A huge hand landed on his shoulder. He looked at Gaist and saw his own weariness reflected in the weaponsmaster’s eyes. But he could also see embers of purpose and resolve burning there, reminding Heraldin of a fire that he had briefly felt in his better moments. And now that he saw it, the bard found that the same embers still smoldered somewhere within him despite his best efforts to extinguish them. To his own despair, he realized that he had developed a conscience over the course of his adventures. And now that Gaist had given his fledgling moral center a voice, of a sort, Heraldin was sure it would allow him no joy or rest until it was satisfied.
His false mustache fluttered in a long sigh. “I know,” he said. “I wish I didn’t, but I know.”
The faintest hint of a smile played beneath Gaist’s crimson scarf as the bard peeled off the false facial hair and carefully repacked his disguise.
“Come on,” Heraldin told the weaponsmaster, sliding the box back into the cubby. “Gorm told us what comes next. Let’s go and get the right thing over with.”
Gaist shifted subtly; not enough to block the door, but enough to indicate the door would be blocked if the bard kept walking.
“What now?”
The weaponsmaster raised an eyebrow.
“Fine!” said Heraldin. He pulled the box back out and set about replacing the false documents and the purse of coins. “I wasn’t going to use them, you know. I just… I would have felt better with a little insurance on hand. Old habits die hard.”
Kaitha stared at the vial of golden liquid on her dining room table.
The salve inside the bottle sang to her. It whispered of delights that she had once known, hinted at joy that had slipped away, promised to reveal secrets that she had forgotten.
Chief among those lost secrets was how the bottle had arrived in her apartment. Kaitha could not recall buying the salve. She was sure she had been shopping for an entirely different purpose—though she couldn’t recall what—and had been surprised to find the potion in her bag upon returning to her apartment. But now it was there, smoldering in the lamplight, waiting to provide sweet, sleepy warmth to anyone who needed it.
A part of Kaitha knew these tricks, these clever little ruses she set up to absolve herself and place the guilt for her transgressions firmly with circumstance. Part of her screamed that she had worked so hard to come this far, and she couldn’t give in now. It willed her to stand, to walk across the room yet again, to flee from the apartment and the infernal bottle that filled it.
But she paused at the door, her hand on the handle without turning it. How far had she come, really, the other side of her asked. How many days of emptiness had she endured just for the right to endure another one? How many priests and therapists and support groups had heard her struggles and passed them along? How many times had she searched for the only one who made it different, calling to someone who would never reply? What did it accomplish? Why not take the happiness the bottle offered her if it was the only bit she could find?
She walked back to the table and froze with her hand on the bottle. Gorm had warned her that Johan would strike soon, that the whole party would need to assemble as soon as the king revealed his scheme. The weight of responsibility pressed her hand to the table, and she set the bottle down.
The Elf shook her head. She needed to leave.
She almost made it to the door before her doubts came rushing back with the desperate intensity of a carnival barker about to lose a fare. Why bother? What could she and Gorm really change? What could Johan actually take away from her when her life was this empty?
He could take a lot more away from other people, she reminded herself as she set her hand on the door. Others were depending on her.
Others who would be gone soon. The party would wither and perish as all mortals do, and the memories of them as well, replaced by different mortals with new concerns, while she—
“No!” Kaitha growled. “Impermanence is not insignificance!” She moved to open the door handle, and found that she wasn’t grasping it anymore. The bottle was in her hand, and she was back at the table. She dropped it like it was made of fire and backed toward the door.
Though, there wasn’t really a good reason to be scared of it. She had functioned just fine for years using salve, hadn’t she? Yes, she’d had some minor problems when she was cut off, but there was little chance of that now that she was back on her game.
“Minor problems?” she laughed, incredulous at herself. She’d nearly died out of desperation for the stuff! She would be gone if it weren’t for—
The memory of Thane drew her out of her inner debate and pulled her gaze to the window. She couldn’t see past the glow of the city, warm and golden as a campfire’s circle, but she sensed a tugging from the darkness beyond the city lights, a call just beyond hearing, a longing for something forgotten.
Kaitha lost track of how long she stood suspended between the window, the door, and the bottle on the table, trapped like a boat caught in crossing eddies. She could have stayed rooted to the spot and wrestling with her own thoughts all night if the bannerman hadn’t knocked at the door to her apartment.
She wore the heraldry of the royal chapter, with the crested hat that marked her as a courier. The bannerman greeted the ranger by name without warmth or malice, deposited a gilt envelope in the Elf’s hand, and left with a curt bow. The door thudded shut again as Kaitha carried the message back into her apartment.
Kaitha opened the envelope and read it.
She sat down and read it again.
She stood up once more. Gorm would want to talk about this before they spoke to the king, and there wasn’t much time. “I can make it one more day,” she told herself as she pulled on her cloak.
She paused by the table on her way out. The vial of salve was still there. It could just as easily be in her rucksack, and nobody would know. She picked up the bottle.
“I have to make it one more day,” she snarled. With a snort she strode to the window, wrenched the glass open, and hurled the bottle out into the air above the street. The ranger grinned in triumph at the tinkle of shattering glass from below, though her smile faded when some unfortunate passerby screamed a curse immediately after.
“One more day,” she repeated, shutting the window. Then she grabbed her rucksack and bow, checked her gear, and burst out her front door.
The sudden bang startled Jynn so thoroughly that he nearly dropped the nornstone wand. He juggled the device as a storm of Ruskan curses thundered from the apartment next door. “You magic my apartment!” Mrs. Ur’Kretchen shrieked through the wall. “You magic my apartment and scare cat! Why you hate cat? Horrible wizards!”
Jynn took a deep breath and hollered back, “I feel nothing for your cat, Mrs. Ur’Kretchen!” This was not entirely true; Jynn held a good amount of pity for the cat, considering the poor beast was forced to share a tiny apartment with an ancient swamp hag. Yet he thought better of saying as much; given that the ancient harridan nearly hammered through the wall at imaginary provocations, he didn’t want to know what she’d resort to if he actually insulted her.
The thunderous assault subsided, leaving Jynn to turn his attention back to the wand. He had assigned several students the task of repairing the defunct device, and after several weeks of their efforts, he was pleased to see that the young omnimancers hadn’t managed to destroy it.
The archmage ran his hands over the gemstone runes inlayed in the ebony wand. The sigils were intact, as was the sorcerous projection matrix woven around them. The correct spells were arrayed through the prophetic latticework. As far as Jynn could see, it should have been a simple weave to get the wand to accurately measure the latent fate in the immediate area. Yet any channeling produced nothing but a brief flash from the wand and shouts from the neighbor.
He drummed his skeletal fingers on the worktable. The matter of the olives and the serendipitous convergence of his own purposes with Gorm and Heraldin’s had initially convinced the wizard that the city was a hotbed of manifest destiny, yet now he wasn’t so sure. In the subsequent weeks, he’d taken so many walks by the royal archivist’s offices that Patches had begun to groan whenever the wizard reached for the leash, yet all he had to show for his efforts was a new set of blisters on his calloused feet. Jynn wondered if the coincidences surrounding his meeting with the Dwarf and bard were just run-of-the-mill happenstance, rather than the early drops of a coalescing destiny. The only way to know was to measure the latent fate around the city, and the only way to measure latent fate in a given area was through the use of a nornstone device.
Jynn flexed his fingers, ready to channel more magic into the wand, but reconsidered at the sounds of heavy footsteps and a yowling cat next door. It has been said that the definition of insanity is trying the same approach repeatedly and expecting different results, but the archmage felt that a more immediately relevant definition of insanity was howling like a banshee and trying to knock a wall down with a broom handle whenever the neighbors made a sound. With that in mind he stood up, wrapped the wand carefully in an old cloak, and headed to his own chambers, a modest apartment down on the third floor.
Patches wilted and stared fixedly at the wall as Jynn fetched his heavy cloak and boots. “No, boy. You don’t need to come this time,” Jynn told the dog. Patches’ tail thumped on the floor a couple of times at the reprieve, but he kept averting his eyes until Jynn left the apartment.
The Order of Twilight was too small and ill-funded to have amenities like dedicated training chambers or well stocked laboratories or even a tower that wasn’t also inhabited by several elderly and perhaps infernal tenants. A Device Support Department was far out of the realm of budgetary possibility. Yet strolling a few streets Wallward and up a tier brought him to the Tower of the Sun within the hour. The ivory spire stood wreathed in golden filigree and crowned with a statue of Musana. The goddess of light held an orb that burned with sorcerous flame and was locked in a stare down with the silver statue of Alluna that topped the Tower of the Moon across the street. Omnimancers were no more welcome in the Order of the Sun’s national headquarters than noctomancers, but the Order of Twilight’s arrangement with the Academy of Mages gave Jynn and his staff access through the service entrance to the basement.
