The gate district of Tyriana smelled more diffrently than port vexis.
There were no fisjy odor, Lucid had passed those stalls on his way out of this territory the first time and had not thought about them since.
He thought about them now because the smell was the same and the stalls were still there and the woman behind the nearest one was still using the same oil she had been using then, which suggested either loyalty to a supplier or an inability to smell what her customers smelled.
Gerald walked beside him. Gerald always walked like he was arriving somewhere important, which made it difficult to tell when he actually was.
"You will find, I think, that the upper district has seen certain improvements since your last visit," Gerald said. "Infrastructure, primarily. The governor has been very invested in the concept of infrastructure. He mentions it frequently. More frequently than most people mention anything."
"Good for him," Lucid said.
"I thought you might say something like that."
Gerald had been like this since they left the carriage. Every sentence arriving with that particular formal weight that managed to sound like a compliment and an insult at the same time, the phrasing too precise, the pauses too considered. Lucid had met people who talked that way when they were nervous. Gerald did not seem nervous. He seemed like someone who had decided a long time ago that this was simply how talking worked and had not revisited the decision.
'He was in the Remembrance,' Alice said inside him, her voice quieter than usual, carrying the careful precision she used when she was flagging something she considered significant. 'The Omega rift. You know him from there.'
Lucid did not respond to that. He kept his eyes on the road ahead, on the gate district's stone archway that separated the lower market from the upper residential district, and on the gap between what he remembered about this territory and what he was currently looking at. The archway was the same. The buildings on the other side had been repainted. Someone had added lamp posts at intervals that were almost but not quite evenly spaced, which suggested either a measurement error or a deliberate choice by someone who found perfect symmetry uncomfortable.
He had not said Gerald's name since they met. He had not confirmed anything. He was fairly certain Gerald knew that he knew, and equally certain that Gerald found this situation more amusing than anything else, and he was not going to give him the satisfaction of naming it first.
'You are being stubborn,' Alice observed.
'I am being careful,' he thought back.
'Those are sometimes the same thing.'
They reached the archway. The gate itself was open, which it apparently always was during daylight hours, and a single guard sat in a chair beside it reading something he turned face-down when they approached. Lucid looked at the face-down document for a moment longer than he needed to.
"How is the governor?" he asked Gerald. "Or the mayor. Whatever he is calling himself."
"Administrator is the current preferred title," Gerald said. "The governor does not care for mayor. He finds it reductive. The administrator is well. Occupied. He has been occupied consistently for the past several months, which I understand is a significant improvement over being unoccupied."
"Right."
They moved through the archway and into the upper district.
The manor sat at the end of a road that was wider than the streets around it, which meant it had been planned rather than grown. Lucid had been in this road once before and had not paid close attention to it. He paid attention now. The lamp posts continued up here at the same almost-even intervals. There were trees that were too young to have been here on his last visit, planted in rows along both sides, the kind of planting that was less about shade and more about saying something.
A man appeared at the manor steps before they had covered half the distance.
Lucid stopped walking.
He had not expected to recognize anyone standing at those steps. He recognized this person. The recognition arrived before he could organize a response to it, before he could decide how to hold his face, and for a half second he was just standing in the road looking at someone he had not expected to be here.
Gerald, beside him, said nothing. He was probably enjoying it.
"You look surprised," Jane said, from the top of the steps. "That is flattering, actually."
"What are you doing here?" Lucid asked.
"Standing on steps," Jane said. "Currently. What are you doing here?"
Lucid started walking again. Jane came down the steps to meet them, and they fell into step together through the manor's front entrance, which was large enough to be impressive without being large enough to be genuinely inconvenient, which suggested someone had thought about it.
The interior smelled of the pastries from the market below. Not strongly. The kind of smell that came from a window left open in the direction of the lower district at the right time of day. There were paintings on the walls that Lucid did not look at because he was looking at the room itself, at the scale of it, at the way the floor had been recently cleaned but the ceiling had not, which meant someone had been cleaning things that visitors looked at and not things they did not.
A door at the far end of the room opened.
Karmen walked in.
Lucid had thought about this. He had thought about it on the carriage, in the hours after he set the course, and then again in the hours before they arrived, and he had organized several possible versions of this moment in his mind. In most of them he said something. In a few of them he said something that landed the way he wanted it to.
He did not say anything.
Karmen looked at him. Lucid looked at Karmen. The room was quiet enough that the distant sound of the market came through from somewhere, faint and unrelated.
"Save the greeting," Lucid said. "Whatever you have prepared."
Gerald cleared his throat. "Is that how you address the administrator?"
"It is how I address him," Lucid said.
Jane appeared behind Karmen's shoulder. Lucid did not understand how she had managed that. She had been at the front door thirty seconds ago. The manor was not small. He looked at the door she had not come through, then at the door Karmen had come through, then at Jane, who looked back at him with an expression that did not offer any explanation.
He filed it away.
Karmen gestured toward a side room and they moved into it, a smaller space with a table and chairs and a window that faced a courtyard rather than the street. Someone had put food on the table. Bread and pastry and something in a covered dish that turned out to be a preserved meat of a type Lucid did not recognize but which tasted like something adjacent to pork. He ate some of it standing because no one had specifically told him to sit and the chair nearest him had a stack of documents on it that he would have had to move.
Gerald sat. Jane sat. Karmen remained standing at the window.
"You came without notifying us," Karmen said.
"I noticed," Lucid replied.
"The course change was flagged. We became aware of your direction approximately six hours before arrival."
"Six hours."
"The monitoring infrastructure in the southern passage is more extensive than it was during your last transit. An improvement."
Gerald looked at the ceiling briefly.
Lucid ate more of the unidentified meat and looked at the covered dish. There had been more of it than he had taken. He considered taking more and decided to wait.
"There was something in the lower district," he said. "On the way up. A stall. Pastries."
"There are several," Gerald said.
"One of them was using an oil I remember. Same smell. Same everything."
"Regional supplier," Karmen said. "Consistent for twenty-three years, I understand. The administrator before the previous administrator established the contract."
Lucid looked at him. "You know the supplier history for a pastry stall."
"I know the supplier history for most things in this district," Karmen said. "It is not interesting. It is thorough."
The room settled into a quiet that was not exactly comfortable and not exactly the other thing either.
Lucid set down the plate he had been holding. "The puppet," he said.
Karmen's eyes moved from the window to him. Not quickly. The kind of movement that happened after something had already been decided.
"The mechanical figure," Lucid said. "The one used at the Transcendence."
The room was quiet. Jane had stopped moving. Gerald was looking at the table.
Karmen said, "A technological advancement."
He said it the way people said things they had prepared to say. Not rehearsed. Prepared. There was a difference. Rehearsed things sounded smooth. Prepared things sounded like exactly what they were, a decision made in advance about what the answer was going to be, regardless of the question.
Lucid looked at him.
Karmen did not look away.
The market sounds came through the window, faint and entirely unrelated to anything happening in this room.