Sambi eventually joined Aleem down in the yard. He’d been lost in the pool visualisation, hardly noticing the yard door slide open. It was the tangy scent of ink more than anything that alerted him to her presence.
“You’ve been doing quite a bit of meditation today,” she noted quietly when his eyes fluttered open.
The sleeves of her frock were so long that they nearly reached the tips of her fingers, but they were also loose and limp. Now, they’d bunched up to her wrists, revealing a spell-foci. It was on her less dominant hand, so he hadn’t noticed it in the Ink room. A trio of coupled rings on her thumb, index and middle fingers. The item looked every bit like Tanton’s had, but of a much darker shade.
She was holding a small earthen bowl and in it were purple-skinned, thumb-sized fruit. “Anguje,” she said as she picked one up. Biting into it produced a crunchy sound. She extended the bowl to him. “Want some?”
He thanked her and carefully extracted a fruit. It was cold to the touch and had clearly been soaked in brine. Anguje, as she’d called it, tasted like cucumbers. It was a welcome reprieve to the odd taste of parchment and ink that still lingered on his tongue. He fished out another.
“You never used to like meditation, you know,” Sambi continued with fruit in her mouth. “Never had the patience for it.”
Considering the magical component meditation bore in this world, he’d half expected everyone to be enamoured by it. Aleem himself had always loved to meditate. Some might even have said that he’d chronically practiced it, enjoying the art of stilling his mind and observing the contents of his thoughts, awareness and feelings. Work in his past life often required him to spend long hours in front of a screen, and he relished every chance he got to disconnect and retreat within himself. Still and all, he had a facade to maintain.
“Haimol taught me some exercises last night,” he said. “I don’t feel quite as overwhelmed when I’m just guiding my mana.” He’d been going for a half-truth but it surprised him how even that had turned out to be rather accurate.
Sambi blinked, “That’s…” a look of surprise flashed across her face, giving way to what might have been approval. “That’s good, actually. Huh. Very constructive.”
Aleem squinted at her. “What does that mean?”
She smiled, pointing a half eaten cucumber at him, “See, I don’t think I’ve met anyone with as much of an aversion to sitting still as you. This is unexpected, but in a good way. I’m just happy you’re handling this well, Two-two.”
He really wasn’t. “I’m trying I guess.”
She gave him a piercing look for a moment then her face softened. “You’ll be fine.” She shook the bowl. “Come on, have another anguje.”
They chewed in companionable silence, Thebas’s soft snoring the only other prominent sound. The mercenary-knight was still snoozing on the detached flokatis. Aleem wondered—
Thebas suddenly shot up into a sitting position like some freshly animated creation of Victor Frankenstein. His eyes were wide and a little reddened. He sniffed the air twice and jumped to his feet.
Sambi chuckled as the man sprinted through the yard door, not even sliding the thing shut entirely.
Aleem stared at the yard door, baffled. “What was that? What’s wrong with him?”
“He could smell the tamcha,” Sambi said, shaking her head at the man’s antics.
Aleem sniffed the air but couldn’t smell anything. “This tamcha must be really something then?” He leaned over to the flokatis still laid out on the floor and began returning them to their places beneath the table.
“Yeah? Well, hold that thought till you’ve had some,” Sambi said ominously.
Aleem glanced over at the partly closed yard door. “Thebas slept for quite a bit there. Are sappers really that overworked?”
“Some olomti have Skills that can suspend sleep. It’s very harmful and Bojra keeps telling him to consider practicing some mana exercises that could help shorten the need for sleep instead. But having someone else do the heavy lifting for you is so much faster and easier. Why learn the arduous work of magically boosting your sleep efficiency, when in seconds you could enforce a work-around.”
Support Skills weren’t news to Aleem, he’d gotten stuck on something else she’d said. “Mana exercises can shorten the need for sleep?” He said it with far more eagerness than he’d been hoping to leak out.
She smiled knowingly at him, “I can tell what you’re thinking,” her smiled slipped a little. “But let me just say it now before you get your hopes up too much: you can’t practice magic or cast any spells. Yes, there are mana exercises to accomplish all sorts of bizarre things, but most of them are beyond your reach for now.”
In ‘Tales of Woe’, Krada Moss, the Outworlder, had been the weakest player character at the start of the game by a dauntingly wide margin. And though she’d caught up very quickly, she’d hardly needed to learn things from scratch. ‘Tales of Woe’, at its heart, was just not a very progression-centric game, and thus there hadn’t really been any characters through which the player could experience the magic system from its lowest levels. As a result, Aleem knew a lot about the high end aspects of the world’s magic, but was functionally benighted where the basics were concerned. It wasn’t so hard to reverse-configure some of the concepts though, even if that only left him with a really spotty understanding of how things should work.
“You’ve been cycling your mana all day, so you must have noticed how slowly it moves.” She paused long enough for him to nod. “It’s because of how young you are. The older we grow, the more weight and potency our mana gains. The more quickly it can stir to aid workings. You’re still too young to do any of that.”
This wasn’t exactly news to him either, but it helped to have it articulated in as many words. Age and historicity carried weight in Orig, and it naturally followed that the most powerful entities on the planet were the oldest ones. The practice of magic was something that was usually held off until the Sithen of the child was believed to have fully congealed. Fifteen was treated as the age of majority for this reason. In the game, there’d been several cultures that exploited the nature of the Sithen to start training their young from very early on; Vriorians were ironically one of such. Aleem also knew from the game that Evna, Sambi’s sister, had been trained for magic since she was as little as ten.
Sambi frowned at him. “Why do I get the feeling you’re thinking of doing something stupid?”
Aleem gave her a scandalised look. “I’m just processing everything you said.”
“I’ve heard that one before, Two-two. Look, you’re literally incapable of casting even the most basic of cantrips.”
“Okay,” Aleem said. He knew that spell-foci were needed for that. Stats too. “But what’s stopping me from practicing the mana exercises now?”
She shook her head, a tired smile on her face. “Nothing, I guess. But it’s just like learning how to cook a meal you don’t yet have the ingredients and implements for. Why not wait till you’re well equipped to train properly? You know, avoid imbibing bad habits.”
“Hmm. Your analogy’s a little confusing. I mean, I do have the mana to practice and train with. Isn’t this like training to lift heavy weights by lifting much, much lighter ones.”
“Yeah, but your mana isn’t potent enough. You’ll still need to retrain from the ground up once you get your Class. There’s an intuitive component to it, and you won’t get that till you turn fifteen—which is just in a couple of weeks by the way. Learning the exercises now is more like a child trying to improve their footwork in combat before even learning to walk.”
Whatever. He wasn’t sure how much of this was just cultural. He could kind of understand her disinclination to something like that, but it didn’t make a lot of sense to him. Perhaps the concept of the Sithen was being given far more reverence than was necessary. He could respect that enough to not press the topic any further. Three people had referred to the base-library already. He needed to answer all these questions for himself. “That makes sense,” he said after making a show of thinking it over.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
“Like I said, you turn fifteen in a few weeks,” Sambi said. Her eyes twinkled. “Don’t worry,” she lifted her chin and, despite not being quite as tall as he was, still managed to peer down at him as though she were on a higher vantage. “You’ll join the ranks of your betters soon.”
Aleem snorted. He eyed the set of spell-foci on her fingers. “Is it okay to ask about your Class, Sambi?”
“It’s not proper to ask such things,” she said with a smug smile. Then she added in a stage whisper, “It’s [Iatreian].”
An uncommon Class, which wasn’t all that impressive. Or at least, it hadn’t been impressive in a game rife with overpowered player characters. Uncommon Classes were a very good foundation, and they quite often evolved into rare or specialty-type Classes. He really needed to get his hands on a primer. Tomorrow would be the day, he promised himself. He’d head out to the base-library first thing in the morning.
“It combines all the things I enjoy in brewing and healing. Brewing bit pales in comparison to Kohv’s [Alchemist] Class,” Sambi said with a shrug, looking self-conscious in that moment. It passed quickly, and she looked down at her spell-foci, smiling. “But I guess I’m much better at healing anyway.”
“Does that mean you can cast cantrips?” Aleem asked, eager to see some more magic.
Sambi rolled her eyes. “Two-two, my abilities are for saving lives, not for your entertain—”
There was a sudden deep and decidedly sorrowful sound, keen and low, coming from … the sky. It didn’t sound quite the same, but he recognised it.
Gloaming.
It gave the impression that a humongous horn was being blown. In ‘Tales of Woe’ it was depicted as some sort of photo-acoustic effect that occurred at dusk. It marked the rising and setting of the sun.
“Don’t look so startled,” Sambi said. “That’s just gloaming. Happens every day.”
She’d barely finished speaking the words when a loud, piercing trill filled the air, it mingled with the keen that was coming from sky. Someone was singing a long distance away. Chanting. Aleem whirled his head in the new sound’s general direction. He could tell it was being amplified somehow.
“Evensong,” Sambi helpfully remarked. “There’s a central Chantry at the edge of this zone.”
Chantries were structures that served as gathering points for public worship, which naturally constituted singing, as the name Evensong implied. The sounds washed over him, they had a tugging effect of some kind. Nothing incessant. Just a soft pull. A gentle persuasion, a soft coaxing to… to do what exactly?
“I’m definitely going to have to investigate that,” Aleem noted, almost to himself.
“Tread carefully then. Evensong can get a little…” she paused, searching for a word, “intense.”
Before he could ask her to clarify, Thebas burst into the yard, a large tray in his hands. Aleem squinted. Were those buns? Bojra and Evna came through the door a breath later, hands full as well. Jepp, the evil fox creature that had nearly mauled Aleem to death, was nowhere to be seen.
“This is such an important day for you,” Thebas said to Aleem as he placed the tray on the table. “Your life will never remain the same again after you taste this. I envy you, Two-two. Truly. To be able to try tamcha for the first time all over again? You’re a very lucky—”
Bojra cuffed the back of his head lightly. “Stop talking over the food.” She placed a small tray of bowls and a glass canister on the table, then she took Evna’s burden off her hands.
Thebas went about setting the table, a grin on his face.
Tamcha looked like palm-sized bread buns. The bowls contained an oily vegetable sauce, which was apparently eaten along with the tamcha.
Aleem actually wasn’t hungry but the buns smelled delicious. He decided to try them without the sauce. His first bite wiped the eager smile off his face.
“What do you think?” Thebas leaned forward expectantly.
Aleem’s eyes watered. “Mmm,” he croaked with a very wooden smile in place.
The bread was incredibly spicy. He’d tried gingerbread before, and like any reasonably minded person, he’d hated it instantly. Yet even that tasted like cold pita next to this.
Oh, oh. This planet was hell.
* * *
Aleem was miffed. And it wasn’t because of the food. He’d eaten far, far less than Thebas had. The vegetable sauce had been nice, the tamcha, though, was another matter entirely. Bojra and Sambi had needed to get back to writing their ‘reports’. As it turned out, those were being sent to the [Hag], their adoptive mother. Which maybe explained why so much care and effort was being put into preparing them. Aleem had offered to help with cleanup, but Bojra had said the servants would handle it. He still hadn’t seen any of those and wasn’t sure how he felt about the whole thing.
It was well past dusk by the time Aleem left the apotheca. The sky was darkened with faint streaks of colour playing along the trajectory of an absent sun. A mostly full, pink-tinted moon hung majestically above. The air was surprisingly cool, and the traffic around here was much sparser than it’d been in the daytime.
None of it did much to help soothe Aleem’s foul mood.
“Oh, lighten up already,” Thebas said.
“Those things are completely pointless,” Aleem mumbled. If Thebas hadn’t insisted otherwise, Aleem would have left the apotheca barefooted. His stupid boots were back on, and it had nearly taken the better half of an hour to string them.
Apparently, you unlashed and strung shoes! Why they didn’t just use uniform verbs was beyond Aleem. Everything concerning the footwear in this world was just evil. Pure evil. When he’d asked about getting boots like Thebas’s, the man had merely laughed.
“Absolutely pointless,” Aleem mumbled once more.
“You’ll get the hang of it soon,” Thebas drawled in an encouraging voice while not having the decency to hide his lazy smile. He let out a mighty yawn, a sack of packed tamcha in his left hand. The man still looked tired. Bojra had berated him over his continued use of the sleep-suspension Skill. It felt like an old argument between the two.
“You really should go and get some rest,” Aleem said to the man.
Thebas’s lodge was in the north-east quadrant of the third zone, while Aleem lived in the south-west quadrant of the fourth. Walking Aleem back to the stockade wouldn’t take Thebas anything less than an hour, to say nothing of the return trip. While Thebas didn’t look like he would fall over any second, Aleem wasn’t comfortable with the idea of needlessly wearing out an already exhausted man.
“It’s fine,” Thebas said, stifling another yawn. He sniffed. “I can make the walk.”
Aleem shook his head. “And I can find my way back. You look like you can barely keep your eyes open, man.”
Thebas seemed to war with himself. “Are you sure? How about I just—”
Aleem had started to feel some irritation, but kept it contained. He didn’t need to be chaperoned. He wasn’t a child. “Thebas, I’ll be fine.”
“Alright, lad. If you say so.” He bumped Aleem lightly on the side of the arm and turned to walk in the other direction.
“Don’t stay up to eat any more tamcha,” Aleem called at his retreating back.
“Why even bother saying that when you know I will,” Thebas called back over his shoulder, laughing. “Avoid trouble, you hear?”
Well, he would try. Aleem held his smile in place until Thebas had turned into a street corner. He let out a sigh. While Gwa.yao.rai’s friends were actually starting to grow on him, Aleem hadn’t sent the man away out of the kindness of his heart.
He needed to invoke the godling, Shallentlan.
And that would be very difficult to do if the man chose to accompany him.
Under the dim glare of Soros, Aleem tried to make out the details on Jolons’s crudely drawn map. The man had marked three chaplets in every zone but the first. There was a chaplet here in the second zone but not in this quadrant. Still, it wasn’t too far off. He put away the map. He’d memorised it already. This was just his nerves.
He’d had enough time to get himself in the right frame of mind for what he needed to do, yet his hands still trembled ever so slightly. It slowed him down too much to juggle activities, so he deactivated his [Trance] Skill. Doing so felt like he’d been submerged in water all along and only just emerged out of it. The sounds were crisper, his vision sharpened, he could more readily taste trace vegetable sauce in his mouth. The evening was cool. He felt numb. Wrung out emotionally. But that was fine. He took long, brisk strides as he made his way over to the chaplet.
His goal was simple. Invoke the godling and transact with her. Shallentlan was very reasonable. Well, she’d been that way in the game, but he’d already prepared himself for a fair amount of deviation. There were fifteen player characters in ‘Tales of Woe’, three of which were godlings. Shallentlan was not one of them, but she’d featured quite heavily in the storyline of one of said playable godlings.
If she turned out to be far less amenable to working with him than he expected, Aleem would terminate the invocation. He had countermeasures in place. Threats, really. And while terribly loath to do something like that, he wouldn’t hesitate if things went to shit. But that was in the worst possible scenario. He should be fine. There was a measure of protection that the old customs should afford him. He took in a deep shaky breath. It never escaped his notice how he’d sunk into relying too heavily on his game knowledge. He exhaled.
A pole held up a wooden board that indicated he’d made his way into the south-west quadrant of the second zone. He was close.
ALERT
Skills have successfully been computed!
Beginning Title-compilation
Well, that was something. He didn’t quite feel in the mood for it now though. He focused instead on his steps and the movement of his body, grounding himself.
Up ahead, Aleem saw someone he recognised. A boy with brown, curly hair. It was the boy he’d seen earlier in the day; one of the teenagers that had been tailing him. He’d switched out his brown armour for a plain button shirt, not too dissimilar from the one Aleem had on now.
Beside Curly stood a much bulkier boy, garbed in the common brown leathers of the local soldiers. His neck was comically thick. He looked like the sort that would feature in a story about seventeen year olds who lifted cows as a proof of their strength. Aleem wasn’t sure that stats could be easily deduced from looking at people, but this guy gave off the feel of someone with maybe double the values Aleem had in the Strength Attribute.
Aleem came to a sudden stop when he noticed that the bulky boy was tightly gripping what looked, from this distance and lighting, to be a broad sheathed dagger. Even if Bulky had no intention of drawing it, blunt force trauma was one hell of a consolation price.
-1 to Agility
He’d almost forgotten about his sub-Diminution debuffs. This had to be the worst possible timing in all of his two lives. Aleem let out a bone-weary sigh.