Part 1
The System's voice faded. The name stayed.
Philip sat at the long table with the pen still in his hand.
He waited for a part of his mind to list arguments against Lydia's hypothesis.
Three came to mind. There were other branches of the forces. There were the two other names on Natalia's list. There would be months of ministers and regulations before anybody was appointed to anything. All of it was true, and none of it altered the conclusion that had settled in his mind the moment Lydia hinted at Beatrice. He had built enough models in his first life to know a good prediction.
It would be Beatrice.
He knew the outline the way a man knows a mortgage that came with the house. His past, or, more correctly, the past of the Philip whose life he now inhabited, had become the greatest impediment to Natalia's future.
One day, if the Bill passed and the clause survived, General Dugu might stand at the door of the room that held Natalia's seal, ready to collect on a debt he had inherited along with this life.
Philip put the pen down carefully, as though it might go off.
Beside him, Natalia did not look at his face first.
She looked at the vein beneath his jaw.
She had kept the ledger since the new year. Eleven garments had been tested under controlled conditions. The twelfth was the plain dark blue she wore tonight, chosen for dinner in the spirit of moderation. Across the evening it had produced a mean elevation of just three beats, which was precisely its purpose.
At Lydia's answer, his pulse had risen by thirty-one.
The leopard silk, at two metres in a lit room, had managed twenty-two. By the only measure she had, the name had moved him more than she ever had.
His face, meanwhile, showed horror. Not surprise, and not mere displeasure. Horror. The two assessments disagreed, and she had no third instrument to settle the discrepancy between them.
She had a new question.
Does Master still …
She did not finish it. It was not a question to ask him tonight. She laid her hand over his, palm down, the way one covers a cup to keep it warm.
"It remains a Bill, Master Philip."
Lydia had come round the table and begun gathering the print into its three portions, squaring each one against her palm.
"Nobody has been designated," Lydia went on. "Nobody has been appointed. Nobody has been given a warrant, an office or a staff. The House sits at two tomorrow, and the division is not until the day after." She tied the red tape in a single neat bow. "You will think more usefully about the General after eight hours' sleep than by fretting over her now."
"I'm not sure I am going to get any sleep."
"This is one time when Miss Natalia's assistance might come in handy." Lydia's eyes moved, without any change of expression, to Natalia.
Natalia sat a little straighter.
"Yes, Miss Lydia."
"I am sure you would not disappoint me." Lydia set the print at the end of the table.
Philip laughed. It came out crooked and too short, but it came, and Natalia's fingers tightened on his once.
That night, Natalia noted, it took forty-one minutes for her Master's heart to forget the name.
Part 2
Lilianna had read the clause with a pencil.
She had done it at two in the morning, in her dressing gown, at the small table in her bedroom, because she had said she would. By three, the print was a battlefield. Both reasonables in subsection (4) were circled. Beside subsection (8) she had written prescribed—by whom? and then, after twenty minutes with the interpretation clause, the answer: the Minister. Designated. Not yet named.
Below that, smaller, in a hand that had begun to slope with tiredness, she had written the question she could not answer.
If the one who prescribes the notice is also the one who wants the door open—who speaks for the Familiar behind the door?
She had underlined who speaks for. Then she had gone to bed.
That afternoon, the print lay on her knee in the place appointed for a duchess, sleet ticked at the high windows, and at two o'clock the House of Lords came back to work as though it had merely stepped out for the night.
The Marquess of Callenden rose at four minutes past and set out the remaining business in the voice of a man reading a railway timetable. The government's amendment to the commencement clause. The new clause, adjourned last night with the Question still before the House. The division on the Bill, as amended, at six o'clock tomorrow, the sixteenth.
"Their Lordships have had a night to read," he said, "and I am told several of them did."
A dry murmur went along the benches. Lilianna felt her ears go warm and kept her face still.
The commencement amendment was taken first, and it was the first thing in the whole Bill she understood on hearing it.
Three dates instead of one. On Royal Assent the amnesty would take effect, a Minister could be designated, and the Inspectorate could be formed and its officers appointed. Licensing, registration and inspection would wait until the Minister's regulations had been made and published. Penalties for non-compliance would wait longer still, until a compliance deadline had been published.
A frame with three hinges, she thought, remembering Aunt Clara folding a glove in the lamplight.
And the picture painted last.
She had braced herself for an afternoon of peers explaining subsection (8) to one another, each more slowly than the last. It did not come. The House had gone home, read the clause, looked at the map of Marabendia that had sat on every front page since the weekend, and come back with a decision.
The Marquess of Durnevell put it most plainly.
She knew him by sight, and by Aunt Clara's filing system, in which he was listed under the Prince's men and marked reliable. He was a long, narrow man in his sixties, with white hair cropped like a guardsman's and a voice that sounded as if it had been kept in a cold room. He sat two places along from Lord Ashbourne. By the newspapers' count he had opposed most of what the First Minister had ever brought to this House.
"I do not like this Bill," Durnevell said. "I shall say so tomorrow in the lobby. But if the House is determined to have it, I would rather it had teeth than manners."
He did not touch his notes.
"Marabendia was conquered in seventy-eight hours by one installation which, I am told, sat nine hundred miles behind the fighting. If the thing behind an Anchorage door can be turned in an afternoon, an inspector who must send a month's notice will arrive in good time to inspect the afternoon after."
A pause.
"I do not ask for the power to walk in whenever an officer is bored. I ask that the exact notice period be defined and set in the Bill under the House's supervision, rather than left to the sole discretion of whichever Minister is designated."
Hear, hear, from the benches around him. Then, more surprisingly, from some of the benches opposite.
Lilianna looked at the circles around reasonable, and then at the question at the foot of the page.
Durnevell wanted a stronger lock and a defined key. He had not given a thought to the being behind the seal. Nor had anyone else in the room.
Lilianna did not rise. She was twenty-one, new to the House, and she did not know how to ask a question the House had not already decided to hear.
A little way along, in the third row of the government benches, Uncle Gerald sat with his stick across his knees and said nothing, exactly as he had said nothing the day before.
The cameras kept finding her. She had stopped counting them.
At five past three the Clerk asked that the schedule to the commencement amendment be displayed, and the great display mirror installed above the Table for the debate, dark until now, filled with three neat columns: On Royal Assent. On a day appointed by regulations. Not before the published compliance date. At the foot of the mirror sat the small grey hallmark of the parliamentary relay, like a printer's imprint at the bottom of a page.
Lilianna leaned forward to read the third column.
Part 3
Meanwhile, at Long Stones the same three columns covered the cinema's far wall.
Philip had slept badly and woken with Beatrice's name already in his mouth, and he had spent the morning not saying it. Natalia had been especially gentle with him at breakfast, which was how he knew she had noticed.
She sat beside him now on the deep leather couch, in a dress he had admired at lunch without finding the right words for it: grey silk, high at the throat, close at the wrist, without a single ornament. It was plain in the way only very expensive things manage to be plain. It had come from Margaret's dressmaker before Christmas. Her hand lay in his.
Lydia sat at the rear sideboard with tea and her notebook. The double doors at the cinema's only entrance were closed. Overhead, the ringed planet had climbed a third of the way across the dome.
Three dates for one law.
The System had settled on the arm of the far couch, dressed in a lace jabot and a tailcoat, a black rod in her hand. The tailcoat, however, stopped at her waist and below it there was only a great deal of black silk stocking.
Amnesty today, rules tomorrow, penalties the day after. She tapped the rod against her palm. In your old trade, Host, they call that a teaser rate. The first year is always lovely.
Please don't.
I'm only saying. Read the third column twice.
She tipped the rod to him like a salute and was gone.
Philip had just found the third column again when it disappeared.
The chart did not fade. The whole mirror went black at once. Then, in the lower right corner of the black, small enough to be a signature, a woman appeared.
She was an avatar rather than a real person. A neat caricature in a green hood, a bright outlaw's silhouette with a quill drawn back on a bowstring as though it were an arrow. It was the sort of emblem a child could copy onto a school satchel. The rest of the great mirror stayed dark.
"Good afternoon, my Lords," said a woman's voice. It was composed, warm and unhurried, the voice of someone used to rooms that listened. "You may call me Robinhoodie."
Philip heard it clearly on the broadcast: one startled bark of laughter, then two or three more, the sound of grown men deciding whether they were watching a prank.
"I borrow facts from those who think they own them," the voice said. "This afternoon I am returning some."
The black filled with an image, and the laughter stopped.
It was a recorder capture: a strip of night road, a cone of lamplight, and in the middle of it a figure moving so fast that the crystal had caught her only as a smear. Tall. Female. A white veil over her face, and blonde hair streaming behind her like a banner. A timestamp sat in the upper corner: 21:47. Beneath it, in the hooded woman's clean lettering: Exit by the same road, 22:30.
Philip's stomach dropped somewhere far below the cinema.
He knew that veil. He had watched her put it on in the hall a dozen times.
"This recorder stands nine miles south of Glorium," said Robinhoodie. "On the night the Marquess of Heartlion died, it saw this woman arrive, and forty-three minutes later it saw her leave. The Imperial Bobbies have held this image for a month. You have not seen it. You may wish to ask why."
Beside him, Natalia had gone still.
Philip had felt that stillness before, and never so completely as in the east study before Christmas, in the second before she said I was at Glorium. It lasted long enough now for him to feel it through her hand: no breath, no flicker, nothing at all.
The capture slid aside. A sheet replaced it: a technical profile with a reference photograph in its corner.
Female. Height and build as shown. Velocity beyond standard recorder capture. Close-quarters capability: high. Deployed: Avalondian theatre.
There was no name. There did not need to be. The face in the photograph was the face beside him on the couch.
"A profile from the files of the Continental Republic's intelligence service," said Robinhoodie.
Another sheet. A letterhead bearing a name Philip had hoped never to see printed in the same sentence as Natalia's.
THE TOOSEXY FOUNDATION.
This time nobody in the chamber laughed.
"You know the name," the hooded woman said. "It is a front for the Republic's intelligence service, and this is its sponsorship roll." The page scrolled to a single entry, ringed in green. Recipient: Natalia. St. Meredith's Home for Foundlings, Commonwealth of East Zeeland. Full combat scholarship: Thornfield Academy, Iron Crane School, Volkov Institute.
At the sideboard, very softly, a cup met its saucer.
Philip did not turn round.
Lines drew themselves across the screen. They ran from the blur behind the veil to the face in the Republican profile, jaw to jaw and brow to brow, and from that face to a photograph the whole Empire knew: a half-dressed young woman standing her ground on a Yorgorian lawn in the middle of a riot, under the headline that had once asked Who Is This Siren of Yortinto? And from there, last of all, to the bicentennial: the quad at the University of Wetdin, filth and stretchers, and a fair-haired woman with her face buried in the neck of a man being hosed down by the Albecaster Fire Service.
His own face was in that one.
Through Thick and Thin, the caption had said. Now it was an exhibit.
"The woman on the southern road," said Robinhoodie, "is the Republic's asset embedded in the House of Redwood."
The faces went away. Three lines of plain type appeared one after another, like names read at a graveside.
GRYFIELD, Dr S.—motor accident, night of 15–16 December.
HEIL, Dr F.—accidental overdose, prescribed medication.
ALDERTON, Prof. J.—self-inflicted.
"Three of the Marquess's researchers," the voice said, more quietly. "All dead within hours of him. Three constabularies. Three files. Not one file mentions the other two. The reason I leave to your own judgement."
Philip had not known. He looked at the three lines and understood, with a slow, sick lurch, what Foxworth had meant by the man and the work in the same grave. Arthur had known, and the Bobbies had known, and until this minute they had kept it from the public.
The screen changed again. A column of log entries in narrow technical script, most of them blacked out. One line had been left clear and boxed.
22:09—DIRECTIVE REVISED. Sabotage parameters withdrawn. Termination parameters entered.
"An extract from the asset's own instruction log," said Robinhoodie. "At nine minutes past ten, the thing the Republic sent into Avalondia had its directive revised. From that minute it stopped doing what it had been sent to do. It killed. Nobody in the Republic has admitted this. And our government has chosen to keep what it knew from you, because the truth would implicate those too powerful to be held accountable: the Republic, the Redwoods, and the interests eager to profit from the summoning boom that will follow legalization."
Then her tone changed. It did not rise. It widened.
"You are about to permit the creation of millions of Familiars. They will become ubiquitous. In your homes. In your factories. In your regiments. You have been told they are safe because they are controlled. Here is one controlled by the most capable intelligence service in the world. It was turned nonetheless."
The bicentennial embrace returned to the screen and stayed.
"Two months ago, minutes before this photograph was taken, a being of incomparable power came within moments of losing control and unmaking a city."
A long pause, beautifully judged.
"If even the greatest governments in this world cannot control their summoned entities, how confident can you be that ordinary citizens will control theirs?"
Another pause.
"Restraint, my Lords. Wait, if necessary, until you truly understand the risks. It is not inefficiency. On the contrary, it is responsibility. There was a reason the ban was in place to begin with."
Natalia was no longer looking at the hood.
She had looked at the southern capture for one point four seconds when it first appeared, and in the lower left corner, almost lost in the grain, she had seen a small grey box with a line of characters inside it. A recorder exported a station number and a clock. This box carried neither. It carried letters, a sequence number and a date: a job reference, the mark a processing house leaves on its own work.
Somebody had rendered this image before anybody stole it.
The lines the hood had drawn from that smear, jaw to jaw and brow to brow, measured nothing at all. A veil has no jaw.
As for the face in the Republican profile, it was hers in every measurement she could take from a screen. She had never stood for that photograph. And every sheet the hood had shown carried, at its foot, the same small grey hallmark of the parliamentary relay that had sat beneath the commencement schedule minutes earlier.
She filed each fact. She did not yet know what any of them was worth.
The rest of her attention was on Philip, whose hand had gone cold.
On the broadcast, somebody in the control room had at last remembered there was a chamber, and the cameras swung across it like men looking for a door. They caught a startled tide of whispering along the back benches. They caught an elderly earl closing his dispatch box with great care, as though that might make what was on the mirror less public. They caught heads turning, one after another, towards the third row of the government benches, where the Duke of Redwood sat with his stick across his knees and his face entirely unchanged.
And the cameras found, because they had been finding her for two days, the Duchess of Wetdin. Her pencil had stopped above the margin of her print, and did not move again.
Part 4
In the drawing room of the Redwood townhouse in Albecaster, Margaret had watched the whole of it on her display mirror.
She did not sit still.
Her mirror phone was in her hand before the hood had finished speaking. Long Stones first. Lydia answered on the first chime and said "Your Grace," and nothing more, which told Margaret that the cinema had seen everything. "I shall ring again," Margaret said, and did not waste either of their time with anything else. Then Gerald's secretary, because Gerald himself was sitting in that chamber under the eyes of four hundred peers and could not be telephoned like a tradesman. Then the First Minister's private office. Within minutes, a preliminary contingency plan was in place.
On the screen, a clean picture came up from the chamber cameras: the House of Lords, for a moment in absolute silence, looking at a blank mirror above the Table.
Her mirror phone chimed again in her hand. It was not a call. It was the Collective Space, which already had the story everywhere.
Margaret set the phone face down on the arm of her chair. Her hand was shaking, for the first time in decades.
Then she called Lydia again.
Part 5
In the cinema, the clean relay showed the Lord Chancellor on his feet calling for order, and no order coming.
Then a long, narrow man rose two places along from Lord Ashbourne, and the noise died around him as if somebody had opened a door onto cold air.
"My Lords." Durnevell did not raise his voice. "An hour ago I asked this House for teeth. I have not changed my mind. But before I am told by a hood what I am to vote for, I should like to know whether we have just been shown a verified record, or a biased interpretation of tampered ones. They are not the same thing. I have sat in this House for thirty years and have seen more than my fair share of both."
A murmur, uncertain which way to go.
"We have been shown a woman's face and a great many conclusions. If the young woman exists as described, it may be that His Grace the Duke's household is the shortest road to her." He did not look at Gerald.
"For the purposes of inquiry. I say inquiry, my Lords. I do not say guilt. I do not say complicity. And I will not be told to change my views on matters of national consequence merely because a vigilante has shown us some pictures."
He sat down.
The shortest road to her.
Philip heard the words, and his body moved before he had decided anything.
He was on his feet. He did not remember standing. "Is it—" he said, and stopped, because the question had too many ends.
Was it true? Not as the hood told it. The woman on the road had been Natalia, and Natalia had told him so, and the woman in the profile was someone else, and the Toosexy roll—
"How did they get the Bobbies' file? How did they get into the—Lydia, is the House—"
He had his mirror phone out. He was about to call the Duke. But then he remembered that his grandfather was sitting in that chamber in front of every camera in the Empire, and he put the phone away.
"I have to get to Albecaster. I have to get to Grandfather—no. The Bobbies. If Foxworth—Lydia, the Agency men are below stairs. There are six of them—"
He could not decide which danger came first. Each one arrived and stood in front of the others: the House, the Republic, the Bobbies, the papers, the six polite young men below stairs with sabres at their hips and crystal on their chests. Each was the most urgent until the next one came.
Lydia had already stood up. She had just finished a call with the Duchess.
She did not hurry. That was what Philip would remember afterwards. She put away her mirror phone, crossed to the panel beside the sideboard that he had taken for an ornament, opened it, and spoke into the household mirror behind it in a voice he had heard her use only once before, on the morning of the confession.
"Long Stones. Closed house."
It meant something. He could tell from the way she said it that it meant several things at once, to several people.
"No calls in or out of the family wing except on this line. Nothing leaves the east study—not the print, not the drawings, not Master Philip's notebook. The lodge is to close the gate to the press and to everyone else until Her Grace says otherwise. Have the car ready, but do not bring it round." She listened. "Yes. When Her Grace rings again, put her through to me here."
She closed the panel and turned. She had not consulted a list.
Talent, Philip thought from a great distance: the kind his old firm would have loved.
It did not help. Nothing Lydia or Margaret did could reach into the heads of four hundred frightened peers and an angry public. They could close a house. They could not sway public opinion fast enough.
"Master Philip," Lydia said. "Sit down. Breathe. Her Grace will—"
Philip turned to Natalia.
Her shock had gone.
It had lasted through the hood's last minute; he had felt it in her hand, that terrible absence of motion.
Now her face had settled into something calm and level and composed: the face she had worn at Herongate, and with General Dugu three feet away, and in every room where she had decided what the room ought to see. Her colour had come back. Her breathing was even. She looked at him with complete attention.
Relief went through him so hard that his knees nearly gave.
She's all right. Whatever just happened, she is taking it well. We can get through this together.
Beneath the façade of calm, Natalia's mind was processing at full speed.
Durnevell had said the shortest road to her was through the Redwoods.
By tonight the phrase would be in every paper. By tomorrow some minister would be asked in the House what steps had been taken to secure the woman in the Redwood house.
For every hour she remained under this roof, her Master's refusal to turn her over would become more damaging for the Redwoods.
She was the risk. Not the House, and not the Bill. Her.
And she was the only part of the risk that could walk out of a door.
And a woman with her face was killing under her name.
Money: none on her person.
Papers: none that were true.
Miss Lydia's treatment kit: upstairs, in Miss Lydia's keeping.
She accepted all three deficits in the time it took Philip to draw one breath.
Find her. Bring her back. Lay her at his feet.
The plan had been lying in the east study since New Year's Day, in her own hand, because he had asked her to write it down after she had asked for a discussion. It was to be carried out after the vote. The vote was tomorrow.
Then she remembered the other thing that had been asked of her in that room.
I am not asking you to be slow. I am asking you to be slower by exactly one conversation. Her Grace's voice. You will tell Lydia, or you will tell me. At any hour.
Miss Lydia was four steps away, and Her Grace a single call beyond her.
A conversation would take ninety seconds. Natalia ran the ninety seconds. In every version, Miss Lydia said wait. Her Grace said wait. And her Master said stay—and if her Master asked her to stay, aloud, with that face, she would stay. She knew herself well enough to know it.
She decided there was no time.
She knew, as she decided it, that this was not the same as there being no time.
"Master," Natalia said.
She had risen too. She stood close to him in the grey silk, under the slow false sky, and took his face in both hands.
"I must take an absence, Master. It will minimise the risk to you."
He did not understand the sentence. He heard every word of it and could not make the words into a meaning.
Then she kissed him.
It was not gentle, and it was not a performance. She kissed him the way she had kissed him in the snow above the cliffs, with her whole attention, as if there were nothing in the world but this and she meant to learn it perfectly. His hands came up of their own accord and found her waist, the silk, the warmth of her through it.
She drew back an inch. Her eyes were very bright.
"Forgive me," she said.
He opened his mouth.
"Wait—"
The word never reached the air. Her hands left his face. There was a sound like a sheet of paper torn very fast; the double doors slammed back against the walls hard enough to shake the dome; a draught of cold sea air came along the passage from the Atrium; and the leather of the couch was still warm where she had been.
That was all. He had not seen her move.
At the end of the passage, the Atrium's lower door banged once. Then nothing.
Lydia was already in the doorway, one hand on the swinging leaf. She looked down the passage for a long moment.
Philip stood beneath the turning planets with his hands still raised, holding the shape of someone who was no longer there.
In the emptied room, two words went on echoing.
Forgive me.