The Overcouncil had been protected by a full Sevenfold, and it had availed nothing against treachery.
Ilv had begun in the wonder-mines, the shafts sunk into the wormy soil where the ancient crystal cities of the wizards had perished; put in her time and sweat, digging out inexhaustible power cores that nobody since knows how to build. There are terrible things in the crystal-strewn dark; worse than cave-ins and miasma, quickdamp and flooding. Strange creatures generated by arcane exposure. Ancient things still functioning, inexplicable or all-too-obvious, or malfunctioning; munitions from the city-smashing finale, unexploded or simply eternally malicious. Pockets of fractured time. Ribbons of mutilated gravity. Once she came across a sphere of impenetrable magical stasis, flung up a fraction of a second too late, perfectly preserving the moment of death of the wizard inside who cast it, and the skinless burning children huddled forever behind her.
Ilv made foreman. Ilv attended the deliberations of the work council. Ilv made councilmember; muddied her hands with the necessity of compromise, of decisions with no good answer. She almost misses the shafts, burning children and all; but she makes hard choices, and she stands firm about them, mistakes and all, sets her sights on what she believes she can achieve — for her foremen and her miners and their families and children, for the traders who carry the cores away to be incorporated into contemporary infrastructure, for the far-away workers under other work councils whose goods the traders bring to them.
Ilv was elected to be the work council’s representative at the Overcouncil. An honour. Also a way of punishing her, of putting her far away, by the people who don’t care for her. Grimly, she went; to do her best, amidst popinjays and politicians, agendas she couldn’t fathom and base corruptions she all-too-familiarly could.
She’d been there five weeks when the coup came. Plotters and patsies, calling themselves the Fifth Conclave on Perpetual Revolution, decrying process and compromise as counter-revolutionary excuses for the world not being as it ought to be.
Ilv began in a mine. A fucking hole in the ground. She knows what’s real, and what’s real is that the world doesn’t give a shit, that natural justice isn’t, that nothing comes for free; everything has to be laboured for, crafted, sweated over. She’s not put her shoulder to the wheels of bureaucracy this long because she thinks it’s perfect; it’s because the miner can’t eat bread without the baker baking it, and the baker can’t bake bread without fuel for his oven, and even in the most ideal instance the fuel flows from an ancient and inexhaustible power core, and that doesn’t come without a miner digging it up. And a municipal planner picking a safe site for it, and builders building it a little hut, and power-wizards hooking it up inside, and so on and so on and so on. Work is real. People are real. Getting along is real, and also takes work; resenting the work, and the time and labour the work take, is understandable. Ilv does, surely; but she knows the alternative is not simply do away with it. The alternative is things going to shit until somebody else does the fucking work, which nobody will be happy with then, either, except in comparison to it not getting done.
It’s a stupid children’s story for most of the Overcouncil to be murdered over, and five of their Sevenfold of wizards. The power wizard, the symbol-wizard, the geomancer, and the saltwitch fell before powder and shot; the artisan of the Chaos Science volleyed toe-to-toe with an arcane peer the rebels brought with them, and both perished screaming. The breathwyrd, Ilv saw nothing of the end of; she went absent minutes before misrule reigned. Complicit, then, probably.
Ilv seized the shoulder of the celatumancer’s coat and practically scruffed her into the Overcouncil chambers’ discreet exit passageways. They haven’t been officially termed an escape route for decades of stability, but the building is old enough that it’s unambiguously what they are. The loyal and the surprised whittled down around them as they fled, they made it to the river tunnels and a little boat; skulked and splashed their way away and into the wilderness.
Now they shiver in a derelict cottage in the dark.
“If we don’t risk lighting a fire,” the mage says, teeth chattering, “we might well not make the morning. We’re not dressed for this, and we have no supplies.”
No firewood, either, but they scrape together enough broken furniture and wooden fixtures to arrange in the long-cold hearth, without stumbling around in the night outside. The mage stoops by the stacked fuel, whispers something to it; flame licks at the base of the fire.
The celatumancer is the path, among the Seven, which derives power from secrets. As they huddle, animal close beneath the one cloak they have between them, pooling what warmth their bodies possess, Ilv wonders what passed the mage’s quiet lips; what confidence the kindling was combusted by.
