“It is not a belief,” I started. “I now have seen proof that a group of vampires, in slumber and refrigerated to give the appearance of being corpses, was brought into this city nine months ago. I do not believe that pursuing this cabal, by its nature a deadly threat to our Court and this city’s Covenants, is against our best interests.”
“Even if you are correct in your belief,” Oberis barked, “there are avenues and authorities this information should have been passed on to. It is not your mandate, child, to hunt down feeders in their homes and wield fae power in a way that risks our secrecy. It is not even within this Court’s mandate to hunt feeders in this city.
“If there was truly a cabal in this city,” he continued, “the Wizard would know and would have dispatched his Enforcers to deal with them. That is their mandate and authority, not ours.”
I wondered how much that pissed him off. It was not in the nature of fae lords to submit easily to external authority, even that of the higher Courts, let alone a Wizard’s.
“You lied to Clan Tenerim and have embarrassed this Court by stating you had orders from us,” Oberis said, his voice cold. “By such, you have risked our reputation and authority in this city—reputation and authority won with sacrifices you don’t seem to comprehend!”
“I did not state I had orders from this Court,” I said quietly. “Nor were they from this Court.”
“Then who were they from?” he demanded. “I am the authority for the fae in this city!”
“I cannot answer that question,” I told him, staring at the moss carpeting the ground. This was where things were going to get awkward.
“You will answer the question,” Oberis told me, his voice low and dangerous. “You claimed to the Clans that you had authority no one in this Court gave you. If this was not a lie, then who gave you that authority?”
“I cannot answer that question,” I repeated.
“You appear to be under the illusion, child,” the fae lord said, his voice approximating ice in temperature, “that you are allowed secrets from me. You are not. You will answer the...”
Oberis’s ice-cold rant was interrupted by the double doors slamming open and the small figure of Eric von Radach stomping in. For all that the gnome was less than half the height of the doors he had just come through, he was suddenly the center of all attention in the room.
Eric was the Keeper. The Keeper was the neutral arbitrator in fae affairs, the keeper of secrets, one whose word that something was true would be taken, even when the secrets themselves could not be revealed. It was tradition that a Keeper did not enter Court except in that capacity.
“I claim Right of Confidence on this trial,” the gnome said simply into the silence that had descended. “We have passed beyond—far beyond, my lord,” he noted pointedly, “affairs that should be public knowledge of the Court.”
For a moment, Oberis looked torn between having Eric thrown out and ordering everyone else out, both of which would be possible but...unusual. Finally, he sighed.
“Fine,” he said. “You and you”—he pointed at me and Eric—“follow me.”
He pushed his chair back from the table and stalked toward a door in the corner of the banquet hall cum courtroom. I hurried to follow, after a quick glance to make sure Eric was coming as well.
The door led back out into the moss-carpeted hallway with the conference room exits, and Oberis strode confidently down the hall while Eric and I hurried to keep up. We quickly left the conference center and passed into a—still moss-floored and hence fae ground—hallway of offices. On a Sunday, they were all empty.
Oberis led us into the office at the end, which turned out to have been re-walled in stone-and-mahogany paneling. A massive black walnut desk occupied pride of place in the small room, and the stones that made up the bottom half of the walls had been carved into bookshelves—every one of them full of well-worn copies of books on a thousand topics. Oberis’s library covered everything from quantum physics to electrical engineering to philosophy, and I didn’t doubt he’d read every one of the thousands of books in his office.
Other than the chair behind the desk, there was no seating in the office, and he looked to Eric as we entered.
“Keeper, if you would be so kind,” he said, gesturing to the empty space in front of his desk, his voice suddenly tired.
Eric nodded and promptly pulled two chairs, copies of the ones I’d seen in his apartment, out of thin air and sat on one. Gingerly, I took a seat on the other and faced Calgary’s fae lord across his desk.
For all of the medieval trappings of the office, the computer that sat on the desk looked like something out of science fiction. Any CPU casing was presumably hidden inside the desk, and the monitor was paper thin—turned off as it was, I could actually see through it. There was no visible keyboard, though I recognized a box at the base of the monitor as the projector for a laser one. A black mouse, textured to look like a piece of obsidian, was the only other item on the desk.
“I think I have all the pieces now,” Oberis said quietly. Here, in private, he sounded much less powerful and more tired than he had in public, and I suddenly wondered just how old he was. A noble fae could easily live over a thousand years, and many of the older ones found dealing with the pace of modern politics and power difficult.
“I’m left with one question for you, Kilkenny,” he continued. “Which one?”
“Which what?” I asked, confused.
“One of the High Fae entered my city via the Between,” Oberis told me patiently. “I can only assume, now, that they came to visit you for Powers only know what reason. This High Fae would be the source of your orders and why you did not actually say this Court had given you your task—making you neither an embarrassment to this Court, if we can confirm this to the Tenerim, nor a liar to the Tenerim. So, I have to know which of the High Court commands you.”
There were nine members of the High Court of the Fae—the Powers who ruled our kind. The Queen ruled them, but the Horned King, the Lord of the Wild Hunt, the Ladies of the Seasons, and the Seelie and Unseelie Lords were all Powers—demigods like the Magus who ruled Calgary.
“I am a Vassal of Mabona,” I said quietly. There wasn’t much point in lying to him now.
He looked over at Eric. “And this is true?” Oberis asked.
“Yes,” the Keeper said quietly. “He is marked to those with eyes to see, like the Keepers. By blood right, he is a Vassal of the Queen, and She has claimed him as such.”
“Damn,” the fae lord whispered, eyeing me as he rested his head in his hands. “Do you have any idea how fucked up you’re making my life?”
He sighed, pulled something out of his desk and tossed it to me. I caught it—it was a small burlap bag, about the size of a sandwich ziplock.
“Take a look at that,” he told me. “That is what everything in this city is about.”
I opened the bag. Inside was a mix of dust and small stones, all the same shade of dark gray. I sniffed and realized the stone was giving off a faint cinnamon-like aroma.
“What is it?” I asked finally.
“Heartstone,” Oberis told me. “It’s a by-product of the oil sands production, it all flows through Calgary, and the Wizard has a complete lock on it. Ninety percent of the world’s production comes from here, and everyone wants to control it.”
“Why?” I asked, passing the bag back to him. It smelt nice and looked odd, but it was hardly the first unusual material I’d seen since being dragged into the world of the fae.
“Mixed with gold, it is orichalcum, the alchemist’s key and a requirement for any magical artefact and much of a Wizard’s higher powers,” Eric explained, eyeing the bag on Oberis’s desk. “Mixed with mercury, it is quicksilver—an extraordinary drug for our kind that can make us stronger, faster, more powerful. Mixed with human blood, it is lifesblood and can temporarily allow a vampire to be, in almost all ways, truly alive.