Thresholder

“Why did you go through the portal that first time?” asked Flora.

They were sitting in an antechamber, waiting for the Jade Council to assemble in full. Perry was out of his armor and into a suit that fit remarkably well for having been acquired on short notice, and given how short the average man in the city was. This was the polite way of saying that the suit still didn’t fit all that well, but it wasn’t as obvious. Perry’s sword was wrapped in cloth, as though it was a long package that he was delivering somewhere, or a gift that he was bringing to a friend. ‘Don’t worry about it’, the glamour would tell people, ‘Not worth thinking about really’.

“I don’t know,” said Perry. “I had student loans.”

“Student loans?” asked Flora, raising an eyebrow.

“To be a scholar requires money,” said Perry. “You borrow money on the thinking that your degree will make more than the cost of the loan, at least in the long run. So, it was a joke, sort of, that I stepped through the portal because I wanted to escape the debt.” Richter had found it funny.

“It’s only half a joke?” asked Flora, quirking an eyebrow.

“I mean,” said Perry. “I did have a pile of student loans with onerous interest on them, and I didn’t know that I would actually be able to earn all that much with a master’s in geography. Really I’d thought that I might go for a PhD after I was done with the master’s, but then I would probably only have been suited to be a professor of geography.” He could tell that none of this was making all that much sense to her, maybe because they had a different system of credentials. Most of what he’d said made very little sense to the people of Seraphinus, so he was used to this, in a way. Certain concepts needed a few hours of background. Romauld had begun to understand, by the end, but that had taken weeks of building up concepts, and it was clear that they would have seen each other as aliens for a very long time after, if he had stayed. “I saw a portal, thought about going back to my car to get supplies, then went through because I was worried that it would disappear. I think my thoughts at the time were ‘is this happening?’ and ‘this is happening’. I had a bottle of water with me, and my cell phone, which seemed like less than I would have liked, but … it’s not every day that a portal appears in front of you, beckoning you to somewhere else.” It had happened three times now though, which was something.

“But you hadn’t known about other worlds,” said Flora. “You said that you had no idea what a thresholder was. So you went through a portal, a magical entrance, without knowing what would happen.”

“Well, yes,” said Perry. “It could have put me anywhere. It could have been a portal to another planet, to another place on Earth, anything.”

Flora was silent. She was probably thinking that it was reckless or stupid, which he thought was fair. There was probably a way of presenting it that made him look better, and he thought about it as they sat in silence.

He hadn’t been a particularly good student, though good enough to get a master’s and probably a PhD, then probably good enough to be a teacher, or to work in urban planning, surveying, or something like that. He hadn’t really known what he was going to do with his life, which he found vaguely embarrassing at twenty-four, and getting a higher degree as a stalling tactic was, in fact, a pretty bad plan. The portal had offered a way out. More than that, it had offered Grand Purpose, something that was new and different and important in a way that his life, up until that point, had not.

Also it got him out of his student loans.

He didn’t think that any of that was particularly more sympathetic, so it was probably better not to say. When he’d been talking to Richter, he had framed it differently, and some of that came because the ‘why’d you go through a portal’ conversation had come after they’d understood each other to be from different Earths and talked about that some. His Earth was worse, hot and dying, or at least felt like it was dying, pandemic-stricken and with rising notes of fascism. He wasn’t a doomer, but Richter’s world was better in almost every way, and it made his Earth look worse by comparison.

Seraphinus hadn’t been quite so rosy, though it was good enough if you were a knight or someone who everyone treated like a knight.

“Does this world have a name?” asked Perry.

“Merreck,” said Flora.

“Huh,” said Perry. “Good to know.”

She was still in the police uniform — the gendarme uniform — though he thought she had probably changed into a different, identical set of clothes, because everything looked pressed and in place. Her hands were folded in her lap, and she was looking straight ahead. He had the impression that she was rehearsing her words in her head, and he would have done the same, except that he really didn’t know what he had to say. Cosme was out there somewhere, probably relocated, probably having abandoned radio altogether, and probably not stuck in administrative meetings — or stuck in an antechamber waiting for an administrative meeting to start.

Perry hoped that they would help him. Flora, so far, had been an enormous help.

The doors swung open, and they were led into the same room they’d been in before.

The change was dramatic. Not only were all the council seats filled, many of the pews were as well, and there were armed guards at every entrance. They had guns at the ready, rifles with good workmanship, but which couldn’t hold a candle to the gun embedded in the shoulder of Perry’s armor. He was without his armor though, and vulnerable to bullets. The guards made him feel like he was in the lion’s den.

Flora led the way, back straight, and Perry followed after her, trying to look professional and unthreatening, but also like he was a force of power not to be trifled with. The sword helped, he hoped. He wasn’t entirely sure what he would do if they decided that he was a liability that needed to be killed, other than lean on Flora and hope that his sword was sharp enough.

There were seven on the council, divided up among the various genuses of ‘vampire’, though the terrine, who ate flesh, didn’t hold one of the seats, and the strix held three of the seven. There was a fairly significant inequality among their kind, some of which stemmed from their differing powers, and some which came from historical circumstances. There were other creatures besides the vampires, but they had no representation, and numbered in the dozens among all their varieties. Perry didn’t have anywhere near the full story, but knew more than he had twelve hours before.

“First, proof,” said Akerman, once some formalities were out of the way. “Can it be furnished?”

“Yes,” said Flora. She held out a hand in Perry’s direction.

As they’d discussed, he let the sword float up and then out of its sheath, displaying a glow about it. He was careful not to flourish it too much, nor to make any motion that might seem like a threat.

“Thresholders come with many powers,” said Akerman. “Are there others?”

“None that he would wish to disclose at this time,” said Flora. “He’s cautious, which is good.”

“I’d prefer less in the way of commentary, Imperator,” said one of the councilors, this one a man with a scowl. Perry hadn’t seen him before, but he was Mercer, the council’s lone osten — bone eaters.

“You have been informed of our Custom?” asked Collingwood, a varcoli — more traditional vampires, in some respects, as they drank blood and shunned the light.

“I have,” said Perry. “And I intend to abide by it. I’ve already fought the other thresholder once, out away from the city. We weren’t seen by anyone except an accomplice he’d attained. I’ll move from the city if possible, let him give chase, but I might be the only one that could stop him." He wasn't at all sure about that, but they seemed to hold thresholders in high regard, and it was better if they felt that he was someone not to be trifled with. "If you seek to preserve the Custom, it seems to me that a quiet, planned fight would be the best way to keep anything from spilling out.”

“Thresholders are not part of the Custom,” said one of the older men on the council, Mellins.

“In a technical sense, no,” said Ackerman. “But a fight between two individuals whose powers make science look the fool would lead the king to devote his resources to the unexplained — a scrutiny that we cannot, at this point, withstand.”

There were general murmurs of assent at that, but two members of the council gave each other a look, the osten and Mellins, the council’s other varcoli.

“There is some question about the cost of the Custom,” said Mellins. “A point which it seems necessary to retread.”

“The question before the full council is that of the thresholder and his enemy,” said Ackerman. “The Custom and its very existence are not up for debate.”

“This is the first time we’ve had a full council in nearly two decades,” said Mellins. “History has been moving quickly. We find ourselves in the Century of Progress, when the Custom costs us more than ever before, when becoming unveiled appears to be just around the corner.”

“Better to control it,” said Mercer. “Better to position ourselves as a force for the king to reach detente with, especially as his own position grows precarious.”

“It is a separate matter,” replied Ackerman. “The question is the thresholder, and the havoc he’s likely to wreak on Teaguewater.” He leaned forward, looking at Perry and studiously not looking at the others. “Does your opposite understand the Custom, and his place in it? The importance of secrecy?”

“No,” replied Perry. “So far as I know, he’s completely ignorant that any of you exist.”

Ackerman leaned back in his seat. “That presents a hazard to us.”

“I would have informed him,” said Perry. “But I was afraid that he would find a way to use it against me, and so far as I knew, it was against the Custom to say much.” That wasn’t entirely true. In fact, it just hadn’t occurred to Perry to ask ‘hey, did you know they’ve got vampires and stuff here?’

The position of these people was delicate, Perry now knew, though he could have guessed as much by the fact that they were so secretive, hiding in the shadows and convening only beneath a building that acted as a front. Firearms had evened the playing field far too much for their liking, and forensic science was a burgeoning field. King Edmund had declared the Century of Progress, which was both capitalization on existing trends and substantial investment in a few different areas. Everyone agreed that this meant the Custom might be facing its most serious challenge in hundreds of years. Edmund was also in need of political support, and the vampires would make an easy target to direct the wrath of the laborer class. The writing was on the wall, and Perry had come at exactly the wrong time, at least if he planned to have a grand splashy battle in the middle of the kingdom’s most populous city.

“Five times thresholders have come before,” said Collingwood. “Five calamities have been visited upon the world, always with upheaval in their wake. The end of empires, the fall of cities, not always to our benefit.”

“Five that you know of,” said Perry. He’d been ready for this one, though Flora hadn't had time to fully brief him on what those battles had been like, and she was a cop, not a scholar. “It’s possible there have been more, the disputes settled silently, never known to anyone, leaving nothing more than a smoking crater in a field. We have no interest in exposing you. We would both prefer to leave this world better than we found it.” He wasn't sure whether that was true of Cosme, but it was what Cosme had said, and it seemed a prudent line to repeat.

“Better?” asked Collingwood. The vampire leaned forward. “How?”

“It’s the Century of Progress,” said Perry. “Some of that progress can be to the benefit of your kind. I have personal knowledge of preservatives that could make your food last longer and some machines to that could make it keep almost indefinitely. It would take some work to get them manufactured, but it would be one step toward reducing your exposure. I come from a place that has these things. Synthetic materials and chemical study could reduce your reliance on bodies that need to be moved in the dead of the night.”

“Synthetics?” asked Mercer. He was one of the two who had suggested that the Custom be broken deliberately, and Perry had put him in a separate group from the others. He didn't seem to like the idea, or perhaps he was just confused, but in either case, he made a face.

“Blood, made from chemicals, which suits the same function,” said Perry. “Bone, brains, organs, all of which might have substitutes that would serve you.”

They needed human organs, and that was a big ask. Perry had questioned Flora about that. But to meet that challenge he had Marchand, who had incredible amounts of information about many subjects, and Richter’s world had artificial blood, lab-grown organs, and all kinds of other miracles.

He had no illusions that he’d be able to get any of that working for the people of this world. He was a grad student in geography, not a doctor, engineer, or scientist, and even if he had been, the technology they had available just wasn’t there, let alone the expertise and materials. Cosme had been having an argument about how to make a radio, and they had made a radio, or at least wireless telegraphy, but it seemed like it had taken a substantial amount of time. Artificial blood, if that would ever work for the varcoli, would need at least half a century of substantial forward progress, institutions of learning, and people far more brilliant than he was.

He could still offer what he had though, and dictate principles that they were still ignorant of. He could prove Fermat’s Last Theorem, or whatever the equivalent was, and lay out some of the basics of medicine, like that people should wash their hands, that milk could be pasteurized, and that germs caused diseases.

“And in exchange?” asked Mercer.

“Nothing,” said Perry. He shrugged. “I would offer it freely. I think that as much as we intend to kill each other, my Adversary would say the same.”

There were some murmurs among the council, private conversations spoken too low for him to hear, which he really didn’t like.

“You are dismissed,” said Ackerman after listening to the man next to him.

“Thank you,” said Perry with a low bow. He’d practiced the bow with Flora earlier, making sure that it was stiff enough and low enough, bending at the waist.

Flora led him out, and he caught only one more snippet of conversation, which had returned to the Custom and whether it would survive the next month.

“That went well,” he said to Flora.

“Not really,” she replied. “No one suggested that you be put to death, which I had feared. The council is fractured though, and this is only going to drive the wedge deeper.” She let out a breath. “Come, I’ll take you home.”

“I can find the way on my own,” said Perry. “You don’t need to bother.”

She quirked her lips. “No, I’ll go with you,” she said. “There’s still some risk to you, and I pledged my protection.”

They left together, and once again, Perry felt some relief as the earpiece reconnected with the suit and Marchand let him know that everything was safe and sound. There had been no more radio signals throughout the rest of the day. Perry suspected that there wouldn’t be for the rest of his time in this world, and if they came, they would be a trap.

“There are none of the flesh-eaters on the Council,” said Perry. “It seems like with seven seats, there should be. They don’t get a voice?”

“They’re disfavored,” said Flora. “And a small group.”

For Perry’s money, the terrine were the most dangerous of the five, at least as described by Flora. They were changelings, doppelgangers, able to take on the form of the people that they’d eaten, at least so long as there wasn’t too much change in height or weight. They seemed like the sort of people you’d want to have if you were running a secret conspiracy, and either way, excluding them from decision making didn’t make sense to him.

“You’re hungry?” asked Flora.

“Starving,” said Perry. “I still don’t have any money.”

“I’ll take the gold from you when we get to the factory,” said Flora. “In the meantime, here.” She handed him some notes, which all had the same picture of the king on them. “That’s all you’ll get from me, at least until I can move the gold.”

“It’s appreciated,” said Perry. “I’m not sure what I’d have done without you. You’re a good ally.”

She gave him a skeptical look. “Is that how you see me?” There was a note of pity in her expression.

“You pledged your protection,” said Perry, hesitating slightly.

“I have other loyalties,” she replied. The night had gotten cold, and her nose was slightly red. Apparently being a supernatural creature that ate organs didn’t protect her from the elements all that much. She had her gendarme's jacket drawn tight around her.

“I did notice that you waited until after the meeting to give me money,” said Perry. “Worried that things would go poorly for me?”

“I still am,” said Flora as they walked. She looked up. “Now would be the time to attack. You’re weaker without the suit, aren’t you?”

“Somewhat,” said Perry, hedging. It was the kind of question he didn’t like. They thought he was stronger than he really was, and he thought at least part of his position in this world was held in place by their mistaken belief that he could start a fight that would level the city. With the suit on, he was strong, but he was pretty sure that the battery would be drained by the time he was done demolishing his second building. He was more or less immune to normal gunfire, which was more than was true for them, but not invulnerable.

“The Council as a whole doesn’t want you dead. Mellins and Mercer think you’ll be the end of our secrecy, which they welcome.” Flora was still looking around. “A call for your death would have failed, especially because you said most of the right things. But if someone wanted you gone, they could wait until the Council was finished, then send people to see your end.”

“I’m in danger from people on your side?” asked Perry. “I thought the Council was supposed to solve that.”

“No, going to the Council was just to ensure that it wouldn’t be officially sanctioned,” said Flora. “Now we worry about rogue elements. You’ll notice that the Council didn’t say you were under their protection, and the point was brought up that you’re not formally a part of the Custom. No one rebutted that.”

“Ah,” said Perry. He was starting to feel nervous, and began watching the rooftops, same as she was. He thought he saw movement, but it was difficult to tell.

“No one knows where you’re staying,” said Flora. “But there’s nothing to stop them from following us back there, except the risk of being caught.”

“People who aren’t under the Custom,” said Perry. “They’re not safe, are they? Some of them are hunted? Civilians?” He'd almost said 'smallfolk', which was how they were spoken of in Seraphinus.

“Formally, no,” said Flora. “Formally, all food for our kind is collected from deaths where we’re not the cause, the bodies processed to take everything possible from them and keep it as well as it will keep.” She glanced at him, waiting to see whether he was showing any disgust. He wasn’t, though he wasn’t sure that he could keep from being grossed out if he actually saw her eat a pickled kidney. “Informally … it’s not a violation of the Custom so long as you don’t get caught. If you do get caught, one of the Jade Imperators will put an end to you.”

“But people die all the time in Teaguewater,” said Perry. “Accidents, murders, that kind of thing. And an unnatural death happening with the others …”

“Might not be caught,” said Flora. “Especially if it was properly disguised. Rats and dogs will eat a corpse readily enough, and if some of it was eaten by a person, then yes, it might be hard to tell.”

Perry let out a breath. “How much trouble am I really in?”

“Other than your counterpart?” asked Flora. “That depends on how the Council members think of you, and how the stakeholders within the council room think your presence here will change things.”

They stopped to eat at a small pub, and Perry wasn’t entirely sure whether they were doing it because he needed food or to throw off anyone that was on their trail. It was a noisy place that reeked of age, at least from the perspective of someone who’d spent most of his life in a suburb of Tacoma.

“King Edmund has always wanted to make his mark,” said Flora as they waited for their food. “The Reclamation War was an attempt to take back his homeland, though he was born here. That failed, so now it’s the Century of Progress. And that’s working, but nothing will ever be enough for him.” Her father had died in that war, which she’d mentioned once and then never again.

“Which is why you think there’s a target on your back,” said Perry.

“It’s a long history,” said Flora. “I’ve given you what I can. We’re not hunted here, which is a better circumstance than on the Eastern Shore.”

“They know about you there?” asked Perry. That was a surprise, given everything she’d said. Perry’s understanding of the world had been slowly evolving with every new thing he’d been told, and the idea that vampires were known and hunted elsewhere didn’t seem like it fit.

“Other things,” said Flora. “Different from what we are. Fair folk and selkies, werewolves and nymphs. Many of them wiped out within living memory of the vampires, killed off long enough that men of science have dismissed them as myths. There are still hags in the swamps on the Eastern Shore, but they would never have made the oceanic voyage, not like we did, and even if they’re not hunted, they’re being encroached on by the new inventions of the modern age.”

Perry shook his head. “Hard to believe that all these things exist under the noses of humanity. That your grand conspiracy is keeping it all together is, ah … admirable, from some perspective.”

“We’re not keeping it together,” said Flora. She frowned at him.

“Right,” nodded Perry. That had been one of the upshots of the council meeting and what Perry had been told before it. They’d had a good run, but everyone was skeptical that the bulwark was going to hold. The king’s detectives were working together with scientists. They had discovered that fingerprints were unique, that they could be used for identification, gathered with an inky digit pressed against a page. Autopsies were now matters of investigation and dissection rather than just giving a corpse a side-eye and making a guess.

Still, to be able to make it a few hundred years with their existence brushed off as superstition, myth, or something else seemed like it was more than anyone should have expected.