Talk to the lawyer, let her offer a way out, then see who went with.
“I don’t think that’s the way to go,” Mags said. “Um. Does anyone have another plan? Suggestions?”
There were a few exchanged glances and murmurs.
Nobody voiced any reply at all.
“Actually,” Rose said, meeting the Elder Sister’s eyes. “It might be.”
The Elder Sister raised her eyebrows, genuinely surprised.
“Two concessions,” Rose said.
“Concessions? You brought us here, why should we concede anything?”
Mags stepped forward, “Wait. Let’s hear them first. If we disagree after the fact, we can talk that out.”
“Fine.”
“First off, this is all or nothing. Either everyone that can retreats, and I work with those who stay to try and kill Johannes and keep them from gaining power, or we all fight, and you help to create an opening for a strike. Going halfway doesn’t achieve a thing.”
Rose frowned, then continued, “I know you’ve made a decision, but I’m worried you’re making that decision for others. Conquest showed that’s very easy to do. You have influence, given where you stand.”
“Ironic, coming from you. At the head of the room, Conquest’s power visible to anyone who looks.”
Rose shrugged. She didn’t trust her hands enough to make any other gesture. “We let everyone present decide on their own, if and when the question gets asked. You don’t get that ball rolling, you can’t be the first one to accept.”
“The goblins too,” Mags said. “They don’t count, they can’t count. If you little bastards fuck around here, I will hunt you down, I will bind you, and I will make you wish a demon had gotten you.”
“Fuck you!”
“You know I’ll follow through!” Mags said.
There wasn’t another shouted epithet, which Rose took as assent.
Rose nodded slowly. That’s one problem out of the way.
“That’s a heavy concession,” the Elder Sister said.
“Yeah,” Rose said. “Because if you don’t make it, if you just take the offer right away, you automatically win. We all know it. One person leaves and we’re weaker. More people leave, and the ball gets rolling. But that’s not a meaningful result.”
“What’s meaningful about your result?”
“That’s the second concession I want,” Rose said.
“The second?”
“Just… let me explain. People are scared. Let me… try to make sense of it all.”
“To convince them?”
“Not directly. I’ve already made my argument, you’ve made yours. I just… like I said, my grandmother studied how things work.”
The Elder Sister spread her arms. “I reserve the right to stop you.”
Rose nodded.
She drew in a deep breath, and sighed.
“According to my grandmother, the demons already won, a long, long time ago. They devoured the vast majority of the universe, and that’s why the planets are so relatively small, compared to the sheer amount of nothingness. It’s why we’re so very tiny, in the grand scheme of it all. But these things we erroneously call angels surged in strength, they spun out a complete universe from the scraps, and on select scraps, or on a select scrap, they prepared life to emerge.”
Rose glanced out over the room.
“It would be easy to say that the universe is an unending repetition of creation and death. That this has happened before and it’ll happen again, and this is the heartbeat of the universe. But in looking at the history of this world, both the clear history and the one behind the curtain, something stands out. Us.
“We’re another force. And we’re only still emerging. We’re change. We’re an equal to them. We just don’t realize it yet. All the Others took our faces and our personalities, or fragments of them, and Faysal’s kind and the demons did the same. We’ve evolved so quickly in so short a time. Faysal saw it in Johannes, as he tried to change the system with his new way of dealing with Others. He tried to harness that. Now the lawyers are doing the same.”
She let the words hang.
She could have explained, could have elaborated, but that would have violated the deal. Would have verged too close to an outright attempt to sway the others to her side.
We’re capable of change. Will you embrace that, or hand that power over to them?
“Does anyone have anything to add?” Mags asked.
There were murmurs. A question was asked, but Rose could barely hear it. About protecting others, one way or the other. Some Behaims and Duchamps had family, tucked in their beds.
“Do what you think is right,” Mags said.
“Okay, that’s settled,” the Elder Sister said. “How do we invite her in?”
Rose’s throat was dry.
“We just say her name. Ms. Lewis. To Ms. Lewis alone, we give permission to enter, for peaceful negotiation.”
The door opened.
Blood pounded in Rose’s ears. Blake was writhing, anxious, restless, eager to act if he needed to act. Maybe if he didn’t.
She couldn’t even hear Ms. Lewis’ footsteps, or the initial words the lawyer spoke. A greeting.
She could process the words that Mags asked, see lips moving, just as she’d anticipated. She knew what they were saying, but she couldn’t wrap her head around it.
“…would like to offer an out, to those uninvolved parties,” Ms. Lewis said.
The silence that followed was louder than any tolling bell.
16.04
Rose hadn’t expected to feel the burden of this decision. Her hands gripped the sides of the altar, and she leaned forward, head bowing just a little, feeling as if an immense weight had settled on her from above.
The candles that were set in sconces in the pillars of the church didn’t move or dance. There was no smoke. Plastic, the ‘flames’ simply flame shaped bulbs, screwed into candle-like bases. A dozen large ‘candles’ on either side, drawing out a road between Rose and Ms. Lewis. The practitioners, Others and humans of Toronto and Jacob’s Bell sitting at various points on that continuum.
Ms. Lewis, such as it was, didn’t bow or bend. There was no sign that she was affected at all. More like the false candle than a real person.
“If this is a question of my word,” Ms. Lewis said, “I can swear an oath.”
Not a soul responded.
Rose was tense enough that the slight turn of her head to check on Alister and the others made her head jitter partway through the motion.
“You called me for a reason,” Ms. Lewis spoke. “If you aren’t asking for mercy or leniency, what did you want me for?”