“Jeepers, a volcano? Sounds bad, I’d better consult with my colleagues.”
Yes. Just like Myra had predicted, word-for-word.
…
Okay, he didn’t say it word-for-word. He said it in Unkmirean. But that just meant Myra had a lot of freedom in how she wanted to mentally translate it.
Anyway, Geel did consult with his colleagues for about five minutes, then came back to pressure Myra for the payment for the job she’d asked them to do. He refused to give her any real specifics on their operational methods that she presumed a ‘normal’ client would be receiving. And he never, once, acknowledged that he had a conflict of interest in being hired to protect Ralkenon.
Myra was ready to throw in the towel on this travesty of a plan. If she were to do it again, she would consider hiring them for something entirely unrelated, just to see how much his specific behavior was related to the fact that her request centered on Ralkenon. But the good news was that she wasn’t going to do this again. She now had key information that provided a much, much better in with the paramilitary group.
The only thing left to do for this loop was watch the sky again.
◆
Okay, actually, there was one other thing she wanted to do. She procrastinated until the very last night, until they’d secured their stargazing spot atop an open platform just above the trees.
Myra had asked around (mostly for more language practice) to find the best stargazing spot. She ended up stumbling on a really good tip about a hard-to-reach spot outside the city, something of an abandoned hideaway, cleverly constructed but difficult to reach, that was now an open secret in the community. There were no bridges there, but it could be reached hopping branch-to-branch, quite a ways outside the city, guided by subtle scratches in the tree bark that signposted the intended path. The spot was perfect for stargazing, and Myra laid on her back to take in the whole sky at once. It was a nice, peaceful way to end the loop.
Oh, right. Except that one thing she wanted to do.
She took a deep breath. “Can I tell you about my father?” Myra asked.
Shera pulled away from the telescope. “I won’t remember, th-though.”
“Well, I wanna tell you anyway.”
Shera looked longingly back at the telescope, but she finally looked back to Myra. “Okay.”
“My father ran this complicated scam with the artifacts that he held onto for his clients and partners,” Myra explained. “There was a lot to it, but the key pillar of it had to do with his underground storage dungeons. Kent Arcane’s dungeons were deep under the surface—really, really deep. It’s one of the selling points, why people trusted him with their valuables and financial artifacts. Very safe, only accessible with secret magecraft owned by Kent Arcane.”
“Okay.”
“The thing is, there were a lot of these dungeons, and there were a lot of entrances, and they… didn’t actually line up 1-to-1. In actuality, there were fewer dungeons than there were supposed to be, but nobody would notice unless they went to every entrance and verified each one went to a different dungeon. This allowed him to lie about how much value he actually kept in reserve to all the authorities. And you know what he did with all the money he skimmed off?”
“What d-did he do?”
“He spent it on my fucking stepmom. Spoiled her rotten with vacation homes and rare artwork and... fancy meals with legendary chefs, and box seats at the Sunstone Theater, always they were going to some opening night at something or other …”
And he didn’t spend it on me.
That last part seemed crude. She didn’t say it.
“I kn-know,” Shera said.
“Know what?”
“All that. It was in the newspaper. About the dungeon scam and his exorbitance and his second wife.”
“Was it in the paper that he stole back the emergency funds that were supposed to be left to me?”
“N-no.”
“Well, now you’ve learned something new.”
“I st-still think you should consult him for financial advice.”
Myra didn’t respond. She only thought, I can’t wait until the next—
—the next loop.
“Okay, well, let’s get on with this thing, then.” Myra sat up and cracked her knuckles, palms out, emphatically pushing the conversation onward to business mode.
“Right.” Shera looked relieved, if nothing else. “Wh-which star should I look at?”
“Let’s do Kasia, same as the last loop.”
Shera adjusted her telescope down to the horizon, looking for Kasia. “Oops,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Err. We can’t see K-Kasia.”
“What do you mean? We watched it last time in Tzurigad.”
“Y-yeah. In Tzurigad.”
It took Myra a second before the neuron fired and she remembered how planets work. By then, Shera was already flipping through one of her astronomy books.
“Tzurigad’s really far east,” she explained. “See, here—”
At the back of her book was a page that showed the Zyarth system—the planet itself, the moon, and Altina—as if looking down on it from the north, and their positions relative to the stars, divided into twelve major constellations. The page was enchanted, and it could be set to any date and time. It was currently set to the loop end time.
She hesitated before scribbling on the book, but she presumably remembered it wasn’t going to matter. She marked Tzurgiad and she marked their current longitude (also roughly the longitude of Casire and Jewel City).
“Look. The star’s just past the eastern horizon here.”
Diagram of Zyarth (rotating counterclockwise around the sun), and Zyarth’s 2 moons (orbiting counterclockwise around Zyarth). In clockwise order around Zyarth: (1) The sun, at 150,000,000 km. (2) Visible region from Tzurigad begins. (3) Kasia star, part of the Terron Bowl constellation. (4) Visible region from Halnya begins. (5) Altina, at 975,000 km, in half moon phase. (6) Jyo-Yilla star, in the Yilla Boot constellation. (7) The moon, at 370,000 km, in full moon phase. (8) Visible region from Tzurigad ends. (9) ZK-1034 in the Swampbear constellation. (10) Visible region from Tzurigad ends. [https://i.imgur.com/UzMCRPx.png]
Diagram of Zyarth (rotating counterclockwise around the sun), and Zyarth’s 2 moons (orbiting counterclockwise around Zyarth). In clockwise order around Zyarth: (1) The sun, at 150,000,000 km. (2) Visible region from Tzurigad begins. (3) Kasia star, part of the Terron Bowl constellation. (4) Visible region from Halnya begins. (5) Altina, at 975,000 km, in half moon phase. (6) Jyo-Yilla star, in the Yilla Boot constellation. (7) The moon, at 370,000 km, in full moon phase. (8) Visible region from Tzurigad ends. (9) ZK-1034 in the Swampbear constellation. (10) Visible region from Tzurigad ends.
“Yeah, I remember now,” Myra said. “I had trouble staying awake because it was almost morning in Tzurigad when the loop ended. I just didn’t think about the difference in the night sky. Anyway, this doesn’t really matter, we just need to pick another star.”
“It m-might matter.”
“How? I mean, do you think that’s why we didn’t see it move last time? Because it wasn’t visible from the empire?”
She shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Like, only stars visible from Ralkenon move? Or from the empire?”
“Well, the em-empire’s pretty big. You could see Kasia if you went as far east as Miirun.”
“Okay, from Ralkenon, then.”
“That still doesn’t make sense—if there’s an illusion that only c-covers part of the sky, someone would have noticed it. And if the illusion covers all of th-the sky but only breaks down for part of the sky a few seconds before the loop ends—” She closed her eyes and scrunched her forehead deep in thought. “Why would that happen? I th-think we just need to get d-data. If we get d-data, we’ll know what we’re looking at.”
“What do you think we should do this time?”
“Let’s pick something further from the horizon, so we can be consistent in the future even if we travel around. I st-still think we should pick something close, something that moves relatively fast so we can measure how far it moves. Let’s do… Jyo-Yilla, in the ear of the shoelace of the Yilla Boot constellation. I’ve always liked that one.”
“Is it close?”
“Only 8 lightyears. It’s not super fast, but it should be easy to measure.” She took the telescope—which was still pointed at the eastern horizon—and casually bumped it up towards the zenith of the sky.
As Shera watched, Myra wondered if they were on the right track at all. The idea that the stars were moving through time was entirely her assumption—all she knew for sure was that Shera had said “the stars moved.” Did they move instantaneously? Continuously? Maybe they rotated or brightened or dimmed or went nova. Maybe they grew arms and gave Shera a thumbs-up.
In the end, Jyo-Yilla also showed no signs of moving.
◆
Loop 11.
Myra had the murk bogs’ phone number now, so one of the first things she did was call them to introduce herself as a runecrafter so she could get on the inside and learn about their upcoming job.
Calling Unkmire from the empire was expensive, and calling the murk bogs of all things was even a little dangerous. The poster she’d been given in the previous loop had special instructions. First, she had to dial for the border operator, to be forwarded into Unkmire. Rather than give the border operator any information about who she was calling (since they were likely to sound some kind of alarm over the phone, blow Myra’s eardrums out, and signal the police to come arrest her), she had to first get through to an Unkmirean information line, and then give them the murk bogs’ number to be forwarded again.
When she finally got through to the murk bogs, she then had to wait half an hour for the mercenary group to connect her to “someone who matters.” Finally, she heard a familiar voice over the line.
“This is the boss speaking, what can I do for ya?”
“Are you, uh—” I’m really doing this, huh? “—recruiting?”
“Sure are. Can you follow orders and shoot things?”
“No, I’m actually skilled in—”
He hung up.
“What—?”
“What happened?” Shera asked.
“He just hung up!” Myra hissed. “This fucking guy—” She dialed the number again. She got put on hold again. She waited another long fifteen minutes.
“This is the boss speaking, what can I do for ya?”
She got right to the point this time. “Hi, are you looking to hire any runecrafting experts?”
“Nah.”
“What do you mean ‘nah’?”
“I think you got the wrong number, lady. We’re not a bunch of fat wizard beards carving our philosophical farts into silver. You know someone who can shoot, you send ‘em our way. Eh?”
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“But—”
He hung up.
“Can you believe this fucker?” She was ready to pull her hair out. “I know he’s looking for runecrafters! They were handing out fucking posters!”
“They w-will be, y-you mean.”
Myra took in Shera’s words and allowed a moment to collect herself.
“Yes. Thank you for keeping a clear head, Shera.” She patted the other girl on the head, and she beamed.
All I know is that they’re looking for a runecrafter approximately three-quarters of the way into the loop. Something could happen between now and then. Maybe they get a job, they get hired to go attack Casire or whatever their job is, and they need some complex rune construct to accomplish the job?
That made enough sense.
“Okay, we just need to wait for the job opening then.” She mentally prepared to call them back so she could leave a way of contacting them.
“What sh-should we do until then?”
“Well, I’d like to go hang out in Krinph so I can respond quickly and I’m still trying to avoid the university as much as possible. Do you want to join me?” She really hoped the girl would accept. Spending half a loop without Shera had been a mistake, and she was somewhat eager to make up for it and hopefully have another good Shera loop. “I’m getting better at the language, so I think we can try engaging with the city a bit more.”
Shera, of course, did accept, so they went back to Krinph, got a hotel, and tried to find things to do.
Myra’s first instinct for exploring Krinph was to see a play, but that was a bad idea because Shera wouldn’t be able to follow along. They visited the theater anyway, just to see what it was like. Myra was particularly curious how they would make a space in the dense forest large enough for a theater.
Somehow, the city had managed to bend the trees around to create a hollow, spherical space, with bleacher-like seats surrounding a stage. It was a beautiful space, but the schedule showed that the main event that month was a production of a famous murder mystery, which immediately turned Myra off of the idea.
Then they went shopping. They decided to get some Unkmirean clothes just so they’d stand out a little less. Dresses like Myra usually wore seemed to be quite uncommon in Unkmire; instead, most people wore trousers or skirts with a vest above the waist, and everything was made out of thick, protective clothing that wouldn’t tear if it caught on a stray branch. Very few people wore their hair down, preferring braids or buns, but long hair seemed a lot more common with men than it was in Ralkenon (which Myra was quite happy about). The accepted magewear centered around cloaks rather than robes. Myra purchased one that was wooly and fairly light, coming down to her knees, while Shera got a heavier one that could obscure her entire body.
The murk bogs, being soldiers, had been dressed differently altogether, but Myra still thought it was probably for the best if they approached the murk bogs without looking like obvious imperial citizens. (There was nothing they could do about Shera’s inability to speak the language, though.)
And as for that meeting, Myra feared they would be waiting for most of the loop. To her delight, she only had to wait until day four.
◆
The murk bogs’ compound was just like they remembered it, save one thing. There was a weird smell in the air, so faint that it almost seemed her imagination, something Myra was sure hadn’t been around the last time.
“So,” Geel greeted the pair. “You’re the ladies who have kindly offered us your expertise in this esteemed arcane skill.”
Well, that sure was a different tack.
“That’s us,” Myra said. “By the way, do you speak imperial by chance…? My companion doesn’t speak Unkmirean.”
“I do speak imperial,” Geel said in Unkmirean. “Now, we are looking for a runecrafter, it turns out. Theoretically, we only have one opening, but I take it the two of you come as a pair, is that it?”
“We’re both looking for work,” Myra said. “Who decides about the job openings?”
“I do.”
“Then you can make one for her.”
“I suppose you’ve got me there.” He flashed a cheeky grin. God.
“So can you give us information on what the job is?”
“Now, hold up a bit, we still need to interview you ladies, don’t we? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“We’d like to know what we’re going to do before we agree to interview,” Myra insisted.
For the first time, the man frowned in irritation. “You’ll manage runes for us. What’s more to say?”
“Is there a specific job you need a runecrafter for…?”
“You’ll accompany us on many of our jobs. Your primary roles will be in maintaining all our runic equipment, upgrading it, and assisting with planning for more unusual situations that require more of a—” He gestured into the air a quick scribbling motion. “—handwritten touch. If you pass our interview.”
“What’s the reason for the sudden opening?”
“Simple. We realized we needed a rune expert.”
“Even though it’s for a generalist position, not anything specific.”
“Huh, guess so. Bit odd now that I think about it.” He pursed his lips. “Guess it didn’t seem that important a couple days ago.”
Geel saw Myra’s expression and threw up his arms. “Hey, hey, look, we really do need a rune expert. I know whoever spoke to you on the phone was kinda rude about it, but we’ll make everything up to you.”
“Weren’t you the one we spoke to on the phone?”
“Sure. Never said I wasn’t. So, does this all satisfy you?”
There really wasn’t a choice, was there? If she wanted to find out what they really needed a runecrafter for, or more importantly, what they were generally doing in Ralkenon or who hired them, then they needed to wriggle into the group. “Fine, we’ll interview.”
“Great. Your interview is… hm.” He rubbed his goatee. “Ah!” He snapped his fingers.
Geel led the two girls out to the suspension bridge at the edge of their compound while Myra quickly explained to Shera what they were doing.
“This bridge. There are runes in some of the planks there. I need you to figure out what’s wrong with ‘em and fix it.”
“The runes are carved in wood,” Myra said. “The wood warps and the runes become inert. That’s why it doesn’t work.”
Geel’s jaw actually dropped.
You’ve gotta be kidding me. Please tell me you at least understood that much.
“Who even built this thing?” Myra asked.
“Don’t remember,” he said. “Anyway, fix it, and you girls got yourselves a job.”
“How? I’ve never seen anything more ill-conceived in my life! You don’t carve runes that small into wood!”
“Dunno. It’s your interview. Hey!” He suddenly pointed to a soldier who was passing by, a muscular woman in a tank top with a shaved head. “Chrysji, watch these ladies while they interview. They’re gonna fix our bridge for us.”
The woman—Chrysji—only responded with a scowl that said very plainly there was nothing she wanted to do less. But Geel walked away and Chrysji plopped to the ground, cross-legged, so she could watch Myra and Shera do their work.
“Hey, uh—” Myra approached her. “Do you know—Oh, do you speak imperial? My companion only speaks it—”
“Sure I do,” she said in imperial.
“Okay, great. Do you happen to know why this position opened up?”
“I do not have a clue.” Her speech was slightly stilted but perfectly understandable.
“It’s just Geel wasn’t interested in speaking to us at all a few days ago. We were surprised to hear back from him.”
“I guess we didn’t need a new rune expert a few days ago.”
“But what changed? Did you have a different expert a few days ago?”
“No. I do not know what changed.”
Myra sighed. “All right.” She turned back to Shera. “Let’s figure out how to fix this fucking bridge.”
◆
Myra looked at the bridge for a few minutes and contemplated the idea of carving runes into wood.
“Yeah, what the hell are we supposed to do?” she finally concluded. “There’s no way this bridge ever worked. Shera, throw out an idea.”
“Could we stabilize the wood so it doesn’t warp?”
“Do you even know how to do that?”
“Wood warps because of the elements, right? Wind—rain.”
“Sure.”
“So what if we made the boards incorporeal? So the rain and wind goes right through them without affecting the boards.”
“Yeah, I guess that’d work, if you want the bridge from hell to have gaps in its floorboards on top of everything else.” That could actually work, though. She’s right that incorporeal objects are static. “We’d still have to fix every single broken plank, though, which is most of them.”
She took a step onto the bridge to inspect one of the boards. “Look at these splinters. This is irreparable. We’d need to replace every plank that looks like this. And then it’d probably break again in a few days anyway.”
“Should we just do that?” Shera whispered. “We just need to get it working once so we can pass the interview and—”
“No, of course not, I’m not a hack. This whole thing is just flawed on a conceptual level!” Myra had decided. “We need to reengineer the whole thing from scratch.”
“Er-er, how hard is th-that?”
Myra contemplated it. “Well, from what I recall trying to understand the script as we walked here, it really is designed to be carved into the wood. The script directly refers to ‘the wood that this rune is embedded in’ and that kind of thing, so the actual geometric shape of the rune script is critical to the design. Trying to rewrite the whole rune script to fit on a plate of silver that we can install in one spot would be pretty difficult—I mean, spreading the rune script out across the bridge is clearly a superior option from a design standpoint, if you ignore the whole carving-runes-into-wood element. Runes always work better when they’re carved on the object you want to manipulate, rather than trying to do everything from a distance.”
The more she thought through the alternatives, the more she could see the vision behind the bridge. Whoever had put this together was obviously uninformed about runes, but they had been clever.
Like, the obvious thing to do, if you were trying to build something like this, would just be to replace the wooden planks with engraved silver or some other high-quality medium. But that would fuck with the composition of the bridge. It would weigh more—which might or might not be a problem—but more importantly, it would also make the bridge much more difficult to control via runes. Deep in the forest, wood aura was abundant, which in turn made it easy to control wood with magic. Even a 7-kilometer bridge made of wood was no problem.
But if every fifth plank was made of silver? A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggested it would become orders of magnitude more expensive in aura usage. If a professional rune forge was building it—say, Precision Isomorphic in Ralkenon—there was no doubt they’d go that route. They could just pump in the aura they needed from the empire’s distribution system.
But that wasn’t an option here. There was no distribution system in Unkmire. So building the entire bridge out of wood made sense. Except for the fact that the runes wouldn’t work.
Framed like this, though, a solution space began to unfold, and Myra snapped a finger. “The wood element. That’s the key. It’s so abundant here, it opens up tricks that might otherwise not work.”
“W-what do you have in mind?”
“Easy. We’ll make an automated repair system.” Yes, this will work. The pieces started to come together in her mind’s eye.
Shera frowned, looking back at the plank that Myra had inspected earlier. “You said it would be t-too difficult to repair them.”
“Sure, we’re not gonna repair any individual planks. We’ll just replace them. Each plank only has one rune on it, and the alphabet they use is a pretty small one. We just need a large stash of backup planks covering the whole alphabet.”
“Wh-where will the stash go?” Shera still seemed puzzled.
Myra bounded to the cliffside and swept her arms around the open area. “Just right here, of course, by the side of the bridge.”
“But how will the replacement planks get where they need to go?”
“Yeah, that’s the tricky bit, isn’t it?” She lightly bounced on her feet. “Having them fly would be way too error-prone, or at least require weeks of testing. Having them teleport right in, swapping with the plank they’re replacing, is the obvious thing to do, but then the distance would be much too far. Not to mention the detection would be difficult at this distance. There’s a better way, though.”
Myra explained her plan.
Say, for example, a plank with the quu rune broke down. There would be another quu rune a few meters away. You could just teleport-swap those two. This wouldn’t change the rune script at all: every plank would still have the same rune. The only thing that would change is which plank was broken, moving it a bit closer to the end of the bridge.
Now, how should she actually implement the mechanism? Well, she could carve more runes into the planks. (For this, she could use the bottom sides of the planks, which were unused.) But those runes would also be prone to breaking down. Therefore, she had to make sure that the rune script making up the automated-plank-swapping mechanism was robust to individual runes going out. In academia, this feature was usually called ‘runic error correction,’ and it was often considered too impractical outside of select circumstances.
However, this was one of those circumstances. Because the swapping mechanism was a fairly simple one that just needed to be repeated tens of thousands of times, the error correction design constraint became significantly more reasonable.
After thinking it through carefully, she was even able to design this secondary rune script so that the fixed bridge would ‘bootstrap’ itself. She would only need to insert the first twelve planks of the upgraded bridge; after that, the bridge would repeatedly invoke the swap mechanism to upgrade the next plank on the bridge until it was complete. (This was kind of tricky to get right, since if she did it wrong and made it too ‘eager’, then the upgraded planks would swap themselves over to the far side of the bridge too quickly, thus leaving the near side of the bridge with only broken planks, causing the bootstrap process to stall.)
The last problem to solve was actually making enough rune-carved planks. She had to pester Chrysji on whether there was a source of lumber on the compound, a request that made Myra desperately glad Geel hadn’t hung around to proctor them. She showed them to a shed near the side of the compound with a large quantity of wooden planks.
“I think these are the same shape we used to build the bridge in the first place,” she explained. To Myra’s eye, they looked the same width and thickness, so they only needed to be sliced longways.
“So y-you do remember making the bridge?” Shera asked.
“Sure.” She shrugged.
“But you d-don’t remember who did the runes.”
Myra was already working on the next part. She needed runes to automate the slicing and carving. And that was easy—sort of. On a theoretical level, there was nothing challenging about carving some runes to automate the plank carving, and again, there was an abundance of wood aura. Practically speaking, the actual runes she needed to carve were pretty complex.
She needed to carve every rune used in the bridge, plus all the runes she was using for the teleport mechanism. That meant writing runes to carve the runes. There were a few runic alphabets that were designed with this kind of self-reference in mind, but they were mostly useless to her here. Thus, she had to do it from scratch, specifying the individual runic geometries in exacting detail. She got started, realized how tedious it was, and then went back and adjusted her teleport-swapping scheme just to make the geometry slightly simpler. She worked until Shera asked if she was hungry.
“Sorry, just a sec,” Myra said, while Shera held out some of the fruit they’d packed. “I’m almost done with this curly phla rune—”
◆
She had everything ready around midnight. She initiated the bootstrap process, which took around an hour to complete.
“So, so, what do you think, huh?” She held her arms out, arms spread wide like a showgirl unveiling an ancient treasure. The runic features of the bridge were now active, and they would stay active. The bridge was also now frozen in place, no longer swaying in the wind, thanks to the stabilizer.
Chrysji, who had dutifully looked on for the entirety of the interview, surveyed the bridge. “It’s certainly not what I expected,” she said. She cupped a hand around her mouth and called out a command word. The bridge caught fire, all seven thousand meters of it.
She let it burn for a few moments, then called out another word. The fire stopped.
“Damn. The truth is, I never thought I would see that working again,” she said. “Good job. You pass.”
“You don’t need to check with your boss—?”
“No, there is no need,” Chrysji said. She walked towards the compound and with her back to both of them, dismissed them with a lazy wave. “Be back here at sunrise, and we’ll show you around.”