Book 1 of Rebirth of the Technomage Saga: Earth's Awakening

Location:Imperial City — Jade Spire: Ministry Corridor, Nursery, Emperor’s Private Study, Third Sublevel

Date/Time:TC1856.08.25 – TC1856.08.27

The seventh one took eleven weeks and cost Kael a man he liked.

Deputy Warden Oris Hale was sixty-one years old, had served three sovereigns, and had never in four decades of service been accused of anything worse than pedantry. He was also standing between Kael and the Bureau of Roads, which held the transit authorizations for the entire eastern quarter, which was where the eighth name on the list had spent the last two years quietly approving the movement of things nobody counted.

Hale was clean. The brooch had never so much as warmed near him. That was the problem.

"You’re retiring me," Hale said.

"I’m recommending you for the Provincial Assize. It’s a promotion in every respect that appears on paper."

"It’s Tessaly. It’s four hundred kilometers from a functioning archive, and the Assize sits twice a year." Hale folded his hands. He had good hands, ink-stained at the first two fingers, the hands of a man who still wrote his own summaries. "Your Highness, I have worked in this building since before you were born. If I have given offense, I would rather be told what it was."

There were four answers Kael could give, and three of them were lies.

"You’ve given none," he said. "You’re being moved because the position you occupy has to go to someone else, and there is no version of that which is fair to you. I’m not going to insult you by dressing it as anything else."

Hale looked at him a long moment.

"Then it’s the other thing," he said. "The thing nobody says. The reassignments these last two years that don’t follow any pattern a sane man could name."

Kael said nothing at all, which was its own kind of answer, and both of them knew it.

"I have wondered," Hale said slowly, "whether I was watching a prince consolidate power. There is a version of these two years that reads exactly like that. Ministers reassigned. Access rerouted. The Emperor’s own secretary moved to a ceremonial chair, and a guard captain’s rotation altered in the same week." He unfolded his hands. "I decided some months ago that I would go on doing my work and let history decide what I had participated in. I would like to be told I decided correctly."

"I can’t tell you that."

"No."

"I can tell you that when the reason becomes speakable, you’ll be told it before most of this building." Kael held the old man’s eyes. "And that if I am the thing you’re afraid I am, then Tessaly is the safest place in the Empire for you to be. Take the Assize, Deputy Warden. Please."

Hale took the Assize.

Kael signed the transfer that afternoon, and the eighth name lost its cover eleven days later without ever knowing why, and he sat afterward in an empty ministry corridor and understood with complete clarity that he had just done a bad thing for a good reason, and that he had gotten better at it than any decent man should.

***

The report on his son came up with the evening bundle, which was the standing arrangement, and which he had not once let slip past a day.

It was four lines in a clerk’s hand, and it was the best part of his week.

Subject well. Weight and height within expected range. Slight cough, resolved. Vocabulary expanding rapidly — has learned that his own name is a thing he can shout, and shouts it. Attached: one drawing, provenance disputed.

The attachment was a piece of sect paper with a great deal of brown on it. Kael turned it over twice, hunting for the part that was a drawing, failed to find it, and put it in the drawer with the others, of which there were now nineteen.

The boy had two rooms and a nurse and a window that looked at a mountain, four hundred kilometers east of the palace he was technically heir to, in the territory of a sovereign power that had declined to acknowledge his grandfather’s authority. He had lived there for most of his life. He was three in a month and had yet to sleep a full week under the same roof as his father, because his father had an apartment two floors above the diplomatic annex and a post that required him in the capital roughly a third of the year.

Kael had asked for it himself. Nobody in the Jade Spire would ever understand that part.

He had written to Seven Peaks asking sanctuary for the child, rewriting the letter nine times, each version shorter than the last because there was no argument in it that was not also a confession. What came back was one line, relayed in Commander Thorne’s handwriting because she would not write to him directly:

The boy has done nothing to me.

That was all. It granted everything and forgave nothing, and it was — he had decided, some hundreds of readings later — the most honest sentence anyone had ever addressed to him.

There was a version of the eight compromised officials’ reports in which a prince had installed the imperial heir on foreign sovereign ground, under the protection of a woman who despised his family, and had done it in writing. Kael had spent the better part of two years making certain that version stayed unwritten. He would spend twenty more if it came to it.

He put the lamp out and sat in the dark for a while, in a palace with a thing of some kind in its lower levels, and thought about a not-quite-three-year-old on a mountain in the east, shouting his own name at people who had no idea why it mattered.

"I moved a good man to a bad posting today," he said, to nobody at all. "Because of you, in part. I’d like to say entirely, but that would be flattering us both."

***

He requested the meeting through the reorganized private office, which meant it went to a secretary Kael had installed himself and had verified four times, and which meant that for the first time since the reorganization began he could be reasonably confident that a request to see his father had reached his father unaltered.

Emperor Tianrong received him in the private study with the shutters open. He was working. He was always working. He looked, Kael thought, like a man being aged by something other than years — and Kael had spent two years knowing exactly what.

"You’ve been busy," the Emperor said, without looking up.

"Yes."

"Eleven senior reassignments in twenty months. The Bureau of Roads, now. Deputy Warden Hale to the Assize." He set down his brush and finally raised his eyes, and they were tired and entirely clear. "Do you know how long I have waited for you to come and tell me why?"

The room went quiet.

"How long have you known?"

"That my son was rebuilding the machinery of my own household around me? Fourteen months." The Emperor leaned back. "That there was a reason worth doing it? Somewhat less. I have spent a good part of this year deciding whether I was watching an heir grow impatient."

"You could have summoned me."

"I could have. And if you were doing what I feared, a summons would have told you I’d noticed, and you would have adjusted, and I would have learned nothing." Something dry moved across the Emperor’s face. "You are my son. I taught you the game. It did not seem wise to open with my strongest piece."

Kael stood very still for a moment. Then he crossed to the desk, took the detection brooch from inside his robe, and set it down on the wood between them.

He told his father everything.

It took most of an hour. The parasites — what they were, what they did to the people they wore, how the brooch found them and how it sometimes didn’t. The eight identified. The pattern that made the eight matter: document flow, internal security, physical access, transit authorization. Not power. Information. The whole architecture of what an Emperor is allowed to know.

He told him about the reports summarized into uselessness. The petition from the border community prioritized into a drawer. The communication from Seven Peaks that had arrived, edited.

He told him he had been governing a fiction for at least three years, and that Kael had known it for two, and had said nothing.

The Emperor listened without interrupting once. When it was finished, he sat looking at the brooch on the desk — a small ugly thing of wire and dull stone — and left it where it lay.

"Show me the Greymere petition," he said. "The original."

"I have it."

"Of course you do." The Emperor’s voice did not rise. That was the frightening part; Kael had braced for the voice and got instead something quieter and much worse. "Four hundred people asked me for help, and I did not answer them, because a thing wearing my Minister of Internal Affairs decided I should not. And my son, who knew, chose to spend two years rearranging my staff rather than telling me."

"If you had known, you would have acted."

"Yes."

"Visibly. Immediately. As you should — as you’d have every right to." Kael heard his own voice go steady in the way it did when he was frightened. "And the network would have learned that we can detect them. That is the one advantage we have. Once it’s gone, they change, and we go blind, and then nothing I do afterward matters. I made a judgment. I stand by it. I’d make it again."

"I don’t doubt it." The Emperor rose. He went to the open shutters and stood there with his back to the room, and for a while there was nothing but the sound of the city, which was considerable and indifferent. "Do you understand what you have actually done?"

"I’ve cleared the channels around—"

"You have built a second cage." The Emperor turned. "A better one. A kinder one, built by someone who loves me, which is the only kind I would never think to look for. Every fact that reaches me now has passed through people you selected. Every channel I use is one you opened. You have not freed me, Kael. You have changed my keeper."

Kael did not have an answer. He had turned this over at three in the morning more times than he could count, and he had never found the end of it, and hearing it said out loud in his father’s voice did not make it smaller.

"I know," he said.

"Do you?"

"I’ve known for about a year." He made himself say the rest of it. "I told myself it was temporary. Every man who has ever built one of these has told himself that."

Something in the Emperor’s shoulders eased, fractionally — not forgiveness, but the recognition of an honest answer.

"Then we will do it differently," the Emperor said. "The operation continues. It is mine now. You will give me the full list, the brooch, the method of verification, and every name you have placed. You will not screen what reaches me. If a report is ugly, I will read it ugly." He came back to the desk. "And you will continue the work, because you are the only person in this building who has been doing it, and I am not fool enough to remove the one competent instrument I have out of wounded pride. But you will do it in front of me. Every reassignment brought to me before it happens, not after."

"That’s slower."

"Considerably." The Emperor picked up the brooch at last, turning the dull little thing between his fingers. "I have been made stupid for three years by people who thought they knew better than to trouble me with the truth. I would rather be slow than be that again — including at my son’s hands. Especially at my son’s hands."

Kael inclined his head. It cost him something he had not expected it to cost.

"There’s a ninth," he said. "Not identified. Something in the lower levels that the brooch touches and loses. It’s been down there at least since spring, and it knows about the third sublevel."

"The sealed room."

"You know about that room."

"I know a room was sealed and that my son sealed it, and that whatever is in it is the reason you have not slept properly in two years." The Emperor set the brooch down. "Show me that too. Tomorrow. Tonight I would like to sit with the fact that I have been a puppet in my own house and my child was the one holding the strings. Give me the night for it."

"Father—"

"Tomorrow, Kael."

***

He did not go to bed. He went down.

The third sublevel had been sealed for over two years, and Kael had the only key that mattered, and he took the stairs at the eastern service well with a lamp and the brooch out in his palm where he could watch it.

It stayed cold on the first flight. It stayed cold on the second.

The air changed at the turn below that. Not the temperature — the palace was cold everywhere below ground and always had been — but the quality of it, the way air goes when it has not been asked to do anything in a long while. He had noticed it the first time, two years ago, with Coop’s man beside him and a three-hour window closing. He had put it down to nerves then.

He did not put it down to nerves now.

On the third flight the brooch warmed — the faint, unpleasant, animal warmth that meant near, the sensation he had learned to hate more than any weapon he had ever faced — and then went cold again before he could take three steps in any direction.

He stopped. He listened to a building six hundred years’ quiet.

Nothing. A drip somewhere to the north, patient and irregular. His own pulse, unhelpfully loud.

He went on, and made himself go on slowly, because the part of him trained in three separate martial disciplines was insisting that slow was wrong and the part of him that had learned what these things actually were knew that speed had never once helped anybody.

The corridor was as he’d left it. Dust undisturbed in the long, even sheet that only accumulates where nothing walks. The door to the sealed chamber was intact, the wards intact, the seal unbroken and unmarked. He checked the seal twice, once with his eyes and once with his hand, because he had come down here expecting to find it broken, and the absence of what he expected was disorienting.

The dust directly before the door was undisturbed too.

He was three strides back toward the stairs before it registered, and he came back, and knelt, and held the lamp low so the light ran flat along the floor.

The dust for perhaps four meters on either side of the door, in a rough band against the wall, had been pressed. Not footprints. Nothing so useful as footprints. A broad shallow compression, its edges soft, the kind of mark left by something with no particular shape that had rested there a long while and then gone away. In two places the band was deeper, as though whatever it was had settled and settled again into a shape it preferred.

On both sides. Flanking the door. Not in front of it.

Kael stood in the corridor with his lamp and worked out what that meant, and what it meant was that whatever had been down here had not tried the door once in two years, and had not needed to.

It had been waiting beside it.

He backed out. He kept his face to the corridor the whole way to the stairs, which was not dignified, and which he could not bring himself to care about.

At the top he sat on the step and wrote a message in the small, tight hand he used for things that would travel: Ninth signature confirmed present, third sublevel, evades brooch. Seal intact. Dust pattern indicates sustained presence flanking the door, not attempting entry. It is not trying to get in. Advise urgently what it means that it is content to wait.

He addressed it to Commander Thorne, because those were the terms, and the terms were that he never wrote to her directly and she never wrote to him, and neither of them had ever once discussed why.

Then he sat a while longer on the cold step, a prince in a house full of strangers wearing faces, and thought about the phrase changed my keeper — and how the thing in the sublevel had spent two years doing exactly nothing, with perfect patience, beside a door it had never once tried to open.