102 - Cute Fluffballs and Aunt Rushimiay's Corns

Nadian screamed in rage and hurled the notes he’d made so meticulously against the walls of his study.  They fluttered to the floor in random heaps of crabbed scribbling.   

“Darkenlighten! Fucking Dark and Fucking Light and female genitilia!!!!”

There were pages and pages of notes some from his own spy network, and reams and reams of information from the new Lainz Information Network.  The problem was that it was too much.  There were a hundred thousand variations of cute fluffball pictures and the state of Great Aunt Rushimiay’s corns or lungs or bowels.

He ended up spread against the closed study doors as if to keep the information blitz safely outside, panting, sweating.  His blood pressure was far too high if he was any judge and he had somehow lost control of everything.  It poured through his awareness in an unending stream and he struggled to slow down the avalanche with his mental bare hands.

His rage was nearly enough.  He baked a great deal of the information into solid brick that he could archive should he choose to peruse it later, but at least he could stack it and make it assume edges.  He sank down at his fancy stone table with his fists knotted in his hair.

Why and how did the old man know?  How did he know to knock me out of the action with the overwhelming onslaught of information? He must be doing this to everyone who’s trying to kill him.  It’s just general protection. Of course, that must be it.  It cannot just be targeting me.  After all, there are half a dozen plots against him that I’m aware of, if not part of. Careless of them that I know. The old man must know about them too.  But he’s constrained by his silly idea that he needs direct evidence not hearsay.  He’s constrained by this ‘rule of law’ concept. I’d just kill them all and if I caught a few innocents along with the conspirators – well, that would just be too bad.  

The most damning thing he’d been able to sift out of the the whole mess was the faintest... tiniest whisper of a thought that the fading old Radiance had actually found a living Heir somewhere. The rumour was that it was a grown man... a warrior of some kind who had lived his whole life unknowing that he was thrown from the Shining One himself.

Breathing hard, Nadian managed to channel the mass of noise and mandery to a part of his mind that he could safely ignore.  It was like having a hundred thousand pieces of correspondence arrive at his Loggia every moment. This is something a servant would handle... ah.  I need to build a mental butler or porter to hold the gate against this.

It took him the rest of the afternoon, and he was forced to nap afterwards, and then endure an endless dinner, though Shashi had to excuse herself before the ice course.  The birth was happening quite quickly this third time.  He’d have a new child by morning it sounded like from the songs echoing from the women’s quarters.

Once more in his peaceful study, he arranged a handful of beads and wires on his table.  His preferred mode of data handling was with spiders but this time he was working at such a distance... perhaps even as far as the Milar border... that he needed something else.

The beads and hair-fine splinters of crystal skittered together over the stone and clicked into place. First one, then a second, then hundreds of tiny glass bugs shimmered in place, quivering.  He sealed his commands into them with a drop of his blood and rose on shaking legs to open the balcony doors.

Glass bugs didn’t precisely fly.  They threw out a long filament and let the wind sweep them away, but their tiny wings did give them some control, though not lift.  The wind blew into the room and the whole shining mass swirled into the air, floating head down from their flight strands, like a description of falling snow that Nadian had once read. They floated out and were snatched away in the roaring wind, off to find this supposed Heir to the Empire.

Once I find out who is behind these rumours, it doesn’t even matter if he is truly of the old one’s line.  I’ll just kill him.  Just in case.  If he’s enough like the old man to excite such talk... he’s too close. What name had cropped up? Cyrus or Kyrus? A common enough name in Lainz. It’s probably not anything. But I’ll have the information I need, with my bugs tracking the data stream.  Now I have control of this monstrous outpouring of thought from common Basin sludge, I’ll get control of the rest of it as well.