Tackson felt little when they heard the news that Her Majesty’s dogs were sniffing around the constitutional committee’s private finances. What they could get by right of law—on the shaky grounds that those now existed—they’d receive post-haste. They were the first institution outside the committee board to inquire about such information, yet still they had been slow in doing so.

  One step behind, and it was just about the only step they could take before they exhausted their reach as an institution. No matter the clandestine aspect of their work, they were still military, and the military was a tool that could not wield itself. To do so would be to degrade itself to the status of a militia: a traitor to the people. And a hand to wield them, they would not get.

  Busywork arrested Tackson once again, their portfolio expanding to other tasks in the days since the Queen’s passing. The director had all but severed communication with Special Operations, barring the barest of formalities. It was a quiet way of beating the war drums or drawing lines in the sand, and meant that Tackson’s time now fell to erasing anything that might put into question the legitimacy of Geverde’s transition as a nation.

  The personal portfolios of the constitutional committee members would prove little. Under the rumours of insider-trading were well-staggered purchases of stocks that coincided neatly with mergers between companies, loss of other foreign suppliers to turmoil or war, and the establishment of new harbours and shipping lanes. Vesmos’s invisible hand had moulded the events into fruition, yes, but the members of the committee were far from the only traders that benefitted from them.

  Numbers that pointed to vague conclusions were about as interesting a result as the GSO would find. All Tackson had to do beyond that was to follow the letter of the law to a T—their adversary was an intelligence division after all, spying on their countrymen to prove their narrative wasn’t far out of the question.

  Recognising Tackson’s eye for discerning the forest from the trees of paperwork that came with bureaucracy, the director had left them with that side of the operation, while he’d insisted on handling the groundwork himself.

  Once a beat officer in a past life, Tackson assumed the director preferred more…tangible work, or that they simply trusted few others with regicide. The latter was understandable; few had his skill set, but came with the same problem an army faced when its general headed the charge.

  It had been thirty-seven hours into what was meant to be a mission that lasted five, and torrential rain the city hadn’t seen in decades bombarded the windowpanes of his office. Thirty-seven hours later, and no armed escort, evidence, or director had exited the portal. Attempting to follow them once the timer struck the seventh hour, the backup team found the portal blocked in a way only possible had the exit on the other side been destroyed.

  Utmost secrecy was paramount, but the GFP’s search for the Queen’s corpse was occupying just about every portal in the city, official and unofficial, and straying further from the capital in search of a free one meant prolonging a journey where every minute was costly. Mounting a search and rescue then could take weeks, months even.

  But that wasn’t his job. Wherever the director failed in his duties, it was his task to quell whatever fallout came of that. That was his duty to the cause, and that duty kept him glued to his desk and oblivious to all else, even the faint shadow gliding into his office through the seams in the windowsill.

  “Tackson.” Their name appeared as a rough set of Aether pulses. On edge already, it wouldn’t have taken much to startle them, let alone a sudden call through Aether. “Don’t look up. Don’t talk.”

  Tackson obeyed the command as best they could, but their fingers were frozen in a mixture of relief and anxiety, the tip of their pen blotching ink into the paper at the end of a half-finished signature. The director was weak—injured or exhausted, Tackson couldn’t tell, but all he knew for certain was that his job was about to get that much harder.

  “The GSO has the evidence. The team we sent in is dead.”

  “How—”

  “Don’t speak,” the director reiterated in his calm, yet raspy voice. “The men don’t connect back to us, and the evidence only corroborates our story. If they’re the ones to find the perpetrators in the public eye, let them have it. Keep a close eye, but do not act.”

  The director fell silent, the last syllable whispering through the notes of Aether as Tackson felt the tension in the room subside, and the invading presence leave as quietly and unceremoniously as it had entered. No doubt, in a few hours, the director would come knocking at his door in an official capacity for that day’s briefing.

  But the message was simple: keep the momentum towards the new constitution going. Don’t get bogged down in the details.

  It was late evening, and the world beyond Provenance’s window was lit ablaze by a fading sun’s last words for the day, cutting through an atmosphere saturated with the remnants of thunder and rain. Streaks of light and shadow banded across the room, emanating from the window and carved into shapes by the pillars and furnishings.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Perhaps he felt a measure of fondness for the place now that he knew his days in it were numbered. That thought flickered through his head as he watched the scene unfolding through his windowsill—one that he’d seen a thousand times over, and yet it had been different every time.

  Another desperate attempt by some wronged Spirit, high on pride, revenge, or a nasty mixture of the two, that amounted to little more than a child beating their palms against a bank vault’s door. The dome above the city flickered with brilliant light, shrugging off each attack as it came.

  Silhouetted against the red of the sky, Provenance thought he might finally identify the Spirit. It wasn’t a beastly one, the quiet kind that felt no actual difference between ground-level and a thousand metres in the sky, with no face or teeth or anything that might suggest it was more than a statue. Its attacks came swiftly, sharp manipulations of Aether that came from gods knew what denomination of meaning. Spirits across the Karaxians probably evolved and died at a faster rate than ever imaginable in the middling nations. Whatever vendetta attracted it over the mountains and into the city’s poisonous grasp, Provenance barely had any time to contemplate.

  Crack. The sound split the air in two, even at his point of observation. Then another. Crack. Then another.

  Very few Spirits could survive such a barrage, and those Spirits were smart enough to weigh the costs and benefits of a hasty attack. Without that intelligence or animalistic instinct, Spirits of such a calibre only had their pride with them when they were blown to smithereens.

  One that he’d seen a thousand times over, and yet it had been a different Spirit every time. One after another fell as piles of decaying flesh against the shield dome, slowly sliding off its rounded surface and into the baskets of a cleaning crew already waiting for its descent. In the end, he had no idea what kind of Spirit it had been.

  ‘No’, he thought. Whatever measure of fondness he might’ve felt for this place, his prison itself, evaporated years ago.

  The remains of the Spirit were halfway down the dome’s side and gaining speed when his telephone rang; something that still gave him a modicum of excitement. Especially now, as the dominoes were falling quicker than ever.

  He stood, his own body casting a shadow across the room of its own, just about the only mark he existed in the space at all. Even that was temporary.

  “Are you well, Antea?” he asked after waiting through a few moments of silence. Only one caller greeted Provenance in such a manner.

  “No,” came Antea’s reply. Perhaps the only surprise that evening. He knew the director to be an honest man, unless it came to displays of weakness. A confession like that from the director meant something was wrong strategically, tactically, in a way with real consequences. “Special Operations beat me to the evidence.”

  “Beat you to it,” Provenance echoed, quelling his disbelief with rationalisation. “I suppose it isn’t out of the question. How do you suppose they did it?”

  “Created a search radius out from the portal at the convention. Cover ground.”

  “In such little time?”

  “These were Witches. Powerful ones. I doubt they were the only ones either.”

  Witches. That explained Antea’s confidence in pinning the blame. Perpetrators aside, that left the briefcase and the body in the hands of their enemy: not disastrous, but not far from it either.

  “The briefcase will destroy itself. They will eventually realise what they have, but it will give us time.”

  “And the body itself corroborates the story you’ve given them,” Provenance said. “That only leaves you and your search party. Did they see you?”

  A pause. A painful one, as though Provenance’s question had struck Antea centre-mass. “Yes,” the Beak said, almost croaking the answer. Even Provenance couldn’t entirely mask his disappointment.

  “That is unfortunate,” he began. “But their only eyewitnesses are people who officially had no reason to be there.”

  “Assuming they keep things above board—”

  “They won’t,” Provenance said, catching Antea’s hopes and crushing them. He took no pleasure in it, but being reasonable was of utmost importance. “They have rarely been above board with anything they’ve done. Just because they’ve lost their royal mandate doesn’t mean their habits will change overnight, too.”

  The woman who stood at the institution’s head was a ruthless one when push came to shove. When every bone in one’s body had sworn eternal service to Geverde, one could easily delude oneself into thinking their actions were the actions of Geverde itself.

  “I’ve given orders to ignore it,” Antea continued. “Any questions, any announcements, we play none-the-wiser.”

  “Good,” Provenance said. With the finish-line so close, sabotaging Special Operations further could mean tripping over their own laces. Right now, the ratifying of the constitution was the priority. Geverde’s council would be receptive to any form of stability during a time of crisis.

  “But that isn’t why I called you,” Antea said, voice box suddenly dropping several decibels in volume, in line with the crackle of the phone cable. “The Witches. I recognised one of them from the catacombs.”

  “The purple?”

  “Yes,” Antea muttered with growing uncertainty. “Not only gas. Liquid and solid matter, too. It seeped into the mouths and eyes and pores of my men and hardened them in an instant, and she commanded this…dragon—”

  “She?”

  “Yes. She had the voice of a young woman. She spoke only for a second before…before her dragon breathed this fire. Bright, and it made a sound like lightning and boiled the air around me.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She…she said she was Destruction.”

  Masquerading or not, bluffing or not, the words and how they seemed to shake Antea to the core were enough to make Provenance’s imagination run wild, for tears to well in his eyes and choke the air from his throat. Destruction…to call oneself that, to know to call oneself that added legitimacy to the claim.

  A dream come true in the purest sense, one that made the last spurts of sunlight shine furiously through brimming eyelids.

  “Was there anything else?” Provenance asked, the flutter in his gut seeping into his voice as he grasped desperately at every word Antea said and could say.

  “Y-yes,” Antea said, as though he was still trembling from the thought of the young Witch. “The woman who ran out after her…if rumour holds true she…she had the mark of the Wishbearer on her cheek.”