Writing Practice: Cold

He couldn’t work at all when he was like this, and in the Hushed Chamber he was like this all the time.

Eisen Alon Garvel, Ministry Justicar

The Hushed Chamber, Machaevo Primus, Scillaeo Sector, The Kingdom

The rafters creaked like an old ship. It was the highest floor of the Chambers, a draughty set of offices on the third floor. Windows, their seals threadbare, rattled like teeth in their frames. Beyond them a city rose, white ghosts with glowing eyes in the snow.

It was here that he had been banished to, a temporary arrangement that each day extended. Garvel was head of E-Section, which consisted of himself, one cryptbreaker and one administrator. Their job was to decrypt esoteries, academic texts sometimes passed through the hands of members of hermetic orders and the like. It was dull, labour intensive work and Garvel hated it.

Not that he did the labour. That was done by Sesan, the young, eager to please administrator who was studying beneath Rith, her senior by sixteen years and an expert cryptbreaker who could only have come into the E-Section as punishment for some misdeed. Garvel studiously avoided the question and in return Rith abstained from openly showing her contempt for him.

His office adjoined theirs and was little more than a cupboard, desk against one wall, chair drawn up to it and his beaten up typewriter hooked up to the screen of a logic engine that was bolted to the wall. Beside it was a stack of papers marked ‘URGENT’ in the red of Sesan’s inkpad.

He’d papered over most of the glass of his door in an attempt at privacy, still he had a small corner peeled clear so he could keep an eye on them. Rith was hunched over a text, looking from it to the parchment she was writing on. A stack of books surrounded her, arranged to obstruct line of sight of anyone walking by the outer office door.

Sesan was busy taking an inventory of the rolls of transcriptions they’d made, a task she had restarted three times as Garvel went out and borrowed some from a stack she hadn’t yet counted, then replaced them on a stack she already had. Every few minutes Sesan would retreat to the burner in the corner and held out her hands, then stamped back over to the scrolls and continued to count.

Garvel watched her, wrapping his coat around himself and propping his heels on the nearby waste basket. He glanced at his own burner, dark and silent, on the other side of the room. It stared back, mouth open in surprise.