The Interview

Bel-iddin received him in a room that pretended not to belong to the magician class.

That was the first thing Danel noticed.

No idols. No braziers. No charms hanging from the lintel or painted symbols on the floor. Just a narrow chamber with two stools, a writing table, three clay tablets, and a single window slit facing west. It looked like an administrative office. It smelled faintly of cedar ash and something metallic underneath.

Rooms told the truth long before people did. This one told him that Bel-iddin understood the value of appearing ordinary.

"Sit," Bel-iddin said.

Danel sat.

Bel-iddin did not. He remained standing for a moment, shuffling tablets into an exact stack, giving the silence time to do work on its own. He had a narrow face, patient hands, and the kind of self-command that read less like peace than training layered so thickly over appetite that the appetite had learned to imitate peace from the inside.

"You know who I am," he said.

"Bel-iddin. Third lector to the Chief Magician."

"Good." He sat then, finally. "And you have no idea why you are here."

"For placement."

"That is the public answer."

Bel-iddin folded his hands.

"Let us begin simply. How are you sleeping?"

Danel had expected language questions. Memory tests. Perhaps something about court service. This was worse because it was narrower.

"Adequately."

"Dreams?"

"Everyone dreams."

Bel-iddin's eyes sharpened a fraction. Nathrek's question, returned by a lesser hand.

"Tell me about yours."

"I usually forget them."

"Usually?"

"I am told that happens to most people."

Bel-iddin wrote something on a tablet without looking down.

"Religious practices," he said. "Do you maintain any?"

"I am Judean."

"That is origin, not answer."

Danel let one breath pass before replying. "I pray."

"How often?"

"When there is reason."

"And what constitutes reason?"

It would have been easier if Bel-iddin were overtly threatening. Easier if he sneered at the God of Judah or made his allegiance plain. Instead he was courteous, measured, almost scholarly. A man could mistake this kind of attention for neutrality if he wanted very badly to survive it.

Danel did not want that enough.

"Need," he said.

"Need is frequent."

"Yes."

Bel-iddin made another note.

"Do you see anything unusual before sleep?" he asked. "Lights. Presences. Changes in air pressure. Impressions that remain after waking."

Danel felt the danger of the room tighten.

He made himself boring.

"No."

"No?"

"No."

Bel-iddin watched him long enough for the lie to become visible if it intended to. Danel kept his face still. The key to lying in dangerous rooms, his father had once said, was to lie as little as possible and never for vanity. Danel had seen unusual things before sleep. He had also seen them after waking, during meals, in hallways, and once in front of an idol with too many hands. The word no was false in detail and strategically true in spirit. He did not owe Hollow men his interior life.

Bel-iddin looked down at the tablet at last.

"You answered your training assessments at a level usually reserved for second-year exiles," he said. "Your refusal pattern during the food test has already become a minor story in the lower corridors. Ashpenaz defends you more than is comfortable for anyone involved. Nathrek's office would prefer to know whether this is discipline, ambition, or a provincial form of madness."

"And if it is?"

"Which?"

"Any of them."

Bel-iddin's mouth twitched once. "Then we place you appropriately."

"Into what?"

"Proximity."

There it was. The word hidden under the rest.

Danel kept his voice even. "To whom?"

"To what is useful."

Bel-iddin leaned back slightly on his stool. The motion seemed casual until Danel noticed that the angle placed the man's left hand nearer the table's edge, where a narrow strip of dark polished stone had been inset into the wood. Not decoration. Anchor.

Threshold sight stirred involuntarily.

For one flickering instant Danel saw a red-black shimmer pass beneath Bel-iddin's skin, not in the flesh itself but in whatever spiritual architecture sat adjacent to it. It resembled debt made luminous. It vanished before he could fully focus.

The headache was lighter this time. That frightened him more.

Bel-iddin's eyes snapped to his face.

"Something wrong?"

"The room is warm."

"Yes," Bel-iddin said softly. "It is."

The interview lasted another twenty minutes and revealed almost nothing direct. Which meant, Danel thought as he left, that it had revealed a great deal.

Bel-iddin wanted patterns of sleep, dream retention, religious routine, unusual perception. Nathrek's office was not merely interested in capable exiles. It was screening for phenomena.

By the time he reached the courtyard, Mishael was waiting for him beneath the shade of a fig tree that had somehow survived transplantation into Babylon.

"Well?" Mishael asked.

"It was an interview."

"You are impossible."

"Bel-iddin asked about sleep. Dreams. Prayer."

Mishael went very still. "That is not placement."

"No."

"What did you tell him?"

"As little as I could without turning the conversation into a contest."

Mishael nodded once, thinking three steps past the surface already.

"Then he was not measuring competence," he said. "He was measuring deviation."

"Yes."

Mishael looked toward the upper palace buildings where the magician wing stood beyond ordinary access.

"You were right not to tell us everything in the corridor yesterday," he said. "But you need to tell us tonight."

"All of it?"

"Enough for the danger to be shared correctly."

Danel looked at him.

This, too, was why Mishael mattered. He did not demand knowledge for comfort. He demanded the right distribution of weight.

"Tonight," Danel said.

The official notice came at evening recitation.

Bel-iddin himself did not deliver it. Melzar did, in the neutral tone of a man pretending not to understand the politics of the tablets in his hand.

"Advanced placements for the Judean cohort," he said. "Effective tomorrow. Danel of Judah will report at first bell to the upper records wing for additional language and archival instruction. Hanan of Judah: administrative track, audit assistance. Mishael of Judah: mathematical and legal indexing. Azaryah of Judah: logistics and supervised conditioning."

Azaryah muttered, "Supervised by whom?"

Melzar ignored him.

"Further adjustments may follow at the discretion of the palace offices involved."

Further adjustments.

The phrase sat in Danel's mind long after the room dispersed.

Upper records wing.

Not Nathrek's chamber. Not yet. But closer.

Much closer.