Over the next two days Elaine worked through nearly every method she could think of, trying to turn herself back into a man.
She began by staring into the mirror for half a morning, then touched the white lines left on the back of her hand and across her chest over and over, and even imitated the people she remembered using Relics, concentrating her attention on the mirror's surface. Nothing happened.
The girl in the mirror matched her movements exactly throughout, raising a hand, blinking, turning, with none of that uncanny blankness from the cellar, nor any other change.
As for the white lines under the skin, they grew fainter by the day, and by the morning of the third only a few transparent threads could barely be seen, and only when the sunlight came slanting across her arm.
As though everything that had happened that night had left nothing but a brief after-effect in her body.
Elaine leaned on the window ledge and watched the street outside, thoroughly bored.
Mornings in the Middle City were always far busier than in the Upper City. Not long after first light the bread and smoked-meat shops threw back their rain covers, apprentices carried crates of coal in and out through the back doors, and the milk cart came along ringing its brass bell and stopping at one house after another.
The people living here were mostly clerks, small traders and craftsmen on reasonably steady incomes. They did not pack into a factory before daylight the way the Lower City's workers did, or fight to the death over some trifle. Nor did they have a noble's leisure to linger over breakfast. Men in clean long coats hurried out with document cases under their arms, women stood at their windows straightening children's collars, and a few students with satchels on their backs chased the public coach around the corner.
As noon came on, the street gradually emptied.
Just as Elaine was about to leave the window, a familiar and very fine carriage drew up outside the door.
Once it had stopped the driver jumped down at once and went round to the other side to open the door.
It was Viola's carriage; Elaine knew it well enough. She waited, and Viola never came out.
Inside there was only a small pale leather case and a furled parasol. The driver seemed long used to this sort of thing. He put his head in for a look, then raised it towards the second floor with an expression of considerable resignation.
A second later somebody knocked twice on the window directly in front of Elaine, from outside.
She started, and turned her head.
Viola was crouched on the narrow stone ledge outside the window, one hand gripping the drainpipe beside her, the other still holding that long thin cane. Her long purple hair had been blown about by the wind, her skirts were caught under the window frame, and she looked as though she might come off the whole thing at any moment.
She winked at Elaine through the glass and pointed the cane at the seal beside the window.
Elaine stood where she was and looked at her for several seconds, and in the end went over and opened it.
"Could you not come in by the front door?"
"Of course I could."
Viola answered without the slightest hesitation, then slid the silver needle into the edge of the seal and opened a gap in it with practised ease.
"But if I came in by the front door and Astraea happened to come home early, or something got left at the entrance, wouldn't we be found out that much more easily?"
More than any of that, Viola's childish streak rather wanted to show off in front of Elaine.
She had taken an unaccountable liking to Elaine. Not that sort of liking; more the way an older sister looks after a younger one.
Elaine was Raea's little sister, after all, and Viola had unthinkingly begun treating her as her own little sister too.
As for what Viola's relationship with Raea actually was, Elaine had asked last time, and Viola had seemed disinclined to say.
With that she caught hold of the window frame and swung herself in, not especially gracefully.
Her soles came down on the floorboards with a small sound. She steadied herself on the corner of the table and bent to smooth the creases out of her skirts, as though the person crouched outside a second-floor window a moment ago had been somebody else entirely.
Elaine glanced down at the carriage parked pointedly at the front door.
"Coming in the front door wouldn't leave any traces either."
Elaine hadn't expected Viola to still be quite this unreliable. But it was rare to have anyone to talk to at all, and the stifled feeling in her eased a little.
"It's not the same. All right, enough of that. Have you got everything ready?"
Viola pulled off her gloves and dropped them on the table. There were a great many rings on her slender fingers, none of them set with any extravagant diamond, just plain metal bands.
Elaine's experience told her those rings would all be Sacred Objects, or Sealed Objects.
She asked nothing further, only turned and picked up the coat she had set out by the bed, then checked the small cloth bag holding the temporary certificate and her loose change one more time.
Viola stood at the mirror tidying her hair, and while she was at it shifted several of the rings into different positions, with the practised air of somebody checking over a set of tools she carried about with her.
Once the two of them were more or less ready and Elaine was about to go and open the door, the sound of a key turning came up from downstairs.
Not loud, and in a quiet house perfectly clear.
That... Elaine didn't quite follow it. By any reckoning Raea should not be back until tonight, or tomorrow morning. Viola's hands stopped.
Then the door below was pushed open and a steady tread came in from the entrance hall. Boot heels on wooden floor, every one of them familiar.
Before Elaine could react the bedroom door was pushed open from outside.
Astraea stood in the doorway, still in the dark long coat she had gone out in, a trace of exhaustion on her face. The grey-blue eyes passed first over a somewhat stunned Viola, then moved to Elaine, dressed and plainly ready to go out.
The room was quiet for several seconds.
"And where... are the two of you going?"
There was a wariness in Raea's eyes, and one hand had already come to rest on the sword hilt at her side.
Raea knew perfectly well who Viola was. As far as she was concerned, however, no so-called noble young lady was worth anything set beside her young master.
"Eh... Elaine and I arranged it. We're going to sort out her papers today."
Viola didn't quite understand why Raea, ordinarily so cold about everything, was being this fierce today.
She recovered first, and pulled the temporary certificate out of the cloth bag in Elaine's arms.
"Elaine has nothing at all to prove who she is, and the population registry wouldn't process it directly, so I took her to the Red Vein Relief Society a few days ago. Today is the third day. Once we have the formal local certification we can carry on with the registration."
Astraea did not take the certificate. Viola went on explaining anyway, though Raea did not seem to be taking any of it in. Her attention was entirely on Elaine.
And Elaine, under that stare, had the unaccountable sense of having been caught in the act of an affair.
Raea came into the room, closed the door behind her and walked straight up to her. Elaine's instinct was to back away, but the small of her back was already against the edge of the table, and all she could do was watch her raise a hand and lay the palm against her forehead.
The cold of it drew Elaine's brows together at once.
Then she took hold of Elaine's wrist, the pad of a finger settling over the pulse, as though confirming something, the grey-blue eyes never leaving her face.
"There was an anomaly at the White manor last night. An extremely strong energy reaction was detected in the cellar, and the Grey Tower now suspects an unregistered high-risk Sealed Object is still hidden there. The Judgment Tribunal recalled me to assist with the cordon. I should have gone straight there, but after I read the report I wanted to come back and confirm your condition first."
Raea delivered it the way she might report on a duty to Elaine, and there was nothing in the world more familiar to Elaine than that.
Except... Elaine could feel perfectly clearly that Raea was not pleased.
Astraea drew Elaine's sleeve up and went over her arm carefully.
The white lines that had been hiding beneath the skin had faded almost past seeing. Only around the back of her hand was a little transparent trace left.
"Very well. In that case, let's hear about you, Miss Rosenfeld."
Having satisfied herself that there was nothing wrong with Elaine's body, Raea turned her attention on Viola.
Publicly Disclosable Information #4
The Grey Tower
The Grey Tower, in full the Tower of Grey, is maintained jointly by the Scribe Codex as principal and the Artisan Codex in support.
Its principal facilities are exactly what the organisation's name suggests: tall grey towers.
It is the transnational body responsible for calamity records and for the appraisal and containment of Relics, Sealed Objects and Sacred Objects, which also takes in the manufacture of Sacred Objects and the re-examination of anomalous sites.
The Grey Tower proceeds in the order "isolate, observe, record, number, contain". Where evidence is insufficient it will never rashly assign a character to an anomaly. Its members are forbidden to answer a name spoken by a Sealed Object, and may not consult unauthorised files on their own initiative.
Once a Relic, Sealed Object or Sacred Object has been identified, it is handed to a Seal-Bearer of the Artisan Codex for improvement or for sealing.
The Grey Tower is strongest in the Iron Crown Empire, where it holds large sacred furnaces, forbidden archives and Relic research facilities.
In the Kingdom of Loren it functions chiefly as the Judgment Tribunal's technical and containment arm, distributed about the capital, the ancient battlefields and the larger cathedrals.
In the United Kingdom of Saint Melia its numbers are fewer, and it mostly attaches itself to hospitals, universities and disaster-relief organisations.
The Grey Tower holds in common the faith of the Silent Chronicler, also called the God of Knowledge: Elnovis Arcatus Vale.