hellonspectacles | The beginning of a beautiful friendship

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The beginning of a beautiful friendship

Palamedes has been in Darrow for two weeks, and the days have begun to blend together. Some days, he stays up so late that it’s nearly early, other times he rises before the sun. Most days he works on theorems that have begun to wallpaper his apartment, or sips tea in Gideon’s kitchen, or surrounds himself with a citadel of books in some corner of the public library. Darrow has yet to give up its secrets, but Palamedes is still determined, and he often pontificates at Gideon about his latest theories. Sometimes he talks to the kitchen table instead, since it’s less likely to talk back.

“Warden, you need to get out more,” says the voice in his head—the one he thinks of as Camilla’s—as he paces his apartment restlessly. She’s right, of course. Camilla usually is. On impulse, he picks up his phone and texts one of the few people he actually knows in this strange city.

Mr. Darlington,

Do you like tea? I would be very interested in meeting up to learn more about these portal magicians of yours.

I promise, I’m slightly less of a raving lunatic these days, though my furniture may believe otherwise.

I look forward to your response,

Palamedes Sextus.

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Palamedes might not mean nothing invasive as something soothing, but Darlington's reassured by it regardless. And intrigued, not least by the fact he describes his idea as logistically complicated, a phrase that back home might've meant anything from the brewing of the Bullet to the first Aurelian rite he'd attended his sophomore year, a twelve-hour odyssey of legal terms and tightening of loopholes. "Of course," he says. "Just let me know what you need when it's time. And any specifics you'd care to share before or after."

Black Elm held magic enough for him, and had his whole life, but that was a thing born of history and nostalgia; a different kind of enchantment than whatever the other man might be planning, but just as important.

Picking up his mug, he follows Palamedes as the kettle begins to whistle, a smile crossing his face at the dramatic accuracy of the descriptor he uses. "They get both more and less eerie-sounding from there," he says. "Hell, I'd probably put the Locksmiths pretty squarely in the middle." He pauses, considering the best place to start, knowing already how different the other man's world is from his. "On the surface, the Ancient Eight are a collection of elite organizations at Yale, the college I was attending before I came here. Secret clubs with powerful and successful lists of alumni--presidents, businessmen, authors and journalists, celebrities. And they are, very much so, but from their first days they also each built themselves around the study and practice of a particular kind of magic."

"I'll show you when we get there," says Palamedes, and though his tone is casual enough, there is a certain playful twinkle in his eye. He wonders if psychometry is among the otherworldly talents Darlington is familiar with and finds himself hoping, just a little, that it is not.

From time to time, Palamedes does like to show off.

He turns off the stove and pours the water into Darlington's mug, and then his own. "Funny, you could say something similar about the Empire. We have nine houses, but only eight are functional in any practical sense. And we're awfully protective of our specialties. Go on."

Darlington has to laugh at the crypticness of it, the amused glint in the other man's eye that suggests something both uncanny and meticulously planned. "Well, now I'm definitely looking forward to whatever it is."

He listens with interest to Palamedes' explanation of his world, the organizational structure of...nearly everything, perhaps; a place more controlled by its houses than even the most crackpot theories about the Ancient Eight ever dreamed. When he mentions that there are nine, Darlington's eyebrows tick up, just slightly. "Technically, there's nine of us, too," he admits. "Though Lethe doesn't operate like the other societies, and our function's a bit different. Which I'll get to."

For a moment, he watches the steam curling up from his mug. He'd explained Lethe and the rest to a handful of people in Darrow, but never in exhaustive detail; not since that first sweltering day in New Haven, walking with Alex through the Green. In a way, he's a bit out of practice, a thing he'd never have expected. "Of the eight Houses of the Veil, there's five major, three minor." As he continues, Darlington ticks each off on his fingers. "Skull and Bones, specializing in divination, specifically splanchomancy and extispicy. Scroll and Key are the portal magicians, though they're also practiced in astral projection. Book and Snake, necromancy. Wolf's Head deals in therianthropy, though most people reduce it to mere shapeshifting, which tends to aggravate them. Manuscript's focus is glamours and perception magic. Aurelian does logomancy of...just about any kind you can think of. St. Elmo's used to be powerful weather magicians, though their power's been on the wane for decades. Berzelius formed itself in opposition to the rest, determining they could do through science what the rest achieved by magic. As far as I know, they haven't succeeded yet."

It's a lot of information. As Darlington pauses for breath, he looks across the table at Palamedes, trying to gauge the impact of it. "With me so far?"

Conceptually, most of what Darlington describes is understandable to Palamedes, even if it sounds as far-fetched and magical to him as it might to someone who didn't come from a universe quite so rich in the uncanny as he did. He's heard of people who claim that a sort of reverse psychometry could be used to divine the future, though they tend to be fringe thinkers; he knows people who dismiss much of what the Third House does as a manipulation of perception; weather magic sounds like terraforming by another name. But it is, of course, the mention of necromancy that catches his attention.

"Go back," he says, sipping his tea. "Tell me more about Book and Snake."

He'd taken notice of the way the other man perked up, almost, at the mere mention of necromancy. It's no surprise when Palamedes asks him to backtrack, though as with everything else about him, it's enough to pique Darlington's curiosity a little bit more. "They're the fourth oldest, founded in 1863. A little less than a hundred and sixty years ago by my reckoning and longer, I think, in terms of yours. Most of the rituals I've observed of theirs involve the invocation of spirits. Raisings. They can also create glumae, spirits that can pass through the veil between the living world and that of the dead and serve as messengers."

The Lettermen had always been one of the vaguer societies, their Thursday night activities cloaked both in the grim secrecy working with the dead almost seemed to require and the more amorphous and equally shadowy nature of who it was usually fueling the requests that drove each rite. It makes them difficult to explain with the kind of detail Darlington wants to give. "As an example," he continues, "the last ritual night of theirs I was present for involved the controlled reanimation of a corpse, who was then used as a conduit for the spirits of recent casualties in the Ukraine. Soldiers with information on troop movements that someone in the State Department had an interest in hearing." He shakes his head. "It was a macabre sort of relay, one ghost after another, a translator standing by to take down whatever was said."

“Ah, speakers to the dead,” Palamedes says with a wry twist of his mouth. All respect to Lady Pent, of course, but he had always found the calling of revenants unnecessarily dramatic. They were awfully unreliable beings, anyway. “…Hell, I had never thought someone might call a revenant for the purposes of military intelligence. And using a corpse? Completely unnecessary. How dreadful. How Eighth.”

Now that he thinks about it, calling up dead soldiers sounds like exactly the sort of tactic the Cohort would employ. Palamedes doesn’t like it one bit.

"A network of dead informants who needn't listen at keyholes when they can walk through walls," he says, quoting from The Life of Lethe. Palamedes' distaste at the idea is obvious, even if some of the terms he uses to express it are not. Darlington can't entirely disagree. "Which is the kind of purpose you apparently turn such power to when one of your alumni was recruited by the CIA before he'd even graduated. Before he was even tapped, frankly."

Picking up his spoon, he stirs his tea, then lifts the mug to take a sip. "What does your Eighth do, that's so similar?"

"Besides make you want to stand in a sonic for a few hours?" Palamedes deadpans. It's not a very politic thing to say, but it isn't like anyone here is going to go reporting that the Master Warden of the Library is being bitchy about the Eighth House. "Like your Book and Snake, they're quite good at calling revenants, but what they're really interested in is harnessing the power of the soul, and they don't have much time for silly things like ethics." He makes a face. "The word soul is so imprecise. In any case, they're not content to only manipulate dead souls, poor things. What really interests them is harnessing the souls of the living, drawing energy from them and converting it into necromatic power."

"And for what it's worth, I've never met an Eight with any sense of humor whatsoever."

Darlington might not know what a sonic is, but the general sentiment is clear enough. He smirks. "They sound about as much fun as Manuscript," he says, and while--just like Palamedes and his Eighth--he shouldn't get a vindictive satisfaction out of maligning his least favorite society, he can't exactly help himself. "Who do have a sense of humor, to be fair, but it's spent on inventive so-called pranks and other ways of fucking with people. There was an incident in 1982, a party that ended with a girl thinking she was a tiger. And never stopped. Her parents caught her trying to maul the mailman."

There was another example of Manuscript trickery more recent and more personally embarrassing to Darlington, but he wisely keeps his silence on that for now.

"Harnessing the souls of the living, though, that's a new level of disturbing. Tonally similar to the kind of ethics violations that led to the founding of Lethe, honestly."

"They sound like quite the barrel of laughs," Palamedes says dryly. "Thank God, none of the Houses have found a way to permanently disrupt someone's neural pathways like that." A beat. "I hope."

It doesn't surprise him, exactly, to hear that the morals of Darlington's magic-wielders are as tenuous as those of the heirs he had encountered at Canaan House, but it certainly is disappointing. "And you're part of Lethe, right? Does that mean you supervise them all?"

"Small mercies," he murmurs, though it's a relief when they move on to other conversational ground. He nods, picking up his mug again. "I am, and we do. Our stated purpose is to serve as an oversight body, monitoring the rites practiced by those eight and making sure nothing they do leads to anyone in or out of the societies coming to harm. It makes the magic we do a little more patchwork, grounded in spells and artifacts, but it all has its purpose."

"And do they respond well to your oversight?" Palamedes asks, his voice laced with sarcasm. Now, he's thinking less of the Houses as a whole, and more of the Sixth in particular. Since he rose to the rank of Master Warden at the age of thirteen, he has been attempting to manage a space station often fueled by too much intellect and too little sense. Necromancers of the Sixth tend to steer away from work that Palamedes would consider ethically dubious, thank goodness, but they're still an intransigent, navel-gazing, and altogether too argumentative bunch.

On its own, the bluntness of the question might have been enough to raise his hackles, sending him into the cold Arlington affect that Alex always rolls her eyes at when he tries it with her, but Palamedes asks with the kind of well-worn sarcasm Darlington recognizes instantly. "Depends on the society," he says, equally wry as he huffs out a laugh. "Aurelian's generally inoffensive as it is, although the last rite of theirs I was present for got...complicated when one of the wards broke. But you try and tell the assholes from Skull and Bones anything that sounds even remotely like a consequence and it's don't you know who my dad is in stereo."

He lifts an eyebrow, looking across the table at Palamedes. "My girlfriend would say that's their response to everything because they're all rich kids who've never been told no in their lives, and I don't think she's wrong." Alex would also say it more colorfully than that, but the general principle still held.

"I think your girlfriend is probably right," Palamedes said with a sympathetic shake of his head. The Sixth might be aggressively meritocratic, but that made them unusual among the Houses. At Canaan House, he'd seen the arrogance of bloodline in action, subtly and not-so-subtly.

Of course, the scholars of the Sixth always find plenty of ways to create their own hierarchy. "In the Library, it's always Archeo that gives me the most trouble. And Archives, of course." He grins briefly. For all her aggressive performance of professionalism, Zeta had never quite gotten used to having her requested budget denied by her son. Then again, she would have made trouble for the Master Warden regardless of who they were.

"She'd be delighted to hear me admit it, but Alex usually is," says Darlington, his tone sliding into something utterly fond for a moment. "Annoyed the hell out of me when we first met." Most things had, in fairness, but they'd settled in to one another afterwards--both there and here.

He listens as Palamedes describes the hierarchy of the Sixth, a system that seems as byzantine as anything he'd encountered at Yale or Barton, let alone between the societies. "Oh, God, of course it'd be the archives," he says, echoing the quick grin Palamedes flashes him. "Good to know some things are constant between worlds."

Palamedes chuckles. "They're quite territorial. And, frankly, unnecessarily petulant about the perception that archeo is generally considered flashier. But God, don't tell Juno Zeta that unless you want a lecture about the linear meters of storage archeo is wasting. And that's when it isn't even budget season."

"Should she ever make it to Darrow, I'll keep that warning in mind," Darlington says dryly, already able to picture this Juno Zeta with an accuracy he's not sure is wholly misplaced. Working at the Peabody and spending countless idle hours in Beinecke--before and after he'd started at Yale--had given him at least a bit of grounding in the tensions between archaeological collections and those more paper-based but no less physical. "Although in terms of storage space, I should tell you about the library at Il Bastone. Lethe's headquarters."

He takes another drink from his mug, the neglected tea inside now a little closer to lukewarm. That was the price one paid for getting wrapped up in conversation. "It's a sizable house, built in 1882 and acquired by Lethe six years later after the owner abandoned it, but it's a city house. Constrained by the size of the lot. It doesn't sprawl like...well, like Black Elm." He makes a small nod of acknowledgement, a gesture towards their plans for the day. "You'll see. Anyway. Lethe's collection of books kept growing, and before long there wasn't enough space in the house to hold it all."

Edited 2021-05-18 03:07 (UTC)

“God, she’d be a terror,” jokes Palamedes, feeling an unexpected pang even as he speaks. The Sixth aren’t family-oriented people, and he tends to think of Zeta as a colleague much more often than he thinks of her as his mother, and yet some part of him he didn’t quite know existed wishes to see her again.

He wonders who told her that he was dead.

It’s a thought he shakes away as quickly as it comes; he can’t do anything about any of that.

The matter of growing collections and limited storage is one Palamedes is very familiar with, and he nods eagerly as Darlington expounds. “Of course. Did you have to build underground?"

"Better," says Darlington, blue eyes alight with the enjoyment of spinning out this explanation, sharing a little more of the magic of his world and of Lethe. It was still strange, no longer needing to bend towards discretion, but for moments like this one Darlington thinks it's worth it. "Most of the collection was moved offsite, to a location about fifty miles away. A bunker, climate controlled, underneath an estate owned by Lethe. But to get books from there to Il Bastone, they designed a telescope portal and a catalogue request system. The Albemarle Book, named after the delegate that created it."

"These portals of yours are sounding more and more useful," Palamedes says with a small laugh. The laws by which his own world works may be mysterious and foreign to others, but he's finding much of what Darlington describes to be equally miraculous. "Goodness. Now I'm jealous. How does the request system work?"

"It's one of my favorite features of the house," he admits, grinning when Palamedes admits his jealousy. "My Dante year, the delegate I was learning from had to set a limit on the number of requests I was able to make per week." It's a bit of terminology he realizes his friend has no cause to know, and Darlington inclines his head slightly. "It's the titles of our offices," he explains. "New delegates are always Dante, and the senior ones are Virgil. Alex was perpetually calling them our code names."

Turning his attention back to the initial question, Darlington slips a little further into easy explanation. "The more specific you can make the query, the better," he says. "Just like any search parameter. You write it in the book, and put it back in its place on the shelf. Once it's done gathering everything--which you know because the bookcase itself stops shaking--you open the door to the library and everything in the collection pertinent to the request is there."

Palamedes grins. The specific reference to Dante and Virgil mean nothing to him, but he can hear the gravity in such words. Code names doesn't seem too far off the mark. "Well, it wouldn't be a good title if it weren't just a little bit ridiculous," he muses. "Mine's Master Warden. I've never quite figured out if it's meant to make me feel like a prison guard, or if that's just a coincidence."

Darlington's description of the retrieval process makes him lift his brows, particularly at the bit about when the bookcase stops shaking. "Remarkable. I do feel professionally obligated to ask: the collections aren't harmed by the process?"

Darlington laughs. "There is something vaguely carceral about it," he agrees. "Impressive, sure, but..." He laughs again, shaking his head. "Although I can think of a few folks at the Yale libraries who'd have appreciated that kind of weighty title and the power it suggests."

The interest and mild shock on Palamedes' face is more than a little entertaining, a bonus to the already-present thrill in enumerating one of Lethe's secrets for an appreciative audience. "The collections are perfectly safe," he says. "I admit I don't know all the nuances of what Albemarle created--he was brilliant, designed it all when he was still a student himself--but as long as the portal magic's maintained, everything works the way it should." There was the cautionary tale of 1928 and poor Chester Vance, but at least that had only happened once.

As long as the portal magic is maintained has a sort of ominousness to it, but Palamedes knows that no system is perfect. "Well, you've officially made me wish for an access to portal magic," he says with a grin. "Being a space station, the Library has some inherent storage limits, and regardless of what some people might think, we really cannot encroach further on residential quarters. Emperor's bones, it would save me a headache if I could move some of the collections off-site."

Technically, it's no longer his headache, not in this universe or the one he left behind, but that's not something Pal has quite allowed himself to comprehend.

"I can imagine," he says, politely sympathetic but also finding that he could in fact imagine it, or near enough. There was only so much space, even--especially, as it appeared--in the vastness of space itself. "I only wish I had a better grounding in the specifics of what the Locksmiths can do, else I'd offer to teach you. Or at least find some way of adapting it to what you can do already."

Darlington picks up his mug again, half-surprised to find it empty. "Speaking of what you can do, though...should we head out to the house? I'm parked around the corner."

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