He had dark brown skin, slightly wrinkled like a man in his fifties, and silver at the wings of his black, short hair. He was trim and solidly built, with a square jaw; as a girl, she would have said he looked like a soldier. Only his eyes stood out, blazing a brighter violet than the celestial lenses around him, as he watched Fate.
“Suriel,” he said, and his voice resonated through the room. “Will you verify for the record that Ozriel is dead?”
Her Presence had prepared her for this. Suriel had not told Sector Twenty-one the story of the survivors she’d pulled from Ozriel’s shelter, but Makiel’s mandate included watching the past as well as the future. Her actions would have alerted him, and he would be able to piece together a picture of the truth, even from the ashes of a dead world.
“I cannot,” she responded, finally settling down on the tiled floor. “I am not myself convinced.” She could feel the energy passing through the circle beneath her feet, urging her to gaze into the future.
Makiel’s hands were still a blur, eyes fluttering into existence and then vanishing several times a second. He didn’t seem to be looking at her, but she knew he saw everything. “Yet he was already missing. Why stage his death?”
The First Judge would have considered all the possibilities already. He was asking her for her opinion, so she gave it.
“To encourage us to look for a replacement,” she said. “He has left us in a scenario where we have no choice but to act as though he is dead. He may have thought that we would simply wait for him to return, even as the cosmos crumbled around us.”
[Based on models of Ozriel’s personality, this explanation is sixty-two percent convincing,] her Presence told her. [And only eighteen percent likely to be the sole explanation.]
Makiel’s hands paused for half a second, and she felt a ripple in Fate as possibilities began tumbling like a handful of dice. For her to feel such a working even in the midst of his normal activity meant he had exerted himself. To check something, or to change something? She would have to investigate later.
“It seems your task has ended, Suriel,” he said at last. “That took much less time than I anticipated. Ninety-two out of a hundred projections had you on his trail for decades.”
Her own predictions had suggested as much. “And a twelve percent chance of finding him eventually,” she added. “In those cases, I had a ninety-one percent chance of persuading him to return. How were your odds?”
Makiel gestured, and his Presence stopped manifesting. The arc of eyeballs in front of him vanished, with a single purple eye hovering over his shoulder just as the gray ghost hovered on Suriel’s. The celestial lenses in the room all remained frozen in the air, emitting violet light and flickering with images and scrolling numbers.
His eyes blazed as he faced her, crossing his hands behind his back. “Tell me. What were you doing in Harrow?”
Anger flooded her system, but she flushed it out. He was provoking her, just as Gadrael had when he had sent her to Harrow. On Makiel’s orders.
“Is the Hound’s eye so blind that he can no longer see his own actions?”
“Gadrael was ordered to show you the cost of Ozriel’s absence. You chose to stay and cleanse the world yourself.”
Which he had surely known she would do, but she remained silent. She would not give him excuses.
“It only cost you a handful of standard months, but those were months in which you were not seeking Ozriel. That you stumbled on evidence of him was due to his foresight, not your own success as a hunter. And where were you before that?”
It was dangerous, here in the heart of Makiel’s power, but she couldn’t let him play her like a puppet. She activated her eyes and scanned Fate.
Immediately, she saw where he was headed with this line of questioning. He hadn’t bothered to hide it. Her stomach twisted, and her anger gained greater heat before she choked it off.
“You were in Cradle,” he continued, overlooking her glimpse into the future. “Where you knew you would not find Ozriel, because he could not hide there. He would have a better chance of hiding in Sanctum itself than in Cradle, but you knew you had a plausible excuse for checking his home world.”
“I want to restore the Abidan,” she said, her power crackling blue in the air between them. “You have been tearing the wound deeper for centuries.”
She was trying to distract him, to pull him away from his plan, but he remained doggedly focused. “You went to Cradle for a breath of fresh air, to consider your options, to decide if you wanted to hunt Ozriel at all. Convenient, then, that your search has ended before you ever started looking for him.”
He would go on for another minute if she didn’t stop him. He would say that she had been manipulated by the Reaper, and allowed him his freedom. That if Ozriel was still on their side, he would have told Suriel before his departure. She was his closest friend on the Court, after all. There was no need to hide it from her, and then place an elaborate distraction to keep her from looking for him.
He was controlling her. Looking down on her. Exploiting her sympathy.
That was the Hound’s objective. Since she couldn’t deflect him, she cut straight to it. “If he didn’t want me looking for him, there were easier ways to stop me.”
“He knew you could find him,” Makiel said. “Your odds of finding him must have been much higher without this plan. Since I didn’t know about his fake death scene, I couldn’t factor it into my projections. He blinded me, and he kept you sidetracked.”
“Then he succeeded. I’m returning to my division.” She tapped into the Way, preparing to depart directly. Leaving this way was disrespectful, but she was beyond caring. She always left Makiel irritated if not disgusted. He had only summoned her here to produce the results he wanted, and then he had the nerve to accuse someone else of manipulation.
The worst part was, he was probably right. Ozriel could have warned her about his departure, but he hadn’t. He had moved her like a pawn to be manipulated.
She would feel better if he really were dead.
“The quarantine,” Makiel said, before she left. “I would like your vote.”
“Ozriel said he left a total of sixteen shelters,” she said, light tearing into a blue-edged portal overlooking Iteration 001: Sanctum. “Evacuate the other fifteen, prepare those worlds for corruption, and you have my vote.”
“Already done.” When she turned back to the portal, he continued. “Now, let’s talk about the changes you made to Cradle.”
Behind her, all the screens vanished except one, which swelled to take up the whole wall.
It showed Wei Shi Lindon. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with short black hair and his expression locked in a glower. He looked sullen even when he was fast asleep, and she knew his face alone had provoked more than one fight.
That face was even more unpleasant now.
His eyes were solid black but for the irises, which were solid red. They shone as black fire gathered within his hands. He was practicing a new Path.
[The Path of Black Flame,] her Presence supplied. [Its sacred artists imitate the power of a tribe of black dragons.]
Suriel didn’t care about those details at the moment. Why had Makiel shown her this?
She turned, allowing her portal to close.