XIII. Jolene
You don't have to think about it long. This might be the only lead you get on Assassin until the next time they try to kill someone - and next time you might be the target.
"Do your best to find out what you can about our Invisible Man," you tell Richard. "We're assuming it's Assassin, but be on your guard for anything. This is purely intel gathering, do not get into any fight you can avoid."
"Got it," Richard says .
"Saber?"
Your Servant nods, and the two of you head out. Captain Whatshisface is there, immediately stepping up and opening his mouth, and you raise a hand sharply, stopping him in his track.
"You're not going to find anyone involved in last night's events," you say. "This is above your paygrade."
His cheeks puff up. "Nothing that happens in Paris is above of the paygrade of the Prefecture-"
"This is DRM business," you say darkly, holding his eyes. He freezes.
"...terrorism?" he says, and then, mentally readjusting as he remembers his acronyms: "No, that'd be DGSE - you can't mean - military intelligence? Foreign military action? On French soil?"
"Trust me, Captain, you're better off not knowing. National security is at stake. Just trust that we have everything in hand."
"I…. Yes, ma'am," he says, still clearly annoyed, but now with a mix of fear and respect in it. "But… you can't just leave me with that. We have an investigation to perform. A public account to give."
"The Prefect will brief you," you say, "but it's a fun one: meteorite."
He stares in baffled silence.
"Bolt from the blue, a meteorite fell, shattered above the street, explaining all the scattered impacts and the wrecked car hit by the main fragment. We'll give you a chunk of meteoritic iron to hang on your mantelpiece, you'll love it."
The man struggles with himself, unsure what to say, until finally he resigns himself to his orders and says: "Yes, ma'am."
You know how this goes from there. He's going to recontextualize everything that happened today over time, smoothing over the bumps and cracks, editing out what doesn't fit the picture. The Servant names and references to powers are going to be reframed as code names, the 'arrows' as referring to some kind of mystery weapon (Americans, after all, call their missiles "Javelins"), and eventually this will all be that personal story of the time he came across the aftermath of some mysterious military-related event and the spooks came in and covered it up for national security reasons. He'll tell that story in hushed tones to friends around a drink, and they'll build up the mythos of conspiracy within which you operate, making the next time easier.
You don't need hypnosis to wipe people's minds to cover up the existence of the supernatural. You don't even need to not talk publicly about it. Society itself weaves the moonlit paths you tread, in the night outside the awareness of the mundane world. You are not a foreign body, a parasite implanted within the body politics of France; you are symbiotic with it. As you protect it from within, destroying hostile foreign bodies and rogue cells, it feeds you and shields you from harm, allowing you to move freely through it. Only sometimes does your targeted surgery inflame the body such that it mistakes you for a threat and turns upon itself. The very reason you didn't want to conceal the events at the church using the pretense of 'terrorism' - you hope your trick with military intelligence and the meteorite story will help.
Your Voice ticks inside your head, reminding you to take your pills. You fish them out of your inner pockets, swallowing two without water, and flex your shoulder. No lingering pain from the high-level integration last night. That's good.
"One day," Saber notes as you approach the car, "you will need to explain to me the story behind your need to take these."
"One day I will," you say, and then frown as Saber walks right past the car. "Where are you going?"
"Three people cannot ride the metal steed," Saber says, grinning. "We have to leave your friends in the carriage. We shall take the bike."
"Oh Reason free me," you whisper, dread settling in.
"You were fine yesterday," Saber says, tossing you a black helmet, "and you shall be fine today. Are you not my Master, whom I am sworn to protect?"
"(we need an extra car)", you whisper.
The Servant looms over you, shoving the helmet into your chest, and says: "Do not be a child."
And so goes Epona, riding across the fields…
"You talk a big game for someone who was scared to death of horses," you say, squinting. You think you delivered a telling blow.
Saber just raises an eyebrow.
"I was also a child, and eventually grew into the best horsewoman in all of Gaul. Are you a child?"
Fuck. You played yourself.
"Get on," Saber says, mounting the sleek black machine, and you have no choice but to follow after her, settling on the (admittedly comfortable) leather saddle and awkwardly wrapping your arms around her wide torso.
The engine revs up, purr turning into a roar, and Midlife Crisis peels off into traffic. You brace yourself for the agony of Saber tearing off past every speed limit, and she accelerates, accelerates, you shudder… And then it stops. She's reached the maximum allowed speed (which on this bike still feels entirely too fast, but is still, tragically, within the legal limits), and is cruising through the wide streets of Paris in the morning, sunshine casting a haze over the asphalt, surrounded by legions of cars of a thousand colors and makes.
"I do not know where we are going," Saber says, "you will need to guide me."
Oh. Of course. With the car you'd have just plugged your phone in and turned on the GPS, but you didn't think about what to do on a bike. Right now, Saber seems to be moving in scenic circles, waiting for you to give her instructions.
You pull the Voice inwards, closing your eyes and flicking through information you never consciously memorized but browsed so many times it's easy to pull it up and combine it into a coherent picture. You take one look at the street name, locate yourself on your mental map, put a pin into your destination and trace the most efficient path to it.
"Take the next left," you say, and Saber accelerates just a little, as if to keep you on your toes, before turning as you asked. "Right next, then straight ahead until the next boulevard."
She complies wordlessly. For a few minutes it's just this - Saber, driving at a speed at the edge of the uncomfortable, and you, giving her instructions on where to go next.
"Does it bother you to lie?" she asks suddenly.
"What do you mean, like, in general?" you say through slightly gritted teeth.
"I meant to these men of the law. They too, are an organ of your country, a stabilizing force, just as you are. And you are the Cult of Reason, dedicated to bringing enlightenment and knowledge to mankind. Does it bother you to lie to them?"
"I'm not sure how 'stabilizing' the Parisian Police really is," you say ruefully, "take the next left - but to answer your question, yes, it bothers me every time. I don't like coverups."
"So why do you engage in them?"
You open your mouth to say something about Mystery, then reassess. "Right, then straight ahead for a hundred meters," you say first. You come to a red light, quieting the sound of the engine, allowing you to think. It's the first red light you've encountered, now that you think of it, and so conveniently timed; you wonder if Epona smooths Saber's way for her. "An intelligence agency that is completely transparent is incapable of fulfilling its purpose, but the more opaque it is, the less accountable it is, the more it becomes an occult power, running unchecked behind the scenes. The Cult is very opaque. It bothers me sometimes. A lot of the times. I don't know how to fix this."
"I understand," Saber says, her tone more sympathetic than you'd expected for some reason. "The mysteries of the gods cannot be handed out to all mortals, but those druids who revel too much in the mystery make it a source of temporal power for them to lord over the nobles and the chiefs."
"Yeah," you say, "that's a pretty good comparison."
"You're attached to the truth," she says, an odd gentleness in her voice. "You want to bring it to the people."
"Isn't that what Reason is?" You ask. "A blade with which to cut through the illusions of the world, to find the truth?"
The red light stretches on. Around you, cars rev up as drivers grow frustrated with the wait.
"Perhaps," Saber says. "And perhaps it is easy for mortal men to come to worship the sword, and not the cut."
You don't know what to say to that. The light turns green, the engine revs up again and you're gone. "Left next," you say, weaving through the crowded 19th century arrondissement.
You realize strangely that you no longer feel all that fearful. Though Saber moves at a speed of her own, you control each turn, each choice of direction. Without you she is just spinning in circles. It's so unlike last night, when she was running wild, with you hanging on for dear life, with no input into whether you'd live or die in the next moment. Here, you can even find reassurance in laying against her mighty back. Yesterday it felt like being strapped to a falling boulder; today it's a little bit more like huddling against a wall.
"Right next," you say, "aaaand… We're there."
The bike stops in front of a white painted building, wrought iron balconies at the windows, flowers around the stairs leading up to the double-door in front.
"Hotel Guttenberg," you say. "The unofficial embassy of the German magical community in France. Especially arranged for them by the Cult as a show of good relations."
"You're giving your enemies a safe haven inside your own country?" Saber asks, baffled.
"Diplomacy is complicated. A lot of our relations with our German colleagues is about trying very hard to not be enemies again no matter how much sense it would make. This War is no different."
"You're hoping to establish an alliance with the German Master." Saber speaks without surprise; you've touched on the topic before.
"More importantly, so do they. Or they wouldn't have sent…" You sigh. "Her."
"You said you're friends with each other," Saber says in the tone of a question.
"Yes, although…" You shuffle your feet uncomfortably. "I haven't seen her in a while. We've mostly been communicating by e-mail, on and off. I don't know what she's been up to lately."
"But you trust distance did not damage your relationship."
"I trust… Look, I don't know," you say wearily. "Let's just go in, alright?"
Saber nods thoughtfully. "We will settle this matter through parley."
You nod, and the both of you climb down, taking off your black helmet. Purple and black suits, tall and short, chalk-white and brown, black hair and white; the two of you make for a contrasting pair. You ring, and a stiff German man in a suit opens the door and welcomes you in with scarcely a word.
"Mrs von Worms-Östringen's noon appointment, I presume?" he asks in heavily accented French. You nod. "Let me show you the way."
You're led through the building, and as you head upstairs you cast your Voice out, mapping the architecture. You're familiar with the place, and quickly renew your sense of it, feeling the faint hum of the Bounded Field within the walls (a security field, woven into the walls with the old ivy creeping alongside the facade, pulsing with each vine), the smell of lacquered wood, the old steps creaking slightly under your feet. Abstract modern paintings hanging on the walls across the estate, splashes of warm colors on borderless canvas. Empire-style furniture everywhere, with its brasses and its complex casts and curves. The chef is cooking with seafood on the first floor; the security staff is playing cards. A woman of barely twenty is winning.
Up above, drawing nearer, a vast well of power, not bothering to conceal its presence. It makes your throat dry up.
The man opens the door, and you step into an elegant salon, carpeted in pale blue, with mahogany shelves, a low table on slender bronze legs framed by upholstered chairs and a divan.
The room is empty. You walk in, the man closes the door behind you. There is a door at the other end of the room. You stare at it, swallowing nervously.
"Anything I should know about-" Saber starts, and then falls silent.
The other door opens and Dolores Maria Christina von Worms-Östringen enters the room.
She's smiling with her cherry-red lips, hair like autumn fire cascading down her shoulders, unspooling around her toned shoulders, emphasized by her sleeveless green dress. Long nails dance at her side, crimson as blood, but her eyes are emerald, greener than her dress. She's walking like a drifting cloud.
"Maddie!" she says, pronouncing your nickname like it's a delightful little macaron to savour. "It's been an age."
And she's on you, kissing you on the cheek, and you do the same on automatic, processing her entrance - your cheeks touch and you breathe. Her skin is soft. She smells of anise and liquorice, fresh and sugary. Le Parfum, Lolita Lempicka. You've smelled it a thousand times, and suddenly you try to remember the name of the perfume you're wearing, you just grabbed something from your cabinet like an idiot-
She's gone. You blink. She's standing in front of Saber, staring the Gaul up and down as if to gauge her, smiling earnestly.
"I see you've upgraded," she says, and you feel your cheeks burning red. Her accent is faint — lightly clipped words, stressed consonants, just the slightest edge of stern authority behind each word.
"I beg your pardon?" Saber asks nonplussed.
"Nothing. Saber, I presume? Kiss or handshake?" Lola asks, holding out her hand.
"You presume correctly," the Servant says, taking her offered hand.
"Damn, you've got a grip," Lola says, grinning with her pearly white teeth.
Their hands part; she turns back to you. "How've you been, Maddie?"
"Fine, thank you," you say blandly.
She laughs, like rain falling on a crystal glass. "Oh, don't be so formal! I'm asking honestly."
You blink again. You pull the Voice back in; the building disappears from your extended awareness and you feel as if you just walked into a cold shower. You manage to repress a gasp as you center yourself.
"But where are my manners! We're not going to talk standing around like this! Please, have a seat, let's have a drink." She waves to the divan; Saber gives you a look of mild concern, and you give her a brief, creaky smile of reassurance before sitting down.
"What's your poison, Saber?" Lola asks, turning her back to you and opening a liquor cabinet with shelves of beautiful glasses, spreading her arms and accentuating her swimmer's back.
"I do not customarily use poison in battle," Saber says, frowning.
"She's asking what you want to drink," you say, finally managing to put a full sentence together.
"Oh. Vodka."
This manages to give Lola pause; she turns around and, slightly bemused, says:
"I don't have vodka."
"Wine, then?" Saber says with a shrug. "Anything but beer."
"Let's go with a red port," Lola says, grinning and turning around, pouring dark ruby liquid into a crystal glass, dark gold in another, and in a wide glass, a translucent liquor. She turns back to you, handing the port glass to Saber first, and then the wide cup to you.
"Martini, right?" she asks smiling.
"Martini still," you say, taking the cup from her hand.
She tips down her glass of Muscat slowly, and you do the same. The crystal rims touch, echoing. Your arms are a diagonal line rising up into her, towering over you, shining eyes smiling down. It's not the first time.
"You always liked bitterness," she says,
She drifts back, slides into the upholstered chair. Wraps one leg over the other, dangling a five-hundred Euros high-heeled shoe in the air, an elbow on the armrest, swirling her cup very slowly.
You take a sip of the martini.
You do like bitterness.
"So, how have you been doing?" she asks, looking straight at you.
"Well, you know me," you say with a sour smile. "Work's a killer."
"And you married that killer. Doesn't that make you an accomplice?"
The words are coming easier with the Martini down. "I wouldn't say work and me are married yet. Still working out who will propose first. You know how it is."
"Oh, I gave up on settling down a long time ago," Lola says brightly. "I want room for more in my life."
"How have you been, Lola?" you ask, desperate to get away from that train of conversation.
She sips her golden Muscat, and smiles.
"You know Germany," she says easily. "Always some ghosts and ghoulies popping up, needing a little culling. You know your little stunt with the Einzbern caused quite a stir? I had to deal with the fallout."
"I did apologize," you remark.
"By email," she says dismissively. "That doesn't count."
"Well, it couldn't be helped." You recline in the divan, empty cup still in hand. "Aristocrats must be made to understand their privileges hold no sway in this, the country of human rights."
"Aw, I'm sure some aristocrats find grace in your eyes," she says with a theatrical flutter of her eyebrows.
"Guillotine for all," you say. Jokes are good. Solid grounds on which to stand to deflect her-
"Would you really slice this neck?" Lola asks, tilting her head up and dragging the tip of a long scarlet nail across her throat.
Whatever witty repartee you had dies in your throat.
"How are you finding France, Saber?" Lola asks, turning to your Servant, whose presence you had somehow completely blanked out of your mind; the white-haired Gaul is looking at the both of you with furrowed eyebrows, as if studying strange creatures through a glass.
"It is a beautiful country," Saber says cautiously. "The food is delicious, and the wine lovely. I only lament the beer, which is flavorless."
"Oh, well, you haven't had a proper German beer," Lola says with a friendly grin. "I'll have some served for you."
Something about that sentence sounds like a warning sign to you, and you're not sure why, until Lola turns back to you and asks, pretending to only be thinking about it now:
"You are staying for lunch, yes? I am realizing that I didn't specify in the invite, I just assumed it would be implicit given the hour. I have Elias preparing a meal for four as we speak!"
And there it is, the jaws of the trap slowly closing in on you.
"Four," Saber says, oblivious to your distress. "I do note you haven't yet introduced your Servant to us."
"Yes, I must apologize," Lola says, a little contrite. "I wanted to catch up first, before we get down to business. Which we can do around lunch!"
"That would be lovely," you say, throat dry. You stare at your cup. Why is it empty?
In the course of the following conversation, you: [Pick 3; this is a plan vote.]
[ ] Blurt out "You look great!" unprompted.
[ ] Respond to direct questions with awkward, inexplicable silence.
[ ] Mention that you are single.
[ ] Ask Lola if she is single.
[ ] Mention that you didn't know Saber would be a woman when you summoned her, just so Lola doesn't get ideas.
[ ] Awkwardly bring up how attractive your Servant is.
[ ] Experience unasked-for, inappropriate flashbacks.
[ ] Excuse yourself to the bathroom to compose yourself, leaving Lola and Saber alone.
[ ] Ask for a Martini refill.
[ ] Ask for a Martini refill.
[ ] Ask for a Martini refill.
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