A wave of foreign panic crashed against [Trance] and penetrated into Aleem’s mind. It seized him forcefully and Aleem began to tremble where he sat, caught between the need to run and to resist the external influence. He was going to die, going to be put down like a—
Pulses of air came from Wulry and Serend, filling the gallery and causing their clothes and hair to flail. The intensity of the foreign influence abated from Aleem’s mind and what little remained got torn apart by [Trance].
“Killing intent,” Serend noted quietly, as she finished undoing the last of her straps. “That felt like second Elevation. Is the entire base under attack?”
Aleem desperately hoped so. A base-wide attack would be terrible, but far from the worst that could happen. A cloud of dust puffed out of the corners of the ceiling as the gallery shuddered once more.
“Not really,” Wulry, still seated cross-legged on his mat, said after a moment of deliberation. He was using his spirit-tool to scry. The sheen of sweat on his forehead had only grown, dribbling down the side of his face. “It looks like it might possibly just be this specific ar—”
“Where?” Aleem couldn’t help himself from cutting in.
Wulry winced. “It’s just this building.”
Aleem closed his eyes. He tried to keep himself from panicking. This didn’t mean anything. There were other explanations.
“Can’t tell if they are Faajians,” Wulry added.
Serend had placed her shlöck on the floor, leaning a part of the instrument against her thigh and begun priming it. She twisted the top of the shlöck, but it made no sounds. “How many are there?”
“A group of three in nondescript armour. They look to be some kind of elite death-squad.” He paused and wiped the sweat from his brow. “I can’t [Identify] any of them, but they’re all exuding so much killing intent, it’s obvious they’re on the second Elevation of their Classes.
“There’re two old timers topside, protecting the building. Also second Elevation. One of them’s the warden of this stockade. Along with Nii, them three are managing to hold off the death squad, but that won’t last for long.”
“Oh dear,” Serend mused, “I wonder why they’d be attacking this specific building.” At the last three words she and Wulry had turned to look at Aleem.
“This have something to do with you, lad?”
Aleem ignored the question. “There’s a Premonitorium on the base. Um, it’s supposed to be within two blocks of the place were the divine manifestation happened. Could you check if it’s also under attack?”
Wulry reluctantly complied, looking up at the ceiling. “No other attacks in this quadrant, or on the base, as far as I can tell.” Wulry said. “A few base patrollers are plodding their way down here through the clogged streets.”
Aleem didn’t feel any relief. He couldn’t relax till he’d made sure. “Could you—” he hesitated. He was about to reveal that he knew a fair deal more about Wulry than he had any right to. “Could you scan for persons in that area using defences against your [Inspect] Skill?” It was a hunch.
Wulry eyed him dangerously for a long moment before turning to the ceiling once more. “I don’t know if it’s the same one, but there’s a building east of the chaplet, two streets off. I detected three hidden signatures from within it.”
Aleem’s heart hammered in his chest. First of all, Faajian’s didn’t have death-squads. Secondly, what were the chances that a bunch of Faajians had slipped past four defensive encampments and directly invaded the Wotbourne base overnight?
“KILL YOURSELVES.” The memory of Luctari’s voice echoed in his mind. “BUY HER TIME.”
This was Murphy’s law in operation. Things were devolving quickly. [Trance], for some reason, was quivering. There was that tugging sensation he’d felt at evensong. Something pulling gently at him, coaxing him out of the gallery. Nii R’shai was out there fighting. She might be able to distract the death-squad long enough to buy him time to escape.
Need to leave, his instincts seemed to be crying. Need to leave now! Aleem tamped down on it and exhaled shakily. “I … I think I should go,” he said. “We can pick up where we left off tomorrow.” He made to rise, but the bulbous end of Serend’s cane pushed at his chest, pressing him against the wall. There hadn’t been any real force behind the motion, so it didn’t hurt.
“Oh, you’re not going anywhere, love.” Her voice had taken on that melodious note again. Bright and frilly, but her face was stern. She tilted her head towards Wulry. “I saw him at the chaplet, right before the manifestation. Might have called it happenstance, but then he comes here with [Confirm]able information.”
“You think he invoked a god?” Wulry asked her, though he was looking at Aleem when he spoke. There was a hint of suppressed incredulity in his voice.
“Godling,” Serend corrected, she was still watching Aleem with that stony expression. “Felt like Luctari. I legged it the moment I sensed what was happening in there. That’s why I came to find Nii.” She pulled her cane away from him and placed it on the floor between them. “And now we’re being attacked.”
The building quaked, and even braced against the wall as he was, Aleem swayed. Dust particulates were suspended in the air like fine mist.
Wulry was watching him with an uncertain expression now. “What aren’t you telling us?”
Aleem pursed his lips tightly. He really didn’t want to reveal just how strongly connected he was to the failed emanation ritual. Not before securing their cooperation, at least. If he came across as too desperate, they might struggle to trust him, and would definitely take advantage of him.
But if trust was what he wanted, it simply wouldn’t do to hide the fact that at least one divine being was ‘targeting’ him directly. His mind was working overtime for a solution that didn’t entirely screw him over. A disturbing sense of wrongness chafed at him and he couldn’t tell whether it was just his anxiety or something else.
“Those people out there,” Aleem finally said, “I have a needling suspicion about who they are, and what they’re after.”
“You can’t possibly be trying to stop them,” Serend said, though her tone implied that she suspected Aleem of that very thing. “I mean … do you even have a Class?”
“I’m trying to hide from them,” Aleem rectified.
Wulry watched him intently. “You’re saying they’re here for you?”
Aleem licked his lips and glanced at the gates leading out of the gallery.
“Come on, lad,” Wulry pressed. “This hardly seems like the best time to hoard vital information. If it’s crucial, you’re just burning the yanpa at this point.”
“Are you honestly willing to take your chances out there?” Serend asked quietly.
“And what were you even going to do, sneak off?” Wulry queried. “You think you can fool the senses of someone at least nine entire stages above you, do you?”
[Trance] needled him, prodded, urged. LEAVE. It almost felt like that vestigial fear he’d experienced at the sight of Wun-oil on his first day here. This seemed just as animalistic, but more … weighty. He’d always considered the concept of ‘having hunches’ to be an error-prone form of heuristics. Poorly processed data leading to inexplicably drawn conclusions. Some magic fuckery was clearly at work. Aleem was feeling a frightening amount of certainty, and that very thing worried him. He’d never been a man of strong convictions. His limbs were trembling from a gnawing, restless trepidation.
Luctari’s words had been the clue and the clincher.
“KILL YOURSELVES.”
“HELP YOUR PATRON TUTELAR.”
“BUY HER TIME.”
If a person found out that her arch-rival was trying to gain access to her cache through a system of derelict, secret tunnels that she had no intentions of ever using, what would be the fastest way to foil that rival?
Diminish the avenues open to them: collapse the tunnels. A fitting self-sabotage that was no self-sabotage at all. Zraazrondre was taking a knife to her extremities.
The walls and floor quaked once more. Because of the stupid enchantments in the gallery, he couldn’t hear anything going on outside.
“That premonitorium place you spoke of?” Wulry said, pointing at the ceiling. “It doesn’t seem to have anyone strong enough to resist the intruders. When they’ve gotten what they want, they might come down here to help their friends. That’d be six on three. I need to know whether I’ll be joining Nii or asking her to fall back.”
“Can you get me out of this?” Aleem asked.
“We can take you away from here,” Wulry assured him with a firm nod.
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Aleem’s shoulder’s sagged. He sighed. “I’m a member of the caste my people refer to as ‘untethered’. My—I think … I suspect that our patron Tutelar just put out a Kill Quest on every untethered within Wotbourne.” Saying this out loud didn’t bring him any kind of succour. If anything, it seemed to worsen his anxiety now that he’d openly admitted it.
Wulry drew in a breath sharply, but Serend’s eyes were squinted in frantic consideration.
“Well, that far outstrips anything I might have guessed,” the man muttered. “I have many more questions, but we can get into that later.” He smoothly rose to his feet, slipping out of his low cell and into the tight hallway. He moved past Serend and began heading to the gallery’s gate. “I’ll seal the exit. Serend, keep an eye on the boy.”
“Will do. You know I still need to get paid, so … be safe?”
Wulry chuckled till he stepped out of the range of the sound enchantment. He slipped out of the gate, and almost immediately, the air shimmered before morphing into a smooth grey wall, swallowing the gallery’s gate. Some sort of optical illusion, no doubt. Not exactly the kind of thing Wulry’s Class could explicitly do, but the man was nothing if not versatile.
Aleem sagged in on himself. He felt double his former age.
And so, so powerless.
He leaned his head back against the wall behind him. He was sick of feeling this way. In his old life it hadn’t been a difficult problem to amend. When his foster mother had gotten too controlling, he’d just left for college. And it’d been that easy to regain the steering wheels of his life. Now, however, there were far more steps. He needed a breather. Needed to truly sit down at an actual table—not those stupid low things used for eating here—and make extensive plans to remedy this.
The stockade trembled once more, and Aleem searched the ceiling worriedly.
“You shouldn’t worry so much,” Serend said. “The stockades on this base are some of the better defended buildings for miles in any direction. This one will hold.”
In truth, he wasn’t worried about the building. What he truly feared was the death squad overpowering Nii and Wulry and then making their way into this place.
He could see her plucking the strings of her shlöck, but no sound whatsoever was being emitted. Aleem squinted. “How are you doing that?”
“Magic,” she said in a mysterious voice, wiggling her eyebrows.
Aleem rolled his eyes, but a wan smile now tugged at his face. He folded his arms. “That’s a beautiful instrument.”
“Isn’t it?” she said, beaming. She gently patted the shlöck. “Are you familiar with it?”
Aleem weighed his head, then remembered she couldn’t see. “Not really,” he said.
“It’s called a vorneshlöckjtal,” Serend told him with a hint of excitement in her voice.
Aleem blinked. Ah. So shlöck—as one of the player characters in the game had always referred to it—was an abbreviation then. It never once occurred to Aleem that the [Vates] had been shortening it. “Vorneshlokshtul,” he sounded out the word slowly. “That’s not … Unolrian, is it?”
Serend laughed softly, a delightful sound. “It’s Nilondlic. It means ‘implement of Mercy’. You know, like the Mercies.”
Aleem nodded, hardly registering what she’d said. “Right.” The shlöck was a majestic instrument, and he was eager to examine it. The thing was shaped like a long, very curvy triangular prism, and looked like it would actually be a nightmare to manoeuvre. He’d taken a few music lessons growing up and had gotten fairly decent with some stringed instruments. Definitely a hobby to look into later.
She continued plucking the shlöck soundlessly, fingers dancing sedately along the odd fretboards.
There came another rocking tremor from above, and Aleem closed his eyes, sighing. Even when there weren’t any big quakes, he could feel the much smaller ones. It rankled having others fight his battles. Today had been a primer in novelty for him.
He’d been so bent on acquiring a set of foci and other such things from Wulry, that he hadn’t noticed just how much it’d all been an appeal to desperation in actuality. That urge to just do something, regardless of how unproductive. Gaining power in Orig was something that would take time, and he’d unwittingly consigned himself to that mode of thinking.
That wasn’t viable anymore.
If he was going to grow stronger, he would need to take some shortcuts. It wasn’t something he’d wanted to consider, but Aleem was already off to a very rocky start.
“Would you like me to play you something?” Serend said, breaking him out of his thoughts.
“Sure.”
Her hands felt around the instrument, as if finding leverage. She hoisted the shlöck and placed it upright, bracing the cylindroid mass between her thighs. Even so, the shlöck towered over her seated form, nearly an entire foot above her head.
Aleem watched, mesmerised. Half the perimeter of the instrument served as some sort of fingerboard, broken into three distinct segments, each one with an array of tightly packed strings. All the parts he could see looked new or well-preserved or both. “How long have you had this for?” Aleem asked her.
Serend twisted the top of the shlöck, and the instrument hummed harmoniously as the internal joints cranked through hidden grooves. “I got this about a year and a half ago.” She rested her head against the side of the shlöck. “But I’ve been playing for a little over two years.”
“That … doesn’t sound like a lot of time,” Aleem said carefully. In his old life, he’d started taking music lessons at about eight. Unless Serend was some kind of musical genius, it was unlikely that she’d acquired anything beyond passable skill.
The corner of her lips quirked up in a decidedly puckish smile, and he thought he heard her scoff faintly. She strummed a few strings on the middle segment of the shlöck with one hand, while the other wrapped around the top segment above her head, fingers scampering over the frets like an antsy spider. The hairs on Aleem’s arms rose. The thing sounded like a theremin possessed by a cello.
There’d been something else in the notes she’d just played. He couldn’t place his finger on what exactly it was though. More interesting was the fact that the segments of the shlöck seemed to be connected somehow. She formed chords on the top segment while strumming the second and third, yet the sound varied.
Serend’s fingers danced above her head and around her abdomen as she spun out a string of captivating melodies. It tasted like sunlight dipping behind a cluster of hills. Felt like the spray of after shine left in its wake. It looked like the deep trills of a horn. A cacophony of paradoxical combinations that still made sense somehow. It all reverberated through Aleem and filled him with a happy exhaustion he had never, ever known. The knowledge of having done a job well done and understanding that it was now time to seat back and pique himself upon the results of his handiwork.
A word came unbidden to his mind: ‘Complacency’.
He closed his eyes and savoured the accompanying sensations that crashed into him. It was something that had always eluded Aleem. Something he’d always wanted for himself, but never managed to grasp. In his past life, Aleem had very often moved from project to project in hopes of finding that smug contentment. And now, having truly encountered it for the first time, it tasted like honey with strong undertones of wormwood and ash.
Vicarious.
This was not his complacency. It was Serend’s. And she was only deigning to share. When she stopped playing, Aleem felt like his chest was pleasantly sore. He opened his eyes.
“How was that for a meagre two years?” Serend asked, striking a haughty pose with her upraised chin, the veneer only spoiled by the smile she fought to contain.
“Not too tacky,” Aleem laughed. “That was—” he shook his head for lack of a fitting word at hand, “it was magical.”
“I know,” she said with a pleased smile. She set about placing the equipment back on her thighs.
She worked so deftly with her hands that Aleem could barely keep from her asking about her blindness. In his old life there’d been many exceptional people who’d accomplished great feats in spite of total blindness, even he’d never known anyone like that personally.
In a world with magic it was conceivable that blindness was not so easily rectified. All the more so if it was congenital. Still, she’d thrown for a loop a few times already. And he suspected that she had some form of magical sight.
“What other instruments can you play?” Aleem asked instead.
She let out a melodrama-laden sigh. “The real question is what instruments can’t I play?” She began cranking the top segment of her shlök back into its earlier position. “I’m not sure there’s any I haven’t practiced with.”
He wasn’t sure he believed her. But this was a fantasy world, and there was so much that could be achieved with Skills. “So, you’ve been playing all your life then?”
“You ask a lot of questions,” she said, screwing up her brows as she ran a finger across a row of strings. No sounds could be heard from the strings.
Aleem’s face heated. “Trying to keep my mind occupied. My curiosity—”
“I was just making an observation,” Serend said not unkindly. “It’s good to ask questions. And yes. I’ve been glued to music since my first steps. And I do mean that literally. You play any?”
He made a meh sound. “More of a listener.”
There hadn’t been any quakes—large or small ones—in a while. He glanced up at the ceiling as though it could give him an explanation.
Serend angled her head towards the gallery’s gate, or where it had been. “That sounds like Nii.”
He soon heard frantic footsteps.
The faux wall subsided, revealing the gate once more, as Nii R’shai came through in her glistening silver armour. There was an air of urgency about her. “Up! Hurry. We’re leaving.”
Aleem and Serend scrabbled off the ground. Serend struggled with her cumbersome musical instrument while Aleem, whose only load was his cloth-bag, moved around her and hustled over to R’shai.
As soon as he crossed out of the range of the sound enchantment. He could hear distant pandemonium. The exact opposite of festive. His gut twisted.
“Where’s Wulry?” he asked. “What happened to the death-squad? Why—”
“No questions,” R’shai said. “Now, shush and follow.”
She led them through empty corridors, at jogging speed. Serend had not been able to strap her shlöck, so she held it in an embrace as she kept pace.
Aleem’s heart was pounding in his chest, but that was more from the running than uncertainty. He was the only one panting. Even Serend seemed fine.
Had they chased off the death-squad? Killed them, gotten them disabled? What was going on? Why were they running and being so hush-hush?
A different flight of steps from the one he’d used to get to the gallery took them up to the ground floor, but towards the back of the stockade. They quietly slipped out a back door, which led into a yard no different from anything he’d seen so far. The screams were much more detectable out in the open. Seemed to be proper chaos out there at the entrance.
The fence was very high but a ladder sat against it. R’shai scaled the fence while Aleem and Serend had to scramble up the ladder. She’d grabbed the shlöck from Serend and was waiting for them on the other side of the fence. It was a blind alley.
At the mouth of the alley, a bald Olomti woman ushered them into a wagon with two horses at the fore. As soon as she slammed the door shut behind Serend, who was the last to get in, the wagon started moving.
There was no light within and the tarp curtains by the windows were left down as per R’shai’s wordless instructions.
He could hardly see a thing as the wagon jostled slowly in motion. The seats were hard wooden benches.
The silence was suffocating.
He could tell when they hit the throughway because of how quickly they moved.
The Olomti woman was driving the wagon, and when she got to the checkpoint she exchanged quick words with sentinels. They were let through, and only after another long minute of silence did R’shai take in what seemed to be her first breath since coming to get them. “Bullshit Vriorian magic. The Premonitorium is running falling scale. Anything said within the Outpost could be recorded.”
“Two of the aggressors were killed,” she continued. “One of them fled. I checked, they were Vriorian. Fuckers took down one of the old coots.”
If Zraazrondre had issued a Kill Quest, it made sense that she would start with her people. They’d be the most obliged to heed her. Aleem was willing to bet that the death-squad had even constituted members of the Order of Vrior Proven.
“Is Wulry okay?” Serend asked. She was sitting beside him.
“He’s fine. There was one last thing he needed to do before leaving,” R’shai said with a sigh. “He’ll meet us at Fouts encampment. He’ll take a horse.” It was hard to see anything in the darkness of the wagon, but it looked like she shook her head. “We’ll take a quick break at Founts. And once Wulry catches up with us, we’ll move on to the Lon encampment.”
“Wait,” Aleem said, sitting straighter, “does that mean—”
“Yes,” R’shai said, a smile in her voice. “We have everything we need to complete the Quest. It’s about time we paid a visit to the Deyegint stretch.”