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Catriona arrived back at her apartments as the bells chimed the fifth hour of the evening. Her footman let her in the door, and then bowed and bid her goodnight.
Most of her staff had gone to bed already, but she was fine with that. One of the few redeeming values of the incredibly ugly robes she wore as a Magister of the Ouranatha was that they did not require a host of attendants to remove, and so she did not need to wake her personal maid to undress her.
With a long sigh, she went into her parlor, meaning to do a bit of journaling before she retired. With a quiet word, she lit the mage lamps, and froze.
There was a man sitting in one of the chairs. Young, fit, a delightfully proportionate face framed by silky black hair, practical clothes that were nonetheless made of good material and perfectly tailored, and he was lounging like he belonged there.
She did not scream, but she did raise her hand to start the invocation for a paralyzation spell.
“Lady Liminal Hours,” said the man, apparently unconcerned by the threat of her magic.
She considered him. He was too fit to be a decorative noble or an ambitious wizard, too striking to be a common spy, too wealthy to be employed in service to any but the highest nobility, and it was unlikely he was here representing himself. She took a shot in the dark. “Ser Guard,” she responded.
The slightest widening of the eyes, and his slow appreciative smile told her that she had hit close to the mark.
“I thought it was time that you and I had a conversation,” he said, his cheerful voice belying the intense focus in his eyes. He had a smooth, aristocratic accent, the sort used by only the highest of nobility.
“Is it?” She murmured in response. She lowered her hand, still considering him. “Well, if we are to have a conversation, may I offer you something to drink? Or will I find that it has been poisoned?”
“I assure you, Lady Catriona, if I mean to poison you, you will know what I am handing you.”
An interesting way of phrasing it, she thought, as she walked over to a cabinet on the side of the room where her staff kept the wine service. As she took the time to open the bottle - a task she knew full well that most noble born would struggle with - she traced a spell onto the table, sending an alert to certain contingency plans she had in place. It might be far too late for those precautions, but she would prefer to have them than the alternative.
She returned to the chairs in the center of the parlor, and placed two glasses on the table, and made a show of pouring them. She did not touch either of them, gesturing for him to pick his own glass, and was slightly surprised when he picked up the one closest to him.
He took a slow, appreciative sniff, and a careful sip. “Amboloyon red,” he said appreciatively. “You have good taste.”
She simply picked up her own glass and rolled the stem in her fingers, watching him. If he was here to talk, then he would talk.
After a moment, he put it down and grinned at her again. “I won’t waste your time by playing waiting games,” he said, and pulled a folio out of his coat. “I brought you something.”
She raised an eyebrow, then took it from him, noticing as she did the perfectly manicured fingers paired with working calluses that implied regular weapons training. With a careful hand, she opened it to reveal a sheaf of papers within.
She glanced over at him. “Go ahead and read it,” he said, “it can frame our discussion.”
She started flipping through the pages, and felt her eyebrows climbing as she did so. It was a dossier, a list of many of the people she had bribed, blackmailed, or straight up employed over the past decade or so, along with notation on their weaknesses and, in many places, the leverage she had on them. It didn’t detail the entirety of her network, she noticed, but given the thoroughness of the rest of it, that didn’t mean much.
She glanced back up at him, and in her friendliest voice, she said, “A generous gift. Are you here to blackmail me or recruit me? Or is this an application?”
He grinned back at her, a personable smile that didn’t reach the eyes. “Go ahead and flip to the back,” he said easily.
The final three pages of the folio were not part of the dossier. Instead, they were a report, written in neat scribal hand, detailing a summary of the workings of the Ouranatha in the years following the Fall. It was a remarkably thorough document for how short it was, summarizing how they had recovered from the Fall and rebuilt as an organization when the magic was too broken to be useful.
There were very, very few people who could command such a report. Most of them were people she worked with, or nobility that she kept a close eye on. Of the ones that remained, only one of them would also employ a guard of noble blood.
She refused to let herself react, firmly mastering the trembling that threatened to reach her hands. Instead, with deliberate casualness, she put the folio down and picked her glass up again. With some effort, she ensured her own accent remained the educated upper class one favored by the Ouranatha. “So not an application, I gather,” she said lightly.
His answering smile was appreciative, and he took another sip of his wine. “It could be a few things,” he said easily. “That rather depends on you.”
“Does it now,” she murmured, taking a sip of her own wine. “It seems to me that that report you have in there is at least a few years out of date by now.”
“The funny thing about time these days is that years don’t mean as much as they used to,” he said. “So much of that report is still relevant today, when I started digging into the specifics.”
“There hasn’t been much call to…” she retrieved the folio and flipped to the report, “bribe an entire department to imitate magical effects,” she observed. “Or liaise with the military mages to artificially inflate our capabilities.”
“No,” he agreed, “the worst of that seems to have stopped after his Radiancy started taking charge of the magic again. It seems to me that a lot of the rest of it, though - the influencing, the spying, none of that has gone away.”
Almost nobody called the Lord Emperor “his Radiancy,” she thought, fascinated. In case she had any doubts as to his employment, that answered them. Or, she allowed, he was going to great lengths to convince her he worked for the Emperor. But she didn’t think anyone would be foolish enough to impersonate one of the imperial guard.
She shrugged, and answered his last statement. “Every power worth anything in Solaara spies,” she said.
“But only some of them work against the interests of the Lord Emperor,” he answered, his voice still light and friendly, his eyes as hard as stone.
“I have never worked against the Lord Emperor,” she answered. “We inherited a broken world, and did what we could to salvage it. Surely the Lord Emperor does not consider ensuring the stability of the world to be working against him?” She let her voice be innocently curious, painting earnestness on her face to let him see that she was genuine in her beliefs, and true in her faith.
Even spies could be fooled by seeing what they wanted to see, especially when attached to a pretty face. She was where she was for the power and influence, but it did suit her purposes for the world to be stable, with the Ouranatha positioned to mediate between the Last Emperor and his subjects. She had preferred the world before the Emperor awoke, but she didn’t get to where she was by dwelling on the past.
“He might object to you misrepresenting your power and his,” the imperial spy responded.
“Surely nothing done to glorify the Sun-on-Earth could be a real misrepresentation of his power,” she responded, shaping her tone to confusion. “It is the people’s belief in him as their god and protector that sustains the Fallen world.”
“Is that so,” he said dryly. “And your power?”
She shrugged. “I won’t deny that. We all did what we thought was necessary at the time. Sometimes we were clumsy, sometimes we were over-zealous. None of it mattered when he took up his mantle. There is nothing to misrepresent any longer.”
As he continued to look at her, his expression evaluating, she let her expression drop into one of exhaustion, not just from the work of a long day, but the exhaustion of someone who has been working on an overwhelming task for far too long.
“Ser Guard, if you are here to see if I am loyal, then I can only assure you that I am. I am deeply invested in the stability of the world, in a peaceful and sustainable society. The Sun-on-Earth has been the heart of everything the people here knew was good, and when they needed something to believe in, we gave them that. I maintain those ties now, because a healthier court is also one where the ground shifts under us constantly, and I have the tools to monitor and influence it, not to destabilize it.”
She had not clawed her way up from being backwater priest all the way into the Ouranatha Council to be told that her efforts were treasonous now, she thought defiantly, though she kept the thought from her face. She was no worse than any other spymaster, and as long as the chaos remained beneath the attention of the Lord Emperor, she had never heard of him caring before.
Perhaps this new secretary of his had influenced him to look at corruption beyond that of the Secretariat. If so, there was plenty of blame to go around.
The guard’s next words seemed to confirm that theory, “His Radiancy will not tolerate interference between the branches of government,” he said. “So I suppose what I am here to do is give you some advice: keep your focus on making a stable priesthood, and I won’t have to notice you.” He grinned again, and this expression was the sharp smile of a predator. ”Don’t make me notice you.”
She inclined her head, then raised her glass in a toast, “To the Emperor then,” she said, “and to a new and better world.”
He raised his glass to mirror her gesture, and took another drink. “Don’t let me keep you up,” he said easily. “I’ll see myself out.”
“By all means,” she said in kind. “I’m going to stay up and write anyway. The front door is over there.”
He smiled that sharp, predatory grin again, and stood up. “I do hope we don’t meet this way again,” he said.
She smiled, allowed herself to look over him with an appreciative look that they both knew was as much for his capabilities as his appearance. “At least if we do, then I hope it is not as enemies,” she agreed.
He bowed, a perfect bow for a high noble to a Lady Priest, and saw himself out the front door.
Only then did she allow herself to relax, and let her body feel the rush of excitement and fear she felt from having drawn the direct attention of the imperial spies. After a few moments of shaking, she got up to deactivate the alarm she had triggered and refill her glass of wine before returning to her seat. She took a deep breath, picked up the folio that he had left behind, and curled up to read the report that the Emperor’s spymaster had built on her.