"I don't, I'm afraid. As you pointed out, knowledge of politics isn't among my many astonishing qualities."
"I'm the minister of foreign affairs, which means I have a great responsi bility to this land. And in order to execute that responsibility I must have only the best and most talented men and women working under me."
"Are you offering me a job, sir?"
"What if I told you that if you were to come work for me, I would fund any thaumatic research you chose to pursue while at the same time allowing you some physical diversion as well?"
"Sir?"
"It was you who stole across the border through the Contested Lands in order to examine an ancient Arami excavation, was it not? An Unseelie expedition, at that?"
"It was interesting."
"Indeed! We thought you were a spy for the longest time until we vetted you."
"You've been watching me? I don't understand."
"Only the best and most talented," repeated Everess. "I don't approach just everyone with these offers."
"What makes you think I'd leave the university?" asked Ironfoot.
"I know exactly why you'd leave it, and that you're considering leaving already."
"You do? And why is that?"
"Because you're bored."
Ironfoot had no rejoinder to that.
"I appreciate the offer," said Ironfoot after a moment, "but as you're well aware, I'm in the middle of something fairly important here."
"Oh, I quite agree," said Everess. "And one of my preconditions for your coming to work at the Ministry would be that you complete that work. As you can guess, we're more than a little interested in its outcome."
"I know," said Ironfoot. He turned away from the river and looked down at the crater. "I'm not sure I know how I feel about potentially handing the plans for the thing that did that over to anyone."
"If it's to be used," said Everess, "I prefer that it be used on the Unseelie rather than us."
"Yes," said Ironfoot. "I suppose I do, too."
"Good then. When you get back to the City Emerald, I'll send you a sprite."
They stood silently together, looking down at what was once Selafae, and then turned and walked back down the path.
Four days later it was finished. Ironfoot collected the last of the readings, which would be mapped in the comfort of his rooms back at Queensbridge. The tents were struck, the army guard removed. The Arcadian priests and loved ones, kept away for so many months, streamed into the ruined citythe priests to administer beatitudes; the relatives looking for keepsakes, bones, trinkets ... anything to remind them of what they'd lost. It was an emotional moment, and Ironfoot had no desire to get caught up in it any further than he already was.
Returning to the Queensbridge campus was like coming home. He couldn't remember the air in the City Emerald smelling so fresh, or the colors being so vivid. For weeks and weeks his entire life had been gray dust and acrid tar, and nights spent hunched over the map. Despite his urgent need to finish the project, he was almost pleased that the minor emergencies that had cropped up in his absence took him away from it for a time. He needed to get some distance from it.
There were message sprites lined up against the office window, bored out of their little minds, all of them clamoring to be the first to deliver its message and disappear. He took them all in turn, scribbling little notes to himself. A dinner invitation from a love-struck female colleague; a meeting request from the dean that could certainly wait. And a simple message from Lord Everess.
"He says he wants you to come over to his office and talk and so on and so forth," said Everess's sprite.
Ironfoot took the tiny creature in hand and said, "Maybe you could just tell him I'm busy."
The sprite's face took on an air of abused hospitality. "Well, he's not going to be too pleased with that, I can tell you. He's a lord, you know. Very fancy. He wears a hat and smokes a pipe. I don't see you with a hat or a pipe, so I guess he wins. Ha!"
Ironfoot had a soft spot for message sprites, though he wasn't quite sure why.
"You think so?" he asked. "You think I don't have a pipe and a hat around here someplace?"
The sprite sniffed. "I know you don't because yesterday I got really bored and I rifled through all of your stuff."
"Clever sprite."
"You think so? You really think so? Because nobody else thinks so, that's for sure. Do you have any roast beef?"
"Excuse me?"
"I like roast beef. I like the smell of it, and I like people who like it. But I can't eat it myself because sprites are herbivores, and it's the greatest tragedy of my life except for when my family died that time."
"Sorry," said Ironfoot. "No roast beef."
"Darn," said the sprite.
"Go on," said Ironfoot. "Send back my message. I think I have some parsley somewhere around here. You can have that."
"Uh, yeah, funny thing about that parsley," said the sprite, flitting up toward the open window. "Remember what I said about rifling through your stuff.?
Ironfoot had done every errand he could think of, returned every message, even cleaned his apartments and straightened the papers in his office. What was he trying to avoid? He'd been so impatient to get back to the city, and now that he was here, he couldn't stop stalling.
The map loomed from the corner of his office. It was rolled up and stored in a tube that was taller than he was, sealed with his own university signet. It called to him, and part of him wanted to answer it, but part of him wanted to set fire to it.
Why? Was this guilt? Was he worried about working on a weapon, about providing the key to re-creating the thing? He didn't think so, to be honest. As much as it might bother him intellectually, it didn't spur this gut reaction. Was it the eeriness of it, the smell of death and tar and gray dust that seemed to emanate from it, even though it produced no actual scent? No, that wasn't it, either.
He knew what it was, but couldn't admit it.
The next morning he awoke early, poured a strong cup of coffee, and forced himself to face the map. He unrolled it in the small parlor of his apartments, where it took up the entire floor, requiring him to lug the settee into the kitchen. He had the final measurements from the intensity gauges stacked neatly on a small stool next to his mug. He took quill and ruler in hand, and began working.
Once the data were entered, there were calculations to be done. These he did on lined sheets of linen paper that he ordered specially from the campus stationery. With each result, a new line appeared on the map. A web was emerging, a pattern. That was good. But still, that unsettling feeling would not leave him. The feeling was linked to that tar smell that he couldn't quite place, the memory it spurred that he could not recall. As the pattern grew, so did the feeling of dread inside him.
When he next looked up, the clock on the mantel read after midnight. The fire had died down in the fireplace, and he realized that he was cold. He stoked the fire, poured himself a whiskey, and went back to work.
He finished the formulaic interpolations around dawn. He'd lost count of the pots of coffee he'd drunk, now measured only in the level of queasiness in his stomach and the frequency with which he'd had to visit the privy. The web was complete, more or less. Some of the data had been lost. Some of the measurements, he was certain, had been faked. One region in particular was a total loss, the readings totally inconsistent with any of the others. It had been handled by the son of a lord whose father had pressed him into the assignment believing that it would reinforce the boy's character. Ironfoot could have told him that there was nothing there to reinforce.
Regardless, what he had was enough, and now the work could begin in earnest. He copied the pattern from the map onto a new sheet of linen paper-large, but not so big as the original map. Only the pattern remained, with detailed figures noting the invocative spectra, the normalization factors. The web stood in front of him, begging to be understood. It was a pattern, yes, but what did it mean? In his imagination about this moment, he'd assumed that the answer would leap out at him at this point. These exact physical components. This precise juggling of Elements, Motion, and Poise, and perhaps any four other Gifts that he could theorize being involved. He was damn clever. It should all have been there, leaping out at him. But it wasn't. The pattern implied nothing. The pattern meant nothing. It was only itself. It suggested things, certainly, but only impossibilities.