who would prefer Keshena pay in gold coins like a civilized person, and resents being forced to do an impromptu appraisal of the fat gold brooch she presents him instead.  But it's a fist-sized lump of gold, much more than fifteen sovs melted down, and he can see that, so he waves them on after he’s gnawed on it a bit.

"Last of my old jewelry," Keshena murmurs to Lin.

"The mirror's prettier," Lin murmurs back, and Keshena smiles.

It's heavier even than she expected - haven’t had to move it myself in a century - but she's not Keshena Kelly anymore, which means she doesn't have to pretend to be weak.  She and Lin carry the mirror between them down the street toward the Juniper Tree Inn, right out in the open, while Keshena repeatedly reminds herself that this belongs to her, fair and proper; she's not a murderer making off with spoils.  Well, I am.  But I paid for these spoils.  That counts for something.

Back in the Citadel, Lin clatters down the stairs to fetch her husband, a barrel-shaped man with a big laugh and a square black beard, who can carry the mirror all on his own down to Keshena's little apartment.  He places it where she directs, in the corner near the windows where the light is good, and then goes back to his work with a wink at his wife.  Keshena sighs as the door closes, and stands in front of her mirror, feeling something inside her satisfied, at peace again.  Lin rests her chin on Keshena's shoulder and peers in with her.

“It’s very elegant; I see why you wanted it back.”

Keshena shrugs, making Lin’s head bob.  “I don’t know why I wanted it back, not really.  It’s just… the only thing I’ve kept with me, even when I ran away.  It remembers me.”  Her fingers skim over the smooth, cold glass.  “Sometimes it’s the only thing in the world that does.”

When she turns back to look at Lin, there’s a sweet sorrow in the Speaker’s eye.  “You don’t need to worry about that, Keshena,” she murmurs.  “Now that I’ve met you, I’ll certainly never forget you.”

Startled by emotion, again, Keshena blinks rapidly and laughs.  “Well, I’ll try to take that as a compliment!”

“You should,” Lin says, and squeezes her arm.  “Oh - I have a couple of books upstairs for you to study.  There will be a test.”  She glimpses Keshena’s sour expression before she quite closes the studio door, and Keshena hears her laughing all the way up the stairs.

Red dye spills over her thumb, brighter than blood.  Keshena tips it off her skin into a little bowl, then follows it with a dash from the bottle in her other hand, shifting her grip on the first bottle to stir the mixture with the handle of a brush.  Back and forth she works, drop by drop, until the color is perfect - a deep, warm brown into which she pours a dusty powder, lighter than flour.  A little spills across her knee, but she doesn't notice.  She kneels naked before her mirror, avoiding a glance at the pale-skinned girl that appears in the glass until after she applies the dark brown paste she's made.

The woman who taught Keshena to make her own cosmetics had skin this color.  They met in the southern desert, when Keshena lived in Morrihm, the City of the Dead.  Built in the warm upper chambers of a dormant volcano known as the Cauldron, Morrihm is the only city where the dead can walk freely in the streets.  Before arriving in the Citadel, Keshena had the impression that Lion's Reach prohibited undead entirely like Shiel does, but it's not so - one of the books Lin gave her makes that very clear.  In fact, several major Blooded and undead families have estates in the city, so old that they take up entire towers and wings on which they haven't paid taxes in generations.  The interior streets of the Basilica are good for those with sunlight sensitivities.  What Keshena didn't know before she started reading is that the Blooded were created in the Reach, not in the Cauldron.

The books are stacked up next to Keshena's heap of blankets, four heavy volumes stamped along the spine with Kumani symbols.  Several of them form the titles and attributions - Divine Lies: Records of the Years of Artifice, by Antoinette Kaeus; Kumani Code of Conduct, by Akal Vyr; The Discipline of Secrecy, by Villi Selannor; and Fall of the Lions: The Wars of the North Reach, by Clay Helleva.  She started with the one by Villi, out of curiosity if nothing else, to see if the imp writes in the same snotty tone as she speaks.  

Her writing turns out to be analytical and clear, obfuscatory only when she needs to be.  The initial chapters discuss some of the same mental tricks Villi has been sharing in their lessons on illusions.  With anecdotes from what appears to be centuries of public service in the Reach, she shares insights on political power as it's held and traded in the Citadel.  There are copious notes in the margins, extensive annotation to the text itself, generations of Kumani students offering subsidiary detail or offhand observations, marking important passages with symbols, and of course doodling unflattering caricatures of the book's odd little author.  Between these and Selannor's focus on a kind of social analysis that Keshena enjoys herself, an actor's understanding of attention and deceit, Keshena finds Villi's book fascinating.  The others aren't nearly as fun.

The dark brown paste is only the beginning of her work - it forms a base for several more powders, and as Keshena brushes them across her cheeks, her shoulders, her hands, she sinks into herself, into that open, listening place where the world could be whatever she imagines it to be.  Light shackled to each mote of powder and forced to linger, spread across her skin... light pushed away and silenced, bent to her will.  "Do not mistake illusions for a purely visual phenomenon," Villi said in her book.  "The true effect of artifice is not on the eyes, but on the mind.  To project an internal conception of reality onto another person, to make your reality their reality, is the essence of artifice as practiced by our Father."  Keshena liked that; it reminded her of things she was told so long ago she doesn't remember them anymore, the words of actors to a tiny child who thought one aging theater was all there was to the world.

Next there comes a drip from a different bottle of dye, this drip falling into her open eye and blurring her vision for a few blinking moments as it coats the surface.  When she can see again, she tilts her head at the brown-skinned girl in the mirror, whose left eye is a black orb like a lump of onyx.

Pleased with the cosmetics work, she lays a hand on her chest and wills the illusion woven into the powder to spread, an act of drive and imagination that starts slowly and then moves like a wave, coloring her skin from the shoulders down to the fingertips, the clavicles to the hips, then the knees, then the feet.  This kind of change, a mere shift of color, is easy, easier than vanishing - just a tilt of the light, not redirecting it entirely.  It’s easy to maintain, too, very little concentration required.  

“Does an illusion exist when it is not observed?” asked Villi’s book, and the ensuing analysis went a little above Keshena’s head, but the upshot seemed to be “yes, sort of.”  An unobserved illusion remains in the state it was left until the power exerted to conjure it dissipates, but it doesn’t require concentration to maintain unless it’s observed.  How long will it last unattended?  Depends, evidently, on the skill of the conjurer.  Keshena’s found that hers will last a few hours without attention, and the color under her clothes doesn’t dissipate enough by the end of the day to make her worry about retouching it.  Half the time she changes faces before then anyway.

The kind of clothing Lin regularly wears is expensive, mostly silks from the Akir desert.  But it’s not the first time Keshena has had to pretend a greater affluence than she can sustain, and she’s got enough bits and pieces from previous costumes to save a bit on accessorizing.  It still costs most of her stipend for a length of sky-blue silk like the wrap Lin was wearing on the day Keshena arrived.  Worth it, though.  It’s gorgeous, draped over and around her shoulder and waist - it makes her feel almost naked, as if she’s not wearing the silk so much as vaguely located inside a floating cloud of it.  

When she steps out of the building into the Citadel’s halls, the biting cold pours through the garment as if it’s not there.  The Called don’t feel things quite the same way that mortal men do - to Keshena, it feels as if the highest peaks and lowest stabs of sensation are merely theoretical.  She can see goosebumps rising on her skin, feel her body working harder to produce heat, but she feels no real urgency to warm herself, and soon she forgets about it.  It does make her hungry, though, and illusions take a bit of energy too.  Food first.  Then we’ll go see what Villi wants.

Guilded life in Keshena’s view is about one part education to nine parts indoctrination.  She’s never properly joined one before, but spent a great deal of time on the periphery of several, and decided long ago that she’d little use for them.  Unaccustomed to having to explain her activities and associations, she has no intention of beginning at two hundred.  But the Kumani suit her in this regard - they don’t explain themselves either, not when she meets them in the cavern complex and not out in the world, where often they pretend not to know her at all.  They speak tersely to each other, and though most conversations involve more voices than she sees faces to match, there are few names.  For one wishing to hide even from one’s own regard, there could be no better place.

They do train her, though.  There are no classrooms she’s seen, and no formal tests.  At odd hours, sometimes while she sleeps - jerked awake with her heart hammering the tattoo of an ancient war when her door rattles under a fist - they call her out to a chilly rendezvous in a copse or crossroads.  At first it’s always a grey-clad functionary like those she sees in the library every day, novices training novices in the basics.  Their thin hands are covered in fresh nicks and cuts.  She watches their fingers move as they talk and sign simultaneously, taking her through the minutiae of stealth, ways to remain unseen in plain sight, ways to soften one’s footfalls.  Some of it is familiar; an actress is half a spy already.  But there’s more magic in this than the art she learned as a child.

The Kumani are not the Artificer’s army, it’s often and emphatically said around the guildhall, nor do they rule Lion’s Reach, but rather are bound to serve it.  Still, lay the city Council’s records of succession against those of the guild and of the church, and the few names that don’t show up on all three don’t linger long.  Slowly, in a way that always seemed accidental, the Kumani had spread their grip across the northern mountains and reaches, a region that even the Lions had struggled to effectively administrate.  

It owes a great deal to the threads; their ability to arrive at any destination hours or days ahead of the competition keeps the lay people intimidated, certain they might be spied upon at any time by an invisible cabal that can be everywhere at once.  Keshena finds that in practice this is largely an illusion, but the Kumani novices do foster it by practicing their stealth in the towns and outposts of the Reach.  More than once, Keshena wanders into a provincial hall or hovel to find a grey-clad kid barely standing against the wall under a shroud of illusions, trying not to nod off as he surveils yet another interminable conversation about goats.  

Most of the threads in the north start somewhere in Lion’s Reach proper.  When they first acquire the training to perceive them, Kumani novices are often stunned by the degree to which the city is honeycombed with these metaphysical doorways.  Keshena can hear them, of course, which makes some wings of the city nearly painful to occupy, the discordant ringing of multiple threads making her brain feel like it’s rattling in her skull.  Deeper in the mountain it’s not so bad; the granite seems to absorb the sound.

Though Villi’s summons slid under the door before she’d finished costuming, Keshena doesn’t trouble herself to hurry.  After two centuries, ‘hurry’ begins to feel superfluous. A sausage-stuffed biscuit in hand, she descends to the Complex and finds Villi in one of the reading nooks, lecturing a middle-aged novice.  Glad not to be the target of the lecture for once, Keshena leans against the threshold and watches for a moment.  The novice isn’t wearing the livery; he’s dressed well, in the style of Shiel, and his face is handsome, but his demeanor never strays far from prideful scorn, no matter whom he’s talking to, apparently.  He’s even sneering at Villi a bit, although Villi seems to think it’s funny.

“So you can feel them, yes?  There are four in this level of the Complex; point in the general direction of each from here, please.”

The man sighs extravagantly and closes his eyes.  He frowns for a moment, then raises a hand and points without opening them.  “There, there, there, and… behind us, back there, although I haven’t seen part of the Complex that goes back there.”

“Yes, nor will you, at this rate,” Villi snaps.  Then she glances over her shoulder.  “Hello, lurker.  Have you met Kang?”

“I haven’t,” Keshena answers, pitching her voice a little higher than her own, and carefully matching Lin’s subtle accent.  Villi scrutinizes her as she moves into the room, but doesn’t comment.  When the novice gets a look at her, Keshena discovers that the contemptuous look on his face isn’t his only talent - he’s also capable of foolishness.  His eyes catch again and again, on the bare brown shoulders under blue silk, the soft curve of the young woman’s cheek, the depths of her doelike eye and the glittering stone of the false one.  Color comes into his cheeks, and he stands and visibly restrains the impulse to salute.  Keshena snorts.

“Yes, he’s always like that,” Villi drawls.  “Kang, this is… Lin al-Akir?”  A sideways glance at Keshena gets her a slight nod, and she continues, “Lin, this is Lianth Kang, a new novice.  He served with the Ashen in Shiel.”

“Ah, that makes sense,” Keshena says, grinning.  Kang doesn’t appear as amused; having grasped that his infatuation is evident, he’s embarrassed and his scorn goes into defensive overdrive.

“And I suppose you are here to waste my time dangling more secrets I’m too junior to know?”

Keshena raises an eyebrow as Villi answers him.  “She is here to assist us in maintaining the city’s threads this morning, and thus her primary function is to ensure that in addition to educating you, I also accomplish literally any worthwhile thing before lunch.  Come, we’ll inspect those in the Complex first.”

They go first to the mushroom garden, where a thread opens behind the Retreat.  

“You both sense this one, yes?”

Kang nods.  Keshena answers, “Aye, I can hear it.”

“That’s right.  Kang, the Called - I don’t have to explain that to you, do I?”

Scowling, Kang says, “I know what Called means, dammit, the Grand Templar of the Ashen is Loro’s Champion.”

“Yes, I’m aware,” Villi murmurs, smiling.  “The Called, due to their heightened sensitivity to essential forces, can often hear a ringing sound in the area of threads.  This can be used to determine if the thread is in working order rather quicker than inspecting it manually,” she adds, looking at Keshena.  “Lin, is the sound of this thread in any way unusual?  Does it seem markedly different from other threads you’ve heard?”

Keshena shakes her head.  “It’s unpleasant in the usual way.”

“Good.  Now, Kang, hold out your hand and inspect it as I showed you; confirm our assessment.”

With ill grace, Kang steps forward and holds out a hand toward the spot where the thread purports to be.  Villi adjusts him slightly, and then his brows draw together in concentration.  After a moment, he drops his hand.  “It feels right.  It knows where the other end is, and there are no knots or fractures along the way.”

Villi nods.  “Good, I concur.  The other end of this one, remember, is in the guildhall of the Engineers, in their reference stacks.”

Keshena laughs.  “Really!  So we spy on the other guilds as well?”

“Of course,” says Villi.  “Now, the second one in the Complex is over near the hallway to the Barracks.”

The second one is also in working order - “to the Numerologists’ halls in the Indeterminate Tower,” Villi notes.  “You’ll be expected to memorize them all, so you’d best begin.  You don’t want to be uncertain where you’re going when you enter a thread; besides being dangerous, it can cause the ends of the thread to fray.”

The third thread starts in a weapons storeroom by the sparring ring, and ends in Shiel, and the fourth begins in the main administrative building and ends outside the Cauldron, in the caves leading to Morrihm.  The third is functioning normally, but when they reach the fourth, in a neglected hallway, its ugly whine has an ugly wobble in it.

“Frayed,” Villi says.  “It’s not broken, but good that we noticed this before it got worse.  Kang, inspect.  Here.”

Kang holds out his hand and focuses on the thread.  His frown deepens.  “It’s… oh, I see.  This end’s location is unclear.”

Villi nods.  “That’s what happens when someone with a little skill - a Kumani or an expert Numerologist - passes through the thread without a firm idea of where they’ll end up.”

“Numerologists can use the threads?” asks Keshena.

“Some can.  The threads aren’t our exclusive property, remember that.  While illusions are Nieran’s magic, threads are Lion technology, and technology obeys any hand that holds it.  Numerologists can’t pin down the end of a thread without Kumani help, but they can sense the threads as a structure.  It’s…”  Villi shakes her head.  “I’m no Numerologist, so this will be a very abbreviated explanation, but all things can be expressed in terms of operant numbers.  The world can be seen, if you’re a Numerologist, as a continuous mathematical operation.  Threads are an expression of fallo, the fourth number - it describes the property of location, a point or points in space.  The Lions had thousands of operant numbers, they say, but only thirty-three are still in use.  When a Numerologist novice learns to perceive properties of fallo, they begin to perceive the threads passing through the world.  It can be very disorienting, I’m told.”  She steps aside and gestures to Keshena.  “Come, you try this one.  You can do this part by sound also.”

“What is that sound?” Keshena asks.  It’s already making her want to grind her teeth, like tinnitus with a tune.

“It’s what the ambient sounds at the far end of this thread sound like when they get here,” Villi answers, then grins.  “Which is why you can’t look through a thread.  Imagine what you would see - it’d drive you mad, most likely.  But that sound is also, for us, a good indication of where we should place threads.  When one thread terminates too close to another, that sound will become much louder, more discordant.”

Grimacing, Keshena says, “I’ve noticed.  The upper hall by the Keymaster’s shop -”

Villi chuckles.  “Oh yes, that’s a bad spot.  It’s the thread in the Lazarth estate, the tower just above there - it’s a bit close to the one on the balcony by the rookery, but the Lazarths pay an exorbitant amount for it annually, so what can you do.  Fortunately, it’s not likely to cause a problem to anyone but the Lazarths themselves if it gets worse.”

“Worse?”  Keshena can feel the thread in front of her - like the skin of a bubble, an elusive shift in density and temperature that doesn’t seem to have a dimension she can grasp.  She can also feel what Kang and Villi sensed, the way the thread is fraying, its commitment to being here unraveling like a scarf.  

“You’d have to ask a Numerologist about the science, but there are places in the world that the Lions tore apart by weaving too many threads.”

Kang’s eyes light up with interest.  “Tore apart?  What is that like?  Can we see it?”

Another chuckle from the imp.  “Nothing to see.  There’s no there, there, anymore.  You can’t get there from here, wherever ‘here’ happens to be.”

“That sounds like the way people talk about Blackwall,” Keshena murmurs.

“Mmhm,” says Villi.  “Now, from this end, you can pull the thread back into alignment with this location.  You might need to use both hands.” 

Keshena opens her eyes and looks down to see the imp showing her both hands, spread in a flowerlike shape, wrist to wrist.  She tries to mimic the pose as she reaches for the thread again.  It’s a problem of scale that’s confusing her - the thread seems to be very small, no bigger than her cupped hands, and yet the Kumani can pass through without changing size.  She wiggles her fingers, like plucking at a page stuck to another page, fumbling for an edge.

“Is it supposed to be so small?”

Villi laughs.  “It is, and it isn’t.  What does ‘small’ mean, anyway?  Size is a matter of perspective.  If you can’t see what you need to see from your current perspective, you should reposition.  Don’t move, no, just try to approach the thread from a different angle.  Conceptually.”

This makes about as little sense as Villi usually does, but Keshena frowns and tries again.  This time she imagines herself falling toward it, the thread’s tiny opening growing and growing into a looming portal.  Now the edge is clear, or rather the border, the boundary between the chilly obsidian hallway and an illusory space that holds all of the same properties except that of fixed location.  She doesn’t know the math, but she begins to see what the Numerologists must see in the thread - that “location” for most of the thread is a continually shifting fact, an unsettled question only resolved when one reaches an end.

The near edges aren’t dissimilar to one another, though, and they aren’t dissimilar to this location, the shiny black stone underfoot and the pressure of the air all part of what the thread knows about this spot.  It’s only a little misaligned.  She draws in a breath, clenching the muscles in her stomach as she would when pulling on a heavy line.  Without moving her body, she sets her weight against an imaginary opponent.  The tinny sound rises, filling her mind until it feels like it will shake the teeth out of her head.  Then, with a kind of bendy sound, she feels it slip into alignment with her location and fix, the expected numbers showing up in all the expected places, the equation coming out cleanly to a result that can only represent this one, specific spot.  It’s elegant, and somewhat physically satisfying too, and Keshena opens her eyes panting and grinning.

“That was fun.”

Villi smiles.  “I’m glad you enjoy it; most people don’t, so I could use more hands to keep up with them.  Kang, you can do the next one.”

Keshena extends her senses as they exit the administrative building, pushing beyond the Complex to see if she can detect any of the threads in the city above.  They’re too far away - her sense of this metaphysical landscape is too limited to even extend as far as her body’s eyes can see.  Then she almost stumbles, because she does detect another thread.  There aren’t four in the Complex… there are five.

The fifth one is below them, evidently buried deep in the stone.  Perhaps in the hidden catacomb she found over the cliff’s edge, and it’s this possibility that keeps her silent - perhaps she’s not supposed to know about that.  She promises herself she’ll go look later, and follows Villi and Kang up into the city.

Then it’s three hours of climbing stairs, trekking up and down alleys, and surprising students in disused corners - often sleeping, if alone; hastily adjusting clothing, if in pairs - before Villi declares the threads of the city satisfactory and dismisses them.  Kang agonizes over a courteous farewell to Keshena, still flummoxed by Lin’s borrowed face, and departs in a haze of blushes.  Climbing the hill to the city, Keshena feels both pleased and annoyed by his reaction.

The agony of an actor, murmurs Kelly.  The glow of attention, undercut by the knowledge that though their eyes are on you, you aren’t there at all - it’s someone else they admire, the person you’ve submerged yourself in.  To have so much love… and always know that none of it would remain if you took off the mask.  It tastes bitter, in such a familiar way; it satisfies the perverse part of her that feels clever for accurately predicting her own misery.

Lin is on her way out when Keshena arrives, descending the stairs with a quiver and shortbow slung over one shoulder.  At the bottom, she sees Keshena entering and stops abruptly, confronted at arm’s length by what appears to be her own face.

“W-what… Keshena?”  Lin’s brows draw together with sudden suspicion.

Keshena watches her shifting expression with something like glee.  It’s far from the first time she’s come face-to-face with a face she’s wearing, and she’s prepared for a range of responses.  Confusion almost always comes first; she’s talented enough to provoke that.  After the first unsteady moment, there’s no reaction that isn’t immensely revealing.  This is the moment she craves, when the performance becomes more than a performance - it’s a way of understanding, of learning someone from the inside out, by testing her impression of them repeatedly against the reality.

Anger is common, and Keshena anticipated this flavor of it.  Lin is young, hot-headed, thoughtless.  Fear makes her angry, and both make her impulsive, but there’s no immediate danger here.  Neither the strength to fight nor the confidence to punish manifests in Lin’s eye, only confused rage, as tattered and transient as a summer storm.

“What are you playing at?  What is this?”  She seizes Keshena’s arm - her fingers almost disappear on skin their exact shade - and shakes her hard.  Hair like black silk falls into both of their faces.  One Lin scowls, and the other laughs.

“What do you think?  Close enough?”  Keshena gently pulls free.  She can see fascination warring with defensive rejection in Lin’s face.  Now is the time for seduction, for openness.  Keshena steps back, spreads her arms and presents herself.

Turning in place, she keeps her eyes on Lin’s face, drinking each moment, each minute movement.  The black eye measures her - wasn’t she taller than Lin, when last they spoke?  Yes. Hadn’t she been thinner than this?  Yes.  Delighted, Keshena holds her breath.  She lives for this moment, but it’s so fragile… if she can only help Lin see.

“This has gone far enough, Keshena.  Explain yourself.  You can’t go around just… just impersonating your superiors!”

“Apparently I can, too well by the look on your face,” Keshena says.  She watches the anger flare again.  Crack the mask - give her a way out.  She feels her mouth twist in a habitual smile.  It’s one she thinks of as “Madame’s smile,” because it’s one of the tics she uses to immerse herself in that ancient face.  Lin’s seen it before.  And there it is - the dimming of fear in Lin’s eyes, the familiar expression forming a bridge between what she knows and this suspicious new face.  The rage dissipates, and with it Lin’s brief energy.  She grips the banister as lightheadedness washes over.

“Lin?  Are you still -”

“I’m all right.  Just… still recuperating.”

“That Wolf took you apart!”

“That’s what they’re known for,” Lin grumbles.  “I want you to explain… this, but now I also have a lot of residual nerves I’d like to aim at something other than your face.  Would you like to come to Tanor with me for shooting practice?”

“Absolutely, if you’ve a bow I can borrow.  Or I can see if Ishin -” 

“No, I have one.  Actually, you can use this, it’s my second-best.”  Lin runs back up the stairs and returns a moment later with another bow and quiver, finer in quality but just as well-used.  Keshena takes the lesser armaments and follows Lin out.

“And while we walk, you can tell me why you look like that.  Like me.”

“Well.  It’s a long story, I suppose, but… trust me when I say that I don’t mean any harm by it.”

Glancing sideways at her, Lin says, “I do.  I don’t know what you’re up to, but I don’t believe you’re dangerous, at least not to me.”

Keshena smiles faintly.  “I’m not.  I only want to understand.  Not just you, but what you represent, what you do here, what the city and the guild and these people mean to you… I told you, this isn’t me trying to lie.  When I create a face out of whole cloth, that’s a way of expressing myself, a way of letting part of myself out to breathe.  When I make a face out of another person… that’s my way of standing in their shoes, as it were, trying to see the world from their perspective.  I live here now, in Lion’s Reach, but I don’t belong here.  I work with the Kumani now, but I don’t belong to them yet, either.  You do.  When I’m you… I can feel what it’s like, to belong here.  Helps me figure out how I might get there myself.”

Lin listens with great interest.  “That makes sense, I understand that.  I came here when I was about nine, and I still remember how lost I felt for the first year or so.”  She smiles.  “I suppose that’s fine then, so long as you don’t impersonate me in any context that matters.  Do I need to worry about you spying on people in my face, or sneaking into my bedroom?”

Keshena snorts.  “I might spy on people in your face, but nobody you wouldn’t spy on yourself.  And as for your bedroom, trust me, your husband isn’t my type.”

“I’m sure he would know, anyway,” Lin says.  They pass through the Inner Gate, out into the teeth of the highland wind, and Lin pulls her coat closer around her.  It’s brightly colored, as is her wont, but at least she’s put on something more substantial than silk today.

“You’d be surprised.  I impersonated a woman’s husband for five years, once.”

Lin gapes at her.  “I… I have so many questions!”

Laughing, Keshena says, “Ask me another time, and I’ll answer them.  It’s an indoor conversation.”

“I just bet.”  Lin gives her what Keshena would, if she didn’t know better, call a flirtatious glance.  Flustered, Keshena changes the subject.

“You look cold; are you sure you want to walk to Tanor?  We could take the thread.”

“I need the exercise, I’ve been laying around for a week!  Come on, the walking will warm me up.”  She pokes Keshena.  “Already worn out for the day?  What took you out this morning?”

“Repairing threads with Villi and Kang.”

“Kang?”

“New novice.”  Smiling, Keshena adds, “You might have trouble on your hands with that one.  He was very taken with this face.”

“Eugh, just what I need.”  Lin rubs her brow.  “I’ll have Brynn beat him up; she’s had a little talk with a few novices on my behalf.”

“It must be exhausting, being so beautiful,” Keshena says.  She’s still smiling, but there’s no teasing in her tone, which makes Lin flustered herself.

“Shut up, or I’ll make you endure his woo-pitching for me.”

“It might not be so bad.  He used to be a knight, it seems.  Ashen.  I always liked knights.  Only men I’ve ever met worth a damn.”

Lin chuckles.  “I think they’re a bit stuffy, but that’s good - knights are easy to retrain, they’re already in shape.  Did you all check the whole city?”

Keshena nods.  “Three threads fraying, total, and we fixed them.  Nothing broken, nothing new that shouldn’t be there.”  Except…  She hesitates, and looks back over her shoulder at the city, for all the good that would do in spotting stealthy surveillance.  Then she asks, “How many threads are there supposed to be in the Complex?”

“Fi - four.”  Lin looks at her, and grins.  “Oh, it’s no good, is it, you’ve already spotted the other one.”

“Yes!  What is that?  Does nobody else know about it?”

“Novices don’t, but everyone else does.”  Lowering her voice, Lin says, “There’s more to the Complex than you’ve seen.  A lot of catacombs and laboratories down there, and the Champion’s office - you’ll be taken there when you pass your second test, so Hanna can offer you a proper contract.  There’s another thread that leads to an old shipwreck far up north on the western coast, north of where Blackwall was.  It’s important to the Kumani for some reason, but I haven’t gotten a clear answer on that.  I think it’s sentimental value.”

A wrecked ship… is it the same one from the thread in Capria?  How many accessible ancient shipwrecks can there be?

“There might be artifacts there that the Council doesn’t want to lose, or technology,” Lin continues.  “In the past, it might have been destroyed - public opinion has swung against use of the Lions’ technology several times over the centuries.  And then swung back.”  Squinting down the hill at the train station, Lin murmurs, “People can always be tempted by ease…”

Chuckling, Keshena says, “True.  Were the Lions so bad?  What’s the worst thing they’ve pulled out of the catacombs?”

Lin shakes her head.  “I’m not the person to ask.  Nat could tell you, the Numerologists work down there more than we do.  Hadall’s people are always digging deeper, as long as the Council allows.  They find new things all the time.  But… well, people have good intentions, right?  The Lions probably started out trying to make the world better, trying to protect their citizens and learn new things.  I don’t think anybody gets up in the morning and sets out to pillage and enslave.  Things get out of hand, is all.”

Keshena raises an eyebrow.  “You just said ‘enslave’ and then ‘things get out of hand.’  Just so you heard yourself.”

Glancing at her, Lin sighs.  “Okay, well, I’m not saying that makes it better.  I’m just saying it’s more complicated than ‘bad’ or ‘not so bad.’”

“I agree with that,” Keshena answers.

Tanor is the richest little town in the region, owing to the train station and its proximity to the Reach.  Workers and students, engineers and teachers, anyone who can’t afford to live in the city lives down the mountain in Tanor, making it essentially a quieter, open-air version of the Citadel.  Fewer explosions here, and fewer spiders in the snacks, but they still sell wondrous machinery, and at night, the town is fully lit by electric street-lamps, so it’s safer than the Reach as well.

Lin doesn’t lead Keshena all the way into town.  She slows down as they move from the terraced fields of the foothills to the farmland below, and hops over a fence into a disused field alongside a weary-looking herd of sheep.  “The man who owns this land barely uses it, so I come here to practice when I don’t want Ishin making fun of me.”

“And yet you brought me,” Keshena says, grinning, and leans on the fencepost as Lin gathers up a handful of what looks like trash at the foot of the field’s one, twisted tree.  There’s a few bottles, a tin cup, a lidless jewelry box, and Lin lines them up an arm’s length apart on top of the fence.  Then she steps back by the tree and begins limbering up her bow.

“Looks like it might snow, but it should be a couple hours at least,” she says, peering at the sky.  “Have you used a reflex bow before?”

Keshena nods.  “A bit, during the Quiet War.  Not in combat, just for hunting.  Aren’t these usually for mounted archers?”

“That’s why we like ‘em,” says Lin, bouncing to her feet.  “A smart Kumani doesn’t fight fair.  These have most of the power of a longbow in a smaller frame, so they’re easier to conceal.  And if you can get a height advantage on your prey, you should.  Bow like that is good for shooting from trees, roofs, windows…”  The Speaker grins.  “You know, urban hunting.”

Keshena lets out a bark of laughter.  “Just when I’m starting to think you’re a good little administrator, you say something adorably vicious like that.  There’s a beast cooped up somewhere in that skin, isn’t there?”

Lin looks at her with a bright, wild eye that cuts to Keshena’s stomach like a hot knife.  “Maybe.”  Then she turns and draws down on the fence-top targets.  She sights for all of two seconds before firing, and the tin cup flies off the fence as if blown from a cannon.  It hasn’t hit the ground yet when Lin reaches over her shoulder for another arrow and nocks it in one smooth motion that leads her clean into her next shot.  She gets off four quick shots like this in the time it takes Keshena to fold her arms, and then turns to look at Keshena with a young woman’s unabashed pride.

“Good gods, you thought I might be a danger to you?  I didn’t realize what high praise that was,” Keshena says.

Lin blushes and grins.  “I won our guild shooting tournament last fall.”

“Did anyone else survive it?”

“Yes.  Some.”  Lin snickers and jogs off to retrieve the targets.  She lines them up again - the tin cup is badly bent now, and the jewelry box can probably take one more hit like that before it falls to pieces.  She replaces one of the bottles - shattered by a direct hit - with a fist-sized stone.

“Okay, let’s see you!” she calls as she returns.

“I’m not fast like you,” Keshena says, gently testing the pull on the bow and flexing her fingers.  “And I’m rusty, it’s been about eighty years since I did this.”

“It’s fine!”  Lin leans against the tree.  “That kind of speed-shooting isn’t usually practical anyway, you don’t get that many easy targets in the real world.  Ishin doesn’t even teach it to the novices anymore, since it’s more flashy than useful.  Exo Vyr taught me before he retired.”

“Oh damn you, of course he did,” Keshena says, laughing.  “Even I’ve heard of Exo Vyr; there’s not a war in the past two centuries he wasn’t involved in whether he was invited or not.”

Lin nods.  “The biggest problem the Kumani ever had was keeping Exo entertained!  When there wasn’t a war going on, that was when he got himself in trouble.  Once, during Akal’s tenure as Champion, there was a thief in the city, a boy who got novice-level training from us and started using it to knock over shops in the Citadel.  It being a slow day in the Complex… Akal and Exo both went after him.”

With a snort, Keshena squares off with the fencepost.  The grey afternoon is getting darker, the sun swallowed up long before sunset behind the black teeth of the mountains.  Another hour and she can start blaming poor visibility for her bad shooting!

“Ah, so that’s when the word ‘overkill’ was coined.”

“Bored Kumani are dangerous!  It’s like… well, top of the list has got to be a bored Engineer.  An Engineer without work to do can end the world.”

Keshena grins and looks at Lin, spinning an arrow between her fingers.  “This is math I understand.  So one unemployed Engineer is roughly equivalent to… two unemployed Kumani, or one bored Kumani and two unemployed Numerologists, or three bored Numerologists.  Or four Numerologists who have an assignment but don’t want to do it.”

Barely keeping a straight face, Lin nods.  “Yep, that sounds about right.  So they trapped the thief in a canyon - you know the spot on the Southern Road past Bleeding Rock?”

Keshena, drawing the bowstring past her face, holds her breath until she lets the arrow go.  Then she claps her hand to her cheek, swearing, as the arrow goes wild into the neighboring field.  When she takes her hand away, there’s a streak swiped clean of both cosmetics and a layer of skin by the bowstring as it passed.

Lin winces.  “Ahh, yeah, I’ve done that.  Your elbow’s too far back.”  She stands and steps behind Keshena to adjust her form.  “Pull it again.  No, with an arrow, never dry-fire a bow!  Okay, yeah, roll your elbow more this way.  And let it in a little bit.”  Lin taps the corner of her mouth.  “I anchor here, not even as far as the cheek.  You don’t need to pull it that far back; power isn’t as important as technique, especially at the range we usually work.  And the recurve in this does some of the work for you.”  She steps back again.  “Try it like that.”

Keshena has no trouble holding the position Lin put her in.  Actresses and archers, all about hitting their marks.  This time when she narrows in on the rock and releases the string, though she feels herself flinch away from its lash, it doesn’t harm her aim too much.  The arrow strikes the rock and both break, a tracery of wood like a bird’s wing flying off in one direction, a spray of stone chips and the glittering arrowhead twirling into the grass.  

Lin applauds.  “Good shot!  That was great.”

“‘Great’ is generous, but thank you,” Keshena murmurs, sighting at the next target.  “So they trapped him in the canyon near Bleeding Rock…” she prompts.  “Finish your story; I can’t aim and talk.”

“Oh yes!  So they trapped the thief in the canyon on the Southern Road, Akal at the south end and Exo at the north end, but before they separated, Akal gave Exo the Champion’s Bow, and he took Exo’s.  Then Akal didn’t even try to hit the kid, just kept him penned in at the south end.”  Lin grinned.  “He always let Exo have his fun.  Exo worked his way forward, leaving snares behind him so the thief couldn’t stealth out, until he hit the curve around the rock and could see all the way down the canyon to Akal at the other end.  Of course they couldn’t see the thief between them… but he was still there.”

“What did they do?”

“Exo filled the canyon.  You couldn’t breathe for forty cubic feet without inhaling an arrow.  When they went in to clean up, the shafts were so thick on the ground they brought a plow.  And halfway down the hill, pinned to the rock, they found the thief.  Pincushioned.  The arrows went in the coffin with him - if they’d pulled them out, there wouldn’t have been enough of him left to bury.”

Keshena holds her breath, trying to steady the swaying of her elbow.  Her release doesn’t cut her this time, and the shot is cleaner, hitting the dented tin cup and sending it across the road with a loud clink!  She throws up a fist in triumph.

“I’m getting this now.  It’s not that different from a shortbow, just takes more pulling.”

Lin nods.  “We also have crossbows if that suits you better.”

“It might.  No chances I’ll pincushion anybody, but lower chance I’ll pincushion myself as well.  So that’s how they treat shop thieves in the Reach?  No wonder crime’s so low.”

Another nod.  “Hasn’t been a major robbery since, and that was a hundred-eighty years ago.”

“How did Exo carry that many arrows with him?  Did he bring a cart?”

Lin stops.  “You know… I never thought about that.”  She laughs.  “The story’s probably embellished some.  But Exo really was a terror.  We had a few people he was hunting turn themselves in to avoid him.  Apparently he referred to that as ‘the Exo Effect.’”

Keshena rolls her eyes.  “Boys are the same everywhere.”

“Yeah, they are.”  Keshena’s tone is dismissive; Lin’s is affectionate.  She looks up at Keshena with amusement.  “You’re not a big fan of men, huh?”

The expression on Keshena’s Lin-like face is, for a moment, incongruously Den Roth-ian.  “The fact that I don’t have the option to avoid men in spite of being ‘not a big fan’ is the primary reason I’m not.  Men love to have an ‘effect’ on things, on people.  They care a whole terrible lot about their ‘effect,’ and they want to calibrate it, and make sure everyone knows about it.  It’s unconscionable to them that there might exist any creature on whom they have no effect.  When they find such a creature, they usually kill it.”

Ruefully, Lin shrugs.  “Can’t argue with you.  Apart from Nat, I haven’t met too many men I’d call grown.  I’ve only been with women since we married, and honestly it’s been so much less hassle.”

With a sideways look, Keshena says, “Does your husband know about that?”

“Of course!”  Lin smiles.  “He seems to think it’s cute.  He calls them my shavora - Reach word for ‘companion,’ as I understand it.”

“Uh...huh.”  A peculiar quiet storm of feelings arises in Keshena’s belly.  As with everything inside her, they quickly acquire voices, the layers of conflicting impulse making her gorge rise.

Cute, is it, because no relationship is real if it doesn’t have a cock in it, eh?

…but she… well, maybe…

Were you hoping…?

No.  I don’t know.  I don’t remember hope.

She makes me feel… real.  Like a real person.  It’s been so long.

...she’s married.  They might have a fucking ‘understanding,’ but she’s still married.

...why do you have to own everything you like?  Why isn’t this enough?

Isn’t this enough?