The Office of Shadow (18 page)

"What's the point of this?" Silverdun blustered, after the second of these, clambering out of the water. He stumbled in turbulent surf that beat against
the black stones whose edges had cut Silverdun more than once.

It was a gray day, about two weeks into the training. Low, gray sky,
turgid sea. It was highsun but felt like dusk. Silverdun's clothes clung to
him, flapping against his prickling skin in time with the wind. He brushed
his hair out of his eyes.

Jedron and Ilian, who'd walked down from the tower to meet him,
looked at each other. Jedron threw Silverdun a towel. "You don't need to
know the lesson in order to learn it," he said.

"Not the test," said Silverdun angrily. "The cruelty. I was under the
impression that I was being trained for a job, not being punished for my sins."

"It's both," said Jedron.

"Where's the other recruit you mentioned before?" said Silverdun. "Do
you treat him as badly as you do me?"

Jedron thought about it. "No," he said. "He's not quite as stupid as you
are."

"Well, where is he?"

"He's around," said Jedron. "I don't want him to pick up any of your bad
habits."

Later, after Silverdun was dry, Jedron came to his quarters. "Come with
me," he said.

Outside it had begun to rain, and Silverdun's fresh clothes were soon as
sodden as his previous ones had been. Jedron led Silverdun and Ilian down to
the quay, where the Splintered Driftwood rested, rolling in the waves. A storm
out to sea somewhere was wreaking a mild havoc here. Jedron climbed aboard
and beckoned Silverdun to follow.

On board, the silver-and-brass automatons had been covered with canvas
tarpaulins that were tied around the things' ankles. Jedron untied one and
pulled the canvas free, gesturing for Silverdun to have a closer look.

Silverdun leaned in and whistled appreciatively. The structure of the
automaton's body matched that of a Fae body perfectly, only with the skin
removed. Muscles of silver, tendons of brass. Eyes of glossy, polished marble.

"This is saturated argentine, isn't it?" said Silverdun. Spellplastic silver,
the stuff could be manipulated easily with Elemental hook sequences. Silverdun had never seen so much of it in one place; it was astonishingly
expensive.

Jedron shrugged. "Not my area of expertise," he said. "And not the point."

Illan took a small knife and, before Silverdun even realized what he was
doing, swiped it across one of the many cuts on Silverdun's left hand.

"Ow!" said Silverdun. Ilian and Jedron shared a quick glance: What a
baby!

Than pried open the automaton's mouth, and its tongue, a lump of argentine, lolled out. Than wiped the knife blade clean on it and shut the thing's
mouth.

"Why do you think I have these spellwork sailors, when real ones would
be far less expensive, and easier to maintain?" asked Jedron.

"Illan said it was because you didn't like visitors."

"True," said Jedron. "But that's not really it. It's because I live in a different world than the one you live in."

He stared out to sea. "Faerie is a more dangerous place than most suspect,
and Faerie is perhaps the most civilized of all the many worlds. The real
threats out here aren't bugganes or soldiers. Those are obvious. You can see
them coming."

Jedron turned his gaze on Silverdun. It was piercing, and somehow
deeply off-putting. Almost bestial. But not that; something else that Silverdun couldn't name.

"The real threats are the people whom you do not realize you can't trust
until it is too late. Trust is perhaps the most deadly weapon that can be used
against you. I have none. And neither must you.

"That is why I will not be your friend, or anything like one. I don't want
you to like me. I don't want you to think you can trust even me."

Silverdun glanced at the automaton. Its face began to cloud over, as
though seen through a misted mirror. "You're hardly making a case for yourself. Everess said that-"

Jedron laughed out loud. "Everess? That pompous bag of gas? He'd step
on his own mother to get another rung higher on the ladder. Do you think
he's gathering his own personal gang of spies purely for the love of the Seelie
Heart?"

"Are you saying I shouldn't work for him?"

"Of course not. I'm only saying you shouldn't trust him."

"Well, that's one thing you didn't need to teach me. I never trusted him."

"And yet you came all the way out here solely on his word."

"I'm not doing this for him."

Jedron chuckled again. "Well said."

The mist around the automaton's face began to slowly resolve itself into
skin, making a face. Dark hair began to flow out of its bald head.

Silverdun pointed at Ilian. "What about Ilian? You trust him, don't
you?"

Jedron rolled his eyes. "Him I could kill in a heartbeat."

Than flicked his knife open and, more quickly than Silverdun could register, put it to Jedron's throat. With almost no effort, and just as quickly,
Jedron snatched the knife from Ilian's hand and hurled him overboard, into
the roiling water.

"Look," said Jedron, pointing to the automaton with his knife. Silverdun
looked and shuddered. The automaton now looked just like Silverdun, an
almost exact duplicate. It glared at Silverdun warily.

"There's the only one in all the worlds that you can trust, Silverdun," said
Jedron.

Silverdun stood before his mechanical double. This was one of Jedron's
less subtle lessons; the theater of it hardly seemed up to the old man's
standards.

The automaton stepped back warily as Silverdun approached. Silverdun
looked in its eyes, and a shudder of revulsion went through him. They were
Jedron's eyes.

"Not quite an exact copy, though, is it?" said Silverdun. "Something
about it isn't me. How it looks at me."

"No, and that's because it isn't you. I didn't say that you were the only
one you could trust. You're weak and confused."

"No," said Silverdun. "Then who's he?"

"He's who you'll be when you leave here. He's who you'll be after you've
completed your training."

Silverdun frowned.

"You don't like him, do you?" said Jedron. His face looked sour.

"No, to be perfectly honest."

"You'll like being him even less," said Jedron. He muttered a syllable
under his breath, and the automaton's glamour vanished, leaving it a dead
machine again. Jedron covered it with the tarpaulin. Silverdun, in a nonetoo-subtle frame of mind, couldn't help thinking that it looked like a shroud.

"You have no idea what you've gotten yourself into, lad," said Jedron,
smiling.

On the dock, Than was pulling himself up out of the water, shaking seawater out of his hair. Jedron walked past Silverdun toward the dock. As he
passed, he grabbed Silverdun's shoulder.

"Hold on," he whispered, "and listen closely."

Jedron nodded toward the dock. "Ilian is a traitor. We'll have to do something about him."

Three weeks passed, during which Silverdun's training became a bit more
what he'd expected upon his arrival. He learned to move without making a
sound, though some of the means by which he was asked to do so seemed
patently impossible. Feel the floorboards with your mind before you step on
them? That would have been difficult even for someone with a well-developed Gift of Insight. Silverdun possessed the Gift, but had never studied it.

There was Silverdun's problem in a nutshell. Insight was a Gift of the
Head, and Glamour was of the Heart. Silverdun had poured all of his efforts
into Glamour as a youth because he had always fancied himself an artist.
Insight was a Gift for research thaumaturges and alchemists. Men who sat in
chairs and pondered. Silverdun's father had pushed him toward Insight as a
more noble form of study. Silverdun knew that he could have been great at
Insight. As it was, he was a mediocre Glamourist at best. But at least he'd
gotten what he wanted.

In the mornings were the daily drills with Jedron. They drilled with
knives and the petite arbalete, a small, short-range crossbow. Silverdun learned
how to kill without making a sound, how to kill painfully, how to disable without killing, all with a calculating precision that teased at his scruples
more and more with each passing day.

Silverdun took his meals with Ilian, who said little, but always seemed
to keep an eye on him. Than was always nearby, always ready to assist in
training, or stepping in to clean something, or bringing Jedron his meals.
Jedron and Than appeared to have no relationship that Silverdun could
divine. They almost never spoke to one another.

Silverdun asked about the other trainee a few more times. Ilian assured
him that he was around somewhere, but that Silverdun wouldn't meet him
until he was ready.

Every few days, Jedron would invite Silverdun to his study for an evening
drink, but these evening drinks likely as not turned into hours-long study
sessions. And Jedron never ceased to be amused by his habit of unexpectedly
hurling blunt objects at Silverdun's head.

Silverdun had managed to reshape what was left of his bed into a
makeshift pallet, which was far from the least comfortable arrangement he'd
ever had (sleeping outdoors in the dead of midwinter after a full day's ride
took the prize by a long shot), but was a far cry from paradise. Most nights,
though, Silverdun was so tired that by the next morning he didn't remember
his head hitting the pillow, and he rarely dreamed.

"We haven't talked about swords at all," said Silverdun one day, after a
long practice session of hand-to-hand fighting with Jedron. Silverdun was
sweating and huffing, but Jedron wasn't even breathing heavily. Astonishing
for a man of his age.

"No," said Jedron. "And we won't."

"Why not?"

"A sword is a weapon of last resort in our work. If you find yourself
drawing one, then you've done something terribly wrong."

"And what if someone draws on me?"

"Throw a knife in his neck and run," said Jedron, matter-of-factly.

"That hardly seems within the bounds of propriety," said Silverdun.

"Propriety is a millstone around your neck, boy. The man with propriety
is the one who dies first. The sooner you get used to that idea, the better off
you'll be."

"But," began Silverdun. He paused, carefully choosing his words. Had he
heard correctly? Jedron might as well have told him to get used to the idea
of kicking puppies and slitting the throats of milkmaids. "If our goal is to
protect the Seelie way of life, how do we achieve the goal by abandoning the
very thing that makes us Seelie?"

"Your precious propriety is for the safe ones. We provide the luxury of
civilized ideas like personal honor by eschewing them."

"I don't understand," said Silverdun.

Jedron pointed east, toward the City Emerald. "All those pretty Fae over
there, all those civilized Fae, live in a giant cocoon spun of the silk of ignorance."

It was the most poetic Jedron had ever been, and Silverdun said so.

"Go to hell, Silverdun. I'm being serious. It is a grand thing to believe
oneself safe. All of the great things of civilization are crafted by those who are
free from danger. Their error-the one we are employed to hide from them,
and rightly so-is their belief that they can uphold civilization by acting civilized. The reason the Shadows have existed for so long, despite the public
hue and cry about their rumored existence, is that those in positions of power
are continuously reminded of that error when it kicks them in the face."

"If you're so apathetic about honor and propriety and civilization," Silverdun spat, "then why bother protecting it at all? Why risk your life to protect something for which you seem to have little use?"

"Because if I don't, who else will? We are beset on all sides by ignorance
and savagery, Silverdun. The bestial Gnomics to the south. Mab's legions of
blind, devoted `citizens' who might as well be slaves. Or worse, really ... at
least a good slave owner values the life of his investment. I may not have
much use for the finer things in life, but I loathe the alternative.

"And," he said, smiling wickedly, "I love my job."