Woo-sah. XD
Oh, yes ... here's 'The Iron Hold'. I don't think I'll bother editing it up to put in my Elfy ticket.
“All right, ladies and gentlemen - all together? Welcome to the Iron Hold!”
Melysse rifled madly through her briefcase for her security passes at the front desk, paying no attention to the over-cheerful voice of the tour guide in the foyer. After so many years of arriving at work at the tour starting time, she could have recited the guide’s whole spiel herself.
Unfortunately this was the mid-morning tour, not the early morning tour, and she was very, very late.
“We’ll start right here in the foyer, which has a rather eventful past all its own. The foyer has been rebuilt on not three but four separate occasions - twice during the Fae Wars in 2004 and 2048, Fifth Fae Age; once in the Faeborn Riots of 283, Iron Age; and once late last century after a structural failure in one of the lower levels. But don’t worry, ladies and gentlemen, you’re in no danger today!”
Touristy laughter, mostly polite. Melysse started to fume a bit as she rummaged on through her case, feeling Paulen’s bored, security-guard stare sharpening with impatience.
“You don’t want to be much later than you already are,” he said in his slow, careful voice, drumming his fingers on his desk. “There’s new blood starting today. He came in this morning. Early.”
“Well, they’re not fobbing him off on me,” retorted Melysse shortly. “I’ve got a man bringing in two new pieces from a private collection. I haven’t had anything new to look at for months.”
Paulen shrugged in his slow-motion way, watching her empty some of the case’s contents onto his desk.
“… in use as a prison, continuously, for just over four hundred years now, making it the oldest such holding facility in the country. In the old days it could hold as many as fifty fae in secure, magic-proofed cells; today it holds only Talton’s famous Seven of the Hold.”
With a triumphant hiss Melysse seized her leather sleeve of passes out from the string-bound leaves of a report, handing them over for Paulen’s meticulous examination.
“All right,” he said, passing them back. “You’d better get a move on.”
Melysse shoved all her things into the briefcase, muttering her thanks, and turned to stride across the foyer towards the office doors. The tour group, about a dozen strong, watched her pass with great interest, perhaps wishing the foyer part of the tour would end and the more exciting underground tour begin.
“-Most of the Iron Hold’s previous function as an iron-clad prison is today performed by the North Side Facility, which receives all dangerous Faeborn awaiting deportation. As a result, today’s Iron Hold is more a research facility and an historical monument than a prison …”
Leaving the tour and the airy-domed foyer behind, Melysse approached the first office checkpoint. No doubt the tourists would soon be ooh-ing with nervous excitement when the rifle-bearing Army operatives checked them over, but Melysse only chafed at the delay until the men in tan let her through.
The stone hall beyond seemed twice as long as usual, the staircase twice as far away. She was already breathless by the time she hit the stairs, dashing down two flights past the levels wryly dubbed ‘Tourist Blocks A and B’ and then again down another two flights, longer flights, to Holding Floor C.
This time it was a relief to pass through checkpoint. Melysse got to stand still and gasp for breath in the gaslit antechamber, ignoring the officers’ dry grins as they looked over her passes and searched her for prohibited items.
At last they opened the big iron doors for her, all three heavy sets of doors, and let her hurry in disarray into head office.
Head office, once the gaoler’s complex of Holding Floor C, almost looked as though it had jumped back in time to the old days this morning. The sharp smell of oiled iron and steel - so synonymous with the old-style iron-clad - was as strong as always, but today there were even armed Special Issue officers present, keeping a silent watch over the sun-starved teams of Melysse’s fellow researchers at their desks.
No doubt about it; there had to be a fresh employee starting work today. It was never facility policy to trust newcomers easily.
Melysse rushed to her desk and dumped her untidy case on top of it, huffing like a steam-train.
“Melysse!” exclaimed Araluna’s voice. “Look at the time!”
She turned to look at her section manager with more vocational than personal dislike, mopping back her sweat-damp hair. “I’m sorry, Araluna. The coaches ran late and I couldn’t find my pass.”
“Well, it was a bad day for it,” Araluna said crossly, both hands planted on the desk, her ascetic face looking more pinched than usual. “I’ve been waiting for you to start showing our newest around the facility. He’s been here two hours already.”
Melysse took pains not to look directly at the figure hovering behind Araluna. “This is a bit of a difficult day for me … I’ve got two pieces coming in any minute from -”
“I understand you’re very busy, Melysse, and I’m very sorry to have to ask, but there’s no-one else who’s available and competent. Don’t make me hand a fresher over to Praxton, for heaven’s sake.”
“But I’m going in for Query today.”
“Fine. Take him with you. I’ll write the clearance.”
Melysse let out a long sigh and finally turned to look at the newcomer. He was a quiet-looking fellow with dark eyes and dark salt-and-pepper hair, more or less her own age, somewhat fieldmouseish in overall appearance and demeanour. A few positives ticked off automatically on her checklist: older than the know-all thirty-year-olds, no silly, fizzy excitement in his expression, no frozen newcomer terror …
“All right,” she muttered. “But I want priority access for Query. I haven’t seen the pieces yet, so I don’t know who I’ll need to talk to.”
“Fine. Done. Good. Now I’ve really got to get busy. I’ll leave you with Melysse here, Stefran.” Araluna disappeared in haste back to her desk, sending a few bits of Melysse’s paperwork swirling onto the floor with the backdraught.
The newcomer bent down to pick them up, clearly very aware of his place in the office pecking order. “Stefran Ixion,” he said as he handed them over.
“Melysse Grandinnen. Nice to meet you,” she replied briskly. “I’ll explain what I can today, but I’m going to be very busy - sorry in advance. While I wait for my delivery, I have time for some questions. Have any?”
“What’s your research specialty here at the facility?”
“Fae artefacts research, Greater Talton area. Specifically Westrock, Liari, Camwell and Alenyan fae. Mostly that involves the study and collective comparison of existing artefacts, since Talton has grown over so much of the locality, but sometimes I get a chance to analyse and catalogue rare new finds. Like today.” She said it significantly.
“I won’t get in your way,” promised Stefran.
Melysse eyed him. “You’re government. Far too compliant to be new to the service. Where did you work?”
He laughed at her analysis. “I was a researcher at North Side. I analysed Faeborn inmates and assessed their potential for harm.”
“I see. Tough job.” She let him climb a little higher in her esteem. “I’ll be glad to skip through some of the safety lectures - ah!”
One of the Army operatives, newly emerged from outside the triple outer doors, was pushing a large crate on a trolley towards her desk. All thoughts of Stefran were forgotten as she stood by the officer’s shoulder, chafing impatiently while he tried to pry the lid open.
At last, with a crack, the lid did come free. Melysse reached in eagerly, pulling out the smaller of the two metal containment boxes inside, searching around for the etched contents plaque.
Artefact Description: Instrument, Flute or Pipe, it read. Origin: Upper Camwell, Talton, collection of R. Cannett. Then, after the heading Function, there was a blank space. That was for her to fill.
The Army officer strode off again with her eager thanks, leaving her with the open crate on the trolley. Melysse bent down over the lip of the crate to read the plaque. Artefact Description: Statuette, Female. Origin: Upper Camwell, Talton, collection of R. Cannett. Function:
It was delicious. Melysse straightened, grinning to herself. Then, in appreciation of Stefran’s extended and total silence, she turned to him and patted one of the metal boxes.
“Lesson one,” she said. “This is a containment box. We keep fae artefacts in these until we learn what they do, and sometimes even after we learn what they do. Don’t ever open one without permission. Don’t ever open one in a crowded room. We have the imaginatively named Opening Room a little further into the complex for that.”
Stefran nodded. Right response.
“You’ll watch me open these pretty soon,” she went on. “While I’m handling the artefacts, please try not to speak or move around. Artefacts are often sound-triggered, though that’s not usually the dangerous ones.”
Stefran nodded again. “May I ask a question?”
“Sure.”
“Why keep magical items in iron boxes? Doesn’t it ruin them?”
“The containment boxes have a small stone called a ‘charge’ placed inside with the artefact. The charges are enchanted by our fae - hah, well, some of them, in their better moods - and they keep the artefact from starving in the iron. It’s the archivists who collect and replace the charges in the government vault … you could specialise in that section eventually if you find it interesting.”
Melysse wrote down a few notes about the consignment, fishing out her passes from her case again, and then gestured for Stefran to follow her as she left her desk and marched through all the other research partitions to the double iron doors at the far side of the room. Only once they’d satisfied the checkpoint soldiers there - all keeping a particularly sharp eye on Stefran - were they allowed through the doors that led to the Opening Room.
It didn’t lead immediately to the Opening Room, of course. Very few doors in the Iron Hold led immediately to anything. Already tired after the morning’s rush, Melysse puffed up the long flights of stairs with great difficulty, pulling her trolley of precious boxes up the running gantry that followed each flight.
Stefran took over for her after the second flight, though he was hardly the muscular sort. “Why are we heading upstairs again?” he asked after a while, struggling along behind her.
“The Opening Room is much closer to the surface than the fae cells. If something explodes in a very big way, we don’t bring too much more of the complex tumbling down.”
“And how often does that happen, exactly?”
She laughed. “Almost never. Once in the history of the facility. Don’t worry.”
At long last, they reached the front desk of Examinations and Surveys. Melysse flashed her passes to the secretary and led Stefran through the small, thick door of the Opening Room.
“Anyone in?” she called, her voice echoing tinnily around the thick, vaulted dome. The onion-shaped Opening Room was not large - about four metres from ceiling to floor and another four from one side to the other - but the walls were heavy iron and steel, five times thicker than any other walls in the whole facility.
“Here, Melaine.”
The chief examiner in Examinations and Surveys, Calaten Tremaine, was seated in one of the chairs immediately next to the door, always difficult to spot. He was a short man about a hundred-fifty centimetres tall, lank-haired and somewhat fish-eyed.
“Melysse,” she corrected him, as she did every time. “Morning, Calaten. I’ve two completely new pieces today. Well, three if you count my new colleague here, Stefran Ixion.”
Calaten turned his deceptively glazed, blank blue stare on Stefran. “Good to meet you, Stefran. I’m Calaten Tremaine,” he said in the usual monotone.
“Good to meet you, Calaten,” replied Stefran, a faint hardness around his dark eyes. Melysse could guess why. Most people reacted to Calaten, though they tended to be more disturbed than suspicious.
“You’re probably thinking I seem rather strange,” Calaten told him. Even if he’d been capable of normal vocal inflection, Melysse suspected, he’d probably still have used a monotone to recite the same old explanation for this hundredth time. “I’ve been Reshaped. I work under a restricted governmental visa with Examinations and Surveys. The Reshaping process has left me with a defective voice box and an impaired ability to experience emotion. The rest of it is simply natural ugliness.”
No-one cracked a deadpan joke like Calaten. He wasn’t really capable of any other kind, in fact. Stefran smiled, still looking a bit cautious. “You’re one of the lucky Reshaped, then, Calaten. Sorry, I’m used to individuals with … rather more spectacular flaws.”
“I can’t set people on fire with my mind,” said Calaten tonelessly. “Even when they call me Fishman.”
“Stefran here used to work at North Side Facility with all the loopy Faeborn, Fishman,” Melysse explained, using the office nickname with affection. There were some researchers who weren’t so positive about it.
Calaten looked at Stefran with his eternally incurious bug-eyes. “Ah. I’ve been there. Frightening people … on both sides.”
“There are at that,” Stefran agreed. “I was glad to come here.”
“Here is pretty much the same,” replied Calaten. “Perhaps you should be a florist.”
Stefran smiled again but didn’t laugh, and some habitual old watchfulness lingered in his face as Melysse ushered him to one of the chairs.
“Now, remember what I said,” she warned briskly. “Sit as quietly as you can until I tell you it’s safe. Save your questions for later.”
She pulled the trolley with the two containment boxes into the middle of the Opening Room. Calaten followed with his clipboard, brushing a bit of rust off his overalls.
Melysse lifted one of the heavy lids off very carefully with his help, laying it down as quietly as possible on the woollen muffling-blanket laid over part of the floor. The first box, the one marked ‘flute or pipe’, contained just a tiny, delicate reed flute couched in old rags. There were a few markings scratched down towards the base, but only very rudimentary. Melysse felt a twinge of disappointment. She’d seen dozens its like during her time at the Iron Hold.
First Calaten looked the flute over without touching it, gauging the ambient feel of any fae magic. His Reshaping had left him with a heightened sensitivity to such things - an ability that the government often praised so long as it didn’t come with any ‘more spectacular flaws’, as Stefran had put it.
Calaten pointed to the chart on his clipboard, soundlessly tapping ‘Little/No Magic’ on the graduated scale. Then he picked the flute up, holding it very gently in his pale hands, examining it from all angles.
He tapped the same index on the scale. Finally, he went through some of the rudimentary trigger-tests: making sounds, speaking trigger-words from similar artefacts discovered in the past, positioning his fingers over all the holes, blowing all the notes of the scale down the flute’s slender neck.
The last tests were the rudimentary substance tests. Calaten dipped the end of the flute in water; he breathed on it; he heated it over a candle; he touched it to each of the mineral samples he kept in his little kit. Nothing.
“I couldn’t say for sure, yet,” he said at last, replacing the flute in its box and tapping the ‘Little/No Magic’ index one last time for procedure’s sake, “but it certainly looks like another little mudman flute, doesn’t it? I’ll try some sand in the intermediary tests. Either way, it’s an extremely low-powered thing.”
“I thought it must be,” Melysse sighed. “Ah, well. - Just quickly, Stefran, any questions so far?”
“Loads,” came his rueful reply. “I’ll just ask you one. What’s a mudman flute?”
“It’s an old fae toy. Little children used to make them when they practised their sigils - if you play little tunes to small patches of mud, the mud shapes itself into a small humanoid doll and does a bit of a dance, usually.”
“Cute.”
“Pretty useless to us, though,” Melysse sighed. “All right, no sounds again, please.”
She lifted off the lid of the second, slightly larger box with Calaten. Inside was a very small statuette, only forty centimetres tall, which appeared to have been carved out of a soft, grainy stone into the shape of a long-haired girl. Her arms were held out slightly from her sides, as if she were starting to embrace someone, or to call out passionately, or perhaps even to leave the ground and fly. The swirl of her skirts were indistinctly carved, blurring and merging with the statuette’s smooth base.
Calaten looked the statuette over with his practised eye, then reached for his clipboard. Melysse’s excited heart sank as he tapped the ‘Little/No Magic’ index again.
Lifting it out of the box, the Reshaped examiner turned the statuette this way and that in his hands with impersonal, clinical care. The statuette’s face had been chipped out of the stone by a very clever hand; her eyes were almond-shaped hints half-hidden under the swirls of stone that delineated her hair, her nose a tiny, childish point in the middle of her face. Of all the graceful hints and half-details, only her mouth had been carved with sharp distinction - a sweetly rounded, rosebud pursing.
Calaten tapped the ‘Little/No Magic’ index once more, decisively. Melysse sighed inwardly as the examiner began to make various noises, recite the old trigger-words, speak the names of the old fae districts, trace a few elementary sigils in the air. Then he went through all the basic substance tests.
“This one’s very low-power too, Melinna,” he concluded at last. “A pretty thing, though. We’ll just see if we can’t make it work in the intermediary tests - spare you a chat with the fae.”
“That would be nice, but I’m no optimist,” she replied, still disheartened as she always was in the Opening Room. It was a dream of hers to someday find a truly rare or truly powerful artefact from the area. For a start, it meant more funding.
The next few hours were consumed by the intermediary tests, during which Calaten applied all the department’s knowledge of past artefacts to try to determine the function of each. The little reed quickly proved itself to be a mudman flute; the moment Calaten made a small mud pie on the ground and went through a few known regional nursery rhymes on the flute, the mud finally did coalesce into a tiny, jigging humanoid. But the statuette was not such an easy nut to crack, however many invocations, unusual substances or carefully copied patterns of previous sigil-triggers were tried.
Melysse sat in one of the spectator chairs now, scribbling notes in an older report beside Stefran. He didn’t seem terribly interested, but then there was only so much gemstone-tapping that anyone could watch, really.
“What triggers an artefact?” he asked her after a while.
“Absolutely bloody anything,” she replied, still scribbling. “Words, usually. Or certain singing notes. Some are particular about whistling or humming. Some have a pressure point, some only react in the presence of a certain substance … some are only triggered by combinations of all these things and more.”
“So doesn’t it take forever for Examinations and Surveys to work it out, sometimes?”
“Yes. In some cases, it literally would be forever. There are far too many permutations. What Examinations and Surveys do is try all the triggers we know about, especially triggers from similar objects or objects found in the same place. If something works, excellent; if not, that’s when we go to the Interim Query with the fae.”
She turned a few pages, checking she’d filled everything in, then folded the report away. “Interim Query is a fancy name for the first interview we have with one of the fae about a particular artefact. Nineteen times out of twenty, we have to ask the fae what an artefact does - we simply can’t figure it out ourselves. Of course, just because we ask the fae doesn’t mean they tell us.”
Stefran arched a curious brow.
“They’re not colleagues,” Melysse told him. “They have no desire whatsoever to help us in any real way, understandably enough. Sometimes they give us a straight answer, usually if they think we’ll bring them something in return; most of the time they’re helpful as a block of wood. We have to ask them the same questions, again and again, and just keep hoping they’ll finally give in. And if they keep refusing flat-out - which is often a sign that you’ve actually got a fairly valuable artefact on your hands - that’s when research and comparison, the bulk of this job, has to kick in.”
“It sounds tough.”
“It can be. There’s a lot of time spent reading through catalogues of our existing artefacts, or taking older artefacts out and re-examining them with new ones, trying to compare and maybe use the similarities. But it’s not the hardest job in the world. That would be Calaten’s. If we decide we might have a really worthwhile artefact on our hands, and the fae aren’t talking, we prioritise it and make our poor Calaten hop around madly doing everything he can think of to trigger it.”
“Playing the harmonica never works,” said Calaten in his ever-flat voice, still peering through a thick lens at the surface of the statuette.
Finally, just an hour or so later, Melysse decided to call the examiner off. She hated the feeling of cooling her heels. Time was something she preferred to keep tightly gripped in her fist. “That’ll do for now, Calaten. One out of two is a pretty flash record. I’ll just go in for Query about the statuette.”
Calaten ticked off the last few tests he’d performed and then sealed up the boxes again. “Have fun with the lunatics.”
“Always.”
Stefran didn’t change expression as they left the Opening Room, though Melysse was sure he must be relieved. North Side had certainly made quite an employee out of him. It was such a refreshing change not to be snowed under with questions from the wide-eyed neophytes she always seemed to be landed with.
Another pleasant change was heading downstairs with the trolley. The gantry was so much easier to deal with on the way down.
Back in head office again, Melysse stopped only to collect the clearances Araluna had promised to write before she headed for the doors that led to the fae’s cells. These doors were almost as rigidly controlled as the security doors topside - Special Issue were present in numbers, fully armed with rifles and pistols. Unlike the topside officers, however, these were additionally armoured with the basic iron bucket-helm and frontal chest-plate that were supposed to make it harder for fae magic to hit them.
“Okay,” said Melysse to Stefran as the soldiers began to make their checks and double-checks, deciding she’d try to use all this wasted time constructively. “I may as well give you the fae lecture. I imagine many of the same rules apply here as they did in North Side, but still.
“Rules one, two and three are be careful. Don’t give the fae ‘healthy respect’, give them the most concentrated focus of your paranoia. The fae hate us. They don’t wish us harm - they wish us dead. And because this level of Iron Hold is built over a magic-emanating area to keep them alive, it also lends them the wherewithal to make you dead. Keep all your North Side wits about you when you step into one of those rooms, okay?”
Stefran nodded. If he’d heard the spiel before, he was being very patient about it.
“Some fae are worse than others,” she went on. “I daresay you’ll never meet Cochalyon - even I don’t have clearance for him. To start with, when you’re no longer considered to be in training, you’ll be given basic clearance to talk to either Ilinme or Fiannas. Fiannas is the safest.” Melysse gave a hard smile. “Don’t ever assume that means much.”
“Sounds like Irredeemables Block Five,” said Stefran dryly. “I feel right at home.”
“Glad to hear it.” Melysse held out her arms as the two Special Issue officers on her searched her clothes. “Oh, and on a more mundane note, if you want to book in for Query - that’s what we call these little visits - do it a few days in advance. Some days it’s a real pain having only the seven fae here.”
After a lengthy and very thorough search - Melysse often waspishly wondered whether each checkpoint simply didn’t trust all the others - she and Stefran were finally admitted through the triple sets of doors and into the long, quiet corridor beyond.
The familiar old corridor stretched out in both directions, an arched tunnel of iron quietly lit in the hushed gaslight that so suited this subdued place. Somewhere further down, very faint, muffled voices were speaking, but everything else was a dead hush.
Melysse started the next part of her lecture up again as they walked down the hall. “You’ll get to know which fae are likelier to know about which artefacts and which fae are likelier to talk to you. Now, most of these old cells are empty, but I’ll point out our inmates as we go …
“On your left is Fiannas’s cell. Fiannas is an old night fae - she turns to stone every sunrise, so you can’t talk to her unless you do overtime. She’s one of the inmates who was originally caught under a no-harm oath, though, so you’re pretty safe with her.
“That door there is Ascalain’s. He’s sea fae. Also a no-harm, but you’ll probably never try talking to him more than once or twice - there are only a few people he takes to. No-one else can get an answer out of him. He’d be long gone if he didn’t know so much.
“Over there - Ilinme. She’s the favourite with those of us who don’t want to talk to Fiannas on overtime. We’ll be back to talk to her in a minute, so I’ll leave it there.
“That does it for the fae who’re bound by a no-harm oath, I’m afraid. The last four are all very capable of doing you harm if they choose. They don’t murder us daily, but they’re dangerous and you don’t ever want to make them mad.”
She hesitated for a moment. “Speaking of which, just a little aside: all of these fae are absolutely priceless. Even the tiny fraction of their knowledge that they choose to impart upon us is invaluable. It hardly bears saying, but don’t expect sympathy or understanding if you harm any fae, whether in self-defence or not. You will be fired and possibly even charged. Sad, but true.”
“I’ll curb my rage.”
“Good man. Now look here … the door on your right is Arathalian’s cell. Yes, that Arathalian. He doesn’t do much city-smashing these days, of course … just sits and ignores us, mostly. You’ll get clearance to do Query with him after you’ve worked here two or three years.
“Down there … Nebeshanin, a beast fae. Now she is bad news. Seven researchers dead in the last decade. Unfortunately she knows everything about everything when she does choose to talk, so the government keeps her here.
“Here’s Culundar. He’s another beast fae and as tricky as they come. Very nearly escaped in 283. He has this annoying habit of asking riddles in return for answers … I’m not so good at those, so I rarely visit.”
Stefran nodded further down the corridor - much further - where yet another battery of guards stood. “And that will be Cochalyon’s cell, I take it.”
“You take it correctly. He’s just as black as all the stories say, I’ve been assured. Top researchers only. Never met him, never want to. Right! That concludes the tour - let’s to back to Ilinme.”
Melysse walked back to Ilinme’s cell and used the iron rod on its chain to bang on the heavy door. After a moment’s scrutiny through the peepslot, the bolts slid back on the inside and Special Issue opened the door for her.
“This security’s unbelievable,” chuckled Stefran. “Can’t walk without tripping over the Army - it wasn’t even like this for our maximum security inmates!”
The officer who’d opened the door, a humourless fellow who always watched the cell on Threedays, gave a bit of a grunt. “If the Faeborn get out, they’re not likely to take the city apart.”
“Not many of them,” conceded Stefran. “How many more checkpoints are there?”
“This is the last.” Melysse grinned a little at his tone, waving a hand around at the small, metal-clad antechamber, its four fully armed Special Issue at their posts, and the last, heavy, windowless cell door, bolted and cross-bolted.
“Come on. Let’s go talk to Ilinme.”
Ilinme’s cell was a little untidy today. Someone had brought in a pile of new books to butter her up, it seemed, and she had left them lying wherever she’d finished reading them. Apart from the books and a few cupboards - which were usually to tidy things up for the researchers’ sake, not Ilinme’s - the cell appeared empty.
“Why are there leaves on the floor?” asked Stefran.
“She likes them.” Melysse chuckled at his lack of reaction. “You’re used to invisible Faeborn, I take it. The last time I brought a new blood in here, he nearly fainted to think one of the Seven was on the loose.”
“We had a few Faeborn who might occasionally go invisible, yes. Can you ever see Ilinme?”
“It’s very rude to talk like I’m not here,” a familiar soprano voice hissed.
Melysse looked in the general direction of Ilinme’s voice, since there was never any better option. “Sorry, Ilinme. Do you feel like explaining your metaphysical makeup to my colleague here, or will I do it?”
“Every new gaoler knows less and less,” the fae’s voice sneered. “One day you’ll know so little that I’ll be able to just walk out of here.”
“I don’t think even you will live long enough for that, Ilinme,” said Melysse a little sadly. To Stefran she explained, “Ilinme is a sun fae. You can’t see her out of the sunlight.”
“Sunlight? What’s that?” Ilinme asked tartly.
Footsteps rustled through the leaves, and suddenly a handful of them were dumped in Stefran’s greying hair, rubbed around in a crackling mess.
“I’ve never seen you before,” said Ilinme. “New blood, are we? What happened? Did that naughty Cochalyon eat another one of you monkeys?”
“No, Ilinme, just another boring old retirement,” Melysse replied blandly as Stefran picked leaves out of his hair, bemused.
A replacement handful of leaves was scrubbed into Stefran’s scalp. Ilinme loved tormenting new employees, though Melysse doubted she’d have much luck with an ex-prison researcher.
“Is he a man or a stuffed toy?” the fae asked coldly, leaving Stefran alone with an invisible but audible slap around the back of the head. “You’re going to be dull to work with. I won’t talk to you.”
Melysse pounced. “Speaking of work and talking …”
“No, I don’t want to talk to you either.” The footsteps rustled away again, decisively.
“Come on, Ilinme, I have two completely new artefacts today. Don’t you want to see them?”
“Artefacts,” sneered the fae. “You stupid monkeys hoard old nursery toys and door-keys and silly little tools and call them artefacts. I’m waiting for the day you bring me an old pair of my trousers.”
“This might be the day, Ilinme. You never know. Go ahead and open the boxes. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.”
Stefran helped her pull the trolley with the two containment boxes a little further into the cell. “Don’t ever bring an artefact into the cell of a fae who hasn’t sworn the no-harm oath,” she muttered to him as they manhandled the trolley into place.
“This one’s not no-harm,” he returned. “She pulled my hair and hurt my feelings.”
More leaf-rustling forestalled Melysse’s reply. But they had a long wait before Ilinme actually removed the iron lid from the first box, throwing it down so close to their feet that they had to jump back.
The fae flute levitated into the air, hovering where a tall woman might hold it to play. “A child made this,” Ilinme said. “You should know what this is.”
“A mudman flute,” replied Melysse. “I was just checking.”
“If you’d found Enna-Iki’s flute, now, you might have something to crow about. When he sang through that flute, he could knit your idiot forebears together like woollens.” Ilinme blew a sudden, shrill discord through the flute, then threw it back into the box.
Then the lid of the second box started to grind aside. Melysse and Stefran both stood well back this time until it had clattered safely away from their toes.
“A statue, a toy, a present,” said Ilinme in an unimpressed voice. “What good is it? Shaped by magic, not carved of stone. Another child made it. Even one of you monkeys could make it.”
The statuette rose into the air, slowly and with effort, as Ilinme examined it from all sides. “… No. Monkeys couldn’t make this. It’s too beautiful.”
They heard her whisper - the fae were still protective, so protective, of their language - and on the statuette’s pedestal, answering the fae’s query, a long string of sigils around the base gave off a wan glow. Melysse actually recognised a few from her dragonmaking days; everyone in the facility made a start in dragonmaking. This wasn’t an exceptionally complicated construction. Calaten had been right in his estimations - as always.
“’Thalian bids me sing,’” said Ilinme. The statuette, already rather eerie to look at in its midair seat, turned its delicate head towards her voice. Then the pursed stone mouth opened and softly began to shape the words of some alien old lullaby, high minor notes like crystal spilling very gently from its cold lips.
After a minute or two, it stopped.
“Beautiful,” murmured Stefran.
Melysse was inclined to agree, but she was more puzzled than entranced. “How did you trigger it by speaking our language, Ilinme?”
“You stupid, fat cow,” replied the fae scornfully, using one of her favourite overheard insults. “You can babble at it in ape-chatter as much as you like. It’s the name that’s the key. … Hmm …”
‘Hmm, Ilinme?”
The statue turned around in the air, this way and that. “Actually … when I look at it again … there’s something else. Another magic. I don’t understand it. It says something about ‘regeneration’ or ‘healing’. I don’t know.”
Melysse pursed her lips. Useful and useable artefacts meant more departmental funding, but Ilinme wasn’t always the most reliable of sources. “Are you sure you don’t understand it? Look again.”
“No, I definitely don’t know,” the fae replied. “You’ll need to ask its maker.”
“Very helpful, Ilinme.”
“Oh, you stupid, fat monkey. Take it to Arathalian! Ara-thalian!”
In the box, the statuette began to sing its high, soft song again. Melysse bent down and reached for the lid, thoughtful. “Thanks, Ilinme. An absolute pleasure to talk to you, as always.”
Hounded more or less ceaselessly by Ilinme as they replaced the lids on the boxes - pinches, leaves flung in their faces, hair-pulling - Melysse and Stefran finally trundled back out of the cell with the trolley and escaped back into the guard antechamber. Stefran’s face was finally betraying a bit of relief by the time the Special Issue bolted the cell door behind them and beat around the room with thin iron canes.
Making sure an invisible fae didn’t escape wasn’t easy.
“And Ilinme’s the nice one,” Melysse told Stefran dryly.
“Great.”
Once Special Issue had made sure Ilinme hadn’t slipped out through the door, they opened the outer door for Melysse to leave. Stefran pulled the trolley back out into the hall after her.
“So what now?” he prompted.
“I try to work out how many fibs Ilinme told me.”
“Fibs?”
“Yes,” she replied, smiling sardonically. “Ilinme isn’t as benign as she seems. She loves wasting our time and she’s always trying to convince researchers to take artefacts in to the no-oath fae - especially powerful artefacts. She’ll be so happy the day one of us gets blown up.” Melysse frowned. “It’s odd, though. This isn’t a powerful artefact. Calaten would’ve felt it. I’m sure … that is, I’m pretty sure none of the fae could use this puny thing to hurt anyone.”
“Are you so sure you can trust Calaten?”
It was a very North Side response. “Yes, I’m sure. He’s worked here almost twenty years and he hates the fae. No chance he’d conspire to get them out.” She shrugged. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. There’s no way I’d take any artefact into one of the no-oath cells, however powerless I might think it was. I certainly wouldn’t take anything into Arathalian’s.”
She cocked an eye at Stefran. “You’re clear on that, right? Not even a silly little mudman flute. Nothing. We never quite know what we’ve got, but the fae do.”
“Understood.”
“Excellent. You’re Iron Hold material through and through, you are. What I might do is stop in with Arathalian and just ask him if he knows about a certain statue of that description. That way I won’t have to spend any precious time wondering about one of Ilinme’s little lies.”
Stefran smiled ruefully. “Guess my clearance doesn’t extend to the destroyer of Old Talton.”
“Not a chance in hell, I’m afraid. I’ll let you wait in the hall with the trolley, though.”
“Lucky me.”
Melysse threw him a wink as she strode to Arathalian’s door and banged on it with the iron rod.
Rather than open the door, though, the Special Issue inside just slid back the peepslot. “Already got someone here for Query,” the framed, moustachioed lips told her shortly.
“Tell them I’ve got priority access today,” replied Melysse a little smugly, well-acquainted with the frustration of being dragged out for someone else’s priority access. “Signed off by Araluna. Here.”
He took her papers through the slot. The sound of angry denials filled up the silence for a moment - Stefran eyed her dryly from his lonely post down the hall - until the door finally opened to let the ousted researcher out.
“Thanks, Melysse,” he snapped - Caren Brellview, chief researcher for historical fae demographics. “I hadn’t even started my Query!”
“Any time, Caren,” she replied with a sweet smile. “Any time for one of the five dozen times you’ve done it to me, really.”
He stalked off down the hall, muttering, as Melysse stepped into the antechamber. Special Issue checked her over with the usual hyper-thoroughness that no-oath fae assignations received, not once but three times over, and then opened up the doors to let her into the cell.
Arathalian’s cell was nothing like Ilinme’s. All moon fae had a fascination with human-style living - even the moon fae who’d once levelled the Old City. His cell was neat, his oaken bed likewise, and the blue velour carpet on the floor was musty but clean. Bookshelves lined two walls, all of them titles like Advancements of the Age of Iron and The Evolving Cultural Demographic of the Federation. It was all about humans, Talton, what was going on aboveground. None of it was about the fae. The one picture on his wall was a huge artist’s sketch of Central Talton from Cripley’s Hill - not a natural scape or a picture of the sky, as other fae had.
Only those with no clue as to how Arathalian’s mind worked were ever confused as to why.
The fae himself was sitting in the overstuffed lounge chair at the foot of his bed, reading. It had to be a half-moon tonight; he was in his young man phase, raven-haired and sapphire-eyed, turning the pages of his book with long, slender fingers. He looked completely human in his dark blue shirt and trousers; most of the Seven wore ‘normal’ clothes now, but he was the only one who habitually wore shoes as well.
“Good morning,” said Melysse evenly.
“Is it?” he replied, not looking up.
“Well, it might just be getting on for afternoon, actually. Time’s run away from me today.”
“It does that.” Flick, flick. “Come back another time, Melysse Grandinnen.”
He learned all the researchers’ names. It was always the first thing he asked. Melysse wished she could have brought Stefran in just to pique the fae’s notoriously elusive interest. “What are you reading today?”
“’Arms and Armour of the Present Day’,” he replied. “Published last year, I believe. Illustrated. Very good of Caren to bring it in for me. Where is he today?”
“I had to slip in ahead of him, just quickly. I have a very small question for you.”
Arathalian looked up - the point at which most newcomers tended to start or flinch back. Only dragonmaking graduates from Loria, the realm of that other famous moon fae, were ever inured to it. Arathalian spoke quietly and calmly, a gentleman’s murmur, and the expression on his long-featured face never changed, but the corundum blaze of his eyes was a permanent snarl of loathing: burn and die!
“I vastly prefer books to questions,” he told her clearly. “You don’t interest me, Melysse Grandinnen. You may go.”
“I’ll bring you another book if you hear me out. Anything but the floor plans of this facility.”
“I already know that,” Arathalian replied, and she couldn’t tell whether he was returning quip for quip or being deadly serious. It was always better to assume the latter. “No. I’m reading at the moment.”
“We’ve just been given two pieces from a private collection in the area. Ilinme said you could tell me a little more about one of them.”
“Unless it’s sharp and you have it with you, I simply don’t care.”
“It’s a statuette. A young girl.”
“Capital. Very pretty. Put it in your hall - it’s rather austere out there.”
Melysse ignored that. “It sings.”
“Blood and iron, it sounds like a lullaby toy! Ilinme is rattling your chain again, that’s all. Now go away.”
She sighed. It was almost a foregone conclusion. But it was such a tantalising, obvious supposition - Arathalian being the ‘Thalian’ whose name called the statuette’s voice. It was from the same general area, after all.
Seeing that Arathalian’s hot blue eyes had returned to his book, and knowing that he would most likely ignore anything else she said from that point onward, Melysse tried one last thing: she opened her mouth and sang the simple, minor lullaby that the statuette had sung, as closely as she could remember.
The book fell from Arathalian’s hands and slipped off his lap to the floor.
“Stop,” he demanded, rising from his chair as his voice also rose - still not loud, but far louder than he usually spoke.
Melysse stopped singing at once, hoping she hadn’t aggravated him too much. At least she knew now that Ilinme hadn’t been spinning stories entirely from thin air.
“Melysse Grandinnen,” said Arathalian in a hard, knife-edged voice, “give me that statuette.”
“I don’t have it with me.”
“Give it to me.”
“You know I can’t do that, Arathalian. But if you -”
The air blurred silver, that telltale sign of movement too fast for real time, and suddenly Melysse found her words choked off by a cold, long-fingered hand. Arathalian’s hot-loathing eyes were only inches from hers, his mouth contorted in a truly uncharacteristic snarl.
All notions of having the situation under control vanished, washed away like sand in a great wave of anxiety. Idiot! Why’d you say “can’t”?
“She is not for you,” the fae whispered harshly. “Not for any of you, you filthy-fingered animal dross. I’ll melt the bones of every vermin that comes in here from now until I die unless you give it to me. I’ll knit your loose human flesh around your own heads until you strangle in it.”
Melysse tried to keep her breathing steady, tried to keep her brain ticking over. She knew departmental policy in situations like these. No hostages. No demands. “If … if it’s … studied … check … safe to give …”
“I told you! Not one moment more in human hands!”
She had never, never heard Arathalian shout. Nor had the Special Issue outside; she could hear their startled, raised voices, calling for her to tell them whether anything was wrong.
Her face felt pouchy with the build-up of all that blood in her head; spots were blooming and fizzing up her sight. Arathalian’s fingers did not unclench even slightly.
“Ask …” was all she could strangle out from under his clutching hand. “Ask … test it … see …”
The world moved in a strange way, and then - bang! - the side of her head hit the iron door, which had previously been at least five feet away. Melysse felt the peepslot slide open beneath her aching cheek, heard the soldiers swearing to see her face jammed there.
“Very soon I’ll be Reshaping her into such a mess that breathing will make her scream,” Arathalian warned, his voice lifted to carry through the door, but no longer shouting. “Then I’ll carry on with everyone else who enters this room. Bring me the statuette.”
“We can’t bring you anything unapproved and we don’t even know what you’re talking about,” retorted the officer outside, curtly. “Calm down. Don’t make things ugly.”
“Are you listening, man of iron? I’m going to kill her. Then I’ll kill every other researcher I can. No more Queries, no more answers, understood? The deaths may not matter, but the information will. It’s far more valuable than your neck or your job - your superiors will explain that to you when they get here.”
Melysse heard more swearing behind the door. She heard some whispering. Then she heard the locks on the outer door - the one from the antechamber to the outside hall - grating aside.
They were either going to fetch Araluna, who’d just repeat policy for them and sadly attend Melysse’s funeral later, or they were going to call a full alert and do things the Army way. Either way, she had to admit, she was gone.
You got me, Ilinme, she thought, choked up by the sour, bitter frustration-fear of it all. You finally did it. Conniving little bitch.
She stayed there with her face pressed against the cold iron - she had no choice - and listened to the sound of her own heartbeat, thumping loud in her ears. Finally she heard the door open again.
Special Issue were arguing.
“You found the section manager already?”
“No, Brinnet’s run on for her. But we found the research partner outside.”
“So why didn’t you bring him in?”
“Got no clearance on him.”
“What?”
Stefran? thought Melysse, her mind drifting in a fatalistic place. What a first day he’s having.
“So where’s his clearance, then?”
A conference at the door. “He’s not actually a research partner, he says. He’s new blood.”
“You’re bloody wasting time, you know that?”
“But he said he knows what this ‘statuette’ is Arathalian keeps belting on about!”
“You sick of your job? Is that it? Because they’ll fire us all to hell if we let a bloody trainee in here!”
“Sweet iron, Camley, he’s going to kill that woman if we don’t do something!”
A detached part of Melysse’s mind marvelled at how perfectly still Arathalian could stand. The only indication that he was still behind her - though granted, it was a fairly strong indication - was the grip of his hands, one on her neck to keep her head jammed against the door, the other twisting one of her arms up behind her back to keep her from struggling.
“Ask him what he suggests. Through the door. But you get him right out of the way if the section manager gets here.”
Murmur, murmur.
“He’s suggesting we give Arathalian what he wants.”
“The statue thing? What is it?”
“… He says it’s an artefact -”
“Fucking hell! Where’d they dig up this idiot?”
“- but it’s a completely harmless trinket, he says! Arathalian made it, he says!”
Melysse gasped, a half-grunt against the iron door.
“Fuck that. It’s not coming in here.”
“Examinations and Surveys checked it out and tagged it harmless just today. That’s what he says. Camley, that’s a woman in there …”
“That’s a researcher aware of the risks - that’s who it is. I’m not giving Arathalian anything he wants that badly.”
Good! Don’t! thought Melysse, still horrified. She didn’t want to die, but she didn’t want the Iron Hold to be cracked open, either. She’d told Stefran, twice, that even Examinations and Surveys could never be completely certain. Why was he ignoring her?
“It’s the worst kind of curse to let a woman die, Camley.”
“You’re really pissing me off with your wide-eyed country boy shit. I don’t want her dead, but we’ve got more than just her to think about here.”
Someone thumped on the outside door. More muffled voices buzzed.
“The section manager says we’re not to enter the cell until she gets here.”
“Time is up,” said Arathalian bleakly.
The soldiers’ voices went quiet at the sound of his voice, and stayed quiet for Melysse’s. Melysse screamed out in almost as much shrill shock as pain - behind her back, her arm had just been forced up so high that her fingers were brushing her own cheek. The agony in her shoulder alone was like a handful of broken glass rammed under the flesh with all the nerves.
“Stop! Wait!” one of the officers roared over her cries. She tried to bite down on them, and succeeded more than once, but every tiny movement cracked that glass whip of pain harder.
“Very well,” said Arathalian. “You have one more minute.”
The voices behind the door were fierce and swift.
“How harmless is harmless?”
“The new blood outside says the artefact’s completely harmless. Completely.”
“Is it certified? Does he have the certification here?”
“Our arses are toasted both ways, Camley. It doesn’t matter what kind of artefact they find we’ve let in. Now we break the rules or we don’t.”
“At least ask the new blood what it does!”
Pause. “… He says it sings a lullaby. That’s all.” Pause. “He thinks it’s sentimental value. Got Arathalian’s name on it.”
“Sings?” the first voice asked sharply.
“Yeah.”
“Ten seconds,” warned Arathalian evenly.
“Y-” Melysse began through her teeth, horrified at the lack of discipline she was hearing outside, terrified to think of the worst case scenario that might result, but she broke off with another full-throated cry at the next sharp tug on her arm.
“Five seconds. Four.”
“It’s coming in, Arathalian! Stop! It’s coming!”
Melysse kicked at the door, trying anything to convey her desperate disapproval to the men outside, but it was too late. The sound of the outer door’s locks and bolts were rattling - Stefran was going to give them the statuette.
Arathalian released her arm. The pain was almost as bad as when he’d first wrenched it out of place. Then he pushed her back across the room - well clear of bolting or snatching-reach once the door opened - and sat her down in the overstuffed lounge chair.
Soon afterwards, the inner door opened.
It admitted the hard-eyed figure of one of the Special Issue, gleaming under the gaslight in his half-plate and iron bucket-helm. In his hands he had the statuette, slim and lovely, held as if the soldier were waiting for it to explode.
“Take it and give her back, Arathalian,” the man demanded tightly.
The statue’s delicate head turned towards the soldier as he spoke the name, and then it began to sing.
High notes streamed softly into the cell like a pattern of raindrops, clear and simple. In spite of all his razor-edged insistences, Arathalian didn’t lunge for it immediately; he seemed unable, standing in place with his eyes tightly shut and one hand pressed hard to his temple.
The song was nearing its slow end when silver blurred - the too-fast movement again - and the statuette disappeared from the soldier’s outstretched hands, snatched away with captious violence.
“Miss,” the soldier called warily to Melysse, eyes on Arathalian rather than her. Melysse rose slowly from the chair, trying to see straight through her streaming eyes, her thoughts reeling from one outcome to another.
Arathalian paid neither of them any attention. As Melysse passed him, he pressed his lips to the cold crown of the statuette’s hair - a family kiss, from father to daughter, or brother to younger sister. They would never know which. The fae would never tell them.
The statuette had begun to sing her lullaby again, sweet-voiced and sad, by the time the soldier banged on the door again - Melysse’s good arm in his - and shouted for the others to let them out.
No-one cheered as the officer escorted her back out into the antechamber, locks and bolts already being thrown back across Arathalian’s door. Melysse knew why. Only now was it occurring to the bloody fools that they really were going to lose their jobs for this, and would be lucky if nothing worse happened … to them, or to the Iron Hold, or even to Talton.
Sitting outside the danger of Arathalian’s cell, however, it was hard to keep letting her professional side stamp out the great, tidal rush of gratitude.
“Let’s take you topside,” said the officer who’d gone in for her, looking subdued even underneath his bucket-helm, but before he could make for the door there was a loud thumping at it from outside.
It was Araluna, anxious and breathless, accompanied by a good ten riflemen from the main offices. They’d never have been used on Arathalian, of course, unless he’d tried his best to escape. “He let you go? Thank the bloody Warrior!” she gasped as she entered, seeing Melysse.
“It’s not all sunshine,” Melysse forced out. She’s going to go mad. But I had nothing to do with this. I didn’t ask anyone to risk the facility for me. The opposite, in fact.
“What’s wrong?”
It wasn’t my fault. I had nothing to do with it. … Oh, crap.
“Well … I had to give him the statuette. He found it … on me.”
Araluna’s solicitous expression couldn’t have been scoured away faster by a full splash of acid. “Found it on you?” she burst out. “What the hell did you take it in for? I can’t believe you’d do anything so bloody stupid!”
You’d better. “Wanted to ask him about it,” she grated out. “Just ask him. Thought it was … harmless … told Special Issue … I bought it … just a present … agh!” The vibrations as she spoke were too painful. Her shoulder felt like it was dissolving. She knew her career was.
“I can’t talk,” she managed once the latest pain-wave ebbed a little. “Hospital. Please.”
“Sure, hospital,” replied Araluna stonily. “You’ll be talking later, though. A lot. I daresay it’ll probably be the last thing you do for us here, Melysse.”
Melysse shot a last look at the silent soldiers, half-reproach and half-warning; they could figure out the thanks for themselves. As she stepped outside with Araluna’s unneeded help, she saw Stefran hovering there in the hall, one of the containment boxes open beside him, his expression clearly showing that he’d heard it all.
“Here, new blood,” ordered Araluna. “I have a very long incident report to fill out. We’ve nothing else for you to do today, so you can take Melysse to the hospital … and forget anything she’s taught you today, please.”
With that the section manager swept off, tight-lipped and tense. Melysse did feel a very tiny tweak of pity for her, even if the rest was just hoping she’d trip in the corridor and break her nose. Today’s misadventures were definitely going to make one hell of an incident report, and who knew how the department would go about separating Arathalian from that blasted statuette now?
“I’m fine,” Melysse said shortly as Stefran tried reaching for her good arm. “I can walk.”
He dropped his hand. “Why’d you take the dive?” he asked.
“Why’d you bloody ignore everything I kept repeating for you?” She started walking down the corridor, keeping her steps small and light. She could already tell from the building agony in her shoulder that it wasn’t going to work.
“Look, I’ll tell them how it really happened -”
“That was for Special Issue. Not you. You’re the one who set things off.” There was plenty more she wanted to say, but she had to grind it all down between her teeth. “Keep a lid on. Don’t get them fired too.”
He said absolutely nothing else, and nor did she, all the way to the coach-house. She did need help getting there, as it turned out, which baffled her somewhat; why should an injured shoulder keep her from walking properly?
Still silent all the while, Stefran got into the coach with her and ignored her pointed, discouraging stare. He checked her into the hospital and sat there in the same silence while one of the doctors examined her rather too thoroughly, making his ‘does it hurt?’ questions completely superfluous.
Finally, when they’d allotted Melysse a bed and confirmed her suspicions - her arm was broken, her shoulder dislocated, and neither would be the same again - Stefran rose to leave.
“I left North Side because one of my colleagues was killed by a Faeborn,” he said, succinctly and matter-of-factly, not really an excuse or an explanation. “He was Reshaped with a spider. I’ve never heard anything like it. Wasn’t prepared to again.”
Melysse watched him walk out, half-exasperatedly, half-sympathetically. He wasn’t tough enough to be Iron Hold material after all.
Then again, four Special Issue - the ultimate hard men of the Army - had seemingly proved today that they weren’t, either.
She wondered if she’d really stand and listen to a co-worker dying in the next room, as her professional pride tried to assure her she would.
Ah, well, she thought. I’ll never know now, will I?
Flippancy didn’t work. She’d just lost a fifteen-year career.
Morphine dealt ably with Melysse’s pain, physical and mental, as her doctor did his best over the next few days to put her ruined shoulder in order. He seemed to think she’d have some limited mobility back in the joint eventually, though it was hard for anyone of Melysse’s character to look beyond the now.
It was a cold, grey morning when the doctor released her from the ward with a stiff sling for her shoulder, three full days after the incident at the Iron Hold, urging her to come back in a week to see how the healing was getting on. Melysse’s aging father was in poorer condition than she was to be meeting her at the hospital, so instead she went outside to make her way home alone.
She almost missed Stefran, striding for the hospital doors without spotting her, and in a different mood she might have let him go anyway. Today, she didn’t. “Hey!”
The thin man stopped and turned. “Ah,” he said. “Liberty day.”
“I’m a free woman.” She hoped that sharing a joke would eliminate the need for apologies or explanations or whatnot. She didn’t like them much. “Looking for me?”
“I am. I’ve been sent straight from head office.”
“Araluna needs me to finish her incident report, I imagine.”
“I’m sure she does. She needs you for a few other things, too.” Stefran paused a little reluctantly. “Arathalian is asking for you.”
Melysse’s stomach made an odd little shift, just fleetingly. “He is?”
“Yes. He is. And he’s not talking to anyone else in the interim, either.”
“He loves his blackmail.” Suddenly Melysse smiled, her butterflies disappearing. She was an Iron Hold researcher - much grittier stuff than the usual, pasty academic. “You know, it sort of sounds like I have Araluna over a barrel, too.”
“You do,” agreed Stefran. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
He looked startled - but only a little, reserved as he always was. Maybe one day he could make proper Iron Hold material … with the right teacher, anyway. “Do you actually want your job back?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Even if she does murder my clearances and slash my Query time in half. I want it back. I’m good at it. And I’m too old to become a florist.”
Stefran’s smile was a bit ambiguous. “Well. I’ll see you later, then, I suppose. When will I tell Araluna you’re coming in?”
“Soon,” replied Melysse. “Fairly soon.” It felt good to be a bit spiteful.
And it felt good, very good, to be a part of the Iron Hold again.
“All right, ladies and gentlemen - all together? Welcome to the Iron Hold!”
Melysse rifled madly through her briefcase for her security passes at the front desk, paying no attention to the over-cheerful voice of the tour guide in the foyer. After so many years of arriving at work at the tour starting time, she could have recited the guide’s whole spiel herself.
Unfortunately this was the mid-morning tour, not the early morning tour, and she was very, very late.
“We’ll start right here in the foyer, which has a rather eventful past all its own. The foyer has been rebuilt on not three but four separate occasions - twice during the Fae Wars in 2004 and 2048, Fifth Fae Age; once in the Faeborn Riots of 283, Iron Age; and once late last century after a structural failure in one of the lower levels. But don’t worry, ladies and gentlemen, you’re in no danger today!”
Touristy laughter, mostly polite. Melysse started to fume a bit as she rummaged on through her case, feeling Paulen’s bored, security-guard stare sharpening with impatience.
“You don’t want to be much later than you already are,” he said in his slow, careful voice, drumming his fingers on his desk. “There’s new blood starting today. He came in this morning. Early.”
“Well, they’re not fobbing him off on me,” retorted Melysse shortly. “I’ve got a man bringing in two new pieces from a private collection. I haven’t had anything new to look at for months.”
Paulen shrugged in his slow-motion way, watching her empty some of the case’s contents onto his desk.
“… in use as a prison, continuously, for just over four hundred years now, making it the oldest such holding facility in the country. In the old days it could hold as many as fifty fae in secure, magic-proofed cells; today it holds only Talton’s famous Seven of the Hold.”
With a triumphant hiss Melysse seized her leather sleeve of passes out from the string-bound leaves of a report, handing them over for Paulen’s meticulous examination.
“All right,” he said, passing them back. “You’d better get a move on.”
Melysse shoved all her things into the briefcase, muttering her thanks, and turned to stride across the foyer towards the office doors. The tour group, about a dozen strong, watched her pass with great interest, perhaps wishing the foyer part of the tour would end and the more exciting underground tour begin.
“-Most of the Iron Hold’s previous function as an iron-clad prison is today performed by the North Side Facility, which receives all dangerous Faeborn awaiting deportation. As a result, today’s Iron Hold is more a research facility and an historical monument than a prison …”
Leaving the tour and the airy-domed foyer behind, Melysse approached the first office checkpoint. No doubt the tourists would soon be ooh-ing with nervous excitement when the rifle-bearing Army operatives checked them over, but Melysse only chafed at the delay until the men in tan let her through.
The stone hall beyond seemed twice as long as usual, the staircase twice as far away. She was already breathless by the time she hit the stairs, dashing down two flights past the levels wryly dubbed ‘Tourist Blocks A and B’ and then again down another two flights, longer flights, to Holding Floor C.
This time it was a relief to pass through checkpoint. Melysse got to stand still and gasp for breath in the gaslit antechamber, ignoring the officers’ dry grins as they looked over her passes and searched her for prohibited items.
At last they opened the big iron doors for her, all three heavy sets of doors, and let her hurry in disarray into head office.
Head office, once the gaoler’s complex of Holding Floor C, almost looked as though it had jumped back in time to the old days this morning. The sharp smell of oiled iron and steel - so synonymous with the old-style iron-clad - was as strong as always, but today there were even armed Special Issue officers present, keeping a silent watch over the sun-starved teams of Melysse’s fellow researchers at their desks.
No doubt about it; there had to be a fresh employee starting work today. It was never facility policy to trust newcomers easily.
Melysse rushed to her desk and dumped her untidy case on top of it, huffing like a steam-train.
“Melysse!” exclaimed Araluna’s voice. “Look at the time!”
She turned to look at her section manager with more vocational than personal dislike, mopping back her sweat-damp hair. “I’m sorry, Araluna. The coaches ran late and I couldn’t find my pass.”
“Well, it was a bad day for it,” Araluna said crossly, both hands planted on the desk, her ascetic face looking more pinched than usual. “I’ve been waiting for you to start showing our newest around the facility. He’s been here two hours already.”
Melysse took pains not to look directly at the figure hovering behind Araluna. “This is a bit of a difficult day for me … I’ve got two pieces coming in any minute from -”
“I understand you’re very busy, Melysse, and I’m very sorry to have to ask, but there’s no-one else who’s available and competent. Don’t make me hand a fresher over to Praxton, for heaven’s sake.”
“But I’m going in for Query today.”
“Fine. Take him with you. I’ll write the clearance.”
Melysse let out a long sigh and finally turned to look at the newcomer. He was a quiet-looking fellow with dark eyes and dark salt-and-pepper hair, more or less her own age, somewhat fieldmouseish in overall appearance and demeanour. A few positives ticked off automatically on her checklist: older than the know-all thirty-year-olds, no silly, fizzy excitement in his expression, no frozen newcomer terror …
“All right,” she muttered. “But I want priority access for Query. I haven’t seen the pieces yet, so I don’t know who I’ll need to talk to.”
“Fine. Done. Good. Now I’ve really got to get busy. I’ll leave you with Melysse here, Stefran.” Araluna disappeared in haste back to her desk, sending a few bits of Melysse’s paperwork swirling onto the floor with the backdraught.
The newcomer bent down to pick them up, clearly very aware of his place in the office pecking order. “Stefran Ixion,” he said as he handed them over.
“Melysse Grandinnen. Nice to meet you,” she replied briskly. “I’ll explain what I can today, but I’m going to be very busy - sorry in advance. While I wait for my delivery, I have time for some questions. Have any?”
“What’s your research specialty here at the facility?”
“Fae artefacts research, Greater Talton area. Specifically Westrock, Liari, Camwell and Alenyan fae. Mostly that involves the study and collective comparison of existing artefacts, since Talton has grown over so much of the locality, but sometimes I get a chance to analyse and catalogue rare new finds. Like today.” She said it significantly.
“I won’t get in your way,” promised Stefran.
Melysse eyed him. “You’re government. Far too compliant to be new to the service. Where did you work?”
He laughed at her analysis. “I was a researcher at North Side. I analysed Faeborn inmates and assessed their potential for harm.”
“I see. Tough job.” She let him climb a little higher in her esteem. “I’ll be glad to skip through some of the safety lectures - ah!”
One of the Army operatives, newly emerged from outside the triple outer doors, was pushing a large crate on a trolley towards her desk. All thoughts of Stefran were forgotten as she stood by the officer’s shoulder, chafing impatiently while he tried to pry the lid open.
At last, with a crack, the lid did come free. Melysse reached in eagerly, pulling out the smaller of the two metal containment boxes inside, searching around for the etched contents plaque.
Artefact Description: Instrument, Flute or Pipe, it read. Origin: Upper Camwell, Talton, collection of R. Cannett. Then, after the heading Function, there was a blank space. That was for her to fill.
The Army officer strode off again with her eager thanks, leaving her with the open crate on the trolley. Melysse bent down over the lip of the crate to read the plaque. Artefact Description: Statuette, Female. Origin: Upper Camwell, Talton, collection of R. Cannett. Function:
It was delicious. Melysse straightened, grinning to herself. Then, in appreciation of Stefran’s extended and total silence, she turned to him and patted one of the metal boxes.
“Lesson one,” she said. “This is a containment box. We keep fae artefacts in these until we learn what they do, and sometimes even after we learn what they do. Don’t ever open one without permission. Don’t ever open one in a crowded room. We have the imaginatively named Opening Room a little further into the complex for that.”
Stefran nodded. Right response.
“You’ll watch me open these pretty soon,” she went on. “While I’m handling the artefacts, please try not to speak or move around. Artefacts are often sound-triggered, though that’s not usually the dangerous ones.”
Stefran nodded again. “May I ask a question?”
“Sure.”
“Why keep magical items in iron boxes? Doesn’t it ruin them?”
“The containment boxes have a small stone called a ‘charge’ placed inside with the artefact. The charges are enchanted by our fae - hah, well, some of them, in their better moods - and they keep the artefact from starving in the iron. It’s the archivists who collect and replace the charges in the government vault … you could specialise in that section eventually if you find it interesting.”
Melysse wrote down a few notes about the consignment, fishing out her passes from her case again, and then gestured for Stefran to follow her as she left her desk and marched through all the other research partitions to the double iron doors at the far side of the room. Only once they’d satisfied the checkpoint soldiers there - all keeping a particularly sharp eye on Stefran - were they allowed through the doors that led to the Opening Room.
It didn’t lead immediately to the Opening Room, of course. Very few doors in the Iron Hold led immediately to anything. Already tired after the morning’s rush, Melysse puffed up the long flights of stairs with great difficulty, pulling her trolley of precious boxes up the running gantry that followed each flight.
Stefran took over for her after the second flight, though he was hardly the muscular sort. “Why are we heading upstairs again?” he asked after a while, struggling along behind her.
“The Opening Room is much closer to the surface than the fae cells. If something explodes in a very big way, we don’t bring too much more of the complex tumbling down.”
“And how often does that happen, exactly?”
She laughed. “Almost never. Once in the history of the facility. Don’t worry.”
At long last, they reached the front desk of Examinations and Surveys. Melysse flashed her passes to the secretary and led Stefran through the small, thick door of the Opening Room.
“Anyone in?” she called, her voice echoing tinnily around the thick, vaulted dome. The onion-shaped Opening Room was not large - about four metres from ceiling to floor and another four from one side to the other - but the walls were heavy iron and steel, five times thicker than any other walls in the whole facility.
“Here, Melaine.”
The chief examiner in Examinations and Surveys, Calaten Tremaine, was seated in one of the chairs immediately next to the door, always difficult to spot. He was a short man about a hundred-fifty centimetres tall, lank-haired and somewhat fish-eyed.
“Melysse,” she corrected him, as she did every time. “Morning, Calaten. I’ve two completely new pieces today. Well, three if you count my new colleague here, Stefran Ixion.”
Calaten turned his deceptively glazed, blank blue stare on Stefran. “Good to meet you, Stefran. I’m Calaten Tremaine,” he said in the usual monotone.
“Good to meet you, Calaten,” replied Stefran, a faint hardness around his dark eyes. Melysse could guess why. Most people reacted to Calaten, though they tended to be more disturbed than suspicious.
“You’re probably thinking I seem rather strange,” Calaten told him. Even if he’d been capable of normal vocal inflection, Melysse suspected, he’d probably still have used a monotone to recite the same old explanation for this hundredth time. “I’ve been Reshaped. I work under a restricted governmental visa with Examinations and Surveys. The Reshaping process has left me with a defective voice box and an impaired ability to experience emotion. The rest of it is simply natural ugliness.”
No-one cracked a deadpan joke like Calaten. He wasn’t really capable of any other kind, in fact. Stefran smiled, still looking a bit cautious. “You’re one of the lucky Reshaped, then, Calaten. Sorry, I’m used to individuals with … rather more spectacular flaws.”
“I can’t set people on fire with my mind,” said Calaten tonelessly. “Even when they call me Fishman.”
“Stefran here used to work at North Side Facility with all the loopy Faeborn, Fishman,” Melysse explained, using the office nickname with affection. There were some researchers who weren’t so positive about it.
Calaten looked at Stefran with his eternally incurious bug-eyes. “Ah. I’ve been there. Frightening people … on both sides.”
“There are at that,” Stefran agreed. “I was glad to come here.”
“Here is pretty much the same,” replied Calaten. “Perhaps you should be a florist.”
Stefran smiled again but didn’t laugh, and some habitual old watchfulness lingered in his face as Melysse ushered him to one of the chairs.
“Now, remember what I said,” she warned briskly. “Sit as quietly as you can until I tell you it’s safe. Save your questions for later.”
She pulled the trolley with the two containment boxes into the middle of the Opening Room. Calaten followed with his clipboard, brushing a bit of rust off his overalls.
Melysse lifted one of the heavy lids off very carefully with his help, laying it down as quietly as possible on the woollen muffling-blanket laid over part of the floor. The first box, the one marked ‘flute or pipe’, contained just a tiny, delicate reed flute couched in old rags. There were a few markings scratched down towards the base, but only very rudimentary. Melysse felt a twinge of disappointment. She’d seen dozens its like during her time at the Iron Hold.
First Calaten looked the flute over without touching it, gauging the ambient feel of any fae magic. His Reshaping had left him with a heightened sensitivity to such things - an ability that the government often praised so long as it didn’t come with any ‘more spectacular flaws’, as Stefran had put it.
Calaten pointed to the chart on his clipboard, soundlessly tapping ‘Little/No Magic’ on the graduated scale. Then he picked the flute up, holding it very gently in his pale hands, examining it from all angles.
He tapped the same index on the scale. Finally, he went through some of the rudimentary trigger-tests: making sounds, speaking trigger-words from similar artefacts discovered in the past, positioning his fingers over all the holes, blowing all the notes of the scale down the flute’s slender neck.
The last tests were the rudimentary substance tests. Calaten dipped the end of the flute in water; he breathed on it; he heated it over a candle; he touched it to each of the mineral samples he kept in his little kit. Nothing.
“I couldn’t say for sure, yet,” he said at last, replacing the flute in its box and tapping the ‘Little/No Magic’ index one last time for procedure’s sake, “but it certainly looks like another little mudman flute, doesn’t it? I’ll try some sand in the intermediary tests. Either way, it’s an extremely low-powered thing.”
“I thought it must be,” Melysse sighed. “Ah, well. - Just quickly, Stefran, any questions so far?”
“Loads,” came his rueful reply. “I’ll just ask you one. What’s a mudman flute?”
“It’s an old fae toy. Little children used to make them when they practised their sigils - if you play little tunes to small patches of mud, the mud shapes itself into a small humanoid doll and does a bit of a dance, usually.”
“Cute.”
“Pretty useless to us, though,” Melysse sighed. “All right, no sounds again, please.”
She lifted off the lid of the second, slightly larger box with Calaten. Inside was a very small statuette, only forty centimetres tall, which appeared to have been carved out of a soft, grainy stone into the shape of a long-haired girl. Her arms were held out slightly from her sides, as if she were starting to embrace someone, or to call out passionately, or perhaps even to leave the ground and fly. The swirl of her skirts were indistinctly carved, blurring and merging with the statuette’s smooth base.
Calaten looked the statuette over with his practised eye, then reached for his clipboard. Melysse’s excited heart sank as he tapped the ‘Little/No Magic’ index again.
Lifting it out of the box, the Reshaped examiner turned the statuette this way and that in his hands with impersonal, clinical care. The statuette’s face had been chipped out of the stone by a very clever hand; her eyes were almond-shaped hints half-hidden under the swirls of stone that delineated her hair, her nose a tiny, childish point in the middle of her face. Of all the graceful hints and half-details, only her mouth had been carved with sharp distinction - a sweetly rounded, rosebud pursing.
Calaten tapped the ‘Little/No Magic’ index once more, decisively. Melysse sighed inwardly as the examiner began to make various noises, recite the old trigger-words, speak the names of the old fae districts, trace a few elementary sigils in the air. Then he went through all the basic substance tests.
“This one’s very low-power too, Melinna,” he concluded at last. “A pretty thing, though. We’ll just see if we can’t make it work in the intermediary tests - spare you a chat with the fae.”
“That would be nice, but I’m no optimist,” she replied, still disheartened as she always was in the Opening Room. It was a dream of hers to someday find a truly rare or truly powerful artefact from the area. For a start, it meant more funding.
The next few hours were consumed by the intermediary tests, during which Calaten applied all the department’s knowledge of past artefacts to try to determine the function of each. The little reed quickly proved itself to be a mudman flute; the moment Calaten made a small mud pie on the ground and went through a few known regional nursery rhymes on the flute, the mud finally did coalesce into a tiny, jigging humanoid. But the statuette was not such an easy nut to crack, however many invocations, unusual substances or carefully copied patterns of previous sigil-triggers were tried.
Melysse sat in one of the spectator chairs now, scribbling notes in an older report beside Stefran. He didn’t seem terribly interested, but then there was only so much gemstone-tapping that anyone could watch, really.
“What triggers an artefact?” he asked her after a while.
“Absolutely bloody anything,” she replied, still scribbling. “Words, usually. Or certain singing notes. Some are particular about whistling or humming. Some have a pressure point, some only react in the presence of a certain substance … some are only triggered by combinations of all these things and more.”
“So doesn’t it take forever for Examinations and Surveys to work it out, sometimes?”
“Yes. In some cases, it literally would be forever. There are far too many permutations. What Examinations and Surveys do is try all the triggers we know about, especially triggers from similar objects or objects found in the same place. If something works, excellent; if not, that’s when we go to the Interim Query with the fae.”
She turned a few pages, checking she’d filled everything in, then folded the report away. “Interim Query is a fancy name for the first interview we have with one of the fae about a particular artefact. Nineteen times out of twenty, we have to ask the fae what an artefact does - we simply can’t figure it out ourselves. Of course, just because we ask the fae doesn’t mean they tell us.”
Stefran arched a curious brow.
“They’re not colleagues,” Melysse told him. “They have no desire whatsoever to help us in any real way, understandably enough. Sometimes they give us a straight answer, usually if they think we’ll bring them something in return; most of the time they’re helpful as a block of wood. We have to ask them the same questions, again and again, and just keep hoping they’ll finally give in. And if they keep refusing flat-out - which is often a sign that you’ve actually got a fairly valuable artefact on your hands - that’s when research and comparison, the bulk of this job, has to kick in.”
“It sounds tough.”
“It can be. There’s a lot of time spent reading through catalogues of our existing artefacts, or taking older artefacts out and re-examining them with new ones, trying to compare and maybe use the similarities. But it’s not the hardest job in the world. That would be Calaten’s. If we decide we might have a really worthwhile artefact on our hands, and the fae aren’t talking, we prioritise it and make our poor Calaten hop around madly doing everything he can think of to trigger it.”
“Playing the harmonica never works,” said Calaten in his ever-flat voice, still peering through a thick lens at the surface of the statuette.
Finally, just an hour or so later, Melysse decided to call the examiner off. She hated the feeling of cooling her heels. Time was something she preferred to keep tightly gripped in her fist. “That’ll do for now, Calaten. One out of two is a pretty flash record. I’ll just go in for Query about the statuette.”
Calaten ticked off the last few tests he’d performed and then sealed up the boxes again. “Have fun with the lunatics.”
“Always.”
Stefran didn’t change expression as they left the Opening Room, though Melysse was sure he must be relieved. North Side had certainly made quite an employee out of him. It was such a refreshing change not to be snowed under with questions from the wide-eyed neophytes she always seemed to be landed with.
Another pleasant change was heading downstairs with the trolley. The gantry was so much easier to deal with on the way down.
Back in head office again, Melysse stopped only to collect the clearances Araluna had promised to write before she headed for the doors that led to the fae’s cells. These doors were almost as rigidly controlled as the security doors topside - Special Issue were present in numbers, fully armed with rifles and pistols. Unlike the topside officers, however, these were additionally armoured with the basic iron bucket-helm and frontal chest-plate that were supposed to make it harder for fae magic to hit them.
“Okay,” said Melysse to Stefran as the soldiers began to make their checks and double-checks, deciding she’d try to use all this wasted time constructively. “I may as well give you the fae lecture. I imagine many of the same rules apply here as they did in North Side, but still.
“Rules one, two and three are be careful. Don’t give the fae ‘healthy respect’, give them the most concentrated focus of your paranoia. The fae hate us. They don’t wish us harm - they wish us dead. And because this level of Iron Hold is built over a magic-emanating area to keep them alive, it also lends them the wherewithal to make you dead. Keep all your North Side wits about you when you step into one of those rooms, okay?”
Stefran nodded. If he’d heard the spiel before, he was being very patient about it.
“Some fae are worse than others,” she went on. “I daresay you’ll never meet Cochalyon - even I don’t have clearance for him. To start with, when you’re no longer considered to be in training, you’ll be given basic clearance to talk to either Ilinme or Fiannas. Fiannas is the safest.” Melysse gave a hard smile. “Don’t ever assume that means much.”
“Sounds like Irredeemables Block Five,” said Stefran dryly. “I feel right at home.”
“Glad to hear it.” Melysse held out her arms as the two Special Issue officers on her searched her clothes. “Oh, and on a more mundane note, if you want to book in for Query - that’s what we call these little visits - do it a few days in advance. Some days it’s a real pain having only the seven fae here.”
After a lengthy and very thorough search - Melysse often waspishly wondered whether each checkpoint simply didn’t trust all the others - she and Stefran were finally admitted through the triple sets of doors and into the long, quiet corridor beyond.
The familiar old corridor stretched out in both directions, an arched tunnel of iron quietly lit in the hushed gaslight that so suited this subdued place. Somewhere further down, very faint, muffled voices were speaking, but everything else was a dead hush.
Melysse started the next part of her lecture up again as they walked down the hall. “You’ll get to know which fae are likelier to know about which artefacts and which fae are likelier to talk to you. Now, most of these old cells are empty, but I’ll point out our inmates as we go …
“On your left is Fiannas’s cell. Fiannas is an old night fae - she turns to stone every sunrise, so you can’t talk to her unless you do overtime. She’s one of the inmates who was originally caught under a no-harm oath, though, so you’re pretty safe with her.
“That door there is Ascalain’s. He’s sea fae. Also a no-harm, but you’ll probably never try talking to him more than once or twice - there are only a few people he takes to. No-one else can get an answer out of him. He’d be long gone if he didn’t know so much.
“Over there - Ilinme. She’s the favourite with those of us who don’t want to talk to Fiannas on overtime. We’ll be back to talk to her in a minute, so I’ll leave it there.
“That does it for the fae who’re bound by a no-harm oath, I’m afraid. The last four are all very capable of doing you harm if they choose. They don’t murder us daily, but they’re dangerous and you don’t ever want to make them mad.”
She hesitated for a moment. “Speaking of which, just a little aside: all of these fae are absolutely priceless. Even the tiny fraction of their knowledge that they choose to impart upon us is invaluable. It hardly bears saying, but don’t expect sympathy or understanding if you harm any fae, whether in self-defence or not. You will be fired and possibly even charged. Sad, but true.”
“I’ll curb my rage.”
“Good man. Now look here … the door on your right is Arathalian’s cell. Yes, that Arathalian. He doesn’t do much city-smashing these days, of course … just sits and ignores us, mostly. You’ll get clearance to do Query with him after you’ve worked here two or three years.
“Down there … Nebeshanin, a beast fae. Now she is bad news. Seven researchers dead in the last decade. Unfortunately she knows everything about everything when she does choose to talk, so the government keeps her here.
“Here’s Culundar. He’s another beast fae and as tricky as they come. Very nearly escaped in 283. He has this annoying habit of asking riddles in return for answers … I’m not so good at those, so I rarely visit.”
Stefran nodded further down the corridor - much further - where yet another battery of guards stood. “And that will be Cochalyon’s cell, I take it.”
“You take it correctly. He’s just as black as all the stories say, I’ve been assured. Top researchers only. Never met him, never want to. Right! That concludes the tour - let’s to back to Ilinme.”
Melysse walked back to Ilinme’s cell and used the iron rod on its chain to bang on the heavy door. After a moment’s scrutiny through the peepslot, the bolts slid back on the inside and Special Issue opened the door for her.
“This security’s unbelievable,” chuckled Stefran. “Can’t walk without tripping over the Army - it wasn’t even like this for our maximum security inmates!”
The officer who’d opened the door, a humourless fellow who always watched the cell on Threedays, gave a bit of a grunt. “If the Faeborn get out, they’re not likely to take the city apart.”
“Not many of them,” conceded Stefran. “How many more checkpoints are there?”
“This is the last.” Melysse grinned a little at his tone, waving a hand around at the small, metal-clad antechamber, its four fully armed Special Issue at their posts, and the last, heavy, windowless cell door, bolted and cross-bolted.
“Come on. Let’s go talk to Ilinme.”
Ilinme’s cell was a little untidy today. Someone had brought in a pile of new books to butter her up, it seemed, and she had left them lying wherever she’d finished reading them. Apart from the books and a few cupboards - which were usually to tidy things up for the researchers’ sake, not Ilinme’s - the cell appeared empty.
“Why are there leaves on the floor?” asked Stefran.
“She likes them.” Melysse chuckled at his lack of reaction. “You’re used to invisible Faeborn, I take it. The last time I brought a new blood in here, he nearly fainted to think one of the Seven was on the loose.”
“We had a few Faeborn who might occasionally go invisible, yes. Can you ever see Ilinme?”
“It’s very rude to talk like I’m not here,” a familiar soprano voice hissed.
Melysse looked in the general direction of Ilinme’s voice, since there was never any better option. “Sorry, Ilinme. Do you feel like explaining your metaphysical makeup to my colleague here, or will I do it?”
“Every new gaoler knows less and less,” the fae’s voice sneered. “One day you’ll know so little that I’ll be able to just walk out of here.”
“I don’t think even you will live long enough for that, Ilinme,” said Melysse a little sadly. To Stefran she explained, “Ilinme is a sun fae. You can’t see her out of the sunlight.”
“Sunlight? What’s that?” Ilinme asked tartly.
Footsteps rustled through the leaves, and suddenly a handful of them were dumped in Stefran’s greying hair, rubbed around in a crackling mess.
“I’ve never seen you before,” said Ilinme. “New blood, are we? What happened? Did that naughty Cochalyon eat another one of you monkeys?”
“No, Ilinme, just another boring old retirement,” Melysse replied blandly as Stefran picked leaves out of his hair, bemused.
A replacement handful of leaves was scrubbed into Stefran’s scalp. Ilinme loved tormenting new employees, though Melysse doubted she’d have much luck with an ex-prison researcher.
“Is he a man or a stuffed toy?” the fae asked coldly, leaving Stefran alone with an invisible but audible slap around the back of the head. “You’re going to be dull to work with. I won’t talk to you.”
Melysse pounced. “Speaking of work and talking …”
“No, I don’t want to talk to you either.” The footsteps rustled away again, decisively.
“Come on, Ilinme, I have two completely new artefacts today. Don’t you want to see them?”
“Artefacts,” sneered the fae. “You stupid monkeys hoard old nursery toys and door-keys and silly little tools and call them artefacts. I’m waiting for the day you bring me an old pair of my trousers.”
“This might be the day, Ilinme. You never know. Go ahead and open the boxes. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.”
Stefran helped her pull the trolley with the two containment boxes a little further into the cell. “Don’t ever bring an artefact into the cell of a fae who hasn’t sworn the no-harm oath,” she muttered to him as they manhandled the trolley into place.
“This one’s not no-harm,” he returned. “She pulled my hair and hurt my feelings.”
More leaf-rustling forestalled Melysse’s reply. But they had a long wait before Ilinme actually removed the iron lid from the first box, throwing it down so close to their feet that they had to jump back.
The fae flute levitated into the air, hovering where a tall woman might hold it to play. “A child made this,” Ilinme said. “You should know what this is.”
“A mudman flute,” replied Melysse. “I was just checking.”
“If you’d found Enna-Iki’s flute, now, you might have something to crow about. When he sang through that flute, he could knit your idiot forebears together like woollens.” Ilinme blew a sudden, shrill discord through the flute, then threw it back into the box.
Then the lid of the second box started to grind aside. Melysse and Stefran both stood well back this time until it had clattered safely away from their toes.
“A statue, a toy, a present,” said Ilinme in an unimpressed voice. “What good is it? Shaped by magic, not carved of stone. Another child made it. Even one of you monkeys could make it.”
The statuette rose into the air, slowly and with effort, as Ilinme examined it from all sides. “… No. Monkeys couldn’t make this. It’s too beautiful.”
They heard her whisper - the fae were still protective, so protective, of their language - and on the statuette’s pedestal, answering the fae’s query, a long string of sigils around the base gave off a wan glow. Melysse actually recognised a few from her dragonmaking days; everyone in the facility made a start in dragonmaking. This wasn’t an exceptionally complicated construction. Calaten had been right in his estimations - as always.
“’Thalian bids me sing,’” said Ilinme. The statuette, already rather eerie to look at in its midair seat, turned its delicate head towards her voice. Then the pursed stone mouth opened and softly began to shape the words of some alien old lullaby, high minor notes like crystal spilling very gently from its cold lips.
After a minute or two, it stopped.
“Beautiful,” murmured Stefran.
Melysse was inclined to agree, but she was more puzzled than entranced. “How did you trigger it by speaking our language, Ilinme?”
“You stupid, fat cow,” replied the fae scornfully, using one of her favourite overheard insults. “You can babble at it in ape-chatter as much as you like. It’s the name that’s the key. … Hmm …”
‘Hmm, Ilinme?”
The statue turned around in the air, this way and that. “Actually … when I look at it again … there’s something else. Another magic. I don’t understand it. It says something about ‘regeneration’ or ‘healing’. I don’t know.”
Melysse pursed her lips. Useful and useable artefacts meant more departmental funding, but Ilinme wasn’t always the most reliable of sources. “Are you sure you don’t understand it? Look again.”
“No, I definitely don’t know,” the fae replied. “You’ll need to ask its maker.”
“Very helpful, Ilinme.”
“Oh, you stupid, fat monkey. Take it to Arathalian! Ara-thalian!”
In the box, the statuette began to sing its high, soft song again. Melysse bent down and reached for the lid, thoughtful. “Thanks, Ilinme. An absolute pleasure to talk to you, as always.”
Hounded more or less ceaselessly by Ilinme as they replaced the lids on the boxes - pinches, leaves flung in their faces, hair-pulling - Melysse and Stefran finally trundled back out of the cell with the trolley and escaped back into the guard antechamber. Stefran’s face was finally betraying a bit of relief by the time the Special Issue bolted the cell door behind them and beat around the room with thin iron canes.
Making sure an invisible fae didn’t escape wasn’t easy.
“And Ilinme’s the nice one,” Melysse told Stefran dryly.
“Great.”
Once Special Issue had made sure Ilinme hadn’t slipped out through the door, they opened the outer door for Melysse to leave. Stefran pulled the trolley back out into the hall after her.
“So what now?” he prompted.
“I try to work out how many fibs Ilinme told me.”
“Fibs?”
“Yes,” she replied, smiling sardonically. “Ilinme isn’t as benign as she seems. She loves wasting our time and she’s always trying to convince researchers to take artefacts in to the no-oath fae - especially powerful artefacts. She’ll be so happy the day one of us gets blown up.” Melysse frowned. “It’s odd, though. This isn’t a powerful artefact. Calaten would’ve felt it. I’m sure … that is, I’m pretty sure none of the fae could use this puny thing to hurt anyone.”
“Are you so sure you can trust Calaten?”
It was a very North Side response. “Yes, I’m sure. He’s worked here almost twenty years and he hates the fae. No chance he’d conspire to get them out.” She shrugged. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. There’s no way I’d take any artefact into one of the no-oath cells, however powerless I might think it was. I certainly wouldn’t take anything into Arathalian’s.”
She cocked an eye at Stefran. “You’re clear on that, right? Not even a silly little mudman flute. Nothing. We never quite know what we’ve got, but the fae do.”
“Understood.”
“Excellent. You’re Iron Hold material through and through, you are. What I might do is stop in with Arathalian and just ask him if he knows about a certain statue of that description. That way I won’t have to spend any precious time wondering about one of Ilinme’s little lies.”
Stefran smiled ruefully. “Guess my clearance doesn’t extend to the destroyer of Old Talton.”
“Not a chance in hell, I’m afraid. I’ll let you wait in the hall with the trolley, though.”
“Lucky me.”
Melysse threw him a wink as she strode to Arathalian’s door and banged on it with the iron rod.
Rather than open the door, though, the Special Issue inside just slid back the peepslot. “Already got someone here for Query,” the framed, moustachioed lips told her shortly.
“Tell them I’ve got priority access today,” replied Melysse a little smugly, well-acquainted with the frustration of being dragged out for someone else’s priority access. “Signed off by Araluna. Here.”
He took her papers through the slot. The sound of angry denials filled up the silence for a moment - Stefran eyed her dryly from his lonely post down the hall - until the door finally opened to let the ousted researcher out.
“Thanks, Melysse,” he snapped - Caren Brellview, chief researcher for historical fae demographics. “I hadn’t even started my Query!”
“Any time, Caren,” she replied with a sweet smile. “Any time for one of the five dozen times you’ve done it to me, really.”
He stalked off down the hall, muttering, as Melysse stepped into the antechamber. Special Issue checked her over with the usual hyper-thoroughness that no-oath fae assignations received, not once but three times over, and then opened up the doors to let her into the cell.
Arathalian’s cell was nothing like Ilinme’s. All moon fae had a fascination with human-style living - even the moon fae who’d once levelled the Old City. His cell was neat, his oaken bed likewise, and the blue velour carpet on the floor was musty but clean. Bookshelves lined two walls, all of them titles like Advancements of the Age of Iron and The Evolving Cultural Demographic of the Federation. It was all about humans, Talton, what was going on aboveground. None of it was about the fae. The one picture on his wall was a huge artist’s sketch of Central Talton from Cripley’s Hill - not a natural scape or a picture of the sky, as other fae had.
Only those with no clue as to how Arathalian’s mind worked were ever confused as to why.
The fae himself was sitting in the overstuffed lounge chair at the foot of his bed, reading. It had to be a half-moon tonight; he was in his young man phase, raven-haired and sapphire-eyed, turning the pages of his book with long, slender fingers. He looked completely human in his dark blue shirt and trousers; most of the Seven wore ‘normal’ clothes now, but he was the only one who habitually wore shoes as well.
“Good morning,” said Melysse evenly.
“Is it?” he replied, not looking up.
“Well, it might just be getting on for afternoon, actually. Time’s run away from me today.”
“It does that.” Flick, flick. “Come back another time, Melysse Grandinnen.”
He learned all the researchers’ names. It was always the first thing he asked. Melysse wished she could have brought Stefran in just to pique the fae’s notoriously elusive interest. “What are you reading today?”
“’Arms and Armour of the Present Day’,” he replied. “Published last year, I believe. Illustrated. Very good of Caren to bring it in for me. Where is he today?”
“I had to slip in ahead of him, just quickly. I have a very small question for you.”
Arathalian looked up - the point at which most newcomers tended to start or flinch back. Only dragonmaking graduates from Loria, the realm of that other famous moon fae, were ever inured to it. Arathalian spoke quietly and calmly, a gentleman’s murmur, and the expression on his long-featured face never changed, but the corundum blaze of his eyes was a permanent snarl of loathing: burn and die!
“I vastly prefer books to questions,” he told her clearly. “You don’t interest me, Melysse Grandinnen. You may go.”
“I’ll bring you another book if you hear me out. Anything but the floor plans of this facility.”
“I already know that,” Arathalian replied, and she couldn’t tell whether he was returning quip for quip or being deadly serious. It was always better to assume the latter. “No. I’m reading at the moment.”
“We’ve just been given two pieces from a private collection in the area. Ilinme said you could tell me a little more about one of them.”
“Unless it’s sharp and you have it with you, I simply don’t care.”
“It’s a statuette. A young girl.”
“Capital. Very pretty. Put it in your hall - it’s rather austere out there.”
Melysse ignored that. “It sings.”
“Blood and iron, it sounds like a lullaby toy! Ilinme is rattling your chain again, that’s all. Now go away.”
She sighed. It was almost a foregone conclusion. But it was such a tantalising, obvious supposition - Arathalian being the ‘Thalian’ whose name called the statuette’s voice. It was from the same general area, after all.
Seeing that Arathalian’s hot blue eyes had returned to his book, and knowing that he would most likely ignore anything else she said from that point onward, Melysse tried one last thing: she opened her mouth and sang the simple, minor lullaby that the statuette had sung, as closely as she could remember.
The book fell from Arathalian’s hands and slipped off his lap to the floor.
“Stop,” he demanded, rising from his chair as his voice also rose - still not loud, but far louder than he usually spoke.
Melysse stopped singing at once, hoping she hadn’t aggravated him too much. At least she knew now that Ilinme hadn’t been spinning stories entirely from thin air.
“Melysse Grandinnen,” said Arathalian in a hard, knife-edged voice, “give me that statuette.”
“I don’t have it with me.”
“Give it to me.”
“You know I can’t do that, Arathalian. But if you -”
The air blurred silver, that telltale sign of movement too fast for real time, and suddenly Melysse found her words choked off by a cold, long-fingered hand. Arathalian’s hot-loathing eyes were only inches from hers, his mouth contorted in a truly uncharacteristic snarl.
All notions of having the situation under control vanished, washed away like sand in a great wave of anxiety. Idiot! Why’d you say “can’t”?
“She is not for you,” the fae whispered harshly. “Not for any of you, you filthy-fingered animal dross. I’ll melt the bones of every vermin that comes in here from now until I die unless you give it to me. I’ll knit your loose human flesh around your own heads until you strangle in it.”
Melysse tried to keep her breathing steady, tried to keep her brain ticking over. She knew departmental policy in situations like these. No hostages. No demands. “If … if it’s … studied … check … safe to give …”
“I told you! Not one moment more in human hands!”
She had never, never heard Arathalian shout. Nor had the Special Issue outside; she could hear their startled, raised voices, calling for her to tell them whether anything was wrong.
Her face felt pouchy with the build-up of all that blood in her head; spots were blooming and fizzing up her sight. Arathalian’s fingers did not unclench even slightly.
“Ask …” was all she could strangle out from under his clutching hand. “Ask … test it … see …”
The world moved in a strange way, and then - bang! - the side of her head hit the iron door, which had previously been at least five feet away. Melysse felt the peepslot slide open beneath her aching cheek, heard the soldiers swearing to see her face jammed there.
“Very soon I’ll be Reshaping her into such a mess that breathing will make her scream,” Arathalian warned, his voice lifted to carry through the door, but no longer shouting. “Then I’ll carry on with everyone else who enters this room. Bring me the statuette.”
“We can’t bring you anything unapproved and we don’t even know what you’re talking about,” retorted the officer outside, curtly. “Calm down. Don’t make things ugly.”
“Are you listening, man of iron? I’m going to kill her. Then I’ll kill every other researcher I can. No more Queries, no more answers, understood? The deaths may not matter, but the information will. It’s far more valuable than your neck or your job - your superiors will explain that to you when they get here.”
Melysse heard more swearing behind the door. She heard some whispering. Then she heard the locks on the outer door - the one from the antechamber to the outside hall - grating aside.
They were either going to fetch Araluna, who’d just repeat policy for them and sadly attend Melysse’s funeral later, or they were going to call a full alert and do things the Army way. Either way, she had to admit, she was gone.
You got me, Ilinme, she thought, choked up by the sour, bitter frustration-fear of it all. You finally did it. Conniving little bitch.
She stayed there with her face pressed against the cold iron - she had no choice - and listened to the sound of her own heartbeat, thumping loud in her ears. Finally she heard the door open again.
Special Issue were arguing.
“You found the section manager already?”
“No, Brinnet’s run on for her. But we found the research partner outside.”
“So why didn’t you bring him in?”
“Got no clearance on him.”
“What?”
Stefran? thought Melysse, her mind drifting in a fatalistic place. What a first day he’s having.
“So where’s his clearance, then?”
A conference at the door. “He’s not actually a research partner, he says. He’s new blood.”
“You’re bloody wasting time, you know that?”
“But he said he knows what this ‘statuette’ is Arathalian keeps belting on about!”
“You sick of your job? Is that it? Because they’ll fire us all to hell if we let a bloody trainee in here!”
“Sweet iron, Camley, he’s going to kill that woman if we don’t do something!”
A detached part of Melysse’s mind marvelled at how perfectly still Arathalian could stand. The only indication that he was still behind her - though granted, it was a fairly strong indication - was the grip of his hands, one on her neck to keep her head jammed against the door, the other twisting one of her arms up behind her back to keep her from struggling.
“Ask him what he suggests. Through the door. But you get him right out of the way if the section manager gets here.”
Murmur, murmur.
“He’s suggesting we give Arathalian what he wants.”
“The statue thing? What is it?”
“… He says it’s an artefact -”
“Fucking hell! Where’d they dig up this idiot?”
“- but it’s a completely harmless trinket, he says! Arathalian made it, he says!”
Melysse gasped, a half-grunt against the iron door.
“Fuck that. It’s not coming in here.”
“Examinations and Surveys checked it out and tagged it harmless just today. That’s what he says. Camley, that’s a woman in there …”
“That’s a researcher aware of the risks - that’s who it is. I’m not giving Arathalian anything he wants that badly.”
Good! Don’t! thought Melysse, still horrified. She didn’t want to die, but she didn’t want the Iron Hold to be cracked open, either. She’d told Stefran, twice, that even Examinations and Surveys could never be completely certain. Why was he ignoring her?
“It’s the worst kind of curse to let a woman die, Camley.”
“You’re really pissing me off with your wide-eyed country boy shit. I don’t want her dead, but we’ve got more than just her to think about here.”
Someone thumped on the outside door. More muffled voices buzzed.
“The section manager says we’re not to enter the cell until she gets here.”
“Time is up,” said Arathalian bleakly.
The soldiers’ voices went quiet at the sound of his voice, and stayed quiet for Melysse’s. Melysse screamed out in almost as much shrill shock as pain - behind her back, her arm had just been forced up so high that her fingers were brushing her own cheek. The agony in her shoulder alone was like a handful of broken glass rammed under the flesh with all the nerves.
“Stop! Wait!” one of the officers roared over her cries. She tried to bite down on them, and succeeded more than once, but every tiny movement cracked that glass whip of pain harder.
“Very well,” said Arathalian. “You have one more minute.”
The voices behind the door were fierce and swift.
“How harmless is harmless?”
“The new blood outside says the artefact’s completely harmless. Completely.”
“Is it certified? Does he have the certification here?”
“Our arses are toasted both ways, Camley. It doesn’t matter what kind of artefact they find we’ve let in. Now we break the rules or we don’t.”
“At least ask the new blood what it does!”
Pause. “… He says it sings a lullaby. That’s all.” Pause. “He thinks it’s sentimental value. Got Arathalian’s name on it.”
“Sings?” the first voice asked sharply.
“Yeah.”
“Ten seconds,” warned Arathalian evenly.
“Y-” Melysse began through her teeth, horrified at the lack of discipline she was hearing outside, terrified to think of the worst case scenario that might result, but she broke off with another full-throated cry at the next sharp tug on her arm.
“Five seconds. Four.”
“It’s coming in, Arathalian! Stop! It’s coming!”
Melysse kicked at the door, trying anything to convey her desperate disapproval to the men outside, but it was too late. The sound of the outer door’s locks and bolts were rattling - Stefran was going to give them the statuette.
Arathalian released her arm. The pain was almost as bad as when he’d first wrenched it out of place. Then he pushed her back across the room - well clear of bolting or snatching-reach once the door opened - and sat her down in the overstuffed lounge chair.
Soon afterwards, the inner door opened.
It admitted the hard-eyed figure of one of the Special Issue, gleaming under the gaslight in his half-plate and iron bucket-helm. In his hands he had the statuette, slim and lovely, held as if the soldier were waiting for it to explode.
“Take it and give her back, Arathalian,” the man demanded tightly.
The statue’s delicate head turned towards the soldier as he spoke the name, and then it began to sing.
High notes streamed softly into the cell like a pattern of raindrops, clear and simple. In spite of all his razor-edged insistences, Arathalian didn’t lunge for it immediately; he seemed unable, standing in place with his eyes tightly shut and one hand pressed hard to his temple.
The song was nearing its slow end when silver blurred - the too-fast movement again - and the statuette disappeared from the soldier’s outstretched hands, snatched away with captious violence.
“Miss,” the soldier called warily to Melysse, eyes on Arathalian rather than her. Melysse rose slowly from the chair, trying to see straight through her streaming eyes, her thoughts reeling from one outcome to another.
Arathalian paid neither of them any attention. As Melysse passed him, he pressed his lips to the cold crown of the statuette’s hair - a family kiss, from father to daughter, or brother to younger sister. They would never know which. The fae would never tell them.
The statuette had begun to sing her lullaby again, sweet-voiced and sad, by the time the soldier banged on the door again - Melysse’s good arm in his - and shouted for the others to let them out.
No-one cheered as the officer escorted her back out into the antechamber, locks and bolts already being thrown back across Arathalian’s door. Melysse knew why. Only now was it occurring to the bloody fools that they really were going to lose their jobs for this, and would be lucky if nothing worse happened … to them, or to the Iron Hold, or even to Talton.
Sitting outside the danger of Arathalian’s cell, however, it was hard to keep letting her professional side stamp out the great, tidal rush of gratitude.
“Let’s take you topside,” said the officer who’d gone in for her, looking subdued even underneath his bucket-helm, but before he could make for the door there was a loud thumping at it from outside.
It was Araluna, anxious and breathless, accompanied by a good ten riflemen from the main offices. They’d never have been used on Arathalian, of course, unless he’d tried his best to escape. “He let you go? Thank the bloody Warrior!” she gasped as she entered, seeing Melysse.
“It’s not all sunshine,” Melysse forced out. She’s going to go mad. But I had nothing to do with this. I didn’t ask anyone to risk the facility for me. The opposite, in fact.
“What’s wrong?”
It wasn’t my fault. I had nothing to do with it. … Oh, crap.
“Well … I had to give him the statuette. He found it … on me.”
Araluna’s solicitous expression couldn’t have been scoured away faster by a full splash of acid. “Found it on you?” she burst out. “What the hell did you take it in for? I can’t believe you’d do anything so bloody stupid!”
You’d better. “Wanted to ask him about it,” she grated out. “Just ask him. Thought it was … harmless … told Special Issue … I bought it … just a present … agh!” The vibrations as she spoke were too painful. Her shoulder felt like it was dissolving. She knew her career was.
“I can’t talk,” she managed once the latest pain-wave ebbed a little. “Hospital. Please.”
“Sure, hospital,” replied Araluna stonily. “You’ll be talking later, though. A lot. I daresay it’ll probably be the last thing you do for us here, Melysse.”
Melysse shot a last look at the silent soldiers, half-reproach and half-warning; they could figure out the thanks for themselves. As she stepped outside with Araluna’s unneeded help, she saw Stefran hovering there in the hall, one of the containment boxes open beside him, his expression clearly showing that he’d heard it all.
“Here, new blood,” ordered Araluna. “I have a very long incident report to fill out. We’ve nothing else for you to do today, so you can take Melysse to the hospital … and forget anything she’s taught you today, please.”
With that the section manager swept off, tight-lipped and tense. Melysse did feel a very tiny tweak of pity for her, even if the rest was just hoping she’d trip in the corridor and break her nose. Today’s misadventures were definitely going to make one hell of an incident report, and who knew how the department would go about separating Arathalian from that blasted statuette now?
“I’m fine,” Melysse said shortly as Stefran tried reaching for her good arm. “I can walk.”
He dropped his hand. “Why’d you take the dive?” he asked.
“Why’d you bloody ignore everything I kept repeating for you?” She started walking down the corridor, keeping her steps small and light. She could already tell from the building agony in her shoulder that it wasn’t going to work.
“Look, I’ll tell them how it really happened -”
“That was for Special Issue. Not you. You’re the one who set things off.” There was plenty more she wanted to say, but she had to grind it all down between her teeth. “Keep a lid on. Don’t get them fired too.”
He said absolutely nothing else, and nor did she, all the way to the coach-house. She did need help getting there, as it turned out, which baffled her somewhat; why should an injured shoulder keep her from walking properly?
Still silent all the while, Stefran got into the coach with her and ignored her pointed, discouraging stare. He checked her into the hospital and sat there in the same silence while one of the doctors examined her rather too thoroughly, making his ‘does it hurt?’ questions completely superfluous.
Finally, when they’d allotted Melysse a bed and confirmed her suspicions - her arm was broken, her shoulder dislocated, and neither would be the same again - Stefran rose to leave.
“I left North Side because one of my colleagues was killed by a Faeborn,” he said, succinctly and matter-of-factly, not really an excuse or an explanation. “He was Reshaped with a spider. I’ve never heard anything like it. Wasn’t prepared to again.”
Melysse watched him walk out, half-exasperatedly, half-sympathetically. He wasn’t tough enough to be Iron Hold material after all.
Then again, four Special Issue - the ultimate hard men of the Army - had seemingly proved today that they weren’t, either.
She wondered if she’d really stand and listen to a co-worker dying in the next room, as her professional pride tried to assure her she would.
Ah, well, she thought. I’ll never know now, will I?
Flippancy didn’t work. She’d just lost a fifteen-year career.
Morphine dealt ably with Melysse’s pain, physical and mental, as her doctor did his best over the next few days to put her ruined shoulder in order. He seemed to think she’d have some limited mobility back in the joint eventually, though it was hard for anyone of Melysse’s character to look beyond the now.
It was a cold, grey morning when the doctor released her from the ward with a stiff sling for her shoulder, three full days after the incident at the Iron Hold, urging her to come back in a week to see how the healing was getting on. Melysse’s aging father was in poorer condition than she was to be meeting her at the hospital, so instead she went outside to make her way home alone.
She almost missed Stefran, striding for the hospital doors without spotting her, and in a different mood she might have let him go anyway. Today, she didn’t. “Hey!”
The thin man stopped and turned. “Ah,” he said. “Liberty day.”
“I’m a free woman.” She hoped that sharing a joke would eliminate the need for apologies or explanations or whatnot. She didn’t like them much. “Looking for me?”
“I am. I’ve been sent straight from head office.”
“Araluna needs me to finish her incident report, I imagine.”
“I’m sure she does. She needs you for a few other things, too.” Stefran paused a little reluctantly. “Arathalian is asking for you.”
Melysse’s stomach made an odd little shift, just fleetingly. “He is?”
“Yes. He is. And he’s not talking to anyone else in the interim, either.”
“He loves his blackmail.” Suddenly Melysse smiled, her butterflies disappearing. She was an Iron Hold researcher - much grittier stuff than the usual, pasty academic. “You know, it sort of sounds like I have Araluna over a barrel, too.”
“You do,” agreed Stefran. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
He looked startled - but only a little, reserved as he always was. Maybe one day he could make proper Iron Hold material … with the right teacher, anyway. “Do you actually want your job back?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Even if she does murder my clearances and slash my Query time in half. I want it back. I’m good at it. And I’m too old to become a florist.”
Stefran’s smile was a bit ambiguous. “Well. I’ll see you later, then, I suppose. When will I tell Araluna you’re coming in?”
“Soon,” replied Melysse. “Fairly soon.” It felt good to be a bit spiteful.
And it felt good, very good, to be a part of the Iron Hold again.