PLATINUM 1.7: SLIPPERY VERMIN

“Sorcerous power flows through all planar entities. Or, it might be said, the power of the planes flows through the sorcerer. Only a few eldritches can be tapped directly. Of those we will not speak: they are without exception infernal, and the uses to which such borrowed power might lend themselves shall tend inexorably towards evil. Yes, even I say it! I have summoned a thousand demons in my time, and even I would not do this thing. I implore you – follow my example, and stray not from the path of light. Anilzar the Wise? Anilzar the Fool!”

– from Mistress Arithos’s Lectures to the Neophyte Assembly

I froze in place. I was only fifteen or twenty feet from the corner – probably a doorway – in which Jargrin was standing. I was crouched on the beam running above the corridor outside the room; there was a tiny, groove-shaped hole in the plaster near me through which their voices were being carried.

“One of my friends brought him for me to experiment on, then lost him. Feychilde’s currently cursed into the form of a rat, if that helps at all.”

“He was always a rat,” Soulbiter said.

Why are all these posh gits so predictably similar?

“This is our moment of revenge,” Screamsong – Lady Rissala – snarled.

“There is also a good chance he has already found a way out, of course,” Jargrin went on smoothly.

“You did right coming to us, boy. Your name?”

“Jargrin Deynos, my lady.”

“Of course – Jargrin. Now begone.”

“Wait,” Soulbiter said. “Your friend’s name.”

“My friend… I-Ishemen. Belexor Ishemen.”

A pause.

“My lady. My lord.”

There was the sound of a door closing, footsteps receding.

‘Moment of revenge.’

I have to get the Twelve Hells out of here.

I made my way through the ceiling, to the spot where I could get inside an interior wall. When I reached the ground and found the spot Zel in the corner had described to me, she was already waiting.

Her arms were crossed as she leaned against a dusty oaken joist; I could just about make out the pale limbs against the relative darkness of her dress. I couldn’t see her features, but I could imagine the anger in her big blue eyes, the disappointment in her pout. The six-inch tall fairy was twice my height, at the moment, even when I craned my neck. She’d put her weapon back in Etherium (assuming I was right about what the fey did about equipment-storage). Her wings were folded and unmoving at her shoulder-blades, so thin they were hard to spot or sense in the gloom.

But then she put out her little, manicured hand and stroked my fur.

“You made it,” she whispered.

I tried to talk, but just chittered at her.

She shushed me, then slid her hand straight into my rodent skull.

A brief sensation of relief, like dousing your face in a bowl of cold water at the end of a hot day – then she had taken up residence once more.

Zel, you aren’t going to believe this.

“Soulbiter and Screamsong are here.”

And you already knew all this. Of course you did.

“I was going to tell you later. This way.”

I let her take control of my limbs, steering me this way and that. Behind the wooden panels of another room, up into a shaft leading back towards the ground floor once again.

What would I do without you?

“Get your heart eaten by a crazy lady?”

Sounds about right. You seem much better, you know.

“Benefits of a bit of exercise. The shapeshift locked me out until you commanded me back through.”

Something to remember for the future.

“Let’s not let this happen again, eh? It was hard to make the connection. This time we’re clean, but when you shift back to your human form we might need to let me out again for a minute.”

So we can rejoin with me as a human, another clean connection.

“You’re getting it. Hold onto your breakfast.”

Zel propelled us upwards again, working my limbs and claws furiously, and within seconds we were undoubtedly behind one of the fittings in the kitchen. There were the scents of food, which enticed my rat-nostrils – but then I could smell smoke.

The kitchen was empty. I could hear only one person outside the room talking, and loudly at that – Saleb, I realised, sounding completely different when he shouted.

Where is everyone?

“I may have started a little fire.”

How did –

“Let me focus.”

Tee-hee. Now you get to find out what it feels like.

There was a gap behind the cupboards along the floor, and we high-tailed along the gap. She found the crack in the bricks next to a pipe coming from the sink, and squeezed us through.

The alleyway was almost clean, the crack letting us out into a gutter beside a cobbled path between the tavern and the other brick building behind it. It had to be into the afternoon but the buildings shrouded this place in shadow.

Other rats were nearby; I could sense them, but they could sense me, and from their sudden flight I suspected they could smell my strangeness. I wasn’t a druid… I didn’t want to risk communicating and ‘saying’ the wrong thing, the thing that would get me torn apart by a hundred little vicious teeth.

Zel relinquished control over the rat-flesh, having no better idea where I was or which way to go than I did. I half-circled the building, coming to a patch of sunlight: the street.

I scampered away just a short distance, hiding at the side of a crate on the street so that I could look back at the front of the place I’d just escaped.

There was a scarlet deer on the sign over the tavern’s door. My eyesight was poor in this form, but with some inspiration from the picture I could make out the lettering below:

‘The Red Hart.’

Were the darkmages so secure they could rub it in the faces of the magistry with such a blatant double-meaning?

Well, some darkmages seemed to be secure-enough to get themselves out of custody after being arrested, as the Cannibal Six evidently had done. Maybe even the magisters wouldn’t risk an assault against a darkmage-haven like this place – it wasn’t somewhere you’d need an excess of firepower to purge. A single band of five well-prepared, well-armed magisters could take control of the staff and patrons no problem.

No, it seemed the problem was keeping them in jail even after they’d been taken into custody. Did the Cannibal Six have some way to keep the charges from sticking, even when they’d been caught like that, inspected by an enchanter and a diviner right there on the scene?

That had some troubling implications.

People were pouring out onto the cobbles accompanied by torrents of smoke, the swinging of the front door wafting clouds of it in billows into the space in front of the tavern. Wisps were rising up into the sky. I recognised Meneda (no longer squirting blood) and Uthon, but saw no sign of Belexor, Jargrin, the members of the Cannibal Six…

I didn’t dare waste any more time.

I was already turning to run, when I noticed it.

It came out of the smoke, low to the ground, and seemed to be formed out of pure, rolling shadow, a skittering, trundling bundle of blackness. I was sure that, even being an arch-sorcerer, the fiend would’ve been almost impossible for me to discern in the smoke without Zel’s perception-boost. Those standing right by it didn’t turn to look at it.

The creature seemed almost feline, its body and head in proportion with an ordinary pet cat – but it was spindly. Its legs were twice the normal length and each seemed to have two knees, yet it kept its body close to the ground, moving almost like a spider missing half its limbs. Its tail and ears were at least three times the normal length and stood erect, alert. A white rune burned in the centre of its brow.

Except for the vertical black slits at their centres, its eyes were burning with the same red fire as that of an infernal portal. The maw was a perpetual grin, a smear of darker-darkness across the bottom of its head in which tiny teeth and a flickering forked tongue gleamed, likewise illuminated by crimson flame. The forked tips of that tongue glistened, dripping colourless venom.

It stopped as it exited the smoke and the crowd, and closed its glimmering eyes, lifting its shadowy chin so that the white rune on its forehead burned towards the sky. It tasted the air with flicks of its tongue.

My human mind was reassuring me that it wasn’t much bigger than cat-sized, but it looked huge from down here, and such reassurance could only do so much.

Even before Zel spoke I’d sent my rodent muscles into action, scurrying away as fast as my four feet could carry me.

“Go!” she cried. “Mizelikon. Second rank, and my sword can’t hurt it.”

It’s not moving?

“It won’t, yet.”

The world was so different so low-down. My human conceptions let me parse the environment as a rat never could, and my vermin instincts let me find the cracks in that environment as a human never could – the places I could squeeze my body between sacks of produce and stacks of tools, between the falling boots of pedestrians and the crumbled bricks in the walls.

So I went, squeezing my body between sacks and stacks, boots and bricks – anything to put distance between myself and the nightmarish thing behind me. When I got the chance I risked a look back but it was useless. Too many feet. Too many intervening obstacles. Sight too blurry.

Snarling, I turned forwards once more, pointing us in the one direction that seemed to flow uphill.

I hadn’t gone twenty feet when it happened.

It wasn’t the demon. Oh no. That would be to assume the whole world wasn’t working against me.

It was an owl that decided to fall out of nowhere, coming right at me in broad daylight.

Admittedly I only realised this when Zel screamed “Owl!” at the top of her mind-voice.

I dived, of course, balking in sheer terror.

And in the end it was even closer than it’d been last night, with the knife.

But it worked; I got into a shadow, the owl missed me by six inches, and I caught a glimpse of it as it took off again, the blur of brownish feathers almost hiding the cruel beak.

I blamed the ratty side of me for the fact I instantly felt sick at the thought of a bird plummeting onto my head. That did little to assuage the actual feeling, however.

Somehow all the trouble they were going to to annihilate me felt rather unfair. Belexor was on my trail, now – or some other druid.

I had nothing to do but keep going.

There’s nothing I can do about the druid. But what’s a mizelikon?

The uncluttered gutter I was following let out onto a cross-street and, as I scurried in the open, a random dwarf with his beard tucked in his belt aimed a clumsy kick at me – he barely clipped my tail with his iron-shod boot as I dove into the next gutter.

Information, Zel!

“Mizelikon…Assassin-class. They take the identity of their prey from the mind of the summoner and apply it to the various possible futures.”

It wasn’t hard to figure out where you were going in Hilltown. Move uphill and you were moving towards Hightown.

Towards a demon?

When you say ‘possible futures’…

“It can take them a minute, but when they get a vision of a world in which they catch you, they set out to make that world reality. It had some idea of what it was looking for before we ever saw it – that’s why it’s a cat, Kas.”

So it wasn’t moving because it didn’t know which way to go to catch me yet.

“They move very quickly, when they move. Don’t think you’re escaping. You’re running into its net.”

I came to the forges, the heat wafting down the road in waves, accompanied by the ringing of hammers and commands issued in the dwarven tongue. I had a sense of where we were, now. Anvil Row. This road ran in parallel with Hill Road, the main street which I’d used on my infrequent visits to Hightown during the cleansings.

Options?

“I’m thinking!”

I hadn’t anticipated anything like this happening to me. I’d figured if I had to fight demons, I could at least count on having my shields, my ability to summon. Fighting demons, like this? I was just a rat, even if I happened to have a fairy onboard. By her own admission, she couldn’t fight this fight for me.

I followed the curve of the street and found an alley that let me cut through to Hill Road – even as I fled, the prey-panic zipping through my nerves, the cleanliness of these alleys was still impressing me, allowing me to more-easily navigate the unknown spaces. I smelt a few ordinary cats as I went; with Zel’s help I crossed out of their eye-lines before they saw me. I’d seen what Missymoo had been like; I was not going to encounter even the world’s most placid cat while in this form.

Any grand ideas?

“Visions tend to unravel when what you’re trying to scry is itself influenced by a diviner… All the possibilities diverge: people, places, random occurrences… It all becomes a big unpredictable, imperceptible mess.”

You seem to know a bit about this.

“I am a diviner, remember.” She managed to sound irritated. “The greatest seer can easily see the least seer – they’re smaller, you see, they can look down on us from above without a problem. They can scry right through all the tiny subtleties of the interactions that fall within our influence. But the greater seer cannot always see the lesser, and the lesser are always blind to the greater. If we’re the same strength, the same ‘size’…”

So… It took me a moment to follow.

“The owl’s circling.”

Wydra’s maw!I hope you’re saying mizelikon aren’t powerful diviners?

“Well, they’re only second rank. Only a bit better than me, even if our methods differ. Their impressions of the future are one-shot, and take time to remake. Just entering the presence of an arch-diviner – even if only briefly – could completely warp the course of your fate, throw off the assassin altogether…”

Do you happen to know any arch-diviners?

I hadn’t meant it entirely rhetorically, but she spared me a negative answer, letting me concentrate as I hit heavier traffic.

If it’d been any kind of ordinary pursuit, I’d have been glad to reach a crowd, a sea of footwear to slip through. As it was, I didn’t really know what I was going to do once I reached Hightown. Even if Emrelet happened to still be there, I’d have no way to find this Blackbranch Square.

She was my only recourse, though. I was pretty sure that if I showed up as a rat and spat Zel out, she’d take her seriously – perhaps I could use Zel to get directions –

“No you couldn’t. It’s coming and you need to take a different route.”

I could turn at the next –

“No, you don’t understand!”

Don’t fret – just tell me. I tried to think in my most soothing tone, while valiantly skittering on up the hill.

“Let the owl take you.”

What! I slowed, feeling sick again even at the prospect of considering to entertain such a thing.

“I didn’t pick it out with danger-sense earlier; I can’t see a future where it hurts us. I don’t think it was trying to kill you. And you would never have taken this path if I hadn’t interfered with your fate.”

Not trying… to kill… I stopped.

It sounded ridiculous, but I stopped.

I hadn’t listened to her before, and it’d doomed me. As I thought back, I didn’t think I could find a single time I’d gone wrong when I’d actually followed her advice.

Maybe I could’ve ran, when the Bagger Boys cornered me – she’d been right about that too, and perhaps I’d given away my identity without need.

I decided to trust, and came to a shuddering halt.

A pig ran past me, slipping through the crowd easily, followed fifteen seconds later by a sweat-soaked lad huffing and puffing as he jogged after it.

I tried to steel myself but the rodent claws were scratching at the stonework underneath me, my belly quivering, my heart racing.

What happens if I die of fright?

I couldn’t be sick. I felt so sick, but there was simply no way in my physiology to make it happen.

How far away is –

She didn’t warn me this time.

The lurch was giddying. The grip of the talons about my midsection was not altogether uncomfortable but this was because I couldn’t feel anything except the rush – we were ten feet up – wings beating, climbing – twenty feet – I didn’t like it – thirty feet – everything becoming a blur…

Then within ten seconds it was over, with a sudden descent that took my breath away.

The owl set me down on a flat roof of a three-storey building, pinning me against the tarred wood. For a moment all I could see were its vibrant yellow eyes, unblinking, stopping me from struggling as much with the cool gaze as the terrifyingly-sharp talons.

It hooted, once, low and sure, right into my horrified rat-face.

And we both changed.

If I ever don’t trust you again –

“– I’ll mention this moment, oh yes-s-s-s-”

It was faster this time, like eye-blinkingly fast, and without any of the accompanying pain.

I was standing up, the rodent nervousness washed right out of my system. I doubted most people ever got to grin like I was grinning now. It hurt my jaw, and I didn’t care, because it was my jaw again. Hood and scarf in place, every part of me seemingly working as normal, every one of my possessions seemingly intact and in place.

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“Sweet Celestium, what happened to you?”

This from my rescuer. Highborn accent but with none of the condescension. He sounded young, maybe even younger than me, if I were any judge.

The arch-druid – for he could be no less – was wearing a dark-green robe with short, wide sleeves revealing that he had mud caked on his arms up the elbow. His hood was up, and like me he covered only the lower-part of his face; but his was no scarf. An awesome mask stretched from ear to ear across the bridge of his nose, covering his jaw, giving him the beak of an owl, black highlighted in white, with grey-brown feathers worked into the cheeks.

It shouldn’t have taken me so long to realise who he was. This was Nighteye. The sigil of a single avian eye with a crescent moon in its pupil was stitched with a golden weave into his robes, most-easily visible where it was biggest and least obscured by the dirt that coated the lower portion of his garment, upon his shoulders and the peak of his cowl.

“My good man?”

“I –”

“Feychilde, do I have it aright?” He seemed excited.

“Er – right. Nighteye?”

“Right.” He said it as if he were smiling.

“How did –”

“I know? I offered to watch for Soulbiter and Screamsong – Termiax and Rissala, as we now know – did you know they’re married? – and then there was a fire, and you came scampering out, and I knew straight away, there was no chance you were a normal rat, just look at you, hm, running like you’d dipped your privates in acid, and then there was a dropping huge weird cat, and when you ran it turned to face the way you went, and look at you, of course, it’s the one who caught them last time, trying to catch them again, though quite why you’d attempt to do so in rat-shape is beyond –”

“Nighteye, I must shower you in thanks,” I interrupted, having gotten the measure of this unlikely ally – he was the sort of person who needed to be interrupted, and he didn’t seem offended, confirming my suspicion that he was intelligent enough to understand this fact about himself; “you’ve just pulled me out of a nightmare. Belexor Ish- Ishemen. A druid of the Shining Circle who works as a magister. He turned me into a rat. He was going to give me to Jargrin Dreynos, something like that – son of the Evil Lord of the Fourteenth Chair. Then I escaped, but Jargrin went to the basement and warned S- Termiax? and Rissala about me. Then –”

“Woah! Wait,” he blurted. I could tell he wasn’t used to getting challenged for the crown of verbal spillage. “Belexor Ishemen, Jargrin Deynos, son of Zanedar Deynos, in league with Termiax and Rissala, oh, this is so good, you’ve given me enough here that I owe you, hm, three more undoings of involuntary metamorphoses, and I even promise not to tell anyone about how you ran, but if you want I can give you lessons in case it ever happens again, or –”

I chuckled. “You keep it to yourself, and we’ll call the slate wiped clean, yeah? So, are you going to report Belexor?“

“Oh, haha, Belexor’s going to get reported alright – and then some – we druids were warned about him, and do you know how illegal it is, turning someone into something against their will? without the proper paperwork? They don’t even let me do it to people who fight back, Leafcloak says I have to use my stupid vines, I risk giving them a heart attack, same as I can’t attack them with bugs, or anything else really for that matter, hm, I –“

“I can confirm that heart attack bit,” I said. “I got pretty close once or twice. Letting an owl pick me up wasn’t exactly the easiest thing I’ve ever done.”

“Sorry, my good man.” He patted me on the upper arm in a comradely fashion that Belexor, in all his feigned friendship, had never managed to accomplish, “I can’t do it at range, I’m still learning to heal without touching never mind completely changing someone’s species, it’s, hm, an order of magnitude more complex and I never thought about how you might feel, you know, being swooped on, but I could, hm, turn you into a special kind of giant dragonfly, and let you swoop on me –”

“So you’re, like, a magister?”

“Oh, no, I don’t go around showing my face,” he gestured at his mask, “can’t risk being identified, who I am, you know, hm, but you know this,” he gestured at mine, “you have a reputation to maintain –”

I had people to protect, which was different, but in either case he wasn’t getting my point. “I mean, you’re currently working for the Magisterium? Watching over –”

“– Termiax and Rissala, yes, I’m taking a fee, but it’s just a bit, really, I mean, this is my job as a champion, you know, and the Cannibal Six, right? and then they turn out to be the Lord of the Isle of Vinnermine and his Lady –”

“But if they let them escape, how can –”

“Escape? My good man! no, they didn’t escape, we let them get out; their identities were uncovered, we knew they had to go to Facechanger –”

“Facechanger?” I interrupted, intrigued.

“Oh, hm, you haven’t heard? about Facechanger? because I didn’t hear until I started catching darkmages, and now you’ve just started catching darkmages –“

He prattled on, but even though he was skirting the answers to my questions at best I managed to wrap my head around it. The ones who got away would change their identities, probably masquerade as their own inheritors if they could manage it… by the Five, what were we dealing with here?

What had I intruded on?

“– without noses, it was kind of funny but also kind of icky when you looked –“

“Did you stop watching them, to come find me?” I felt a kind of coldness in my gut. “They’ve got away for real this time?”

“Bah, we’ve got Lightblind watching them, that’s how we were tracking them in the first place, hm, I didn’t need to stay there, it was my job to check who went in and who went out, the Red Hart is pretty famous, or infamous if you know what I mean, and now you’ve given me better information than I would’ve gotten from just watching from my perch anyway, and –“

Lightblind. The diviner-champion who wore an eyeless white mask, her robes pure white but for her black sigil, the eyelashes of a closed eye. She was famous for defeating Hierarch Nine, one of the worst leaders of the Srol Heretics and a mass-murderer well into the triple digits – taking him down ostensibly without looking.

I wondered how much she’d earned from that little demonstration.

Nighteye’s reassurances worked; I felt the worry fade, the tension ease. The Magisterium weren’t a bunch of incompetent fools after all, then. They might not have warned me, but at least they’d had an idea about Belexor already… They’d let the worst members of the Cannibal Six do a runner, but they were tightly leashed, and being used as bait to lure a much bigger, very-important-sounding fish…

But would they be able to stop Belexor from spreading my real name around? Would they be able to do so indefinitely? I doubted it. By their own admission, they were having trouble with darkmages getting free and changing their faces – the magicrux-jails clearly weren’t all they were hyped-up to be.

“– I saw you, you were in danger, you took priority.” He actually finished a sentence.

As much as I wanted to be sceptical of this clearly-highborn, clearly-highly-strung youth, he was a fellow archmage, a fellow champion, and, what was more, he was actually nice. He hadn’t judged me one bit – how could I judge him, as anything other than my saviour in the worst time of trouble I’d ever encountered?

“Can I consider you a friend, Nighteye?” I asked, extending a hand.

“Of course!” He shook the proffered hand vigorously. “Feychilde.”

We each inclined our heads, then stepped apart again.

I looked around. We were far enough from the edge of the roof that the people walking up the street couldn’t see us, and I could guess we were adjacent to a street that intersected Hill Road – he hadn’t taken me more than fifty yards off-course.

“You have a way to get down, I take it? because if not I’d, hm, be more than happy to give you a winged shape –“

“No, no thank you!” I said far too loudly. “I can get down.”

I had something in mind.

“I’ll see you at the Gathering, then,” he said, and waved, becoming an owl again.

“Gathering?” I asked, turning back to him and looking down at the (now small and not at all intimidating) brown-and-grey mottled owl.

It was weird to hear an owl hooting with human meaning coming through.

“Oh, you don’t know yet, woah, I’ve never got to be the one to tell anyone before – well, they say it’s traditionally called the ‘Gathering of Champions’, but we mostly just call it the Gathering, you know, as it’s, hoot, less pretentious? on the night of the full moon, in the foundations of the Tower of Mourning – you’ll be there, right?”

The owl cocked its head, and I couldn’t help but laugh again.

“Right.”

Of course I’d be there. I couldn’t even conceive of a situation in which I’d been invited to something called the Gathering of Champions and decided, no, I had better things to do actually, might have to give that one a miss… And at that place, too…

Full moon couldn’t come quickly enough.

“See you in a couple of weeks, I guess, then,” he said, a bit hesitantly, then hopped to the edge of the roof and spread his wings into flight.

I watched him go, flapping his way over the buildings, already a speck against the greyed-over sky. I kept my eyes on him until he disappeared into a wall of smog towards the south-west, enjoying the full capacity of my augmented perception.

I flexed my fingers, then marked out shields and a star with pleasure.

I drew a breath, feeling safe, feeling ready.

Zelurra, faerie queen, bondswoman, I command you to awaken and heed my call!

While I waited I opened a chasm between the material world and the otherworld, summoning Flood Boy.

The faun stepped through a little unsteadily. He was covered in moss where he’d patched up his Missymoo-inflicted wounds, and had a hand clasped to his brow, as if to either relieve a headache or protect his eyes from even this dimly-lit sky. Either way, from the way he was swaying gently it was obvious he’d been self-medicating quite liberally. Not that I objected, so long as he could do his job.

“Olberu –” I began.

“Olbru,” he moaned.

“Olbru,” I said, “I need an ice slide to the ground, please.”

He muttered something about high-pitch, but dutifully retrieved his goblet and pipes as he staggered towards the roof’s rim. I joined him there, and watched as he drew a deep, shuddering breath. When he released it through the pipes it made a series of staggered notes that were almost as shrill as that which he’d used on the razor-fiend last night.

We drew looks, but at this point I didn’t care, didn’t care who knew I was here. If any of my former tormentors wanted a confrontation, now, I’d give them one.

Instead of a storm of ice-shards or a huge gush, this time the wine lapped out, cut thin by the music, like just the surface of a wave standing freely in the air without support.

I moved right to the edge and looked down. Support or not, the narrow waterfall of wine was there, and I couldn’t deny what my eyes could see – it transitioned from transparency to translucency, frosted-over in the space of a heartbeat – a glimmering, near-white slide, like a bridge of crystal, stretching from the roof to the ground.

Flood Boy swooned a bit as he halted, dropping the arms that held his equipment to his sides wearily – I crouched a little and put out a hand to steady him.

“Sorry about all this,” I said.

He tried to grin, but it was more of a grimace than anything else.

“Anything else, O master?” He managed to be a bit more convincing with that.

“Just… stop drinking before you can’t count your own fingers, yeah? I might need you again soon. I’ve been in a few tight spots this morning and I couldn’t summon you, but that was my fault, not yours…”

He just stared at me, a bit blearily.

“I mean… no, nothing else, Flood Boy.” I opened the fissure for him to return. “Have fun!”

The faun staggered home through the fizzy green portal.

“K-K-Kas.”

I had my backside centred in the middle of the ice slide and was preparing to set myself off when her communication started to come through. It looked awfully high from up here but I was all about taking leaps of faith today it seemed.

You’ve picked an opportune moment.

She let herself out of my face, turning to me as she did so, floating in the air before me.

“You’re back,” she said, her voice tinny but far louder than her size would suggest.

“We’re back.”

She smiled, brushed my cheek with her hand, and joined again with me.

Ready?

“Emrelet?”

When the mizelikon looked ahead to this, it would see you getting Emrelet’s attention as my ambassador, with me still in rat form. This time, I’ll have other options. Just taking it, for one.

“Not bad,” she thought back at me. “But it’s… one o’clock?”

That was the very encouragement I’d been waiting for.

I pushed, letting the slippery ice take me.

The contact under my buttocks and legs gave way – I fell, only touching the slide with my back, and my stomach dropped – I could see people looking at me, a glimpse of a sea of faces – faster than I could react, my hindquarters made contact again, and I was soaring through the air, arms and legs sent akimbo – at the last sliver of an instant my instincts took hold and I tucked my knees –

I landed in a crouch, with only a dull pain radiating across my heels. Flood Boy had given me a little lip at the bottom to guide me to my feet, and somehow it’d worked.

As I stood up, hands checking my scarf was still tightly fixed in place beneath the cowl, I got some scattered applause.

“Thank you, thank you,” I said.

“Which one’re you?” asked a short, bald fellow in a loud but rasping voice. The man was muscle-bound despite the fact he had to be pushing seventy, dressed in a leather jerkin.

There was no reason to downplay it.

“I am Feychilde, good sir! And this is your lucky day! Do you happen to like fortified wine?”

By the time I left my heels were already feeling better, and the crowd were gathering their pots, pans and pails, buckets, barrels and barrows – queueing up to collect what had been verified by the brave pushing-seventy local as ‘Myrielle white, almost certainly nine eighty-eight vintage’, the tip of his discerning tongue placed gingerly on a broken-off icicle. Damn the Magisterium to all Twelve Hells if they came after me for this – I’d been through enough at their hands today that I’d almost welcome the opportunity to square-off with them over the issue of giving away some frozen wine.

Okay, so, a huge amount of frozen wine, really, but who was miserly-enough to be measuring?

My shields firmly in place, I found my stride, the pentagon, square and triangle rotating around the star-reinforced circle, blue lines only I could see flickering through the hundreds of other Mundians and foreigners using Hill Road to reach Hightown. I wasn’t going to take any risks. This way I’d get a bare minimum of twenty-odd feet’s warning if something was coming my way.

Within a few moments, I could see the towers of Hightown rising up before me, piercing a sky that was actually showing some blue. There was a sea of lesser towers, but a few really caught the eye. The closest, and most impressive I thought, was the three-sided Tower of Mourning, standing alone in a vast cracked courtyard that none could tend on pain of death. The vast creation – for to call it a building was not to do it justice – was seemingly carved of a single piece of unbreakable black stone, threaded with veins that glowed blue in the dark. Whenever they were rung its Bells could be heard, it was said, even out in the Bay of Salnifast, far from the city’s quartz walls – but that was only ever in times of direst need.

A little farther away, the one they called the Thirteen Candles: an edifice shaped like a haphazard, absurd candelabrum that surely never would’ve stood up for five minutes, never mind five centuries, without copious applications of wizardry; it was painted in a scabrous red that legend said was real blood. Each of its thirteen minarets pointed in a different direction and from the conical roof of each tower there came an endless stream of flame.

And then, at the far side of Hightown – almost at the outer wall of Mund, near the gate that let out onto the mountain-paths – there stood the Maginox.

It was an ugly building, I thought. The School of Magery and Headquarters of the Magisterium was a structure of transparent glass, in a pentagonal pyramid – like a regular pyramid but with a pentagon for a base instead of a square, and five faces instead of four. Incredibly tall – almost a mile, they said – and shaped like a spike, almost a needle. Yes, it looked ‘pretty’, especially at sunset, but that was the problem with it. Nothing in Mund looked that pretty. The old, real School of Magery, where the Five Founders themselves had taught, was lost in an Infernal Incursion; this monument to magecraft was no more than two hundred years old, and it looked it. Sure, lots of the smaller towers were all modern-looking, but out of the big ones, the ones too big for just anyone to build given enough money, the Maginox really stood out, like a mage in a street full of lowborn.

I made my way up Hightown’s broad, gleaming stretch of Hill Road, and it was like stepping through a portal into another world. The intricately-designed fences which formed hip-high barriers around private areas sported ensorcelled light-balls on wrought-iron posts that would activate as night fell, to light the way for travellers. Each direction I looked, the houses and mercantile outlets, the workshops and guild-halls, the hotels and shrines were all styled out of the same white-grey brick, with huge glass windows in place of walls, even glass domes for roofs.

Glass roofs… I supposed it’d be worth looking at the sky, here, given you could actually see it. Now I was closer, I saw quite a few of the azure patches here in the greyness overhead, like Hightown was blessed by Celestium itself – or like some wizards had been paid to let a bit of sunshine through…

But it wasn’t just the place; it was the people. I saw a Knight of Kultemeren striding ahead of me – a dwarf, from what his diminutive height and broad shoulders told me. The hem of his specially-made cloak drifted just an inch off the floor, the darkness of the night-blue fabric bringing the white dragon embroidered upon it to life, its shape seeming to writhe as the garment billowed, the dwarf trudging on his way. His broadsword looked no less fearsome for missing a few inches off its length; the crowds were naturally giving the walking lie-exterminator a wide berth. And, obviously, there were lots more magic-users here – I would’ve said that maybe even as many as one in a dozen bore the markers. Many would be students from all over the Mundic Realm; the vast majority weren’t much older than me. I spotted plenty of groups of mages, their hoods cast back, usually all wearing similar colours – I guessed enchanters hung out with enchanters, sorcerers with sorcerers and so on, in the wider community of mages? They were all ambling into and out of the busy bazaars, chatting openly about their work.

There was an older female wizard with a gaggle of eager younger wizards trying to match her stride as she instructed them in the finer points of architecture while she walked. Teams of zombies toiled in place of animals or prisoners, workers who would never get loose, capable of tireless labour and following surprisingly-complex instructions from their sorcerer-handlers; they all had the same rune on the forehead, the angular ‘P’ of a foreign pillager, an acceptable target for forced reanimation. I couldn’t account for druids, given the number of birds around here, but no fewer than four flying mages passed me by in thirty seconds at one point. A trio of thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girls who seemed to be enchanters-in-training were lying on their backs on a grass verge, drawing the visages of various boys directly into the air with their gleaming illusions; one of them had a glyphstone out, a chunk of crystal into which she gazed with total obliviousness while the others played.

Grass verges. They were everywhere, assaulting the senses with their wholesomeness and greenness – at the edge of every side-street, protecting the pavements from the wagon-routes with a strip of nature fifteen feet wide. At this time of year the huge trees that were evenly-spaced along the verges were shedding their leaves, but enough still clutched on to the branches that it was as though there were a yellow roof above the pavements as I made my way into the centre of town.

The druids didn’t – wouldn’t – clean up all the leaves, so I trudged through my share of knee-deep yellow-brown windrows as I stepped into the verges. Time and again I was forced to avoid circles of kids my own age clogging the pavement, hanging around talking about this-or-that champion or their latest game of Squire, and the veritable armies of tourists, jabbering away in foreign tongues. Still, the lack of mud or other-yet-more-disgusting-brown-plop was a literal breath of fresh air. You really would think this place and Mud Lane were on opposite sides of the country, if you were picked up in one and dropped in the other – even the accents and dialects of the natives diverged to a ridiculous degree. Here you’d catch the odd thee, thou and thine, said in a serious, totally-not-mocking tone of voice, and they had words to differentiate not, say, diseases, but, for example, the type of snobbish amusement you were feeling, like titillation and delectation.

As I left the outskirts of Hightown and got to the bit where the tall towers started to loom above me – crenellations outfitted with gargoyles which might or might not be (for all intents and purposes) alive, and thin windows flickering with weird lights – I stopped to ask for directions.

“Excuse me, sir,” I said, halting in front of a young man wearing business dress in scarlet and black, his face thin and studious, eyes watery blue and hair dark and wavy. “I don’t suppose you could point me the way to Blackbranch Square? I have –”

His gaze snapped to my face, as though he could see me through the shroud, and I froze.

“I know you,” he intoned, and it was not at all the voice I expected; I’d anticipated something in the vein of whiny or perhaps nasal, but his voice was quiet, deep, grave. “I have waited for you, Feychilde. And you have waited for me, all the days of your life.”

A seer?

“Finally, it begins – here, now. You must grip the brand tightly. Do you hear me? You… What is that? You are the Scion of the Sorcerer,” then his voice dropped into a startled-sounding note of incredulity, “and you are his Slave. How –” He paused, then let loose a sigh of realisation. “Ahhhh, you’re in there. This makes so much sense! Damn… damn damn damn…”

“Get us away from this one,” Zel whispered in a tight voice.

He doesn’t like me having a pet fey?

“I am not your pet!”

Poor choice of words. I apologise.

“Hmph. Let’s get directions elsewhere.”

“Okay, pal,” I said, edging back, “at first I thought hey, a prophet telling me something, this has to be useful, let’s put up with the creep-factor, but…”

“But I’ve erred into hey, this lunatic is trying to make a bad day even worse territory. I get it.” The young man was simply shaking his head and laughing softly to himself. “Oh, Feychilde. I’m sorry.” He wiped his eyes, and the look of mirth slowly faded from his features. “I’ll be seeing you again soon.”

He bowed lightly and backed away a few steps, before turning and striding off the way I’d come.

That was strange.

But then he called back over his shoulder, “Right at the Diamond Mare. Follow the curve past Blackroot Tor to Blackbranch Square. But home is where the heart is!”

I stood where I was, paralysed by no spell but by the subtler pins employed by the diviner.

However, try as I might, nothing he said was making any damn sense and he was gone, anyway, vanished into the crowd already.

‘Home is where the heart is’? Why would I go home?

“Just try his directions; he’s a diviner – if he hadn’t thought you’d ignore the bit about going home he wouldn’t have included them.”

Shrugging, I headed off to look for this ‘Diamond Mare’.

Your reasoning is sound, but don’t think you’re off the hook. What did –

“He didn’t realise the arch-sorcerer could also contain the slave of the arch-sorcerer. Couldn’t you pick that much up?”

I thought of the way he’d said ‘you’re in there,’ as though he knew Zel somehow – but she was right, that just made even less sense.

“And there it is, just like that.”

The Diamond Mare seemed to be, from just the external appearance, to the Red Hart what the Red Hart was to any of a hundred pubs around Helbert’s Bend.

The tavern was huge. It was comprised of a central, steepled area with walls of glass, lit by just a few fires that burned without fuel-sources in massive, clear-glass bowls – all visible through the transparent walls. The cylindrical wings on either side with rooms for guests were like miniature towers, turrets four floors tall, built from big bricks of the white-grey stone and dotted with curved windows so that patrons could view the streets from their beds, should they so wish. Etched with white crystal into a plaque of black stone above the doorway were the tavern’s name and the likeness of a cantering horse with a gleaming gem on its brow.

I took the turn-off, and followed the road to the right.

The route did indeed curve as the strange young man had said it would. I saw what must have been Blackroot Tor, a withered-looking heath atop a small, steep and somewhat-lopsided hill.

The silhouette of a lone leafless tree swayed slightly upon the highest point, long fingers made from branches writing unreadable messages, moving ceaselessly in the cold caress of a breeze I couldn’t feel here, a few hundred yards away.

No buildings backed onto the heather-choked grassland surrounding the Tor; a tall wall of the white-grey stone separated it from the pavement on the far side of the road. None of the people I passed gave it a glance as they went on their ways; after a minute of looking at the tree atop the hill I got the distinct feeling there was something wrong with it. I couldn’t imagine living in one of the houses or working in one of the shops on this side of the street, having to look at it all day long. A little reluctantly I crossed closer to it, so that the wall would block it from my sight.

Plus, the curve around this hillock made it technically faster to walk on this side of the road anyway. Yes. That would be a perfectly good excuse for crossing over, actually – I could scrap all that stuff about a spooky tree. Yes, that made the most sense.

I got to the part of the curve where I could see Blackbranch Square ahead. A few roadways seemed to meet here, coming from different areas of Hightown, and there were four big structures; not so huge as the Diamond Mare, but bigger than anything outside the district by a fair margin. I saw the ‘Blackbranch Bank’ letters gilded onto the white front of a building, and headed that way.

The bank’s entrance was up a set of shallow, narrow steps and its overhanging roof was supported by a row of ten white pillars. The golden clock set into the front wall of the bank’s upper floors, beaming down on the square like a miniature sun, showed one thirty-five.

I couldn’t see Emrelet anywhere.

I could see plenty of mages, plenty of nobles and merchants in garments of velvet and silk, guardsmen liveried and spear-armed, families out enjoying the Starday afternoon… My eyes seized on a tall elflord and elfmaid dragging their elfchild into a shop, their white-golden hair catching my attention.

But no. No awesome archmage.

I’d built up the moment in my mind without meaning to, I’d acted, I’d felt like there was no way that fate would be so cruel as to deny me this – that there was some special plan in place, a destiny to be unveiled that would begin here, now – but it had happened – it had gone wrong, tainted by the jealousy of a darkmage-druid – tainted by my own bravado, getting on the wrong side of a magister in the first lousy minute, running on ego and making excuses to myself about how I had to comport myself as a champion, not allowing myself to be challenged, not backing-down… Such childishness. I could curse Belexor, and he’d deserve it, but I was to blame, my lack of control, ignoring all my own rules –

“Eh yeh! Be yeh Feeehhhhh-choyld?”

It was an exclamation in a thick Northman accent, such that I almost missed the words. One could happily mistake the ‘Feychilde’ for a sneeze.

I sighed, and turned to face the old, hairy man walking towards me from the pillars in front of the bank.

“Are you going to turn me into a rat? Because if you’re going to turn me into a rat, I want fair warning.” He’d stepped right through my outermost shields, which meant I was being facetious or he was scary powerful, but I just couldn’t stop. “Or if you’re going to be all cryptic and doomy at me, just spit it out, get right to the point. I’m looking for someone and when I thought about being famous and people recognising me I had no idea it was going to happen three times in a row, I might as well go round with a sign above my head –”

“Yeh be Feeehhhhh-choyld, then,” he grunted, stopping ten feet from me and regarding me with an assessing gaze. His attire was that of a beggar, if I had to guess – torn up, frayed, a bit dirty here and there – but he was the most finely-groomed beggar I’d ever seen if that was the case. It looked like even the streetfolk of Hightown had standards.

“Yes, I am Feychilde, and –“

“Yeh be lookin’ fer thar young margistur, I tekk’it?”

Young magister.

“Emrelet?” I blurted in a much more desperate-sounding voice than I’d planned.

“Aye, m’little lord, thar be the one, thar’s a fair young lass. She be the one who gev for me to be ‘ere to meet yeh. Said as you should find ‘er at yer place.”

“My place?”

“Aye, ‘tis as she said it with ‘er own lips… Yeh’ll tell ‘er I passed on ‘er word, m’lord?”

It’s what the seer said. What am I going to do?

“Run?”

Very funny.

“If you’d let me take you on a pet-hunt,” she gave the term an added dollop of petulance, “we could’ve gotten you a mount.”

I thanked Emrelet’s envoy profusely, nearly dislocating his arm while I shook his hand, pressing a couple of my coins into it for his trouble.

Then I turned on my heel.

I was on my way home.