Thresholder

Perry broadcast his message for Cosme with some trepidation. He was worried about a counterattack, triangulation of the same sort he’d used, so he waited for a foggy night and set up his own radio equipment on top of the local college, Mirthheart. Perry had underestimated the engineering work that needed to go into making a radio transmitter, or at least making one with Marchand’s help, though he was also cheating, using a large makeshift antenna and internal radio parts from the suit — specifically, from the drone. He didn’t intend to leave the message going on its own though, and would put himself in harm’s way, leaving as soon as the transmission was complete. He’d be using the same frequency and amplitude that Cosme had used, and would have to hope that Cosme was listening, or more likely, had someone who was listening.

Perry’s message was on the longer side, pre-recorded, and it answered Cosme’s message with the things that he would want to know, mostly information on the three worlds that Perry had known before this one. He didn’t care whether Cosme knew most of that, and was hungering to hear Cosme’s own version of events. Cosme had lost a lot, sure, but he’d experienced seven worlds. He knew what was out there to a far better extent than Perry did. Ten data points instead of (generously) four — but it was more than that, because Cosme had opponents too, and must have learned at least a little something from them, even if it was just the extent of their powers before they’d smashed him in the face.

It was hard to know what not to say. Obviously Cosme had some inkling of what Perry could do, but if Perry went into the specifics of Richter’s Earth, or into the poorly-understood nature of Seraphinus’ magic, it might reveal operationally useful information. The microfusion reactor at the core of the power armor needed to be a secret, as did Marchand. This limited what Perry felt he could say, and even the things that he thought were safe might have fatal flaws. He was also blind in many respects, since he might be revealing his ignorance of things that Cosme had available to him — powers that came from other worlds that would only fool a person once.

Still, Perry thought it was worth it, and he was putting in no small amount of time and effort on the communication. The worst case scenario was that Cosme simply never responded, and in the best case, Perry would greatly expand his understanding of the worlds ahead. Clearly magic was on the table, possibly in ready supply, and technology too if Richter’s world was anything to go by. He needed to know what kind of threats were out there, and more, what the possibilities for power were.

It was a relief once the message was sent, and Perry immediately moved away from the roof he’d been standing on. He was careful in where he went, since the rooftops of Teaguewater had recently become home to soldiers, only some of them in disguise, and a few surely vampires of some variety. The further he got, the more he put the priority on safety and secrecy than speed, but he saw no one, and didn’t get any kind of chirp from Marchand.

Once Perry had returned to the apartment and taken off his armor, he went straight back to Mirthheart, not just to see whether Cosme would send investigators, but because Flora had set up a meeting.

The osten and the varcoli couldn’t be trusted. Someone among their number had made some kind of deal with the king, it seemed, and while Flora hadn’t yet been able to find out who had made that deal, nor when, the news was going to break among the Jade Council any day. The biggest implication, at least in Flora’s opinion, was that some of the vampire factions would get left out in the cold. Much of it was dictated by the terms of their diets: osten could eat bones that were years old and the varcoli could subsist on donated blood if it came to that, but the others weren’t so fortunate.

There weren’t many of the cerebol, but a few of them worked at Mirthheart.

“The cerebol aren’t just the glamours they make,” Flora had explained. “They work in mind alteration, always with some material focus, metals. They work in amulets, but also rings, and it can be stretched to others. They’re a backbone of the Custom, allowing us to move in public, to paper over the worst of the offenses and cause people to dismiss the peculiarities, too-long necks, pointed ears, sharp teeth, pale skin. If need be, a targeted token can be made and given to a specific troublesome individual, which we’ve done before.”

“An … anti-glamour?” asked Perry.

“In more ways than one,” said Flora. “A glamour projects outward, changing minds, but this points inward, targeting the person who wears it. We give them only to specific people, those who would damage the Custom most if they knew, or those who would be most likely to know. If you can slip the right ring on a man’s finger, he’ll refuse even the clearest evidence before his eyes. It’s important that the ring stay on though, that he never removes it and gives himself a moment of clarity.”

“But it can’t just be that,” said Perry. “I mean, the whole of being cerebol, it’s not about the Custom and its maintenance, is it?”

“They play their cards close to their vests,” said Flora. “But no, that’s not everything. They traffic in thoughts, emotions, that sort of thing. Defeating it is easy, if you know it’s there, but most people don’t know it’s there. They have more incentive to be secretive, and a diet that’s more stringent.”

“They’re the natural allies of the Custom,” said Perry. “And they’ll help us?”

“If we present our case,” Flora had said.

That had been earlier, and Perry had been given plenty of time to adjust to the idea of having the cerebol as allies. He hadn’t been given anything to put on except the glamour, which he didn’t wear in the apartment, but just for the sake of paranoia, he’d spent some time in the shower checking himself over. A ring that made you staunchly believe that everything under the Custom was silly superstition was one thing, but if that were possible, then it seemed to Perry as though you could also make a ring that made you forget you were wearing a ring. Paranoia, certainly, but it had been worth the check.

Down on ground level, Mirthheart wasn’t all that different from any other old college as seen back on Earth. Perry had been on the campuses of Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge, among others, some of them as part of trips, others when he’d been applying to colleges for both undergrad and to see whether he was going to move when he got his masters. He hadn’t actually ended up going to any of them, but he’d seen enough of them. Mirthheart had that same smell of money and old age, though it was trying to be that, competing for prestige with funding from the crown, and not nearly as old is it would have liked to have people believe. Still, the buildings were made of thick, solid stones, embellished by master masons, and the windows had some of the best glass that Perry had seen in this world, free from bubbles, warping, or imperfections. It was still beset by the same smog as the rest of the city, the fine craftsmanship of the buildings being dirtied by the very air and the magnificent trees clearly struggling.

They met their contact in his office, with Flora dressed in her civilian clothes, not wanting to draw attention. It was Perry’s first time on a college campus in almost half a year, and he felt woefully out of place, not like a student at all, in part because he was routinely the tallest person around. Flora looked nothing like a student, but then, Mirthheart didn’t allow female students: they had their own separate, smaller institute of learning, a case of casual sexism that wasn’t all that jarring given everything else in this world but still rankled.

Professor Mellon was a man with a thick white beard and wispy white hair that did its best to cover his shiny pate. His entire appearance seemed like it was meant to draw attention away from his face, which was a strategy that didn’t entirely work on Perry, who was prepared for it. The man’s spectacles and ostentatious collar drew the eye, as did the bushy and well-maintained beard, but the man’s head was too large, almost bulging, and from time to time it shifted as though there were something moving around inside it. The glamour he wore was powerful, and Perry could feel his mind attempting to slip sideways, but once you knew, you knew, and the glamours were much more designed to keep people from noticing than they were designed to stop people from thinking about things they already knew.

They had come to Mellon for two reasons. The first was that he was cerebol and they wanted him on their side, but the second was that he was one of the vaunted Jade Scholars, and knew more about thresholders than anyone else.

“It’s a long history,” said Mellon, who gave them a warm greeting. He was a professor being asked to talk about an area of expertise, and in Perry’s experience, that usually put professors in a good mood, especially if they were speaking to someone who they considered a novice. “It’s a bloody history. And a few of the events we now believe to be thresholders were not known as such, at the time.”

“You have them cataloged?” asked Perry.

“I do,” said Mellon, nodding. “Not written down anywhere, of course, there would be too much risk for that, but I have them locked away up here.” He tapped his own head. Perry caught, for just a moment, movement beneath the man’s forehead, as though there was something squirming inside a soft skull, but then the thought was gone as soon as it had come. “The first — what we believe to be the first — was just prior to anno 0, the Fall of Praski … did you want them in full?”

“I care less about the geopolitics and geography of these events, and more about what you can tell me about the thresholders themselves, their powers, their fights, that sort of thing,” said Perry. “What happened afterward seems like it doesn’t depend upon the thresholders all that much, and was more about the world itself. Though if you have ways that these incidents were covered up, kept quiet, methods of preserving the Custom, that would be good too.”

“Hrm,” said Mellon. “You’re ignorant of the scope of your powers?”

“Yes,” said Perry. “That is, we all have different powers, and I don’t know what other people might have. I think I’ve seen everything that my counterpart has available, and I can’t believe that there are stops he hasn’t pulled out yet, but the next world … I don’t know.”

Mellon tapped his fingers against the table, a short tune that Perry couldn’t place. “In Praski, there was a series of explosions and the puppeteering of bodies, though it’s not clear whether they were the bodies of the living or dead. From what we know now, we think that it was two thresholders, but all sources from the time are muddled, suggesting that it might have been a single person destroying much of the city for no particular reason, or that it was a group of hundreds — which might have been because of the aforementioned bodies. There is, however, other historical evidence from Praski, a particular metal that seems to stem from that era, which might also be a part of the battle, though it’s not clear. Praski swords were quite prized up until the modern era.”

Perry frowned. “This caused the downfall of the city?”

“Praski was one of the great city-states, supported by a large outlying area that was under its partial control,” said Mellon. “It had enemies though, kingdoms that hungered for a city on the coast, and the chaos in the wake of the thresholder battle allowed those enemies to make their move. Praski was a divided city, shared between Longorn and Terrick, for a period of some fifty years until Longorn won out. But you said that you’re not interested in that sort of thing?”

“It’s less actionable for me,” said Perry. He shifted in his seat. “I am interested, I want to know what happens, but … I don’t think it’s going to be predictive of what happens to Teaguewater once this is over. I don’t think that we can use what happened to Praski as a guide to what will happen here. Especially because here, the Custom is at stake.”

Mellon huffed. “I’ve been hearing that for hundreds of years,” he said. “The Custom is always at stake, and the cerebol are always tasked with helping to keep it safe. Threat to the Custom is a screw that gets turned to coerce us into what-have-you, tithes to the Council or extra labor.”

“We can discuss that later,” said Flora. She gave a glance at Perry, a ‘this is too soon to pivot’ glance. “You were going through the thresholders, the incidents.”

“Karmesh,” said Mellon, though he seemed like he wanted to argue the point. “In Karmesh, the city was nearly leveled, a jewel of the Green Ocean brought down in twenty-four short hours. The buildings were made of stone, and one of the two thresholders could manipulate the material to absurd degrees, pulling enormous chunks of rock out from their foundations, throwing them at speeds that shattered them into jagged little pieces. The other — we have eyewitness confirmation that there were two — was fast, could possibly step through portals, though that’s less clear. There were some reports of ice being used, parts of the city going so cold that people were frozen in place, and high winds sweeping through.”

“Multiple different powers?” asked Perry, leaning forward.

“It’s extremely difficult to say,” said Mellon. “From the perspective of history, these people, these thresholders, are very rarely talked to. They’re almost never personal figures, only sources of destruction, and while they’re seen in conflict with one another, there are only two instances I know of where someone actually spoke to one of them and then put down a record of that communication for history. I’ve heard that you said, before the Council, that there might have been far more than five sets of thresholders through history, and you’re right, of course. We only know that which has been preserved for history in some way, and that is precious little.”

“But you do know,” said Perry. “Flora knew enough to identify me. And someone has talked to the thresholders. Twice?”

“Three times, now,” said Mellon. “I don’t know if you’re particularly chatty, or if it’s simply that most visits from the thresholders end in death, but yes, this seems exceptional from the view of a historian.” He turned to look at Flora. “You’ve spoken to him about what I taught you?”

“As much as I could,” said Flora. “I hadn’t expected that I would ever run into one. I’m afraid I remembered less than I was told.” She frowned somewhat. “I was never a scholar. Perry was, in another life.”

“Oh?” asked Mellon, raising an eyebrow.

“Nothing of importance,” said Perry. “I was at an institution of learning, like this one, for six years. That was in another world, much different from this one.” Perry was pretty sure that his undergrad degree probably blew anything Mellon had out of the water, if only because he was standing on the shoulders of giants and had lived in the information age.

Mellon nodded, and seemed a bit more at ease. When he was done with the history lesson, there would be a big ask coming, and Flora was doing her best to massage this meeting as much as possible.

“The first meeting I know of was at the end of the Lunar Empire,” said Mellon, continuing on. “Not one of our people, but someone who was under a precursor to the Custom, a witch. She wrote everything down, which she was able to do because she was able to get out of the city before it all went to hell. The thresholder was determined, callous, seeking to gather up any scrap of power for the coming war against his counterpart, and the witch bestowed him with enchantments before fleeing. He had told her much, and it’s from that conversation that we know more about these people — about your kind. He viewed himself as a soldier in a war across worlds, and he’d been to nearly forty worlds by that point, accumulating alterations to his body, his soul, and gaining equipment to use in battle.”

“Forty,” said Perry, letting out a breath. That was hard to imagine. If the worlds were two or three months a piece, that would mean something like seven years. Forty powers? How would you even handle remembering all that, let alone actually using it in combat? “Did he say whether he could get more than one power from a world?”

“More than one power?” asked Mellon, raising a thick white eyebrow. Again, something moved beneath his soft skull, and again the sight of it was dismissed by Perry’s mind. “If the topic came up, it wasn’t recorded.”

“And I suppose there was no information on his alternate,” said Perry. Would it have been someone else who’d been through forty worlds? Some kind of MMR system? ELO? Perry had done just enough online gaming to have run into all kinds of matchmaking problems, and the presence of something like that had all kinds of implications. Perry had already had an inkling of that with how things had gone, but he wondered whether there was a way to manipulate it, and if there wasn’t a way to manipulate it, what that might mean. The possibility of a cease fire lasting a decade wasn’t anything that appealed to him, but if it was possible … he didn’t know.

“I have no catalog of powers,” said Mellon. “And of the ‘alternate’, there is nothing to speak of aside from the destruction of a city left in the wake of the fight. We don’t know what caused it all, but trees had grown up through houses in the city center, statues were sliced clean in half, and there were few survivors. Plagues and hardship followed in the wake of the thresholders, and the vampires ate well.”

“Jesus,” said Perry.

“It is the truth of our condition, that we look well on death,” said Mellon. “We are hunters, sometimes, but more often we scavenge. I know when I heard that there was a thresholder, I thought of the feasts that might await us if we could weather it, before I thought of the Custom.”

Perry looked over at Flora, and she gave a slight nod. “We are kept from fullness, in service of the Custom.”

Perry had known that, just as he’d known that there were limits on the induction of new vampires, but he hadn’t thought they would describe it as hunger, not like something that was limiting them. A society of ‘vampires’ in a constant state of having just slightly not enough blood, flesh, brains, or whatever seemed entirely too dangerous to be allowed to continue. Perry might have understood if it was the rich hoarding food from the poor, that wasn’t too different from anything he’d known, but if someone like Flora was feeling the squeeze, a cop, that was a sign that things had already been a powder keg.

“The coming conflict, if it does come, might mean a time of plenty,” said Mellon. “It’s grim, but it’s the truth.” He cleared his throat. “We do not enjoy killing, as a rule, we enjoy only to feed in our own ways. For the cerebol in particular — I’m sure that Flora has told you.”

“I’m not sure she has,” said Perry.

“The brains we consume must be fresh,” he said, sighing slightly. “We take on a part of them, their thoughts, emotions, intellect, wit, which lingers even long after the meal is gone.”

“Meaning … ?” asked Perry. “I mean, why would that mean that you don’t prefer to kill, or why would the killing be worse for you?”

“We prefer the minds of the cultured, the excellent, the young,” said Mellon. “Yet there’s a sadness that comes with that, an exceptional life cut short. If we were the ones who had orchestrated that ending, it would be all the worse.” He let out a sigh. “But the other option, the one we follow most closely, is to take only the minds of those who have died ignoble deaths, usually those at the lowest rungs of civilization, the poor and forlorn, which weighs on us as well.”

“Hence the grimness, one way or another,” said Perry. He wasn’t sure that he liked the implications of classism there, but he understood it. Most of the people that the vampires ate would be those who’d been crushed by the boot of industry and class warfare in one way or another, and most of the people that the cerebol would want most as food wouldn’t be the kind whose bodies could simply disappear from a morgue.

Mellon cleared his throat. “You’ve taken it well.”

“I was assured that it was done ethically,” said Perry.

“There are many who would say there is no ethical consumption of the human body,” said Mellon. “And it goes against the wishes of the living.”

“You’re pressing the point,” said Perry. “Why?” He had already said that he was on their side.

“You’re a mystery,” said Mellon. “We understand thresholders to be human, of a sort, but they come into our world and cause such destruction. Can there be an ethical battle?”

“Not really my department,” said Perry. It was flippant, probably too flippant, but he wasn’t in the mood for a philosophical discussion on the nature of ‘just war’.

“We’re here, in part, because we want to reduce damage,” said Flora. “I’m trying to help Perry navigate his way to a resolution that leaves Teaguewater as untouched as possible.”

“If you want my definition of an ethical battle, it’s one that doesn’t involve ripping my way through a city,” said Perry. “No civilian casualties.”

“We had hoped for that before,” said Mellon. “I suppose I’ve been going on for some time, and you came here to talk about the past thresholders. Chronologically, anno 887, was the closest we came to what you’d consider an ethical battle. One hundred dead, a neighboorhood is Glomdurn sliced through, but that was the only sign of it, and there were efforts made to cover everything up. We think there might have been other battles, with lesser damage, but it’s difficult to say, and the record keeping in Golmdurn was awful. There was little intervention in the conflict, it was simply of lower power, more of a cat and mouse conflict than a brawl.”

“No details on powers?” asked Perry. What he really wanted was some kind of systematized understanding of the power, rather than just the examples of results that he’d been given so far.

“Buildings were cleaved through,” said Mellon. “Clean cuts that went through stone, metal, wood, flesh, and bone, so clean that pieces of it were kept for later study. That was the most striking aspect, but there were victims with extensive burns, others whose flesh had warped, and a few whose brains had been affected. It’s difficult to know how much of that was collateral damage.”

“This was … one of the good times?” asked Perry.

“Relatively few dead,” nodded Mellon. “The battle happened suddenly, with little time to evacuate, and it had spillover, but compared to the other times, it was minimal, no grand scars left indelible on the city.”

Perry frowned. “That’s not a very good outcome.”

“No,” said Mellon. “Which is why the last time a thresholder visited, the people of the Custom attempted to kill him.”

“And it went very poorly for them,” said Perry.

“There are no longer any witches in the world,” said Mellon. “The last of the yetis were killed, the creatures of the depths had their hivemother killed, it was an utter calamity for our kind, though almost unmarked by the outside world, and a success only in that regard.”

There was a reason that the vampires had made only token attempts at killing him, why they thought that he was a force of nature. He had heard a little of this from Flora, but she’d been short on information, which was partly because there didn’t seem to be all that much information to be had. Still, the last contact with a thresholder had been an utter calamity, wiping out entire classes of people.

“Are you so powerful?” asked Mellon. “We really don’t know. I’ve heard someone sent a group to go after you and they were never seen nor heard from before.”

“I don’t know how I would kill a ‘hivemother’ or whatever,” said Perry. “I could dive down into the ocean depths, if I had to, which I guess would be the starting point.”

Mellon was watching him. “There was only one hivemother,” he finally said. “With her death, the depth cult collapsed, the last of their kind dead within a human generation.”

“We worry that vampires might go the same way,” said Flora.

“We don’t actually know how the witches died,” said Mellon. His eyes were still on Perry, and it wasn’t clear whether he was ignoring Flora or trying to make a point. “They died, all at once, across the entire world. They could be found dead in their cabins in the North Wastes, hundreds of miles from civilization. Do you know how such a thing could be accomplished?”

“No,” said Perry. He had thoughts, but didn’t think that it was appropriate to share them. An airborne virus would be his first choice, though he had no idea how he’d go about creating one of those, and knew that it was completely beyond Marchand. Still, with forty worlds, it didn’t seem like the kind of thing that would stay out of reach forever. “I’m trying to avoid that kind of thing, even if there have been attempts on my life.”

“It’s the other reason we’re here,” said Flora, who’d apparently decided that it was time to pivot. “We’re trying to keep the peace.”

Mellon looked between them. “You’re not what I expected from a thresholder.”

“I think that’s probably good,” said Perry. “But Flora is right, one of the reasons we’re here is that we want to keep the peace. And we want your help in doing that.”

Mellon looked off in the distance for a bit. “I’m trying to decide whether you went to Councilor Trent first or not.”

“We didn’t,” said Flora. “He’s a politician, selected by the consent of the Council, which means that he was selected for political reasons, not because he was the most widely regarded cerebol, nor the one who speaks for them.”

“You wish for the cerebol to take a side, and do not trust him to do so?” asked Mellon. He regarded them. “Or you do not trust him to make the right decision.”

“The king would make more cerebol, if possible,” said Perry. “He would make them from among those he thought he could trust, then get rid of those whose loyalties he felt were, at best, divided. Following that, he would begin the production of glamours en masse, but not those designed to keep the Custom secret, those that were designed to … I don’t know. The boundaries of your art are secret. Loyalty amulets?”

Mellon kept a stone face. “A possibility,” he finally admitted. “There is a reason jewelry is eschewed by those under the Custom. The cerebol have long lived under their own Custom, trade secrets that keep us safe and secure. It would take the kingdom a long time to train its own people in the art.”

“They would though, wouldn’t they?” asked Perry. “If they’re paying cerebol in brains, it makes sense to ensure that you’re not feeding a rebellion in your own backyard.”

“Unless the cerebol go willingly, make ourselves useful,” said Mellon. “That’s the conclusion Trent might come to, if he were allowed. It seems that in the modern era the old revulsions have begun to decay. People have become used to dirt, grime, pollution, and decay. The philosophers of this era cut into bodies to see how they work, get their hands red with the blood of dogs and mice. It came in vogue at this very university, imported from across the seas, and people might simply accept the theft of their brains if the king placed his boot squarely on their necks. Or … the other way it might go is that the king would maintain the Custom, but for his own purposes.”

“These are possibilities, yes,” said Flora.

“Your aim is to undo the knowledge the kingdom already has of us?” asked Mellon.

“If possible,” said Perry. “We don’t know how much you keep abreast of what’s going on —”

“More than most,” said Mellon. “I trade in thoughts.”

Perry wondered what he was implying. The cerebol were perhaps the most mysterious of the vampires, though the terrine — flesh eaters — were shapeshifters, natural spies and hoarders of information, and gave the cerebol a run for their money. The cerebol kept their powers murky, which largely seemed like a defense mechanism, and Flora had said that cerebols regularly traded in that mystery, implying powers above and beyond what was known. It reminded Perry of a moth with a pattern of eyes on its wings, spreading them wide to try to warn off predators.

“We want the best outcome,” said Flora. “We believe that means preserving as much of the Custom as possible, and not under the thumb of the king.”

“If the king has been informed of the cerebol, there’s no chance he’ll wear something that could cloud his mind,” said Mellon. “Our constructions work much less well when people know they’re there, and nudity is an absolute defense against something placed upon you. Even if you could get to the king … no, it wouldn’t work, not when those within his inner circle have surely been clued in.”

“You’re saying there’s no putting this genie back in the bottle?” asked Perry. “That it’s hopeless?”

“I’m not saying that,” said Mellon. He stood from his desk and moved to his window to look outside at the grimy air of Teaguewater. “There is another option.”

“Oh?” asked Perry. “Some secret of the cerebol?”

“You’ve seen Wesley Tower, yes?” asked Mellon. “It would be hard not to. It dominates the skyline.”

“I have,” said Perry. “I even rode to the top.”

“Metal is the foundation of our art,” said Mellon. “The amulets and rings we craft are metal imbued with our magic. When Wesley was first constructing his tower, I had come up with a plan to use it, to place upon this mass of bare metal. Nothing of its sort has ever been constructed before, and may not be constructed after. It was a rare opportunity for us, a glamour that could extend through the whole city — but Trent didn’t so much as bring it to the Council.”

“Word of it reached my ear,” said Flora. “It carried risk, to do something like that in the open, and its power might draw attention. You said yourself that the glamours work best when they’re subtle.”

“It was to be a new type of glamour,” said Mellon, still looking at the window.

“And it’s still possible?” asked Perry. “Even though it’s fully constructed?”

“Still possible, yes, just enormously more difficult,” said Mellon. “When the tower was first announced, that would have been the best time, we could have gotten someone inside his team, someone that could let me into the construction area to touch the beams, to hide the symbols. Now? We would need someone to scale the structure, or a powerful strix to fly up, and it would all need to be done under cover of darkness or fog.”

“The result would be that we could hide the Custom from peoples’ minds?” asked Flora. “Whether or not any other glamour was involved?”

“Yes,” said Mellon, letting out a breath. “A glamour to end all glamours, at least in Teaguewater.”

“You have the plans for such a thing?” asked Perry. “You could make it work, fast?”

“I could,” said Mellon. “To wipe the Custom from someone’s mind, from the king’s mind, would take that much power, a glamour larger than anything ever built before. To remove a thought from someone’s head, to not allow that thought back in … yes, it could be done.”

Perry felt the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. There was some fanaticism to the professor that hadn’t been there when he was talking about history. This was a man who had his own belief in the Century of Progress, which Perry hadn’t see much from those under the Custom. He spoke of a grand glamour in the way that the varcoli doctors had spoken of blood, but moreso.

“I can fly,” said Perry. “If you let me know where to place … metal plates?” Mellon nodded. “I can do that.”

“It would affect only the humans?” asked Flora.

“With the power of that much metal, so prominently placed, exposed to the sky,” said Mellon, “It would be possible for me to construct almost anything.” There was a breathlessness to his voice. “But yes, putting us in ignorance of the Custom, stripping that long-held knowledge, would be counterproductive. Those who’d only known of the Custom for a short period of time, those who were inducted within the last weeks —” He looked at Perry.

“I would forget?” asked Perry.

“Probably, yes,” said Mellon. He was rubbing his beard. “Of course, the effect would be limited to Teaguewater, so as soon as you left, those memories would resurface, but, hmmm, it would depend upon the final configuration.”

“And the new vampires, they would just … forget that they were vampires?” asked Perry. “They would have powers but no idea how they got them?”

“It’s not simply the removal of memory,” said Mellon. “It’s nearly impossible to do that anyway. It’s the suppression of memory, not by pushing the memory down, no, but by making the mind skitter off the memory, shielding it from thought.”

“Let us know what you need,” said Flora. “We need to get started on this right away if there’s to be any hope of restoring the Custom.”

“You speak of it as though it’s broken,” said Mellon, rubbing his chin.

“There are cracks in the wall,” said Flora. “We’ve likely been revealed to the king, at least.”

“Mmm,” said Mellon. “Yet the raids haven’t come, have they?”

“We both know it would be a bloodbath,” said Flora. “The king needs to consolidate power, grow more soldiers with abilities to rival our own, weed out spies.”

“Then I’ll start work at once,” said Mellon. “I still have the plans I had drawn up when the tower was being constructed.” He nodded. “Leave me in peace. I need to work.”

Perry had been hoping for more about the thresholders, a catalog of artifacts and eyewitness accounts, but if Mellon was going to focus on the task at hand, Perry wasn’t going to stand in the way of that, not when it was clear that the actual evidence of past thresholders was considerably less well-documented than Perry would have hoped.

They left the office not long after with a promise that they would meet up again, and a second promise of secrecy in this endeavor, especially with all the potential spies about.

“That was good,” said Flora. “It was exactly the sort of thing we needed.” She sucked her teeth for a moment. “I had known that the cerebol were hiding powers, they telegraph that, but this is … hope.”

“Do we trust him?” asked Perry.

“As much as we can,” said Flora.

“He had a mad scientist vibe to me,” said Perry. Flora gave him a questioning look. “Like he was more interested in the possibility of doing this insane thing that had never been done before than he was interested in the actual point of it.”

“I had that impression too,” said Flora.

“And when I say ‘trust’ I don’t just mean him keeping quiet about this plan to the others, I mean … he’s talking about constructing this thing, and we have no way of double checking what it does before it does it. There’s no accountability.” Perry was frowning. “There are multiple ways for him to betray us, multiple reasons, bases we can’t cover.”

“Do you think coming here was a mistake?” asked Flora. “We can’t do this alone. We need allies. This is a chance. What else is there?”

Perry nodded. The fight with Cosme was coming, and this would at least deprive Cosme of allies, if it was strong enough. Vampires who didn’t know they were vampires, if Mellon could actually deliver, was cause for celebration.

There were other preparations to make though, and Perry was trying to get himself into the best possible position.