 peace begins with a smile.
- mother teresa
Tsi set down the quill, rubbed his eyes and sighed. Midday was fast approaching and, despite having been working solidly since five thirty a.m., he had not yet even reached that half-way point with the pile of paperwork mounted on his desk. Only a tiny percentage of the communications sent to Tsi actually made it to him: the vast majority of it was sifted out by his efficient assistant Chen, who was skilled at sorting the urgent documents from the less urgent ones. A number of papers Chen had marked as high priority were the usual complaints and comments from Manekhtites and extremist Christians, who had undoubtedly only sent the letters in the first place to clog up Tsi’s in-tray. Nevertheless, if he didn’t respond to them promptly, the two groups could become distinctly more hostile. Thus far they had been fairly quiet, and Tsi hoped to keep it that way.
The seconds inched by while he worked on a response to one of the high Auran priests, who had written to express concerns which had already been expressed and answered several times. The Aurans were not being openly aggressive, but their resentment was growing and there were worrying signs of unrest. Mallos was too preoccupied with the Italian situation to be able to spare them much time, which only reinforced Tsi’s desire to send another person back to Earth, but so far his only candidate for the position had repeatedly rejected him. (Spain and Italy, due to a leak in information that nobody cared to trace, were on the verge of war. Both nations felt their deities had been slighted, and neither of the deities in question were prepared to apologise or put in a good word about the other. Mallos had been meeting with Spanish and Italian ambassadors every day for the past week, but tensions didn’t seem to be getting any better. Just another headache Tsi didn’t need.) Eventually, he managed to round off the letter, dump it into his out-tray with relish and look eagerly down at his watch. Quarter past eleven. He’d just have to be early: Tsi couldn’t take any more paperwork.
He strolled around his office for a minute to get the circulation flowing in his legs again, before teleporting to the castle grounds. The castle was bigger than he remembered so the fact that he was fifteen minutes early for the scheduled appointment didn’t much matter, since it took almost that long just to find the king’s office. It wasn’t sign-posted and Tsi had only been there once before, but luckily it wasn’t too difficult to locate. A brief pause to chat to one of the maids ate another five minutes (she asked how the ‘fight’ was going, although Tsi suspected she was just procrastinating on her cleaning duties) so by the time he reached the familiar office door, the time on his watch said eleven twenty-seven. He knocked three times before entering, his tired face breaking out into the first true smile of the day at the sight of the king of Shaman. Few people understood what it was like to lead a group of magical people; Arthur was one of them.
“Hello, hello,” the spring which had formerly always occupied Tsi’s step, and which had been somewhat lacking since he became Acting Chairman, worked its way back as he crossed the room. “How are things? No trouble from any of mine, I hope.”
He prayed. Rhaegar and Xephyr hadn’t done anything openly rebellious, yet, but Tsi lived in a state of constant nervous anticipation.
“Thanks for taking the time to see me,” he continued cheerfully as he sank into the chair opposite the king. The appointment had been made the week previous and was earliest vacancy they’d both had in their schedules. “I shouldn’t take up too much of your time. I just came to – ” He broke off as the tree-shaped pendant around his neck began to glow. There was a flash of light and a rolled-up scroll of paper appeared in his left-hand, which he immediately unrolled and began to read, after apologising to Arthur for the interruption. A light frown furrowed the Acting Chairman’s forehead while he absorbed the contents of the note, written in hasty Mandarin, before he pulled a biro out of nowhere and scribbled a quick reply on the bottom. There was another flash of light while the paper vanished and Tsi sighed, rubbing his temples. “Sorry about that,” he said. “That was my secretary… apparently one of Lorraine’s attendants has arrived at the pantheon, very flustered. She says Lorraine’s been put under another curse and she’s blaming Mallos again. It’s odd,” his tone altered slightly, as if it wasn’t odd at all, and he leant forward and fixed Arthur with a shrewd look. “Because Lorraine and Mallos usually get on quite well, but they’ve recently been very hostile to each other. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”
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