"Or a door. Something. It was quick." Nophel breathed deeply, inhaling the scents of cooked slash, wine, and sex. He indulged in none of them, and the odors stirred little within him.
Dane waddled to the bed and lifted his gown, swinging it around his shoulders with a surprising deftness. Fat he might be, and cursed with many vices, but Nophel had long suspected that Dane was stronger and fitter than he looked. Perhaps deception came naturally to such a man, or maybe he had simply taken advantage of circumstance.
"You're certain of what you saw?" he asked.
Nophel nodded.
"The Northern Scope, it's fit and well? Healthy?"
"There was no fault. It wasn't a blur in the mirror or an inconsistency in the Scope's vision. Quick, granted, but I'm sure. Part of a dome slid open. Something came out. The dome closed again." He shut his eyes for a beat, remembering what he'd seen to ensure it tallied with his description. Something came out-that was the part that still confused him.
"What came out?"
"I don't know."
"Hmm." Dane regarded him for a moment, then came closer and touched his shoulder. "Sit with me." He walked around the bed to an area of floor seats, the table in the center bearing several opened wine bottles and a scatter of glasses and goblets. There was also the remains of a meal. "You're well?" he asked.
"I'm as fine as I can be," Nophel said.
"Then we have a problem that needs investigating."
"You'll take it to the Council?"
"Of course." Dane eased himself into a seat, the upholstery expanding and stretching to take his weight. Nophel sat opposite, uncomfortable as ever in such plush surroundings. He preferred his own rooms lower down in the vast sprawl of buildings that made up Hanharan Heights-book-lined, simple, with the smell of the past hanging in the air from old manuscripts and older maps. Nophel had once met Sprote Felder, the renowned explorer of the Echoes, and the two had talked for hours about things most Echoians would never even know. Nophel respected that man-perhaps envied him too-but he was as much an explorer as Felder. The only difference was, he explored history through his mind. And the history he sought was all to do with the Bakers-those damned women who had cursed him so.
"And what will they do?" he asked.
"They'll want to talk to you. To ask exactly what you saw." Dane sighed and poured himself a large glass of ruby wine. "Then they'll debate the veracity of your account, argue once again over your control of the Scopes. Express their continuing mistrust at your heritage."
"I gave them the Baker."
"Some don't see it that way, Nophel. You know that well enough." He sipped at the wine, nodded, then clunked the glass down on the table. "They'll argue and agree, then dispute and call for more meetings, and it'll take them three days to get to where I've arrived in two heartbeats."
"Where you've arrived…"
"Knowing that we can take no chances." Dane shook his head, the metal bonds in his tightly tied hair tinkling together. "Dragar's is given its privacy, and most have forgotten it's even there. It's a blank spot on the city, Nophel, but you know as well as I that we keep a good watch. That's partly what they're for." He nodded vaguely at the ceiling. "And also part of the reason why you and I are such good friends."
"Maybe it happens a lot," Nophel said. "Maybe they're always slipping in and out, and it's just that I happened to see it today."
"Do you believe that?"
Nophel thought about what he'd seen, trying to make it clear in his mind. "No," he said softly.
"No. That's why you need to go and investigate."
"Me?" He was shocked, but pleased as well. Nophel knew he was a monster to most, but he had never denied the presence of his own ego. It was something to do with fitting in.
"You're quiet," Dane said. "You can move well. People…" He shrugged. "You know."
"People avoid me."
"Yes. So while I take this to the Council and let them bicker like old women, go and look for me, Nophel. Find out what came out and what it means. And bring it to me."
Nophel nodded, running his fingers around the rim of an empty wineglass. When he looked, a fine line of lip paint slashed across his finger, and he thought of where else those lips had been. He felt no longings and never had.
"I'll need something from you," he said. "Something to help me."
Dane raised his hands in a whatever-you-want gesture.
"I need to be more than quiet and unseen. More than unnoticed. I need to be invisible."
"Blue Water?" Dane gasped.
Nophel nodded again.
"But… there's very little left. Only drops. And nobody has ever survived it." Dane stood and paced around the table. His robe knocked over his wineglass and it spilled, dripping onto the pale carpet. That stain will always be there, Nophel thought, long after I'm gone. "You know we tried it on some of the Blades, Nophel, and…"
"They died."
"They disappeared. Everyone who took it-just gone."
"Everyone who took it wasn't the Baker's blood son."
Dane stared at him, and for the first time ever, Nophel saw fear in that fat politician's eyes. He called us friends, he thought, and we have been for a long time. But sometime in the future, he'll become so afraid of where I came from that…
"Have it," Dane said, nodding slowly. "I'll take you down myself."
… that he'll have to kill me. When that time came, Nophel would need to be ready.
Dane led him through the hidden bookcase door. It seemed that today was filled with privileges.
Peer could not help watching Gorham as he prepared drinks for them. The way he moved, his smallest mannerisms, the subtle twitch in his left eye when he was concentrating, all belonged to the man she had once known. Yet here he was now, that same man-leader of the Watchers and a stranger to her all over again.
And he had given her up. Their loving and caring for each other, their tentative plans for a future, all had been discarded when the need of the Watchers grew too great. He'd sacrificed her to the brutality of the Marcellans and their religious pogrom. She thought of that grinning torturer, sweating and slavering as he drove the air shards into her arm, knowing that they could never be withdrawn. Her screams had barely covered his grunts, or the chanting of that bastard Hanharan priest. You're supposed to love everyone! she'd pleaded between long sessions of torture, but he had been only too keen to put her right.
Hanharan loves everyone, he had replied. All he asks is that you love him back.
I love him! Peer had screamed. I love him; I love Hanharan. And then she'd seen that priest's self-righteous, sad smile and noticed that he was actually rather beautiful.
I think we both know you don't mean that deep in your heart, the priest had whispered. And then the grinning man, and the air shards, and later the hammer when she realized she could never mean that, could never really love the myth of Hanharan. And neither could she pretend.
"I left a man in Skulk," she said. Gorham paused in his movement-only briefly, but it was there. "He's been there for a long time. He wrote about the Dragarians and how they were wronged long ago by the city and its rulers. He expressed pity for them, and the Marcellans banished him. A good man." She wondered what Penler was doing now and wished she could be with him. They would talk and argue, debate and agree, and sometimes they'd discuss only the quality of the evening's wine or what the weather might do tomorrow. But with Penler, it was always deeper. Those vines draw such goodness from deep down where no one goes, he might say, or, Imagine the things that weather saw before it reached the city, and the things it will see beyond.
"I'm sorry, Peer."
"It doesn't matter. Only Rufus matters."