JET 8.10: LEARN TO TEACH
“They call it a problem of evil, as though they understood the meaning of perfection without ever attempting to imagine it. Let it be said thus: there is War in Heaven, waged unceasing across a plenitude of dimensions so great as to defy definition. Shall that not answer the eternal query on both its faces?”
– from ‘The Book of Kultemeren’, 1:206-211
Bleak grey waves stretched as far as the eye could see into the distance, and curtains of white motes drifted down slowly into the waters. Snow was rare here, for whatever reason, and I’d never actually seen snow falling into the sea before – not close-up like this, at any rate – but there was a first time for everything. The bay was remarkably still at this time of day, the waves falling upon the rocks with little more than a rhythmic rumble. The ice floes had been reduced to little white eggs tapping against the shoreline. I stood at the rail of the walkway above the surf, a fur-lined glove enclosing my fingers as I gripped the frost-clad wooden beam. Thirty feet below me, Northril reigned.
But not here. This was the province of Deymar and his thanes. My province, if I wanted to think of things that way. I was, after all, a lord.
I tried not to think too much about it, something I found surprisingly easy, considering how often I was being addressed in deferential terms.
For an outsider, I hadn’t done badly for myself in Telior. People still gave me strange looks – but only when they thought I wasn’t looking back. It was a fun thing indeed, to catch them mid-glance, turn my patented Feychilde grin on them and watch them melt in horror.
The people with me right now didn’t have any reason to cast me strange looks; they’d already seen me at some of my strangest.
“Vot about imps?” Nafala suggested, a faint blush creeping up her cheeks. The girl was shy, but her confidence was growing. “You could…”
I thought about the way I directly tapped the mizelikon’s essence in Zyger and shook my head, carefully arranging the apologetic smile on my face so she wouldn’t be too put-off by my denial.
“Won’t work,” I said plainly. “An imp’s essence is too weak to feed the spell for long, and certainly not indefinitely. There are particular creatures whose power could, for sure, keep the ensorcellment ticking over forever… But those are few and far between, and beyond your ability to summon.”
Nafala gazed at me, expectantly.
“Beyond my ability to summon!” I was thinking of the rose-man beneath Mund. “Any eldritch whose Wellspring you attached to an indefinite spell would, in the end, expire… I think.”
“What would happen then?” Roba said, half-groaning.
I gnawed my lip for a moment. “Well, the ensorcellment would weaken, then fail, and you’d have no way to tell when. You couldn’t just look at the rune, and judge its half-life by the fraying of the shape, like you could with the partial-infinity. You’d have to keep your eyes on the imp. The rune binding the eldritch Wellspring to the ensorcellment might look fine one minute, then simply evaporate the next.”
My two students looked at one another, clearly disgruntled. Nafala’s lips were pressed firmly together – she was doing her best to contain her disappointment – but Roba was actively scowling at his feet.
“And you both looked so happy, when you brought the idea to my attention…” I grinned at them, then tilted my head towards the nearest marketplace, not a hundred yards off at Tenport. “Fancy a snack before we test it?”
Their eyes lit back up at that.
“Oh, so you are hungry? Come on. It’s on me.”
It was the promise of the experiment that perked them both up, but even if I’d only offered the free meal I knew what the answer would be. I wasn’t actually responsible for paying their wages – not yet at least – but I was aware their stipend from the crown was a single percentage-point of my own, and they were quite well-off in comparison to a lot of their countrymen. Some food was the least of a bonus I could offer such diligent, thoughtful scholars.
I turned to lead the way, steering around a group of belligerent beggars and a stack of cockle-loaded pallets, heading up towards the ladder-stair we needed.
“You’re alvays eating,” Nafala said as she fell in just behind me. She spoke out of curiosity more than complaint – it was hardly like she was going to put me off, given she was getting something for herself into the bargain.
“Gosh, sorry,” I gushed. “I was under the stupid impression the human body requires regular feeding to operate – I’m obviously wrong…”
I expected a thump or a snigger, some acknowledgement of my attempt at humour, but I’d clearly failed. I glanced back at my apprentice, trying to show her my grin, but her eyes were on her footing as she evaded a tangle of rope stretched across the beams; she missed it.
She wasn’t like anyone else I’d ever met. Introspective. Not prone to babbling. It made me wonder what would make someone choose such a life as this – why not go into another profession? It wasn’t like magic was limited to sorcery, and students of the other schools were actually respected. As we walked into the narrow market-way, either side of the path clogged with stalls and barely-moving lines of crowds, those crowds parted – but it wasn’t out of love for their betters. The unwashed masses saw our robes, and, remembering our reputations as dealers in the dark things of the world, they parted for us.
I resolutely fixed my childish, stupid smile, nodded my thanks to everyone I could and even tried to shake a few hands. My students were used to it by now. Nafala was too unassuming to try to emulate me, but clever, shaven-headed Roba was simply too scared. He was their kinsman, naturally afraid of expressing himself, experiencing humiliation.
I was the weird outsider. I had no friends to lose and hundreds of enemies to unmake. Damn right I shook as many hands as I could.
As much as I was the senior in terms of ability, in terms of station, I was acutely aware that, legally-speaking, I was still a kid in Telior. Yet I was also acutely aware of Nafala’s cuteness, and no amount of horrible past experience could stop my mind wandering from time to time, her its object. At least a quarter of my fearlessness came, I suspected, out of a deep-seated desire to impress her, and not just with my magic, my money.
I dropped a few coins in a trader’s palm, and hefted a crate of caramelised prawn sandwiches onto my shoulder, using a quick flash of satyr-strength to make it look easy. I hated the things, but the locals saw them as a delicacy, and I’d long-since learnt that treating my favourites to the tastiest snack in all of Telior without bringing more back to the tower for my other students would get me into hot water. I’d grabbed a plain loaf for me to enjoy back at the tower with my cheese, and all the way home Roba wouldn’t stop harassing me, until I finally broke down and tried a prawn butty for the second time just to shut him up.
“You didn’t see it the first time, did you?” I said, coming to a halt smack in the middle of a bridge between two rickety, creaking streets.
“I do no believe you no like!” Roba insisted. “Please – I must see!”
“Leave him alone,” Nafala murmured.
“Oh yeah.” I grinned at her. “You saw.”
A smile touched her lips, and she turned away to spare herself a repetition of the first experience. I was pretty sure I’d never looked uglier in my life than I did with a mouthful of dripping fishiness.
I let an old woman in a long coat walk around us – giving us such a wide berth she must’ve thought we were stopping to summon a hell-fiend – then pulled off my glove, produced a single noxious bun, and bit down into it.
I felt it pop, felt the gore running down my chin. The odour filling my nostrils reached down its stinky fingers into my lungs and I coughed the contents of my mouth out over the rail.
“Virdut knows! Aha!” Roba chortled, patting me on the back in a friendly fashion.
“Never… again…” I moaned.
“Make no promises!” he yelled, still laughing.
I glanced about. There had to be at least a dozen pairs of eyes on us while we stood there, being immature wielders of devastating forces.
Good, I thought. Whatever they think of us, they need to know we’re just people too.
I drew myself up, smoothed down my robes, and looked around at my accidental audience as I cried, “Best prawns in Telior!”
Those watching quickly fell back about their business, and, laughing along with Roba, I continued to lead the way back up to the posh levels. I had no trouble navigating the place, using wraith-form wherever needed to bypass difficult changes in elevation, hauling the food-crate with me through a shadow of Nethernum from time to time.
The sandwiches were for sorcerers. Sorcerers wouldn’t mind.
I appraised my new abode as we approached. It was a slipshod, lopsided piece of architecture, more appealing to my Sticktowner’s soul than any of the Telese might have guessed. The base was squarish, but a poor attempt had been made at circular upper levels, and the section where the two styles were married together was a morass of iron rivets, struts and support-beams. Almost entirely comprised of oil-dark planks, my tower stretched up out of the edge of the palace courtyard like a blackened finger, bits of long-abandoned rope-ladder still clinging to it from the days of its construction – or, probably, reconstruction.
The view from my bedroom balcony was magnificent. Almost as much as Deymar from his throne, I ruled the ocean from my eyrie; Northril’s vast expanse was more like an endless peaceful tundra than anything so chaotic as churning waters, the motions of its distant white waves almost imperceptible when looked upon from such remove.
When we reached the porch I lowered my hood, lowered my wraith-essence. It was instinctive, now, when I left the bitter chill of the outdoors. I’d been doing it so long, the nethernal state had become part of my reflexes. Part of my self. Even when I was reducing its hold on my flesh and blood and bone, I knew it was still there, always there, ready to be called upon, relied upon.
The door was unlocked; it always was. The locks on the upper levels only I had the key to – and perhaps the king or some city-guard or other – but the lower levels could be accessed at all hours for the purposes of work or trade. Any miscreant wandering up the stair-ladders to my private floors would find more than just locks in their way, however. Only the warlock and his siblings would be able to pass the gauntlet of invisible imps without enduring a surprise-attack. A surprise-attack of quite possibly inappropriate weirdness. I knew at least one of my imps was obsessed with stealing clothes, and, due to an enforced period of abstinence from his favourite hobby, I feared a potential thief or intruder would stumble back out of my tower not only covered in boils and blisters, but completely butt-naked too.
Entering, we were presented with the narrow spiral staircase which led up to the hanging walkways of the next floor above us, with the store-rooms at either end of the main bridge. Slightly below us, the workshop was teeming with activity. Half-completed, highly-theoretical arcane glyphs were scrawled in chalk on slate, or other random surfaces all over the room. Experimental objects festooned the side-tables near the shelves, some glimmering to my sorcerer’s-eye, nakedly dangerous if mishandled. Morbid vats and extra-planar materials were lying around exuding their strange, familiar scents.
Home, I thought, almost with satisfaction.
“Anyone want something absolutely revolting?” I asked blandly, hefting the box of sandwiches up so that they could see it.
Looks of confusion were swiftly replaced with unconcealed delight when Roba pulled out a prawn butty.
Many of them started their meals with a mumbled, ‘aefel ya Ystrava’, even for something so informal as this lunch. While everyone sat around munching on their putrid little parcels, doing their best to make me nauseous with the enraptured sounds they were making, I got to work. I went around and shared the sorcerous sight with them, to begin with, so that they could watch as I formed a force-matrix atop my desk: a glowing azure cage.
“What is happening, Hool Raz?” Menild asked around his mouthful.
“Just testing something. Something that until recently might’ve gotten us thrown in prison.”
That got their attention. The chatter in the room died down. I had an avid audience as I completed the cage and checked its structures for weak-points, every pair of eyes fixed on the glowing box I’d created, its bars of pure power.
The trochoids were good, trailing the circles such that the curtate and prolate lines streamed at non-intersecting vectors. Finally I stepped back, and tore off a chunk of my own cheese butty with my teeth. I stood, spinning my force-lines lazily with one hand until they were at maximum strength.
“Vot do ve test, Raz?” Ghena said.
Immediately the speculations broke out, from half a dozen different throats:
“… seen ze cage spinning so fast…”
“… if ve can do zat? I do not think…”
“… trapped inside the shields…”
I held up a hand for silence, and received it almost instantly.
“We’re going to find out what happens when an eldritch is used to power an ensorcellment. It was your idea, Nafala, Roba… Do you want to do the honours?”
I wasn’t the best master in the universe, but I wasn’t going to put one of my imps into a magical machine that was going to kill it. I knew most of them by name, now. Not their true names – those largely-unpronouncable contortions were there at the back of my mind, of course – but the names I’d given them. Condemning one of the poor things back to the Twelve Hells as nothing more than a wisp of potential, awaiting rebirth – that would’ve been a bit of a low blow after all we’d been through together.
My pupils used the Cant of Odim, the standard invocation for dual-casting a low-rank summoning spell, the same the world over. Perfect for when you didn’t have a named demon in mind. Banned, until my little talk with Deymar. Thanks to the cage, they were able to leave off the initial pacifism commands, vastly reducing the cast-time. When they were done, a spiny little critter burst into Materium, all wings and claws, teeth and tails. He wore a tiny beard, formed of what appeared to be icicles, on the very end of his pointy chin.
It took him only a few seconds to realise he was behind bars; he spun about, biting at the force-lines then, when that didn’t work, he tried putting his wing-barbs through the momentary gaps in the matrix.
“Hold on, little fella!” I nodded gratefully to Nafala and Roba, then cast my glance across the classroom. “Anyone got any idea what this is?”
My answers were shrugs and a few muttered guesses.
“It’s got three diverging tails, see, with two wings, and only two limbs. The prime tail is segmented…”
“There’s no way to knowing,” Roba said stubbornly, stepping back and regarding his eldritch with a critical eye. “It is random, this spell.”
“But the thing it summons still has a name and type,” I pressed. “It’s a vauntagliar. Colloquially, a winter’s imp. Rare…” I smiled, and gestured vaguely at our surroundings, Telior. “More easily reached up here, I’d imagine.”
“I have seen its kind before,” old Menild said wistfully, putting down his sandwich and approaching my desk for a closer look, “but I did not know about this.”
I nodded at the critter. “Vauntagliar, right?”
The imp met my gaze, loosed a pitiful sigh, then warbled in Infernal: “How much longer?”
I chuckled, and I wasn’t alone – there were a fair few in the room with a good-enough grasp on the hell-tongue to find his question mildly amusing.
I did my best to give him a supportive smile. “I’m afraid you’ll be taking a… less-direct trip back home, Sir Javen. It might be awhile.”
The imp just pawed at his horns with the corner of his wing, looking fairly anxious.
I turned aside to grab an unfinished light-globe, nothing more yet than a dim glass orb, then I twisted my fingertips at the cage, releasing petals of force from its outer layer with the imp still trapped in the bud at the centre.
“What are you doing?” the little guy moaned.
“You’re going to power a light,” I said plainly.
“A light?” he cried in disbelief.
“Don’t worry.”
“Worry? You great git –”
“Silence!” Roba thundered.
I spun the shape about the fiend, and watched as the first few particles of his being were ripped away, joining the whirling, glowing blue box. It was as though his body were made of blood and tar, streaks of red-black matter pulled from his torso, his wings, the top of his head.
“Owwwww…”
I eyed the globe’s sorcerous nexus, sitting at the astral heart of the ball, only awaiting a source’s imprint in order for it to activate. As the shield absorbed some of the infernal essence, I gestured sharply, joining the vector to the nexus with a single line of will.
The red-black arc leapt across. The clean, yellow-white light of the globe sputtered into life, casting its warm radiance against the walls with the others.
“It worked! Hool Raz!”
I looked at Menild critically. “Did you doubt me? The only question is, how long will –”
The imp’s baby-like death-cry cut me off with my answer.
I spun back to stare down at the eldritch, and before I even locked my gaze on it the imp was ash, right down to the beard. After a few moments the petrified shape shuddered, crumbs of charred material drifting down towards my desk – and then it collapsed in a puff of grey dust.
The essence failed. The light died.
I lowered the force-cage with a wave of my hand, and turned to face the class. Many of them had put down their food but still had gaping mouths full of bread-prawn paste.
“And that was just a single light-ball.” I reached out and brushed the imp’s remains to the floor. “Guess there’s no short-cuts to power sources – back to the rune work, ladies and gentlemen. After your lunches, of course.”
“Don’t you vont one, Raz?” Ghena asked, flashing me a cheeky smile. “Zey are delshious.”
“Gods, not again,” I muttered – in Telese.
That caught them off-guard – the room fell immediately into silence, then uproarious laughter.
I smiled bashfully as I cleaned my desk, secretly pleased with how it’d gone down. I’d been practising their tongue alongside the twins, without letting any of the natives in on what I was up to. An hour a night with Ysara proved sufficient to keep us improving, without too much of an impact on our time. Not that the twins spent much time with me anymore – I had my burgeoning school-cum-workshop to deal with, and they were taking full advantage of my various distractions, heading off with their peers of similar age whenever opportunity arose. (At least I knew that, with the crown prince present, they would be well-guarded on their little jaunts under the palace to who-knew-where.) There were days when Telese-class was the only time I saw them. It’d been three days since either of them bothered attending one of my lessons, but I couldn’t exactly hold it against them. They finally had their chance to be free – I just had to hope that they were enjoying themselves here as much as I was.
They said they were. Their eyes told a different story – as much as the old wounds had healed, they’d been severe, leaving scars in our three-way relationship that might never go away. There was plenty of terse politeness from Jaid, and a few wise-cracks from Jaroan, but that was pretty much the extent of it. As much as in my isolation in Zyger I’d wished I’d been there for them more, that I’d been a better big brother, I found myself slipping straight back into old habits. I was buried in books most of my free time, planning lessons or new ways to use my powers for the betterment of Telior. I remembered the trinkets I’d heard of or seen back in Mund, and some evenings I did little more than fiddle with fish-attracting lures for the nets, braziers that sensed your presence and warmed up or cooled accordingly…
I knew what I was doing was wrong, but it wasn’t just the easy way – it was the only way. I knew I was supposed to stay on top of them, coddle them, keep them safe – and I knew without having to ask that if I did what I felt compelled to do, I’d only drive them further away. If they were at arm’s length right now, at least I could still keep a grip, a tenuous handhold on them, their lives. Trying to draw them into an embrace, I would only push them out of reach.
Or, at least, that’s what I was telling myself.
There were times like now, when I was just cleaning my desk and bathing in the company of my sorcerous peers – sorcerous sycophants – that I could almost forget the emptiness inside me. My face smiled of its own accord. I should have been happy. I should have felt satisfied.
Was it just the twins? Or was it something more? Was I homesick, or something? No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t scry out the source of my discomfort.
The door banged open, letting a smattering of pale natural light into the globe-lit room, and I looked up to see a courtier, backed up by a bunch of spear-armed guards.
There wasn’t much space to manoeuvre in here. The place was crammed with desks, and the walls bristled with shelves containing assorted items few men would wish to go near. Every walking-path was too narrow for one, never mind two.
They stayed up there in the doorway, and the courtier declared:
“Warlock! You are summoned.”
I felt myself frowning, but I started moving towards him nonetheless. He wasn’t like one of the courtier-folk in Mund – this young man, probably a minor lordling on loan to the king, looked like a fighter. His hair was short, his hands were big, and he too had suffered a broken nose at some point. He wore a shiny, undented breastplate and a fancy-looking sword-grip was at his left hip, the scabbard hidden by the folds of his shaggy black cloak.
“What’s going on?” I asked him plainly.
“Zere is… a problem.” The messenger looked uncomfortable. “A problem… for dark magic.”
I stopped at the bottom of the short stair, just beneath him.
“My apprentices? It’d be good for them to get some hands-on experience.”
I felt the collective tension in the room go up about three thousand percent.
“I am ask to summon you… Hool Raz.” He seemed to force the formal term of address out between clenched teeth. “No other.”
I sighed, and looked back to shrug at the others. Most of them looked incredibly relieved.
“Fine,” I muttered, then glanced around at them. “Anyone who wants to try what Roba and Nafala came up with, feel free to give it a shot. Other than that, Ghena, can you get everyone started on the braziers?”
I started up the steps – the courtier turned on his heel and stalked out into the wind, his guards waiting for him to pass then falling in behind him.
As an afterthought I brought forth Gristlehead to finish the clean-up at my desk, opting to err on the side of discretion as to the exact nature of the mess, and headed out after them into the cold, readjusting my wraith as I went.
They didn’t slow for me, but two of the spearmen had hung back to serve as my escort, falling in to flank me as I passed between them.
“Oi, what’s all this?” I called, halting abruptly.
The guards turned and parted – the broken-nosed courtier glared back at me.
I dimmed further, and floated.
I noted the faint look of terror that came into every eye, and many of my escorts shuddered, using the motions to mask their fear as they each drew away from me slightly.
“I’ll not be marched like a prisoner,” I crooned at the leader. “I’ll walk at the front, with you.”
I hovered closer to him.
“Or fly,” I finished softly.
Suffice to say, the courtier stayed at my side and didn’t dare put half a foot in advance of me as we made our way towards the palace steps.
“So what’s this really about, then?” I asked conversationally, drifting up the stairway. If my eldritch substance loaned a certain deathly hollowness to my voice, that just couldn’t be helped, now, could it?
I caught the loud swallowing sound that echoed from his throat before he answered.
“Hool Raz… It is for the king. There is – how you say? – a ghost?”
I turned my head to regard him, and he shrank back from my gaze like I would immolate him with my mere awareness.
“A ghost? Interesting. Doesn’t he have a sorcerer on his staff?”
“His… staff? Hool Raz, I do not –”
“I mean – no sorcerers in the palace?”
The messenger shook his head. “He vould have sent me to Menild, to ze Night Order, before. Now, zere is… zere is anozzer option.”
I smiled to myself. A better option, he means.
But it wasn’t my power that set me apart – it was my discretion, it transpired. Entering between the pillars of the gods and into the Fish-Queen’s gaping maw, I was quickly led to one of Deymar’s private chambers, a room of repose with comfortable furniture, tables and lamps, a small library on the back wall. When the door was closed behind me, I noticed the king himself sitting upon a couch in casual clothing, a silken smock and loose pants – and, beside him, huddled forwards as if to drink in the fire’s warmth, was a man in his forties with bloodshot eyes.
There was no wine, no food upon the table before them.
“Raz,” Deymar said familiarly, “come in. Come closer to the fire, by the gods.”
It was only as I came fully within the firelight that I let go of the shadows, dropping to the bearskin rug. The stranger barely seemed to register my presence at first – and when he did, it was only that a light of hopefulness entered his red-raw gaze. His hands remained clenched upon his knees. The man might’ve shed an outdoor cloak but was otherwise dressed for activity in an expensive-looking white doublet, belted and booted in fine black leather. His headwear was typical of the Telese gentry, stubby and broad-brimmed with a long tail covering the nape of his neck.
When I took the seat farthest from the flames, Deymar made no comment.
“How can I aid you, my king?”
Whenever I used such forms of address for him, I was never sure whether he understood the tinge of sarcasm that was plain to hear in my voice… plain as far as my own ears were concerned, at least. He never gave the faintest impression of offence.
“My friend, the Earl ya Oedenfron. He is… familiar with Mundic.”
I understood the implication of such an introduction, and turned to the earl. “Kur hool.”
“Hool Raz,” he whispered nervously.
“Don’t worry, earl.” I smiled. “I’m only familiar with Telese.”
“Blease – blease, Hool Raz.” Oedenfron’s voice was hoarse when he raised it but he seemed to have no choice, desperation compelling him. “Hel’ me!”
Tears sprang from his eyes, and Deymar looked away awkwardly.
Over the next ten minutes, the king explained the situation, aided from time to time by the sniffling Oedenfron in broken Mundic or garbled Telese. The earl’s story was an intricate and grisly one. The man’s bride had been selected for him when he was still knee-high, and the pair of them became childhood sweethearts long before they were to exchange vows. When the time came for friendship to mature into love, however, no romance blossomed.
“The relationship was consummated… but the bond revisited so infrequently, the chance of an heir being produced was reduced basically to nil.” The king’s awkwardness didn’t let up, and he was telling the tale with his eyes on the floor – yet his perseverance, all to save his friend the ignominy of attempting the same: it only endeared my liege lord to me further. “It was… after some time… that my good earl forsook his oath, and lay with another woman.”
I nodded, indicating that he should continue. It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen this turn of events coming a mile off.
“He still loved, and loves, Jenika. Yet when he made mention of divorce she took her own life before his very eyes. This is almost four years ago, now.”
I leaned forward. “Forgive me, but… How? By what method did she die?”
Oedenfron glanced at me, then away again.
“She cast herself into the sea. The drop…” Deymar grimaced briefly. “She could not have survived this fall, Raz. It would be as casting yourself onto stone.”
I sat back once more, remembering Hightown rushing down at me as I fell head-first into its broken wasteland.
I shook off the shudder that threatened to claim me with a surge of wraith-power. “When did the ghostly visitations first begin?”
Oedenfron murmured something I couldn’t catch, and Deymar continued in his stead:
“Two years ago this spring.”
“Two years?” I cried.
It transpired that the haunting had started out innocuously-enough, things going missing, moving around between one moment and the next – occurrences which had gone unexplained until the subsequent, overtly-spiritual events forced their reinterpretation. For six months the earl had thought himself going quietly mad – until her drowned and bloated likeness took shape on the air, standing across the bedroom from him in the midnight hour, clams and kelp-strands knotted in her dripping hair.
“He says that she never stayed longer than it took him to blink, and never made a sound at first, yet her returning came with greater and greater frequency. Now she speaks to him. We all noticed the change in him. We thought… We thought it was rum. But the rum was not the cause. It was the symptom. It… This thing has changed him, Raz.”
I nodded. “And what makes him bring this to you now? To me?”
Surely he could’ve brought this to a priest… Doesn’t he trust the priests?
Deymar pursed his lips, turning to his countryman.
I looked across, into the earl’s bloodshot eyes.
Is he lying?
Perhaps this was all some carefully-constructed face he presented to the world: it could be that he was a womaniser. Maybe he threw Jenika into the sea himself, when she refused him his divorce – or maybe it was that she desired a divorce… Were there witnesses to her last moments? Could anyone be trusted to come forward even if there were, given that it would be their word against their own liege’s?
Then he moaned, in halting Mundic, and if he was a liar he was good. I believed him.
“Because off you! Hool Raz! You scare dak elze! She says… says zat I vill… she vill kill me if I say… if I say zat she is, zat I see her… but you! You free her! Blease, Hool Raz – you free her?”
He was weeping like a baby, and I almost reached out instinctively to touch him, comfort him – then I stopped, catching myself.
“Come on.” I cleared my throat, more noisily than I wanted to. “Let’s go catch your ghost, my good earl.”
* * *
From the very moment we’d left the privacy of Deymar’s quiet little room, Oedenfron had changed in demeanour like he was flipping a coin. For all that his eyes were still red, his glare was steely, his gaze going before us like a pair of bloody knives – guards stood to attention as our silent trio approached, and fell in behind us where appropriate.
The earl’s house was not far from the palace. We followed the road from the courtyard along the cliff’s edge to a series of wide, sturdy bridges of iron-clad planks. The beams of varnished wood were so thick and heavy they were bound by chains rather than ropes, and the things barely shivered in the wind even when a strong gust caught us. As though they were islands floating above the city, the bridges led us along a row of big wooden structures. The houses looked from the connecting walkways like single-storey bungalows, but I could tell they extended down into the supports beneath.
Those living here had to be rich – not just because the location would command views equal to mine and the king’s, but because of all the colours. These winter gardens might’ve been meagre by the standards of Hightown, but they showed evidence of rudimentary druidry, the spending of considerable coin. Here amidst all this dreary greyness, the flowerbeds seemed awash not with roses and forget-me-nots, but rubies and sapphires, brighter against their surroundings than any terrace in Upper Tivertain, any plot on the slopes of the Westrise.
Our destination came into view, a sprawling property, its doorway’s arch clad in luminous creeping-ivy. Sword-armed guards on either side opened the way before us, and I could tell from the looks on their faces that this ghost was real, no flight of fancy bound solely to Oedenfron’s imagination. The guards eyed me with concern, fear, and even perhaps a little hatred – but, just as I’d seen on their lord’s face upon my summons, pure, honest relief was overpowering their other reactions.
He isn’t the only one to have run into the creature, I surmised – then second-guessed myself. That, or they just can’t wait for someone to put a lid on their boss’s insanity…
Inside, there was too much light. The curtains on the glass-set windows were thrown wide, and oil-burning lamps had been placed such that every nook and cranny of the hallway was illuminated; there wasn’t a single corner for the shadows to hide in. So much light, its very presence bespoke the fear in which the resident of this house had been languishing. I almost thought the place would’ve been less creepy with a few of those lamps snuffed out.
It wasn’t like ghosts were afraid of the light, exactly, anyway. They possessed more power at night, but no amount of lamps could bring back the day. Extinguishing every single flame in the building right now would no more hand the ghost free rein than igniting them at night would repel it.
Not to worry, in any case. My senses were at work, and I suspected I had a good idea what was going on.
“Where did she jump from, my lord?”
Oedenfron led the way through a smartly-upholstered lounge area, small but replete with rugs and ornaments and what seemed to be a thousand candles. On the far side, a door let us out onto a veranda overlooking the open ocean.
I stepped out into the wind, and looked down over the rail. Deymar had been quite correct. No one was surviving this fall. If Jenika had jumped here, she would’ve hit the water a good thirty, maybe forty feet out from the rocks –
“And her body wasn’t recovered?”
“There was nothing, no remains,” the king said tersely. “A netter-girl heard the impact – she saw the red water, and some clothing.”
“Her… her cloak,” Oedenfron whispered. “It is gone, too…”
His anguish was plain to hear in his voice.
I stared out at the sea, as if scrying in Northril’s ceaseless motions an answer to the conundrum.
Without a body, or a significant piece of it at least, I had no conduit to the soul. Searching Nethernum could take an inordinate amount of time and energy – where would I even begin? I’d never been. Personal effects could cut through all that nonsense, if I understood the texts correctly… It wasn’t something I’d ever attempted before, but without access to the actual spirit of the woman it’d be impossible for me to figure out what had truly happened here.
Unless…
Zab!
“Feychilde? Feychilde! How are things going? I see that we’re still in Telior. How lovely and dreary!”
I didn’t get the impression he was joking.
Zabalam! Can you give me an emotional read here?
“Whose emotions? Ah-h-h-h…”
I couldn’t sense his power at work, but I knew from the pensive inner silence that he was busy sifting through Oedenfron’s psychic energies.
Deymar looked at me in concern – I was still sucking on my lip, staring into space.
“It’s okay – I’m just…” I tapped the side of my head. “Give me a minute.”
The king and the earl exchanged a glance, and Oedenfron seemed reassured more than anything else, smiling softly, hope in the bloodshot eyes.
“He’s a tricky bugger, oh yes, Feychilde. Filled with thirst for women and wine. I could easily get him to dance to my tune, and –“
Oh, give that up, Zab. I almost sniggered aloud. We aren’t here to corrupt him further, we’re here to save him. What’s beneath the ‘women and wine’? Come on. Do you think he killed his wife, or do you think she jumped?
“By the Horned One! Slow down… I mean… I could guess?”
You can’t pick apart his mind like that?
“No, Feychilde… But I think you’re aiming in the right direction. He was relieved when you implied you were working on it. He doesn’t seem frightened of what you might find.”
That’s helpful. There was little chance he’d brought this to my attention with an ulterior motive.
I was being entirely unhelpful here, wasn’t I? This poor man’s wife had perished, he was being tormented by a malicious, unknown entity. I wasn’t even trying to bring him closure – I was pointing fingers, acting as an accuser rather than a healer.
Could you build an illusion of his wife?
“I… I don’t think so, Feychilde. I have no way to see her, hear her –“
Ah, of course… I understand now. The lost items…
“You think –“
Never mind.
I’d known from the outset that there was no ghost present in this house – but the air had a certain familiar scent to my sorcerer’s-nostrils, and I could feel the presence of a lesser eldritch. I couldn’t really act until I had my eyes on it, or at least until its whereabouts had crystallised in my mind. It’d be best to go through the motions anyway. Jumping straight to the end might’ve been read as an insult to the Earl of Oedenfron. The last thing I wanted would’ve been for the earl to see this upstart mage as correcting him in some manner, especially given his current mental state. Far better to let Oedenfron take some steps in the right direction first, let him have a hand himself in solving the mystery of his ‘ghost’ problem.
Could the critter sense me, like I could sense it?
No, not from the way it hadn’t immediately fled. I wasn’t flashing around my powers, using no outward effects other than the instinctive circle-shield, and if the creature’s abilities permitted it even the merest perception of me, it surely would’ve run by now.
Unless it knows, and knows it’s incapable of escape. Don’t underestimate it.
I rolled my shoulders and my shields, fixed my devious grin and my trap. The creature probably laid low through the day, maybe even returning in dream-spirit to its own plane. Whatever the reason, it was here physically. That was all that mattered. I had a fix on its location now.
The two men saw my smile, and Deymar squinted at me quizzically.
“Personal things can help you contact a spirit, if it is close.”
“You – you vont –“
I shook my head. “You said things moved. Went missing. This possibly started within a year of her passing?”
Oedenfron stared at me in bafflement, but Deymar nodded, his eyes suddenly troubled.
“What would seek to know your wife – her appearance, her attitude? Her death?” I let every bit of portentousness I could muster into my voice, played the part of the archmage to the fullest of my ability. “What would seek to torment you? Do not think she has not been freed, earl! Come with me!”
I sensed the way my enigmatic questions infused them with curiosity, and they both stayed close on my heels as I stalked back inside the house. I didn’t want them to answer – I just wanted them to consider the possibilities. I would keep the momentum up until the moment of revelation now.
I pulled my diamond-tesseract across my shields as I moved through the rooms, stretching it to the next shape then the next, keeping my target blissfully unaware as I tightened the net. I descended a stair into a sumptuously-appointed dining room, toasty with a roaring hearth on every external wall – crossing it, another hallway and set of steps led me down into the private quarters.
“Hool Raz – my chamber –“ the earl choked as I pulled open a door.
“That doesn’t surprise me, my lord,” I murmured, ignoring his weak attempt to remonstrate and sweeping into the dishevelled room.
It was immediately apparent from the scents and mess that he didn’t let the maids into his bedchamber – the silken sheets lying twisted like a rope on the bed were not visibly damp by this time of day, yet the odour of sweat permeated the air.
“My lords,” the Earl of Oedenfron sobbed.
“Do not give up now,” Deymar said tightly.
I crossed to the ash-wood wardrobe, and as I reached for its handle the earl finally released a small shriek of protest.
“No! No, don’t,” he moaned, “please!”
“Be strong,” I murmured quietly, easing open the wardrobe door so that it made the minimum amount of creaking.
Inside, the wardrobe was inky darkness, clogged with cobwebs and scuttling things. A foul, soft mist seeped from the dead woman’s remaining clothing.
The two Telese nobles fell back, each making a strangled sound – but the sheer fact that the interior exuded such horror only reinforced my assessment of the situation.
I supposed I could’ve called on Blofm, checked things out properly to make sure it was safe, but in the end I just couldn’t be bothered.
The king and the earl looked at me like I was mad as I plunged my arm in at the top shelf, rifling through the belongings that were tucked away out of sight.
I seized its arm, and jerked it awake even as I pulled it into the light, dangling just beyond my circle.
“Here’s your culprit, chaps,” I said merrily, hoisting up the tiny, squealing creature. They stared like they’d been clubbed in the head. “It must’ve sensed your grief, Earl ya Oedenfron.”
“Unhand me, foulness!” it whined, twisting its little bird-legs, contorting its tail as if to hide itself, curl up on my hand. “I am a gremlin of the otherworld, and may not be imprisoned!”
“No, you’re an imp of the Twelve Hells. A devotee of pain.” I gave it a shake, and its miniature leathery wings fell open. “A good illusionist, but you can’t keep the stink of Infernum out.”
I could feel it trying, but the demon wasn’t even strong enough to put a glamour through my shield boundaries. Its every attempt failed and soon it gave up, hanging limply from my hand with its talons pointed at the floor. Just its pointy chin was upraised, looking up at me with dejection in its bean-sized red eyes.
It clearly hadn’t been around arch-sorcerers much. It met my gaze, only for it to flinch momentarily as the agony lashed it, binding it to me. Its name, its power and essence were instantly mine to command.
“Wh-what are you going to do with me?” it moaned.
“‘What are you going to do with me, Master.’”
“M-M-Master…”
“Good – now be quiet.” I cast my smile back onto the earl. “What do you want me to do with it?”
Oedenfron was still trying to control his shock. The horror was starting to leave him, the red sorrowful stare transforming once more to a hard glare.
“You mean – zis is – zis is vot… A dimon, all ze time? A dimon!”
“I’m afraid so. It’s not the first time I’ve seen a fake ghost.”
Not that this in any way compared with a dark arch-enchanter on the loose.
“And – Jenika –“
I shook my head. “I’m certain any priest with power would be able to tell you the same. She’s gone, Oedenfron. She’s gone, and she isn’t coming back. Whether that really makes you happy or not – I don’t know.”
He shuddered, closing his eyes and falling back to the bed. He placed his hand on his face, paler than his doublet.
“If you don’t have any issues with it, I have a punishment in mind for little Moanmouth here.” I shook my captive again. “I’ll make sure its remaining time on this plane is short.”
Oedenfron waved a hand in dismissal, then, seeming to realise the rudeness of his gesture, he swiftly glanced at me. The faint smile conveyed his gratitude.
I took my leave of the king, made my way back to the top floor, and exited the earl’s property alone. The guards all recoiled when they saw what I was swinging in my hand, so I whistled nonchalantly as I went on towards home, projecting far and wide that this imp dangling from my fist was no cause for concern.
Once there were no eyes on me – not overt ones, in any case – I quit whistling and spoke to it softly.
“Why were you even there? – what’s that name of yours… oh, gods… Skek-leg-nen-om? Skeklegnenom? No, no, that won’t do…”
The imp hissed, and actual steam escaped its little snapping maw.
“I wanted to be there!” it spat.
“Why? What goes through your little head, eh? You’re all so weird.”
“Weird!” It managed to sound offended.
“Yeah, weird!” I insisted, holding onto the rail with my free hand so I didn’t get blown off the wooden bridge I was crossing. “Like, you’ve been sitting in his wardrobe for years – for what? You fed on his sorrow?”
It made an irritated, tutting kind of sound. “I just want to make the world worse!”
I laughed. “Because that makes so much sense.”
“What’s the problem? What goes through your head, foulness? Why would you want to make this place better? Really, why?”
There were so many answers, each one a fragment of the whole, each one insufficient.
“That’s just a stupid question. You are aware there’s other gods than just Mother-Chaos, right? We need clean souls, doofus. Clean.“
“You listen only to the weak gods,” it sniffed. “The gods who would have you powerless!”
“It’s basic nature,” I went on, unperturbed. “We want to see other people smile, not cry.”
“But there’s no way to achieve it,” it sniffed. “Create one smile at the cost of a thousand tears and call it a victory if you will!”
I scowled. “That’s the fault of you and yours. The dark gods and their slaves.”
“Because everywhere there’s dissent, there’s a demon.”
That intrigued me.
“Well – is there?”
The beady crimson eyes met mine.
“Don’t be stupid! I was being sarcastic. Mortals…”
Retorts deserted me, and it got the last word:
“Every attempt to fix the world only breaks it again in new and unexpected ways, Master – Mother knows best. Only the fat have time to smile, and only at the expense of another. It’s basic nature. You’d do well to learn that, before the ground shatters under your feet.”
We’re all broken.
What happened to us? Did someone try to fix us? Is this what results?
I shook it into its native plane, walking the remaining distance alone.
Is it Mekesta? Her power in us? Is it the seeds of chaos we sow?
When I entered the tower, I shrugged off the questions of my apprentices and waved Moanmouth back into existence.
“Another volunteer,” I declared, and turned aside to grab a cup of wine. “Someone start hooking it up.”
“What’s this?” the imp chirped in alarm, squatting frozen upon the table-top where I’d summoned it.
I found my glass and crossed to the decanter. “You’re going to power a light.”
“A light?”
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