IV

That pale October light again. It was the same light, but here, in the Headmaster’s Office, it had a new, menacing quality. The Office had a high ceiling, and the windows were set high up in the back wall. When one sat facing the Headmaster’s desk, one saw first the Headmaster himself, and then the tall bookshelf directly behind him, both in partial shadow; and then, further up, the bookshelf’s upper reaches cleaved the bank of windows into two glowing rectangles, the brightest things one could see by far, even on a glum afternoon like this one. This arrangement always lent a hallowed quality to the room, almost cathedral-like—but the hospitality and good humor of the Ells added to this an ironic garnish, or transmuted it into a mere tranquility without teeth. No such twist was in effect now, as Cordelia sat, trembling hands folded in lap. The windows were the blank white-grey of the overcast sky, and they were so, so bright.

Cordelia’s relationship with light had soured, suddenly. She did not like this development one bit.

Lucifer Vance, though, was disarmingly himself. As Lilith had stormed in with Cordelia in tow, Lucifer had looked up from a mess of papers, apparently surprised to have company. The usual gentle smile had manifested under the usual short spiky hair, and though grace notes of concern were added as Lilith explained the cause of their visit, the smile remained dominant. Headmaster Lucifer Vance was somewhere in his forties, and though he and Lilith had no children, he was distinctively paternal—a consummate dad, even—in physiognomy and mien. And it was with undiminished dadliness that he sat back in his chair, after Lilith’s tirade, and sighed (without malice, if perhaps with disappointment), and said to Cordelia:

“All right. Let’s talk through this.”

Cordelia said nothing, not knowing what was expected of her. She had talked to the Ells many times, but she had not, to her knowledge, ever talked through anything with them.

“So let me see if I understand,” Lucifer said, after a pause. “What you’re saying”—he turned to Lilith—“is that we still have that old comm link down in the Catacombs.”

“Apparently we do,” Lilith said. “Or did, until Cordelia here took it out and brought it onto campus. And linked.”

“Right, I understand,” said Lucifer. “Where is the comm link now?”

Cordelia, who was usually sure that whatever she was she was not dumb, had been feeling much less sure of this in the past fifteen minutes. So when she went ahead and assumed that “the comm link” was the same thing as the box she’d found, she did second-guess herself for a moment: yes, it seemed obvious, but what if it was the sort of thing that only seemed obvious if you were dumb? But taking her guesses as provisional fact had always been a good bet in the past, and so she promptly produced the box and set it on Lucifer’s desk.

Lucifer’s eyebrows shot up, but in an a-ha way, not in fear or shock. He nodded a few times, almost enthusiastically.

“That’s the one. I thought Hector had gotten rid of it! Well, anyway, it’s here now, and it’s good we know where it is.”

He intertwined his fingers, at the end of this statement, and rested his hands on the table. His face was calmly expectant, as if he wanted Lilith and Cordelia to leave so he could get back to the thrills of paperwork. This engendered another pause, longer and awkwarder.

“Lulu,” Lilith said at last, “I’m worried about Cordelia. We’ve allowed her to romp about as she pleases because we knew exactly how much trouble she could, and could not, get into. Free rein in safe places breeds rashness. And when we judged the Catacombs a safe place, we were wrong. We cannot afford this kind of risk.”

Lucifer adopted a certain mildly pained expression—an expression you could find in any dad’s emotional arsenal, conveying an acknowledgment of tension without betraying any particular attitude toward that tension. “I agree,” he said, “but I don’t think it’s fair to blame that risk on Cordelia.” He nodded to Cordelia and she could see he was smiling; he didn’t wink at her, but if he had, it would not have seemed out of place.

“Even if she hadn’t found the link,” he went on, “it would still have been true that we didn’t know where it was. That risk was there no matter what. In fact, one could make the very same case against us that you just made against Cordelia: if she wrongly assumed safety, then so did we, by allowing her into the Catacombs without being aware of all they contained. See what I mean?”

Cordelia recognized the smile, the hand gestures: this was what Lucifer looked like when he got interested in a discussion. When he gave in to his enthusiasm for the twists and turns of a concept, and let it overcome his usual state of pleasant, polite inertia—let himself change from a serene ceremonious statue into a whizzing gyroscope. Before this had always delighted Cordelia, but now it worried her a little, because this time he wasn’t just explaining a funny old book she’d found in the library, or bantering on about some perennial staple of Academy banter, like the nature of color-space or what distinguishes a true mantis from a mere mancer. This time there was a tension in the room, and the argument he played with had real emotional charge.

And yet, as though this time were the same as any other, Lilith was playing her part in the pattern. Cordelia watched her as she watched Lucifer, and saw that there was no ice or agitation in her expression anymore, just warmth, the warmth that was so often on Lilith Vance’s face when she was deep in conversation with Lucifer. Of course! thought Cordelia. Lilith loved to talk to Lucifer, loved Lucifer by talking to him, and likewise he with her; this was why it was such a special thing, not just an honor but an intimate gesture, that they so often made her a part of their conversations. The magic of a Vance conversation was powerful, and of course a little turbulence could not threaten it.

The Ells! Always lights in the darkness, always clear and strong and bright in defiance of the dimness and discordance around them.

And yet—

Cordelia thought suddenly of the box, of being a shrivel. She had seen light in that place, real light, and in that place she had been part of the dimness and discordance. How would the Ells stack up against that great light? She imagined them feeling as she had felt: the idea seemed impossible, or impermissible, or somewhere between the two. The Ells were not shrivels, she thought. But just as she was trying to make her mental voice strong and sure, it began to waver, took on a desperate quality. Before opening the box she had possessed a sense of the ordering of things, larger above smaller, better above worse, stacked into neat hierarchies with ends in clear sight. When she had opened the box, the sense had capsized, and she could no longer tell up from down from sideways in the great order.

“ . . . the same in either case,” Lilith Vance was saying as Cordelia snapped out of her reverie. “We need to rethink what we’re doing here. Of course we both know the whole conundrum with safety measures, no incidents in the last eight years because we stopped them versus no incidents because there wouldn’t have been any incidents anyway versus no incidents because we stopped them but it wasn’t our safety measures that did it, and so on, so might as well not think about it and keep everything the same—”

“—right—”

“—but by that very same token” (the Ells loved making one argument bear multiple fruit) “when something out of the ordinary does happen, we should pay attention! We can’t learn from absences, so we should squeeze every bit of learning we can out of every presence that graces us with its, well, presence.”

“Agree!” (The Ell patois stripped the final d from agreed and disagreed.) “So let’s begin. So Hector just left a comm link sitting around for anyone to find. Can’t have been negligence, can it?”

“Oh yes definitely not negligence.” Lilith was pacing now, hands interlaced behind her, head inclined slightly downward. “Not our Hector. So either he put it there meaning to remove it, and didn’t get the chance—or someone else put it there, and he didn’t notice in time—”

“—but he did survey the whole Academy grounds before his ascension, including the Catacombs, we were there with him—”

“—should we be talking about this . . . you know, in front of her?”

Cordelia blushed.

“That’s just the issue, isn’t it?” said Lucifer. “For the sake of safety, we have not been open with her, just as we are not open with any student. But if things like this are going to start happening, then perhaps openness is safer than the alternative.”

“Gods,” said Lilith, and clutched her brow. “They’re going to send procedural shades to investigate, as a start. And then who knows where it’ll end. And how is she going to know, when they come, I mean . . .”

Lilith was fiddling with her hair nervously, and her hands—her big, firm hands—were shaking, slightly but noticeably. Cordelia had never seen Lilith’s hands shake.

But it was only a moment before she regained her composure, and said:

“Yes. We don’t have a choice. We need her ready when the shades come.”

Lucifer shifted in his chair. He was sitting perfectly straight now, so that he seemed a part of the room itself, still and firm like the bookcase behind him and the two to his left and right. The afternoon was now shading into evening; the windows above still caught the eye with their stark glow, but parts of the room now harbored deep pools of shadow.

“Cordelia, how much do you know about Hector Stein?”

Cordelia thought of the desolate wind sweeping dead leaves across the floor of the belfry, and of whispered dorm-room tales about the Bad Old Days, and of the familiar rhyme:

Blood wine and turpentine

That Hector Stein’s no friend of mine

“I know,” she said, “that he founded the Academy eleven years ago, and that he tried to fight the Shroud, and failed. And I know that he designated you guys as his successors, and so, now, um, here we are?”

Lucifer nodded. “I am going to tell you some things about Hector Stein, right now, that you are not to tell to any student or teacher. When I have told you, you will understand why. I am serious, Cordelia.”

“The Shroud,” Lilith said again, “is not a joke.”

“You said that Hector fought the Shroud, Cordelia. How do you imagine he did that?”

This seemed like a trick question, because everyone knew the story. They performed it every year, and it was the biggest event of the school calendar, with a cast roster that served as a trusty barometer for schoolwide popularity. “He trained everyone really hard, so hard that everyone hated him, but they were all really good mancers, and then when a shade came to tell him they were getting too powerful and had to shut down the school, he held up a mirror and made it look at its own reflection. And that made the Shroud really angry, and Hector cast a defensive enchantment on the belltower and the whole school took shelter there and fought a huge battle with the Shroud’s shades. And, uh, they lost.”

“That is what we tell you, yes.” Lucifer sighed. “It is a lie, and to anyone who understands the Shroud, it sounds like a joke. We cannot harm it by mantic force any more than an author can be hurt by the fists of their own characters.”

“But I’ve talked to people who remember it! Chester, my dorm manager, he used to be a student back then—”

“Chester has a role to play, and when he tells you things like that, he is playing his role.”

Cordelia had nothing to say to this. She put her face in her hands and sat very still. The ordering of things was smashed to bits now, the once orderly rungs of every hierarchy now just broken clutter on the floor of her mind. The Ells had lied, Chester had lied, everyone had lied and would, presumably, continue to lie. Everyone was lying and everything was suspect, the godsblessed Ells were suspect, everyone, everything. (Except, said a quiet voice in the back of her mind, for the box. Except for the box.)

“We’re sorry, Cordelia,” Lilith said. “And I know that it isn’t enough to say that. I know that it wouldn’t be enough to say anything. But look. You’re in danger, right now, and whether or not you believe me, I care about you.”

And Cordelia found that she did believe her—in no small part because of that “whether or not you believe me” clause. That frankness, that hard piercing quality, together with that warmth, together in a way that made them somehow the same thing: if she must cling to someone, let it be the Ells.

“So,” she said. “How did Hector fight the Shroud?”

“Hector Stein was a great man,” Lucifer said, as if this were an answer. “He was a great man, and a complicated man, and a . . .”

“. . . a horrible man,” said Lilith.

“Thank you, Lil. Yes. I didn’t want to say it, but I have to, I have to say the whole sick godsforsaken thing. Yes. He was a horrible man.” Lucifer leaned forward, brushing some papers out of his way, and there was a bit of the gyroscope in him again, now. His face was closer to her now, and no longer shadowed by the bookshelf, so that she could see the very pale blue of his eyes and the lines of tension across his brow.

“Hector Stein was a man who saw the Shroud, the force that sustained his life and all our lives in their delicate balance, and said no. Said, I reject you. Do you know why mancy is possible, Cordelia? Because this world of ours is not firm and stable. It is changeable and it wishes to change. It is only by a miracle, by endless miracles, moment after moment, that the mantic chaos carves out a place where we can walk, and eat, and shit, and make noises with our mouths. We demand to do these things, unthinkingly, complacently, hour by hour, day by day. And the price we pay for this exorbitant demand is the Shroud.

“It is a good story that Hector Stein was a great mantis, and that when we train here, at the Academy, we follow in his footsteps. It is a story that gives us purpose, and sometimes I think it is the right story, even if it is not the true one. But the Hector Stein I knew hated being called a mantis. To him it was a grave insult. Because he wanted to kill the Shroud, remake the whole world, and that could not be done by force. Only by tricks, by clever, dirty, awful tricks. He thought he could fool the Shroud, and then stab it in the back. Just a man, just a little thing like us that eats and shits and makes noises with its mouth, and thought he could do that. Of course he failed. And we are all suffering for it.”

“Lulu,” said Lilith. Her arm was on Lucifer’s shoulder, her voice concerned. “Let’s just . . . tell her what she needs to know. And send her to bed.”

Lucifer nodded, and Cordelia could tell that there was a history behind that nod, a wealth of shared pain, a hundred conversations about Hector Stein on gloomy evenings just like this one, conversations that burned until the fuel ran out and led to nothing.

“The shades are the Shroud’s,” Lucifer said, rocklike and composed again. “All of them. Even the ones in your classes. They are the Shroud’s eyes and we welcome them here. We are never going to kill the Shroud, never going to fight it again. We live, and we practice mancy, and we have that delicious orange tea on Saturday mornings, and that is a good life. I realize that I am arguing with Hector Stein right now, and I am going to stop, because he is not here. Not dead, by the way, but not here, and none of us are ever going to see him again.

“The box you opened was a comm link, which is short for communication link. We used to use them to talk to the Shroud—well, I shouldn’t say that, not the Shroud, per se, but—oh, damn it all, okay, we used them to talk to the Shroud back when Hector was still around. And the Shroud doesn’t like to talk that way anymore, it just uses the shades now, because Hector did some very nasty things when he linked to the Shroud. An hour or two ago, you yourself used a comm link. To my knowledge no one’s done that in eight years. So you see the implications.

“Some shades will take you aside and talk to you, probably tomorrow, probably in the early morning. How much experience do you have talking with shades?”

Cordelia reflected. “I was partnered with one in geomancy class once, because, like, things got mixed up and they couldn’t get a shade partner.”

“Did you understand them?”

“It was like talking to a wall.”

“Right. These ones will be more talkative, but it’s going to be . . . hard. Shit.” Lucifer paused to think and burned off nervous energy by moving one hand in frantic circles. “Uh. Say as little as possible, but answer when they ask questions. Try to . . . move as little as possible, too. Lie down on something if you can, that’s the easiest way. You’re going to tell them that it was a mistake, of course, but it may take a very long time to get that across. Be patient. Make them aware that you know what Lil and I have told you just now. Deny that you are learning mancy in order to fight, because you aren’t. Tell them you want everything to stay the same. Yes, tell them that. They understand that, things staying the same.”

Lucifer sat back in his chair. He seemed weary, and Lilith seemed wary. “You go home now, all right?” she said. “And come back here the moment the shades are done with you. I’m sorry about all this.”

Cordelia got up, and was about to leave when something occurred to her. “You said I was going to be, uh, disciplined?”

That got a smile out of Lilith. “I think we’ve put you through enough tonight, Cordo.”

 

---

 

Sleep came late for Cordelia that night. When she finally slept, after many hours fitfully turning from side to side and configuring her covers every which way, her dreams were inchoate, full of wispy dark shapes that never hardened into anything recognizable. The one definite thing was a voice, a child’s voice, impish and insistent. “Lucifer dies,” it said. Again and again. Sometimes a boy, sometimes a girl, sometimes neither, but always sing-song, obnoxious, almost mocking. Lucifer dies. Lucifer dies. The voice of a child who has all the candy when you have none, and you can do nothing at all about it. Rubbing it in. Lucifer dies.

Upon waking, Cordelia was more perplexed than troubled. Just a nervous dream, after all, but why that one? She put it out of her mind, and did what she could to ready herself for the shades.