The Aegidian Building had been made to look innocuous and nondescript, and, as it sat on the edge of a small financial district, this meant that it was four stories of blank glass facade with nothing but its address above the door. A small fountain that stood out front was adorned with a statue that was a jumble of streaks and spheres. I have never learned what it represented; incoherence, perhaps. In any case, it was exactly like any number of modern sculptures adorning any number of financial buildings with sheer glassy walls in any number of financial districts in any number of cities across the world.
If you enter by the front door, you will find a small lobby with a marble floor, a security desk, and two elevator doors at the end; and that is as far as you will ever get. It is even possible that the elevator doors do not open at all. If you inquire about the Aegidian Corporation, you will be given a brochure that talks vaguely about what it calls 'international investment consultancy'. You will then be firmly told that you must leave.
As many such buildings do, however, it has a small parking garage, which also has a set of elevators. These elevators do not have buttons for floors, only a single keypad on the outside to open the door and another inside to operate the elevator; each floor has its own keycode combination. Up you go to whichever floor you choose, there to find a new security desk. The Aegidian Building is a very secure building.
On one of these secure floors is a conference room, and it was there that a meeting of Primes was held at about the time Giles, Seneca, and Jolie would usually have been sitting down to breakfast. There were several of them already there when the three entered. Giles went immediately to one of them, a dark-haired woman with a narrow, girlish face.
"Elsbietka," he said, kissing her on the cheek. "It is good that you have come; we will need your counsel. How are things out east?"
"As good as ever," she replied. Her voice was deep and slightly husky, but still a woman's voice.
Jolie, who was immediately behind, followed suit, and the two kissed each other on the cheek; but it was a very coolly perfunctory kiss on the part of both of them.
"It is good to see you," said Jolie with a tight smile.
"Jolie Corday! It is, indeed," said Elsbietka with an equally tight smile.
"We should have these meetings more often," said Giles cheerfully. "It is always good seeing friends." He sought out Seneca, who had moved to another small cluster of people on the other side of the room, and, catching his eye, gave him a look.
Seneca immediately stepped to the center of the room and cleared his throat. "We have a great deal discuss, so perhaps it is best if we get seated and begin."
The conference table was a long one with curved sides. Looking to the left of Giles we see Seneca, in a wine-colored sweater-vest and a matching bowtie. To his left is Elsbietka, her dark hair somewhat disordered. The delicate-looking woman who looks in her thirties, the one with the short blond hair, is Charlotte; she is actually a distant relative of Jolie. The square-jawed older-looking man to her left is Alexander. Across from Alexander, the woman with the very short curly hair, is Sarah. Next to her is her fraternal twin, Simon. The large, ruddy-faced man with small eyes is Cotton. And next to him, of course, is Jolie, looking perfect as always, which brings us back to Giles, still pale with the pallor the mind associates with terrible sickness.
For me to transcribe the early part of the meeting would be pointless, for it consisted simply of Seneca summarizing what you already know, with Jolie occasionally interjecting a comment and a question occasionally coming from one of the others. Through it all Giles spoke not a single word; he merely turned an attentive gaze to each Wolf in turn. And each Wolf, when those dark eyes rested on him or her, was unsettled by it.
"The major problem we face," said Seneca, summing up, "is our lack of information. Vsesalevich, as far as we know, is dead. Our sources in Yakutsk have gone silent, whether because they are dead or have thrown in their lot with the new regime, we do not know. And we still do not know what happened."
"Yakutsk was always of mostly symbolic importance, anyway," said Elsbietka. "Vsesalevich was most likely to be there, if he was anywhere. If my advice had been followed a few years ago" -- and here she shot a dark look at Jolie -- "we would have worked harder to get insiders in some of the fringe Packs."
"Past policies are under review," said Seneca drily. "At present our focus should be on plans."
"We will need to send people to investigate," said Alexander. "Dangerous work. And there are so many places to start -- Novosibirsk, Omsk, Krasnoyarsk...."
"I would recommend Krasnoyarsk," Elsbietka said. "The Packs of Krasnoyarsk Krai are quite large, relatively speaking, and notoriously restless."
Simon leaned forward. "And what do your sources say?"
She looked sharply at him. "What do you mean?"
"Come now," Sarah said. "We all know that you're not the kind to let things be; you've probably been working on getting information about the fringe Packs for years now."
"Agents in Krasnoyarsk, I wouldn't doubt," said Simon.
Giles looked with interest at Elsbietka, and she broke under the glance. "They have gone silent, too."
"I find it more and more disturbing that this could have all happened without our knowing anything of it," said Seneca.
"Wait," said Alexander, "don't we have one of their agents? The fellow in England?"
"No," said Giles quietly, the first word he had spoken since the meeting began. "We do not have him."
"Why?" asked Cotton with outrage. "Surely he didn't escape?"
"No," said Giles, "he didn't escape. I killed him."
The silence at the table was very deep; the quiet matter-of-factness of the way in which Giles had stated it had, I think, as much to do with its impact as the statement itself. After a few minutes, Cotton said, "But it was full moon." He perhaps meant it to sound incredulous; but it came out as little more than a broken whisper.
"Yes," said Giles, suddenly amused. "It was full moon." He leaned forward and looked around the table, amusement still on his face. "He was a Prime, and it was full moon, and I ripped the moonlight out of his soul, and I tore his heart out of his chest, and he died." He leaned back suddenly. "You are all young," he said, "very young. What, after all, do you know of Lykaios? He was dead long before you received the Bite, long before any of you were born. And thus I can see how it would be tempted to think that all the stories about how Lykaios was called the Invincible, and how I killed him under full moon, were just tall tales, or maybe stores with some grain of truth that grew in the telling over centuries. Particularly since it must seem so very long ago, a legend from out of the hazy mists of time. But I did beat the unbeatable Wolf, the one who had lived so long that he could not even remember his original name, the one every Wolf of the day feared; and the moon was full and bright that night. And I killed this one, too, during full moon.
"Or perhaps you believed the story, but thought that it was so long ago that I had forgotten how I did it, or that it was a unique happening resulting from some freak of fortune. After all, the stories all say that only one Prime has ever been killed at full moon. But there have been others; Lykaios was just the only one worth mentioning. But in this case you can confirm it, if any doubt lingers. Ask Aveline, or Roysa, or this newly minted Wolf, Eric, who comes to us courtesy of some no-name renegade. They left me alone in a room with him, and he was alive; they returned, and he was dead."
The others at the table shifted uneasily in their seats. After an uncomfortable minute or two, Cotton cleared his throat and tried again. "Perhaps it would have been better to have kept him alive; we could have extracted further information from him."
Everyone in the room knew that the event was a sign of the yawning chasm between Giles on the one hand and all the other Primes on the other; everyone knew that Giles had raised it as a banner of his superiority, an emblem of the Wolf-King, a reminder of their place. And thus to everyone's ears this attempt to treat an almost unthinkable action expressing almost unthinkable power as a mere prudential miscalculation sounded as limp as his previous protest. But Giles simply shook his head.
"I stole the moonlight inside of him; I extracted everything he had to tell. It is good, however, that the point has been raised. For I am Aegidius, Death at Full Moon, Scion and Slayer of the Invincible Wolf, the Wolf who can do what no other Wolf has ever found possible, and I assure you," putting his hand on his heart, "that in the conflict to come I will win. I want to be very clear about that. I do not promise comfort and ease, but I promise you that I will not be outmaneuvered or outpowered by any Prime now living. I am beyond mere Primacy. Some of you are young enough, or came to know me late enough, that you only know this by rumor. But there are Wolves who know it. Jolie, for instance." He turned and looked at her; she was looking at her hands.
"Do you remember, Jolie, the time when we hunted down that rebel Pack in the Franche-Comté? You know, the one led by the Wolf who killed Charles Louis outside Saint-Nizier -- what was his name? Hugh, I think?"
"No," said Jolie, still looking at her hands, "it was Alain; Hugh was his brother."
"We made them pay with terror before they died, didn't we?"
"Yes," said Jolie, still looking at her hands.
He leaned back, his face still full of amusement. "But this is no time for old war stories." He rose to his feet. "As Seneca noted, information is our primary concern. Get me information about the Pack of Krasnoyarsk Krai, or anything else that might be of use!" He looked down at Jolie. "Will you be returning to the Manor with us?"
She finally looked up from her hands. "No," she said, "Cotton and I have business to discuss on this renegade Wolf problem."
Giles nodded and smiled and took his leave.
In the elevator, Seneca asked, "Did you discover anything?"
"Of course," said Giles cheerfully. "There is nothing so effective as getting people who hate each other in one room and then having them threatened by a notorious killer. Cotton certainly, and Charlotte probably, are with Jolie; Elsbietka doesn't have any inkling because Jolie wouldn't trust her to keep quiet, and rightly so, she would gladly prefer a chance of killing Jolie to joining with her any day of the week. The rest are various shades of in-between, waiting to see how things tip."
"Does Jolie have any idea that we know? That last bit was heavy-handed."
"Does it matter? If she has any sense -- and she does -- she has been taking that possibility into account from the beginning. But you are quite right; I overdid it. Even after centuries I still can't resist giving that last little jab."
