Thresholder

It took twelve hours before the word ‘symboulion’ started to lose all meaning. The thing that Perry couldn’t figure out was how they had ended up with such a long word, given that they were going to be using it so often. There was a certain insistence to it that hadn’t been there in Kerry Coast City, a way of saying the word that made Perry cringe a little bit. ‘Symboulion’ was a shibboleth, something that they seemed to say to assure each other that they were on the same side. It smacked of the careful policing of language that Perry was very familiar with from his time on Earth, which seemed to him to mostly give people on Twitter something to talk about rather than serve any useful function or have any positive impact on anything. In Kerry Coast City, they had done all the necessary corrections ages ago, then somehow not descended into a performative ballet of escalating linguistic modifications for ever-more obscure reasons. Here, there still seemed to be the threat of that escalation, and for Perry, who wasn’t steeped in either culture and had been through many worlds with varying social and linguistic mores, it was all the more difficult.

Thankfully, there wasn’t much cause for Perry to talk.

“You’ll stick with me,” Moss had said on the ship. “They won’t have seen many dwarves, nor elves, and there’s some risk to me and my wife. I’ll have another guard as backup, pulled from the local symboulion, but if you accept, if it aligns with your interests, you’re the first line of defense.”

“Alright,” said Perry. “I can handle that. This isn’t how they normally handle protection duty in the culture though, right?”

“It is,” said Moss. “Trusted volunteers, a sense of duty, forged friendships … the only unusual part is that we don’t know each other.”

“But you didn’t bring someone to fill that role,” said Perry. “In spite of how important you and your wife seem to be.”

“What’s considered important is not to bring too many people in,” said Moss. He gave a heavy sigh. “You’ll come to understand this as a matter of images. These people, who will only rarely have seen a dwarf, will already resent me to some degree. Some will have bought in completely, of course, people who have read the writings and internalized everything, but others will think that having a dwarf is a step too far. If I came with my own people, I’d be seen as even more of an outsider. We have a field of study here, something called ‘optics’, unrelated to the masks or lanterns, a school of philosophy related to the way that things seem to be.”

Perry gave him a smile. “Ah, clever.”

“Whoever you are, wherever you’re from, it’s better for me to be seen with someone who belongs here in a way that I don’t,” said Moss. “We can work with you on your backstory, if need be, but it’s mostly how it looks, rather than how it is. You’re a strong son of Berus who has seen how bad things had gotten, and whatever you want to say about what you were doing in Kerry, you’re back here to help out.”

“Not to play ah —” Perry almost used the phrase ‘devil’s advocate’, but his sense of translation steered him away like a conversational Spidey sense. “— to advocate against myself, but you’re placing a lot of trust in me.”

“You are clearly a man of extreme violence,” said Moss. “But it’s equally clear that I’m not the target of that violence. No, I think the biggest risk is that you’ll simply walk away from the responsibilities you’ve agreed to, leaving me in the lurch, but that’s the culture.”

“Leaving people in the lurch is the culture?” asked Perry.

“No,” said Moss with a sigh. “But we do believe that a person shouldn’t be shackled to simple agreements, and that complex agreements are often the tools of abusers. I explain this to you only because I’m skeptical of your understanding.”

“Fair,” shrugged Perry. “So it’s hard to trust that when someone says that they’ll do something, they’ll actually do it. Seems like a headache.”

“Abandoning your duties is not the culture,” said Moss. “But there are many things weighed against each other in the culture, and guarding someone is boring work.”

Perry had been a soldier, but he’d never been a guard. In fact, in Seraphinus, he’d been the most frontline of all frontline soldiers, running into battle and killing orcs by the dozen, leading charges, never put on guard duty, and usually back in the warmth of the castle by night thanks to how fast he could move.

Moss had not been lying about guarding people being incredibly boring. If Perry had felt like he could get away with wearing the armor, he would have just watched some television while standing around, but that didn’t seem to be much of an option, so he was reduced to listening to March’s audiobooks or actually paying attention to what was happening. Perry wasn’t all that worried about the actual guarding aspect, since there were plenty of guards all over the place, and he was faster and stronger than all of them. He was keeping his power level hidden as much as he could by bottling up the energy and not letting it flow freely from his skin, the inverse of the technique that allowed him to repair Marchand.

Perry watched the symboulions and listened. He did his best to show absolutely no reaction to anything, which was simple with the second sphere when he applied some effort to it. There were marks of effluence everywhere, and it was easy to see how people would become radicalized when the world around them was choking them out and killing them. Sometimes effluence killed people in simple ways, no worse than being suddenly struck with cancer, but other times the wild magic would cause a splash of feathers across someone’s face, or a withered arm, or an enlarged purple eye. The symboulions had more than their share of the afflicted, and they captured Perry’s attention. He stayed stone-faced while looking at a vocal man whose face was literally made of stone.

There were more men than women and more humans than any other species, and that couldn’t all be explained by simple demographics. It wasn’t the sort of start to a new nation that inspired a lot of confidence in their notions of equality. Perry’s mind went to the wealthy white landowners who had written lofty declarations of liberty in the Declaration of Independence, and he wondered whether they were as hard-nosed and serious as the men of the symboulions. They weren’t quite white though, with the dominant ethnicity of their island nation having an olive complexion that Perry had always associated with the south of France thanks to an ex-girlfriend who talked about her heritage a bit too much.

They were only scheduled to be in Calamus for two days before moving the airship into the countryside where the first of the golden domes would be built. There were complicated technical reasons for doing it there rather than in the city, but the biggest factor was that most of the industrial lanterns were out there because of the problem of effluence, and all the logistics were in place for the transportation of food. Food was going to be the biggest thing, at least in the short term.

Perry was most interested in their time outside, some of which was on walking tours for the foreigners. The city wasn’t under lockdown anymore, as it had been after the death of the king, but while the culturalists were attempting to get things back to some semblance of normal, the city clearly wasn’t ready. The streets were largely deserted, especially in the city center among all the large, imposing buildings that had once done most of the work of keeping the kingdom’s branches of governance running.

There were lots of empty plinths, and in many cases, rectangular depressions on stonework where plaques had been removed. There were flagpoles without flags and signs that had been defaced in acts of revolutionary zealotry, and the problem was, nothing had been created to replace them. It seemed like a city stripped of its art and history, at least in the places that Perry and Moss had gone. A church had its stained glass bashed out, and Perry could only imagine what it had once depicted that had earned it such vandalism.

They were staying in the city’s largest hotel, which was now running under a new system of voluntary labor and communal ownership. Moss and Velli had been given a penthouse suite as honored guests, and possibly as preferential treatment because they weren’t human, while Mette and Perry had been given more modest rooms in the floor below. Perry had been thankful to find that there was running water, then disappointed when it turned out that the water was only working intermittently due to some new scheme to limit how much effluence the lanterns were putting out. But in the hotel there were also places where paintings had obviously been removed, with nail holes in the wall and conspicuous blank spaces on many walls.

“Okay, but why?” asked Perry over dinner in the penthouse suite.

“Removing the artwork is necessary,” said Velli. “Maybe even vital. Kings and nobles like to put up statues of themselves, with bronze being the default mode for the last however long. They like to commemorate with plaques and create a sort of commons where people can view these often exquisite works, but naturally that’s to serve their own interests, those being either ego or a need to keep the commoners in line.”

“It’s part of how a culture is created,” said Moss. “The culture we’re supplanting. Statues are a form of veneration. Artwork always lauds something or someone, and some of what it lauds is incompatible with what we’re trying to accomplish. You’ll notice that paintings of landscapes remain.”

Perry always felt like he was giving away too much by asking those sorts of questions, but Moss never seemed to take those questions as a sign of anything, and never pressed Perry very much. Maybe he was thinking that Perry would volunteer information on his own terms, but there was another part to it. Perry had sat in enough of the symboulions now to have been told outright that this was one of the things that transition demanded: people would be ignorant, and would need to be repeatedly told things, which needed to be done with care and grace.

At night, Perry put on his armor and slipped out of the hotel, giving Mette a kiss before the helmet slipped on. It was going to be some time before Perry could entirely eliminate sleep, but he didn’t need the eight hours that everyone else did so long as he had energy flowing through his system. The clouds were dark at night, shimmering briefly for unknown reasons at times but otherwise blocking the moonlight and the stars. There were few lights on in the city, thanks to a policy of having effluence-reducing blackouts, which made it safe for Perry to move overhead, silently following the sword, which was wrapped in a blanket to contain its glow. He was going to have to find a new sheathe somewhere, or a better solution.

Perry had built up a stockpile of nanites during the two year lull on Esperide, but he was burning through the stockpile quickly due to needing so many listeners. There were no computer systems in this world, nothing that could carry a signal, which meant that the nanites themselves had to become repeaters, and that meant that if Perry wanted to have an ear to the ground, he was going to have to have cast them far and wide.

The city was too quiet for a place of this size, but the lack of light was definitely part of that, and the militants were another. There had been a few flare ups in the weeks since the symboulions had taken over and the people of the kingdom had started to make their transition to being a communal society of equals.

Perry made his way to the castle, which stood as an imposing presence in the city, up on a hill just as the one in Teaguewater had been, a natural defensive position close to the river, convergent architecture and decision-making in action. This castle was more vertical, with a number of high towers, built with what had to be a deliberate attempt at having the single greatest vantage point it possibly could. At the very top of the tallest tower, which transitioned from stonework to thick metal scaffolding, there was a lantern of enormous size with what looked like an elevator at the bottom. It had been designed to cast light out over the entire city, providing cooling in the summer and heat in the winter, a second sun of sorts, and had not yet been dismantled. It was inefficient to the extreme, a symbol of the monarchy and what it did for the people far more than a clever bit of infrastructure. It was also a threat, because a lantern’s effects could be varied with fuel and internal components, and something that could warm the city could also be used to flay the skin off anyone who stepped outside.

The castle was under the control of the symboulions now, but they had the same problem that the leaders of the Natrix had: it was terrible optics to depose someone who was stealing the labor of the masses and then sit in their lavish rooms with all their ornate artworks around you. The contrast had been less extreme on the Natrix than here, where the king’s room was itself another supposed symbol of the monarchy. Eventually, all of this stuff would be made a part of the commons, including the castle itself, but for the time being, most of it wasn’t in use.

The king had been abducted from his bedroom, and for that reason, it was one of the two places that Perry was looking at first. He climbed in through the window, whose latch was easily defeated. Thankfully, security on windows many stories up was usually pretty damned lax.

The room was as it had been the night the king had been abducted. Perry looked around with a frown beneath his helmet. Almost nothing was disturbed; even the bed hadn’t been made since that night. There were ashes in the fireplace and a tray beside the bed with a glass of water that had almost entirely evaporated, leaving residue. It was a place of absurd opulence, with every inch of it showing the work of tedious labor and rare materials. The carpets were woven scenes of rich red and deep blue, the tapestries hung on the walls must have taken hundreds of hours, the handles on the windows were gilded, the doorknobs cut crystal. It was gaudy and sickening, at least by Perry’s standards, a disgusting royal maximalism.

“March, run every analysis you can think of,” said Perry. “I’m looking for definite proof that the abduction was by someone from another world.”

“The scans are in progress, sir,” said Marchand. “I’ve taken the liberty of directing the nanites to spread out and use their own sensors, which might possibly give more information. Are we to assume that the crime scene is pristine?”

“Depends on what we find,” said Perry, still frowning.

“Then might I ask, sir, what proof there might be for someone being from another world?” asked Marchand in that dry tone that managed to be just on the right side of endearing.

“So, thinking it through,” said Perry. “Organisms that aren’t native to this world, DNA analysis of hairs or skin cells, —”

“I apologize, sir, but we in no way have the capacity to undertake that sort of analysis,” said Marchand.

“Chromosomal analysis then,” said Perry. “Check whether the shapes of the chromosomes match the shapes of the chromosomes of the species we’ve come across, that sort of thing.”

“Possible in theory, sir, with some finagaling of the nanites, though it’s not the sort of work they’re built for,” said Marchand.

“We could do that thing they do with nuclear weapons,” said Perry.

“Explode them?” asked Marchand.

“No,” said Perry. “No, I mean … nuclear weapons go off, and they contaminate the whole world, which means that you can tell a fake wine from a real wine by seeing whether it’s … minorly radioactive, or why they need to pull steel up from old wrecks that settled on the seabed before the nukes went off.” He was out of his depth on this one, and hoped that Marchand would fill in the blanks.

“I doubt our instruments are powerful enough for that,” said Marchand. “And sir, my scans are complete. I’ve identified a number of fingerprints, hairs for collection which I’ve highlighted on your HUD, but there appears to be nothing that I would consider to be evidence of any kind. With my capabilities, it’s impossible for me to say what precisely happened, but there are very few signs of a struggle. Given what we must suspect to be true about an enemy thresholder, that wouldn’t be terribly surprising, but there are mundane explanations.”

“If I were coming in here to abduct a king, I wouldn’t leave any evidence either,” said Perry. “Not hairs, not fingerprints.”

“This is true, sir,” said Marchand. “Though with the level of scientific understanding these people have shown, I doubt hair, fingerprints, or indeed, genetic material would allow them to catch a killer.”

“Alright then,” said Perry. “Time to try some magic.”

He opened up the shelf space with a casual wave of the hand, and Nima took a timid step out of it. She was in her full armor, which had been extended by the necklace. She moved freely, with her armor having none of the same bulk that Marchand provided, all the slender grace of an elf with all the hardness of a beetle. Perry was confident in his ability to take her if it came to that, but he hadn’t seen her fight yet, and there was a slim chance that her lone power gave her the ability to withstand everything he could throw at her.

“I don’t like it in there,” said Nima.

“I’m working on being able to just keep a pinhole open,” said Perry. “That would let us at least talk to each other. It’s difficult though, it keeps collapsing unless I focus on it.” He shrugged. He would get it in time, but as far as methods of transport went, it was better than flying coach, even if there was now a dank seawater smell that he hadn’t been able to scrub out.

“This is it?” asked Nima as she looked around the room. “The seat of power?”

“Sure is,” said Perry. “The king was taken from here, and we want to find out how and by whom.”

Nima’s armor retracted from her hands, the metal peeling back to show her thin and delicate fingers. She touched the fabric of the bed, then ran her hands along the bedpost, which was obviously the work of a master craftsman and altogether too much gold leaf.

“Not sure what you’re hoping to find doing that,” said Perry.

“I’ve never been where a king sleeps,” said Nima. “I’m just … experiencing it.”

They had kings in the world Nima was from, but those kings were ‘angels’ rather than human or elf. They hadn’t had a conversation about kings and their place in the world, but seeing her awe at the interior of the room, Perry thought maybe that was a conversation they needed to have. He would have thought that more important if they weren’t trying to track down a guy who was killing kings. At least it wasn’t going to be a point of conflict between the two of them.

“Masks?” asked Perry after giving her a moment.

Nima had them hanging by a hook on her side, a common way for someone to carry a bunch of masks around, though specialization was the name of the game with the masks, and those who had multiples usually used them only for their ability to perceive rather than their abilities in terms of utility or combat.

“I don’t know what you’re hoping I’ll find,” said Nima. “I can be your eyes, but I’m not going to find anything that they wouldn’t have already found.”

“I’m pretty sure that they didn’t look, if ‘they’ means the people who are in charge now,” said Perry. “The castle was taken over after a week had passed, and the people who are in charge now have much more pressing concerns than figuring out who did them a favor. It’s very possible that we’re the first people to look into this.”

While Nima was looking through the masks, Perry picked out a few hairs and got the cameras closer to the suspect fingerprints. There were a few different hairs, and Perry diligently collected them all. A few mostly likely belonged to the king, being curled and brown in keeping with the portraits of him or his ancestors that hung in the room, and there were others that Perry was pretty sure would be matched to a chambermaid, butler, or other staff. One of the hairs was anomalous though, with Marchand marking its tensile strength as being very high. It was silvery white and very long, and it went into a small compartment in the suit for further study.

“I don’t know what I’m looking for,” said Nima.

“Massive energy signatures,” said Perry. “Signs of an Implement, something like that.”

“There’s nothing,” she said with a sigh as she switched masks for the fourth time.

“It’s also possible that there’s nothing,” said Perry.

Nima’s eyes kept going to the bed. It was a huge bed, as Perry would have expected for a king, and it had that sort of overwrought richness that Perry associated with wealth, though here it was taken to an extreme. He wondered how many hours someone had spent slaving away at making this bed, and decided that it was probably a whole team of people taking at least a year to get all the carving and sanding and other stuff done.

“What will happen to all this?” asked Nima as her fingers passed over the edge of the embroidered silk sheets. “Is it destined for a museum?”

“Probably not, if I understand right,” said Perry. “My guess is that it’s going straight into the commons, to be a part of a library, free to be taken out by anyone.”

“Really?” asked Nima. “I wouldn’t have thought so. They wouldn’t know how to treat things like this right.”

“Maybe the librarians would tell them what to do,” said Perry. “Or, maybe more likely, the amount of resources that it takes to keep all this stuff intact and clean means that its ultimate fate is to be used for only long enough until it gets broken or worn down. Which is what they probably want, at least from an ideological standpoint. Putting this stuff in a museum would be a sort of veneration of kings, a testament to personal greed.”

Nima fell silent. Perry would have to ask Velli, who was a librarian of some significant power. Tearing this castle apart and making it and everything in it part of the commons was going to be a part of her role here. She had done it before, in other nations, and seemed to take some pleasure in it.

“Can I tell you something?” asked Nima.

“Sure, of course,” said Perry. “We can spend as long as we want here, there’s no one around, and we can just duck out the window really fast if we need to.”

“I meant more … something personal,” said Nima.

Perry shrugged. “If we’re hitting dead ends, we’re hitting dead ends.”

Nima frowned at him, her mouth drawn tight. She pointed at the bed. “The elves of this world, they’re considered … less than.”

“Not really,” said Perry. “I mean, historically, from the perspective of the other species, sure, but I sort of got the impression that they all looked down on each other to varying degrees, aside from the melekee.”

“Is that a joke about their stature?” asked Nima.

“No,” said Perry. “I mean, it works as a joke, but then I would have included dwarves. The melekee have a different relationship with the other species, they have this acknowledgement of their own inferiority, at least historically if not in the present. Probably comes from many generations of being told that they were less than. At least, that’s where I would assume an inferiority complex comes from.”

“I don’t think you have to feel inferior just because someone is objectively better than you are,” said Nima.

Perry blinked. She had come from a caste system in her homeworld, and he was pretty sure that was what was shining through. In his opinion, it must have been a lot easier to believe in a system like that if you were up near the top, and from what she had said, her elves were second only to angels.

“This isn’t what you wanted to talk about,” said Perry. “Sorry, go on.”

Nima was looking at the bed again. She slowly and deliberately changed masks, but if she saw anything unexpected, it didn’t show in her eyes. “The elves of this world are — or were — considered less than. No one made a big deal of it in Kerry Coast City, and I imagine that’s just not the culture, but I did have a number of men and a few women ask me whether I was interested in a … a dalliance.”

“There’s an assumption of promiscuity, when it comes to elves,” said Perry. “Sure.”

“You don’t understand it in your bones,” said Nima. She took the mask off and looked at him. “It’s intellectual to you.”

“Of course,” said Perry. He shrugged. “It can’t really be anything other than intellectual. I can try to have empathy for you, but it’s easier to have empathy when I have specifics, and it’s not about the specifics, it’s about the feel of the whole thing that’s built up over weeks or months. Am I getting close?”

“Closer,” said Nima. She took a breath. “You’re insightful sometimes, did you know that?”

“I come from a culture with a lot of this sort of thing,” said Perry.

“And what do you think that is?” asked Nima.

“Discontent with how other people see you,” said Perry. “Though … I’m not sure why you’re bringing it up now, so I might be way off base.”

“In my home, we had expectations,” said Nima. “Expectations of the same sort. But we weren’t considered less than, not by the humans, and certainly not by the angels. It was something we were celebrated for.”

Perry nodded along with that. He wasn’t sure where she was going with this, and he held back his initial glib response of ‘oh, so slutty elves are a multiversal constant’.

“There were rules about how the different levels of our society interacted with each other,” said Nima. She set her mask on the hook and picked up a new one, but didn’t put it on her face. Perry was pretty sure she wasn’t going to find anything with the masks, which was unfortunate, but if now was the time she was choosing to open up a little bit, he could roll with it. “Elves were the intellectual class, the artists, it was our role, one that we were good at. We weren’t warriors like the angels, not rulers, managers, nothing like that, and there were more of us than them. But it happened some time that there were bridges built between elf and angel, a selection process that was used sometimes, personal artistry, it was called, something that we were celebrated for.”

Perry looked at the bed, where her eyes had kept going. “The angels were leaders, rulers … kings?”

“Only one king,” said Nima. “And I was selected to be his.”

“You were going to be a queen?” asked Perry, momentarily nonplussed.

“No, no, nothing like that,” said Nima. “I would be one of dozens, a personal artist to the king from his stable that he kept, and of course once I was selected, nothing happened right away, I needed to be coached by other elves, made to look as pretty as I possibly could, to be toned and limber, all these things.”

“Ah,” said Perry. “I can see where being here might bring back some memories.”

“No,” said Nima. “I never made it that far. The thresholder arrived in my world when I was only seven months into the process of refinement.”

“You had complicated feelings about it?” asked Perry.

“I knew that I was blessed,” said Nima. “I was anxious to do well, and it was an imposition on my other work, because I still had to fulfill my other duties. I was committed to research during the day, and when I was done, I would go get plucked and pruned. But if you’re thinking that I didn’t want to be there, with the king, you’re wrong. I did. It was a great honor, and one that I was looking forward to, whatever my trepidation.” She looked around the room. “Of course this is nothing like what an angel would have.”

Perry watched her. She had a single mask left to use, and put it on while letting a breath out.

“You mourn your old life,” said Perry.

“I do,” she said as she scanned the room. “You don’t? Never did? Or is it just so far behind you that it doesn’t cause any ripples on the surface?”

“I didn’t have a lot going on,” said Perry. “I had friends, family … but the future wasn’t bright, and I wasn’t on top of the world.” Perry couldn’t imagine a career he could possibly have had that would have made him refuse the portal. He could maybe imagine getting married and having children, all that, but bringing children into a world that was getting worse seemed downright unethical to him. That wouldn’t have necessarily stopped him, but it did weigh on him.

“I wasn’t on top of the world,” said Nima. She took the mask off and frowned, then put it back on. “There’s a trace of something there.”

“You had a job you liked, an … opportunity that you were excited for, all was going well,” said Perry. “You weren’t in the highest caste, but you didn’t have an ambition to jump castes, and that makes sense because caste mobility isn’t really a thing. Not the top of the world, no, but close to it before the thresholders came in and started wrecking everything.”

“Not the thresholders,” said Nima, who was staring through her mask. “A thresholder. The one who unleashed the demons.” She frowned at Perry, visible only because the mask didn’t entirely cover the side of her face. “You don’t want to know what I see?”

“Go ahead,” said Perry.

“It’s traces of an Implement,” said Nima. “I think, anyway. They have their own leavings, an equivalent to effluent, tiny little motes that settle instead of hanging in the air. Except … this would be three Implements.”

“This king didn’t have any,” said Perry. “And no one has three Implements.”

“You have three,” said Nima.

“If we’re counting generously, then I have three sources of power,” said Perry. “But they wouldn’t show up like that. You’ve seen them, they’re all their own thing, not under some coherent umbrella like the deep magic of the Implements. And most of this stuff wouldn’t be all that rare on the worlds I got them from. How do you get three incredibly rare magic items in this world? They’re all in the commons, pretty much exclusively, which means either you have to convince a lot of people in a very public manner that it’s in their best interests to loan them out to a single individual, or you need to steal them and not have that be a big deal, or … I don’t know.”

“You don’t think the other thresholder stole them?” asked Nima.

“I don’t know,” said Perry. “I don’t know how it would be possible, not without it being a major news story. I guess we can ask around, dig deep, but … Marchand, anything you’ve read or heard?”

“No, sir,” said Marchand. “You expressed a great deal of interest in having an Implement of your own, so I’ve kept a keen ear out. If someone has stolen an Implement in the last few months, news of it never reached Kerry Coast City.”

“So, not impossible that the other thresholder came in, stole a bunch of things that somehow didn’t get reported, then went to kill a few kings,” said Perry. “But that’s much less likely than what I was thinking, which is that this was someone from another world coming in and doing this all with tools of their own, picked up after a career of a year or two thresholding.”

“The residue is only here,” said Nima. “Only over the bed, and a bit by the window. I think they came in the same way that we came in.”

“Seems likely,” said Perry. “Then they closed the door after themselves, and left us only some invisible dust, a few fingerprints, and some hairs.”

“What’s a fingerprint?” asked Nima.

“We can go over it later,” said Perry. “For now, this seems like a dead end, and the signs are pointing to this not being a thresholder at all.” He let out a little sigh. “It felt like there had to be a connection. The timeline felt right.”

Nima nodded. “Back into the shelf for me then,” she said.

“Elf in a shelf,” said Perry.

“What?” asked Nima.

“Nothing,” said Perry. He waved a hand and opened up the shelf space for her. He would have to analyze the hair and see what they could find, but this wasn’t what he wanted from the expedition. He wanted a lead on the other thresholder.

“I have a question,” said Nima as she stopped at the doorway. “If the person who killed the kings isn’t our thresholder, who is he?”

Perry nodded. “Yeah, that does seem like a very important question.”