The Society of Two Houses (Dissolution Cycle)

  THE SOCIETY OF TWO HOUSES

  Also in the Dissolutionverse by William C. Tracy

  Tuning the Symphony

  Merchants and Maji

  The Seeds of Dissolution

  Journey to the Top of the Nether

  THE SOCIETY OF TWO HOUSES

  William C. Tracy

  Space Wizard Science Fantasy

  Raleigh, NC

  Copyright © 2018 by William C. Tracy

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

  Space Wizard Science Fantasy

  Raleigh, NC

  www.spacewizardsciencefantasy.com

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Cover art by Luisa Preissler

  Interior illustrations by Micah Epstein

  Book Layout © 2015 BookDesignTemplates.com

  The Society of Two Houses/William C. Tracy.-- 1st ed.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018905714

  ISBN 978-0-9972994-6-5

  Author’s website: www.williamctracy.com

  For Grandad:

  Who inspired me to learn everything I can

  CONTENTS

  The Body

  The Mansion

  More Than One

  System Beast

  Homebrew

  Harmonic

  The Society of Two Houses

  PART ONE

  The Body

  - Maji in the Great Assembly of Species are rare, born at a rate of, hm, one per five million individuals. Most hear only one of the six aspects of the Great Symphony, but one in every sixty maji, or one in three hundred million individuals, can hear two of the Symphony’s aspects. It is one’s belief these few—the, hm, ones gathered here—have the ability to drive innovation in the Great Assembly, bolstered by a sensitivity to the underlying rhythms of the universe. For this group’s final entrance into the Society, please, hm, step forward for the geas to be applied.

  Private address by Moortlin, Benish Head of the House of Healing, on the induction of new members into the Society of Two Houses

  I stared down at the body of Speaker Thurapo, willing my frozen feet to bring me further into his study. I was supposed to be presenting the prototype model I held, not discovering his corpse.

  I clenched my hand involuntarily, then yelped and released my fingers as the scale model of the System Beast dug tiny sharp hands into my palm. The delicate construct, made in the form of a Festuour—like my colleague Gompt—had taken days to build. The pain unlocked my feet and I hurried forward to set the model on a side table—just a little too tall for me, like everything in the Speaker’s study.

  Though my first instinct was to go to the Imperium guard, I instead closed the study door. I had a few minutes during which the deceased Speaker and I were supposed to meet, before his secretary announced his next appointment. My mind flew through what questions the guard would ask if I alerted them.

  Majus Mandamon Feldo, is it? Why were you here to see the Speaker? Why does a majus need approval from the Assembly? Shouldn’t this be going through the Council of the Maji?

  Even thinking of telling the authorities about the Society of Two Houses made the jingly earworm of the geas threaten to derail my thoughts. The guard would quickly become suspicious when I further choked and fainted instead of telling where my prototype System Beast came from or under whose patronage I worked.

  I shook my head, dislodging the music that kept the Society safe. Because of our…unconventional methods, Society maji went through a roundabout process of getting approval from the Great Assembly to introduce our new and disruptive inventions.

  Per our usual methods, the head of the Society had ‘convinced’ the late Speaker not to ask questions about where my colleagues and I got our resources. Even I didn’t know how the Society provided so many high-quality metals and logical gearing ratios.

  Once available, our System Beasts would be the perfect servants and secretaries. They could haul loads, act as butlers, deliver mail, remind owners of engagements, and much more. However, without a sponsor, Gompt, Kratitha, and I would never be able to supply them to the inhabitants of the Nether. If this murder even hinted at our organization’s existence, it would also compromise and taint our research by association. I’d be left with nothing, and the Society could no longer develop innovation without those in power asking severe questions. My heart sped, just thinking about it.

  Now, the Speaker who would have sponsored us was dead. I let myself really look at him, sprawled out on the floor. He was an Etanela, half again as tall as me, hence the furniture.

  What had happened to him? One hand rose to my mouth, then down to the small beard I was growing out, pulling at the hair in thought. Something in my head was silently screaming, though I had been near violent death before. Stay calm.

  I had to concentrate—use the few minutes available to figure out what happened. Then I would at least have a way to defend myself against questioning authorities. Otherwise, they would detain me as a suspect, no matter what I said. Any questions would lead to the Society.

  There was a pool of blood, slowly seeping into the carpet, and still dripping from the deep cuts which nearly severed the Speaker’s neck. His head was at an unnatural angle, wide glassy eyes staring out from his faintly blue face. Though his mouth was open in shock, the blue coloration was natural to the Etanela, not a symptom of asphyxiation. He wouldn’t have had time to suffocate before the blood loss to his brain killed him. I tried to push away the nausea threatening to bring my breakfast back. Adding to the mess would only complicate solving Speaker Thurapo’s death.

  The Speaker and I had corresponded through the Imperium’s mail service just the day before, and he’d invited me to show him the model my colleagues and I had created. Introducing innovations developed by the select group of maji I belonged to had to be handled delicately—a dance of avoiding names, places, and methods of experimentation.

  Was the Speaker killed to stop me from showing him the little System Beast? Did someone find out about the Society and its methods?

  No. That was paranoia bordering on my mentor’s level. No one outside of my unique Society even knew what the System Beasts were.

  Was this self-inflicted? I couldn’t see how. There was no implement here with which the Speaker could have cut his own throat—not like that.

  The Speaker’s secretary would check on us soon—maybe even open the closed door without knocking. I had perhaps ten minutes—the time in which I would have presented my proposal—before someone else called for the Speaker’s attention.

  The defining quality of maji belonging to the Society of Two Houses was that each of us could hear two of the six aspects of the Great Symphony, rather than just one, like most maji. Each combination of aspects had its own label. My title in the Society was ‘Investigator.’ Until now, I thought the titles merely convenient masks for those members not wanting to be identified by name. Now it seemed more ironic.

  So—I would investigate, and if I could clear any trace of the Society from Speaker Thurapo’s death, then I would go to the authorities. If not, well, I’d deal with that when I got to it.

  Wood paneling made the office comfortable, and a dominating Festuour-made rug co
vered the tile floor. There was one desk, clean save for a writing mat, with a chair on either side. Beside me was the side table where my prototype sat. Both side walls held rows of bookshelves, dusty and obviously little used. The Speaker’s body took up most of the floor, splayed across the center of the rug.

  I looked at the chronograph—an older invention of the Society—chained to my vest, marking time until I estimated I would be discovered with the corpse. I knelt by Speaker Thurapo’s body, careful to avoid putting the knees of my tailored suit in the pool of greenish blood seeping into the rug. I could feel the heat from the blood, and from the body, though the sticky liquid was already coagulating. He had not been dead long, whatever happened. I swallowed bile and leaned in.

  Aside from the deep gash in the Etanela’s throat—certainly fatal—there was no other sign of a fight. I looked from the body to the closed door of the study, gauging where the Speaker would have been standing.

  Falling back on the rug like this meant he was facing the door. Along with his killer? It was pure luck the body hadn’t hit the chair pulled out on this side of the Chorin-wood desk. I held one hand out, measuring. Speaker Thurapo’s frizzy mane of auburn hair was less than the width of my hand away from one leg of the desk.

  I pushed my glasses up my nose, and tried to forget how Thurapo would have been the sponsor for our new company selling System Beasts, and a façade to remove interest in where and how my colleagues and I had developed the idea.

  Many of the experiments occurring behind the walls of the mansion where I lived would not sit well in the public eye, yet the Society was a generator of progress. It also had connections—under false identities, of course—to many of the Speakers for the Great Assembly, using its members’ reach to exploit potentially embarrassing knowledge. I didn’t know what Speaker Thurapo had done, but I hoped his indiscretion had nothing to do with his death. The Society’s direct involvement would complicate things greatly.

  From information gathered over the short time I had been a member, I knew the Society’s efforts had saved people’s lives and ended wars quickly and efficiently. Its members had added comforts to our lives like freezing and heating technology and remedies for bacterial infections. If, in the process, a few unknown persons suffered, or a few highly prized resources went missing, what was that against the good of all? Yet I was sure the Great Assembly or the Council of the Maji would not see it the same way.

  Time was wasting, and I reigned in my thoughts, looking up to the desk. Someone must have been sitting on this side, speaking with the Etanela before pushing away. The Speaker had come from behind his desk before he was killed. I clenched my jaw. What prompted his death, and why did it have to happen this morning, of all mornings?

  A non-majus might have difficulty discovering more in the brief time before they were found. But as an ‘Investigator,’ I had two advantages: the Symphonies I could hear.

  I let the Symphony of Healing fill my mind with faint rising and falling scales. It told me Speaker Thurapo was definitely dead, his complex trills and glissandos degenerating into steady and uninteresting eighth notes.

  Conversely, the Symphony of Potential dealt in transferring energy, and as I listened to the fundamental music underlying the universe, I heard residues of people’s actions, reactions, and movements. Each one was a traceable resonance, though some were extremely faint.

  As I got to my feet and went to the desk, the musical themes of energy became clearer. Speaker Thurapo had come around the desk—a glissando and dipping trill in the music—following another body, who was speaking with him. I crossed the rug on the other side of the Speaker’s body, stepping over his large boots, pointed out at angles. I looked away from the ghastly wound.

  Sifting through the Symphony of Potential, I found another fading theme. Thurapo had been standing just here, and…I listened carefully, trying to separate out one rhythm, like listening to a single string playing in an orchestra. I thought his assailant had stood in the doorway, ready to leave, but it was hard to say. Closing the door had partially written over that music. I checked my chronograph again—I had found nothing yet, but there was still time.

  Did this other person murder the Speaker? They must have. Could it be connected to showing the System Beast prototype model? The geas protected the Society and—some would say—its unethical practices. It was supposed to be foolproof. I didn’t want this extra complication. Just creating the System Beasts had been challenge enough.

  Need more information. My eyes, almost of their own accord, were drawn back to the body, my subconscious registering something I’d missed. I wiped sweaty hands on my vest and stepped closer, pulling the hem of my pants away from the ruined section of rug, and Thurapo’s throat. The fingers and thumb of the Speaker’s right hand were together, as if he had held something. Going by the corpse’s open mouth and wide eyes, he had been surprised when he died.

  The House of Potential revealed a fading jangle of discordant notes—tight muscles in the Speaker’s hand, now loosened in death. The House of Healing repeated an intertwined duet—he’d been holding something made from organic material, like cloth or paper.

  I knelt down by his right hand. Another trait of an Investigator was to hear the past energy and biology of an object—like seeing a short way into the past. I listened to the pattern of harmonics between the two Symphonies.

  The music of Healing was regular, overlapping chords weaving into a rigidly defined structure. The music of Potential held the fading change in beat that meant the object had been cut or torn from another source. It was probably a piece of paper, taken from a larger source of information—maybe something the Speaker had written? Finally, another clue.

  I let the Symphony of Potential take the upper hand, retracing the descending melody. It led toward the closed door. So, whoever had killed the Speaker had taken what he held into the hallway and beyond. I checked the timepiece on my vest again. About half my interview time gone.

  I opened the door, peering both ways. The short corridor was empty for the moment and I surged outside, closing the door silently behind me. The intersection of Healing and Potential rose out here, the notes more recent. Whoever had taken the paper went this way.

  I turned left, following the melody. This hallway was in the lower level of the Dome of the Assembly, where each of the sixty-six speakers had their own rooms, and, unfortunately, their own secretary.

  I had only gone a few steps when a face under a bob of golden hair stuck around the next corner. The Etanela who had let me in must have heard my steps. She was wearing the kind of makeup many female working Etanela adopted, with tiny red dots above and below her eyes, her lips tinted deep purple against the faint blue of her face.

  She came fully around the corner, putting away a tube of lipstick, and I stopped dead, my mind whirling. Something about her movement looked suddenly familiar, as if I knew her from somewhere, but I couldn’t place it.

  “Anything I can help you with?” she asked. “Are you finished with your interview? I’ll just pop in and see what the Speaker—” Her hands clasped together in front of her, each massaging the other.

  She must have seen something. She couldn’t have killed him.

  I interrupted her flow of words. “Ah, no. We’re not done yet.” What if…? “You haven’t seen anyone come past, have you? Perhaps with a piece of paper?”

  The secretary considered me, looking down from shoulders and head above me. Her eyes were watery, and still puffy from sleep. They would have been comically large on one of my species, but in her faintly blue, freckled face, they only looked earnest. “I haven’t, but I got here just before you. You’re the Speaker’s first appointment.” She shrugged. “He works odd hours. Sometimes early in the morning, sometimes late at night.”

  So whoever had killed him had left with the list just in time. I still needed to clear the Society from this mess, and somehow keep the Imperium guard from arresting me once this secr
etary figured out I’d been having an interview with a deceased speaker.

  Perhaps a little misdirection. “The…the Speaker asked if he had another five minutes in his schedule.” I shrugged. “He seems to have lost some information necessary to my presentation.” I tried to keep my face neutral.

  “Just a moment. I’ll check.” She sniffed, then ducked back around the corner, presumably to her desk. I let out a slow breath, trying to keep my hands from shaking.

  In the few moments available, I focused on the fading musical traces of the paper’s thief. Whatever happened had been very recent, or I wouldn’t have been able to still hear the notes. It went right by her desk, and unless I wanted to run past and alert everyone to the body, the musical trail would fade away before I could follow it. The way the music was dropping notes into inaudibility, it wouldn’t be long until it was impossible to track.

  The secretary popped around the corner again, her hands tracing elegant paths through the air. “He can spare another five minutes. I’ll come tell you when the time is up.”

  She looks tired—must have been late coming in this morning. That will only make her feel worse when she finds the body.

  “That will do nicely. I’ll let him know,” I said as I backed away, then threw a glance down at the chronograph. A few more minutes to search. Once I left, the Speaker’s cooling body would not stay secret long. My only chance was to find a clue inside the room.

  I paused at the door to make sure the secretary wasn’t watching, then closed my eyes, separating out the bubbly, anxious music that defined her person from the rest of the Symphony of Healing.

  Taking notes from my being, mimicking her chords and melodies, I tied them to a note keyed to the House of Potential. An aura of white and brown grew around me, visible only to maji—the physical results of changing the Symphony. I pressed my fingers on the doorframe, and the aura transferred to that spot. The new construct—a System—would send me an alerting tone if the secretary came down the corridor. Losing a few of my notes was worth the extra warning.