“Because I’m looking at the caller ID on my phone and wondering if I’ve been sucked into the past somehow.”
I chuckled. “You watch too many science fiction movies. I’m hiding in my old office. Care for a visitor?”
“Sure. You’re not dead, right?”
Glancing to my left, I smiled. Virgil had moved his gargoyle self from his lower perch to the nook right outside my window.
“No. Minor scorching. I’ll be down in a sec,” I said and hung up.
A familiar cool flutter touched my mind. I had felt it before, like a sending, only more subtle and less identifiable. It was how gargoyles communicated.
A circle contains and excludes but defines itself, Virgil said.
That sounded like an abstract philosophical game. Gargoyles never make any sense when they speak. At least, I don’t think so. They only make sense afterward, and then you kick yourself for not understanding. I’ve tried to figure out Virgil, but I only end up second-guessing myself. I think he’s sincere in trying to help. Why, I don’t know. I’ve known very few people that gargoyles have spoken to. As far as their conversations go, Virgil was downright chatty with me, but most of the time I had no idea what he was talking about.
You don’t send your thoughts to a gargoyle like you do to other fey. You think loudly, and they appear to overhear. I’ve never had a conversation with Virgil unless we were near each other. It made me doubt gargoyles could actually do sendings, but no one knows much about what they can do. I relaxed my mind and thought, Sometimes I feel my entire life is running in circles.
Jested truth makes dangerous folly. The stroke of a sword injures the heart of the wielder and his foe.
I didn’t like the sound of that. My dagger was a sword, after a fashion, but I didn’t know how to make it turn into a sword. The one time I did it, it felt more like the sword was using me than the other way around. No jokes, then, Virgil.
When he didn’t say anything, I thought he was finished speaking. It’s really hard to know when the conversation is over when you’re dealing with a talking stone that doesn’t move.
Bones, he said.
I stared at him, pointlessly trying to read something, anything, into his words. Sometimes runes are carved on bones, which are thrown to read the future. Elves favored it, but I didn’t know anyone who actually knew how to do it.
I don’t understand. As usual, I thought, hoping it wasn’t loud enough for Virgil to hear.
Bones, he said. The coolness floated away. Virgil was done speaking. I stared at his little naked body, wondering if he ever felt self-conscious with his goods hanging out for all to see. He moved somehow, though I had never seen it happen, and yet he never moved his hands from his knees to hide his groin. Maybe he felt no shame. Maybe he didn’t understand it. I grinned as a thought occurred to me. Maybe it was because he had nothing to hide.
If possible, the Community Liaison offices were even emptier than the last time I was there. Everyone must have been running around outside dealing with the hysteria. I would have mobilized everyone if I were in charge. I would lock down the Guildhouse, sure, but I wouldn’t try to take on the Consortium and an entire neighborhood simultaneously.
I took the elevator straight down to the subbasement. Meryl smiled for a fraction of a second when I walked into her office, then wrinkled her nose. “You smell like burnt cow.”
“It’s new.” I turned to show her the scorch marks on my jacket.
She whistled appreciatively. “Nice miss.”
“Yeah. It was fun.”
She leaned back in her chair. “So, is it a fascist wet dream out there?”
I nodded. “Nigel thinks the Consortium is behind the attacks.”
Meryl snickered. “Nigel thinks the Consortium is behind everything. I swear the man is itching for a war no one wants.”
“He was never this single-minded before.”
She gestured at me. “He’s pissed at them. They took out his main man.”
That took me by surprise. “Me? Are you talking about me? He’s pissed because of my injury?”
She nodded. “Before you lost your abilities, the scuttlebutt was that you were being groomed in case hostilities broke out. You were one of the few here-born with major potential.”
You could have knocked me flat with an eyeblink. Nigel wasn’t one for compliments, but now that I looked back, I could see what Meryl meant. He was always pushing me to work harder, trying to get me to join the Druidic College, teaching me ways to use my abilities even when he wasn’t happy that I had gone the Guild route. It made a sort of sense. “I never realized. No one ever said anything.”
She grinned. “Ha! With your ego? Are you kidding me? No one in their right mind was going to give you more reason to strut around like a peacock.”
I didn’t say anything. Meryl wasn’t the first person to comment on my arrogance, only the most vocal. I don’t think I impressed her enough for her to be diplomatic.
“I’ve changed.”
Her grin broadened. “No shit. Almost dying a couple of times has done good things for you.”
She had a point. When your life hits bottom, you can’t help reevaluating things. Losing my livelihood and being abandoned by people I thought were my friends made me understand what it’s like to be on the other side of privilege.
“Look, I need to get out of here. There’s a meeting of the Bosnemeton tonight, and I have to do something before that.”
Her eyebrows went up and hid behind her bangs. “Do something?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Keeva’s got the building locked down tight, and I don’t want to be followed.”
“And you’re not going to tell me what it is?”
“Nope.” We had a playful staring contest involving lots of smirking and grinning. At last, Meryl sighed.
“Okay. I’ll show you a way. But I want details later.”
“Deal,” I said.
I stood as she got up from her desk. She started around it, then walked right through the wall of her office. Impressed, I stared at the illusion. The space between an overflowing credenza and an old filing cabinet looked like a perfectly normal wall. It took a lot of ability to maintain, even more when you had to contend with the amount of essence and warding in the Guildhouse. And I hadn’t sensed it there at all. Meryl was damned good at what she knew how to do.
“Coming?” Her voice sounded muffled coming through the illusion, as though she were calling out from a good distance.
I walked through the wall after her, feeling the spiderweb tingle of essence skim over my body as I went through it. Meryl waited on the other side with a small flashlight. We were in a narrow tunnel that looked much like the other subbasement hallways, only without the doors. Behind me, I could see Meryl’s office as clear as day.
“You’re full of surprises,” I said.
“Did you really think I’d have an office with only one door?” she asked. She turned and led the way along the tunnel. The light dimmed the farther we went from her office, and she turned on her flashlight. “I found this tunnel by accident one day. Took me a while to create the opening in the office, but it was worth it.”
I could feel warding along the walls. If I had to guess, I’d have said we were moving between Guildhouse storerooms, which were filled with all kinds of things that had essence to spare. As a chief archivist, Meryl kept it all in check, making sure nothing disappeared or reacted with something else or exploded. By the odd fluctuations in warding, I could tell there had to be more openings, but Meryl didn’t seem inclined to give a tour.
We reached the bottom of a flight of stairs. Meryl paused and held up her hand. After a few murmurs, a small ball of blue light no bigger than a glow bee danced up from her palm. Still murmuring, she tapped my forehead with her free hand, cupped both her hands together, then tossed the light ball. It swirled up into the darkness.