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Gashanatantra pursed his lips. “If we are to believe his own testimony, the casting was his own.”

“What do you mean?” snarled Jill. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“You and Jardin clearly encountered him while he was someone else, when he struck against you. That someone else by his own admission is Iskendarian. While in that guise he told the personality present with us now that he had cast the Spell of Namelessness on himself and created this personality as a concealing subterfuge. What we do not yet know is why.”

“Anyone who would do that to themselves must be out of their mind.”

“That remains a distinct possibility.”

“Jardin and I felt his unleashed power,” said Jill thoughtfully. “It was consistent with what I’ve heard about Iskendarian. I don’t know about this Scapula, but this man - whoever he is - is a clear menace. Especially if he’s walking around as some sort of hidden weapon from the past or part of an ancient plot.”

“You begin to appreciate the problem.”

“And you brought him here? He should be destroyed - immediately!”

“You still don’t entirely see the problem. If he is Iskendarian now emerged from the past, just how would you propose to destroy him? And why be precipitate? Is there a particular reason he has reappeared now? Since his emergence - indeed in the last several hours - we have seen a dramatic escalation in incidents.”

“I heard,” she said. “First that squid business on the water and now this new report of a disturbance in the Wraith District. Just what did the two of you have to do with these things?”

“Why would you think I had any involvement at all?” said Gashanatantra.

“I know you too well. You may recall we were married.”

“Ah. Yes, indeed. Well, in that case, my involvement was purely circumstantial.”

“Excuse me,” Shaa said. “What disturbance in the Wraith District are we discussing? I’m afraid my brother failed to update the news while I was in his custody.”

Gashanatantra faced him squarely. “This man, while under the control of Iskendarian, brutally attacked the facility of your associates, leaving the vicinity ablaze.”

“... Is this true?” Shaa said softly.

“... Yeah,” said the Creeping Sword. “Basically it is. Iskendarian went there to pick up some of his old papers. When he got there one thing led to another.”

“And casualties? Just what do you mean, ‘one thing led to another’?”

Shaa could barely hear the man’s voice. On the one hand that was just as well; he didn’t want to hear this. But hearing or not hearing wouldn’t change the facts. And in fact the man was talking. “Roni was there,” he was saying, “Karlini’s wife.”

“So you - Iskendarian -”

“I was trying to fight back against him. He thought he’d erased me but I’d woken up again. I was trying to overpower him, hold him back, but then he let loose with the fireballs anyway and if Gash hadn’t shown up I -”

“So you disclaim responsibility?”

“No,” the Sword said heavily. “How can I do that? It’s my body too - if you can say there really is any real me.”

“This scene is touching but immaterial,” snapped Jill. “I - where do you think you’re going?”

Shaa paused in the opening to the secret passage. “While you check on the well-being of your friend, it is only right that I see to mine. Gashanatantra - what was the situation when you left Harrow Street?”

“The main building was a loss and the conflagration was spreading, yet I thought it most prudent to remove this one quickly from the scene lest Iskendarian use the opportunity to reemerge.”

“You were there,” Shaa muttered. “I’m sure you could see what needed to be done.”

“Go now,” directed Gashanatantra, interposing himself between Shaa and the gesturing Jill. In a whisper, he added, “I will consider your idea for action,” as Shaa set his path to follow the footprints in the dust.

CHAPTER 8

Not for the first time in the past several days - Lords, no! - the Imperial Archivist was wondering just what she had found herself enmeshed within. She was not paranoid, or devoted to theories of the world that centered on conspiracies vast and venal in their scope, or on currents deep as they were powerful and subtle as their omniscience. Was not? Or had not been? Indeed, her attitude was undergoing an evolution, based solely on empiricism, that last refuge of the bankrupt philosopher. Empiricism was unduly scorned for all that, Leen had always thought. And who could doubt its present relevance? Short of a vast amusement mounted for her own mystification and with Leen herself as the object, and populated by a far too expansive cast of players, no other explanation fit the observable facts.

Great doings were indeed afoot.

So why should this one small step alone among them all be the thing that struck her most jarringly as unnatural?

Because it was in her own backyard. Or no, not in the backyard - in her Archives. The whole idea of visitors in the Archives was a perversion of her upbringing, and now here was another one. She’d had more people traipsing through the sanctum in the last few days than in the whole preceding time since she’d taken over from her grandfather. Well, maybe not, but it certainly felt like it.

Which was of course the leading problem with empiricism. The intertwined relationship between external reality and its observation - meaning of course the observer - led inevitably to the solid knowledge that something had happened when in fact, judged by another observer who had no stake in the matter, or was equipped with merely a different vantage point, the interpreter had created one situation in mind where another had apparently transpired in the empirical world of external fact.

When gods were involved it was only worse; part of the point of being a god was to play tricks with causality, with the domain of the senses, with the tangle of the mind - with those very areas, indeed, which interfered with the ability to discriminate fiction from truth. When gods were involved? - gods were always involved, one way or another.

“Um, excuse me, Madame Archivist?”

“Please don’t call me that,” Leen muttered. “I’m not an ancient; you don’t have to make me into one.”

“Excuse me, I’m sorry,” said the young woman at her side. Tarfon? Yes, that was what Shaa’s contact at the monotheist cult had called her. Why that fellow Aki hadn’t chosen to come himself had struck Leen as an example of poor judgment, to put it mildly; this was not a situation for delegation to an apprentice, however gifted. A lifetime of experience and the keenest of honed insights were probably insufficient. “This is a matter of the utmost delicacy,” Leen had told him.

“So the affairs of the Shaas always seem to be,” he had said, “yet with the fullest justification. I do not attack your assertion to lessen it, by any means, and your request plainly honors us. But the situation is such at the present to demand my availability here.” He had indicated with a gesture of his hand the people lying in the aisles of his cult’s sanctuary, victims of the catastrophe at the Running of the Squids just three short blocks away.

She had tried her trump card. “Don’t you want to see the Archives?”

Aki’s expression was as pained as those of the charred, crushed, trampled, and doused casualties on the floor. “Books are my life. But do I have the right to set my preference against these unfortunates’ need?”

“Are these your people?”

“All people are our people,” Aki had said resolutely. “My responsibility is here. May I have your leave to join you as soon as possible?”

And that had been that. After leaving Shaa she had half-killed herself to get over to the cult, too, with the streets locked into virtual immobility by the crush of the Knitting crowds and by the Tongue-side congestion of the Running and its calamitous denouement. She had been desperate enough to consider hijacking a velocipede she had seen wobbling down the street, and had been brought up short only by the prospect of then having to drive it. Instead, she had made the journey to her brother’s, with the hope that he might have better luck arranging for her transportation, but of course Lemon had been out somewhere in the mess himself. Perhaps he’d receive the message she’d left for him, perhaps she’d run into him herself out on the streets, if synchronicity continued operating in as hyperactive a fashion as it had recently adopted as its wont; perhaps all these exercises would be rendered moot by some new and even greater cataclysm, such as perhaps the transformed Scapula might be preparing to provide.