Our Flesh continues the Work of the Beloved One.
Our Bones protect the Legacy of the Beloved One.
Our Blood spills for the Dream of the Beloved One.

 - Organization motto of the Council.

Sai-em stood up from his seat once more. Nemira’s eyes flickered up his bronze face as he approached, a quick and furtive glance. In the center of his forehead, peeking between the strands of his dark bangs, sat a small pear-shaped stone. It possessed no polish nor shone with any inner light. It looked for all the world cut from a plain rock anyone could have picked up from the side of the road. Sai-em rarely spoke of it, and she would never bring the topic up first, but she knew what it meant. The burden foisted upon him. How it drained his pneuma down to the last glowing coals of a dying chartreuse fire. It made him a most pitiable Rhuzian. And, she thought with no small amount of guilt, a Rhuzian with too much potential ulterior motive to be completely trustworthy.

“Public Safety are weak fools who hold long grudges and a deep envy against their betters,” he told her, folding his arms across his chest and propping his hip against the counter. As casual as the pose was, he still loomed above her and did not try to hide it. It made a sharp contrast with the deferential tone he took with her. “But more importantly, Detective North called you a broad, so I thought to provoke her into a duel she would not have won.”

Nemira’s face twisted. “Terrible answer. Zero out of ten points. I’m extending your stay outside to a whole week.”

It was a poor punishment and they both knew it. Nemira possessed only a vague familiarity of the knightly orders of the League of Chivalry, but she didn’t doubt that there were plenty of members who shirked the actual work of exploring the Voidlands and chipping away at its endless supernatural dangers while living like celebrities on the renown of their title. Sai-em had done no such thing before finding his way to her. Slaying aberrants and rescuing tiny village populations and novice explorers on nothing but water, salt pork, and hardtack for days on end was his norm. A soggy week out and about in rainy downtown Coine probably would not phase him enough to quit, but another idea began to percolate in her mind as she gazed at him with a thoughtful frown. Even a stoic knight like Sai-em had to have a pain point she could stab.

“How could I have let that woman’s words go without a challenge?” asked Sai-em, more gravity to his tone now. “These Coinish humans treat you poorly.”

Nemira plopped back onto her chair. “Firstly: the average person in this city knows absolutely nothing about the Council. According to statistics as listed in the latest issue of The City-State Esoteric, twenty-two percent of the roughly two thousand poll participants believe that the Council refers to some completely unrelated government agency, eleven percent think we disbanded at the end of the Anti-Imperial Defense Campaign, and four percent assume we somehow made a mysterious fourth plane of reality and are hiding from the rest of existence in it. With those odds, Why would I expect any formalities from the Coinish? That’s silly. I don’t engage in silliness.”

She paused to pull up her legs so that she sat cross-legged in her chair and gave the knight a particularly hard glower. “Second of all: mind how much venom with which you talk about humans. Nothing good comes out of maintaining such a nasty superiority complex, you know.”

The veneer of casual haughtiness slipped off Sai-em’s unfairly good-looking face, revealing an expression that might have been close to remorse if Nemira squinted. “Forgive me, my lady summoner, I am no enemy of your species, only of any who bear you ill will. Human or nephilim, aberrant or aetherian.”

Nemira shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Once again, his words unsettled her in a way she did not want to examine at all at the moment, so she affected another scowl and skipped over them entirely. “In other words…no remorse at all for riling up those Grays?”

A smile flickered across Sai-em’s finely sculpted mouth, there and gone again in a blink. A very rarely used weapon of his, but she considered it nearly as dangerous as his sword, and not just because nephilim had particularly sharp teeth. “I let Detective North turn her back on me unscathed. No need for remorse when restraint can suffice. Your journal, my lady.”

“My what? Oh, yes.” She took the plain, leatherbound book he had scooped up with his tail and proffered to her, blinking back faint surprise. She had all but forgotten dropping the thing. It was not her journal at all, but if it had fallen open, Sai-em would have seen nothing but blank pages. She slid it down the counter so that it could stay a safe distance away from her, and did not correct him. 

Sai-em gave his scarred knuckles a crack and rolled his shoulders, which gave him the air of some sort of prize fighter about to enter the ring rather than a decorated knight. “You told the officers we’d meet them at the station in an hour, but we need not keep to so strict a schedule. When do we leave?”

“Hm…” Nemira pretended to consider the question, allowing her eyes to drift over her storefront and take her back to the past instead. A couple of weeks after the Council had informed her of how they had arranged her post-graduation life and mailed her the key to the building, she had arrived with her head whirling with plans on how to make the store her own and arms full of books and notes on how to run a business, because if she could not become a librarian she was determined to make the book shop the next best option. She had even worn herself down to the nub shadowing her mama at the apothecary during the scant bits of free time she could squeeze in while attending her last week of university just to pick up customer service tips, using up several notebook pages on a list of potential shop names whenever she had a spare moment. 

A flick of the light switch had been all it took to dash away her optimism. The bookshelves were ugly, cheap blocks of wood she would have never chosen herself, all neatly lined across the room and already packed with books she had not ordered and organized without her input. There was no furniture for guests, no decoration on the impersonal beige walls, and harsh fluorescent lights in the ceiling. There wasn’t even a cash register on the countertop. Instead, another letter bearing the seal of the Council sat upon it. She remembered opening it with shaking hands and reading its contents with burning eyes.

WELCOME TO BOOKS ON 8TH.
WORRY NOT ABOUT PATRONAGE.
YOUR LIVELIHOOD IS OURS. WE SHALL PROVIDE.
YOU NEED ONLY REST AND WAIT FOR OUR COMMAND.

She huffed out a little breath of air, a sound that hovered between a laugh and a sigh. And so, after almost a year of waiting, the Council finally deemed it time to tug on her leash. That it chafed even before the mission started did not bode well at all.

“My lady?”

Nemira looked back at him and lifted her hand. At some point during the day she had propped her torch in the far corner of the back counter space, next to the stairs that lead up to her living quarters on the second floor. It was a long length of gold-embellished wood that had been with her for many years, the spherical lantern dangling from it looking somewhat forlorn without illumination. An easy gesture of her hand lit it up, bringing to life a heavy sphere of crackling fire that danced in chilly blue-white tints and licks of dark shadows. The torch gave a shudder, snapped up on its end point, shot through the air and smacked neatly into her hand, coming just a hairbreadth from bashing Sai-em’s elbow inside-out on its trajectory toward her. He didn’t even blink.

“I’m leaving for the station right now,” she said, hauling herself out of her seat with her torch. “You are staying here and minding the store.”

Sai-em’s eyes went wide. “But I am your guard. This is your very first assignment, lady summoner. I have to go with you!”

She felt a mean little prickle of satisfaction at that. His reaction was just what she had been looking for. She covered it up with her best stern voice. “You were also a knight, Sai-em, and apparently the Grays really take exception to that. I wouldn’t let you follow me even if you had been the very definition of politeness. Stay here. I’ll take you on my next assignment instead.”

“But—”

Nemira thumped the butt of her torch upon the floor twice. “‘But’ nothing! You saw how they reacted when you said you had been knighted! I refuse to start some kind of war between the League and Public Safety by bringing you with me. Stay here, damn you.”

Sai-em’s mouth opened, then snapped shut. Mutiny roiled behind his eyes. Nemira raised her eyebrows at him and waited.

At last, he sucked a deep breath through his nose and let it back out in an exhale of defeat. “Those who attempt to follow the impossible footpaths of Our Lord in Perpetual Exile yet spare little thought to Their teachings shall return to their homes in failure and shame, but those who remain where they are and tend to God’s rest stops will always walk shoulder to shoulder with Them across all the planes of Heaven and Earth.” 

Nemira leaned on her torch and considered him with a frown. “Mm hm…And if I catch you sneaking after me despite your respectable Holya recitation skills I’ll drag you by your horns over to my parents’ place and have them babysit you until I come back, you hear?”

She had meant it mostly as a joke. She preferred not to involve her mothers with her work at the best of times, and suddenly bringing Sai-em to them as though he were some paramour she desired their approval for made her want to dry-heave. But Sai-em’s grave expression didn’t budge as he answered, “I hear the Daughter of the Necropolis and I obey.”

“Good.” She slipped past him and towards the stairs, letting the moniker go without comment. Whatever misgivings he still clearly had, she didn’t expect further pushback. A master’s word was the law of a knight. The Book of Journeys was the spiritual guide of religious Rhuzian. And Sai-em was a staunch traditionalist both ways. “I intend to wrap this whole assignment up in one go, so I’ll be heading to Central Ward after I’m done at the public safety department. There’s plenty of leftover food in the ice cabinet. Don’t stay up for me and feel free to wash in my bathroom instead of going to a bath house tonight.”

Sai-em bowed his head as she walked away, and said nothing.