Chapter Text
It took me an appalling three hours and thirteen minutes to even realize that Kip was gone.
Ah, but that was too charitable. Once we had a timeline together, we discovered that Franzel had seen Kip last, turning in for bed at twelve minutes before midnight, and it was not until Shoänie went to wake him at dawn that anyone knew he was anything but asleep in bed. This meant that by the time the knock on my study door came, shortly past the third hour of the morning, Kip could already have been missing for more than nine hours.
Pikabe, on door duty with Ato that morning, reported, “Ser Rhodin with potential security concern, says it may be urgent.”
Huara, my current secretary, paused the dictation that she was taking at Cliopher’s desk (I really had to stop thinking of it that way) and waited.
“We will see him,” I said: concerned, but not yet alarmed.
“My lord,” Rhodin said, after we’d gotten through the formalities, “do you happen to know where Cliopher is? It may be nothing,” he added hastily, though I was already reaching out with my magic, “but he’s missed his first morning meeting, and his household says —”
The rest of his words slid past my ears as my attention poured its ways through the hallways and crevasses of the Palace of Stars. Though the Palace of Stars had thousands of occupants, I expected it to be a matter of moments nonetheless. My magic knew Kip: as like called to like, it knew itself in the tangle of spells I’d woven around him over the centuries; Zunidh knew the sharp smell of sea-salt and brine, sunlight filtering down into deep waters with unexpected currents, the sting of smoke in coals on sand, that was his connection to the Vangavaye-ve; and I, who had always reveled in the naming of things, knew enough ways to describe Kip, enough facets, that it was easy to, when my magic snagged on Ludvic (wound in his own set of protections, down by the barracks) or Gaudy (with that same root to the Vangavaye-ve, down in the Offices of State), skip over the distractions and keep questing for Kip. For Cliopher Mdang of Tahivoa, whose island was Loaloa, whose dance was Aōteketētana; Kip to his family and to me; my intrepid, competent, funny former secretary; my peerless councilor, my Hands and Lord Chancellor; my dear friend.
My magic curled around the Palace doors, questing, restless, and I paused. Then I let it spill down to Solaara.
Not in the Palace? That was odd, for Kip. Oh, he went down to Solaara now and then, or to the Liauu to hike, but not on a weekday, not in the morning, not without telling anyone where he was going —
Kip was not in Solaara, either.
I opened my eyes and met Rhodin’s gaze. His expression was grim.
The Imperial Apartments resembled a kicked anthill in under five minutes. I watched it happen in almost a daze. It reminded me distinctly of a fight I’d once been in with a dragon: its tail had whipped around and struck me in the chest, flinging me into the wall and knocking the breath out of me. I had spent enough moments just trying to catch my breath that it wasn’t until — until a friend with me cried out that I looked down and saw from the blood on me that I’d been stabbed by its spikes.
The Imperial Guard present had already doubled in number and moved to secure the Tower. This struck me as profoundly useless; if Kip was — was in trouble, then I was not about to stay politely cooped up in the Tower under heavy guard. I was the Lord Magus of Zunidh; I was —
The first step was to ascertain what had happened. It was still possible that there was a benign explanation for this. Rhodin, I knew, was descending on Kip’s rooms in force; my spymaster would gain what mundane information there was.
It had not been so long. I had seen Kip late yesterday afternoon, after a Helma Council meeting, where he had been exhausted but in good humor. He could not have gotten far. Hostile magic could not be cast on Kip without setting off the protections that I had laid on him; the nearest Border was two days’ travel away and would not open for a week yet; the nearest Border that would open today was six days’ travel even for me, with all the resources in the world at my fingertips. If he was still in Zunidh, and he must still be in Zunidh, then I could find him.
I told Huara, “I’ll be entering a deep trance. Send for Conju and bring him up to speed, and ask him for assistance waking me out of the trance if any news comes.”
I didn’t bother with my usual setup, but I did have enough presence of mind to sink into my chair as I sank into the deep trance. This would not be a quick or cursory search, and coming out of the deep trance was disorienting at the best of times, which this was not.
Earlier I had blown through the palace like a breeze; now I worked slower, more methodically, beginning in the Tower and working my way down in circles, hunting for Kip but also for strange magic, gaps and oddities.
I heard Conju, in the dressing room fussing with my clothes, say, “What do you mean, Cliopher is missing?” as I traced the layers and layers of remnant magic in the Tower, like layers of bark on a tree, from a millenium of spells I had cast, and found only my own magic.
I prowled round the circumference of Cliopher’s rooms, tracing out the boundary of the spells for safety, for security, for privacy. As I poured over the threshold of the main entrance, I heard Gaudy, in the antechamber, say, “I’ll check his desk, see if he received an urgent message, something that would have called him away,” and Tulliantha reply, “Surely one of the footmen would know about it? Or he would have left a message? Has anyone checked the infirmary?” My spells to repel unauthorized entrance were strong and unbroken, and I moved on.
I had not, however, thought to do anything with the secret passage. I stared at it with my mind’s eye. Stupid of me, stupid, stupid —
Two rooms over, Féonie wailed, “But all of his clothes are still here!”
Shoänie said, “Even his —”
“Even his grass skirt! All his shoes, even his house slippers. The only thing that’s gone are the nightclothes he was wearing. He didn’t even get dressed this morning!”
The entry to the secret passage was inert to my eyes: no sign of any magic, and no sign of the snarling twists that strong emotion could tangle into the fabric of the world. Such as I would expect there to be if one of Kip’s enemies — or one of mine — had broken in through it and taken —
The fear was rising in me now; I could not keep it back. I let it carry me instead, turned it into a flood of power that poured through the cracks and chinks of the Palace. I rode the flood out through Solaara, down through the Fens, out along the curve of the train tracks, let my magic run out ahead of me like hunting dogs, chasing a scent.
My magic caught and snagged on someone on the sea train a day or two out from Solaara. Not Kip, but with that same smell of sea salt, coals on sand, a boat rocked on stormy waters sense of the Vangavaye-ve, the sensory experience of it even more similar to Kip’s than Gaudy’s was. Older, I thought; the rhythm of this stranger was a slower rumble to Kip’s crisp staccato, reliable enough to set a metronome by. I detangled my magic and flowed onwards.
Nothing — nothing — nothing — and how could there be nothing? How could Kip be nowhere, how could I be failing so utterly at finding Kip — Kip, of all people? I was out clear to Amboloyo and Xiputl, which was a twelve hour trip on a sky ship. He could not possibly be further out than this, and yet he wasn’t anywhere within this circumference. My magic was pushing me faster and faster, sweeping me along with it, and I could not get careless and could not be hasty, Kip needed me to be precise but there were oceans and oceans of nothing, where the fuck could he even be?
I swept down into the Vangavaye-ve, on the other side of the world, into a roiling cacophony of people with the exact same roots as Kip, all fifty-nine first cousins and the whole rest of the tribe. I skimmed through them as fast as I could, for he could not be here but I still needed to check, but there was nobody entangled in my magic the way Kip was; they were all dark of magic or dim candlelights of their own small powers, not the glitter of starlight and flame that I’d entangled around Kip.
My magic reached itself at the opposite point on the other side of the planet. I held all of Zunidh between my two palms, and Kip was nowhere on it.
I had to resist the urge to shake the world until it rattled, as if Kip would pop out of some secret crevasse if enough force was applied. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know where else to look.
I don’t know how long I hung there, turning the world over and over again between my palms as if the result would change if I just waited, stupid and sluggish and useless, before the scent of jasmine touched my nose, my real nose, of my physical body. Conju, calling me back.
I obeyed the summons, locating myself again in physical space, in a body that was stiff with disuse, aching and old, and I hung there, half-in and half-out of the deep trance, while I drew my power back to me, reeling the far-flung strands of it in.
“— a couple of minutes,” Conju said. I observed him more from above my body than inside it. He stood on one side of my desk, with the little vial of scent he’d used to call me back placed on the table under my nose. “Perhaps he will have better news.”
He spoke to Rhodin and Ludvic, I saw, who both stood a couple of feet further from the desk, Rhodin in his panopoly and Ludvic in civilian wear. They both wore grim expressions, and from the glance they exchanged, I could tell they already knew that no news was not good news.
Ludvic said, in an undertone, “You’ve sent someone to…”
Rhodin nodded.
Conju turned from fussing with my desk. “To what?”
“Just some due diligence,” Rhodin said airily. His gaze darted, for the briefest of moments, to me.
“To what, Rhodin,” Conju said, voice sharpening.
Rhodin and Ludvic looked at each other again.
I was drawing the last of my power in. I felt stretched thin and rather wobbly, like taffy pulled too taut. I hadn’t ever tried to hold that much of Zunidh in my attention at one time before, and my body had a headache brewing.
Ludvic said gently, “To check the morgue, Conju.”
I recoiled straight out of my body. The lights in my study went dark then flared bright. Rhodin and Ludvic’s gazes both shot directly to the body at the Imperial Desk.
Conju said, for both of us, “No. Absolutely not. There is no way Cliopher is —”
Kip wasn’t. He could not be. I would have felt my protections on him trigger. I would have known the moment I woke up this morning. I would have felt the heart of my world be ripped out of it.
Rhodin said, to Conju, to me, “It’s unlikely anyone could have harmed Kip without setting off the protections his Radiancy has on him, but we have to be certain. It’s just to eliminate the possibility.”
The last thing I had said to Kip yesterday was, “Well, now that you’ve achieved the hitherto unimaginable feat of concluding a Helma Council meeting in under three hours, what’s next on your agenda, my lord Mdang? Winning over the Council of Princes?”
The last thing Kip had said to me, with a prim face and laughing eyes, was, “Oh, you know I try to stick to achievable goals, my lord. Things like world peace, ending global poverty…”
And I had laughed, and we had gone our separate ways.
That was not — it could not be — the last thing that I —
Ludvic said, “My lord?”
I —
You settled yourself back in your body. You opened your eyes. You said, “Ser Rhodin, your report?”
“So in conclusion,” you said, “Cliopher is most assuredly missing, but all the evidence seems to indicate that he simply vanished from his bed in the middle of the night, in his nightclothes, with no evidence of foul play.” You paced as you talked, that habitual path around your study, and did not flinch every time when you turned to see Cliopher’s desk empty.
(Oh, it was shameful how easy I found it to sink back under you. I’d started to slide into you now and then after I finished the Lights, after I saw my work, my penance, the restoration of Zunidh after the Fall, start to finally come to an end, and understood that my sentence was one for life nonetheless. Until Ludvic had rebutted that, at the vacation, and I’d seen the path to freedom. I hadn’t needed you since then. But Kip needed someone focused and sharp and steady to lead the search efforts, and I was none of those things right now. I was — I was —)
Rhodin saluted crisply. “Yes, my lord.” A mid-conversation salute was slightly more formal than his usual. (Had I frightened him when my magic had caused the lights to flicker?) He told you, “It would be difficult to Cliopher to have left through the front door, whether under his own will or not, without members of his household seeing him. From the accounts of individuals’ movements we’ve received from the household members, I believe it would require at least two, if not three, individuals to have been suborned and working together, or to have been convinced by Cliopher to conceal his movements, even from us.”
You said, “The secret passage may be a more promising avenue of exploration. I… realized when doing the magical inspection that I forgot to place protections against intrusion on that entrance. I saw no signs of a struggle there, but…”
Rhodin nodded. “I will investigate it and the areas immediately surrounding the exits as soon as possible, my lord.” He hesitated. “Prior to this point, we have treated the secret passageway with a high level of operational security, but…” He flicked a glance at Conju, who had his arms crossed and a tight furrow in his brow, listening to this official briefing from my spymaster. The proper protocol here would have been to have sent him away before discussing this, but obviously I wasn't going to do that. “In instances where maintaining tight operational security around the existence of the tunnel conflicts with the ability to pursue the investigation with all speed, how would you like me to resolve said conflict?”
You could see from his expression that he knew as well as you did that there was only one answer to give; but the forms had to be obeyed, nonetheless. You said, “Please prioritize the effectiveness and speed of the investigation at all times, Ser Rhodin.”
You went on, “I will consider whether there could be magical protections shielding Cliopher from my sight. It would take a powerful and canny mage, but there are a few who might be able to manage it.” The Lord of Ysthar had a slight edge on me in both power and skill. I suspected Circe of Aiaia, who had nearly beaten him in the Great Game Aurieleteer, was somewhere near that same level. And there were a few others, the Lord Magus of Colhélhé, the Mother of Mountains maybe, though I didn’t think she would. There were likely a couple I did not know about who were canny enough that they, like the Lord of Ysthar, were capable of concealing the extent of their powers from me. “I do not think it would be possible for anyone to have made it to a Border in the time since Cliopher’s disappearance, but…”
“I have a few of the guards mapping potential routes,” Ludvic said. “I’ll check their findings and report back.”
You nodded crisply. There was that one avenue left to consider. “We would hope that Cliopher could not have… come to harm without our becoming aware of it from the protections we laid on him, but we will consider whether it is possible to… detect, magically, if we are wrong about that.”
Rhodin looked at Ludvic, who looked at Conju. Conju swallowed. None of them looked at you.
“Or if it could be possible for a sufficiently talented mage to have removed the protections, which may have confused my magical search for him.” Your pacing was picking up in speed, carrying you across the floor in swift sharp movements. And every time you turned the corner, your household, your guards on the door, the desk taunting you.
“My lord…” Conju said, and then hesitated.
Your footsteps, tracing their habitual path, wearing the track a little deeper into the stone every time. This room had not felt so much like a cage in a long time.
“Would you like some tea? Some ginger cookies?” was what Conju settled on.
Eat? Now? When Kip was — “No,” you said curtly. The guards, again, doubled-up, four of them standing uselessly on the doorway. Three of them standing uselessly, rather, one of them speaking with someone outside the study. Catching your gaze as he withdrew back into your study, Ato said, “There are several visitors in your reception room, my lord. The Princess of Xiputl, for a previously scheduled meeting.”
You could not tolerate your great-aunt today. “We are not taking any scheduled meetings today.”
“Huara, with some questions about your schedule.”
Your schedule? Your schedule? Ah, but once again the forms had to be obeyed, didn’t they. She could not simply take the liberty of canceling your entire day for you, despite the fact that you’d already missed, according to the bells, three straight hours of meetings in the deep trance. You repeated, “We are not taking any scheduled meetings today.”
He went on, “Also, Sayo Aioru, to discuss the protocols for the lord chancellor’s disappearance.” He hesitated. “Gaudenius Vawen has not asked to be presented, but is sitting in with the pages, my lord.”
Where any news or urgent messages would come first, but where he would not be in the way. Oh, you could at least do better for him than that. You said, “Tell him he may sit in in here if he would prefer. He is of course also welcome to remain with the pages. We will see Sayo Aioru after he is settled.”
Gaudy did not prefer to remain with the pages. “My lord!” he said as he entered your study, dropping into an obeisance. He started to come out of it even before you made the signal to rise, eyes lifting to yours: “What’s happened? Is there any news?”
(How I wished I had something, anything, to tell him.)
“Not yet,” you said. “We are doing everything in our power to find him.”
Gaudy’s mouth worked for a moment before he blurted out, “It couldn’t just — he couldn’t have just — gotten called away somewhere and forgotten to leave a note?”
Wouldn’t that be nice. Some remnant sensibilities from the days before you were Emperor agreed, and said that twelve hours was not nearly so long a time to be missing to require this degree of fuss, that Kip was off having an adventure and he would be back before you knew it.
The many years of bitter experience as Emperor said that for Kip to have vanished this completely this quickly, the odds were very high that either he himself had planned and executed a meticulous campaign to disappear off the map, or someone who was extraordinarily skilled and motivated had taken him, someone who both understood the lengths I would go to to get him back and was capable of countering me. I thought — Kip knew, he had to know, he had said he knew back in the Vangavaye-ve, that I would never try to hold him if he wanted to leave — and if it was not me he was hiding from, then surely he would tell somebody, tell me, before leaving if he had gone voluntarily, from a sense of duty at the very least. Kip would not want to miss his meetings unexpectedly; he would not want to cause a fuss. (He would not want to frighten me like this.)
You said, as gently as you could, “I’m afraid that’s unlikely.” You didn’t want to say it, but it was the truth, and Kip’s nephew deserved to know it: “I cannot currently find him anywhere on Zunidh with my power.”
“Oh,” Gaudy said blankly. He was even worse at hiding his expressions than Kip had been when he first came to your service, so you could see him putting the pieces together, could see him starting to reason through the kind of people or situations that could cause the Lord Chancellor of Zunidh to disappear so completely that the Lord Magus of that world could not find him. “Is — will he —” Gaudy bit his tongue.
You wanted to tell him that certainly Cliopher would be fine. I wanted to tell him that I would rip the world in half if that what it took to find Kip and bring him home. Neither you nor I could tell him any such thing. You knew — I knew — that sometimes people left and they did not come back. That it was perfectly possible to be snatched by magic surrounded by friends, and to be taken and trapped, and to not be found.
You repeated, “We are doing everything in our power to find him.” Rhodin and Ludvic had already left, Rhodin to continue his investigation and Ludvic to check on routes to Borders. Conju had stayed and was fussing over your desk now, pretending not to listen to this conversation. You went on, “You are welcome to stay and observe the investigation, if you would like; all information will be coming here.”
Conju coughed and said, “Perhaps, my lord, you would find the Peacock room a more comfortable one to await and organize reports in?” You did not care about comfort, but from the look Conju flicked to Gaudy you could admit that a room with more than two chairs would be convenient. And the Peacock room was right next to the room you usually used for works of magic.
“Very well,” you said. “I will join you there once I have spoken with Sayo Aioru.”
Aioru was, thankfully, both quick and competent. Not that you should have been surprised by this; you knew that Kip was considering him as his successor (for once he retired, and no sooner), and Kip wouldn’t pick anyone but the best, but your patience already was worn as thin as the finest threads Conju used to embroider with, and it was a relief to dismiss him and go to the Peacock room and check for any news.
It had only been around ten minutes, but that was time enough for Ludvic to return and confirm what you and he had both already known, which was that not enough time had passed for Kip to have been spirited through a Border to one of the other eight worlds. But at least you now had paperwork to confirm it!
I did not throw the paperwork against the wall; it was too lightweight to provide a satisfying thump anyways. Conju spirited it away and said, as several servers came out with trays, “Did you eat breakfast today, Ludvic? Gaudy? Have something light for lunch at least, it won’t do for you to collapse mid-afternoon.”
From the way he was not quite looking at you, you knew this was more than half directed at you, except that Conju could not boss you around directly. You were not hungry; you did not want to eat fucking charcuterie off of gold-rimmed plates in this sitting room with its sumptuous couches and intricate wallpaper while Kip was in trouble.
(I wanted to rip the chandelier out of the ceiling. I wanted to shred that gorgeous wallpaper with my fingernails. I wanted to know where Kip was so that I could go get him, so that I could rain fire and fury down on whoever it was who had taken him, so that I could bring him home safe.)
You said, “I will go back into the deep trance and continue the search.” For whatever good you could do, when you had come up so comprehensively empty earlier. But it was the most productive thing you could think to do, and you could not do nothing.
Conju cleared his throat. “Some water first, perhaps, my lord?” There were sharper words, you could see, lurking under the surface in him. But Conju was not Kip, and he did not like even the petty treasons that Kip stuck to; he would not come to knock on the door of your private study even after you dismissed him because he thought you were in pain. Conju kept his concerns wrapped up in a courtly fashion, and so you could use courtly language to dismiss them.
He was, perhaps, not entirely wrong that sustenance could be useful before dropping back into another trance. You drank half a cup of water and ate a piece of cheese and then retreated to the room where you worked magic, leaving the door open.
You remembered to say, “Wake me if news comes,” before dropping yourself under.
Your power had been twisting and pulling at the reins ever since you had come out of the earlier deep trance. I let it go, let it spring free of me and flood out. This time I had three things to look for. The first: mages or magic strong enough to conceal Kip from my sight.
The Ouranatha: none of them individually strong enough, but working together, possibly. My power found a young initiate, surrounded by texts with a pen stuck behind one ear, carefully and slowly piecing together a gleaming machine of a spell for filtering smoke from air (Kip would approve); an older man earnestly entreating his fellows with tales of the splendor that could come to them if they were able to summon and bind a phoenix to them; the newly appointed high priests, arguing in a private office about what would occur if the Lord Chancellor had not returned before the purification rituals were to begin in a week and if they could safely shorten some of the intervals later on to make up lost time.
Nothing relevant. I moved on.
“I’ll tell it to the Lord of Ysthar,” a woman said to the Voonran consul, a saying I had always enjoyed. On a whim I pushed my attention out further even than Zunidh, skipping my mind like a skipping stone across the distance to Ysthar, which was wavering and uncertain under my attention, not my world, but I had met the Lord of Ysthar there before, and with a moment’s fiddling at it, trying to keep the connection from slipping out out my hands like soap, I landed squarely on him. He sat in a cafe with a man who looked very like him, saying, “If our parents want to see me, they can come here, I know you’ve told them I’m alive.” The other man sighed and said, “Raphael, please —”
I lost the connection, fell back to Zunidh. Just as well; nobody not on Zunidh could have done this.
My magic snagged on a girl in Epapalona with one blue eye and one brown, burgeoning power growing around her, an incipient great mage. She explained to an older man, “And so you take the tovo and the tanaea and together you make fire —”
The Mother of Mountains, listening intently to a weeping nun, who cried, “And I truly don’t know what’s to be done with him; he’ll lose the leg entire if we can’t —”
Nothing, nothing, nothing.
There could not be nothing. Kip could not be nowhere; Kip had to be somewhere, and if he was somewhere, then I could find him; I was not looking in the right places.
I flung my power out to the Vangavaye-ve and went through the whole of it again, slower this time. Last time I had relied on the taste of my magic to determine that Kip was not here, but my protections were not an intrinsic part of Kip, and could be removed. (By what great mage? But by a god, perhaps; I knew Kip did have the eye of at least one god on him.) This time I hunted for Kip’s sly humor, for his stubborn persistence, for that polite court face he used to hide his fire. I hunted for that passion that flared out of him around the postal service and poverty and common and ordinary goods, for his enduring interest in people and systems and the ways that people worked in and around said systems, for the way he smiled at me.
I caught echoes, slanting notes of familiarity. Here was the stubbornness in one person, the passion in another, the humor in a third. But everybody was too much of one aspect or too little of another; nobody had all the notes correct; their chords were half a note flat or half a note sharp, not quite right and jarring in the dissonance. A whole cacophonous chorus of Mdangs, but the entire orchestra lacked Kip’s particular melody.
It had always been a long shot, but I was beginning to run low on ideas again, besides Rhodin’s — but no.
I let the wind of my magic blow in what direction it would, trusting to instinct and the intuition of a wild mage to carry me for the moment. It listened for news, for Kip’s name on peoples’ lips, and came back with:
“— Mdang, missing?” Prince Rufus demanded, slamming a hand down on the desk. “What a coward’s move. Does nobody respect an honest political opponent these days? You don’t see me moving against him under the shroud of night — when I disagree with him, I do it in broad —”
“— Lord Chancellor,” a cook in one of the Palace kitchens said to the woman next to her. “I hope they find the man; he’s one of the good ones, and there’s not many of those in politics —”
“— Mdang? Good riddance,” scoffed Lord Demetrius, one of Princess Oriana’s circle at court. The person he spoke to shook his head and said, “You say that now, but reserve your judgment until the heads finish rolling. You know the Glorious One’s going to want to make an example of those responsible —”
“— Cliopher,” Ludvic said. He stood in one of the smaller private rooms in the Imperial Apartments, talking to Kiri Kalikiri. (An odd place for Ludvic to be having a meeting, I thought.) They both had tight, set faces.
“Yes,” she said, “is there anything I can do to help? Aioru came up to speak with the Glorious One already, I know; we’re doing our best to keep everything off his plate.”
Ludvic said, “I have been thinking.”
“Yes?” Kiri said. She was too drawn to be encouraging, exactly.
“I have been thinking,” Ludvic said, “about what questions Cliopher would be asking, and what counsel he would be providing, were he here and it a different member of the Imperial Household who had gone missing.” He hesitated. “Can He afford to be absent from the day-to-day of government operation for a time, with Cliopher gone?”
I understood, now, why this meeting was happening in the Imperial Apartments, where I maintained the spells for privacy myself.
“Yes,” Kiri said immediately, which was good, because if I had to sit in a meeting of the Council of Princes today I did not think even you had the patience to avoid turning someone into a chair. “Not forever, but for a while, yes. Everybody knows — that is to say, nobody expects him to be engaged in government work until Lord Mdang comes back to us.”
“At what point would it be a problem?”
Kiri hesitated. “Three weeks, a month, the princes would start to maneuver. Under the guise of helping Lord Mdang, probably.”
Like hell was I leaving Kip in some enemy’s hands for three weeks to a month.
Kiri, clearly thinking along the same lines, burst out, “Surely the situation isn’t — isn’t tenable for that long? You don’t think —”
“I think,” Ludvic said, “that if he was still on this world, that his Radiancy would have found him by now, and he hasn’t. So even though I don’t see how he could have gotten to another world, I can’t rule it out as a possibility. And if Cliopher is on another world, then time differentials will pose… a challenge.”
Fuck. I had not thought about the time differentials at all.
Ysthar would be all right, time there ran faster than Zunidh if not quite as fast as it had in the immediate days after the Fall, but Voonra or Colhélhé… or even worse, Alinor. It was the closest border, time there could run anywhere from one month in Alinor to one year here, and the only stable Border to return back to Zunidh opened once every six months. If Kip had been taken to Alinor, I could not go myself, not with the worst-case scenario of not making it back for years, but what was the alternative? Send Rhodin or Ludvic and — and wait? Wait for years, maybe, not knowing the entire time if Kip was well, if he was in trouble, if he needed me —
I couldn’t do it. It had only been six hours and already I was coming undone at the seams. Hadn’t I sacrificed enough at the altar of the world? My poetry, my freedom, my name? I couldn’t bear this too.
You could. I had created you to endure the things that I could not, to wear the face of serenity when I was falling to pieces.
(Was there much point to me without Kip anyway?)
Enough. Enough. These were foolish and pointless hypotheticals. How could Kip be in Alinor anyways when the nearest Border was a two days trip and it had not even been a full twenty-four hours yet? I needed information. I needed something, anything, to go off of.
(That was an unfair question, maybe. I was fairly sure my household liked me and not just you; my old friends wanted me — or rather Fitzroy Angursell, I suppose; Pali had found me entirely wanting in that regard.
Kip was the only person, in the last thirty or a thousand years, to have told me that he loved me: me, the person who I was today, and not the person that I had once been.)
The simplest explanation at this point was Rhodin’s: Kip was already dead and that was how he had been obscured from my sight.
I could still — that was not what I had been looking for, before, but I thought my magic could still find — the physical space he took up in the world would still be the same; the curve of his nose; the ever-present ink stains on the side of his index finger. I could scry for anything in Zunidh so long as I could define what it was I was looking for.
I had seen — I had seen bodies before; I could — extrapolate — you could extrapolate what Cliopher would look like if —
Your power cracked out of you like a whip, like a wildfire. You poured yourself out of yourself. You were an artist of magic by now, you almost never chose to simply throw power at the problem any longer, but that did not mean that you did not know how to do it.
Your power swept across the whole of Zunidh, hunting, hunting, hunting for that image in your mind of the shape Kip’s body would make in the world without the animating breath or spark or light in his eyes. You surged and flowed across oceans and continents until you covered the whole world.
Nothing, nothing, nothing.
You let the image go. I was dizzy with relief, reeling as my magic rebounded into me, every thread of it repeating that same certainty: nothing, nothing, nothing.
The smell of roses. Conju. News?
My body was stiff; my body was dizzy; my body was —
“— too long,” Conju said.
Ludvic’s voice said, “He’s gone longer than this in trances before.”
“Yes, but not for years, and not four months after recovering from a heart attack,”Conju said tersely. “He’s sweated through his overrobe. Something’s wrong.”
Why was Conju worried about me? I was fine. Kip was the one who needed worrying about. Kip was the one who needed help.
If there wasn’t any news then I wasn’t done yet. I ignored the roses, pushed myself back into the deep trance, went deeper to ignore the faint summons back to my physical self.
If Kip was magically hidden from my sight, perhaps whoever had done it had not thought to hide his belongings in the same way. For instance: the necklace Kip always wore. (At least, I thought it was always; he had never told me about it and usually wore it beneath his shirt, but it had slid out now and again over the nine hundred years of working together, and once I knew it was there I started to notice all the moments where he would reach for it and then stop himself.)
The pendant was obsidian, chipped —
— and my attention snagged on, incongruously, an obsidian knife, carried in Gaudy’s writing kit like a totem, as he said, voice cracking, “They’re all so — calm. How can they be so calm?”
Tulliantha wrapped an arm around his shoulders. The two of them were sitting side-by-side on the floor in a spare room out by the pages, with Zaoul sitting cross-legged opposite them.
Zaoul said quietly, “They may be less so than they appear on the surface. You know how the court is.”
Gaudy hissed, “The Imperial Apartments aren’t court!” as he pushed his hands into his hair. Over his head, Tulliantha and Zaoul exchanged a look that visibly said of course they are, but neither of them said anything. Gaudy went on, voice rising, “Commander Omo and Ser Rhodin spent half an hour going over the hostage negotiation protocols earlier — which basically boil down to ‘don’t do it,’ and which Uncle Kip wrote, of course — and Lord Conju kept trying to offer me fruit juice. Fruit juice!”
I could see, now that it was somebody else on the receiving end, that fretting over everybody was possibly Conju’s only outlet for the terror he most certainly felt on Kip’s behalf. It was not his realm to parse through the knowledge from informants or ensure the security protocols were executed or magically search for Kip; what he did best was make our lives, my life, as comfortable and convenient as possible, by, for instance, ensuring that we had food that could be eaten quickly and without losing focus on what we were doing.
Gaudy, of course, had no particular reason to know that. The only interaction he’d had with my household that I knew of had been through Kip —
Gaudy said, “Even —”
Or me. Gaudy knew me, from our language lessons.
“Even?” Tulliantha asked after a moment.
But I had not talked to him, had I? I had let you talk to him, from behind that thick dividing wall of the imperial serenity.
Gaudy shook his head once and said nothing. After a long moment, he whispered, “What am I supposed to tell my mom?”
I flinched away from the conversation. Kip would be fine. I would find him. There was no other acceptable outcome
I was the Lord Magus of Zunidh, and I would bend this world to my will.
I reached out, blanketing Zunidh in my magic, and kept going east. Alinor refused to be mapped in the same way, sliding out of my grip, and I tried to pin it down: Alinor, Jullanar’s homeland —
— a teenage girl crunched sullenly on a ginger cookie and said, “They’re fighting again,” to an older boy — I was getting distracted — the smell of roses was strengthening in my nostrils and I ignored it, pushed it back, reached out for Kip and found —
— a boy of twelve or so with brown skin and blue eyes and a sharp quick interest in his gaze that was familiar said, “Tell me about Vou’a and Ani again,” and the older man with him, not Kip but another member of the Mdang symphony with that clear bright tether back to the Vangavaye-ve opened his mouth and said —
“— can’t think when Kip will be home again,” Eidora Mdang sniffed, putting a pot down into the sink only just gently enough not to bang it. “Three visits in a year, we all got so hopeful, but now —”
— Not Zunidh, Alinor or Ysthar or — the floral scent was drowning me my body calling but I could not answer I needed — nothing, there was nothing to find, nothing to hold onto, vast continents sliding out of my fingertips like soap-slick plates — but Kip was somewhere, he had to be somewhere — Voonra maybe or —
The most pungent scent I have ever had the misfortune to smell ripped me physically out of my deep trance and shoved me straight back into my aching, bleary body. I sneezed three times in rapid succession and managed not to fall over, but it was a near thing.
“News?” I croaked, or maybe you croaked, though croaking wasn’t a very dignified thing for an emperor to do.
Conju, crouching in front of me with a pinched expression, didn’t answer. Ludvic, standing behind him in the doorway, said, “Nothing yet.” I could see Gaudy behind him, trying to pretend that he wasn’t standing on tiptoes to peer over Ludvic’s shoulder.
I took a moment, you took a moment, to gather your words. You could not speak hastily. Speaking hastily hurt people. “Why have you woken us?” That was wrong, too formal for your household, but you needed the formality to remain in control. Only Gaudy was standing behind Ludvic, trying to pretend that he wasn’t standing on tiptoes to peer over at me, and I hadn’t wanted to disappear into you again. My head throbbed.
Conju swallowed and said, “My lord, I was afraid for you. You did not look well, and… when you did not respond to the first summons, I feared something had gone amiss.” He sank into an obeisance.
You gestured him up and said, “I am well, Conju.” Was that a lie? You preferred not to lie, I preferred to be precise with my language, but you could not say that it did not matter whether I was well or not. The emperor’s well-being was always paramount. I was not meant to care more about somebody else’s well-being than my own. The forms, as always, had to be obeyed. I was not meant to sacrifice for other people, or at least not visibly; I could sacrifice almost anything dear to me so long as the you the Lord of Ten Thousand Titles, that golden god, could look untouched by it, so that the court could take pride in your glamor and your glory, so that they never had to look at me.
Fuck that.
You said, “I will,” trying to think, trying to figure out the next step, something, anything you could do that would actually be useful, that would get you somewhere, “review any information that Rhodin’s gathered.”
“My lord,” Conju said to the floor, having not yet come out of his obeisance, “will you eat first?”
“I’m not hungry. Please get up, Conju.”
Conju did not get up. He said, “Rhodin is still synthesizing and processing the leads. Will you not rest while he does that?” You could see his throat work when he swallowed. “Would it not be better for you to be rested and able to react quickly once we do get news?”
I had not actually thought Conju would go this far. My Cavalier, the strictest adherent to protocol and the customs of my innermost household?
It surprised me enough that I said what I actually thought, which was, “Am I supposed to just sit and do nothing while Kip’s in trouble?”
"Not nothing, my lord,” Conju told the floor. This was where he drew the line? This of all places? Conju, who could not tolerate calling me by name or allow even a single paper to be out of alignment on my desk? “Reserving your energy.”
I said, “You have no idea how far my energy can go.” You sealed off my throat before I could say anything more, forced your lungs to inhale and exhale on a careful count of five, three times in a row.
Conju, still deep in his obeisance, was trembling very slightly.
Your stomach cramped with a hot flare of nausea. You said with your serene and placid voice, “Of course you are right, Conju. We will —” Not the formal plural. Conju could easily read displeasure in that. “I will —” I will what?
You were aware of Gaudy watching this spectacle. (Why had I thought I should talk to Gaudy? I was in no fit state to talk to anyone, not if I had forgotten one of my oldest lessons: that an emperor’s anger was a blade that cut unacceptably deep.)
You ought to allow Conju to draw you back into the flow of the day. I could not do that. You needed to reassert control, to keep your head, to tend to your aching head. I needed — I needed —
You said, “I will take a break,” and stood, with careful precision, on one leg that tingled with pins and needles. Your head swam. Still: you had done worse. You kept your face on, you walked with smooth precision, you did not stumble or swear or run.
You walked to the door of my private study, and I shut the door on you and on my guards and on the rest of the world. I shut myself back into my oubliette. My gaze fell on the tray with glasses and a bottle of wine that I had cleaned myself and restocked after Kip came to me the day I had seen Pali.
I picked up the tray and threw the entire thing at the wall with all my strength, and gloried in the tremendous clattering of glass and liquid. I sat on the floor. I watched the wine seep and drip into the carpet.
If I was shaking, there was nobody there to see it. I did not weep. That was good, as there was no Kip here to come and hold me this time.
Here was a dilemma: I did not allow the Emperor to follow me into my private study, but being in there with myself was equally wretched company. Some Lord Magus I was. Some friend.
I did not know how long I sat there in my private study, mind twisting in circles around itself, before the knock on the door came.
I lurched to my feet and yanked the door open.
It was Ludvic. “No news,” he said immediately.
You absorbed that blow in silence. “What is it, then, Commander Omo?”
Ludvic met your gaze squarely. “If Cliopher were here, this is the time when I would be knocking on his door and telling him that you needed him. I am not Cliopher, but I am here.”
You considered him. Steady, reliable Ludvic held still and awaited your verdict. He did not look away from your eyes, and did not flinch, and did not sweat or tremble. Still, you were not at all certain that you ought to let him in.
But he was here, and he had knocked.
“You should know I am poor company at the moment, Commander Omo,” you said.
“I would be surprised if you were not.” There was a pause where Ludvic carefully swallowed the ‘my lord’ that would normally reside at the end of the sentence. He said, “But a wise man once advised me that I ought to act in the office of friendship with my friends, and I do not think that extends only to when the friend is in good humor.”
I stepped out of the doorway and let him in. Against my better judgment, for I had no serenity in me at this moment, and Ludvic was not wrong to imply that I wanted Kip and not him, and that combination was dangerous to him. A drowning man could not be picky about his choice of life preservers, but still I knew that Ludvic and Kip deserved a better friend than this hollow shell of a man who would swallow everything they could give and had bare scraps to give in return.
Kip would not like it, probably, if he could hear that thought. Kip always looked at me like I was real, like I was a person, like I was a person that he liked, and when he did it made it easier to believe it of myself — to like myself. My sense of humor was far subtler than it once had been, but I liked it for the way I could slide a joke past most people but see Kip biting back laughter at it. My sense of duty was a shackle that had bound me to my oubliette, but Kip respected and admired me for it, and I could understand why when I thought about the way Kip heard the call of freedom and yet stayed in Solaara to shoulder the weight of the world with me instead. I did not like being Artorin Damara, I did not always like Artorin Damara, but I could like being Kip’s Tor.
It was difficult, with how useless I had so far been in this situation and without Kip here to hold that gentler mirror up to me, to find any part of myself worth salvaging at all right now.
Ludvic had followed me inside the study and let the door close behind him, but he did not speak. He waited.
I observed, “You say that you would be knocking on Cliopher’s door and telling him that I needed him as if it is something you have done before.” I was cognizant enough of who I was that I was able to avoid phrasing it as a question. My jaw tightened at the necessity of it, here in this one room that was mine where the emperor was not welcome.
Ludvic said, “When Domina Black came, and after you sent him away. He was… reluctant to go against that dismissal, at first.”
“Was he?” I had neither the desire nor the current ability to detangle the complex little bundle of emotions that rose in me at that. I inquired, “What did you say to convince him?” Kip could be very difficult to move once he had set himself in a direction.
Ludvic didn’t answer me for a moment. His voice was painfully gentle when he said, “I asked him how deeply he loves you.”
I could more easily have borne being stabbed. I covered my face with my hands, pressing hard to try and keep my hands from shaking. I croaked, “I don’t know how to do this without him.”
“I know,” Ludvic said quietly.
“Do you?” It slipped out before I could stop it. I did my best to mask the way I wiped my eyes as I let my hands drop, but I couldn’t look at Ludvic.
Ludvic never spoke hastily. I envied him that sometimes. He said, “It is different, but… I find myself looking to Cliopher when I am not sure how to set my own path. After — after Woodlark, I did not know what to do, how to help, only that I wished to do something.”
I did turn back, then, and gave him my full attention. We never spoke, he and I, of Woodlark; of what we had done there and what he had lost.
“He had been working on the Indrogan Estates then, and I had heard him talk again and again about what communities need to thrive: a gathering place, knowledge and tools… I bought a bar, a tool library, and a book library down in the Levels. It gave me something to do, when the memories weighed heavy.” From the darkness in his eyes, I knew that the memories still weighed as heavily on him as they did on me.
My throat hurt. “Ludvic,” I said.
Ludvic looked up at me and then shook his head once. “I never told Cliopher about it. I didn’t… I didn’t know until the priests came for me, until I saw his face, that he… and then still I did not tell him about it.” His voice was nearly forlorn. It was a bleak sound.
“You think he’s —” Still I could not say it.
Ludvic said, “I do not know what I think. If we were looking in the right places, I think we should have already found him, dead or alive.”
“Where else is there to look?” I demanded. There was no room to pace in here. I tapped my fingers against my desk instead. “He’s not on Zunidh. Rhodin’s checking all the paths out of the palace and through any borders. I looked for a b-body and didn’t find one.” I had to spit the word out, but I managed it. “It’s as if a god spirited him away to the Sea of Stars.”
Then I actually heard what I’d just said. I stopped tapping my fingers. I turned the idea over in my head.
Ludvic said slowly, “He’s attracted the attention of gods before.”
We looked at each other.
I tried to tamp down the rising swell of hope and think. A wild theory, compelling though it might be, wasn’t good enough. We needed something more concrete. What we needed was —
“I need to inspect his rooms,” I said. “I have an idea.”
Nobody protested when I ejected the entirety of Kip’s household and also five of Rhodin’s men from Kip’s private rooms. On the contrary, they huddled right outside of the door that I’d deemed an acceptable boundary, watching me with eyes huge with hope. Your gaze slid smoothly away from them, unflinching.
I considered Kip’s sitting room and said, “You’re certain this is the spot he vanished from?”
Rhodin said, “Certain? No. But I do believe it to be the most-likely explanation to what would have caused Cliopher to drop his pen mid-word. He left an ink streak on his letter, my lord.”
I had seen Kip refuse to acknowledge princes and priests and, well, me until he finished writing down a train of thought, so I had to agree that was fairly conclusive. “Very well,” I said, “stand back by the door.” I had worked with time before, of course, with the Lights, but that had always been in service of altering the way it flowed presently, not touching the past or future, and I didn’t want to drop anybody eighteen hours in the past by mistake.
Rhodin joined Ludvic and my guards there, all of whom looked deeply unhappy to have been ordered to stand back out of the way of potentially dangerous magic. I ignored their expressions and focused, dropping back into the deep trance. It didn’t come easily — I had been pouring my power out like water today — but it came. I had strength enough for this.
I would find Kip. I must. If I could get this to work, it would give us a real lead at last, even if I was wrong about the Sea of Stars.
I reached for the fabric of time.
I had been concerned about ripping it accidentally, but a few minutes’ examination was enough to determine that I didn’t need to worry about that. It ran like water: faster or slower was easy, but it could not run backwards anymore than a waterfall could run uphill.
That was the wrong metaphor. Don’t be water, I persuaded it, be cloth, spilling out from a loom. The passage of time, woven and captured by the passage of the shuttle, would not be undone if the cloth was simply… folded back, for a moment, to reveal an earlier piece of the weave.
The light in Kip’s sitting room wavered and shifted, dimming before brightening. The air captured a brief image of Kip sitting with Conju and I, Conju pouring out cups of what must be the champagne we drank after Gaudy’s admittance to the service.
From a stifled noise behind me, I could tell that I was not the only one who could see it. I had it, this was working, it only needed a more delicate touch, a cautious one. I tweaked it as carefully as I could.
There. Kip, sitting on the couch in his nightgown with a lap desk, writing in light that was just bright enough that he didn’t need to squint. He looked tired, eyes shadowed, and I wanted —
The air changed, and the light. Kip didn’t immediately look up, his fingers scribing another letter, two, and then he paused, looking up, pen still to the paper, as the breath of air turned into a breeze, as the glimmer of light turned into a glittering array of stars hanging in the air around him.
Then the water came, the Sea to join the Stars, pouring down over Kip and carrying him away, sending the lap desk and the pen flying, papers fluttering slowly through the air as the torrent faded until they landed on the perfectly dry floor, the room now still and empty of any inhabitants.
I let the magic fade as I lowered my hands. “Well,” I said, turning back to Rhodin and Ludvic, “that seems fairly conclusive.” They had been joined, at some point, by Conju and Gaudy, who had made their way through the clustered members of Kip’s household through what I was tempted to imagine had been a judicious use of Conju’s bony elbows, even though ordinarily such a thing would be beneath Conju’s dignity.
“Indeed,” Rhodin said, eyes bright, “which means — ah! Aha!” he cried, with a joy so manic that I knew instantly he was running on at least four cups of coffee.
“You have an idea, Ser Rhodin?” I inquired.
“My lord, with your permission I will go to chase a lead,” Rhodin said, bowing, but not before I could see the glitter in his eyes. I was well-acquainted with both this glitter and the level of, shall we say, whimsy that Rhodin is inclined to indulge in moments of high energy, which normally I found delightful, but normally Kip wasn’t in danger.
“I would like to review that lead, before you do,” I said.
Rhodin saluted. “Glorious One, may I recommend that you focus on the rescue mission for Cliopher? The lead is a tenuous one, and it may take me some time to see if anything comes of it.” His gaze flicked over my expression, my posture, and added, voice airy, “And, if I may be so bold, the legal case against them won’t hold if my interrogation devolves into the Lord of Zunidh menacing them. You know how Cliopher gets about coerced confessions.” (I did know.)
I genuinely had no intention of being involved in chasing the lead myself — well, unless it did seem likely to speed up the process of finding Kip — yes, all right, perhaps Rhodin had a point.
I quirked an eyebrow at him. I couldn’t help myself: “Is everybody trying to make up for Kip’s absence by stepping up their petty treasons?”
Conju bowed. Rhodin looked chagrined. Ludvic said placidly, “What makes you think that?”
I had been joking, mostly, but at the looks on their faces, I started to laugh. “You are, aren’t you?”
Rhodin was too much of a courtier to smile too widely, but I could see on his face that he shared my amusement. “We discussed the matter and determined that you seem to find regular injections of irreverence nourishing, my lord. You know we live to serve,” he finished with a flourish.
“I do know that,” I said, letting all the warmth I felt filter through into my voice. “Thank you.”
It was, perhaps, too early to be allowing optimism to take the edge off of my fear, but I could not help myself. Kip had been alive and well when he had fallen into the Sea of Stars, and Kip was clever and competent and a brilliant negotiator; I thought, I hoped, that he would be able to manage alone for a while until we could find him. I had Rhodin, Conju, and Ludvic, to help me and to help each other; we had accomplished more challenging feats than this.
A ruckus at the entrance to the apartments caught my attention. The others turned too, catching sight of the source of the commotion first by virtue of their closer proximity to the door.
Rhodin said, “Huh,” at more or less the same time Gaudy yelped, “Buru Tovo?”
I could see the resemblance instantly in the man who made his way past my guards into the heart of Kip’s apartments. Oh, he was much older than Kip, and dressed in a grass skirt and little else, but there was a sharp interest and humor to his gaze that I knew.
Kip’s Buru Tovo looked me up and down, did not bow or fall into an obeisance, and instead said, “You’d be Kip’s emperor, then.”
I’ve had much worse titles. “That I am,” I agreed. “And you must be Kip’s Buru Tovo.”
“Heard Kip’s gone missing,” Buru Tovo said.
I inclined my head. “He’s fallen into the Sea of Stars.”
Buru Tovo snorted. “Bah. That boy’s been wanting to walk in legends his whole life. Suppose I oughtn’t be surprised that he’s managed it. And what are you going to do about it, then?”
There was an unmistakable challenge in his voice. I knew how to answer it. I had been afraid, throughout this desperate search, that we would be too late, or that I would have to choose between the call of my heart or the call of my duty. This was not that. This was a challenge, a quest, that I knew how to meet — that I, of all people, I who had walked in the Sea of Stars myself, who knew a few of the secret paths into and out of it, was especially suited to meet.
I said, “I’m going to go find him, of course.”