“I wanted to see if you needed help with anything.” In truth, she wasn’t sure what had driven her downstairs. It wasn’t as if she could share her good news with him. “Hey, I decided not to steal from you and betray you after all!” That would have been a great way to start a conversation. But it was why she’d wanted to see him; she’d made her decision, and it had made her happy. However, it was a happiness she could not share with him. “You know, get something for you, or just pester you while you work.”
“No, I don’t think I need anything like that,” Belamy said with a soft smile. He threw his hands over his head and turned back toward the staircase.
“What are you doing, anyway?” Skate put her legs back under her and stood up, taking a step away from the fire. The logs had caught and were starting to burn with their bright blue waves of heat.
“Getting prepared. I have magic, but I can’t rely on that alone. How did that brigand Tillby put it? ‘Fortune favors the ready.’ Something like that. And he’s right. So, I need to get ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“War.” He walked downstairs without looking back at her.
Skate took a step to follow, but decided that was a stupid thing to do, given the choking fumes. Instead, she took the stairs upward and went into the library. There, Rattle and Petre were reading in their usual position on the small table against the wall. She walked over and brushed Rattle’s legs aside to see the page they were examining. The legs made a sound like rocks tumbling down a metal tube.
The letters on the page were not anything she could identify. They must have been Elvish, she decided. The unknown letters flowed and drifted together in a more intricate way than the letters she could read, and were far less blocky than the runes the dwarves used. She put a hand on Petre’s sphere. His eyes flowed into view, looking at the book.
“What is this?” she asked, giving the unreadable words another cursory, polite glance.
“It’s a political treatise written by an elven philosopher comparing the benefits of taking consideration for the self above all others and of taking a more altruistic approach to decision-making when it comes to making choices on behalf of a nation or kingdom.”
Skate smiled at this response, struck by how wonderful it was to know these two—to eat Rattle’s food, and to learn of stories and history and philosophy from Petre. Watching them further convinced her that she could not throw this all away, even for the Ink.
The gang wouldn’t be happy about it. BB wouldn’t especially.
Her smile faded. The Big Boss wouldn’t be happy to hear of it at all. He was expecting a lich delivered into the hands of a subordinate tomorrow. When he learned he wouldn’t be getting one, he’d be furious. A furious man might lash out at those around him, and assign blame where it didn’t belong, like on Boss Marshall’s head. She didn’t want him hurt over any of this. Her—and by extension, his—recent acquisition of Gherun as a paying customer might help smooth over any disappointment. That’s loads of free money each month that they didn’t have before, right?
“Blade for your thoughts.” Petre was watching her, an eyebrow arched. “You seem unusually pensive.”
“Just thinking about the past. And you don’t have any money.”
“You’re right about that. At the moment, I don’t have a copper coin to my name. Or a body for that matter. What holds your attention in the past?”
Skate sighed. “How you can’t change it. How it’s part of who we are, whether we know it or not.” She couldn’t deny that the Ink would always be a part of her—literally, with regard to the tattoo on her back—and that it had brought her to where she was. But if staying with it meant throwing Belamy into slavery, she had to move on.
Petre was silent now, his gaze in the blue haze far away; he might have been looking at the book, but it seemed he was looking beyond it. Rattle’s legs clicked idly as it floated, sounding like a wind chime in a breeze.
When Petre spoke, his voice was thoughtful and low. “It binds us. It controls us. It shapes our every move. And it’s not even real.” Now it was Skate’s turn to look curious. Petre’s tone lifted a bit, becoming more energized at the apparent challenge of her questioning stare. “It’s not. Think of it a moment: what’s the most real of the three—past, present, or future?”
“They’re all real.”
“Oh, really? Can you do anything with any of them? Interact with any of them but the present?”
The conversation had taken a rather sudden and bewildering turn. “Uhh.” Skate shrugged. “No? I can’t go to the past, or to the future. It’s just always now.”
“Exactly my point. The future is speculation and guessing, hope and fear, but not tangible, not experienced, not real. And the past is nothing but memory and records. It did happen, but it is no longer real, just as the future will certainly happen but is not yet real. You see?”
“No.” The discussion had become immensely confusing, but Skate was almost certain what Petre was saying was nonsense. “No,” she said again, “the past is real because it happened. We know it happened.”
“But it’s not happening now,” he said, leaning on the final word with a hint of exasperation. “That’s what I mean. Of course it happened, when it was now, and of course the future will happen—when it becomes now. That’s what I mean by the past being unreal—it’s not real in the same way that now is.”
“Oookay,” she said, shaking her head at the dizzying pace and direction of the topic at hand. “So what? What’s it matter that the past isn’t the same as the present? Does that mean it doesn’t matter?”
“No, never that. It matters immensely. As you said, it brought us to now, and there’s no changing that fact. We all owe our existence to the past, one way or the other. That was my whole point: it’s insane that we rely so much on something that’s not real, and that it has such power over everything.”
“So we should…what, ignore it? Pretend it doesn’t matter?” She was guessing at the tilt of the train of thought, but immediately found the flaw in her own estimation.
Petre seemed to see in her face what she had realized, and his smile reached his eyes to give them a point at each corner. “Never that, either. I’m in here because of the past. I will not leave here because of the past. It matters immensely to me that the past should hold a great authority over the affairs of mortals like you and me. We cannot escape it.” He looked away again, his stare growing distant. “We should not seek to. To do so would be to lose who we are.”
The pronouncement hung in the air, unanswered and unanswerable, because Skate did not know how to even begin interacting with the ideas wrapped up in the statement. Rattle’s legs continued their gentle clicking.
Skate shook her head. The Ink, the past, and her relation to both were swimming and mingling in her head so freely that she feared she’d never be able to sort them out without long hours of further mind-boggling discussion and self-exploration. “What did the elves have to say on the matter?” she said, pointing to the open book on the table.