In a city where close to one hundred per cent of manufactured goods are conjured — solidified from raw magic into simulacra of real materials, or the low-effort arcane condensate of meltstuff, you'd think civic logistics would be a solved problem; and yet it's the single biggest and most complex department City Hall has to offer.
Harika's cubbyhole is at the end of a dead-end corridor, away from the offices designed to ever be seen by anyone except their inmate, tiny spaces crammed together. Expense spared to the point that every artificial light on the corridor is on a single switch at the corridor's mouth, and any single burned-out bulb takes all dozen offices' light along with it.
Harri lifts her reading glasses for a second, massages the sore indentations they've left in her nose through hours of aggressively shoving them up, as if jamming the lenses closer to her eyes will compensate for typewriter ribbons used past the point of legibility at the documents' point of origin. She winds a sheet of rough bureaucracy-grade paper into her own typewriter, arranges her sources, her jotter and pencil, and takes a deep and weary breath to begin typing up essentially the same report as every other quarter for several years: that the food crops possible to grow in the remaining arable land of the End simply don't represent comprehensive nutrition, and the Northstone's population is suffering mass, if minor, deficiencies. Public health demands the expenditure of civic arcana to nutritionally enrich key staples; the cost-benefit analysis will only become worse with time.
Better-paid people in larger offices will duly pass her reports on to be discarded by elected officials who consider all benefits to be ruled out by any degree of attached cost, regardless of topic.
The soft knock on the frame of the doorless entrance startles her from her concentration.
"Excuse me," Vespidine korvu by-Tenstone korvu Overmore kanru Tjenwater says, incongruous as a fire underwater, here in her tailored slacks and antique, belted wraparound blouse of heavy silk and neat little flat canvas shoes that probably cost as much as City Hall pay Harri per year. What they do have in common, Harri and the elf, is that they look immensely weary to be here. "I remember you take lunch around this time. I — the family would like to ask you something."
Harri isn't sure that Vespidine understands that taking lunch, in context, meant that Vespidine's sister Cosimisa would demand to remove Harri from the office without regard for Harri's, or the office's, time; that lunch meant burning the midnight oil to compensate for the elf's airy insistence that reality bends to the whims of a korvu by-Tenstone korvu Overmore kanru Tjenwater.
It does, of course. And of course, Harri is not one, and once ejected from the whirlwind, absorbed the whiplash of an irritated reality asserting itself.
She bites her tongue over a cold observation that she has a packet of sandwiches in her handbag, and hopes Vespidine comes likewise equipped. She might not have much of a career, but like a climbing plant attempting to twine around hot coals, the displeasure of elven princesses is an unwise move with implications for her future direction.
"I suppose it's lunchtime," she concedes instead, glancing at her watch, and piles her sources into a neat sheaf before sliding them into the top drawer of her desk. She spends the walk out of the building, and a few streets away to a blisteringly expensive bistro, calculating how late her return to the office is made by every step, every wait, how many hours of lamp-lit penance past dark she'll do over her typewriter.
Cosimisa korvu by-Tenstone korvu Overmore kanru Tjenwater is getting married, and despite everything, that gnaws and sickens in Harri's gut. She picks dully at a dish of meatless navarin, stilling her fingers from picking apart to shreds the excellent crusty bread it's served with.
"My sister," Vespidine says eventually, in a low, strained voice, "is — causing difficulties."
Cos likes to cause difficulties. She feeds off the spikes of frantic excitement they cause among other people. There is a terrible premonition forming, pressing on Harri's lungs so that she feels she can't quite breathe. She sips her glass of water, with its decoratively twisted, wafer-thin round sliced from lemon floating in it, and says nothing.
"She insists you be at the ceremony," Vespidine says, looking at the table instead of at Harri, and now Harri really can't breathe.
"Excuse me," she chokes, and flees to the bathroom, an upright coffin of a room with ominously juddering plumbing, gulps for air and splashes water on her face until she feels as if she can pretend to as much presentability as usual; and walks straight into Vespidine, unprepared for the elf to be hovering immediately outside the door.
"Harika," Vespidine says with a quiet helplessness, hands on Harri's shoulders.
Harri's been the means by which Cos has caused all too many scenes. At a wedding — at Cosimisa's wedding — it doesn't bear imagining. "You can't be serious," she says, a strangled whisper.
Vespidine, impassive pillar of elven indifference, grimaces bitterly. "Cos gets everything," she says. "If I said half what I thought—" and she stops herself. "I should sound entirely self-pitying," she finishes instead, mouth twisting in self-mockery before she smooths her expression. "Oh, the poor elven princess.... Our parents have agreed to give her this, under threat she'll derail the date of the ceremony. This has been planned longer than she's been alive."
"I can't," Harri says, feeling as if she's floating downward in some drowning sump. "She'll — you don't want that."
But if the displeasure of elven princesses is unwise, fear more the ancient filthy-fingered consiglieri who father them.
"Please sit down, you look as though you'll collapse," Vespidine says, and Harri finds herself gentled back into her chair, water glass pressed into nerveless hands; the elf pulling her own chair around the table to sit knee to knee with her, hand on her shoulder, heads close. "I've tried," she thinks Vespidine says, both quiet and also very far away, on the other side of Harri drowning. "Please believe me that I've tried, Harika, but — they've already given her this. I can't make it not happen."
Harri laughs, a terrible croak. She can see it already; the cathedral, the dress, the groom. Five hundred or so of the family's closest business rivals. Cosimisa. Watching Cosimisa married, or worse, being made the spotlight for Cos to ruin it and not be.
"There are things I can do, to protect you," Vespidine is saying.
"What can you do," Harri sputters out through her unhappy laughter, too overwhelmed to be wise, and Vespidine frowns a little, and squeezes her shoulder.
"Some far day," Vespidine says, terrifyingly matter-fact, "I will be head of the family. Cosimisa is spoiled and unruly, but she knows what she can, and what she cannot, escape the consequences of. And she knows which I am."
Harri looks into a face which has impassively judged her across the table at dozens of Cos-ruined family lunches, and dizzily perceives that she's just been made the Northstone's future consigliere's wedding plus-one. Vespidine attending with the family's small Cos-engendered disgrace on her arm a small strategic loss, a chess move designed to position Harri within enough projected threat to prevent Cos from using her to embarrass the family in any larger way on the happy day.
She stops laughing, only because she once again can't breathe well enough.
"I think I should let your office know you've taken unwell for the afternoon," Vespidine says from the other side of Harri's tightly closed eyelids, with that terrible stupid concern again.
