Table of Contents | Previous chapter | Next chapter
Aeshma had been expecting the summons.
Not in the way that guilty things expect consequences; crouched, rehearsing, watching every shadow for the shape of what is coming. More the way that very old things expect the weather. You know the season. You know what the season brings. You do not hurry it and you do not run from it. You simply continue being old until it arrives.
The messenger came at the grey hour before the shift-change, when the compound was at its quietest and the Elves on watch had settled into the particular inattention of the long middle of a night. Small and quick and careful, the way all of His personal messengers were small and quick and careful. Aeshma did not ask what it was about. He already knew what it was about.
He put on his outer layers against the cold he was about to walk into, and followed.
He received Aeshma in the long room at the centre of the main structure.
Aeshma had been in this room before, over the centuries of his service. Each time it was the same. The cold that lived here was His cold specifically; not the ambient cold of the place, which was merely a side effect of proximity to something that had been burning on its own fury for so long it had scorched the air around it permanently. This cold was deliberate. Maintained. The temperature of a room whose owner wanted you to feel, at all times, the precise gap between where you were and where warmth was.
He was standing at the far end. Not seated. He rarely sat in these conversations; sitting implied an equivalence of position that He was never willing to grant.
“Aeshma,” He said.
Not a greeting. A placement. The tone of a craftsman setting a piece on the workbench to examine it.
Aeshma stopped at the appropriate distance and waited. He had learned, in the long years of this service, that the first words you offered in a room like this were the most expensive. Better to let Him set the price before you reached for your purse.
“The lists,” He said, “are becoming more difficult.”
Aeshma said nothing.
“The humans are changing.” He moved, slowly, along the far end of the room. Not pacing; He never paced. Something more deliberate than pacing. “Their wants have become complicated in ways I did not fully anticipate. The transformation magic requires more maintenance than it did. You have noticed this.”
The last sentence was not a question.
“I have noticed,” Aeshma said carefully. “The magic is old. Old things require more tending.”
He paused at this. Not in surprise. In the manner of someone filing away the exact shape of a deflection for later examination.
“The magic is old,” He agreed. “And old things develop weaknesses. Particularly at the edges.” He looked at Aeshma directly for the first time. “You have also noticed this.”
Aeshma held the gaze. This was the moment he had been preparing for since the first walk with the Unicorn. Not preparing in the sense of building a story. He had no story to build. Stories, in this room, were a liability. He would find the seams in any story within three sentences and pull until it came apart.
What Aeshma had prepared was something simpler. Every word he intended to say was true. The truth of it was not the problem. The problem was what the truth, arranged carefully, would allow Him to conclude.
“I have noticed the fraying at the edges,” Aeshma said. “I attributed it to the age of the spellwork and the complexity of the current human population. Both of these things remain accurate.”
A silence.
“Both of these things,” He said, “are accurate. Yes.”
The way He said it made clear that accuracy was not the same as completeness, and that He knew the difference.
What followed was not an interrogation in the way the word usually implies. There were no direct accusations. No specific names or incidents placed on the table between them. He was too precise for that. Naming a thing before you were certain of it was a gift to the other party; it told them exactly what you knew and exactly where your knowledge ended.
He was never that generous.
Instead He spoke at length about the Unicorns. Their value to the work. The specific gift they carried that no other beings in the known order possessed. The question, entirely theoretical and framed with a lightness that had nothing light in it, of what one of the older Elves might stand to gain from interfering with an arrangement that had functioned without incident for so long.
Aeshma listened. He kept his face arranged in the expression of an elder who was tired and cold and waiting to be told something he was required to care about. He had been perfecting this expression for longer than most things in this world had existed.
Inside, in the private architecture where his thoughts actually lived, he was doing a very precise kind of accounting.
He knew something. The specifics were not yet clear to Him. If they were clear, this conversation would have a different texture entirely; there would be no theoretical framing, no circling. He would simply state what He knew and proceed to whatever came after knowing.
The circling meant He was still gathering. Which meant there was still time. Not much. But some.
“You have served a long time,” He said finally. The shift in register was deliberate; softer, almost companionable. Aeshma had heard this register before, in other conversations, with other old servants. He knew what it meant. It meant the direct approach was coming, wrapped in something that resembled warmth.
“A very long time,” Aeshma agreed.
“Long enough to remember what things were before.” He paused. “Before the arrangement. Before the work. Before all of this became what it is.”
“I remember,” Aeshma said.
“What do you remember?”
The question landed with the specific weight of something that had been positioned very carefully and released at exactly the right moment. Aeshma felt it arrive. He felt the temptation of it; the vast, aching pull of the thing that lived in every old creature who had been made into something they had not chosen. The temptation to simply say it. To say: I remember what we were. I remember what you made of us. I remember that there was a time before this cold, and I am so tired of the cold, and yes, I spoke to the Unicorn, and yes I helped arrange what was arranged, and I would do it again because I have been waiting for something to do it again for longer than you have been watching me.
He did not say this.
He said: “I remember that things change. And that what changes can sometimes change again.”
Another silence. Longer than the others.
“Yes,” He said quietly. “They can.”
The warmth was gone from His voice. What was left was something Aeshma recognized from the very beginning of the long service; the sound of a decision being made, calmly, about what to do with a thing that had revealed itself to be less reliable than previously assessed.
“You may go,” He said.
Aeshma went.
He walked back through the compound at the same pace he had walked in.
Not quickly. Quickly would mean something. His body was an instrument that had been read by His people for centuries, and every deviation from his ordinary movement was a data point for those who were always, always watching. He had learned early and at cost that the way you walked out of a room like that was exactly the way you walked into it. Whatever was happening inside you was your own business, and you kept it there.
Inside, the accounting continued.
He had not reached a conclusion yet. But He was close. The conversation had been a probe, not a verdict, and the probe had found something; Aeshma was certain of this. How much it had found, and how long before the finding became a certainty that required action, he could not calculate with precision.
What he could calculate was this: the plan, whatever it was in its final shape, had less time than it had yesterday.
He needed to find Dash.
This was the part that cost him the most.
Not the room with Him. He had been in that room before and survived it and would perhaps survive it again, though the last thought came with less confidence than it once had. The room was a known quantity. The danger in it was a known quantity.
What he was about to do was not a known quantity. He was about to step, deliberately and with full understanding of the consequences, across a line he had been standing at the edge of for the entirety of the long service. He had approached it before. He had looked over it. He had told himself, each time, that not crossing was wisdom, and that wisdom was worth more than loyalty to things that were gone and had been gone for a very long time.
He had spent centuries being wise.
He was very tired of it.
Dash was at the eastern edge of the pen, at the place near the fence where Aeshma had learned the Unicorn went when he was thinking rather than resting. He was alone. His power held its steady white in the dark, that particular quality it had of illuminating without announcing.
Aeshma approached the fence. He did not look directly at Dash. He stood at the fence in the way of an old Elf doing a routine inspection of the containment perimeter, which he had done a hundred times and which no watcher would find remarkable.
“He summoned me tonight,” Aeshma said, not loudly. “He does not know the shape of it yet. He knows the edges are wrong. He will know more soon.”
Dash said nothing. He did not move.
“Whatever you’re doing,” Aeshma said, “you are doing it with less time than you had this morning.”
A pause. Then Dash, very quietly: “Why are you telling me this?”
Aeshma was silent for a moment. The old wound in his side ached; it always ached when he was at the edge of something he could not walk back from. He had come to think of it as a kind of honesty his body insisted on when his mind was still negotiating.
“Because I remember,” he said, “what we were.”
He did not wait for an answer. He completed his inspection of the fence line and walked back toward the compound at his ordinary pace, neither faster nor slower than always, and did not look back.
Behind him, in the pen, the white glow of a Unicorn’s power deepened briefly. Not much. Just enough.
Aeshma did not sleep that night.
He sat in his quarters in the cold that was everywhere in this place, and he held what he had done the way you hold something you cannot put down and cannot carry comfortably, and he waited to see what it would cost him.
He had been waiting for something like this, he realized. For a long time. For longer than he had admitted to himself. All the careful obliqueness, the words said around things rather than at them, the maintenance of a position that was neither one side nor the other; he had told himself this was wisdom. He had told himself that neutrality was the only rational posture for a creature in his position.
What it had actually been was fear dressed in the language of strategy.
He was still afraid. He wanted to be precise about that. The fear had not gone anywhere. It sat in him the same way it always sat in him, that specific cold that had nothing to do with temperature. The cold that knew His name and flinched at it.
But he had done the thing anyway.
He was not certain there was a word for what you were when you were afraid and you did the thing anyway and the fear was still there afterward, unchanged, offering no reward for having acted despite it.
He thought perhaps the word was decided.
He had been, for the first time in a very long time, decided.
Outside, the cold place did what it always did. The lights moved in the sky. The compound hummed with the sounds of the long night’s work.
Aeshma sat in the dark and was decided, and waited for morning.