Thresholder

“Hey!” said Mette. “Where the fuck is my tooth?”

“What?” asked Perry. He had been at the desk in his bedroom, wearing the helmet but not the rest of the armor. It had been a day since he’d returned, and there was still no sign of Third Fervor. He’d removed the helmet when he heard her coming.

“You gave him a tooth,” said Mette, gesturing vaguely in the direction of Kes’ bedroom. “Where’s my tooth?”

“It’s not … I mean, why should you get one?” asked Perry.

“Because you gave him one,” said Mette. She folded her arms across her chest. “Is this because I had sex with him? Are you mad at me about that?”

“No,” said Perry. Outwardly, he was completely in control of his emotions, cool and calculated, but inwardly he was wondering what was going on. Mette usually wasn’t this animated.

“Look, I know you come from a culture with some weird ideas,” said Mette. “Marchand warned me about that. But —”

“Sorry, Marchand is giving you dating advice?” asked Perry.

“If I understand dating right, which I’m not sure I do,” said Mette. “But I mean … we’re not dating, are we?”

“Uh,” said Perry. “I was considering us more … friends with benefits.”

“The benefit … is sex?” asked Mette. She looked over at the helmet. “March, why didn’t you tell me about that?”

“My apologies, ma’am,” said Marchand. “Sexual and romantic relationships have undergone enormous changes since the point of divergence between our timelines, so it’s very likely that Master Holzman and I have different understandings of what’s within the bounds of acceptability.”

“Well then, I mean, okay,” said Mette, turning her gaze back to Perry. “You don’t have weird cultural hangups about me banging your clone?” She had learned the word ‘banging’ from him, and seemed to quite enjoy it.

“Uh,” said Perry. “My culture … doesn’t really consider clones to be … a thing.”

“You know what I mean,” said Mette. She placed her hands on her hips.

“I really don’t,” said Perry.

“Why does he get a tooth, and I get nothing?” asked Mette, getting back on some semblance of track. “He’s just a guy, you’ve said that and he’s said that, so you agree he’s not special. But he gets a tooth.”

Perry very nearly spun up a line of argument. He was pretty sure that he could out-argue Mette. The argument would have gone something like ‘well, he looks like me and has already been attacked once, so it’s for him to use in absolute emergencies, and we really don’t want proliferate lycanthropy in this new world without a firmly established tradition of getting werewolves under control without killing people, especially with their strong moon’.

Instead, Perry rose from his seat, went over to the armor, and pulled a tooth out from one of the pockets that was normally hidden by a panel. He placed this gently into Mette’s hand, then sat back down in front of his desk.

Mette stared down at the tooth in her hand. “What, just like that?”

“I mean, we can argue about it, if you want to,” said Perry. “That’s definitely an option.”

“No,” said Mette slowly. She turned the tooth over slowly in her fingers.

“But I have to warn you, once you eat that, it is a curse, and difficult to control, and will take you some time to master,” said Perry. “I’m fairly confident that I can stop either you or Kes while you’re a wolf, but it’s going to cause some damage to whatever is around us. And I don’t think I can handle you both at once, which is a problem. The most likely solution is that we just stick you in the shelfspace for the duration of the full moon.”

“I’m not a moron,” said Mette with a roll of her eyes. “I’m not going to eat it right now.”

“Only in an emergency, when you’re fine with killing everyone around you,” said Perry.

She nodded. “Thank you,” Mette said slowly.

“Sure,” nodded Perry, then, “You’re welcome.”

He had sort of thought that she would leave, but instead, she stayed and hovered near him.

“Sorry,” she said. “For coming in and being a bit, uh, aggressive about it.”

“No problem,” said Perry. “Don’t worry about it.”

She still didn’t leave though. She was holding the tooth in her hand, and swaying slightly like she was deciding on whether to stay or go.

“Do we need to talk about … the three of us?” asked Mette. “Because we kind of haven’t, and I know you have your weird hang ups, but if you wanted to be … what was it?”

“What was what?” asked Perry.

“I believe the mistress is referring to the expression ‘friends with benefits’, sir,” said Marchand’s helmet.

“Yeah,” said Mette. “That.”

“I really think I’m fine,” said Perry. “I’m second sphere, I can control the flow of energy, subsume the urges.”

“Ah,” said Mette. She hesitated. “But we are still friends, right?”

“Yes,” said Perry. “I don’t give teeth to people who aren’t friends.” He waited to see whether there was more, because it seemed like there was definitely more.

“Can you drop the second sphere stuff?” asked Mette. She leaned in slightly closer to peer at him. “It’s legitimately difficult to read your face. It’s like everything you say is just … I don’t know.”

“Mette, I’ve been like this the entire time you’ve known me,” said Perry. He watched her eyes as they scanned his face. “I haven’t changed.”

“Yeah, it’s been a problem for the entire time I’ve known you,” said Mette. “You’re too cool and collected. I don’t think it was until I met Kes that I realized what you’re actually like.”

“And what’s that?” asked Perry.

“Scared, affectionate, amused,” said Mette. “An actual emotional creature.”

“Sir,” said Marchand. “I did attempt to let her know that even under the best of conditions you have difficulty expressing yourself as an emotional being, likely as a result of the uncertainty and conflicts we’ve faced during our time together, coupled with the repressive culture you come from.”

“My … what?” asked Perry. He was making a conscious effort not to still his face, which felt weird and unfamiliar. He turned to the helmet. “I didn’t come from a repressive culture.”

“I apologize, sir, and don’t mean to make a habit of gainsaying you,” said Marchand. “However, I believe your exact words were that you had to watch what you said or ‘some bitch on Twitter’ would —”

“Alright, that’s not — that’s different,” said Perry. He frowned at the helmet. “When was that?”

“I believe I had inquired about what Twitter was while we were waiting to ambush an orcish contingent, sir,” said Marchand. “Your response was rather long.”

“That’s totally different from being a repressive culture,” said Perry. “I mean, I get where you’d make that connection though. I sometimes felt like I couldn’t say what I actually wanted to say, like I needed to watch my words and how I expressed myself. We were mired in this ongoing culture war, and I didn’t really have a side, or … I had a side but hated them, and a lot of it was idiotic.” He paused. “Did I really say ‘some bitch’? Not a good look.”

“You did in fact point that out at the time, sir,” said Marchand. “You said that ‘some bitch on Twitter would get angry with you for using gendered language’. You seemed to find it quite amusing.”

“I mean, it is funny,” said Perry. “Alright, new rule, Marchand, please don’t cite previous conversations to me unless they’re actually important. I don’t remember half of what I’ve said, and I disavow the other half.”

“Very well, sir,” said Marchand. “Do you consider glaring hypocrisy to be ‘actually important’?”

“I love him,” said Mette. When Perry turned back to her, she was smiling. “We should clone him.”

“We did clone him,” said Perry.

“Well, we should do it again,” said Mette. “And the one I made wasn’t nearly this good.” She turned from the helmet toward Perry. “Can I make a request, as your friend?”

“Sure Mette, go ahead,” said Perry.

“I want you to drop the second sphere thing when you’re just with us,” said Mette. “It makes it easier to relate to you if you’re being your natural self, not only smiling when you think to communicate a smile.” She reached forward and touched his face in a way that was rather more affectionate than Perry would have done with any of his friends, but she seemed to show no shame or embarrassment. “If I had known you were doing it, I would have asked you to stop ages ago.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Perry.

“Alright,” said Mette, straightening up and smiling at him. “Great talk! Thanks for the tooth!”

Perry watched her go, then returned to his work.

“She seemed in a good mood, sir,” said Marchand.

“Yeah,” said Perry. “I just hope she doesn’t forget that we’re at war and in a lot of danger. Continue with the analysis, please.”

~~~~

The immense datadump from the Farfinder would have been enough to endear the ship’s crew to Perry even if there wasn’t a promise of future collaboration and a sharing of power. They had been picking up data like packrats, and apparently had interoperability between their magic and computers, at least on this world. Every single system of the Farfinder was finally active after many years of having to work with whatever was on hand.

Fenilor wasn’t a mystery to them, but they had less on him than on the others. They thought that he was probably using some kind of cloaking device to keep them from being able to fully scry him, but they didn’t know what it was or how it was disabling three separate systems of magic. There was a note from Eggy that they would look into it, but there were lots of notes, some of them dating back a full decade and written by people who were now dead.

The only wrinkle they had uncovered about Nima was the nature of her armor. They considered it to be more powerful than her use of it would suggest, as it had a voice inside it and an intelligence that was revealed only in its private conversations with her, which weren’t so private to the ears of the Farfinder. It was smarter than Marchand, for a start, though Perry didn’t think that was saying much. It also had the capacity to cover more than just her body and take on the powers of whatever it was covering. The Farfinder crew thought that meant she could wear multiple masks, but they weren’t entirely sure, given that they didn’t have a handle on which thaumic class her armor fell under.

And that left Third Fervor, whose entire history on this world was laid bare. Their ability to see into the past was somewhat strained, since they were trying to view three months back, but their best guess was that she had come in around Miller’s Crag, a small city far to the north that wasn’t so much different from Kerry Coast, except that it had made the transition more recently. It was still feeling the echoing aftershocks of reform, and hadn’t yet settled down, but the library culture was firmly established and the line of kings was long ended. There it had happened by peaceful transition, and their king was now a storyteller living in a modest house with many neighbors.

The Farfinder’s magic was using guesswork, painting a picture of the past. If you asked it twice, it would paint different pictures, sometimes wildly different pictures. If there was something they thought was important to know, they would try many times and do their best to take the average, which would be at least close to the truth.

~~~~

Third Fervor had been wary when she arrived, in that thresholder way. She’d had her weapon drawn and waited in place, ready to strike, just in case someone had seen her coming. There was a method of signal-seeking, she knew, a way to know the location of a portal shortly before it opened, but after many long minutes, she decided that she wasn’t going to be ambushed. She kept the spear in her hand though, and didn’t take off her armor, as she tried to get her bearings.

She portaled up into the sky. The portals required her touch, and specifically the touch of her hand, but only to open the end near her, not the far end. Her range was thirty miles, an impressive distance, and in the brief moment she was airborne, she looked down on the world from above, scoping out the contours of the continent. The armor let her ignore the chill of the air and the lack of oxygen, and then she was dropping back down into another portal.

She stashed her armor, along with her spear, and portaled into a nearby city. The clothes she wore beneath the shapely armor were indecent, skin tight and incredibly revealing, so her first stop was a clothing store, which turned out to be a library instead.

“Do you need any help, ma’am?” asked the librarian behind the counter. “I mean … are you well?”

“I’m fine,” said Third Fervor. Her lips were tight. She didn’t like their selection of dresses, but she liked the eyes on her even less. She was going to find the king quickly this time, but she needed to be able to present herself. It would be better to do it in armor, but past experience had shown her that armor wasn’t always appreciated.

“If you’re feeling out of sorts, or if there’s trouble at home,” the librarian began.

“I’m fine,” said Third Fervor.

The librarian was tight-lipped after that, and only watched her move around the clothing library, picking out things to wear that wouldn’t draw attention to her, or that would draw less attention.

“I do need help fastening this,” she eventually said, once she had decided on a dress.

Properly dressed, she had taken a portal away from that city and to another one, a place where she wouldn’t be known and the prying eyes that had followed her through that first city wouldn’t find a way to undercut her work. She did pay diligent attention to the slips that the librarian had given her. She thought there was great value in following a king’s laws, as much as she might not understand them. If there was someone she was supposed to report to about having come from another world, she would.

She found another library, this one filled with books, and walked along the shelves, letting her fingers thump along every spine.

When she sat down to process it all, what she found horrified her. She sat in that library for hours, hands gripping the worn table, mind going backward and forward over what she had learned.

(The Farfinder wasn’t sure which city she’d gone to, only that she’d gone to a city somewhere in Miller’s Crag. Similarly, they couldn’t pinpoint the library she’d gone to, only that she’d gone to one of them and had some moment of contemplation and despair about the state of the world.)

She found a room in the city, then the next morning, had gone to find the Miller King.

It didn’t take her long. He went by Jorges Miller now, and he lived in a row house, in an older part of the city. It was modest red brickwork and a few thick wooden beams, and in midday it was in the shadow of the golden dome nearby. Bright flowers grew from boxes that hung from every window, and Third Fervor steeled herself as she walked up in a borrowed dress. She knocked sharply on the door, expecting a butler, but getting the king himself.

He was a weathered man with a lined face and salt-and-pepper hair. He dressed simply, in a button-down shirt the color of cream and slacks that were a darker brown. He was handsome, but only in the way of a painter, not that of a monarch. His nose was a bit bulbous and his eyebrows thick and expressive. It was a face that had been on money, twenty years ago.

“Yes, can I help you?” asked the former king Jorges Miller.

Third Fervor went down to one knee and bowed her head. “I have been sent here to help you retake the throne, your grace.”

(Perry had never actually seen Third Fervor before, only the armor that covered her every time they met. She was beautiful, at least in the pictures that had been part of the data dump. The humans of her worlds had melanin hypervariance, and would change their skin color in response to the sun far faster than a normal human, with much greater range of skin color. She had come from a world with almost nothing in the way of light, so was pale as could be, with bleach-blonde hair, but a single day in this new world was already changing her. That the hair changed with the skin was interesting to the Farfinder, but probably not relevant.

Third Fervor had a cuteness to her, buccal fat making her look like a cherub, eyes a little too big for her face, like a puppy. Her lips were plump, with a deep groove in the upper lip that drew the eye. Perry thought she looked striking and odd, in a way that he was sure would keep his eyes drawn to her.)

“Come in, please,” said Jorges.

The house was just as modest on the inside as it had been on the outside. The walls were brick, but the floors were polished wood, and a simple dining room had a table with four chairs surrounding it next to a glass-fronted cabinet that held simple white ceramic dishes and a few cups. There was no sign that this place belonged to a king, not even a portrait on the wall.

“Tell me, where do you come from?” asked Jorges.

“I come from beyond this world,” said Third Fervor. “I’ve been sent to you, to be your knight. I have powers, incredible powers, ones beyond the understanding of your people. I can travel through this world with ease, step into locked rooms, fight like a demon, and deliver knowledge that can revolutionize your industry.”

Jorge nodded, looking her over. “Would you like some water?”

“No, your grace,” said Third Fervor. “You don’t believe me?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Jorges. He had a kindly way about him. “Do you know what happened to me? Why I’m no longer king?”

“Yes, your grace,” said Third Fervor.

Jorges frowned and waved his hand. “The honorifics make me uncomfortable. It’s been so long since I’ve heard them.” He sighed. “When my father passed and I became king, I knew that the era of kings was ending. I had a choice, in those years, whether I wanted to push for my place or whether I wanted to give the people what they wanted. There is value in tradition. I tried, for three years, to blend the old with the new.”

“We can return to that tradition,” said Third Fervor, leaning closer.

“I am no longer king,” said Jorges. “I gave up the throne, the crown, and everything else. It was a peaceful transition. That is my legacy, and one I’m proud of.”

“But you have nothing,” said Third Fervor. “A house you don’t even own, no guards to keep you safe, no advisors, no crown, no —”

“I have what every citizen has,” said Jorges. “To give up power is a difficult, delicate, noble thing.”

“They have no one to guide them,” said Third Fervor. “They have no direction. How can it be noble to refuse nobility?”

“You claim to have come from another world,” said Jorges. “Have you not seen the cities? The countryside? The libraries? It works. The new way isn’t even the new way anymore, it’s been ages.” He leaned back. “The time of kings has come and gone.”

“There’s no reason a king can’t have libraries,” said Third Fervor. She was stubborn and intense. Her demeanor didn’t fit her clothes, which were flouncy and floral.

“To have a king would be to say that there’s a man above all other men,” said Jorges. “Not only is it not the culture, it is anathema to the culture. The culture is founded on community, togetherness, democracy, and the needs of the many. Even if I were a king who gave up all of the trappings of monarchy, if I had this simple house instead of a castle, if I had these plain clothes instead of a crown and robes, the mere idea that I am am specially positioned to dictate the course of this country’s future would be like a thorn in the side of the culture.”

“Then it is a thorn worth having,” said Third Fervor. “These people will run their country into the ground without your wisdom.”

“My wisdom was that it was time for my rule to end,” said Jorges. “Please. Let my duty end with me. My son is a carpenter, my daughter an educator. There is no hope of bringing the monarchy back. There never was.”

Maybe the conversation didn’t go quite like that, but it was probably close. The king was kind and compassionate though, and didn’t believe Third Fervor in the slightest. She had shown him no power, nothing he’d be obligated to report to any symboulion or Command Authority. It wasn’t the first time he’d dealt with people pleading for him to become monarch again, as though that were possible without a groundswell of support that simply wasn’t there. Jorges Miller was the last king that Miller’s Crag would ever have, and he had calluses on his fingers now.

Third Fervor had left. At first, she’d had thoughts of restoring the monarchy on her own, but it was a task of such enormity that she quickly switched tracks. There were only two kingdoms left in the world, one of them Berus, the other Thirlwell, twin islands in the middle of a wide ocean, former colonial empires.

Perhaps she’d been wrong about what she was meant to do. She had come into the world a great deal away from Berus and Thirlwell, but she had mobility, and with the portals, could make her way across the ocean by rapidly chaining them.

Once she’d arrived on the islands, she had looked carefully at them. She had a choice to make when deciding which one to support. Third Fervor had never been very good at choices. She did best when she was under a firm hand, when she had formally pledged herself. This time, she had portaled her way through the castles and homes, a flagrant violation of personal space and far worse than simply stealing from the libraries. She was only after the books, trying to get a lay of the land, trying to understand them.

The very institution of monarchy hung in the balance, and if she had been brought here for a reason, this was a test, one to decide on which monarch was capable of pushing back the tide.

In the end, she’d settled on Thirlwell, of course. Berus was a monarchy in the classical mold, of the sort that the anti-monarchist had plenty of experience with dismantling. Thirlwell was something new and different, a kingdom that was striving against the darkness. It had hardly been a choice at all.

~~~~

“They’re reading a lot into her,” said Perry. “Do they have cause to do that?”

“Cause, sir?” asked Marchand.

“Like, some kind of magic that lets them know what she’s thinking,” said Perry. “They’ve hardly been on this world for two days. The report is making lots of suppositions, and I endorse them, but … do they have mind reading?”

“No, sir,” said Marchand. “They appear to have a system of abstract personality analysis picked up along the course of their travels.” He changed the view on the HUD, which showed a number of files with red strings pointing between them, his way of making sense of the mess of data they’d shown him. “It doesn’t appear to have a good track record, but has interoperability with their ability to view the probable past.”

“Have they used it on me?” asked Perry.

“Yes, sir,” replied Marchand.

“And?” asked Perry.

“They’ve been aware of you since the Great Arc,” said Marchand. “They appear to hold a high opinion of you, relative to the other thresholders they have on record, a number which is quite high if we count second and thirdhand information.”

“I mean, that’s good,” said Perry. “But they did this sentiment analysis thing on me and think they know me because of it?”

“Their approach is varied, sir,” said Marchand. “You would have to speak with them to know more.”

Perry frowned. When he’d been on the Great Arc, he hadn’t been thinking about the kind of impression he would make. Aligning himself with Worm Gate had been a low point. Actually, transforming into a wolf and being forced to kill people by having his bloodlust turned against him was a low point. Or maybe it was when Xiyan almost murdered him because he’d thought she was going to give him a blowjob. There were a lot of low points in the Great Arc, when he really thought about it, and if they had taken records of it all, he didn’t know how they could possibly come to the conclusion that he was worth anything.

He was going to speak with them more, that was for certain.

They had Third Fervor pinned down hard. They knew the bounds of all her powers. Her portal power was stopped by doors and windows, but so long as a location was in her thirty mile range and within the same volume she was, she could make a portal there, and she had some internal sense of what was where. That must have been how she had found his shelfspace so quickly. She could chain portals and approximate flight that way, but she would accumulate downward velocity from gravity that would need to be counteracted by another portal that flung her up to counteract it. Her staff was pegged to a single location, which had been deep underwater in the middle of nowhere, and it could bring her right back to where she’d been, which is exactly what she’d done after their fight. She could scream loud enough to incapacitate and then kill, but hadn’t used that power much, and the Farfinder assumed that the reason she’d stopped using it against him was that she thought he was immune.

But the last bit of information was the one that Perry was most grateful for — Third Fervor had a power she hadn’t used yet, the God Form. It let her grow to enormous height and dramatically increased her power, but at the cost of sending her into a rage. He was a little surprised that she hadn’t used it during her fight, and he was glad that he knew it was coming, but he had no earthly idea how he was going to fight against it.

Perry was interrupted in reading through the data by a knock on the door. When he turned, he saw Dirk standing there.

“You offered to help,” said Dirk, voice tight. “Does that still stand?”

“Assuming you don’t think I’ll fuck it up,” said Perry.

“I think there’s a good chance,” said Dirk. “But Thirlwell probably knows all about you, given how much you talked to the enemy, so there’s not much risk in deploying you, as long as you’re not going to kill another king.”

“It would be a queen this time,” said Perry.

“We were going to extract some of our people,” said Dirk. “It’s gotten hot, and it’s not what they signed up for, not with someone like Third Fervor there, not with all this outside shit that’s a part of you and your people. We weren’t going to involve you, because you invite trouble, but plans fell through, and from all the information I’ve been getting, it’s time for me to call in a favor.”

“Tell me where to go and what to do, and I’ll do it,” said Perry.

“You can fly across in an hour?” asked Dirk. “You can go in silent, not let them see you?”

“Masks would be a problem, but yes,” said Perry.

“She won’t show up if you cross into their territory?” asked Dirk.

“I don’t know,” said Perry.

Dirk considered this. He was trying to work the problem, and seemed to appreciate the honesty. “Then prepare yourself,” said Dirk. “It’s going to be tonight. If the result is a fight, then I guess that’s better than leaving my people to get swept up and killed.”

“Can do, boss,” said Perry, giving him a lazy salute. “I won’t let you down.”