alexanderwales
patreon
Thresholder, ch 136, Interlude: The Assassin and the Spy
🕑 Added 2024-07-07 08:39:07 +0000 UTCHey, it's a chapter! If you finish this chapter and are looking for more stuff to read, I suggest Millennial Scarlet, a webcomic I'm writing, drawn by ssandulak. The first two issues are almost up for the public.
~~~~
Dirk Gibbons was, so far as he could ascertain, completely fucked. He was yesterday’s news at the bottom of a bird cage. He was a house of cards in a hurricane. He was cooked, garnished, and served with a side of regret.
This version of him, anyway.
It had originally been some comfort that he had the clones all over the world, carrying out the important work of statecraft, getting in the nitty gritty of politics and Command Authorities. He had hard-won faith in himself, and it could only be good for the culture to have more of him, given that he was clear-headed and willing to work the problem in a way that the culture didn’t seem to incentivize. One of the long-term problems with the culture, at least in Dirk’s opinion, was a lack of ambition and hard work, and there were times it seemed as though the entire superstructure of their society depended upon people who worked without a lever pushing them to work, the small contingent of those who would strive for the success of their people even when that meant putting in a hundred times the effort of the common citizen.
There was, in fact, a term floating around that no one seemed to like, “civic lynchpin”. Declaring that a single person was load bearing for a given community was “not the culture”, as true as it often was. The world often felt short on those sorts of people, the ones who would devote themselves to the masses. There just weren’t enough of them, and never would be. You needed people who stayed late, who cleaned up, who picked up extra shifts when no one else would, who did the difficult and boring work that no one would ever thank them for. The culture did its best to encourage and laud those people, and to mold children into becoming them, but they were still in short supply.
The cloning machine changed all that. Dirk Gibbons was a civic lynchpin, and now there were lots of him. There was no worry that he would catch a cold and die, leaving a gaping hole in global planning. And since Dirk was no longer unique and important, just one of many Dirks, that meant that he could engage in high risk activities that no one could possibly have justified him doing before.
Dirk hadn’t meant to become the spymaster of Thirlwell. He’d only meant to infiltrate and keep an eye on them while covering their operations and recruiting what people he could to the cause. He was supposed to be stirring up shit and getting notes on what the country was up to, given that they were one of the global “areas of concern”. It had just happened to be that their intelligence network was ripe for the plucking. Given that he had the entirety of a much more competent intelligence network on his side, it hadn’t actually been that hard to get into a position of power — all he had to do was feed information to the right people, set up the right schemes, and watch his predecessor resign in disgrace.
And now it was almost certainly going to bite him in the ass.
It would have been bad enough if it was just the thresholders he had to worry about, men and women from other worlds with completely unknown abilities, but he apparently had to worry about the other Dirks as well. There was at least one operating in Berus, and he wouldn’t have been entirely surprised to find that there was one operating in Thirlwell as well. If Dirk had a personality defect, it was that he often thought “I’ll do it myself”, even when it sometimes wasn’t necessary. That was precisely the thing that had made him into a civic lynchpin, but there were natural downsides to that mentality. The personal downside was that he put a lot on his plate and ran at a constant high level of stress from all the roles and responsibilities — something the clones had helped with immensely. The communal downside was that he stepped on peoples’ toes, and with the clones, now he was stepping on his own toes.
If Third Fervor got a whiff of the clones, she would flay him alive, and it was bad enough that she knew there were clones, even if she seemed to misunderstand their source and nature. Dirk’s decision to stage a suicide for Perry’s clone had gone disastrously wrong, with the clone apparently turning into a giant monster that broke free from his manacles and killed a good number of guards before disappearing into the countryside and somehow not being found. It was about as wrong as a staged suicide could go, more wrong than he’d known was possible a few years ago, and he was thankful that he’d left the room rather than waiting for the clone to bleed out.
So there were at least two people who had a reason to kill him, both with the capacity to do so.
And then of course there was Nima, who had met the other Dirk, and could instantly connect the dots if they were ever to meet each other. He had thankfully figured that out in time and given himself every distance he could from her, stationing her in one of the old holding houses, but with the power of portals they could be face to face at literally any moment. All that would take is for Third Fervor to decide that she knew best.
When Dirk was woken up and summoned late in the night, he had thought it might be the end for him, which would also be a blow to the culture. He tried to think about that rather than his own mortality, but it was difficult. Third Fervor was fast and strong, nearly invulnerable in her armor, and as Dirk went down the hallways of the castle, he felt a lump in his throat. It felt like he’d run out of options, and the thing to worry about was what to do to maximize the impact of his death.
He was, unexpectedly, brought to the castle’s medical center.
Third Fervor was laid out on a gurney, her armor removed. He had never seen her without her armor, and was surprised by just how pale her skin was. She had curly brown hair that he wouldn’t have expected, and while he never would have said she was plain-looking, the armor had given him the impression that she wasn’t human. With the doctors looking over her, it was clear that she was mortal.
Someone had destroyed part of her jaw, but most of the attention was being paid to her stomach, where blood was flowing freely. Gut wounds could easily kill, at least for normal people, and Dirk immediately began thinking of what it would take to finish the job right then and there. He could do it himself, if he had to. From what he knew of her abilities, he’d have to do it quickly, but even approaching the gurney might make her flee — or scream loud enough to kill him and everyone in the room.
He almost didn’t register the queen standing there in her nightgown. When he did, he moved to her.
“I was summoned,” he said. “I wasn’t given details.”
“A fight,” said the queen as Third Fervor cried out in pain. Her face was streaked with tears, though Dirk imagined that this was just the result of accumulated stress and heartbreak.
“Are we safe to be standing here?” asked Dirk.
“We will stay by her side,” said the queen. In spite of the fact that she’d been crying, her face was set. “She fought for this kingdom.”
“Without her, we’re vulnerable,” said Dirk. “Did she say where their people were?”
“No,” said the queen. “She was woken in the middle of the night when the alarm was raised. After she left, she appeared before four guards stationed in the east balcony tied up in vines, which they cut from her, then disappeared to fight again. When she came back, she was injured. They brought her here.”
“The alarm,” said Dirk. “From where? Spotters?”
“No,” said the queen. “Nima was attacked, or possibly taken. I didn’t get the full report.”
Dirk came close to letting out a sigh of relief, but he had trained and practiced, and showed no emotions except those he meant to show. “I’ll get the report,” he said. “She was of dubious value, and if she was broken out …”
“It would call into question the information we’ve gotten from her thus far,” said the queen. She only had eyes for Third Fervor. Dirk was surprised that she’d made the connection he had laid down for her. He’d been trying to discredit Nima since she’d arrived on their shores, but it was best to lay the seed for distrust now so he could take up the case against her without being suspicious.
“I’ll work through the night,” said Dirk.
“Mmm,” said the queen. She turned to look at him. “I called you here for a reason. Third Fervor and I will be going away as soon as she’s well enough to take me. The assault on Nima might have been an assault on me. With my father and brother both dead, I could very well be next, and our primary asset being out of commission would give them plenty of opportunity.”
“Yes, your grace,” said Dirk with a bow.
“I will make my appearances, but they’ll be with her help,” said the queen. “I don’t know where we’re going to stay, but I’m sure you have guidance on the matter. Somewhere far from here.”
“Yes, your grace,” said Dirk after a moment. “Our foreign holdings are scarce. There are credibly as few as three, all places that have not been seized by symboulions. Give me half an hour to consider it. Only the two of you?”
“I am low on trust,” said the queen. She ran her fingers through her hair, which was hanging loosely at her shoulders. “It will be only the two of us, because she has proven herself beyond reproach. But there are lingering questions, Thom. I need you to find out how they knew where Nima was being kept.” Her eyes were intense. He hadn’t thought much of her when she’d just been a princess, but she was proving to have hidden depths. “And I need, more than anything, to find out what happened to my brother.”
Dirk’s mouth was a tight line. They’d had this conversation before. He was Thirlwell’s spymaster, and had already registered his opinion that it had been suicide. If it wasn’t a suicide, it was so impeccably staged that it was indistinguishable from suicide, and no amount of questioning was going to change anything.
“I’ll keep up the questioning,” said Dirk. That was as much as he would give her. “If someone knows something, they’ll eventually fold. I’ve already had people with the finest masks looking over the room.”
“Someone needs to hang for my father’s death,” said the queen. “That man can be brought to justice by Third Fervor and Third Fervor alone. But someone must also hang for my brother’s death. I do not accept it as coincidence. The people do not accept it. Do you understand me?”
“I understand,” said Dirk. “But —”
“No,” said the queen, holding up a hand. “There is a viper in the henhouse. It must be found and made an example of. Find it.”
Dirk nodded. “Yes, your grace.”
She was asking him to find someone, anyone, who could credibly be accused of having poisoned the prince. She wanted a symbol that would show that the kingdom was still in control, that someone had their hands on the reins, and from her tone she didn’t particularly care whether or not the person Dirk found was actually responsible.
He moved away from her, off to find a place for the two of them to hide out, as well as to get a report from the jail that had been holding Nima. In theory, he was also going to put more effort into finding the prince’s killer, but the idea of finding a scapegoat made his stomach churn.
He was the one who’d killed the prince.
Assassination was not the culture. It was very much not the culture. If anyone ever found out he’d been the one responsible, he and all the other Dirks would probably lose the authorities that had been granted to them. It wouldn’t just be a blow to him, it would be a blow to the culture as a whole, a cause for the masses to re-evaluate their relationship with the Command Authorities, to question what was being done with resources from the commons.
He’d done it anyway.
The prince had been a sadist, unacceptable as a ruler, and had often spoken in private moments about what he would do when he was king. When Dirk had first heard the prince express these dark thoughts, he’d assumed that the prince trusted him for some reason, but no, the prince spoke of these things to almost everyone, dismissing it as a twisted sense of humor if anyone objected — and because he was the presumptive heir, there was always an undercurrent of threat, one that stopped people from talking. Some of the things that Dirk had heard come from the prince’s mouth would have been decried as ludicrous character assassination if they’d been printed in the papers.
In killing the prince, Dirk had probably spared the lives of hundreds, maybe thousands. Still, it wasn’t the culture, and he knew that. His only solace was that the culture understood that contradictions were required and that dogma was the enemy. He wouldn’t be able to argue a good case, if he lived long enough for that, but his defense would be that it needed to be done. The king had many people working for him to make weapons that could be used against the peoples of the world in both threat and retribution, and those powers, in the hands of the prince, in the wake of his father’s death … well, assassination had been the correct course, come what may.
But pinning the crime on a useful patsy wasn’t something that Dirk was going to do, as pragmatic as it might be. He would have to find a way to navigate the queen’s demand, one that satisfied the need to show control while at the same time working toward Dirk’s goal, which was the dissolution of the monarchy.
The queen was supposed to be the best choice of heir, but if she was going to turn her mind toward retribution, she might have to be eliminated too, which would mean the other princess, who was much younger, would become queen instead.
For the time being, Dirk was going to sit tight and work the problems, hoping that it would all, somehow, work out in the end. Nima was gone, that was something, and Third Fervor was going to be less of a problem until she recovered.
In fact, with the queen under protection and the thresholder out of commission, it might be possible to put other plans in motion across Berus, ones that would firm up the grip of the culture and bring about a clean revolution on a reasonable timescale. He’d gone from dreading his imminent execution to thinking about trying to end the monarchy, and he stopped to take a moment to be grateful for that.
Somewhere out there, it seemed like someone was looking out for him.
~~~~
Fenilor had been around the world a dozen times over, exploring cities and their people, learning from their comings and goings, listening in on their conversations and speaking with their officials, guards, and clerics. Thirlwell and Berus were island nations, important in the sense that they had once been imperial powers, but of shrinking relevance as the sequence of revolutions had taken root. It was intriguing to see them now, fallen powers running off the fumes of empire.
In Berus, Fenilor moved with impunity. He walked the city streets as an elf, taking his food from the recently set up dining halls where everyone was still getting used to the fact that food would be provided as a basic necessity. They weren’t the happy smiling people that Fenilor was used to elsewhere in the world, but he was confident that they would get there in time as the old wounds faded into the past and the golden domes provided their bounty without the dread effluence from the lanterns. It would be a poorer existence in some ways, at least at first, but the assets of the nobility had been seized and were being redistributed.
Berus had a strain of militancy that Fenilor had not seen elsewhere, which was worrisome. The culture worked, but there was no guarantee that it would work in every circumstance. There was also no guarantee that it would continue to work in the future, as much as it was tempting to look at the passing decades as proof it could weather anything.
Elves were uncommon in Berus, so his presence drew some stares, even in the city of Calamus, where people should have been more familiar with those of other races. He was taken for a foreigner, which was true enough, but he wasn’t connected with the symboulions, which was doubly odd. More people were coming in with every passing week, drawn from across the world, those with expertise and ambitions to get the country working, so he fit in with them in that sense. The people of this world thought him young, in the way of their elves, reborn not more than ten or twenty years ago, witness to little. He allowed them to think that, as he had for the last five hundred years, and he listened to their stories, complaints, and idle chatter as he ate simple stew with simple bread.
There was a deep anger in Berus, but only some of it was directed at their former kingdom. The people had grown up with stories of an empire that spanned the seas, one they thought was their birthright. There were those of them old enough to remember when they’d had the bounty of the entire world, when lantern-powered ships had meant the apples were in season at all times of the year and spices would come in by the tonne. The rich were most often the beneficiaries of those shipments, grown fat off what had been looted, but some of it had trickled down, at least while the empire held.
The anger was the anger of those who thought that they would or should be like an empire again. The frustration was from a people who had suspected that revolution would mean that everyone would become rich. Instead, they were learning that revolution meant hardship, at least initially, and when that hardship had passed and the lanterns had gone cold, they would still not be dressed in the finery of kings and still not eat the bounty of the world. They would have simple, functional clothes of high quality and simple, nutritious meals made from local sources. Their needs would be met, and from what he could see of them, they might grow discontent anyway.
Fenilor had no small amount of frustration with these people, but it wasn’t a new frustration. It was an important part of culture building, finding the places where expectations did not meet with reality. It would be the work of the faithful to bring understanding to the people of the crowded dining halls and gaming parlors.
He tried to ignore a gnawing fear that the culture might fail here, after so much time.
At night, he broke into buildings and read through their papers. It wasn’t unusual for symboulions to put things down, and meeting minutes were considered a public good. It led to accountability, or at least that was the thought. The amount of paper required was immense, and some of the work had clearly been done by people with no experience, but Fenilor read through as much as he could, looking for information.
In page after page there was nothing on Perry, and little on Third Fervor. They didn’t know about thresholders, or if they did, they hadn’t had a meeting about it. The Berus Security symboulion had been organized to deal with the remaining elements of the counter-revolution, and there was an inner symboulion with private meetings, but after combing through their files too, it seemed like they knew a lot less than people assumed. There were unsavory details in there too, things that Fenilor didn’t particularly like to see. It was one thing to kill those who were responsible for what had been done under the system of monarchy, and another thing entirely to jail the workers whose main crime seemed to be a delusion that the monarchy might be restored.
Fenilor found Perry’s name only once, in the minutes of a meeting about agricultural practices with a focus on whether the moving machines might still be used to sow and harvest. Perry was listed as a bodyguard to a dwarf named Moss, but did not speak through the course of the meeting. Those were the only meeting minutes that listed bodyguards, and were from an earlier date. No doubt the change in protocol was logged somewhere in the meeting minutes that Fenilor hadn’t gone through — or perhaps it was one of those things that was never written down and nevertheless became a part of how things are done.
The name of Moss Grumhill was familiar to Fenilor. He had been around since the early years, and while they had never met, Moss had been working as an engineer of some skill for a very long time. It was no great surprise that he’s come to Calamus. As wide as the world was, the same names kept coming up over and over, those with skills and connections, the ones that were a part of the machinery of the culture.
What was surprising was that Moss was still apparently married to Velli, another name that Fenilor was familiar with. She was an elf, reborn every so often, and by the accounting of this world she was a different person each time. Any marriage to an elf was dissolved on rebirth, as were any contracts they’d signed or agreements they made — partly because they had only vague memories of their previous life. If Fenilor needed to, he could take up his old name, but it would be assumed that he was an entirely different person. If Velli was still with Moss, it was because he was continually putting work into wooing each new version of her.
It was a week and a half after the big fight when he finally found Velli. She had been elevated by a symboulion vote to become, at least temporarily, one of the chief dispensers of the royal wealth. In spite of her importance, she ate her meals in one of the local dining halls, often with other librarians, but sometimes alone.
On one of the occasions that she ate alone, Fenilor sat down beside her with a plate of his own food. She regarded him, eyes going to his pointed ears, though of course you could tell an elf from bone structure alone. She was wearing something conservative by elven standards, a tightly-fitting top that covered her skin down to her elbow and a skirt that came to just above her knees.
“Do I know you?” she asked.
“In another life,” said Fenilor with a smile. It was a common eleven greeting. He held out a hand and gave her a fake name, and once introductions were made, they both ate for a bit.
“I’m surprised that they’ve elevated you,” said Fenilor.
“There is no elevation,” Velli said gently. “That is not the culture.”
“You have authority to mete out the treasures that this kingdom has taken from the world,” said Fenilor. “What is that if not elevation?”
“It is a duty,” said Velli. “If I saw it as power, it would be a duty I wasn’t fit for.” She tapped the tines of her fork against her plate. The meal of the day was an unappetizing fish with lantern-made bread. “I don’t take these as aspersions, but I assume you sought me out for a reason?”
“I’ve been searching for a man,” said Fenilor. “He goes by the unusual name of Peregrin Holzmann.”
“I see,” said Velli. She offered nothing more and had paused in eating her food.
“He was aboard the airship you came in on,” said Fenilor. “There was an altercation there, wasn’t there? But it’s unclear to me what actually happened.”
“They were counter-revolutionaries,” said Velli. “Remnants of a network of spies and operatives in Kerry Coast City. They wanted to take the ship to Thirlwell.”
Fenilor grinned at her. “From the report, they —”
“Fenilor,” she said.
The grin stayed on his face. “I don’t wish you any harm,” he said. “I just want information. There’s something I’m missing about Perry.”
“There’s little I can tell you,” said Velli. “I learned of his true nature — if we can even be said to know it — only in the last two weeks.” She pursed her lips. “I wanted to thank you for everything you’ve done.”
“I assume you don’t know much of what I’ve done,” said Fenilor.
“Likely not,” said Velli. “But I know my history well enough to know a fraction of what you’ve helped to accomplish. The culture was not your sole creation, but it would not have existed without you.” She gave a slow, solemn nod of her head.
“It is likely that you will know my full history, in time,” said Fenilor. “The truth is a vital part of the commons. It is one of the reasons religion could not stand. There are statues that were made in haste which will need to be torn down.”
“We will have our own reckoning with the past, I am sure,” said Velli. “But no matter what you’ve done, my thanks will remain.”
Fenilor nodded. “If my past means something to you, will you tell me about Perry?”
“I have no loyalty to him, and he certainly seems to have no loyalty to me,” said Velli. “I would hide nothing on his account, nor have I been asked to.”
“Then I’m afraid I’ve wasted my time,” said Fenilor, standing up from his seat. “I don’t expect you to stay silent about my appearance here.”
Velli was silent as he turned to go. He had no idea whether or not she was telling the truth, but it was no matter: he would follow her and see where the trail led.
She spoke with her husband, and her husband spoke with another man named Dirk Gibbons, who pulled a machine from inside his pocket that seemed to be technological in origin. The three of them were a unit, it seemed, important people who shared secrets. The device was interesting, as it was far beyond the capacity of this world to create, and could only have come from Perry. Fenilor watched from a distance, aided by a magical bow, as Perry arrived. Curiously, astonishingly, he came out of a door on the roof of the building, and there was a brief glimpse inside — confederates, but not ones that Fenilor knew.
Fenilor could see the conversation but not hear it. That didn’t matter. Perry had abilities beyond what he had shown. He had allies. If there was an answer to how he’d found the mine, it was there: someone was working with Perry. Unknown forces were in play with agendas of their own. Fenilor watched the meeting and looked closely as Perry left through the same door, having left through the balcony. He saw little, but that didn’t matter.
Time, as always, was on Fenilor’s side.
Comments
Lorenzo
Moss has been cloned many times, just like Dirk.
patreonizing
Confusion: I thought Moss died to 3F? Did they replace him already? Interesting twist that Dirk was responsible for the prince's unfortunate ill health. I'd totally thought that was Fenilor's doing, and it even fit with his known skillset of assassination and poisons. Guess he doesn't really do the sarcasm thing (or I just misread his conversation with Kes).
Cam X
Well... suspected it from Fenilor's final thought last chapter, but there it is. The Farfinder might just be a part of it now.
Brendan Murphy
Something pretty ironic about assassination not being the culture while the culture was built by an assassin
