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The bed wasn't totally made, the blanket on it was a little rumpled and the pillows were askew. The magician crossed his legs and nodded to one of the legs of the bed and said aloud, "Lock," and one of the manacled cuffs on the chains locked around the metal post, just like that. Then he stood up and walked into the other room for a time.

There was no point in trying to free himself disarmed, with a broken finger, and with probably no more than thirty seconds with his captor in the other room. Hector had never been one to not try, though. So he did try, as best he could, while speculating a little morbidly on what Wiseman could be doing: checking on Small Lady, maybe, putting her on the couch and keeping tabs on her breathing and her pulse. That was a faintly repulsive mental image, though, and whether or not it was true about twenty seconds later Hector heard a drawer slide open, and then shut again, and soon he came back in to the bedroom.

He had an X-Acto knife, the kind that you used for arts and crafts, in his hand lowered at his side. Hector closed his eyes again.

This time he sat down next to Hector on the floor and crossed his legs once more. He looked studiously focused, and, it seemed, a bit flushed.

"I don't," he said simply. "Your cooperation was never a necessary element to this endeavor. You're free to do as you wish."

And then he picked up Hector's unhurt hand and laid his arm out like he was a nurse about to take blood, and with a brief sting of pain drew a short, shallow red line on his arm with the blade.

The wizard sat with his arms resting on his knees. The edge of the X-Acto knife was bloody and he wiped it off, both sides, on the leg of his trousers. "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. If turnips were swords, I'd have one at my side. If ifs and ands were pots and pans," he looked at the mirror, then at Hector, then back at the mirror, "there'd be no use for tinkers' hands."

The cut still stung, but blood didn't well up beyond what it already had. It looked like some MySpacer's idea of a wound. There was definitively no reason for Hector to flinch when Wiseman took his chained hand and pulled his immobilized, bleeding arm into his lap, so he didn't, but he did shudder. He didn't make another incision, though, just held the knife between two fingers and stared at the mirror.

"Now we wait," he said.

When he bored of waiting, a little later, he made a parallel cut to the first one and cleaned the blade again; but he had nothing to say about this, just fixed his bright eyes on the bedroom mirror. He didn't have to explain. He had explained more than enough.

Wiseman said nothing. He'd lost interest in Hector, except to make a third cut alongside the first two after a few minutes of waiting; then he set the knife aside and stared into the mirror, intent on an imaginary prince on the imaginary other side of the mirror. Let Dylan be asleep, or high, or too strung-out on withdrawal to leave the inside of the Hillworth bathroom. Let Ronnie Harvey not mention it to Cora Grant, and let Cora Grant not mention it to Dylan Rasmussen. Let Jesse Alvarez's absence be a blip on the radar, static in the signal, something that would go unnoticed until he was free or the people with flashlights in the woods turned up his broken-child from a broken-home body. It was nighttime. For once, let Dylan Rasmussen slumber on.

Not long after, but fairly suddenly, the bedroom mirror went dark.

The room it reflected wasn't the same room. It was a room that was too dark to see the dimensions of; someone had turned out all the lights in it, clearly, so the fact that there was a shape sitting in front of the mirror was only something you saw once your eyes adjusted. Only the frame of the figure was distinct in the low light: the outline of a pair of shoulders, of a brooch, of a metal circle on its forehead that caught the light, the hints of pale hair, enough to see that it was human and male. More was only obvious if you knew what to look for. Hector knew what to look for.

Alexandros had turned off all the lights in the room before trying to contact him, so prying strange eyes couldn't make out the details of his face or the inside of their Hillworth dorm room. That was Dylan. He always thought of these things.

Hector and Wiseman, on the other hand, were brightly illuminated. Wiseman didn't seem to care.

"I must say, I appreciate your promptness in communication," the wizard broke the silence, staring at the dark mirror with his uncanny eyes.

Alex said nothing for a moment or two. "I imagine I'm to believe that's Captain Hector." He sounded calm. The one warrior's virtue Father ever ascribed to me, Hector: stoicism. Would that he knew my blood did always run dreadfully chilly with his temperament.

As quickly as that, Hector was propped up by invisible hands, where he tried to look away from the mirror, tried not to meet his brother's eyes, wherever they were. "The very same."

The silhouette of the Prince was very still. "You make war on the Imperium," he said, quiet, "with your every new action, sorceror. And I don't see any armies at your back."

"The Imperium," said Wiseman delicately, "is a tyrannical medieval state for whom military technology has not progressed beyond the bow and arrow. Nevertheless I'll be sure to quake in my boots. I have a living auxiliary Prince, you have a Great Crystal, which is a funny story, because I'm fairly certain we'd very much want it the other way around, both of us -- here, he's in very good shape, almost mint. Hector, would you like to attest to your pristine condition? Please don't tell him about the shark vat. Nobody likes a tattletale."

Alexandros was quiet for a moment or two longer. For a short while Hector had the slim hope that he'd make the hard choice, the right choice -- his brother for the Imperium. Aeneas could Captain the Cavaliers, Laocoon could, Alexandros could lead his own damned men, always had. Hector had always been an auxiliary prince. In war games Alexandros had always taken the sword to his own men when he had to, taken the fire to the villages when it was necessary to bring an end to the war. He abandoned every Kobayashi Maru. Maybe now also. Maybe now as well.

Then he said, "I don't recall saying you were at ease, Cavalier. You'll remain silent until I address you."

Wiseman's grin widened such that it seemed that if he disappeared, it would hang in the air without him, while the bottom dropped out of Hector's stomach. "I daresay that since your brother attempted murder or capture or murcapture or capmurder on my own dear little cornmuffin, holding him here in such comfy accommodations is hardly unfair. Not, of course, that I imagine the Imperium would know anything about that. I've certainly never heard of a state that would attack its neighbors without provocation. So, what's it to be? It's a yes-or-no question, and I'm afraid I'll have to conclude that --"

"Would that you remained silent until I addressed you," remarked Alexandros. "You have your trade. Or you will if you meet me at Lake Providence tomorrow evening. It's an old camping destination. Clever fellow like you should be able to arrange transportation."

"Much," said Wiseman, "as I'm charmed by your baldfaced attempt to lure me to a place abandoned enough that you feel justified in using your Crystal of Mass Destruction to wreak nuclear death on me and all around you, I'm afraid you'll have to try someplace more populous."

Alexandros hissed in a breath and Hector closed his eyes.

"The statue garden in the Museum of Art," Alexandros said.

His eyes glinted a little more in the darkness.

"It's closed on Sundays," he concluded.

Wiseman raised his eyebrows, shrugged and turned his palms up in a gesture of, it's all the same to me. "Suit yourself," he said. "All right. I'm afraid as much as I've been enjoying this videochat, I've got planes to catch and bills to pay. Say bye-bye to your brother, Hector."

Alexandros didn't answer for a moment, and brought his face no closer; however, he moved something in the darkness and a moment later the pale shape of his left hand was pressed against the surface of the mirror.

The wizard reached out and idly traced the outline of the Prince's handprint with his thumb. "Any parting shots, Your Highness?" He dropped his hand.

"None to you," said Alexandros. "Hector."

Hector met the sheen of two pale eyes that so barely caught the light.

"Do as you're told," he said.

The image blinked out of the mirror and they were left staring at their own reflections, both a little flushed with adrenaline, not actually, in fact, looking that much more composed than the other -- it was an odd, striking moment for Hector when he met his captor's eyes in the mirror and knew that Devourer had dragged his nerves to the same stretching point as terror and despair had Hector's. He was imprisoned by and with a man half-mad. It wasn't any better.

But a moment later Wiseman had shrugged and leapt to his feet, as was his fashion, and strolled around to the other side of the bed to pick something up off the floor.

"It's just you and me, kid," he said, and brought something down overhand in a ringing blow to Hector's skull, and everything went black.