“That never happened,” said the archmage.
Gaist shook his head.
“Sounds wrong to me,” agreed Gorm.
“It doesn’t matter what really happened! That’s the key to a great ballad,” said Heraldin. “You have to make it more interesting than reality. So sensational that it’s more fun for people to run with it than go digging for the truth. The bigger, the better!”
“See? This is why me answer is no.”
“Really?” Heraldin looked dubious.
“That and the fact that I don’t trust ye. And the fact that I’ve heard ye sing.”
“Come now! Your investigation has brought you to a point where you need someone with ties to smugglers that you can trust, and I—one of your closest friends—”
“One of my professional acquaintances,” amended Jynn.
“One of the bards I don’t always want to kill,” interjected Gorm.
“Closest friends,” Heraldin repeated loudly and leveled a pointed glare at Gaist. “And I happen to be just such a connected individual. I’m a former bodyguard of Benny Hookhand, the most prolific smuggler in Andarun! And you only knew you needed me because Jynn is investigating olive markets on the recommendation of his father. And I need the three of you, and the intellectual rights to a recent bit of your biographies. It’s too perfect to be a coincidence! This is destiny! Don’t deny it! Seize the moment!”
Gorm snorted. “Ye think—”
“I’ll do it,” said the archmage.
Gaist whirled to stare at Jynn.
“Ye what?” asked Gorm.
The bard sounded almost as surprised as the Dwarf. “You will?”
Jynn looked at his desk for a moment, ruminating on something far from oil prices and music rights. When he looked back up, there was steel in his blue eyes. “Yes.”
I accept your generous offer without reservation.
Feista Hrurk wrote in a neat, tight script. She was watched by a small group of Wood Gnomes from the corners of her office in Mrs. Hrurk’s Home for the Underprivileged. One of the Domovoy on the bookshelf next to the desk, a silver-haired woman in a white rat pelt, looked down at the letter and chirruped a question.
“Um, yes, thank you for asking,” said Feista. “I’ve thought about it a lot, and this is what I want.”
Mr. Poldo told Feista that it took him a while to be able to understand the speech of the tiny men and women who formed the backbone of his businesses; Wood Gnomes’ voices were as soft and high-pitched as rodents. The Gnoll imagined it was easy for most people to mistake the Domovoy’s speech for fighting rats or agitated squirrels, but for someone with a dog’s ears it was easy to make out what the diminutive Gnomes were trying to say. The only tricky parts were sorting out the Wood Gnomes’ thick accents and getting past their prolific cursing.
White Rat gave a small shrug and went back to sharpening a pencil into a spear. The Wood Gnomes here were in Mr. Poldo’s employ, and they mainly served as translators for the coded messages that she and the Scribkin exchanged about the running of the house. Otherwise, they stayed around Feista’s office and didn’t cause much trouble, provided she knocked on the doors and left them a saucer of milk on weekends.
Still, it paid to be polite to someone who knew where you slept. Feista bowed her head with a friendly smile before she turned back to her letter and, after steadying the tremble in her paws, continued writing.
Attached please find my executed agreements. Per the instructions in your offer letter, I will arrive at work on the 23rd day of Frostfall at the Warg Incorporated main office at Sixteen Wrothgar Way on the Fifth Tier.
The pups would be fine, she told herself. Mr. Poldo had assured her that replacements could be found for working around the home, and the gods knew Aubren was ready for more responsibility. This was a dream career for Feista. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Her grandmother once told her that when life gave you lemons, you grabbed them as fast as you could and shared them with all of your family so that nobody got scurvy. Granny Zelvia came from a time and place where lemons were as rare as diamonds, and still much better to eat.
With a deep breath, Feista tucked the letter and signed contracts into an envelope and sealed it with wax. Then, with a nod to the Wood Gnomes, she stood up, turned around three times, and left her office.
She found Aubren cleaning the dining hall downstairs. “I need the letter courier to get this when he stops by,” the Gnoll said, holding up the thick envelope.
Aubren looked worried for a moment. “He’s already been by, ma’am. And no, it didn’t come,” she added, answering Feista’s question before she could give it words.
Feista brushed away her disappointment and focused on the letter she did have—the one she needed to get to Warg Incorporated. At times like this, Feista wished she could rely on more relevant matriarchal wisdom than “sour on the tongue, no more bleeding gums.” Still, you had to work with the generational role models you got, and if anyone could say anything about Granny Zelvia, it was that she never gave up. “I’ll be out for a while then. I need to either chase the courier down or deliver this to the Fifth Tier.”
“What? Now?” asked Aubren.
“No time like the present,” said Feista. Fate had given her a treasure, and she planned to squeeze every drop out of it. She grabbed her cloak, told Aubren to watch the pups, and burst through the front door with so much enthusiasm it threatened to fly off its hinges.
The door swung shut. The clank and thud of Dwarven and Human footsteps faded in the halls of the building that housed the transitional Tower of Twilight. Patches eventually abandoned hope that the guests’ departure heralded an imminent walk to the park and went back to his bed. Jynn Ur’Mayan stared at the back of his office door, his body motionless while his mind rifled through his life’s work, which recently had extended to include his father’s life’s work.
Jynn had locked cabinets filled with information on Detarr Ur’Mayan’s projects, along with the soul of Detarr Ur’Mayan himself. Aya of Blades had provided some insights back during the liche’s invasion. The omnimancer had acquired the collection of Teldir of Umbrax through an estate sale. He’d even issued a guild quest to retrieve the lost writings of Win Cinder, though few heroes signed on and they’d yet to return.
Since childhood, Jynn had known about his father’s joint venture with the kings of Ruskan and the Freedlands. Teldir’s papers noted that the goal of their collaboration was a way to escape death, either by achieving true immortality or at least securing a return from the dead. The kings had assembled five wizards and started a project named for Mannon’s great escape from death at the hands of the gods: the Leviathan Project. The project wasn’t necromancy—it was explicitly stated not to leverage necromancy in the contracts Jynn had found—but the participants were given wide leeway to skirt the borders of the dark arts in pursuit of new solutions. His father worked on soul-binding, but other mages took other avenues of inquiry. Aya of Blades researched cures and potions created by the ancient masters of low magic. Win Cinder had tried to entice or ensorcel a minor god to steal souls from Mordo Ogg’s threshold. Teldir tried to bind souls into golems, as one might enchant a magic weapon.
Detarr Ur’Mayan once called the Leviathan Project “unsightly work,” which meant that it was the sort of endeavor that usually brings villagers with torches and pitchforks. The five noctomancers hired henchmen and thugs in quiet arrangements to avoid attention, and many assumed they had gone villain. But they hadn’t—the noctomancers were operating under full royal authority and protection. At least, until Az’Anon the Black made a grave mistake.
Jynn wasn’t sure exactly what Az’Anon did wrong. Whatever it was, it frightened the other four noctomancers on the Leviathan Project and turned the kings of Ruskan and the Freedlands against them. Days after the project’s charter was terminated, the Heroes’ Guild was on a hunt for its participants. The deed had marked the beginning of the wizard’s descent from being Az’Anon the Black to becoming the Spider King, dabbling in true necromancy, and threatening Andarun. Yet Jynn could find no record of what, exactly, he had done.
There would be records, of course—guild contracts and documentation for the justification of the quest—but those were kept under the protection of the royal archivists. Such papers were sealed in the Royal Archives of the Heroes’ Guild Great Vault beneath the Palace of Andarun, and not available to the public, not even an Archmage of the Academy of Mages. This point had been made emphatically and repeatedly clear in Jynn’s prior correspondence with the royal archivist in the guild office on the Fifth Tier, who advised the wizard that such records were not to be released to the public until the sun froze over and the Pit released the dead.
That left Jynn with no good options left. He had no way to locate and speak with the mages of the Leviathan Project, living or dead, except perhaps his father. And while Jynn had risked much to pursue Detarr’s knowledge, using necromancy on a warded phylactery was a bridge too far, and too interwoven with explosive counterspells. The omnimancer’s research on the project had been nearly at a dead end for months.
Then Gorm showed up, with evidence linking his father’s remarks to the dragon attacks. And Heraldin was there, perhaps summoned by Jynn’s own experimental prophecy, with a way to further investigate the issue. Two of the few people he knew, arriving on exactly the same day, with information related to Detarr Ur’Mayan’s coded words. Looking back, had he not been recruited by the Al’Matrans, he would never have met Gorm and Heraldin, would have never found his father’s work, foiled his father’s schemes, or found Patches. The litany of serendipity went on and on.
It was all coincidence, Jynn knew. Yet he also knew that coincidence and destiny are much the same, in the way that raindrops and the ocean are the same; one might have been more vast and powerful and dangerous than the other, but they were made of identical components, and in sufficient quantities the lesser became the greater. Too many convenient coincidences were a sign of fate, but if you saw the hand of destiny at every coincidence, you’d wind up looking as silly as a captain trying to sail a schooner across a puddle. The trick, the essence of low magic, was to know the difference.
Eventually he stood and pulled a slim volume off his bookshelf. About halfway through the thin leather journal he found the most often cited quote of the Third Age omnimancer Salam Abdus.
Note, dear reader, that destiny is like a cat that you wish to call to you. Give it your attention, try to coax it into place, and it shall have naught to do with you. Play coy as a maiden, and it shall surely come running. Yet turn your back on the bastard at your deepest peril.
Jynn took a deep breath. Regrettably little remained of Adbus’ teachings; he was most famous for this observation being quoted in Nove’s Lex Infortunii, wherein the great philosopher-scientist noted that shortly after writing the quote, Abdus was eaten by a Dire Ocelot.
Still, the archmage could see that wisdom remained in the ancient omnimancer’s words. It would do little good to meddle in matters of destiny—his experiment with the prophetic vault had shown him the folly in that. Yet it seemed like folly to ignore the confluence of events that had brought him so close to his father’s work. If fate had really brought him this far, perhaps it might take him further still. Perhaps even into the Royal Archives. It was just a matter of being in the right place at the right time, without using magic to do so.
Predicting the future is notoriously fraught, but predicting a wizard’s course of action is relatively simple. The likelihood that a mage will do something can be expressed as a ratio of the power or knowledge of secrets gained against the effort and risk of gaining it. Since Jynn stood to gain insights into his destiny and possibly access to his father’s research without engaging in any actual low magic, his decision was easy. The only question was where he should be until his next meeting with Gorm and Heraldin.
“Come, Patches,” he said, fetching a leather leash from the shelf between two arcane tomes.
A sudden, frenetic cacophony erupted from the bed beside his desk; the scrabbling of claws on wood playing under earnest panting. Patches skidded around Jynn in a tight circle, his paws flailing in all directions, his tail wagging hard enough to bend his body into alternating right angles.
“Yes. Yes, it is time for walkies,” Jynn assured the dog dancing about his feet as he pushed the door open. “Perhaps all the way down to the Fifth Tier.”
