“Feeling like she stole your crown?” I asked Tanra a few minutes later.
“Don’t be silly, Feychilde,” the seeress replied, taking a gulp of her drink – two parts water to one part wine – without seeming to move her mask. “The girl could never be quite as corrosive as me. She can’t see the future.”
“Maybe that’s why you’re losing your edge,” I shot back.
“Think about it: I knew what she was going to say; I had about seven hundred ways to stop her, but I didn’t… I basically said it myself, didn’t I?”
“You’ve changed, you know?”
She cast an almost-guilty look over at Bor, currently engaged in an illusion-contest with Ibbalat.
“You make a good couple,” I said. “An enchanter… Aside from another diviner, I guess an enchanter’s gonna be your best option, right?”
“At least things are slightly unpredictable,” she said, still watching Bor, then loosed a little sigh. “And he is easy on the eyes.”
I joined her in following the ‘contest’. There was no real challenge in it for Spiritwhisper, of course – Bor was an archmage. He could’ve made glamours at least ten times the scope of Ibbalat’s. He was clearly holding himself back but that didn’t stop him pushing the adventurer to improve his craft – when Ibb created a flock of pure-white doves to flap around the small orchard of druidry-infused apple trees, Bor created some that actually shone like the moon. When the mage copied him, increasing the intensity of his doves’ radiance, Bor split all his doves in two, suddenly doubling the size of his flock…
I butted in, throwing out a half-baked illusion of my own, blurry grey birds descending out of nowhere, but they literally split the glowing doves with their sudden intrusion.
“Leave it to the experts, eh,” Spirit said with a grin.
Meanwhile, Em and Ana had been discussing ensorcelled weaponry as Phanar barbecued some sliced pork; when he started serving, Em came and sat next to me.
“She trying to get you to discount her some spells again?” I asked. Vampiric hearing hadn’t been required for me to notice the content of their conversation.
“She wants them for free,” Em said with a sigh. “Not just a one-time fireball – oh no, a full-on explosive sword. I tried to explain, how long that might take – for a wizard this would be the work of months – and even for me, I do not know how many days…”
“But it’d be soooo useful,” Ana said, sitting down across from us. “Come on, Stormy Baby… for me…”
She wheedled and pouted, which of course only made Em knuckle-down in her refusals.
“It’s not just that,” I said after a minute; “I’d have to draw you a full infinity rune if you were going to use it all the time – fireballs don’t have duration, they just happen, and that’d be a real drain on the binding… Full infinity runes suck, in case you didn’t pick up on that part – I haven’t even tried drawing one yet.”
“Seriously? You suck.”
“Anathta!” Phanar snapped, looking up from the smoking grill – Em’s mouth was agape, and I could see her eyes hardening to steel through the slits in her phoenix-mask –
I laughed loudly, before anyone could get too angry.
“Besides,” Ibb interjected, “a ‘full infinity rune’ – isn’t that, like, an oxymoron? What in the Twelve Hells is half an infin-”
“Who’re you callin’ a moron?” Bor cried, clearly putting it on.
Once the outbursts turned fully good-natured and everyone had taken their chance to be offended and their chance to laugh their ass off at someone, I caught Kani looking at me with a strange expression on her face. I hoped she was reassessing me in a good way, rather than taking affront at my stupid retort.
“Why can’t we see your faces, know your names?” the redhead asked after catching my gaze. “Redgate – he never told us, who he was…“
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“We couldn’t read it, either,” Bor said. “Even his face looks wrong in your memories. Damn demons…”
“Timesnatcher’s been working on it,” Tanra supplied.
“I hope the information is of use to you, when you obtain it,” the cleric went on. “But even he showed us what he looked like – and he was our enemy. You – you are our friends, right?”
“Kani,” Ibbalat cut in, “they’re thinking about us leaving.”
“But, we aren’t –“ Kani began.
“We aren’t leaving yet, no,” the mage continued. “But we could, one day, couldn’t we? We might up and leave on a moment’s notice, and our anti-glamour pendants…” He nodded in gratitude to Bor, not for the first time, and the archmage just nodded back. “Their spells would fail eventually. There’s no need in them running unnecessary risks. You can’t forget the kind of people they fight on a daily basis.”
“I wish,” Em sniffed, finishing her glass of wine. “More like weekly.”
“But that doesn’t really make any sense,” Kani said, looking back at us – me and Em, Tanra and Bor. “You know each other’s names, faces, right? Well, what if one of you leaves Mund…”
I sniggered. Em pulled a face like she wasn’t quite sure whether it was meant to be a joke. Tanra sighed and Bor just stared blankly.
“What?” Kani asked. “What did I say?”
“It is their home,” Phanar murmured. “Think, Kani, what it took for us to leave Miserdell.”
It’s not just that, I thought grimly. I couldn’t say it, but I could think it: We – are – all – broken. It’s not that Mund is our home. It’s that each of us fully expects to die here before too long.
“We feel the same thing you do,” Tanra said all of a sudden, her voice severe. The winter wind whistled in the trees on the edge of the garden. “We know death approaches. We’re young…” She glanced at Bor. “Too young to die, but old enough to try our hands against theirs, and with what’s on the way… dragons, demons… None us expects to ever leave this city. Not without returning, anyway. Each of us is fated to make our last stands within these walls.”
We all regarded her in silence. The wind died down – possibly Em’s doing, conscious or not…
“The truth is, I can’t really see any of our futures… I mean, I can see too many, which just amounts to the same thing. We’re all tied up in this together. I don’t know if you guys are staying or going. So I’m going to trust my gut.”
Tanra reached up to her face, the motions deliberate, slow. “We may not be able to show our faces at the ceremony, but I’ll be damned if you don’t know what your wedding guests look like behind the mask.”
She removed her frowning face, displaying the crooked smile beneath.
“I’m Tanra. Pleased to meet you.”
We all followed suit, and the chill atmosphere lifted, like it was an enchantment being broken. I noticed Kani looking at me again, and this time I thought for a moment that I saw her eyes flash a deep amber hue as she glanced across our features. Then I actually saw the disgust diminishing as the seconds wore on, her distrust fading. She was relaxing. The next time she laughed, the timbre of it was deeper, more guttural.
Redgate really did a number on her.
She had used magic of some kind to give us the once-over, I was certain of it. I almost wanted to start a debate on the nature of divine spells, but I was loath to risk shattering the mood by saying something she’d take personally… that, and I was a bit scared about the answers I’d receive. The books to which I’d been exposed had hardly touched on the limits of so-called miraculous interferences… something about ‘deific extrusion’ and ‘planar cavities’, accompanied by extremely convoluted diagrams… The theory was beyond my grasp, and all I’d seen during Incursions was comparable to low-level battle-magic. The possibilities… did divine spells surpass archmagery, not just in efficacy but in scope?
I got sidetracked in my own thoughts, not speaking for a while, watching Phanar at work. When he started serving up, he said, “So, Kas, I see you eyeing this piece of pork. Is that the human in you hungering, or the vampire?”
I hadn’t even realised I’d been staring, but he was right, damn him.
“Vampire?” Em gasped, breaking my reverie. “Truly, Kas?”
I turned my face to her, bared my fangs and said laconically, “Mwahahha!”
Em poked me in the ribs then leaned closer, inspecting my new teeth with interest.
“You could not tell, Emrelet?” Phanar’s lips twitched, which for his impassive face was equal to at least a medium-sized grin.
“Even with her tongue halfway down his throat earlier…” Ibbalat murmured.
“I don’t know how you do it where you come from, mate,” Bor said, “but round here we don’t lick each other’s teeth…”
“Yeah, Ibb,” Ana said, “just shut up, will you?”
Ibbalat started mumbling at her like a mute, lips pressed together, shaking his head around – she put her arms round his neck to kiss him.
We ate. We drank. We had a night of good cheer.
Me and Em discussed buying a similar house – Kultemeren knew we had enough money. We could live near our friends… have a space together… And a few hours later, when I was stealing the demons off a cultist who thought he could go toe-to-toe with one of the city’s most-prominent sorcerers, I was just going through the motions, my mind still there in Phanar and Kani’s garden, enjoying the ambience and the feeling of comradeship, the dreams of the future.
The future I had to make present. I could buy a place with my girlfriend, a luxurious manor-house probably previously-owned at some point by another champion, long gone from this world… We could live together – we could bring all our families to live there – or keep it secret, keep it just for us…
Marriage? No. Surely, not yet… We were too young, weren’t we? We hadn’t known each other long enough…
But who knew how quickly it might all end, for any of us?
All of us?
If Everseer were to be believed about the ‘Crucible’ – what sounded very much like a year of torment, only concluding with the death of the city – we would would soon find out.
* * *