The fire burned bright in the Archduchen’s room.

Nothing had been said; No more than the simple fact of Lippothalus’s return. Nothing had needed to be said. Belah had made his thoughts plain.

For all his recent failings, his head-servant knew his master’s moods well. He had not been present at dinner, nor stood by during any of Belah’s dressings to inform him of important news of the day, nor council him in matters of the servants. He had remained hidden, doubtlessly performing duties between the walls, but out of Belah’s sight. He must have known Belah would summon him when it was time.

Belah reached out and rang his bell. It was time now.

Before long, there was a knock on the door.

Renner Torvis stepped off the shuttle to the thick heat of the First World. The Ever Palace had its own Port Tower, naturally, and it more than any other in the Empire was covered with jewels, precious metals, and fine silks. He guessed that even the storage rooms and peasant rooms were covered in beautiful ornamentation.

It was a delicate line to walk; Renner wanted nothing more than to be unobtrusive in his arrival. Were this a military campaign, he would have approached under the cover of night with no more than a single band of soldiers. They could have escorted the medic Yebidesh up to the Palace walls, and slipped him through a side door, or perhaps over one of the shorter parts of the palace walls.

As it was, Renner was a Bulquis of House Torvis, and so would have been more obtrusive had he been unobtrusive. He was forced to march off his shuttle with a full retinue of soldiers in a pompous military parade, while a cluster of observing nobles and servants stood watching the arrival of one of the Empire’s favored sons.

Sen could walk again.

His legs and arms moved slowly, but without pain. His hands were still frozen, though they were as warm as the rest of his body. He could move his first finger on his left hand, and his thumb and the second and third finger of his right, but not well; and the other fingers were locked into gnarled claws.

He was surely dead.

There were still hallways, but they were warm and bright, not cold and dark. The air lacked the smells of coppery blood and frozen dead. Here, the soldiers walked and talked and laughed, not screamed or lay still with blood pouring from their wounds.

Archduke Belah Tharghem yawned lazily. The harsh sunlight of the Ever Palace shone through the break in his curtains like a burning lance.

With a slow and feeble arm, he reached out to the table at his bedside. Even before he was completely awake, he had rung the tiny bell that dangled from the hands of the small statue of a full voluptuous woman. He yawned again.

In seconds, his bedroom door opened, and a parcel of servants hobbled to his bedside. In seconds his outfit had been selected, ornamented, and sat waiting while he staggered upright, his hair was brushed, and his skin covered in perfume.

In minutes he was standing, fully dressed, and walking slowly towards his breakfast chamber. Not a single word had yet been spoken.

Had there ever been a place in the Empire that Sarisa had expected to see less than the Ever Palace?

Had she hoped to never see it? No other place in the Empire so embodied the rot, the disgust, the hate she felt for the towering machine of titles and pleasantries that had done such horrible things to her and her family.

No, there was one place that embodied it more…

“Smile, love,” Luran’s sotto voice broke through her thoughts. “Don’t give them fodder to feed on.”

It disgusted Sarisa too, how easy the fake smile was. By every right, she should have been furious, distraught, terrified…no, she should have been there. She should be with Ladymaid Aisha as the world did…whatever it did.

Raugraf Tania Maar despised negotiation. It was nothing but words covering displays of force. It was deception, begging, and the winner was the one who hid the most. It was war without the clean dividing lines of strength and strategy.

Their disc had landed on one of the free platforms of the Ever Palace’s Port Tower. The disc had held her, the Relic Keeper, and seven of the devices they had extracted from the sunken wreckage; a sampling of what remained in the hold.

Now they stood on the landing walk that separated the tower from the platform, the devices all arrayed neatly in two lines like a parade of soldiers. They glinted in the daylight, a phalanx of holy machines and ancient technology.

Mura had never seen a Vessel-ship before.

She had heard stories from her uncles and aunts who had traveled to the distant Port City. They described what glimpses they caught of ships rising into the mists, vanishing into the Velvet with a crackling hum.

When she was younger, her grandmother told her the Old Tales, until her father demanded she stop. Mura still remembered, though, the stories of monstrous wizards from behind the Aspectured Wall who traveled the Velvet in spheres of glass. She could clearly see in her mind’s eye the golden boats with silk sails all bedecked with small metal coins that drifted lazily between the ice crystals. She shivered at the idea of giant beasts with broad bodies and their barbarian riders who drove them between the Worlds.

The duties of the Quill-Servants of the Ever Palace were legion. They were the clerks, note-takers, scribes, and historians. There was never a time when there was nothing to do, and the Librarian kept all of them working like tireless ants.

Of course, they did tire — a fact the Librarian was reluctant to acknowledge — and eventually the number of mistakes and unreliable work forced the rules of the Hall of Record to change.

Every Quill-Servant had a guaranteed rest period, as well as a limit to the days spent doing a specific job. The servants were rotated between different tasks to keep their minds sharp, and they were never assigned to the same duty twice in a row, no matter the need.

You ever hear the story about pots?

It goes like this: a teacher tells one group of students they will be graded on how many pots they make in a pottery class, while another group will be graded on the quality of one pot. At the end of the semester, the best pots all came from the group being graded on number, rather than quality.

It’s a parable about quantity vs. quality, about how spending time focusing on the qualities of a single product may hamper your growth, while experience and failure can be excellent teachers. It’s about getting wrapped up in details as opposed to finishing your art and moving on. It’s beloved by all art-teachers and life-coaches and people who love quippy parables over the ugly trench-warfare of creating art.

That said, this is one of those parables that can be twisted to mean different things by adding or removing details. When I say “best pots,” for instance, what do I mean? The ones with the shiniest glazing? Most resistant to breaking? The ones voted best by the class? The ones the teacher liked the best? Adjusting or defining the term can really change the message.

The Imperial Vessel-ship Blessing of Harvest was cold. It was an odd feeling for the Bulquis Renner Torvis, who had commanded entire military campaigns from its marbled interior.

Usually the ship was quite comfortable, cool at worst. The Velvet’s winds were rarely too hot or too cold. The old Priest-sailors considered such temperatures as ill omens.

Renner stood on the Royal Balcony, staring out over the railing down towards the pale white of the Fifth World. He had heard many years ago that beyond the Aspectured Wall, the strange people named their worlds. He had thought it was an odd idea, and time had not mellowed his opinion. Perhaps, he thought, the idea held more merit when there were more than five worlds.