She tilted her head.
"Yes. You can come with me."
Behind Const, Aim swallowed.
The woman in the white hair turned her back on them and began to walk toward the southern gate, unhurried, the way a person walks who knows that everyone they are taking with them will follow.
They followed.
---
"You can call me Vine."
That was all she gave them.
She walked at the front, the way a person walks who has already decided where everyone will sit at dinner. Const fell in behind her. Aim and Isolde tucked behind Const in the small unconscious formation of two people who had decided, without discussion, that they would prefer Const to be the first thing she dealt with.
Vine reached behind herself without looking, hooked one finger into a strand of Const's hair, and tugged it between two fingers.
"Hey—" Const said.
She held the strand up to the afternoon light without answering.
A glove on her right hand had a small enamel inset along the back of the index finger. It glowed once, faintly. Like a coal being breathed on.
Her expression went from polite to skeptical to something cold and surgical in the span of three seconds.
"Well, judging from your clothes," Aim offered, in the slightly too cheerful voice of a man trying to start small talk in a situation that was not small at all. "A jabot, a fitted blouse, that coat — you work in a court somewhere. Or the Palace. Yes?"
Vine ignored him completely.
She rolled the strand of hair between her fingers.
"You have a ripple," she said to Const, in a quieter tone, the kind of tone people use when they want to be heard by exactly one other person in a group. "I felt it the moment I walked up to you. I've been getting strange readings ever since."
Const made a small expression of mild confusion. "I don't understand, ma'am."
"Don't 'I don't understand' me."
"I genuinely don't—"
"You are deflecting."
"I'm a private person."
"Tsk." Her gloved hand tightened slightly around the hair.
Const still have his grin.
She held up the glove.
"You see this? This artifact is a copy of one of Agares's . The Eye Beyond Time, in the smallest possible form. Even though it can only read the age of any fragment held against it—it's enough in investigating you." She grab his neck tie, pull him closer.
"And you know what."
She paused.
"This hair," she said, "return no number at all." Her voice remain low and cold
"So stop playing dumb. And fullfill my curiosity please? Mister?"
Aim and Isolde, three paces behind, exchanged a single very specific look.
"That is fascinating, and your curiosity level indeed fascinating too." Const said pleasantly.
"You should have it serviced. The artifact, I mean. Sounds malfunctioning."
Vine's eyes narrowed.
"Mm. We were going to walk all the way to the gate at this pace?" Const continued, gesturing generously toward the avenue ahead. "I've never been to Sancturia. Are the libraries really as large as people say?"
She let go of tie.
She watched him walk.
"One day," she said, almost conversationally, "I will study you piece by piece."
"Looking forward to it," Const replied, without breaking stride.
She crossed her arms and followed.
---
The southern gate was closed.
It was not normally closed sure. The fact that it was closed today told everyone in the queued-up street that something had changed. A captain of the RMO stood on the inner side with three subordinates, their catalysts glowing at the cuffs. Two squads of Standing Army riflemen stood in a half-ring around them. The soldiers' faces had the closed-off neutrality of men who had been told to stop people leaving and had decided not to think about it any harder than that.
Vine walked toward the gate without slowing any bit.
The captain stepped forward, hand raised.
"By order of Her Majesty the Goddess, no person may—"
Vine raised her left hand, palm out.
There was a small object in it. The captain saw what it was. His hand came down. His shoulders came down. His knees came down.
The other RMO officers caught up half a beat later and dropped to a similar bow. The Standing Army soldiers, who could not see the object from their angle, saw the captain bowing and copied the bow with the speed of men who had been trained never to be the last person bowing in a room.
"You have heard of the Rosier seal it?" Aim murmured to Isolde, behind Const.
"Rosier? Her Majesty's last name? Where do you keep getting all this stuff," Isolde whispered.
"Senior cadets. Noble's child of course. They mention things. Anyone bearing the seal is treated as having the same authority as Her Majesty herself."
"Then this woman—"
"Is either Her Majesty's favorite or.. nevermind."
A officer in the bowing line — slightly braver, slightly less observant than the others, half-rose, looking past Vine at the people behind her.
"Wait — that one is Deputy Lethward's daughter, she's on the active wanted l—"
"Hush."
Vine did not turn her head.
Her index finger curled.
The young officer's body slammed face-first into the cobblestone with a sound like a sack of grain dropped from a roof. He did not get up. His mouth was pressed into the stone with enough weight that he could not open it; his cheeks were grinding into the dust under the pressure of something invisible. His hand came up, fingers clawing at the ground. Veins stood out along the back of his neck.
He did not die.
He was not allowed to.
The pressure stayed on him for exactly three seconds.
The captain did not move. The Standing Army did not move. The other RMO officers did not move.
A red coat had just been pinned to the ground by a single finger and a syllable.
A Redcoat, one of the Standing Army soldiers was thinking. He's a Redcoat. I am a Standing Army rifleman. I have a rifle. What is a rifle.
Vine released him.
"My apology.. have problem controlling the catalyst."
The young officer drew in a single rattling breath and lay where he was, panting against the stone.
Const was watching Vine with an expression that, on close inspection, looked very much like genuine pride.
Vine glanced sideways at him, caught the expression, and pretended she had not seen it.
"Are you two close, or something eh?" Aim murmured, trying to use humor to keep his hands from shaking.
No one did answer.
The captain who had clearly had a moment to consult his survival instincts — straightened with the practiced humility of a man who was very good at staying alive in rooms with people more powerful than him.
"Forgive the interruption, my lady," he said. "Where might the four of you be heading today?"
"North," Vine said. "We have business in Sancturia first."
Aim and Isolde stiffened in unison. Sancturia!? Const's mouth twitched into the smallest possible amused grin.
"But that wouldn't be conve—"
"Don't intervene," Vine said pleasantly, without looking at Aim.
"I — yes, of course, my lady. Then please travel safely."
The gate opened.
The four of them walked out.
---
Outside the wall, the grey dirt path ran along the curve of the outer wall. Vine walked at the front. Const walked a half-pace behind her. Aim and Isolde walked some distance behind them both, in the unconscious formation of background extras who had not yet been given lines.
"Did we forget someone, by the way?" Isolde said, in a low voice.
"That guy," Aim murmured. "I wasn't dragging him into this."
The conversation in front of them rolled on as if neither of them had spoken.
"So," Vine said. "What is your name."
"Const, ma'am."
"Const? Constant?" She laughed once. "What an arrogant name to choose. Don't you find that a little embarrassing?"
Const offered a thin dry laugh in return.
Behind them Aim cleared his throat. "Lady Vine — what is the actual reason for going to Sancturia? If we may ask."
Vine did not turn around. "You two struck me as the kind of investigator type who get themselves in trouble for asking too much," she said. "So you'll want to come, won't you. The library of the gods at Sancturia. The largest collection of pre-Omen divine writings still standing in the north."
"...Yes, my lady."
"Yes, Lady Vine."
"And one more thing." Vine's voice stayed level. "You — Aim, was it — you have one of the Turning Wheel pendants, don't you."
A brief silence.
"...Yes, my lady."
"Good."
---
Up at the front, walking pace by pace beside Vine, Const said quietly:
"Decieving is mean of you, ma'am."
Vine smiled without looking at him.
---
Then the ground exploded.
Vine's left hand rose almost lazily. "Hm."
The mass that had been in the air at them — large, fast, cresting over — was crushed flat against the stones in a single instant. The shock wave knocked Aim and Isolde backward off their feet. Dust and debris and a fine mist of blood mushroomed into the air.
For several seconds none of them could see.
Aim coughed, eyes streaming. Isolde rolled to her knees, hand on her rapier, vision fogged and useless. Through the dust, the only visible figure was Vine — standing exactly where she had been, gloves clean.
The dust thinned.
What lay on the ground in front of them was not a person.
It was a creature the size of a wagon. Plated, four-legged, with the heavy short-skulled shape of a rhinoceros — except its eye was wrong. Its eye was moving in places it should not have been moving. Its eyes were black. Not dark. Black, with no visible iris, no visible pupil, no living structure to read at all. Even crushed, even dead, the body twitched at irregular intervals, as though it could not finish dying.
The creature should not have existed. Aim could not name a class of beast that matched it. He had seen records of things from the dead lands but nothing like this — nothing this large, nothing this corrupted.
Vine stepped forward.
She crouched. With one gloved hand she pulled aside a section of the broken hide along the creature's flank.
A symbol had been branded into the skin underneath.
A hand. A chain across it. A faint glyph at its center.
Vine's expression did not change.
But her voice, when she spoke, came out at a temperature that Aim and Isolde felt in their chests before they understood the word.
"Mivelle."
Her tone laced with cold annoyanced.
She stood, dusted the glove against her thigh, and turned back to the road as though she had stepped over a puddle.
Behind her, the body was still twitching.