This Is How You Lose the Time War

Your talk of ideographic signatures and operational security brought to mind some grooming work I did among a few strands’ worth of Bess of Hardwick’s botanists. While there it was my pleasure to observe correspondence between them and their Lady; just how layered and complex plain speech could be, how many secrets wrapped in the banner of Sincerity (a word commonly invented in sixteenth centuries). Even that ideographic signature could easily be a lie, of course: counterfeit stamps, sealed letters hidden under separate cover, the wrong colour of wax or silk flossing. How much glorious double-talk took place while Mary, Queen of Scots, was under her roof! I assure you that cryptography pales in comparison; imagine a cipher made up of interlocking moods shifting in response to environmental stimuli.

Also, standardized spelling wasn’t yet a feature of English. Forging someone’s handwriting was wasted effort if you didn’t also learn their idiosyncratic orthography. Funnily enough, that would prove to be the undoing of latter-century forgers. Chatterton, that Marvellous Boy, et cetera.

We make so much of lettercraft literal, don’t we? Whacked seals aside. Letters as time travel, time-travelling letters. Hidden meanings.

I wonder what you see me saying here.

Absent from your mention of food—so sweet, so savoury—was any mention of hunger. You spoke of the lack of need, yes—no lion in pursuit, no “animalist procreative desperation,” and these lead to enjoyment, certainly. But hunger is a many-splendoured thing; it needn’t be conceived only in limbic terms, in biology. Hunger, Red—to sate a hunger or to stoke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth—is this a thing you, singly, know? Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out?

Sometimes I think that’s what I have instead of friends.

I hope it isn’t too hard to read this. Best I could do on short notice—hope it reaches you before the island breaks around you.

Write to me in London next.

Blue

* * *

London Next—the same day, month, year, but one strand over—is the kind of London other Londons dream: sepia tinted, skies strung with dirigibles, the viciousness of empire acknowledged only as a rosy backdrop glow redolent of spice and petalled sugar. Mannered as a novel, filthy only where story requires it, all meat pies and monarchy—this is a place Blue loves, and hates herself for loving.

She sits in a Mayfair teahouse, in a corner, back to the wall with one eye on the door—some spycraft rules transcend both time and space—and the other on a stylised map of the New World. She finds it slightly incongruous—the teahouse favours a decidedly Orientalist aesthetic—but eclecticism is one of the many things Blue cherishes about the fibres of this particular strand.

Her hair now is black and thick and long, deftly styled into a high chignon girdled in braids, carefully twisted curls clustering at her nape, drawing attention to the length and slope of her neck. Her dress is modest and neat, not quite at the cutting edge of fashion; it’s been a couple of years since the Princess line was new, but she suits it in charcoal grey. She is not here to play a role; she is here to be invisible.

She has observed, with pleasure, the very fine china of which the establishment boasts: Meissen’s Ming Dragon, sinuous as arteries, persimmon bright against gilt-edged bone white. She looks forward to her own pot, anticipates the dark, smoky, malty path her chosen tea will pick between the notes of candied rose, delicate bergamot, champagne and muscat and violet.

Her server arrives, quietly, unobtrusively laying out the Meissen tiered cake tray, teapot, sugar bowl. As she settles the teacup on its saucer, however, Blue’s hand snaps out to circle her retreating wrist. The server looks terrified.

“This set,” says Blue, adjusting, softening her eyes into kindness, her grip into a caress, “is mismatched.”

“I’m so sorry, miss,” says the server, biting her lip. “I’d already made the pot, but the cup was cracked, and I thought you’d not want to wait longer for your tea, and all the other sets were spoken for on account of it’s a busy time of day, but if you’re happy to wait I could—”

“No,” she says, and her smile is like clouds parting; the withdrawal of her hand into her lap is an erasure, a thing the server imagined, surely, this woman is a perfect picture of a lady, “it’s very beautiful. Thank you.”

The server ducks her head and retreats back into the kitchen. Blue stares intently at the teacup, its saucer and spoon: Blue Italian, classical figures harvesting grain, carrying water forever beneath the rim.

She pours her tea, delicately, without straining the leaves. She lifts her teaspoon to the light—can see that it’s coated with a downthread substance she thinks she recognises but sniffs to be sure. She wills herself not to look around, commands every atom of her body into stillness, forbids the need to leap into the kitchen and pursue and hunt and catch—

Instead, she stirs the spoon, empty, into the tea, and watches as the leaves unclump, swirl, spindle into letters. Each rotation is slow, and she marks paragraph breaks with small sips; every sip undoes the letters until she swirls them into meaning again.

Briefly she wonders if the hardness in her throat is poison, her inability to swallow around it anaphylactic. This does not frighten her.

She closes her eyes against the alternative, which does.

When the tea and letter are finished, clumps remain; she reads the dregs as a postscript. Easy enough to do when the New World map matches it so precisely; easy to read the discrepancy as direction.

She dabs at her mouth, lifts the teacup, places it upside down beneath the boot of her heel, and grinds it so hard and swift that its destruction makes no sound.

After she’s gone, the seeker, dressed as help, armed with dustpan and brush, collects the remnants, gathers them like rosebuds. When she is out of sight, she cuts the mix of clay and bone and leaf into three tidy lines, tightly rolls up a bank note, and inhales sharply enough to feel smoke behind her eyes.

* * *

Dearest 0000FF,

Common cause on Atlantis—who would have thought? I suppose no thread’s one thing; they train us full confident in that knowledge. Each has facets, hooks, barbs, useful in different ways, depending on articulation. The novice believes a single change will make a thread thus, or thus. An event—an invasion or a spasm or a sigh—is like a hammer: one side blunt and perfect for driving nails, the other clawed to pry them free. And, like hammers, you store Atlantises out of sight when not in use: stick ’em in a drawer somewhere safe till the next need comes around.

I wonder, in that light, how much of your work has helped me, and the other way round—a question beyond my calculative capacity. I’d ask the Chaos Oracle, but I have enough trouble with the higher-ups at present. I had to step fast after your last letter caught me napping. Commandant wanted explanations, as Commandant tends to, after the sinking island took so many treasures with it. A brief lapse in efficiency, according to the Agency’s models, but well within tolerance considering my track record. But added to the inroads your side’s made against our more exposed deep-cover teams—well, I shouldn’t talk shop. What a bore, your tea salon pals would say.