Ambushing the drug runners wasn’t hard. Nym and Analia floated a hundred feet in the air over the group, safely hidden behind his camouflage screen, and hit all four of the adults with paralysis spells. Two of them started casting immediately, so he peppered them with arcana injections. The other two apparently weren’t mages, and there was very little they could do to fight back.
Though he hadn’t ever seen anyone besides himself push through an arcana injection to keep flinging spells, Nym wasn’t about to bank on the idea that they couldn’t. These would be desperate men, after all, more than willing to accept a little pain to get in the chump shot when Nym wasn’t looking.
So he kept an eye on them while Analia talked with the children. They were tied together with a rope in a single long line, each one with their hands bound and the rope leading off to the next. Nym cut the rope between each child and Analia untied them the old-fashioned way.
After that, she had some questions for the men, which they were surprisingly steadfast in refusing to answer. They didn’t try to lie like the one she’d questioned back in the city. They just glared at her, stone-faced and silent. At least, they did until Nym picked one at random and lifted him a thousand feet into the sky, then let him fall.
He caught the man around the hundred-foot mark and lowered him to the ground itself at a still terrifying, but not dangerous, speed. Part of him felt bad for essentially torturing the guy, but all it took was a glance over at the dozen traumatized children and he got over it. When the man refused to talk, he went for a second ride, and all three of his friends went with him.
He still wouldn’t talk, but one of the other guys started blubbering and eagerly spilled his guts, much to the disgust of the other three. Analia asked him some rapid-fire questions, some of which seemed to confuse the man, but in the end she was satisfied with the information.
“We’re going to do a lot with this,” she told Nym.
“What were you trying to find out?”
“Mostly names and places involved in their organization. We’ll hit them and shut them down as fast as we can. This particular cartel is going to lose a lot of money over the next few weeks. We might even shut them down completely.”
Nym just shook his head. “This really wasn’t what I pictured you doing with your free time.”
“I just kind of stumbled onto it, but I don’t regret joining.”
“Mmhmm. How illegal is this thing you’re doing?”
“No more illegal than what they’re doing,” she said, jabbing one finger angrily at the drug runners.
“Sure, but that just sounds like everyone gets arrested when the guards notice what’s going on. The, what did you call them? The bluehats?”
“Only if we get caught,” she said grimly. “With you helping, I don’t think that’ll be an issue.”
“Uh, I would not count on that if I were you. I’m helping you specifically this afternoon, but I do have my own work to do.”
“Nym, don’t you care about what they’re doing to these kids? Or what they’re doing with this dangerous and addictive drug? The users will stab somebody without a second thought when they start going through withdrawal, anything even for the hint of getting a fix.”
Nym shrugged. “I care about you being safe. I would prefer these kids not be mixed up in it. If someone old enough to know better gets hooked on what these guys are selling, that’s their problem.”
“It’s everyone’s problem,” Analia said.
“Not mine, not really. I’m just making sure it’s clear to you that I am here as a favor to you, only, and that I’m not signing on for your vigilante gang. I don’t think you should either, but you’ll do what you like.”
She glared at him, and Nym stared back, his face blank. He’d never been one to go out of his way trying to right all the wrongs of the world, and he’d thought she’d known that about him. If there was a problem in front of him, sure, Nym would help if he could. What she was doing was on a whole different level, and he was mostly just concerned that she’d get herself killed while he was away.
“I’m not going to have an argument here in the middle of the jungle,” she said. “Get these kids back to Shu-Ain for me and I won’t bother you anymore. You can go do whatever you want after that.”
“Of course I’m going to do that,” Nym said, scratching his head. He wasn’t sure why she was surprised that he wasn’t going to drop everything and rush off to fight an organized crime syndicate. There were too many problems in front of him already to spend months or years trying to help people he didn’t even know for no reason other than they needed help.
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“I think we’re done here then,” she told him. “Go on ahead with the kids and I’ll join you shortly.”
“Why aren’t you-”
“I don’t want them to see what’s going to happen next,” she hissed. “Get them out of here while I take care of these guys.”
“Are you sure you want to...” Nym shot a look at the kids. “You know…”
“I don’t want to, but I’m going to. I should have done the ones back in the city too instead of letting you talk me out of it.”
“That’s a bit bloodthirsty.”
“It is what it is, Nym. Now please take the children back to Cern’s, and I will join you in a little bit.”
“Hmm… alright. If you’re sure.” He turned to the children and said, “Who wants to fly all the way back home?”
None of them were eager, but they didn’t resist either. Nym lifted them up and they flew, slowly, back towards the city. He left an air golem behind to keep an eye on Analia, just in case.
* * *
Nym didn’t mention what Analia did to Cern, or to anybody else. He flew the kids in without any trouble, and she joined him twenty minutes later. If he hadn’t watched it happen, he wouldn’t have known the men were dead.
“Come on,” she told the kids, “We’re going to give you some medicine that will get rid of the stuff those bad people made you swallow, and then we’re going to find your parents.”
He stayed out of the way while she worked. Cern had him finishing up Archmage Veran’s orders anyway, so he had plenty to occupy his attention. There was no way he could have done it on his own, but he was able to follow directions and Cern kept a close eye on the process. It only took an hour to make them. Nym wrapped them in a thermal barrier to keep them frozen, and then he waited for Analia to come back from taking the kids to her friends.
When she did, the first thing she said was, “You’re leaving now?”
“Soon,” Nym said, tossing a glance over at the boxed up freezing brain twisters. “I’ve got a delivery to make.”
“And then you’re going off on your bug hunt in the uninhabited frozen lands of the north.”
Nym could hear the accusation in her tone. She still wanted him to stay and help. “I am. A few weeks or a month is a small price to pay to finally have this aging curse broken.”
“That’s… understandable,” she said. “There’s a lot of work to be done here, good people who need help. This city isn’t really as good a place as it looks. Once you start living here, you see all the awful things, all the time, everywhere. It’s hard. I could use your help making it a little bit better when you’re done.”
Nym didn’t really know what to say about that. He had his own things going on and didn’t really want to get involved. “I’ll think about it,” he said. Maybe he’d change his mind, but he didn’t see that happening. That wasn’t to say he wouldn’t help if something landed right in front of him, just that it wasn’t really in his nature to go out of his way looking for problems to solve.
“You do that.”
“Are you going to be okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Analia.”
She stilled and looked at him. “What?”
“I remember the first time I killed someone,” Nym said. “He was in the process of trying to murder me, not for anything I’d done, but just because I was in his way. It was… easy… in the moment. But it was harder later. I lost some sleep thinking about that. Doing it the way you did, doing it cold, against people who couldn’t fight back… I think that’s going to take some time to process.”
“Thanks for the unasked for advice,” she said acidly. “Why don’t you just get going now?”
“I… Yeah. I’ll be back in a month or so. Don’t get yourself killed, and don’t let yourself get sucked into this thing. This will drag you under and drown you. The more you kill, the easier it gets to keep justifying it.”
“How would you know anyway?”
Nym didn’t even know how many people he’d killed. The worst were the soldiers who’d begged him to end it when they’d been caught by geists. Senman was another one that still haunted him, even now. Sometimes he wondered if the wights counted. They’d been people once. Maybe it was possible to reverse that. Surely they deserved to have their lives back. They hadn’t asked to be turned into monsters.
Reviving them seemed like something an ascendant could do. He wasn’t sure if it made a difference that he hadn’t been the one who’d killed them. If he had the power to bring them back, maybe that should weigh on him too that he hadn’t. Of course, he didn’t have that power, but maybe if he’d been more focused on reaching the fifth layer and recovering all of his lost magic, he could have.
Even now, he was putting it off. He knew why. If he could break the aging curse without going to the cube, he might never have to actually recover those memories. Niramyn was a psycho, and Nym didn’t want to become him again. Everything he was doing was just a stall to put that off, but he was afraid that someday, something would show up that was too powerful to fight without becoming an Exarch again.
He took a deep breath and shook his head. “I know,” he said quietly. “Goodbye, Analia. Don’t lose yourself. I’ll see you soon.”
“Bye,” she said. She sounded angry.
Nym picked up the box of freezing brain twisters and constructed the teleportation spell. It felt like there was more to say, but he didn’t know what those words were. He suspected she didn’t either. Her time in Shu-Ain had changed her, and was going to continue changing her. He hoped that when she left, she was still a person he recognized.
The teleport spell caught hold of him and stretched over the box in his arms. Everything went black for a moment, and when the world returned, he was standing in Archmage Veran’s sanctum. With another heavy sigh, he trudged to the lab to tuck away the party treats in cold storage. Then he made himself comfortable in the library and continued his preparations for his trip to the northlands.
The longer he sat there, the less it felt like he got anything done. Try as he might, he couldn’t keep his mind on the task in front of him. He ended up sitting there, his head in his hands and the open book in front of him forgotten. It was long past dark, and still he sat there in the artificial light of the library, unaware of the hours ticking by.
When the sun rose again, he still hadn’t discovered any solutions to his problems.