"I mean they solved it. A mote they captured before it could mature, and extending the time on a larger threat temporarily locked away. Not to say they've definitely been net positive, but there have been positives."

"By 'my work' I meant 'make sure they become a net positive.'"

"In that case, yes. It's probably not too impossible, even."

"How reassuring. How about yourself, you said you think you've managed to become a net positive?"

"Smaller activities were sometimes more urgent, but my peak accomplishment was getting a mid-tier ancient demon to agree to the Seal of Solomon. Since the high-tier demons do things like tear down stars out of the sky, that was as far as I thought I could escalate."

"Tear down stars—how does that even work they are several light-years away and they are flaming balls of gas—"

"It's likely that the saying is partly metaphorical. Not that any associated literal version wouldn't also be intimidating, of course. The particular entity it's about is far beyond my ability to interfere with even when limited to its better attested feats."

"I see. Still sounds like a problem that will need to be solved eventually, I need to find a non-horrifying means of immortality."

"That's probably not strictly impossible, but there is a reason few people with morals ever try."

"And what's the reason? It seems to me that at least when it comes to muggles it's just memetic acceptance."

"That's part of it, and not only on the practitioners' part. Something like straightforward immortality would involve dealing with powerful spirits, and Others are as used to human mortality as humans are. So your potential counterparties are limited to those who are willing to go against the way things are, which sounds fine but when you're dealing with nonhuman intelligences there are vastly more ways for it to go wrong than right. It is surprisingly easy for results to be horrifying by human standards.

And that's before even getting into what the cost might be."

"The non-horrifyingness requirement included the cost," she says. "But yes, this is a rather hostile magic system. And I still have that thing with the Behaims to deal with."

"Right, them. How did they manage it, did they tell you?"

"They used a thing that froze someone in place while keeping them aware, typically used as a curse for revenge or to drive people nuts, and another thing that let my mind skip over the intervening time more-or-less at will, so that worked out pretty well."

"I hadn't heard of the first thing. 

They let you skip time?"

"Yeah, or at least not notice it passing."

"That's not quite how I've heard it described, but supposedly losing focus and not being aware of where the time went is what it feels like when the Behaims pay into the family supply of time."

"—the family supply of time?"

"This is a bit of a secret. I know it because I used to be close with some of the Behaims, but I never did promise to keep it hidden and they don't rely on the secrecy much anyway.

They have a store of power, a well is what they call it. All family members give up some fraction of their time. Nearly all of it gets lost in the transition. The remainder gets spent on magical effects or hoarded for the future.

Old Malcolm was too much of a miser to make the offer without playing some game, but I confess this one never occurred to me."

"...so I already paid him rather a lot more than he could ever possibly have normally gotten and he didn't tell me. That's the catch."

"Probably. We don't know that's what he did. But yes, it would explain why he was willing to accept a promise of payment he claimed to be skeptical you could deliver."

"That is incredibly clever and manipulative and I hate and respect him a little for it."

"I'm more worried about the results. My plan if I ended up their opponent was always to try to bankrupt them, or at least be too expensive to be worth fighting. Now they're more powerful than anyone else in Jacob's Bell, but at least they don't know we know it."

"I wonder if I'd be able to leverage some of that by having unknowingly paid it."

"It would be surprising if there's no effect at all. I only have basic chronomancy texts, but I'll see what I can find."