It was a good party. It would have been much better if Eliza was free to enjoy it.
She sipped at her wine, carefully rationing the glass. It was irritatingly excellent: delicate and crisp and clear and completely without colour, like so much in the Silver Port. But tonight, sadly, she had to keep a clear head.
She reminded herself that there were still a few bottles of the heady, pungent stuff from back home stashed away at the embassy, where she was fairly confident that soak of an ambassador wouldn't be able to find them. She'd open one if all went well tonight, she promised herself.
Not that it would be a tenth as good as what she was being plied with right now. Not wine bought on an aide's salary.
The hosts were passing around snuff. The rumours were that among the archmages of the Silver Port -- the ones who spoke to the Lady herself, the ones who spent so much time gazing into the world behind mirrors that they forgot which side was real and which was a brittle labyrinth of reflections -- the fashion was to mix fragments of powdered glass into the stuff.
Eliza would never understand wizards. But fortunately, that wasn't her job. Her job was to understand people.
On paper, her job at the embassy of the Thousand Years' Empire was to compile copious notes of official meetings, correct the spelling, and present the results to Ambassador Lanning once he'd sobered up. In reality, her job was to wear the face of a quiet, meek clerk; to present no visible outward thoughts other than a shallow interest in fashion and dashing men (the former, at least, required very little in the way of acting); and to make full use of the anonymity this granted her to observe everything that took place inside the embassy and without.
Tonight, she was observing a soiree held in honour of the eighteenth birthday of the Port's Princess Xinthia. Lanning had received an invite, of course. He had somehow wrangled some for Eliza, as well as a small school of aides like herself, to act as protective colouration.
Xinthia herself had spoken just a few short words to them, and had appeared for all the world like a porcelain doll dressed in a chandelier, skin so pale that it was almost transparent. And she had looked terrified.
But Xinthia wasn't who Eliza needed to be keeping her eyes on now. Samantha, who managed the typing golems and tended the stable of Minds, was on her fifth glass of the Port's excellent wine, helped along by one of the Port's many alabaster-skinned young nobles.
She'd seen him before; or at least, his type. They seemed to move in schools too: all swagger and braggadocio, elegant jackets and embroidered sashes and archaic duelling-sabres. And this one was getting Samantha drunk.
This was distressing, for one of two reasons. If he was planning on pressing Samantha for gossip, then the Port must have figured out that one of the ambassadorial aides was more than met the eye.
The other possibility was considerably worse.
Eliza circulated over to where a colleague was picking curiously at a platter of candied seafood. "Kate. Four o'clock," she muttered. "Young dickhead trying it on with Sam. Keep an eye on them?"
Kate sighed. "Always one, isn't there?" she said. "Leave it to me." She offered Eliza something small and translucent. "Crystallised jellyfish, I think. Try it. They're better than you'd imagine."
"Sorry to crash your night like this." Eliza took a bite, crunching through the sugar shell to a soft, gummy core. "Huh. You're right," she said, surprised. "See if you can get any back to the embassy with you."
"No problem," nodded Kate. "On both points. We're all Thousand Years here. We look after our own."
Eliza nodded, and resumed her scanning of the crowd. Nobles, in cream and silk and -- of course -- glass. Gemstones were never in fashion in the Port and never would be, when mirrors glittered so much more brightly. Lanning would be around somewhere too: oh, yes, there he was, speaking to Xinthia, rosy-cheeked and bushy-whiskered and hiding his razor-sharp intellect behind a mask of drunken buffoonery.
It was a mask that he wore well. Perhaps too well. It was becoming harder and harder to tell where the mask ended and where Lanning started.
And, that, with a moment of clarity, was when it struck Eliza. This was why she had been invited to this party far above her pay grade. She was being groomed for something bigger. It was no secret that Lanning was looking to retire, and Eliza's eye for people had made one thing clear to her. Many of Lanning's potential successors were competent men. A few were even good men. But none could possibly be half the man Lanning had ever been.
But, one day, perhaps she might.
Eliza's thoughts were interrupted by a tap at her elbow. It was Kate. "Ly," she said, "action."
Samantha was clinging onto the young fop's arm, giggling at her own abortive attempts to stand. He was helping her away from the party, all smiles and kindness.
But not towards the exit. The door they were heading for led deeper into the palace. Eliza was already sweeping across the dancefloor towards them, righteous wrath boiling within her. Some little shit thought he could get his fun with a drunken aide, just because of his money and his family?
Something caught on her dress. There was sudden movement, and Eliza was on the floor in a tangle of skirts. So was Princess Xinthia.
And Samantha, and the young noble, were nowhere to be seen.
It was some hours later. Eliza and Kate were sharing a furious cigarette in the embassy's carriage as they waited for the party to finish. The Port's famous thin, invasive rain was just starting to spot, the prelude to a vicious, bitter deluge.
"Fucker. They're all fuckers." spat Kate. "They get money and a name and they think it means consequences don't apply to them, that basic fucking decency doesn't apply to them."
Eliza took a drag. Kate's anger made her vicious. Hers own made her cold. "We'll file a report. The embassy has files on everybody rich. Some day he'll be in a position of power, and our side can use it against him."
"That's not consequences." said Kate. "That's a price. He probably has it factored in, budgeted away. So the embassy blackmails him, he does us a favour, nothing changes. So what. The world still carries on as if nothing happened." The thin drizzle tap-tap-tapped on the carriage's roof. "Some day we'll see a real change."
Quietly, and to her deep shame, Eliza mentally scribbled "Possible revolutionary sympathies?" on the bottom of a card with Kate's name on it. That was the thing about this job. You never could turn it off.
"Wait," hissed Kate. "Shit, is that him?"
It was him. The lizard in human form had stepped out of a side door, an elegant cigarette-holder in his hand, eyes darting this way and that. And Kate was now holding a thin, plain blade.
"I'll show him some fucking consequences," she snarled. Eliza's hand flew to her wrist. "No," she hissed. "Not yet. Just watch. Gather information. Don't throw this away."
He was talking to someone, gesturing them out. From the palace came two footmen. Between them...
... the sack they were carrying, six feet long, heavy, could only have contained a body.
Eliza's grip tensed.
They sat there, watching, as the footmen loaded it into a cart. The noble gave them a nod; they climbed on board, and it rattled away.
"Can you drive?" asked Eliza. Kate nodded. "I'll keep tabs on dickhead here. Give me the count of ten to get hidden, then you follow them. Shouldn't be hard, it's a fancy ride. See where they dump Sam. If they spot you, get the hell away as fast as you can."
Eliza slid out of the back as quietly as her gown would allow, slipped behind another carriage, and fervently hoped that she wasn't sending her friend to her death as the embassy's carriage rolled out of the palace grounds.
That got the noble's attention. Eliza breathed a sigh of relief -- that meant his eyes weren't on her. And his own transport had just left; he had no way of following Kate. A look of intense fury washed across his face.
Wait. No. It was more than that. Fractures were spreading across his face, like flaws in a pane of glass. Across his whole body. Then, with a crash, his skin, his clothes, even his hair, fell from him in fragments.
Beneath was a second face, a second set of clothes. Drab, plain, unremarkable. All this time, he'd been wearing the appearance of a noble like a mask. And this face, the face underneath, was one she recognised.
Smiling. Welcoming. All lines and wrinkles. The leathery skin of a sailor, perhaps. Pale, milky eyes. She'd seen him a hundred times. A thousand times. Sweeping the Thousand Years Empire's embassy. Mucking out the stables. Doing the thousand and one odd jobs that any busy building needed doing. She didn't even know his name.
But he was a sorceror. He was using the Silver Lady's magic. And he had just murdered Samantha.
* * *
"And that's everything you saw?" asked Lanning.
Eliza shifted in her seat. Her dressing-down from Lanning was not going the way the rosy-cheeked ambassador had intended. When she had mentioned the noble's abduction of Samantha, Lanning had leaned sluggishly forward in his seat and begun taking notes. When she reached the point where the sorceror removed his disguise, Lanning's feigned hangover had vanished. The ambassador had crossed his office, checked the passage outside, and locked the door.
"Everything," she said. Bar the bottles of Reaches Red, she thought to herself.
"You know what this means," said Lanning. "If we have one infiltrator, we may have more. Someone let that man in, skipped his background check. We need to know how deep this goes. We need to keep this quiet, while we make our move. You've told nobody else about this, I hope."
"Not even Kate," said Eliza.
"Good." Lanning nodded. Unseen arms gripped Eliza's wrists, dragging her upright. Before she could scream, Lanning had reached over, stuffed a rag into her mouth. "Don't struggle," he said. "It'll only hurt more."
To hell with that. Eliza twisted her head around, trying to wriggle free of her assailant.
But when she craned around, got a glimpse of who it was, the shock was enough to stop her dead.
It was Samantha.
"No." said Lanning. "Eyes this way, please." He grabbed her by the hair, forced her head forward. While she'd been struggling with Samantha, he had opened the full-length wardrobe at the back of his office. A wardrobe that Eliza had previously assumed only to contain mothballs, old dress uniforms, and perhaps a sizable stash of brandy.
It contained a full-length mirror, that even now Samantha was forcing her towards.
And the reflections were wrong. On the far side of the mirror, Lanning and Samantha lay dead, slumped untidily in a corner, bleeding from a thousand cuts and abrasions. The sorceror stood by them, gazing out thoughtfully with milky-blue eyes.
And Eliza's reflection was free, malice painted across its face, stepping purposefully towards her.
The surface of the mirror rippled. Eliza screamed.
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