Last First Snow by Max Gladstone

replied, earnest, slow, calm.
    Neither noticed the Wardens crossing the street, or the red-arms who blocked the Wardens’ path, shoulders square, jaws jutting. Chel shouted, “Stand down!” but the red-arms didn’t listen. A Warden drew her club.
    Elayne moved without moving.
    Shadow boiled from the ground. Solid winds thrust red-arms and Wardens apart.
    Elayne tossed one of the red-arms six feet into the air and passed beneath him into the road. She blazed, grown large in glyphlight. The Wardens recoiled from her, and raised their weapons with the uncertainty of foxes before a bear.
    She let her shadows fade. Frost on stone sublimated to steam. Sunlight slunk back like a kicked dog. “There is no trouble here.” She floated them a business card. “I work for the King in Red. A boy was hurt in an accident. Send for a doctor.”
    Their blank eyes reflected her. A Warden wearing officer’s bars recovered his composure first. “We need to see for ourselves.”
    â€œFollow me, then,” she said. “You alone. The situation is tense.”
    The officer waved his fellows back, and followed Elayne. A scarred giant with a red armband blocked their way. Elayne was about to make the giant move, before Chel grabbed his arm. “Zip. Don’t.”
    He stepped aside.
    A rumble of distant thunder followed the Warden through the crowd. Temoc turned to meet him. “There is no crime here.”
    â€œI’ll judge that.”
    â€œThe boy fell,” he said. “This man shoved him by accident, and broke his leg. These two are his parents. A fight ensued. That is all.”
    The Warden stepped past Temoc to address the men. “Is this true?”
    Veins stood out on Temoc’s neck, but he kept quiet. Elayne marveled to see such control so near to breaking.
    But it held.
    Wardens wheeled a stretcher through the crowd. Elayne did not like how fast the stretcher came—it implied the Wardens expected trouble. No one wanted to press charges with Temoc watching. The boy and his fathers went with the Wardens, and Temoc turned to the remaining brawlers with a gaze that drained color from their faces.
    But Elayne saw the fear under Temoc’s rage. This might have been the breaking point. A brawl between red-arms and Wardens would spread, and the whole square catch fire.
    She took that fear with her when she left. And she took, too, a broadsheet she found near the fight, which bore an etching of Chakal Square beneath a blocky one-word headline: “Rise.”

 
    14
    In the heart of Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao’s office pyramid, a golem sat in a steel chair behind a steel desk in a cork-walled room and sipped a mug of steaming coffee through a straw. False stars shone around him: light from the ghostlamp on his desk glittered off tacks pinning alchemical prints to the walls. Yarn and wire tied pins to pins, pictures to pictures: a bridge in Shikaw to a Southern Gleb tribesman bleeding out from a lion attack, the claw marks in the tribesman’s back to a teenage girl in a floral print dress with white lace at collar and cuffs, her right eye to a reproduction of a Schwarzwald painting a century and a half old, some ancient family standing before a castle in the depths of a wood—three bearded elders, a small round woman carved from ivory, a young man in a billowing shirt with a smile bent as an old druid’s sickle. And another twenty lines spread from that man, from the curve of his smile, some weaving back to Shikaw and the bridge, and others off to still more distant lands and interlocking wheels of yarn. Thousands of pictures, and these were only the top layer: more beneath, long faded, the string in some cases thrice rotted and replaced by wire.
    In that cork-lined room, silent and swift, the golem worked. Four-armed, with its upper limbs it lifted newspapers in many languages from the stack beside the desk, and with its thick manipulators turned the