Aleem staggered to his feet amid a bevy of disturbing noises coming from outside the chaplet. He could hear singing, moaning, screaming, and clanging sounds. He knew some of the superstitious beliefs that surrounded divine manifestations, and quite a good number of them were grounded in fact. One of these had to do with the lingering quiddity of divine beings; whenever they visited a physical location, something of theirs was left behind. A mark on the world, signalling their passage. Such things were of significant benefit to a mortal’s soul, and often facilitated breakthroughs and revelations. As a sign of respect, no one would be waltzing into the chaplet for some time yet. They’d rather first savour the phenomenon—paying homage to the gods in whatever way they deemed fit, and things of that kind often took a while.
The chaplet was lighted by softly glowing glim-stones overhead, and without the impairment of incense or arrases, Aleem could see that altars stretched out in either direction from where he stood; back the way he’d come and further into the hall, black blocks lined the walls. He counted maybe twenty such pairs. The one that sat opposite Akeshi’s—and which he’d been leaning against during his talk with Luctari—bore the inscriptions of an ancestral spirit. Some cultures also worshipped those alongside the gods. It was merely a sentimental practice, as ancestral spirits were of even lower magnitude than the godlings.
There were nine people in the chaplet including himself. Mostly local soldiers, two of them Olomti, and just beside Akeshi’s altar, was a very rotund man in gaudy, expensive-looking, yellow robes. He lay prostrate on the floor, and what little Aleem could glimpse of his face showed that he was unconscious; it’d be quite the effort to stretch out one’s tongue that far out otherwise. He also noticed the body of one of his assailants by the front entrance stairs. Luogs, the wide-necked youth who’d brought a knife to a fist fight. The black-haired girl from before was sprawled out beside him.
No matter how Aleem chose to look at this, he was responsible for everyone he’d forced into helping him bear the load of the invocation. Luctari had not been soft-handed in the slightest, but he’d been the one to invoke her. Knowing her, she’d probably been lying in wait with the intention of manifesting herself no matter what he ended up doing. It felt like an excuse in his mind. Soul trauma was no joke, and unlike him many of those who’d gotten caught in the radius of Luctari’s shenanigans would be unable to heal themselves. They had most likely collapsed from the shock. Other than the Consuetude and the general nature of invocations, Aleem’s unique Sithen had protected him from the worst of it. There would be consequences, of that he was sure. He sighed. He could sort through these emotions another day.
He retrieved his cloth-bag from the floor and walked over to Akeshi’s altar. There were three items atop it. A flat pan of used-up incense sticks, an iron spherule and a black cube. The last item held the most value to him. The cube was merely about the size of a balled up fist, faint patterns decorated its surface, and smack dab in the centre of one of its faces was a circle no larger than his thumbnail. A spiff-lock. Exactly the sort of mystery artefact that he imagined would be put forth as an oblation to Akeshi. He dumped the items—sans the pan of incense—into his bag and immediately headed for the backdoor. Luctari’s map had shown him just how similar the chaplet’s layout was to the apotheca’s.
Someone would eventually be put up to finding out what had happened here. Even though he’d been seen by a handful of people mere moments before the godling’s manifestation occurred, he felt quite confident that no one would directly connect him to it. But if after everything that had happened with the jrjis, he was then found among a group of unconscious people at the site of a divine manifestation, while seemingly having taken the least damage from the affair, there’d be no explaining that away. All the more reason to distance himself from this place and claim that he’d slipped out just at the last moment.
He gulped from his water-skin as he approached the anterior wall’s steps, which led up into the chaplet’s yard. He would need to give Luctari’s map a proper inspection later. It didn’t appear to be a Skill, so it was probably an arcane construct of some kind. Doing so was definitely far beyond his current ability, but Aleem distantly felt some eagerness at the thought of poking around it.
Aleem mentally posed a query to the map, trying to find the shortest path to Wulry Cosk, and it accentuated a route that led out the front door, but that was not an option for him right now. He amended his query and the map showed him an alternate route that cut right through a building. He sloshed some water into his mouth as he trudged up the steps.
The sliding door brought in a cacophony of sounds, and if he didn’t know any better, he’d have supposed a festival was going on outside. There were drums and other percussion instruments he hadn’t noticed while within the chaplet’s walls. The singing was terribly identical to drunken revelling; disorganised, varied, unrestrained.
Aleem slid the door shut behind him and his attention was immediately drawn upwards. The night sky was alight with a multicoloured sheen that looked like someone had cut out blocky patches of a dimmed rainbow and haphazardly smeared them on the stratosphere. It was well and truly nighttime. He wondered how long he’d been in the chaplet for. Pointless to ask, he needed to get moving.
He hustled across the empty yard to the fence, which was mercifully low, shorter even than the altars in the chaplet had been. Heaving himself into the neighbouring yard, he found four people passed out there. Aleem bit his lower lip and took in a calming breath as he looked at them. One was an olomti man decked in all but his helmet. He was lying on his face. The other three were strewn across the yard in their plain clothes. There was a form of karma in this world. Something the game had referred to as cosmic debt or imbalance. The very same concept that had earned him some advantage over Luctari in their meeting. It had been highly conceptual in ’Tales of Woe’ and had only seemed to have any effect on the most powerful of player characters and NPCs. Still, Aleem felt that he couldn’t ignore this system of cosmic debt, as it had resulted in the death of a few gods even. He pushed the thought out of his mind for now.
The yard door had been left wide open. Within he found a large front-room, half the size of the chaplet. There were six low tables in the room and three doors on each side wall. He didn’t waste anytime examining his surroundings. One man lay crumpled by one of the side doors. He had some kind of loincloth on and a towel wrapped around his head.
The anterior wall held a set of steps that led outside. Aleem walked right past the unconscious man, hastened up the stairway, and left the lodge behind.
The streets were crowded and as loud as the yards had been. Soldiers sat on the floor singing or crying. Some stood in clusters looking up at the sky, specifically the patch of it that hung above the chaplet. Some others sat atop their parked wagons. There were people passed out on the floor too, but many of them seemed to have been moved off the road and pavements onto the front of the buildings. Just how many accidents had this caused? If any. A rider caught in the range of the invocation might have lost control of their carriage and crashed into another carriage or pedestrian. Aleem told himself that it was unproductive to wallow in guilt when he still had so much to do. He could experience mortification later, he mentally added. It hardly helped.
Aleem took in the crowds as he walked. He’d watched documentaries about apparitions and alleged sightings of religious figures before, and so few of those had actually captured the sense of shared awe he felt out here. It was almost tangible and, oddly enough, struck him as far too vulnerable a thing to witness in a public place.
There was an undercurrent of fear as well, but Aleem didn’t care to examine any of it. For now, he just wanted to not deal with this shitfest for five minutes. Five hours, if he could manage it. Keeping his head down, Aleem slunk through the throng of people and parked carriages, not seeming to draw any glances as he cut across the crowded street. Thankfully, he didn’t need to circle back to the street that cut along the chaplet’s entrance.
It came as no surprise to him that people were streaming in that direction. Clothe-bag hanging from his shoulder, he tried to take measured steps and appear casual, which simply wasn’t easy. Exhaustion and dull pain pulsed in time with each footfall. [Trance] had been running since he’d barged into the chaplet, and he feared to deactivate the Skill.
He had to take a number of detours due to how clogged some streets were, but he eventually arrived at the Ens stockade. Jolons had been kind enough to indicate some landmarks on the crude map he’d drawn Aleem earlier that day. Luctari’s map, for all its exquisite detail and neat features, did not have any descriptive elements or labels. Not that he was complaining.
Ens Stockade was, for all intents and purposes, exactly what Aleem imagined the Kwesh stockade would look like at night. His tired mind struggled to accept that he had not somehow made the hour-long trip in a little over ten minutes, because both buildings looked similar to a fault. Same also for the surrounding structures and the slight curve of the roads. The most prominent difference was the abundance of those poles he’d seen from the roof with Haimol. The ones bearing green flames that now, to his eyes, burned high as though trying to reach for the strange, many-splendored anomaly in the sky.
This was, in a sense, equally true for the persons he found standing around the Ens stockade. Like many other people he’d seen on his way here, they were quite absorbed with the sky, and he honestly couldn’t blame them. The street along the stockade was not nearly as bad as some of the ones he’d had to avoid; still, people loitered, eyes fixed above. He only spotted one person on their knees, though. Carriages and wagons were parked by the sides and in the middle of the road.
Aleem had stopped by the building opposite the stockade to observe his surroundings a little. There was a large number of people on the buildings’s roof; it probably had a roof garden like Kwesh did. The entrance was right there. Unmanned. But Aleem stayed put. This was a stockade, after all. And even with the whole distraction thing going for him, he felt the need for caution. But he didn’t know what to do with his caution.
He recalled hearing about Haimol’s Skill from the night before, the one that allowed him to get a feel for whatever was happening in the entire building. Merely knowing where Wulry was didn’t mean that Aleem could just saunter into the place. Snippets of the conversation he’d been eaves-dropping on at the Mess hall this morning came to him; something about how the stockade in Second zone kept everything tight. If this stockade had a [Turn Key] like Haimol, they might even be able to tell when someone entered into their stockade unauthorised. Haimol’s Skill had surprised Aleem; it was far more power than he’d been expecting some random jailor to be in possession of. What were the chances that there was another Jailor-type individual in the Outpost with as powerful a Skill as Haimol’s?
Aleem did not know the answer to that. He queried the map and felt a pronounced ebbing within himself. He’d been feeling it since he’d first used the map, but now it felt more distinct. It was akin to that hypnagogic unwillingness to do anything other than sleep, that seeming inability to act. The map flickered in his vision, vanished, then resolved itself in a very faint and unsophisticated imaging. A memory only half remembered. Ah. Was this a mana thing? Had he used it up? A little disappointing, but it was yet another thing to investigate.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
The map showed him the layout of the stockade, all four layers of the building. Wulry appeared to be on the second level, which was the only other floor in the Kwesh stockade that he had been exposed to. If the interior of this building didn’t deviate too much from Kwesh’s, then he would have little difficulty moving around without having need of the map. He quickly committed the directions to memory. On his second look over, the map dispersed from his mind like a fleeting dream. Her eyelids were heavier than they’d ever been.
He pushed off the building he’d been leaning on and crossed over to the other side of the fairly inhabited street. As before, he kept his movements casual and confident. He glided through the front door, which stood ajar at the moment, and walked into the small waiting section. There were only three people within. Two of them had their backs turned to him.
A little girl sitting on a stout man’s shoulders turned to stare at Aleem as he walked on past the trio. Her stout-framed father or whatever was having an involved discussion with an olomti man.
“Daddy,” the girl said, tapping her father’s head and pointing at Aleem. His heart almost leaped into his mouth. “Daddy, see.”
Aleem rejected the impulse to hasten his stride.
“Illa, I’m having a conversation,” her father scolded gently.
Aleem could feel the girl’s eyes on his back even after he’d walked through the next door. He turned into a corner and let out a sigh of relief. The walls were grey and smooth, spaced glim-stones lighting the path. In the hollow silence of the stairwell, he could hear his breathing. When he got to the foot of the stairs and made a few turns, Aleem realised that he was headed towards this stockade’s equivalent of Kwesh’s gallery with the weird sound enchantment.
He made a few more turns before finding himself at a large gate whose bars were sturdy-looking and nearly as thick as his forearms. This part of the stockade was better lit than Kwesh had been. He pulled at the gate and it rattled softly. Locked?
Leaning closer to it, Aleem pulled again and found that his first impression was not entirely accurate. The gate was sturdy-looking, which could perhaps be blamed on its size, but there were subtle indicators of decrepitude. The gate was very clearly holding its own against age. Aleem hadn’t examined the one at Kwesh and couldn’t say for sure if it’d been in this bad a state. The gate seemed to be hooking at the bottom third, which, he saw, was being caused by its rusted edges catching against the frame. A problem of torque. He gripped the bars at the bottom half and pulled. The gate swung towards him, creaking softly.
Aleem walked into the gallery. The wall stood to his left, and to his right were rows of cells. A single, dim glim-stone hung from the ceiling right above the entrance. His own footfalls were very apparent to his hearing. Whatever sound-muffling enchantments had been inscribed in here had eroded with time. He peered into the first cell. Empty. So also were the next few cells he checked. The cells got progressively darker the deeper in he went.
As soon as he’d covered a little over half the length of the hallway, his ears popped, and a whistling sound could now be heard coming from the very end of the gallery. Aleem’s next few steps were so inaudible, he only felt them. Even his breathing could not be heard. Still, he paused to gather himself, inhaled deeply. He reached the end of the hallway.
A cell, much like the one at Kwesh. It was terribly compact, with little else on the floor but a mat upon which lay a man, staring up at the room’s low ceiling with his hands clasped behind his head and his legs crossed. He glanced at Aleem but did not cease his whistling; an upbeat warbling tune that dipped and crescendoed. There was a lit candle in a pan, sitting in the cell’s left corner.
Wulry was a man with a full head of lush red hair, which lay about him in long tresses. He had on a tattered, dark-coloured shirt and his face looked to be unblemished but in the poor lighting, Aleem couldn’t really be sure.
Aleem lowered himself into a sitting position in front of the cell. He felt the weight of every decision he’d made to get here. He was so tired. He opened his mouth and spoke but couldn’t even so much as hear his own voice. The enchantments, he realised. Something about it seemed terribly similar to what Luctari had done at the chaplet. Curious.
Wulry, however, had continued whistling, head turned sideways so he could keep watching Aleem. He wore his curiosity so openly, brows creased in amusement.
Aleem tried to speak again, very carefully thinking to be heard. He sensed an anaemic compression within himself. “Hello, Wulry Cosk.” His voice came out tinny and muted. “Sparrow upon speckled eye.”
The whistling stopped. A bemused smile tugged the corner of Wulry’s lips upwards. “I’m not sure I heard you right,” he said after a full moment of silence. There was a roughness to his intonation that hinted at his lowered proficiency with the language. Speckled Eye was depicted in ‘Tales of Woe’ as a shadowy organisation that engaged and black and grey market trade. They dealt mostly in enchanted items and knowledge, offering both for incredibly exorbitant prices. This was a secret phrase used by Client’s of the organisation.
“There’s nothing wrong with your hearing,” Aleem said, giving the man a patient smile.
Wulry pulled himself onto his elbows, chuckling. He craned his neck sideways, as if trying to peer over Aleem’s shoulder and determine whether anyone else was in the hallway with him. That bemused smile was still on his face, and he didn’t seem to be taking this seriously enough. Aleem couldn’t blame him. “Alright, who put you up to this, lad?”
Aleem managed to hold back a sigh but could feel his smile straining. He was in the body of a child. He had to get used to being treated like one. “I wasn’t put up to anything.” He glanced back the way he’d come. “Is this place secure?”
Wulry squinted, his own smile slipping. He sat up fully. “It is.” He turned his entire body to face Aleem. “Reworked it myself.”
Aleem nodded. “Good. My Master sent me.” He took on a grave demeanour. “You may call her the venerable Sibyl, and I bring you her most uneager salutations.”
Wulry folded his hands across his broad chest. “Sibyl, huh? I’ve never heard that alias before.”
“That might be the general idea behind aliases,” Aleem said flatly. He tilted his head to the side. “I’m sure you would know a thing or two about that, wouldn’t you, Romis?” That earned him an appropriate reaction.
Wulry’s eyes widened, and he reeled back slightly. That had been the man’s birth name. Romis. He’d changed it after running away from home, many years ago. Very few knew that Wulry had been born a scion of the great Cailidge family in upper Nilondla, and while it wasn’t a big secret by any margin, the nation of Ontacreese was very, very far from the seat of his family’s power. Knowledge of this sort would be harmlessly impactful. It was exactly the kind of low and slow revelation that would make him start paying attention. “I haven’t heard that name in a very long time.” Wulry studied him with renewed interest. “You seem to know a fair bit about me.”
Aleem made a noncommittal sound, shrugging. “My Master knows a lot of things. Me? I’m merely her mouthpiece.”
“Right, right,” Wulry said, rubbing the side of his face as his own smile returned in full force. He studied Aleem for a moment. “And what do they call you, lad?”
“My name is A—” he caught himself. What the fuck had he very nearly just said? He realised now that he hadn’t needed to introduce himself to anyone since arriving in this world. “Ah, it’s a bit of a mouthful, so all my friends call me Two-two. You can just call me that.”
Wulry let out a cheerful laugh. “Excellent. Very clandestine and hush-hush. I like it! I’ll call you Twenty-two and you can call me…” He rubbed his stubbled jaw thoughtfully. “Jewellery.”
Aleem raised a quizzical eyebrow.
“Tell me then, Twenty-two, what service does the venerable Sibyl require of our noble establishment?”
Aleem considered his answer. Speckled Eye was known to be the dispenser of hidden information. A lot of it was pretty scummy, really. Trade secrets, chantage material, heinous arcane mysteries. Their name implied that they saw all, observed all, had access to just about any important occurrence. That was dreadfully untrue, of course, but not many other organisations on the planet could match their information gathering network. Conversely, their ability to circulate information was just as stellar. They had a grapevine, and he planned to make very extensive use of it. It was not often that Speckled-Eye procured information directly from their clientele, but there were exceptions, and he was certain he fell firmly within those.
“Actually,” Aleem said, “I have knowledge to trade.”
Wulry grimaced and sucked his teeth. “Ah. Let me just stop you right there. I’m not sure what your master told you, but we don’t buy information. We sell it.”
That was as accurate as half-truths went. Speckled-Eye didn’t go around sharing the parameters by which they appraised information. Aleem was tempted to start small. His encounter with Luctari had put the fear of proportional reactions in him. But that had only happened because he’d been… well, tactless wasn’t the word, but it kept coming to mind. Maybe his delivery could use some work? Irrelevant right now.
“A large portion of this is information about a godling,” Aleem told the man. “I can’t imagine why you would turn that down.”
Wulry watched him silently for several long seconds, his face taking on a serious edge. It was a little unsettling how quickly he moved from cheerful to very solemn.
“You could have it confirmed,” Aleem added.
Any Cleric-type votary of Akeshi’s could confirm historicity. The authenticity of a historical occurrence. But this only worked for events of great scale, not the commonplace. It was completely useless to the average person, as most would go the entirety of their lives, never even so much as experiencing anything of such note. Akeshi’s divine aspect of historicity concerned happenings large enough to have disturbed the Weave in some way. Even if such things were to pass unnoticed, Akeshi would know. Eventually. All the more so if say, one of her Representatives had recently just learned of it. Aleem was implying that what he had to offer was that important.
“Alright,” Wulry finally said, a very intrigued smile on his face. “That could work. What terms are amenable to you?”
“Commensuration,” Aleem said. He’d indulged in Wulry’s play-through far too many times to not know the basic terminology used in Speckled-Eye transactions, and like the most serious ones, obtestations to Aok’nkor were necessary. Her arcane models were employed to ensure fairness and equivalent exchange in the most high-principled of mortal dealings. Commensuration would allow for correspondent value, letting him make requests that could be weighed against what he’d provided.
“Acceptable,” Wulry said. “Describe the uh,” he waved a hand in the air, “the goods.”
“I’ll offer information on three particulars.” Aleem leaned forward as he spoke. “The first one concerns the fate of nations, and numerous lives depend on it.”
“Ooh,” Wulry said in a droll tone, nodding his head appreciably. “Doomy.”
“The second piece of information is of vital importance to Speckled Eye.” Aleem paused, thinking about how to phrase the next part.
“And the third?” Wulry asked when he’d stayed silent for too long.
Aleem pursed his lips. “That one’s about you. I have knowledge of a very personal matter of yours.”
“Blackmail?” Wulry asked. There was a trace of delight in his voice.
Aleem gave the man an odd look. “No.”
Wulry’s shoulders fell in what seemed to be disappointment, though his smile did not falter.
“Think of it as a solution to a personal problem you’ve been having,” Aleem said.
Wulry nodded. “I find them all acceptable and worthy of assessment, at the very least. Of course, since I’ll be conducting that assessment myself, there’ll be a steep servicing charge. I really hope you’re not trying to waste my time, Twenty-two.”
Aleem kept his face blank.
Wulry reached a hand behind and retrieved a silver orb, as though it had been right there all along. Aleem knew that Wulry was in possession of a spirit-tool that, amongst other things, granted him an extra-dimensional storage space. It wasn’t so much a closely guarded secret as it was an opportunity to gloat over his wealth and good fortune. He placed the orb on the floor, inches away from his cell’s bars. “This lovely thing here is called a—”
“Nemithon—I know what it is,” Aleem said. “Supposed to facilitate the obtestation, right?” It was a religious appliance often used by Cleric-types during basic venerant devotion or when bestowing benisons. Now it would help with their oaths.
Wulry clacked his tongue. “This should only take a moment,” he grumbled.
The artefact lit up, tiny diagrams and inscriptions on its surface glowing a fiery red. The diagrams shifted, twisted, moved across the surface of the orb. Then there was a clicking sound, as though something was being cranked through grooves. The orb extended upwards into two halves with a small orb in the middle. The top half spun for some seconds, making a mechanical, whirling sound.
Wulry slapped a hand down on the orb, closing it shut with a snap and in that very moment, Aleem could sense something familiar. It had a texture reminiscent of the Consuetude right before it’d taken Luctari away with it, but this was much, much weaker in scale and seeming complexity. Where the Consuetude had felt like general artificial intelligence, this new presence felt like a very advanced calculator.
“We have agreed to trade upon commensuration,” Wulry recited. “You will provide knowledge and I will deem its value. I swear by Aok’nkor’s consonance and symmetry to uphold equivalent exchange.”
“And so swear I,” Aleem added. He felt a chill run through his ducts.
“Alright, let’s hear it then.”