The Office of Shadow (66 page)

Hy Pezho stepped toward Silverdun and looked him in the eye. "And
now that I've explained to you in explicit detail exactly what you've stumbled into, would you please tell your pretty friend here to stop what she's
doing before these gods wake up and decide to take back Faerie, drunk on five
thousand years of stored vengeance?"

Faella frowned. "I don't know how," she said.

"What?" said Hy Pezho.

"It wasn't so hard to turn the iron into cobalt," she said, "if that's indeed
what I did. But I wouldn't have the slightest idea how to make it go the other
way. I was just pulling the iron apart, like shattering a glass. I can't put it
back together."

"Then, my dear," said Hy Pezho, "the five of us are all dead, and Faerie is
doomed." He smiled at Faella in cynical resignation. "And it's all your fault."

Hy Pezho sighed. "All I did was make a bomb."

"He's telling the truth," said Sela. "He knows all this to be true. He's
studied ancient texts, peered into the past with dark powers. Everything he's
saying is right."

"Indeed," said Hy Pezho. "And as much as I'd like to stay here and be
the first to be devoured once these gods awaken and so spare myself from
their rule, I am now Bel Zheret, and I have been ordered by Mab to create
more Einswrath. I've got enough blood to build a sufficient amount to bomb
the Seelie Kingdom into oblivion. Really, I'll be doing them a favor,
assuming I get to them first."

The silver armor fluttered down from the ceiling, and Hy Pezho stepped
toward it. "Within a day the Great Seelie Keep will be a smoldering ruin,"
he said. "And then the Chthonic gods will rule us all. Ironically, Titania
might have been the only one powerful enough to stand a chance against
them."

"You're not going anywhere," said Silverdun. "You're going to stay here
and help us stop this."

"That wasn't in my orders," said Hy Pezho. "I belong to Mab heart and
soul, and I must do as I'm bidden."

Hy Pezho reached out his hand and waved. A blast of Motion struck Silverdun and slammed him backward. Sela, Ironfoot, and Faella were all flung
in different directions.

Hy Pezho climbed into his armor. "Good-bye, Shadows," he called. "Fare
thee well." The wings began to flap, and he rose off of the floor, beginning to
chant an incantation of Folding.

Silverdun channeled Elements and pried open the front of the armor. Hy
Pezho fell to the floor, his concentration broken. The silver armor listed to
the side, its wings flapping crazily. Silverdun ran at him and tackled him,
knife in hand.

"Ironfoot!" he shouted. "Get with Faella and find a way to stop this!" He
slashed with the knife, but Hy Pezho slipped from his grasp and kicked out,
catching Silverdun in the face. He was as strong as the other Bel Zheret had
been. The one that had killed him.

The floor shook. Silverdun cast a brief glance upward and saw Ein's hand
open and close. The god's bonds rattled.

A voice boomed into the wide space, speaking in a very, very old dialect
of High Fae. "Who pricks my skin and wakes me from my slumber?"

In the rooftop garden in Elenth, Sergeant Hy-Asher supervised the reloading
of the catapult with the second Einswrath. The lieutenant was looking over
the edge of the rooftop toward the battle.

"Hurry!" he shouted. "They're almost to the gate!"

"You understand," said Hy-Asher, "that if we lob it this close, we'll kill
our own troops, and probably half the city as well."

"Who cares?" said the lieutenant. "If they get through the gate, we're all
dead anyway!"

Hy-Asher continued winding back the beam, a feeling of dread that he
could not control stealing over him.

The High Priest: I fear that we will never agree, then, on
what constitutes a good man.

Alpaurle: Is it wise to fear disagreement? Should we not,
rather, embrace it?

The High Priest: Surely it is better to agree on such
matters.

Alpaurle:You must be correct, of course, as you are very
wise. But that is not what I asked. Should we not
embrace a state of disagreement, on the grounds
that from debate comes knowledge?

The High Priest: In matters of morals, I believe that unanimity is key. I find the idea of ambiguity in such matters disquieting.

Alpaurle:Why?

The High Priest: Because I desire to know the truth, of
course!

Alpaurle: But what if truth is to be found in ambiguity?

-Alpaurle, from Conversations with the High Priest of Ulet,
conversation VI, edited by Feven IV of the City Emerald

ronfoot ran toward Silverdun to help him, but Silverdun waved him away.
"No! Stay with Faella!" he shouted. "You can tell her how to change all this
back into iron!"

Ironfoot turned back to Faella and Sela, while Silverdun wrestled with
Hy Pezho a dozen yards away.

"Sela," he said. `Join me and Faella together, like you did back in the
temple. Let's see if we can stop this."

"Take my hands," said Sela. "I'll do what I can."

Ironfoot closed his eyes and felt Faella and Sela flow into him. Now was
the time to be perfect. Now was the time not to fail. Now was the time to be
the best.

Ironfoot tried to sift through Faella's understanding, but it was difficult;
she had no thaumatic training, no understanding of what it was she was
doing, or how she did it. She was raw power, a creature of pure intuition.

And what she did, what Lin Vo had done back at the Arami Camp, was
beyond anything Ironfoot even understood. All of his equations, all of his
understanding about the workings of the Gifts-none of these applied here.
This was an entirely new approach to magic. And he was going to have to
work it out right here, right now, while his partner fought a demon to the
death and gods rose up all around him.

What was iron? What was cobalt? What lay beneath Elements and
Insight? What was at the heart of things, beyond reason and understanding?
What was the quotient of division by zero?

Silverdun struggled against Hy Pezho, trying to work the knife up into his
ribs. Hy Pezho had all of the strength and quickness of Silverdun's previous
opponent, but what he lacked was Asp's skill, his experience. Asp had
enjoyed a lifetime of killing before Silverdun had met him. Hy Pezho probably knew a thing or two about killing as well, but not the Bel Zheret kind.
Not the punching, kicking, biting kind.

They rolled on top of each other, slammed up against the base of Ein's
column. Above them, Ein bellowed and strained.

Ironfoot and Faella walked together through the substance of things. He
asked questions without words; she provided answers without thoughts. Slowly he began to understand. The ground shook around them and Sela
cried out, but Ironfoot couldn't worry about that right now.

As he watched Faella flail against her lack of understanding, trying to
reach out with her Giftless re, Ironfoot began to see something. It wasn't
music without pitch, not colorless color, but something that lay behind
pitch, beyond color. It wasn't a Giftless Gift, but that which lay beyond
Gifts, gave rise to them. Beyond iron and cobalt lay something else, a deeper
reality. Both were expressions of a deeper whole.

There was no division by zero. That was a function of numbers that
applied to the Gifts. The Gifts were not the reality, though. They were a special case of reality. The thaumatics that applied to them, applied to them only
in their special cases. In the depth beneath that spawned them, those equations simply did not apply. That depth was the genesis of the equations and
was not bound by them.

He and Faella saw it at the same time. Cobalt and iron were simply variations on a theme, as were the Gifts. Thaumaturges had believed in the Gifts
for so long that they had made them the reality, just as the Chthonics had
made a reality of their own gods. Believing made it so.

Believe in iron, Ironfoot told Faella. Something reached out of Faella, colorless color beyond sight, and twisted.

The truth is sharper than any blade.

-Fae proverb

ela watched Faella and Ironfoot think back and forth at each other, marveling at the speed and clarity of their thought. Sela understood almost
none of it. It was all beyond her. Color without color? Belief in iron? It made
no sense.