The next morning, Warden barricades stopped Elayne’s cab two blocks from Chakal Square. She walked the rest of the way, past jowly counterprotesters and buzzard-eyed journalists, past the Wardens’ command tent and a table set with pastries and coffee for officers on duty.
Sentries surrounded the Chakal Square camp—all, this time, at an approximation of attention. Each guard wore a red armband, which Elayne did not like. Nor did she like that they remembered her.
She appreciated the escort they offered, though. The camp had grown. Faerie circles of sleeping bags, groves of protest signs and skeleton effigies, marker-scrawled icons of dead Quechal gods—before, all these seemed scattered from a height onto a game board, but as the square filled they’d assumed an organic order. She followed game trails through organizational microclimates toward the fountain. Someone had painted a face on its faceless god.
Temoc met her in a clearing. “You’ve grown popular,” she said.
“Not me. Many have come to support us. Chel”—who waited behind Temoc, with five men in red armbands—“helped organize the guard.”
“You didn’t stop her?”
“Why would I?”
“She’s given these people an identity to set against the Wardens. You know as well as anyone how dangerous that is.”
“I can’t be everywhere.” He illustrated the clearing with a sweep of his hand. “Does this place suffice?”
“We need a tent.”
“My people won’t like that. They want our talks transparent.”
“My clients put themselves at risk to come here. They want to deal, not play for the cheap seats. The negotiations should be private, and insulated.”
“We’ll bring a tent.”
“Good enough. And I’ll guard this clearing against undue influence.”
“What do you mean, influence?”
She raised one hand, and sparks flickered between her fingers.
“Oh,” he said.
“It goes both ways, of course. Kopil is robed in fear as well as crimson, but your people have their own power. Their faith has bent the local noosphere to draw more faith to feed itself. Combined, there’s too much interference for a reasoned debate. Not to mention our hidden players.”
“What do you mean?”
“We still don’t know who publishes the broadsheets, or what that person’s goals might be. Better protect ourselves now than wish we had later.”
Watchers surrounded the clearing, peering through holes in fabric and around the curved walls of tents. “Your enchantment could twist our wills,” Temoc said. “Why should I trust you?”
“A Craftswoman’s word is her power. I promise to protect both sides equally.”
“Such specificity,” he said, and smiled: a flaw in the cliff face. “Do it, then.”
She touched the glyph above her heart, and drew her work knife. The starfire blade glistened. Darkness spread from her. Glyphs flared at her temples and wrists, and she saw herself transform in Temoc’s eyes from a friend to a being of light and terror. That hurt, though she was used to this particular pain. Their onlookers drew back, as expected. The world of hearts that beat and love that never died fell silent. Only whispers and wind remained.
There were many ways to prepare for a meeting. This was one.
* * *
She carved a circle into the flagstones, sixty feet across with a few inches’ gap in its circumference. Outline established, she inscribed the ward’s terms in unborn script. The space within the broken circle calmed and stabilized. Eyes closed, Elayne watched the green tide of the crowd’s faith part around the perimeter she’d drawn.
Dresediel Lex’s discontented watched her work. Many of these men and women had never seen real Craft. They knew its artifacts and echoes: crystal-shard skyspires overhead, driverless carriages, airbuses, optera, trapped demons, doctors who dipped their hands through patients’ skin, and for every such sign a thousand smaller and subtler. The Craft told merchants how to stock their shelves, and by its power water coursed through the city’s sunken pipes. These people lived in a Crafted land, but today, for the first time, they watched a Craftswoman work her will.
Temoc crossed his arms, unimpressed.
“Explain.”
She pointed with her knife. “That language defines the space where we’ll meet.”
“We agreed to meet here. What remains to define?”
“Where ‘here’ is, for starters.”
“These few yards of Chakal Square.”
“Ten seconds ago these few yards of Chakal Square were several hundred miles back on our planet’s orbit. They’ve traveled even further relative to galactic center.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean, but the Craft only knows what I tell it. That’s why we use circles. Geometry’s dependable. Most of the time, a point is either inside a sphere defined by a given great circle, or outside.”
“Most of the time?”
“Geometry’s tricky. That’s why I added the spiraling language: to establish that I’m warding the sphere described by this great circle, as interpreted through standard fifth-postulate spatial geometry.”
“This isn’t assumed?”
She looked at him sideways. “Standard fifth isn’t even true on the surface of a sphere, but we define it to be true for present purposes.” The sun beat down, even through the writhing shadows her Craft cast. “Could someone fetch me water?”
He waved to a red-arm, who returned bearing a canteen. She accepted it with thanks, careful not to touch his hand. Frost spread across the metal from her fingertips. She drank until her lips froze the water within, then set down the ice-filled canteen.
She surrounded her first circle with a second, also open, to bind and limit the warded space.
“Why do some symbols fade?”
“They stay where I carve them. But I’m not always carving into rock.”
“Into what, then?”
“Notional space, where the ward lives. We don’t compose a new ward every time we need one—it’s easier to use pre-existing forms. Those lines connect this circle to a ward we Crafted decades back, which will remove us”—she winced as she sliced a vicious wound in the fabric of reality—“from the Square. This way I don’t have to fight the crowd’s faith directly. Instead, I establish that the space inside these circles is not part of Chakal Square, so your people’s beliefs about the square will not interfere with us.” The last cut was always the hardest, when exhaustion dulled will’s edge. There. She stood, and with a wave banished the dust from her trousers and reinstated their crease. “A drop of blood from each of us, and I’m done.”
He didn’t flinch as she cut between his scars. The skin resisted more than it should have, but at last blood flowed. She caught it with Craft, a red globe in air, drew a drop from her own arm, mixed the two, made her blade long and curved like a calligrapher’s brush, and, kneeling, painted the circles closed. Blood smoked and sank into stone. Beneath the daylit world, large gears ground, counterweights fell. Circle, curved runes, spiderweb lines, all shone for a glorious, terrifying instant.
Elayne didn’t blink, but someone did, somewhere, and the light died. She crossed the circle, and did not stumble. After decades of slipping from world to world, one found one’s sea legs quickly.
The rest of her business was mundane by comparison, concerned with format and food, security and the spacing of bathroom breaks. They ate after, Temoc and Elayne and Chel, a rough hearty lunch of roast pork and rice delivered by red-arms with the Kemals’ complements. Temoc did not mention Mina or Caleb. Elayne didn’t, either. They were present nonetheless, uninvoked, in the silence.
For all Temoc’s scars and strength, she thought, he needed a ward of his own around Chakal Square, or around his heart, or around that courtyard with the cactus flowers and the screen windows and the boy who played solitaire in the dust.
* * *
After lunch, Temoc and Chel escorted her to the square’s edge. They were near the border when the fight broke out.
First she heard the scream, followed by curses in Low Quechal, and fists striking flesh. Temoc moved, fast. Chel ran after him and Elayne followed, arriving almost too late to see.
A crowd pried two pairs of Quechal men apart. A boy lay between them, clutching his leg. Temoc’s arrival shocked everyone but the brawlers, too set on their fight to notice. One took advantage of his captors’ shock to fight free. His arm came around to strike—
And stopped.
Temoc had grabbed the man’s wrist. The assailant’s arm wrenched at an odd angle, and he cried out. Temoc caught him before he fell.
“What happened here?” Temoc said.
One of the men on the right shouted in Low Quechal, and pointed to the boy on the ground. Temoc replied, earnest, slow, calm.
Neither noticed the Wardens crossing the street, or the red-arms who blocked the Wardens’ path, shoulders square, jaws jutting. Chel shouted, “Stand down!” but the red-arms didn’t listen. A Warden drew her club.
Elayne moved without moving.
Shadow boiled from the ground. Solid winds thrust red-arms and Wardens apart.
Elayne tossed one of the red-arms six feet into the air and passed beneath him into the road. She blazed, grown large in glyphlight. The Wardens recoiled from her, and raised their weapons with the uncertainty of foxes before a bear.
She let her shadows fade. Frost on stone sublimated to steam. Sunlight slunk back like a kicked dog. “There is no trouble here.” She floated them a business card. “I work for the King in Red. A boy was hurt in an accident. Send for a doctor.”
Their blank eyes reflected her. A Warden wearing officer’s bars recovered his composure first. “We need to see for ourselves.”
“Follow me, then,” she said. “You alone. The situation is tense.”
The officer waved his fellows back, and followed Elayne. A scarred giant with a red armband blocked their way. Elayne was about to make the giant move, before Chel grabbed his arm. “Zip. Don’t.”
He stepped aside.
A rumble of distant thunder followed the Warden through the crowd. Temoc turned to meet him. “There is no crime here.”
“I’ll judge that.”
“The boy fell,” he said. “This man shoved him by accident, and broke his leg. These two are his parents. A fight ensued. That is all.”
The Warden stepped past Temoc to address the men. “Is this true?”
Veins stood out on Temoc’s neck, but he kept quiet. Elayne marveled to see such control so near to breaking.
But it held.
Wardens wheeled a stretcher through the crowd. Elayne did not like how fast the stretcher came—it implied the Wardens expected trouble. No one wanted to press charges with Temoc watching. The boy and his fathers went with the Wardens, and Temoc turned to the remaining brawlers with a gaze that drained color from their faces.
But Elayne saw the fear under Temoc’s rage. This might have been the breaking point. A brawl between red-arms and Wardens would spread, and the whole square catch fire.
She took that fear with her when she left. And she took, too, a broadsheet she found near the fight, which bore an etching of Chakal Square beneath a blocky one-word headline: “Rise.”