The Emperor arrived in the garden at half past nine.
Levi saw him come through the east wing door and had approximately two seconds of warning before their eyes met — long enough to keep his face neutral and not long enough to think of anywhere else to be. He looked down at the leaves he was raking and told himself, with the particular calm of someone actively manufacturing it, that there was no reason for this to be a problem.
He was the royal gardener. He was supposed to be here. The Emperor was supposed to be here. This was fine.
The Emperor walked the garden path with the unhurried attention of someone for whom this was a genuine pleasure rather than a routine — pausing at the flower beds, looking at the hedge work, tilting his head at the animal topiaries in a way that suggested he was identifying each one. He was a man in his fifties, well-dressed without ceremony, with the particular quality of someone who had exercised power for so long that it had become invisible — not performed, just present.
He stopped next to Levi.
Levi felt the weight of the pause and made a decision. "Good morning, your highness. Steve Bell, your new gardener. A pleasure."
He kept his eyes respectfully down, which had the additional benefit of not making direct eye contact with the person he was planning to steal a hostage from tonight.
"So you're the new one," the Emperor said. There was a moment's silence that Levi couldn't read. "You're better than the previous one."
Levi exhaled very quietly. "Thank you, your highness. Though this is nothing compared to what I have planned for the rest of the garden."
The Emperor looked at the musical hedges, the animal topiaries, the overall composition of the space. "My wife finds them beautiful," he said. "That means more than my opinion, frankly." Something that was almost a smile. "I like that you're ambitious about it. I look forward to seeing what you do."
He extended his hand.
Levi took off his gardening glove and shook it.
Emperor Lyon — the man who had been holding an ambassador in a dungeon for three days, who had announced to his dinner guests that he intended to execute that person on live television tomorrow — shook Levi's hand with the easy warmth of someone who appreciated a good garden.
"Enjoy the rest of your morning, Steve," he said, and walked back toward the palace.
Levi watched him go.
He stood in the garden for a moment after the door closed, rake in hand, processing the specific cognitive dissonance of having just had a pleasant professional exchange with the target of a rescue mission.
Then he went back to raking.
The morning passed. Lunch was approaching. He had a window.
✦ ✦ ✦
The garden shed had the specific smell of a space that was used for practical purposes and not much else — soil, oil, the wood of old handles. Levi stepped inside, closed the door, and stood in the quiet for a moment.
He focused his energy at his hands and shaped it — not a spell, more like a sustained intent, the Flux condensing and taking form. An electron clone stepped out of the energy field: a version of him, in the gardening clothes, carrying the quality of his movement patterns and the shape of his posture. He watched it for a moment, checking — from a distance, at a glance, it would pass.
"Go," he told it. "Keep working."
The clone walked out. Levi watched through a gap in the shed wall as it picked up the rake and continued exactly where he'd left off, the movement patterns close enough to his own that it settled into the garden's rhythm without disruption.
He changed into the black clothes he'd packed for exactly this. Gloves, mask, nothing reflective. Then he reached for the Godspeed.
It was a spell he'd developed in the inner realm — Ivel's contribution, during one of the sessions where they'd been exploring what the ability could do if you stopped distributing the Flux and concentrated it entirely into a single function. Godspeed focused everything into speed, one hundred percent of his available magic energy channelled into movement. At 4th Gear, the world didn't slow down exactly — he moved fast enough that everything else appeared to. Eleven seconds at that level before the energy cost became unsustainable. Eleven seconds was enough.
He activated it.
The shed door, the garden, the path to the palace, the service entrance — all of it moved past him in the compressed time of something running much faster than its environment. He was inside the palace before the first second had elapsed.
The Emperor's bedroom: locked. He teleported through the keyhole — a technique that required the telestride to find a path rather than a destination, the kind of precision that had taken weeks of inner realm practice — and emerged into a large, well-appointed room that smelled of cedar and morning.
He worked through it in four seconds. Walls, floor, furniture, fixtures. Nothing. No hidden panel, no concealed door, no inconsistency in the architecture. He left the way he'd come.
The butler's room.
He found it on the ground floor near the service entrance — exactly where Priscilla had said it would be. The door was unlocked. He pushed it open and stopped.
Mr Zané was standing in front of a large mirror.
Not looking at himself — standing before it with the formal stillness of someone waiting, or guarding, or both. His back was to the door. In the centre of the mirror's surface, barely visible, a ripple moved outward from the glass in slow rings — the way a reflection behaves when the water behind it is disturbed.
Levi looked at the ripple. Then he reached out his hand and pressed it against the mirror's surface.
His hand went through.
He followed it.
✦ ✦ ✦
The dungeon on the other side of the mirror was larger than a dungeon had any right to be.
The mirror deposited him into a corridor of dressed stone that branched immediately in three directions, the branches branching further ahead, the whole thing extending into a dim distance that suggested considerable depth. Torches at intervals gave just enough light to see by and not enough to see far. The air was cold and smelled of old stone and something chemical that Levi didn't want to think about too carefully.
He was at full Godspeed but reduced to 2nd Gear — the labyrinth required navigation, not just speed, and charging through it blind would accomplish nothing. He moved quickly but carefully, checking branches, reading the construction.
Then he saw the Emperor.
Twenty metres ahead, walking at ordinary pace through the labyrinth corridor — which meant he'd entered from another access point, or the mirror had deposited them at different times. Either way, the Emperor was here and moving with the familiarity of someone who knew exactly where he was going.
Levi let the Godspeed settle back to normal speed. Suppressed his Flux signature. Followed.
The Emperor was whistling.
It was a quiet, almost absent tune — the kind of whistling that happens when someone is comfortable and thinking about something pleasant. He turned a corner and Levi hung back at the junction, waiting for the footsteps to reach their destination.
They stopped.
Levi moved to the corner and looked around it.
The ambassador was behind iron bars at the end of the corridor. He was conscious — eyes open, tracking the Emperor's approach — but barely. Chains at his wrists and ankles, his clothes unchanged from what he'd been wearing when he was taken, the particular stillness of someone who had been in one place for too long and had stopped expecting anything to change.
"Ambassador," the Emperor said, in the tone of someone visiting an interesting exhibit. "You're looking well. Relatively speaking."
The ambassador said nothing.
"The King of Olympia has been very quiet," the Emperor continued. "No payment. No counter-offer. No contact at all, in fact." He tilted his head slightly. "I've decided to interpret that as indifference. Which makes what happens tomorrow more of a statement than an execution, really. He's choosing not to act — I'm simply making the consequence visible."
He said it with the easy philosophical tone of someone who had thought about this and arrived at a conclusion that satisfied him.
Levi, behind the corner, felt his jaw tighten.
"Try to rest," the Emperor said. "Tomorrow will be busy."
He turned to leave.
A hand closed on Levi's shoulder from behind.
"Can I help you."
The butler's voice was very quiet and very specific — not a shout, not an alarm, just the calm statement of someone who had found what he was looking for and was not surprised.
Levi's body moved before his mind caught up. He grabbed the hand on his shoulder, twisted, shifted his weight — a judo throw, clean, the kind that should have put the butler on the floor.
The butler read it. He absorbed the rotation, used it, and his foot connected with Levi's jaw in the moment the throw failed.
The corridor went sideways. Levi caught himself on the wall, blinking, and had enough time to register that the butler was already back on his feet and moving before he telestrided.
He went to Priscilla's marker.
—
She was vacuuming a second-floor room when he appeared beside her.
The vacuum cleaner went one direction and Priscilla went another.
"I found the dungeon," he said, in the lowest possible voice. "Butler's room. Mirror portal. Labyrinth on the other side. Ambassador is alive." He was already moving toward the door. "Hotel. Tonight. Tell Sylvia."
He was gone before she'd fully processed the arrival.
She stood in the room for a moment, vacuum cleaner still running, heart rate adjusting.
"Right," she said quietly, to nobody. "Mirror portal."
She went back to vacuuming.
✦ ✦ ✦
The electron clone was still raking when Levi got back to the shed.
He changed quickly, dismissed the clone, and walked back out into the garden as if he'd been there all along. The morning was finishing — the light had shifted to the particular warmth of pre-noon, the palace kitchen emitting the preliminary aromas of lunch preparation.
Sylvia appeared at the garden gate with the expression of someone who had been sent to find him and also genuinely needed a break from the kitchen.
"Lunch," she said.
"Coming," said Levi.
He set down the rake and walked with her toward the servants' lounge, keeping his voice low. "I found it. Butler's room, mirror entrance, labyrinth behind it. He's alive. We go tonight."
Sylvia's expression didn't change. Her kitchen supervisor was visible through the window. "How complicated is the labyrinth?"
"I don't know yet. There's a problem."
"What problem?"
"The butler knows someone was in there. He'll be making it more complex before tonight." He looked straight ahead. "We need to move as soon as the palace goes quiet."
Sylvia was quiet for a moment. "How much time do we have?"
"The execution is tomorrow. The Emperor wants him alive until then." He held the door to the servants' lounge open. "So tonight."
—
In the dining room, Emperor Lyon set down his fork and looked at his butler.
"You're certain they teleported," he said.
"Certain," said Zané. "The ripple size in the mirror was inconsistent with a normal entry. Someone moved through it at a speed I couldn't track, which eliminated everyone currently employed in this palace." He paused. "They were also skilled enough to throw me. Almost."
"Almost," the Emperor repeated. Something in his expression was amused rather than alarmed. "Olympia's response, presumably. Faster than I expected."
"Should I interrogate the staff?"
"No. Whoever it is, they're already hiding among us or they've already left. Interrogating the staff will cause panic and waste time." He picked up his fork again. "Complicate the labyrinth. Change the access sequence on the mirror. Make it impossible to navigate quickly."
"If I may — if they know where the ambassador is, they'll come back tonight."
"Yes," the Emperor said simply.
"That doesn't concern you?"
The Emperor ate for a moment, looking out the dining room window at his garden — the musical hedges, the animal topiaries, the new royal gardener visible in the distance attending to something near the flower beds.
"What concerns me," he said, "is whether they can navigate the labyrinth after I've changed it. Which they can't." He lifted his glass. "The ambassador dies tomorrow regardless. If they fail tonight, I've made my point. If somehow they succeed — well, then I've underestimated something, and I'd rather know that now than later."
Zané was quiet.
"Complicate the labyrinth," the Emperor said again. "And increase the guard rotation after midnight." He looked at the garden. "Also — send something nice to the new gardener. He did excellent work on those hedges."
✦ ✦ ✦
Levi was back at the flower beds by the time the butler emerged from the palace with a tray — a covered plate of something from the lunch service, delivered to the garden with the courtesy of an employer who appreciated good work.
"From the Emperor," Zané said, setting it on the garden bench. "He was impressed."
"Thank the Emperor for me," said Levi.
The butler looked at him for a moment. Levi met the look with the comfortable directness of a royal gardener who had nothing to hide, and held it until Zané turned and went back inside.
Levi looked at the tray.
He thought about the labyrinth being changed. About the mirror's access sequence being altered. About the labyrinth that had already been complex enough to disorient him in eleven seconds now being more complex.
He thought about the ambassador in the chains.
He ate the lunch the Emperor had sent him, because he was going to need his energy tonight, and went back to tending the garden.