Chapter 209. Service (Patreon)

The boy was on the floor with the small girl and the creature.

Peregrine watched from the corner of the family room. She had been assigned to Adom Sylla for forty-three days. She had stood in this corner of this house for thirty-two of them. The wallpaper, at this point, knew her better than most of her colleagues.

The boy and the girl were building a tower out of blocks, with the girl insisting on putting an unstable piece at the bottom, and the boy had agreed against engineering judgment.

Ben, the boy, was also looking at her.

He was always looking at her, eventually, in any room she shared with him. He didn't even bother to disguise it. The household was uniformly polite to Peregrine. Maria offered her food. Ada had once tried to braid a flower into her hair and been told gently by the boy that Peregrine was working. Even Arthur acknowledged her with the courtesy of an old officer. But Ben Sylla did not.

He looked at her as if she was not welcome and seemed to be calculating the patience required to wait out. Whatever a five-year-old's version of contempt looked like, this was that. He had never spoken a word to her in her presence in forty-three days. He had never returned a greeting or even let her catch him making a single childish gesture in her direction.

She had decided, around the second week, that she did not enjoy being in rooms with Ben.

Her file on Adom Sylla had been thick and specific. Youngest magus in imperial history, substantial public profile, famous Krozball champion, and patron of Wangara. A list of magus-level innovations, several of which Peregrine had read about.

The file had told her to expect arrogance. People who collected accolades that early were usually working for the next one, and they let you know about it.

But the Adom Sylla in the file and the Adom Sylla on the rug in front of her did not match.

He was clever. She had once watched him build a runic puzzle for the girl in under a minute and explain it in sentences a five-year-old could follow. He carried himself like someone who knew what he was capable of. But he did not perform any of it. The cleverness arrived in service of the girl's laughter, or in settling an argument between Ben and Zuni about whether Zuni was allowed to perch on Ben's head.

It unnerved her.

People who did not perform their capability were, in Peregrine's experience, either deeply secure or deeply concealing.

The other thing that unnerved her was the tracking spell placed on the magus. What happened to it?

If removed, he had given no indication of having found it. He had not changed his routine, his coat, or his behavior toward her in any way that would have flagged hostility.

Except for one other thing that had been bothering her since yesterday morning: he had stopped making small talk.

For the first month and a half, he had attempted variations of conversation. Comments about the weather. Polite questions about whether she had eaten. The occasional offer of tea, declined. A remark, once, about a passing pigeon. But yesterday morning he had walked past her at his front door, said good morning, and said nothing else for the remainder of the day. The same had been true today.

What was happening?

Her gaze stayed on him until the sound of pages flipping pulled it away.

It was from the father. Arthur Sylla, former commander of the Iron Wolves, sitting across the room with a book he was not reading. Peregrine had been watching him long enough to know the difference between a man turning pages and a man absorbing words. He had turned three in the last hour and absorbed none of them.

Another behavior to log, alongside the fact that he had been home more often since yesterday morning.

So many years of service had also given Commander Sylla a particular awareness of where the people in a room were standing. He had not looked at her directly since she had taken up her position, but she could feel the perimeter of his attention sweeping past her at regular intervals.

He was watching the watcher.

She approved of him slightly more than the manuals said she should approve of any retired officer of an organization the imperial line currently found politically inconvenient.

Peregrine was still in her thoughts about the recent changes in the Sylla household when suddenly, her comm crystal pulsed against her hip.

She did not react visibly. The crystal was dampened, silent to the room, the pulse picked up only as a small shift in temperature against her skin, which was standard for daytime fieldwork. But she had not been on daytime fieldwork. Her instructions, since the start of this assignment, had been to report once at the end of each day, by crystal, after the subject had retired. She did not receive calls, much less calls at midmorning, and she certainly did not receive them while standing in the subject's family room.

...Something was up. Something important.

She shifted out of standing posture by a fraction, and sure enough, commander Sylla noticed it and looked up from his unread book.

"You can take that, if you need to."

Adom didn't look up from the tower. "Yeah, Peregrine, please go ahead. No need to stand there if it's important."

She inclined her head. "Thank you. I won't be long." Then crossed the family room, stepped into the front hall, opened the door, and went out into the garden.

The crystal pulsed again as she closed the door behind her. She walked to the far side of the fountain, where the angle of the house's wards would give her the most acoustic privacy, and pressed two fingers to the surface.

"Shadow eleven, awaiting authorization."

The standard authentication channel ran through three resonance checks before the line opened, which was the part of Service protocol Peregrine had always appreciated most. The wait between identifying yourself and being identified was the only quiet she got in a working day.

"Shadow eleven. Confirmed. Voice-locked."

The voice on the other end was Director Veth's. She knew it inside two syllables. He used the same flat register for commendations and condolences and the weather, and today it carried the particular weight she had learned to associate with orders that did not invite questions.

"Shadow eleven, by authority of the Office of the Chancellor and under the seal of the Imperial Service, you are charged with the termination of your subject. Immediate effect. Confirm receipt."

Peregrine's mouth went dry.

She had been issued termination orders twice before in seven years. Both subjects had been confirmed traitors with documented evidence and a Magisterium signature on the warrant. Neither had been a magus, and certainly neither had been a son of the former commander of the Iron Wolves, who was at this moment sitting in a chair fifteen feet from where the subject was building a tower of blocks with a five-year-old.

"Director. I beg your pardon. Would you repeat that?"

"The termination of Adom Sylla. Immediate effect. Confirm, Shadow eleven."

She did not confirm.

"Director, with respect. I have been on this subject forty-three days. He has been within my watch for the great part of his waking hours. He has done nothing actionable. He has not contacted unauthorized parties. He has not received, transmitted, or acted upon anything that could be called intelligence. I have nothing in my logs that supports a termination."

"I am aware of your logs, Shadow eleven."

"Then I would beg the basis for the order."

There was a pause. She heard, on Veth's end, the small sound of a folder being lifted from a desk. He did this when he was about to give her something he was not glad to give.

"There has been an incident. The island estate of Lord Aldric of Castle White. A breach of the inner ward, an attempt against his lordship's person who has been found half an hour ago, and the intent or theft of property whose nature is not yet established. The Lord Chancellor was in attendance and was himself attacked. He survived. He is, by all accounts, in a temper that has not been seen at court in a decade."

"Casualties?"

"Unconfirmed. The investigation has begun this morning."

"And the basis for naming Magus Sylla?"

"Among the items recovered from the breach was a comm crystal of Wangara manufacture. A model that has not yet been released, of which the chancellor himself has been seeking a pair through private channels for the past some time. He identified it on sight. The crystal's distribution, by his understanding, runs through a list small enough to be counted on one hand and is, at every link, traceable to the Sylla household."

She was quiet.

"The chancellor's preliminary assessment is that Magus Sylla was directly involved in the operation. The investigation will continue and the assessment will be confirmed or revised. The order, however, is being issued now."

"Director."

"Yes."

"He has been with me the whole time. There is no hour of yesterday or the day before that I cannot account for."

"I know."

She waited.

Veth said, "If the magus had a hand in what occurred on that island while you stood in his father's house, then he had it by means the Service does not yet understand, and he is therefore doing something we cannot yet see. The chancellor will not have us wait for the rest of the picture to come into view. If the judgment is confirmed, the man is capable of orchestrating a breach of a fortified imperial estate, of moving against the Lord Chancellor in person, and of walking off with what he came for, all without leaving his city. He will not give us a second opening. We close this one now."

She closed her eyes for a moment and opened them.

"Method, Director."

"Tonight. The hour of his deepest sleep. The blade you were issued at the start of this rotation."

The anti-magic blade. The short, unpleasant artifact she had been hoping to hand back at the end of her assignment in its original case. Designed to suppress ambient mana along the cutting edge for the length of a single strike, intended to bypass the passive protections worn by mages of significant rank. Not a weapon she had expected to draw against a magus of Sylla's tier. The weapon issued for precisely this contingency.

"Understood."

"One further matter, Shadow eleven."

"Director?"

"If the chancellor's judgment is confirmed, and the Service is satisfied that the operation on Castle White was the magus's, you will be called upon to give an account of how it was carried out under your watch. I tell you this now, as a courtesy, so that you may begin to prepare it."

"Of course, Director."

"Confirm."

"Receipt confirmed. Termination of Adom Sylla, immediate effect, by issued blade, at the hour of deepest sleep. I will report at completion."

"Service."

"Service."

The crystal went cold against her fingers, and Peregrine stood in the garden for a long moment without moving.

The fountain ran while a sparrow argued with another over a bit of bread somewhere in the hedge. The morning was warm. Arkhos mornings in late summer often were.

She thought, against her will, about Ada.

A small girl was going to wake up in a house with no brother. The boy who hated Peregrine was going to wake up to the same.

She closed her eyes for one second, sighing, as she realized what was happening. This was what they had warned her about in the first weeks of Service.

The discipline was to remember that an enemy of the empire was her enemy, however softly the household received her. Prolonged observation rounded sharp edges, and a subject who had given her nothing in forty-three days was simply a subject good at giving nothing. She had been in the room with Adom Sylla every waking hour available to him, and she had not felt a single false note, and by the chancellor's reckoning, that was the false note itself.

Peregrine realized she had been letting her own training erode against the texture of the rugs and the smell of Maria's kitchen, and she had not noticed it happening, which was itself the proof that it had been happening.

She exhaled, slow and once, and the training settled back into its place behind her ribs as she walked back to the house.

The family room was as she had left it. Adom on the rug, the tower a little taller now. The girl arguing with Ben about which block came next. Arthur in his chair, holding a different page of the same unread book. Zuni asleep on the side table...

Peregrine took up her position in the corner.

She did not look at Adom directly. She let him sit at the edge of her vision and she began to think through the shape of the night. The hour of his deepest sleep fell between two and three in the morning, by her logs. She would aim for the window she had timed on twenty-eight nights of the last forty-three. She had hallway access under the standing Shadow protocol, and from the door to the bedside was four steps along boards she had mapped. The blade was in her quarters, and would be in her sleeve by midnight.

Her thoughts were interrupted as she heard the girl laugh at something. A block falling, she realised. Then Ben got up from his chair.

He walked across the family room toward her, and Peregrine assumed, in the half-second she took to register the movement, that he was going to walk past her into the front hall. But he did not.

Instead, he stopped two feet in front of her and looked up.

The boy had never stood this close to her before. In forty-three days, he had not been within arm's reach. He had a child's face and a child's height but a quiet that was not a child's quiet at all. His hands hung at his sides, and he waited, so she looked down at him.

The Service had not trained her for what to do when a five-year-old stood two feet in front of her and waited, so she held the silence, until he broke it.

"Are you going to hurt him tonight?"

Peregrine looked at the boy, her heart skipping a beat, and she was about to say something when fire arrived before she had finished registering what he had said.

It came from his open palm as blue fire. Not the blue of a low-grade flame, which carried green in it, but a deeper and flatter blue she had no reference for. It moved as a single sheet, the leading edge curving inward toward her chest. Her ward broke before it caught her, and she felt the lattice go in a single flash across her shoulders as her back hit the wall behind her hard enough to drive the air out of her lungs.

She fell forward.

Peregrine had been hit by spells before, spells even stronger than this one. So she'd survive this. But what took her by surprise, and was not in any room of her training, was the absence of mana compression that always preceded a spell. Shadows, as any other decent mage, were taught to read the building of an attack working before release. But there had been no building, nothing for her instinct to register at all.

Peregrine got her hands under her and pushed up just as a sword touched the side of her neck, just below her ear.

"Don't move." Said Arthur Sylla.