Balif

Balif came to the Supreme Ruler’s court in the season the ruler’s consort died, offered his service to a grieving household, and never went back to the Arcanum Arcanorum that had sent him. He had known her. He stayed for the infant daughter she left behind, and for the whole of that child’s growing he was her tutor, her protector and the nearest thing she had to a second father. Much later, and with far less success, he was the closest thing the court had to an investigator: he spent four years assembling the case that the Gilded Coven had tried to have its sovereign killed, and never finished that either.

He raised Zarina by arguing with her. He gave her history as a quarrel rather than a list of dates, taught her to spot an altered map and a forged seal, and told her that licking an unidentified substance was not acceptable scholarship, which he reminded her of for years afterwards. He let her ask the questions the court tutors called inappropriate — whether a princess married off for peace had liked the man — and answered them honestly enough to make the room uncomfortable. He gave her a punishing book every birthday and pretended not to notice that she watered a plant he had let die. When his eyes began to fail she arranged the reading lenses through her father and denied doing it. He was the one who could tell her that her mother sang badly and cheated at dice, because he had known the woman before she was anybody’s queen, and Zarina noticed only that he went quiet whenever she was mentioned.

He also told the first lie. When he found out she had left the palace at night without guards, he did not shout and he did not report it. He asked her why, and she told him the truth — that she had wanted to be among people without being Zarina — and he understood it, which was worse than disapproval. He said that if she ever felt she could not stay, she was to come to him first, because he would rather she was angry with him than missing. Then he kept it from her father. He believed he was protecting what was between them. He had in fact begun the habit that would cost all three of them everything. He was repaid for it within the month. When she came to him after ruining the Saren family with a kindness, he told her the true thing — that there was no version of it she could have done as herself — and she heard the council in it, and told him he was her father’s man too. He answered that he had been her father’s man for twenty years, that he had come for her mother and stayed for her, and that she could decide which of those made him so. They mended it badly, over a game of stones, with nothing said. She never came to him first again.

The Arcanum had taught him that truth is rarely hidden by darkness and is very often buried beneath too many versions of the same event, and he brought to the palace an irritating preference for asking why several facts agreed too neatly. He was sixty-eight the year the decree was issued and past seventy by the time he closed a document case on everything he had failed to prove, white-haired, long-bearded, and well beyond the age at which the Arcanum expects its people to stop doing their own asking in person. He dressed as he always had — practical layers, narrow sleeves, pockets hidden everywhere — and the court tailors gave up. He carried folders under one arm and a cup of something that had stopped steaming hours earlier, and drank from it anyway, and regretted it. He entered rooms without ceremony, including the ruler’s.

He found it first in a pamphlet. Seven hundred and forty thousand, printed in a merchant tract in one city and again in a private Merent report the throne should have been the only other holder of — the same figure, rounded wrong the same way. It proved nothing. So did everything after it: forged requisitions with valid seals, grain redirected into warehouses belonging to a cooperative financed by a house that owed money to Merent, a lamp-oil order altered by a man nobody could name. He covered a wall of his office with the connections and most of them ended in question marks, and when the Supreme Ruler asked how much of it was real he said he did not know, and that this was the problem. He could show twelve incidents that benefited Gilded interests, eight officials with Gilded ties, six newspapers using arguments that had originated in Coven documents, and not one order saying: do this.

He was also the reason the ruler survived the western balcony. He disliked that balcony and had said so for no better reason than that it shook, and on the morning of the address he noticed a crack along the underside of the outer support, put his hand against the column, and watched dust come away. He got the words out perhaps four seconds before the front half of the structure went into the courtyard. Lying on the floor afterwards with the ruler winded beside him, he asked whether it still did not shake, and then apologised.

What followed was a catalogue of people who could not help him. A mason named Jorven Kale, who had signed for a repair he never made, found beaten half to death by someone the Coven itself had not sent. A stablemaster who filed through a carriage pin, panicked, told his wife, and was dead off a warehouse roof before anyone reached him. A frightened man named Terik Vann who described a black-and-gold ring and said he had only been told to make sure the ruler went down the west trail, and who was poisoned inside a guarded military post. Balif read the message twice and sat alone for a long time.

He kept one source outside the palace: Iven Marr of the Arcanum, who did not like him, which was the point. Iven traced the ink, and later produced payment schedules matching Gilded money against the dates of attempts, and then refused to let him keep a copy. The Arcanum sealed them instead. Balif argued that records nobody can reach are not records; he had made the same argument to the throne about proof, and it was not easier to hear from the other side.

He never learned that some of the attempts had been spoiled by people who were not his. He blamed bureaucracy for a route that became inconvenient at exactly the right moment, and bureaucracy was innocent.

He kept his own notes. Some he destroyed, some he copied by hand, some he hid among records that appeared unrelated. What he had at the end was fragments, suspicions, and names he could not prove belonged together, and he closed the clasp on the case containing all of it.