Zaric and Talia got their bowls of breakfast stew, this time with the addition of a little pot of sweet jam, before heading off to join Osra where she’d sat apart from the crew in the circle of benches around the firepit. The cave they’d been sheltering had already picked up signs of sapient inhabitation in the form of shattered wooden tankards here and there, bits of fabric and leather scraps, and other garbage that inevitably piled up wherever sapients gathered. The scent of stale urine just below the aroma of simmering stew made Talia roll her eyes in disgust.

For gods’ sake, every bunk wagon has working water closets. Would it kill them to use them?

Thinking back to how much the average delver drank on a ‘rest’ day, she realized that it just might.

Osra was humming a little hymn as the pair took their seats near her. Even in her cloak and cowl, her caramel face hidden in the shadows of the flowy garments, the mage apprentice looked positively vibrant.

Heh. Guess I’m not the only one that got up feeling good today.

The other girl’s demeanour was a complete reversal of the timid aloofness she’d previously carried like a protective shield. It seemed a little companionship and some honesty was all it took to break through her fragile shell.

“Good morning sleepyhead,” Osra said, “ you must have been pretty tired, after all. I never would have guessed, given how hard it was to drag you out of wagon seven last night.”

Talia exchanged an amused look with Zaric and shrugged.

“I guess so. I did wake up feeling refreshed, so there’s that. Ready for more metal shaping practice today? I’ve got a much bigger project planned,” Talia replied with a crooked smile.

Zaric leaned forward, the ghost of a grin on his lips and eyebrow raised.

“Oh? How come this is the first I’m hearing of this?”

Now it was Osra’s turn to exchange an amused glance with Talia.

“It’s no big deal, that’s why, though if you want to volunteer your services, dear mage-commandrum, there are over two dozen new battle wands in need of mana sitting in wagon seven. I figured that given the new…dangers we’re likely to face, we’d better have something more than arrows and bolts to meet them with,” the arcanist said.

“Battle wands? Torval signed off on that? Wait, what am I saying, if he hadn’t you’d have better luck tearing bones from the clutches of a ghuul than getting silverite out of Hanmul,” he replied.

Osra giggled at the comparison, a sound that tinkled like bells through the open space.

“Yep, and that goes double for me. I had to haggle with him just to get what I needed, and even then, I only got enough to coat some steel in it. Though let me tell you, arcanistry is like a hundred times easier with a metal mage at my beck and call.”

Osra blushed in what might have been embarrassment or indignation, suddenly incredibly interested in the contents of her empty bowl, while Zaric frowned at Talia.

“Yea, well, from what I understand, the metal stores are meant to be used for essential repairs and on-expedition adaptation. Though Hanmul does seem to have a particular dislike for you, gods know why.”

Talia frowned right back at him.

“A hundred bars of silverite, and twenty bars of mithril…for repairs? I figured we only brought that much because I’d have some serious arcanics to cook up once we got to Karzurkul. With that much metal, I could redo the whole caravan’s enchantments twice over. No, thrice over,” Talia argued.

“Don’t forget in the field adaptations. I can’t tell you how many times Ikkel’s on-the-spot arcanics have saved us,” Zaric retorted.

Talia’s frown only grew deeper.

“Still, it’s excessive, the guild must pay through the nose for that much silverite alone, not to mention mithril. This may be the Under, but it doesn’t mine and alloy itself you know. How much could you possibly need? Even my master doesn’t keep that much on hand at once, and he’s like three steps below the guildmaster of the Arcanists’ Guild.”

The mage-commandrum raised his hands in surrender, caving to Talia’s expertise.

“I’m little more than muscle here, if you want to discuss logistics, take it up with Copperpike or Calisto, they’re the ones that do all the numbers.”

A silence ensued where Talia glared at her stew, deep in thought. Something about the amount of precious metals the expedition carried didn’t add up.

Maybe I will talk to Calisto about it. There’s no way we need that much on hand.

Then she rolled her eyes at herself.

Right, Tals, let’s shift the focus off the end of the world for a little bit, to discuss logistics and inefficient guild spending. Especially when there’s literally nothing we can do about it. Scatterbrain.

Osra cleared her throat, clearly ill at ease with the silence.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

“You mentioned a bigger project? Does it have something to do with that big piece of drearwood you didn’t touch yesterday?” the apprentice asked, changing the subject.

Talia gladly took the out that the girl offered.

“Yesss. So I figured, we have these wagons, right? And they’re great, don’t get me wrong. Whatever the Delver’s Guild does to straighten out those planks is pure genius, and the things they’ve done with sound are mindboggling. But isn’t it a little odd that there aren’t any weapons on them?” she said.

Osra looked over at her master, who seemed just as puzzled, but offered up his opinion anyway.

“I think I heard an old dwarf mention that we once had ballista platforms installed on the roofs, but I don’t know why the practice fell out of favour. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say it was a combination of unwieldiness, coupled with the training and manpower requirements. Maybe the cost, but like I said, I’m not sure,” Zaric said.

Talia nodded and waved her hand at him.

“And I’m sure it all made sense when the doctrine was to keep quiet and move swiftly through the Under. From what I gather, the threats you all face don’t usually need that kind of firepower. But this is different. The Ways are about to be flooded with all manner of beasts, and I think we can all agree that we need all the firepower we can get,” Talia continued.

The two mages looked at each other, still not understanding.

“So…you’re making a ballista?” Osra asked.

“I don’t see how useful that would be, if I’m honest, though I admire the initiative. No one here has the training to operate one,” Zaric added.

The grin spread across Talia’s face like a black, virulent plague.

“No, I’m not making a ballista. Engineering is great and all, but why bother with that when you have arcanistry?”

The young arcanist pulled out her notebook, flipping through the pages until she found the schema that she was planning on modifying. It stretched across four pages of viciously cluttered rune arrays and channels so packed in the parchment was more ink than paper. Smiling madly, Talia presented the indecipherable mess to the two mages.

Predictably, the pair only looked at each other with confusion on their faces.

Talia sighed.

“This, my friends, is the schema for an ash lance,” she declared.

She sighed again when the blank look stubbornly refused to leave their expressions.

“Right, let me explain. This part back here is to hold finely packed dust or ash. Hence the name, but any particle with a high heat tolerance will work. Then, once I unlock the dual activation runes, mana will hit these rune arrays, heating up the mithril plating on the inner tube, and pulling in fresh air from the holes along the back, you follow so far?”

Osra nodded, clearly thinking back to the impromptu lesson of the day before, while Zaric simply frowned and gestured for the arcanist to continue.

“Great, now when I push this trigger here,” she continued, flipping the page, “ The artefact will create a jet of superheated air that shoots through the mithril-plated tube. And once I hold down the opposite trigger, it will push whatever particle you have in the container into said tube.”

Understanding dawned in the mages’ eyes, coupled with very obvious horror.

“That’s…terrifying,” Zaric breathed.

Osra nodded along, similarly…impressed… but clearly had questions.

Hmph. I would’ve thought it would be the opposite. Shows what I know.

“If I understood this right, the…device, is supposed to shoot out superheated ash. What I don’t get, is why it needs to be so complicated. Couldn’t you just have a mechanism to do it all in one chamber, and then shoot it?” she asked.

Talia winced.

“Theoretically, with the right combination of runes, anything is possible. The problem is, modern arcanists are working with an incomplete toolbox. At last estimates, we understand the meaning of about thirty percent of the runes that we know exist. That’s the main limiter in arcanics,” Talia’s voice came out as a growl, and a scowl settled across her features, “We don’t know enough Ancient Runic, so we…improvise. It means that we sometimes have to take roundabout approaches to getting things done. It’s often really inefficient. The whole thing is the question that has plagued the arcanist community for, well, longer than living memory. We call it The Great Enigma.”

Osra’s eyes narrowed to slits, and she stared at the schema in Talia’s lap.

“You mean the gods never left us a blueprint for these things? A lexicon of sorts? You’re just…making it up as you go?”

Before she could think, Talia was already nodding.

“Yep. I’ll be honest, most of the work I do in Regg— my master’s workshop is helping him figure out what exactly old artefacts, left to us by the Ancient, actually do. Sad to say, most of what arcanists create nowadays is just a hodgepodge of Runic arrayed in whatever way will work. We just don’t understand the old enchantments anymore.”

Her words seemed to spark a fire in the apprentice’s eyes, but before she could ask another question, Zaric interrupted with one of his own.

“Sorry if I’ve misunderstood, but wouldn’t the arcano-sun fit into the category of ‘old’ enchantments?” he asked.

Talia froze and cringed a little, seeing where the line of questioning was leading.

“Er— yes.”

“But didn’t you just say that we don’t understand the older artefacts anymore?” he pressed.

Talia scratched at the back of her neck, shrivelling up inside as Zaric touched up the very real pressure that awaited her once the expedition got to the abandoned city.

“Umm— it’s more complicated than that, matrix cores aren’t really artefacts, they’re more like hyper-complex components of macro enchantments, most of which—”

Zaric interrupted in a low tone.

“So not only do we not even know if we’ll find what we’re looking for, which was bad enough, but we don’t even know if it’ll work?” he hissed.

Talia fiddled with the pages of her journal and nodded mutely. Zaric let out a long breath that seemed to screech in the young woman’s ears with its intensity.

“Well, we’d better hope the gods are watching over us then, hadn’t we?” he finally quipped “I’d hate to have done all this for nothing, that’d be some cosmic joke!”

The man’s attempt at mirth didn’t catch, and he seemed to realize it, clapping his hands once and standing up. He patted Talia on the shoulder and gave Osra—who seemed either apoplectic or on the verge of a crisis of faith— a comforting look.

“Problems for when we get there, and once we get back, for people above our pay grade. Why don’t the two of you scamper off and work on this ash lance? I’ll take care of refilling the enchantments,” he said.

Osra’s head jerked up in amazement, pulling a chuckle from the older mage.

“Don’t get used to it, I’ll expect some extra emittance training from you to make up for it,” he chided.

The girl beamed, whatever had been plaguing her temporarily banished.

“Off you get then, ladies, magical weapons of terrifying power won’t build themselves. We leave tomorrow, so you’d best get it all done quickly.”

The girls exchange a glance and the trio separated. Zaric picked up the bowls and brought them with him while the pair headed off towards wagon seven.

Though he put on a brave face, Talia couldn’t miss the worry that lurked behind his dark eyes, the tightness in the lines of his face, or the way his shoulders had hunched just that bit more. She wondered if sharing knowledge of the Enigma had been the right thing to do. It had been but a footnote in her history class, and though the broad strokes of arcanistry were pretty widespread, apparently fewer people had made the connection than she’d thought.