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Sometimes the best means to secure an invitation is to eloquently express your disinterest. Other times you have to kill a whole bunch of people.

The Debutant’s Handbook , by Lady Jane Ashen

Arpix

The dozen fliers were the end of it. Arpix had imagined that a storm of them might descend. He had been attacked on these same slopes by many hundreds of the things. He’d watched colleagues die there: the bookbinders Kleeson and Brigha with whom he’d spent five years on the Arthran Plateau.

But twelve were the limit of the message that the skeer had sent. Twelve to undo any lies that might be told by exhibiting their crippled brethren. Twelve to re-instil any fear that seeing the soldier skeer die beneath a hail of bullets had erased.

Clovis had swung the balance of that equation back towards the city. Her remarkable display of violence had established once more that the insectoids were beatable. It was a lie that might last as long as the skeer’s true numbers remained hidden from the potentate’s subjects.

For these reasons and more, Arpix wasn’t worried that the new waves of soldiers rushing into the square were there to arrest Clovis in connection with the killings from the previous day. The rapturous applause of the crowd might have soured very rapidly if the troops had turned their guns on the only warrior to have convincingly bested a skeer.

Arpix clambered down from his seat and was amazed to find himself not the first to enter the killing ground. He hurried forward amid people who, having seen what they just saw, now wanted to step through the gory remains of the fallen champions to laud the sole survivor. A ring of soldiers formed around Clovis, keeping back the more enthusiastic members of the public who seemed determined to touch her. If not for the shouting, Arpix might have tried to tell them how badly such an invasion of her personal space would end.

While Arpix stood outside the ring of bristling guns, several dignitaries descended from the stands to address Clovis in person. Two lords in plush robes that looked too warm for the day, burdened beneath gold chains, and a tall canith lady with a tumbling purple mane and diamonds around her neck, shattering the sunlight into dazzling pieces. Arpix watched as they addressed Clovis. Words were exchanged, primarily between the two canith, who at least saw eye to eye.

It didn’t take long for Clovis to scan the crowd and point Arpix out. More words were exchanged before a group of four soldiers came to secure Arpix’s passage within the cordon. The three aristocrats eyed him with varying degrees of disbelief.

“This is the expert?” one of the lords asked, an older man with a greying beard and deep-set eyes.

“He saved me from a cratalac the day after I met him,” Clovis said. “The thing was too much for me.”

Arpix couldn’t help the apologetic shrug that took hold of him, but he didn’t deny the story. It was true, after all.

“We’ll meet this potentate of yours together or not at all.”

Eyebrows were raised, but nobody was ready to argue with a flame-maned warrior still dripping with the ichor of half a dozen skeer.

The elegant Lady Gharra suffered Clovis’s presence in her personal carriage without laying down protective sheets first. She seemed somehow more hesitant to allow Arpix in, despite his relatively unsoiled appearance. Somewhat mortified, Arpix remembered quite how long it had been since his last good wash, and how sensitive a canith’s nose was. He felt himself shade to crimson as he squeezed in beside Clovis, wondering if Lady Gharra’s nose might provide her with a full account of Arpix’s night. Clovis, on the other hand, seemed unconcerned, growling to her new sponsor a comment that Arpix couldn’t decipher.

The driver shook his reins and the horses set off, pulling them along at a speed that Arpix had never experienced before. He took the door handle in a white-knuckled grip and tried to pay attention as Lady Gharra continued to quiz Clovis on where exactly she’d come from.

Clovis proved remarkably bad at lying, and uninterested in trying. After failing to deflect their host with “a small place to the east,” she turned to Arpix. “You explain it. I’m tired now.”

“You’re bleeding!” Arpix pointed to a damp patch around a rent in her newly acquired cape, high on her shoulder.

“It’s just a flesh wound.”

“What other sorts are there?” Arpix looked up at Lady Gharra. “She needs to be seen by a surgeon.” He reached for the cape. “Let me see! You’ll need stitches at least— Ow!” He snatched his hand back, stinging from Clovis’s slap.

“We can deal with it later,” she growled.

Lady Gharra smiled. “Wherever you’re from, I can see that you’ve come a long way together.”

“We’ve come from the library,” Arpix said, knowing that the questions would not stop. “Things are falling apart. Doorways are opening. We’re not from around here. Not this city, not this kingdom, nor continent.”

Lady Gharra’s eyes widened but perhaps not so much as they might have if this was a complete shock to her.

The carriage rolled sedately out of the square, and Arpix watched a city both strange and strangely familiar go by. A city built of maybes and of different choices, just as every life and every city is. As the driver turned left and right, it seemed to Arpix a portrait of the decisions that, individually and en masse, shaped both people and worlds.

It felt inevitable that King Oanold would be waiting for them in the potentate’s throne. Where else would such a man’s personal evil and hunger for power take him but across the bodies of the persecuted and defenceless to his own benefit? In this city, just as in Arpix’s, Oanold lay at the heart of the disease which time and again dragged his species through cycles of destruction. It was Oanold who, with the library in his grasp, had not merely ignored its lessons, but taken great efforts to paint over them with lies more pleasing to his ears than the inconvenient truths of collective experience.

Anger had long been a stranger to Arpix. He’d lived a monk’s life, an austere existence dominated by learning. But as Clovis had opened new chambers within his mind, those discoveries hadn’t been limited to new excesses of good feelings. Surrender to emotion carried edges that cut both ways. Arpix’s detachment had shielded him to some degree from the horror that Oanold had thrust upon him. Now, raw from the exposure Clovis had drawn him into, insisting with her honesty and appetite that his soul come forward into the light, and be shared…he found that anger, rage even, flared when he thought of Oanold’s many crimes.

Irad and Jaspeth might be the avatars of some ancient struggle over the alpha and omega of mankind and many other kinds. But the real war was surely the one that Oanold and his lackeys brought with them everywhere they went. The real evil was easy enough to point at, and Clovis’s solution, to cut it out with her white blade, felt more reasonable with each passing moment as the distance to their destination narrowed.

Clovis had to surrender her sword at the main door. The potentate’s palace stood more or less in the space once occupied by the Allocation Hall in Arpix’s version of the city. He wondered what Crath City looked like now, two centuries after the canith had sacked it and beneath the vast skeer hive. Were its towers levelled, or thick with the insectoids’ eggs?

Such pondering distracted Arpix from the opulence of the hallways and corridors through which Lady Gharra led them, now with a contingent of palace guards to watch over them. Arpix realised how unmoored he’d become from his old life, how adrift on a sea of time and possibility, unable to return to former shores. All that mattered to him now were the friends he’d made, or rather who had made him their friend. They were the foundation that he carried with him. The finding of those friends was the reason he was walking towards the throne room of a murderous dictator. The grand matters of the library’s fate, of the futures of the seemingly endless species whose intelligence bound them to Irad’s great work, all of that was somehow secondary to securing the safety and company of the people he’d grown with.

As they came to a halt before a towering pair of gold-plated doors, Arpix considered that he had perhaps stumbled across the paradox that lay at the heart of the problem. He lacked the farsightedness required to see past the cycles of destruction to a solution, but the short-sightedness that afflicted him, the focus on friends and family, was at its core what being human was, and without it—

“You’re doing it again,” Clovis said.

“What?” Arpix blinked and looked around at the servants and guards on all sides.

“Thinking too much. I can hear your brain grinding.”

The doors began to open, saving Arpix from a futile denial. Even though he knew the throne room had been constructed specifically with the goal of impressing people, he was impressed. Though far smaller than a library chamber, it somehow made Arpix believe, at least on an emotional level, that it was larger. Pillars of pinkish marble, veined with purple, black, and gold, held aloft a ceiling from which a god and his angelic host peered down through painted clouds.

Armed guards stood at attention within the shadows of each pillar. On a musicians’ gallery there would surely be hidden guns aimed at the hearts of any who approached the throne. Arpix resisted telling Clovis of the impossibility of action. She would know already, better than he did. And his comment would see them arrested immediately.

The glitter of courtiers was confined to either side of the throne, where a dozen lords and ladies stood. The floor seemed to have been given over to petitioners, or perhaps to those on whom the potentate was going to pass judgement. Given the swift and summary nature of his own death sentence, Arpix imagined that only the richest or most significant of New Kraff’s citizenry got to be sent to the gallows by the potentate’s personal command.

Lady Gharra led them to the end of a short line of petitioners, all more grandly attired than Arpix or Clovis. The man immediately ahead of them, whose considerable girth was bound up in purple velvet, and whose obvious wig shimmered with what looked to be gold dust, sniffed loudly, and turned to identify Arpix as the source of his disgust. To her credit, Clovis didn’t punch the lordling.

The figure on the throne was still too distant for Arpix to identify as Oanold. The potentate looked like a geyser of costly fabrics, practically imprisoned by the weight of silks and satins that flowed in all directions, and his wig was considerably larger than his head, with oversized grey coils mounded around him. And yet this was the man who had apparently demonized a sizeable chunk of his population in order to elevate himself to power. He’d plunged the Amacar into a nightmare to provide his people with someone to hate, and to unite them around that common purpose.

One of the courtiers stepped up onto the dais and, coming up behind the throne to avoid the overspill of trailing cape, leaned around the great gilded chair to whisper to the ruler.

The potentate’s head lifted and turned until it fixed its shadowed gaze in Arpix’s direction.

“Lady Gharra.” The man’s voice held a familiar croak of petulance. “You may approach with your guests.”

The purple-maned lady led the way, and Arpix, shooting a final, furious warning look at Clovis, followed.

“Illustrious Sir.” Lady Gharra bowed so low before the throne that Arpix finally got his first clear view of the potentate.

Two shrewd, dark eyes met his, underhung with pouchy, discoloured bags of skin. The slightly bulbous nose, pallid complexion powdered to the point at which cracks started to show around his jowls, the loose, wet mouth…Arpix knew him in an instant. Oanold, the cannibal king, the man who had ordered slaughter in the library, whose troops had set it aflame. The same venal, cruel, indulgent suppresser of truth who had hunted the weak from the throne of Crath City instead of ensuring the safety of its people.

“I feel I know you from somewhere.” Oanold stared at Arpix, then glanced at Clovis with a frown. “The angry one too…”

“Illustrious Sir.” Lady Gharra straightened, trying to push surprise from her face. “Mistress Clovis here saved many lives, including my own, at the tourney in Blue Tower Square today. She killed more than a dozen bugs…with a sword…” She still sounded unable to believe it.

“Ah yes.” Oanold continued to frown. “That was today, wasn’t it? Where’s that fellow everyone loves. Looks like a pirate. Golden-something?”

“Erico Goldeye, Illustrious Sir.” Lady Gharra winced. “He was the first to die. All of the champions are dead, nearly a score of soldiers too. An unexpected incursion of winged bugs. She killed them all.” Gharra spread her hand towards Clovis, who certainly looked fierce enough to make the story believable.

“Remarkable.” The potentate sounded less than pleased. “And this one?” He flapped a jewelled hand in Arpix’s direction.

“An expert in killing the bugs, Illustrious Sir. Both Master Arpix and Mistress Clovis come to us from the library as a result of recent developments there.”

“I see…” Oanold narrowed his eyes at Arpix as if trying to see past the barriers holding back the recollections of an alternate life. “Interesting. So, really, they count as my discoveries.”

“Indeed, Illustrious Sir.” Lady Gharra inclined her head.

Arpix edged closer to Clovis and set a hand upon her wrist, finding it vibrating with invisible but palpable rage. She might be unarmed and surrounded by palace guards, but Arpix didn’t entirely trust her not to leap on the potentate there and then. He squeezed and hoped that the squeeze conveyed both his understanding of the depth of her passion, along with the assurance that there would be a better time.

“And you two have come to offer me your services, have you?” Oanold looked from Clovis to Arpix and back again.

“We have,” Arpix stated with a surety he didn’t feel. He needed to stop Clovis speaking. If she didn’t speak, there was still a chance that Oanold wouldn’t understand that the reckless hate in her eyes was all for him. “We went to the tournament to prove our credentials.”

“It sounds as if you impressed Lady Gharra, at least.” Oanold’s sour look suggested that he was still chewing over some grievance he couldn’t quite put into words. “But the leader of nations can’t hand out trust on hearsay.” He ran his tongue over yellowing teeth. “You came from the library, you say?”

“We did.” Arpix inclined his head, choosing not to elaborate.

The potentate nodded. “Indulge me for a short while.” He waved his fingers in a shooing motion. Lady Gharra immediately bowed and started to back away. Arpix followed her example. Clovis, although she couldn’t bring herself to bow, retreated from the throne without so much as a snarl.

Gharra took them almost to the ring of pillars that supported the false heavens above them.

“What are we doing?” Clovis hissed through clenched teeth.

“Indulging the potentate,” Gharra murmured. “Waiting. Because he’s told us to wait.”

And so, they waited. The potentate summoned and dispatched a courtier, then turned his attention back to the supplicants before him. Over the course of perhaps an hour he dealt with seven cases, almost all of which concerned land disputes. He ruled on the cases without enthusiasm, ensuring that the state grew richer whatever the outcome. A merchant dealing in imported gun barrels complained that a particular general had dealt with him unfairly. A modest amount of compensation was ordained, but the merchant had to ensure increased supplies in the coming year.

Clovis made no effort to hide her boredom, and even Arpix found himself struggling to hide the yawns that wanted to crack his jaw. It had been a night with far less sleeping and far more exercise than he was used to. Since he wasn’t absorbed by the court proceedings, he was one of the first to notice the great doors start to open.

The object that the widening gap between the doors revealed looked familiar. A large rectangular box covered by a black cloth big as a sail. It rumbled forward on poorly oiled wheels, and it was their squeaking as much as anything else that stopped the potentate mid-flow and drew every eye.

“Ah.” The potentate waved the guardsmen forward, pointing to where they should position their charge.

Arpix’s heart fell. Another skeer. Clovis would have to butcher another maimed soldier to convince the potentate, or perhaps the exercise was simply to entertain the members of court who had felt themselves too lofty to join Lady Gharra at such a spectacle. He steeled himself for violence as he watched the guards manoeuvre the object and a sudden horrible thought clutched at his insides with icy fingers. What if it was his alleged expertise the potentate wanted a demonstration of? Would Oanold’s evident distaste for Arpix overcome any arguments that his skills were tactical not hand-to-hand, or would he be forced into a hopeless contest?

Oanold rose from his throne, fabric sliding across the floor, a shimmering mass trailing his advance. “Not everything that has escaped the library recently has been deserving of trust, or even mercy.” He turned his pouchy stare from Arpix to Clovis. “It seems that some of those emerging from the beyond within—I rather like that one, ‘the beyond within.’?” He singled out a man near the end of the courtier line. “Jammon, write that one down.” Oanold paused a yard in front of his throne. “Some of those emerging from our library in the aftermath of my great work there have demonstrated a natural affinity with the most corrupt elements that plague honest society. Some have no sooner found their way into our great city than they’ve offered aid to the parasites that drain our wealth and poison our blood.”

The potentate glanced around the great cavern of his throne room as if seeking someone, anyone, to challenge his statements. He settled at last on Arpix. “You’ve won Lady Gharra’s seal of approval as a person who knows the bugs. Now win mine as a person ready to bring ruin to my enemies.”

All around the chamber’s perimeter guards shifted their grip on their weapons. Up in the musicians’ gallery, no longer sheltering behind the players, three guards stood, each with a long gun aimed at Arpix’s heart.

At the lift of a single finger, a palace guardsman strode towards Arpix and thrust a spear into his hands.

“Really…” Arpix stammered. “I couldn’t—”

A second guard whipped the cloth from the cage. Rather than the single skeer that Arpix had dreaded, three figures stood inside. Kerrol, Yute, and the child Arpix now knew to be Yute’s daughter.

Oanold waved Arpix forward. “Kill them for me.”