Second Dominion (Fourth Age)
Aurean Cycle no. 462 of the Macbeth dynasty, reign of Aldric II
Second Quadrant, Crestoria (Seat-Planet of House Rouge)
One of the Opulence's domed ceilings opened onto the night city like a fan of glass and steel. The panes, filtered through a play of inner mirrors, multiplied Crestoria's lights in iridescent reflections, making it impossible to tell where the hall ended and the panorama began. Since it was night, the crystals set into the palace reflected a placid blue glow.
The table, a slab of translucent onyx lit from below, seemed to float in a fossil night. An automatic harp plucked nocturnal themes, and from the double-hemicycle bar dripped spirits that shone like domesticated plasma.
Mareque Rouge had arrived early. He chose a crimson loveseat in the central alcove, where a kinetic sculpture—gold rings suspended and moved by magnetic fields—imitated the breath of an invisible colossus. His inhaler, thin as a pen, gleamed at the first draw; he exhaled a curtain of amethyst-colored smoke that rose in a perfect spiral, rippled, and vanished.
The servants let the hall do the work it knew best: make guests feel poised between height and void. Beneath the dome, the city turned slowly, as if someone had lowered the world's volume.
Clarisse arrived the way one enters a place that won't forgive the slightest misstep: with no visible hesitation, but a back taut as a bow. The dress was made of matte black brushstrokes on a glossy black background, practical cut, real pockets. Hair gathered high, face clean. Her eyes—of that color that refuses to be lit—fell on him, not on the sculpture, not on the bar, not on the synthetic stars set into the domed ceiling.
Mareque offered her a smile that counted as both invitation and warning. "In this hall they still keep a cult of scenic entrances. Yours stripped the rite of the last word."
"Rites don't settle accounts," she replied, setting her bag on the table with a touch that sounded like a full stop.
Mareque signaled the waiter; two goblets arrived without words. A clear liqueur, in which three crystallized petals floated. Clarisse nudged one with her finger without drinking, as if it could stain her.
"I don't drink what doesn't carry a name," she said.
Mareque laughed softly, resting two fingers on the rim of his glass. "Prudence, not distrust. Same gesture, different criterion."
Clarisse remained standing. The window light sculpted the profile of her face, rendering it halfway between angelic and glacial. "New frame, identical image."
"It depends on the eye that looks, ma soeur." Mareque drew on the inhaler, his crimson pupils glinting in the artificial light.
"Mine sees boys used as pawns." Clarisse turned, letting her gaze slide over Crestoria's luminous arteries below. There, in the real city, the gears turned even without music.
Mareque was silent a moment, then tapped his fingers lightly, as if awarding a well-turned line. "So direct, Clarisse. Back to studying futurism? But I mean it, it's a rare virtue. Allow me, though: I see only roles taken on. No one pushes anyone: one steps in."
"A role? Whose text?"
"The world's itself," he replied, theatrical without raising his voice. "I do nothing but reveal the form already glimpsed beneath the marble."
"All for your twenty percent commission."
"Also for my twenty percent commission."
Clarisse stared at him again, motionless. "You speak as if they were statues. They aren't."
"Sculptors aren't statues either, and yet they let themselves be sculpted by time," Mareque countered without losing his smile. "Your Lacrosse is no different."
A shadow crossed her gaze, but she gave no voice to the immediate retort. She inhaled, calm, almost glacial. "'Yours'? He is our brother."
"He isn't blood."
"It doesn't matter. He isn't 'mine.'"
"And yet you defend him as such…" Mareque tilted his head, letting a dense red curl brush his temple. "You fear he'll define himself without your frame…"
"I'd prefer he not do it through yours."
The Master of Sculpture laughed again, a low, velvety laugh. "Oh, Clarisse, how you flatter me. You ascribe such power to me over another's soul… I, who am only a humble framer."
Clarisse took a step forward, tone low but sharp. "Don't flatter yourself. I wasn't speaking of power, but of responsibility."
Mareque's smile stopped. He held still, only the crimson eyes moving. It seemed he was tasting that word on his tongue. "Responsibility. A word heavier than the metal of the Forge. Perhaps that's why you don't find it engraved on treaties, only whispered among those who truly care."
"And you're not among them," Clarisse shot back without hesitation.
The silence that followed was different: not elegant, not theatrical, but full of tension. Crestoria's lights blinked like a heartbeat, and in the hall of windows nothing could be heard but the subtle hiss of the inhaler.
Mareque leaned forward and broke the silence. He spoke in an even voice. "Then let us get to the point, Clarisse. Do you want to ask me why I'm exposing him?"
"That is exactly what I want to ask."
The question hung between them, crisp.
Mareque leaned back against the loveseat, the inhaler suspended midair. He lowered his gaze to the liqueur. With his finger he shifted one of the petals, as she had done. "I'm not exposing him. He already is exposed."
Clarisse drew her thin brows together. "Don't evade."
"I'm not evading." Mareque lifted his chin. "Do you remember the first time you saw him? In front of the minor infirmary, east corridor… half-courts leaning over the railing in wait, like for a comet about to enter the room."
Clarisse pressed her lips together. She barely nodded.
"I saw him before the others. Before you, before Mother." He moved the goblet aside. "It was a classic retrieval, on a route that shouldn't have held surprises. There was orbital debris, a little, a shell and a flicker of local magnetic field. Then the signal, thermal by fits and starts, vital by fits and starts, like a short breath. We went to look."
He paused, without emphasis. "He was floating."
"I know," Clarisse said. "And not from you."
"Now you do."
Another draw from the inhaler, shorter this time. "He was floating, the body in pieces: not cleanly, like a surgery; not shattered, like a detonation. It was more like brutal cuts. In pieces. And he wasn't bleeding. No trace of hemorrhage, no halo. Only… silence."
Clarisse inhaled through her nose. "The eyes?"
"Wide, empty. There were no irises. The skin was intact where there was skin. The rest… an armor I had never seen. Not in our collections, not in those of the other Houses, not in the catalogues. I latched on, removed what I could without ruining what I didn't understand, and brought him home."
"To Crestoria," she murmured. The Opulence, the nurses, the looks: images that needed no saying.
"Inanimate," Mareque went on. "Then, the next day, he woke."
"And on the same day…" Clarisse finished, curt. "…the House lost an artifact."
"Exactement."
"And?"
"It was a piece never displayed: no one knew what it was. It resembled a matrix: modular, but not modulated. And it vanished."
The void between phrases became normative, smelling of broken rules.
"And that day, you linked the two," Clarisse said.
"I observed a coincidence I couldn't prove," Mareque corrected. "And I reported it."
"To Mother."
The name fell like a seal.
"To Mother," Mareque confirmed.
"And she?"
"She recognized the armor."
"In what sense 'recognized'?"
"She said it dated back to the First Dominion," he dropped the phrase without frills. "She stopped there. She looked at the armor like one looks at a horizon one doesn't recognize. She recognized, and stopped. She stopped us."
"No examinations."
"No disassembly, no tests. 'We don't get it. We don't understand. It isn't our matter. Not now.' Her words."
Clarisse held back a nod. "And then she gave him a room. A name. A family."
"Here you're the source," he admitted. "You taught him the grammar of the house. The customs. Not to start at every adult who enters a room."
"He still starts," Clarisse cut in, a flash of a smile on her intricate face. "Only better hidden."
"Then Mother decided the rest: no fanfare, no proclamations. Growth in shadow. And when needed, light."
Clarisse leaned forward. "In the end you did evade. Why now? Why like this? Why send him into a company he doesn't know, doing something like that?"
"I'm not sending him." Mareque's eyes stayed steady. "It's Mother's will."
"I know it's Mother's will," Clarisse replied without raising her voice. "I want to know if it pleases you."
"It isn't relevant."
"It is to me."
"To me, the House is relevant."
"And your twenty percent commission."
"And my twenty percent commission. But especially the House. And the simple fact that keeping him shut in here doesn't protect him. It only exposes him. From within."
"Who's watching him?"
"Those we don't name."
"You yourself don't know what that means."
"He appears in the void, in pieces, without blood; we lose a thing that shouldn't exist. Mother recognizes an armor we shouldn't recognize. Do you really believe it will remain a secret indefinitely?"
"This is a map of fears."
"More than a map, it's an inventory, really." Mareque drew in gently. "There's more. You want him here because here you defend him. I want him moving because outside he can become something he never will here."
"An autonomous pawn," Clarisse translated, dry.
"A person who decides," he corrected. "But to decide you have to see. To see you have to risk. I didn't write that rule."
"You wrote the scene—"
Mareque didn't deny it. "I did my trade: margins, not nets."
"For your twenty percent commission."
"Also for my twenty percent commission."
They studied each other, for a span the harp filled without asking permission.
"There's more," Clarisse said, suddenly. "I called today. You saw the rest. They fired in the hall. At him."
Mareque dropped his gaze for an instant. "I heard. And we foresaw it."
"You, or Mother?"
"Mother," Mareque said without hesitation. "I did what I had to do beforehand. I 'wrote the scene.' I spoke to whom I needed to, put hands where hands needed putting, left spaces where spaces needed leaving. Now we wait."
"Wait for what?" Clarisse asked.
"For proof we were right," Mareque replied. "And that the others, well…" There was no need to finish.
"…That the others will pay," Clarisse finished for him. "In a language they understand."
Her brother smiled, mischievous.
"And him?"
"He's not alone, Clarisse." Mareque straightened. "In the end, he's with seasoned artists. Two who know how to stay alive and one who reads seals better than those who stamp them. We didn't give him a cuirass; we gave him a crew."
"A crew isn't a shield."
"It's a deflection. Sometimes that's enough."
"And when it isn't?"
Mareque didn't answer. He made a small gesture to the waiter, who stopped at a respectful distance, as if he understood they were speaking a language that doesn't admit witnesses.
Clarisse lifted her eyes toward the dome. The city reflected in the glass in a mosaic of blue lights.
"Does Mother know about the artifact?"
"She knows." No hesitation. "She knows everything we're given to know, and she knows what we're not given. She recognized the armor and said: 'It's from then.' She said: 'We don't understand.' She said: 'Don't touch it.'" A pause. "She also said the rest."
"Which is?"
Mareque looked at her with an expression he had never shown her. "'If he stays here, they'll find him before we do. If he walks, perhaps he meets us halfway.'"
"Her words?"
"Her words."
Clarisse lowered her head. "And you thought: perfect for your frame."
"I thought: perfect for his life," Mareque shot back. "Don't make that face… You know I have no children. I don't know what it means to protect someone the way you do. But I know what it means to keep something in the dark until it rots. I won't do it."
"Such authority, and yet it isn't you who decides," Clarisse said. "You just said so, Mother decides."
"Mother decides," he repeated, calm. "It's her operation. I execute with clean hands and open eyes; and at times with dirty hands and closed eyes. We aren't saints, Clarisse. Neither you nor I."
She smiled without joy. "On that, we agree."
"We'll agree on another word," he said. "'Ours.'"
That "ours" wasn't a compromise; it was more a practicable ground.
Clarisse let the air out in measure. "Too accommodating to be reliable."
"When can I be, then?"
"When Mother isn't listening."
"..."
"I want to see him," Clarisse said, changing the subject. "When he returns. Before anyone."
"You'll see him," Mareque answered. "If you prefer, I can tell Mother now."
"No need. She already knows." She stood. "You'll tell me instead."
"I'll be the one to say it."
"Good." She went to take her bag, then stopped. "One more thing."
"Yes?"
"When you found him, were you afraid?"
The question remained between them, heavier than expected.
Mareque looked at his reflection in the onyx slab. "It isn't a word I like to use."
"That isn't an answer."
"I thought I was bringing home something I didn't understand… and then I thought it was already home before us."
Clarisse looked at him for a long time. "That is an answer."
"Does it satisfy you?"
"No. But it's true."
They turned together toward the dome, drawn by an imperceptible shift in the light: down in a low quarter, a band of signs went dark all at once, then lit again in a wave. A thing that happens every night. A thing that looked like a signal only if you wanted to see it.
"They'll come to ask you the sequel," Clarisse said, turning back to him. "Not just me. All of us. When the shipment is truly missing, when it's no longer statistics, they'll come here."
"I know."
"And you'll say you were ready."
"I'll say we have hands," Mareque replied. "And that we'll use them."
"Yours or his?" she asked, expression unchanged.
"Ours," he said. He wasn't choosing a pretty word. He was choosing a useful one.
Clarisse nodded once. "Make him come back."
"It doesn't depend on me," he replied. "But I want it as much as you."
He watched her move away one step, then another. In the window's reflection her figure appeared for an instant, tiny. It looked like a full stop on a map that didn't want to stay still.
"If we lose another thing," she said without turning. "Don't call it coincidence."
"I won't call it that."
"And don't call him a pawn."
"I've never called him that," Mareque said, and for once there was no irony at the end of the sentence.
Clarisse left. The door behind her closed the hall's echo, and for an instant Mareque was left with the sound of the city filtering through the windows: a wind that didn't enter, a sea that wasn't there.
A crystalline trill cut the quiet. The central alcove was sealed by acoustic and anti-tracking shields: the panorama looked open, the room did not.
Before him, in the empty space between the goblets, the hologram of the Custodians of the Forge materialized. Kaellen, semi-transparent face in his silver Innesto; Theryon, incandescent amber eyes.
"Mareque," Kaellen said, cold. "The shipment. It's been taken."
The Master of Sculpture clenched his jaw. "Oh."
The Custodians' hologram flickered across the windows, the city's reflections mingling with the metallic contours of their Innesti.
Kaellen spoke first. His voice was calm, but beneath it vibrated a tension that called to mind a taut cable on the verge of snapping. "The shipment bound here to Orenor. Twelve canisters. It never arrived. Futura Life has just informed us it was taken during transit."
Mareque kept still, the smoke leaving his lips slowly, as if needing more time to understand. Then he brought a hand to his chest. "Heavens! Don't tell me… It's impossible."
"And yet it happened," Theryon cut in. His face was drawn in a bitter snarl. "Reports speak of a well-organized assault, conducted with military precision. Not two-bit mercenaries."
Mareque lowered his gaze, drew again on the inhaler, and shook his head slowly. "Such a misfortune. Barely three weeks. I had promised you the symphony would find its instrument…"
"And instead we're left with silence. Without a catalyst, the new iterations of Endalo remain on paper," Theryon snarled, fists clenched. The golden Innesto on his hands glittered, as if reacting to his anger.
Kaellen, more controlled, added: "Futura Life suspects outside interference, but provides no details. They don't want to look weak."
Mareque raised his eyes, and in his crimson pupils a glint shone that might have been indignation—or perhaps something else. "Of course they don't. They don't want it known that their secrets can be violated. But tell me, my dear Custodians, who has an interest in striking a shipment that benefits only you?"
Theryon snorted. "I could list half the galaxy. Anyone who wants to slow House Lysander."
"Ah, but wanting to slow isn't enough," Mareque replied, tilting his head slightly. "One must also have the brazenness to challenge Futura Life and the courage to draw their vengeance. Not just anyone's undertaking."
Kaellen watched him closely. "Are you suggesting you know who's behind it?"
The Master of Sculpture opened his arms, theatrical. "I don't assert, I pose questions. But tell me… who has always shown greed toward what isn't theirs? Who lives on predation and on second ranks ready to risk themselves for easy power?"
A cutting silence followed his words.
Theryon broke it first, with a low growl. "The Claws. Them again."
Mareque smiled faintly. "Exactement."
Kaellen, though more cautious, did not contradict. "It's true the opportunity fits their inclinations. But without proof…"
"Proof will come," Mareque whispered, gripping the empty goblet as though it were full. "Vultures don't know how to hide feathers stained with blood. If the shipment has ended up in their hands, their very greed will betray them."
Theryon nodded, eyes incandescent. "And when it happens, we'll tear them apart."
Mareque allowed himself a thin smile, brief enough to look like a flash of resolve, not of pleasure. "And rightly so. Don't fear, my lords: the Rouges won't let your art be defiled by such crude hands. We will stand by you when you demand reckoning."
Kaellen lowered his gaze for an instant, thinking. Then he raised it again. "Good. Then ready your artists. If this theft leads to open war, there will be no room for hesitation."
"But of course," Mareque replied, almost affectionate in tone. "Sculpture never hesitates: it strikes at the right moment, and remains eternal."
The link flickered; the Custodians' figures began to dissolve. Theryon closed it with a last growl: "Claw or not Claw, someone will pay."
The hologram vanished, leaving Mareque alone.
He finally poured the wine from the full decanter, studied it in the reflected city light, and raised it as in a silent toast. "To the roles each of us plays," he murmured. Then he drank, his crimson eyes glinting with a satisfaction that no one but the windows could witness.