Hora Prima

The boss worked some mornings out in his solarium — a magic glass garden kept temperate throughout the winter.

It was located on the roof of the main Potestas Tower building, hundreds of feet below the hovering penthouse, the roof of which the party last night had taken place.

While Ilan read reports and signed documents, he waited for Cristo to appear, but he had to send away a dozen other visitors from the second the sun rose, and none of them were him.

The sun had come up early and somehow Potestas was expected to do something about it. Someone tried to kill him and the whole city wanted to know what he planned to do about that too.

Every time he got rid of one of them, the solarium fell into a not quite silence as the gardeners whispered with security guards and the whole staff speculated in media vox the cause of the solar irregularity and whether they were all about to drop dead today.

When the thirteenth petitioner entered the solarium by half secunda (though the sun's position was closer to hora quarta) Ilan began to regret his open door Saturday morning policy. He threw down his stack of papers, and on second glance recognized Leander Prince striding across the garden path toward him, careful to keep his brogue-shod feet out of the flower beds.

The suit Leander wore couldn't belong to him; it was tailored, but not to his size. The shoulders were tight yet the arms and waist managed to bag. He lost the aqua vest and tie. The wide peak lapels on his shiny black silk dinner jacket looked ridiculous without them.

Clearly the clothing had been given to him by Doctor Reveur — Cristo said Leander 'replaced' the dead man — but the color of the tie must not have been to his liking. Potestas preferred a wool-silk blend jacket for the daytime, and with a shake of his head he scribbled himself a note to have Leander fitted for a rope stripe suit in cyan or azure and matching double breasted vest.

And a tie with more gravity, to match his serious disposition.

Even his "Good morning" was steel and flint, so humorless it was funny.

"Good morning," said Ilan, and he put aside his work to give Leander his full attention, then noticed that Leander was standing at attention. "Have a seat if you like."

Eyes of iron examined the patio furniture and Leander stayed where he was.

"Boss, I didn't tell you the truth last night," he said. "I feel obligated to admit that I don't know Cristo."

"I had that figured out already," Potestas said with a jovial wiggle of his head. "You 'arrived' just as the doctor died, isn't that how it works?"

"I'm not sure what you mean. I don't know how it works."

"But you came here from a different world. After you died. And then Louis died. That's the story, isn't it? That's how Louis said it would happen, and Cristo said you were Louis's replacement."

Leander said, "I have no idea whether everything Cristo said last night was a lie."

"Except that," said Ilan.

"Louis Reveur told me to trust you and no one else. It was a mistake to go along with everything Cristo said. I hoped to leverage his lie to get him to tell me everything, but unfortunately he refused, and then he disappeared."

"Leander," said Ilan, "I would like you to join my security forces. In fact, I want you to guard my person. I expect you won't betray my trust a second time.

"I also expect you to have questions, about me, the company, the city, the empire. Louis was insufferable for years after he popped up out of his grave or whatever the story is. In approximately a hundred and twenty seconds I want to get back to my work and I won't tolerate interruptions. You have two minutes to ask, so choose carefully. Or don't, just spew whatever comes to mind first, seconds are ticking after all."

"Are the days usually this short and do you people usually spend all day staring at the sun?" Leander asked. Finally, a sense of humor emerged.

Ilan smiled. "No. And I don't know why it's happening. And I'm not working on it. That has got to be someone else's job, I run the city, not the planet and certainly not Sol. Next question."

Leander moved right along. "Why am I here?"

That was a question Ilan couldn't answer, and he wasn't the right person to either. Potestas remembered a day that was now decades in the past when he met Louis and the doctor told him a story that Ilan never believed, and he still wasn't sure he did, even if a replacement had turned up after all.

Louis found his way to the solarium just like Leander except he trampled more flowers to get to Ilan. That day too there had been snow on the ground at the bottom of Potestas Tower. Stephen wasn't born yet and Ilan was decades younger and his mind was filled with decades' fewer cares. At least today his hair was as full and dark as it was then. Katin was alive and she had just gone inside, but she spent mornings with him, plotting and planning policies and the perfect flower beds.

Louis didn't ask Ilan why he was here; he told him.

"I don't care whether you believe me," Louis had said, "but I'm here for a reason. There's always something. Society's in the toilet, the world's about to end, some monarch is about to get beheaded — that never ends well, trust me, if you got that problem let me tell you from experience, never behead. It creates an endless cycle, everybody dies, not good. Whatever it is that's about to doom your empire and cast you into a thousand years of darkness, or kill everybody, I'm here to stop it. I'm an experienced disaster-averter, and with centuries of experience I've learned that the best way to go about averting disaster is to ask someone straightforwardly just what the problem is. Someone like you, Boss. So please tell me, just exactly what is the problem?"

Instead of answering, Ilan had responded with a question that was burning a hole in him even if he didn't believe. "Where did you say you came from?"

"From another world. From a dozen other worlds. Where I come from there's no Solari Empire and there's no magic. That's all I can tell you, all that means anything."

"So not from Atalanta?" Ilan asked, a ridiculous curious tingling in his heart that wanted it to be true was smothered by his mind's cynicism.

"Atlanta? What's—"

"Atalanta. Empire on the other side of the planet, as far as you can go from here. I take your answer to mean no."

"No," Louis said.

For thirty or so years he maintained that he was not from the Atalantic Empire, but from somewhere much further. Every time he died, he said, he came back to life in a new place. He said he ended up somewhere else, every time someplace that needed him. A few centuries living in scores of worlds with a plethora of existential problems had given him the experience to single-handedly restore peace, sometimes; other times freedom, and still others prosperity.

The thing was, the Solari Empire lacked none of those things. The empire was in an unparalleled golden age of peace, freedom and prosperity. The best use Ilan could ever put Louis to was spying on people he didn't like and reporting their crimes, sins and bad habits.

For years it went on like that and nothing changed, but just weeks ago Louis came to ask Ilan for the only payment he ever requested, and it was a dangerous and illegal thing he asked for, but he asked it anyway. "I wouldn't, but there's no other way. At this point it's the only option. I know something is happening, but my investigation is at a standstill."

Louis took a seat on the patio chair next to Ilan. "I need magic," he said. "I need magical powers to break into Constellation. I need links and I need a gun. I need connection to Potestas Tower's star power source thing."

Ilan replied, "It may be possible to get away with a minor infraction or two, but over time it will be impossible to hide illegal magic. Observable patterns based on location of use will emerge on the stardial conduit downtown. The guardia will catch you, and they will execute you."

"Can it be traced back to you?" was all Louis wanted to know.

"Maybe," Ilan said. "Or maybe one day. Stephen is an engineer at the company. He says it is possible to read information from the router. His results haven't been conclusive. At present, no. It shouldn't be traced back to my router."

"That's the only thing that matters. They can kill me if they want, but I need to find some answers first. And it would be preferable if when I find them, there's someone to tell them to."

Ilan had to ask Leander, "What did he say to you before he died? Did he tell you anything?"

"He sent me to you. He said Mr. Potestas, director of Invernali, could answer my questions," said Leander.

"But he didn't have a message for me?"

"He only said he was about to be killed, nothing could stop it, and I needed to find the boss. He gave me the gun to give back to you. He said you would mentor me. That's all I remember."

Louis died without telling anyone what he knew.

"I didn't mentor him. He had to learn his own way around. You're lucky, though, because I've decided to take additional security measures as of midnight last night. You need a paying job, and I need personal protection."

Leander accepted that silently and didn't need to be told it was time for the boss to get back to the stack of documents on his coffee table, an irreplaceable quality in a body guard. From at ease Leander took a spot over the boss's shoulder and the boss was able to get back to work for all of sixty seconds.