The Office of Shadow (8 page)

"Fortune only takes one so far," said Everess. "You've got a fine mind and
you're a fine soldier."

"I don't mean to be critical, sir, but I'm well aware of who I am and what
I've done. May I ask what it is you're leading up to?"

Everess laughed, a barking noise that made Ironfoot uncomfortable.
Ironfoot smiled in return.

Everess let his smile fade. He looked out over the river. The light from
the rising sun behind them skipped across its surface. "I'm aware of what it
is you're doing here, what it is you're trying to accomplish," he said.

"Is that so?"

"I also know that the dean of your college at Queensbridge thinks it's
impossible, and is attempting to have the project suspended."

"It's expensive," said Ironfoot. "And for all I know it may come to
nothing."

"For all your talent, son, you're not the best politician."

"Not something I've ever aspired to be."

They came to a steep rise in the path, and Everess stopped talking for a
moment to pick his way up it, using his walking stick to climb. When they
reached the top he stopped, admiring the view. The ruined city was behind
them, and the river valley below them was farmland, much of it gone fallow
now that the city it once fed was gone.

"Do you know what my position is, Ironfoot?" asked Everess.

"I don't, I'm afraid. As you pointed out, knowledge of politics isn't
among my many astonishing qualities."

"I'm the minister of foreign affairs, which means I have a great responsi bility to this land. And in order to execute that responsibility I must have
only the best and most talented men and women working under me."

"Are you offering me a job, sir?"

"What if I told you that if you were to come work for me, I would fund
any thaumatic research you chose to pursue while at the same time allowing
you some physical diversion as well?"

"Sir?"

"It was you who stole across the border through the Contested Lands in
order to examine an ancient Arami excavation, was it not? An Unseelie expedition, at that?"

"It was interesting."

"Indeed! We thought you were a spy for the longest time until we vetted
you."

"You've been watching me? I don't understand."

"Only the best and most talented," repeated Everess. "I don't approach
just everyone with these offers."

"What makes you think I'd leave the university?" asked Ironfoot.

"I know exactly why you'd leave it, and that you're considering leaving
already."

"You do? And why is that?"

"Because you're bored."

Ironfoot had no rejoinder to that.

"I appreciate the offer," said Ironfoot after a moment, "but as you're well
aware, I'm in the middle of something fairly important here."

"Oh, I quite agree," said Everess. "And one of my preconditions for your
coming to work at the Ministry would be that you complete that work. As
you can guess, we're more than a little interested in its outcome."

"I know," said Ironfoot. He turned away from the river and looked down
at the crater. "I'm not sure I know how I feel about potentially handing the
plans for the thing that did that over to anyone."

"If it's to be used," said Everess, "I prefer that it be used on the Unseelie
rather than us."

"Yes," said Ironfoot. "I suppose I do, too."

"Good then. When you get back to the City Emerald, I'll send you a sprite."

They stood silently together, looking down at what was once Selafae, and
then turned and walked back down the path.

Four days later it was finished. Ironfoot collected the last of the readings,
which would be mapped in the comfort of his rooms back at Queensbridge.
The tents were struck, the army guard removed. The Arcadian priests and
loved ones, kept away for so many months, streamed into the ruined citythe priests to administer beatitudes; the relatives looking for keepsakes,
bones, trinkets ... anything to remind them of what they'd lost. It was an
emotional moment, and Ironfoot had no desire to get caught up in it any further than he already was.

Returning to the Queensbridge campus was like coming home. He
couldn't remember the air in the City Emerald smelling so fresh, or the colors
being so vivid. For weeks and weeks his entire life had been gray dust and
acrid tar, and nights spent hunched over the map. Despite his urgent need to
finish the project, he was almost pleased that the minor emergencies that had
cropped up in his absence took him away from it for a time. He needed to get
some distance from it.

There were message sprites lined up against the office window, bored out
of their little minds, all of them clamoring to be the first to deliver its message and disappear. He took them all in turn, scribbling little notes to himself. A dinner invitation from a love-struck female colleague; a meeting
request from the dean that could certainly wait. And a simple message from
Lord Everess.

"He says he wants you to come over to his office and talk and so on and
so forth," said Everess's sprite.

Ironfoot took the tiny creature in hand and said, "Maybe you could just
tell him I'm busy."

The sprite's face took on an air of abused hospitality. "Well, he's not
going to be too pleased with that, I can tell you. He's a lord, you know. Very
fancy. He wears a hat and smokes a pipe. I don't see you with a hat or a pipe,
so I guess he wins. Ha!"

Ironfoot had a soft spot for message sprites, though he wasn't quite sure
why.

"You think so?" he asked. "You think I don't have a pipe and a hat
around here someplace?"

The sprite sniffed. "I know you don't because yesterday I got really bored
and I rifled through all of your stuff."

"Clever sprite."

"You think so? You really think so? Because nobody else thinks so, that's
for sure. Do you have any roast beef?"

"Excuse me?"

"I like roast beef. I like the smell of it, and I like people who like it. But
I can't eat it myself because sprites are herbivores, and it's the greatest
tragedy of my life except for when my family died that time."

"Sorry," said Ironfoot. "No roast beef."

"Darn," said the sprite.

"Go on," said Ironfoot. "Send back my message. I think I have some
parsley somewhere around here. You can have that."

"Uh, yeah, funny thing about that parsley," said the sprite, flitting up
toward the open window. "Remember what I said about rifling through your
stuff.?

Ironfoot had done every errand he could think of, returned every message,
even cleaned his apartments and straightened the papers in his office. What
was he trying to avoid? He'd been so impatient to get back to the city, and
now that he was here, he couldn't stop stalling.

The map loomed from the corner of his office. It was rolled up and stored
in a tube that was taller than he was, sealed with his own university signet.
It called to him, and part of him wanted to answer it, but part of him wanted
to set fire to it.

Why? Was this guilt? Was he worried about working on a weapon,
about providing the key to re-creating the thing? He didn't think so, to be
honest. As much as it might bother him intellectually, it didn't spur this gut reaction. Was it the eeriness of it, the smell of death and tar and gray dust
that seemed to emanate from it, even though it produced no actual scent?
No, that wasn't it, either.

He knew what it was, but couldn't admit it.

The next morning he awoke early, poured a strong cup of coffee, and
forced himself to face the map. He unrolled it in the small parlor of his apartments, where it took up the entire floor, requiring him to lug the settee into
the kitchen. He had the final measurements from the intensity gauges
stacked neatly on a small stool next to his mug. He took quill and ruler in
hand, and began working.

Once the data were entered, there were calculations to be done. These he
did on lined sheets of linen paper that he ordered specially from the campus
stationery. With each result, a new line appeared on the map. A web was
emerging, a pattern. That was good. But still, that unsettling feeling would
not leave him. The feeling was linked to that tar smell that he couldn't quite
place, the memory it spurred that he could not recall. As the pattern grew, so
did the feeling of dread inside him.

When he next looked up, the clock on the mantel read after midnight.
The fire had died down in the fireplace, and he realized that he was cold. He
stoked the fire, poured himself a whiskey, and went back to work.

He finished the formulaic interpolations around dawn. He'd lost count of
the pots of coffee he'd drunk, now measured only in the level of queasiness in
his stomach and the frequency with which he'd had to visit the privy. The
web was complete, more or less. Some of the data had been lost. Some of the
measurements, he was certain, had been faked. One region in particular was
a total loss, the readings totally inconsistent with any of the others. It had
been handled by the son of a lord whose father had pressed him into the
assignment believing that it would reinforce the boy's character. Ironfoot
could have told him that there was nothing there to reinforce.

Regardless, what he had was enough, and now the work could begin in
earnest. He copied the pattern from the map onto a new sheet of linen
paper-large, but not so big as the original map. Only the pattern remained,
with detailed figures noting the invocative spectra, the normalization factors.
The web stood in front of him, begging to be understood. It was a pattern, yes, but what did it mean? In his imagination about this moment, he'd
assumed that the answer would leap out at him at this point. These exact
physical components. This precise juggling of Elements, Motion, and Poise,
and perhaps any four other Gifts that he could theorize being involved. He
was damn clever. It should all have been there, leaping out at him. But it
wasn't. The pattern implied nothing. The pattern meant nothing. It was only
itself. It suggested things, certainly, but only impossibilities.

Ironfoot awoke. It was late afternoon. He'd fallen asleep at some point,
still contemplating the pattern, still frustrated. He opened the shades and let
the (morning? afternoon?) sun illuminate the pattern. Still nothing. He stood
it upside down. Nothing. He held it up to the window, viewing the pattern
through the back of the page. Still nothing.

It gnawed at him, this sensation that the key to its mystery was just outside his grasp. The Einswrath was an explosive-there had to be an Elements
component to it. It was a delayed reaction, so it had to use the Gift of
Binding as well. But what components? Which bindings? There was no
binding ever created to hold in that amount of Elemental force, and no way
to trigger it from such a distance. So what, then? It was right there in front
of him. So why couldn't he see it?

The dread inside had grown into a fever. This was what he'd truly been
afraid of. This was the source of the dread that had been welling up inside
him ever since he'd returned to Queensbridge.

He had the pattern complete in front of him.

And he didn't understand it.

He turned toward the wall and lashed out with his fist, making a
strangely satisfying crack in the plaster, though the pain that followed wasn't
worth it. Raw failure sunk into him like a stone through mud.

You can do better than this, came the voice from inside.