Obyl was probably the least bad person in the murk bogs.
Maybe that phrasing was a little unfair. But: In Myra’s opinion, there was an upper bound on how ‘good’ a member of the murk bogs could actually be, and that upper bound fell a bit short of actually being good. Still, Obyl was pretty nice. Thus, the next few days weren’t so bad, sticking close to Obyl and the people he was close to, and staying farther from Geel, Nesr Wald, and their close-knit core leadership group.
One thing the girls did in their evening downtime was join Obyl for a particular tile-based word game he seemed very fond of. It was similar to a game Myra had played as a kid, though the rules were a bit different. Myra participated because it was a good way to practice Unkmirean vocabulary, though it took a lot of focus and went counter to the board game’s ostensible goal of relaxation. As a handicap, Shera was allowed to use imperial vocabulary.
As they kept their ears to the ground for any news of an upcoming attack on Ralkenon, there remained no shortage of runework to be maintained. However, it was mostly fairly mundane work. When Myra realized that evening board games were taking up around half of her mental expenditure each day, she was ready to officially declare that their lives as Actual Mercenary Support Officers had fallen into a “lull.”
Obyl was also generally more forthcoming than the other mercenaries, usually happy to answer their questions. Eventually, Shera brought up a question that had been sitting in the back of Myra’s mind.
“Obyl,” she started. “What was here b-before the murk bogs?”
“What do you mean, ‘before’?”
“Lot of the buildings, th-they don’t look like they were built for this kind of organization.”
“Mrm.” He rolled his tongue around the inside of his mouth for a bit. “I think I can say a bit about that. This was a community center.”
“For the village… the village we walked through to get here?”
He shook his head. “Other side.”
Myra scratched her head. She had checked the maps pretty thoroughly for this area, and the unnamed village with the train stop was just about the only thing in the area. It was naught but wilderness in every direction.
“The village isn’t around an-anymore,” Shera concluded.
“That it isn’t,” he said solemnly. “We took the space from them.”
The two girls looked at each other. “Y-you took?”
“Like you stole it? You pushed them out?”
“Sorry, I am not speaking properly,” he said hastily. “We took it… we took it after them. After they had abandoned it I mean. Though you are not the first to misunderstand.” His voice turned bitter. “We didn’t do anything, though if you ask anyone, they’ll tell you we did it. Everybody thinks it was us. The truth is, all this space was abandoned, gone to waste, all but forgotten by Unkmire on the whole. No one was using it. No one wanted it. There was no reason we couldn’t move in. We moved in four years ago.”
“I’ve asked around a lot, when we were researching your organization,” Myra admitted. “People were pretty quick to say awful things about your organization, but I don’t think anybody ever accused you of burning down a village to make your base. I’m surprised I didn’t hear about this before.”
“As I said, the city has been all but forgotten.”
“Then what did happen to it?” Shera asked. “It sounds like… something big happened that you’ve been falsely accused of?”
“It was a fire. The circumstances are… are… Aughk.” Even his frustrated guttural noises had an unmistakable Unkirean accent. “Sorry, this is easier in my native tongue.”
Shera looked away in annoyance.
“Sorry, Shera really can’t understand—”
Obyl nodded. “Okay. I will try.” He continued in their common tongue. “Unkmireans maintain large enchantments to prevent forest fires,” he explained.
“Makes sense.” Shera nodded.
“The enchantment was undone, somehow. People said it was an act of sabotage, but nobody ever decided how. Then there was a fire, and the village was destroyed.”
“Oh,” Myra said quietly. “That’s awful.”
“Did they find evidence of t-tampering with the enchantment?” Shera asked. “Or anything wrong with the enchantment at all?”
“Well, the enchantment controls were wrecked beyond repair. But they were all locked up, safe behind teleport shields, the… everything. Nobody figured out how the… ‘sabotager’... got in or out. It was a big investigation, nothing came of it. Many people blamed your empire, but they didn’t have any evidence. They blamed that famous assassin.”
“Assassin?” Myra asked. “You mean the blank cloaks?”
“Is there more than one?”
“Yeah. That’s like their M.O., so it sorta makes sense to blame them.”
“M.O.?” Obyl was clearly confused by the word choice.
“Oh, like, their signature method. Uhh, I mean, just, the type of thing they are known everywhere for. Getting in and out of high-security areas without a trace is one of their big things.”
“Well, nothing came of the investigation,” he said. “If it was them, Unkmire had no evidence and no means of recourse. Then people forgot, and they blamed us, but only after we took over the space. We cannot possibly have done it. We only wish we had the skills to pull off that sabotage.”
“Right…”
Obyl relaxed, and his defensive tone reverted to his solemn one. “There were a few survivors—some of them still live around here.”
“What was the village called?” Myra asked. She anticipated looking this up later, not the least because she considered it fairly likely that the murk bogs did, in fact, destroy the village. Maybe Obyl was lying. Maybe he didn’t even know.
“Don’t know. Name was lost.”
“Er. What? What do you mean, ‘lost’?”
He blinked. “Lost… am I using it wrong? Lost as in, we don’t have the name anymore.”
“Er,” she said again. “Would this be easier to explain in Unkmirean?”
“Sure.” Obyl shrugged. He said it again in Unkmirean: the name was lost.
Again: anything about these people had to have an asterisk. Obyl wasn’t forthcoming; he was more forthcoming than most everyone else.
◆
It was interesting to consider the possibility that the blank cloaks really had burned down the village, especially in light of their relevance to the event hall massacre. Between the very nature of the imperial assassins and Aurora’s info about them, they were pretty solidly number one in her culprit suspect list.
The blank cloaks possibly acting on foreign soil. Unresolved cold case. Peace talks several years later. The blank cloaks disappearing ‘on business’ near the end of the loop, possibly murdering everyone involved. And the murk bogs in the place of the village, hired to do something in Ralkenon—
Was she just seeing patterns? What were the connections? What was extraneous?
◆
Myrabelle claimed she’d never heard of the event at all, but Shera was pretty sure she had. She couldn’t think of where she had heard it—at that time of her life, when the fire must have happened, Shera had been holed up in her mother’s old house, barely leaving except for groceries, scarcely making contact with anyone, and not in the habit of reading the news. Still, the fact of a tragic village fire resulting from failed enchantments was a story she was sure she’d read somewhere. Even the name of the village—which Obyl had cryptically said “was lost”—was on the tip of her tongue, just out of reach.
To Shera, the underground area of the platform now took on a graver, more melancholic atmosphere. Whereas before, it had seemed creepy and menacing—What were they planning to do with a bunch of playground equipment? Where had they gotten it?—now that she knew the answer, it just seemed sad.
Now that she knew what to look for, a lot of the equipment showed signs of the fire itself. Soot still coated the slides and the climbing walls and the swings, and the rubber was disfigured. There was a centrifugal carousel thing that was stuck in place, maybe from warping in the heat. This has probably been a villager kid’s favorite toy. Some couple—maybe a pair of teenagers—had apparently liked it enough that they had engraved a heart with their initials into the center. It was easy to imagine the pair standing in the center, holding each other, as the carousel spun ‘round and ‘round. Both of them were probably dead, if they weren’t among the lucky—maybe she should just say unlikely—survivors, and now the initials were unreadably disfigured by the fire—no, actually, on closer inspection, it looked like they had been scratched out. In any case, there might now be no record this romance had ever existed. It was lost.
She shivered. The way Obyl had spoken of the village had unnerved her.
She didn’t spend didn’t spend too long in the playground storage area. There was something else she had a mind to investigate.
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While mapping out the underground, there was a pretty clear irregularity near the ‘front’ side of the platform. Sensing around, it was immediately obvious that there was a large, inaccessible area, and then it wasn’t hard to find the secret entrance. It was so poorly hidden that, once she finally worked up the nerve to investigate, she could tell almost immediately it probably wasn’t going to be a stash of the mercenaries’ closely guarded secrets. She reduced her expectations: it would probably be a maintenance tunnel or something equally banal.
It was a lounge.
It surely hadn’t been touched in years. The air was thick and disgusting, the carpet was hidden under a layer of dust, and there were potted plants that had decayed to unrecognizable detritus, all attached to a mechanical irrigation apparatus that had long since dried up of water.
It had probably been a nice place when it had been used. The lamps still worked, and they had clearly been installed by someone with an eye for lighting and color, illuminating the room in a cool, blueish light that in better days would have set a relaxing mood. There were multiple sofas and chairs, and the carpet was soft, even after all this time, and when it was clean it must have been a joy to sink one’s toes into.
There was a box full of toys (yo-yos, perpetual bubbles, that kind of thing), a strange tank with blobby gunk that floated up and down in a liquid medium, and some kind of art project made of leaves.
The final object of interest was a book of photographs, which was interesting purely because photography was so unusual. The photographs themselves were nothing special. There were thirty or forty in all. Most of them depicted a single young, lanky woman, usually sitting on a branch or frolicking in a garden or doing handstands, though a few other individuals made some appearances, like a younger boy with glasses and braids and an older man that (based on his face) might have been a relative of the first woman. There were also a couple of photographs depicting nothing but owls.
The photos all but confirmed what she already suspected. It was a secret hideout, obviously a leftover from the village.
She flopped on the sofa and sighed.
The whole fucking thing was so confusing. When Myrabelle had whisked her off for an adventure in a foreign city, when Myrabelle had gushed about all the insights and observations, even her bravery, it was like some kind of dream come to life. To Myrabelle, these were facts of the previous loops, but to Shera, they had formed a promise. A promise that she, the Sherazyn Marcrombie of this loop, would get to do all those things too.
But what were her contributions here? She didn’t speak the language, and that wasn’t something she could change. (Apparently, she had tried in a previous loop? That was ridiculous. Why had she even tried?) For the one and only intellectual challenge they’d faced, it had been Myrabelle’s wheelhouse. Since then, she had thought that snooping around could be her thing, but it had also turned out that the underground area had little to do with the murk bogs in the first place.
Maybe she would make it a task of cleaning up the place, making it her own hideout. It would at least be nice to have something to keep occupied. She just wasn’t sure she would be able to replace the plants. What species would survive in the low lighting? But if she aired the place out, cleaned up the carpet and the furniture, it’d still be a nice place to sneak away to. Myrabelle often complained of having to sleep in the barracks, but she could sleep on the couch instead.
She imagined the bewildering time looper stretching out on the sofa, safe and comfortable in the isolated room, drifting off for a chance to clear the dark bags under her eyes. Her head sunk deep into a thick, cushy pillow, her bare feet propped up on the opposite arm, her pajama top riding up her waist to expose her soft stomach…
Shera twitched. She snapped out of her daydream of nighttime.
She pulled herself back to her feet and left the secret lounge through the passage on the other end and ended up near the storage closet full of all the astronomy gear.
In truth, Shera wasn’t sure she would have stuck around this long if not for this place. No matter her conflicted feelings about the plan or about Myrabelle, there was something here to uncomplicatedly enjoy. That implied she could decide to stick around purely for that reason, without all the more complicated feelings being load-bearing elements of the decision.
In short, the Unkmireans’ astronomical equipment was of extremely high quality. Shera could tell this from the instant she operated the first one. The telescope had a satisfying weight to it, balanced at its fulcrum, with near-frictionless rotation brought about from finely-machined staggered gearwork that let her make minuscule adjustments with ease. The image itself was super crisp, and on the inside of the scope around the circumference of the view was a bronze meter that showed the telescope’s angle in an intuitive way, cleverly arranged out of intricate moving parts. It wasn’t just functional, this telescope had been constructed with the delicate touch of an artist. She was certain: whoever crafted this telescope had loved astronomy.
Additionally, the storage closet also had an unexpected amount of special-purpose equipment. There was one telescope—which was unfinished, or maybe under repair—that would have let her see through the planet and look at the other hemisphere. It was too bad it was in this incomplete state since it sounded like it might have been useful for Myrabelle’s experiments.
There was another telescope that could automatically track comets, which seemed to be functional, though Shera wasn’t interested because following along with your hand was always part of the fun, to her. In the corner of the room, almost unnoticed, there was a large vase that was designed to detect gravitational waves and correlate their measurements with the astral aura channels. Most impressively, there was a rare combination telescope-microscope. Some of the major labs used these scopes for lunar-microbiology. She had never seen one before, and even Ralkenon didn’t have one—she had never imagined she’d just find one in the middle of nowhere.
Myrabelle would probably geek out over all this runework, wouldn’t she?
“Hey, tell me what these lenses do!” Shera imagined her saying. “I’ve never seen a design like this before, I want to learn it…”
She smiles, warm and bright and somewhat manic, just as enthusiastic about the machinery as she was. She puts her arm around Shera and they look at the lenses together.
Besides having the equipment, the platform was just objectively a nice place for stargazing. Fresh air, wide-open sky, no light pollution.
What did the Unkmirean villagers see when they looked at the sky? Shera wondered. The Unkmireans had probably divided the sky differently, spotted different shapes, and named different constellations. In that spirit, she tried to look at the sky with a fresh eye, looking past the shapes she was so used to seeing. What else could you pick out? What did they?
One thing that the base didn’t seem to have, among all its fancy equipment, was a stack of star charts. So she could only guess.
“I never thought of it that way, Shera. That different cultures would have different constellations.” Maybe that’s what she’d say.
“Do you wanna name some constellations with me?”
“I dunno, that’s such a you thing, Shera.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Y’know… astronomy, constellations. That’s a you thing.”
“What’s that mean?”
Her expression changes completely, turning upside-down and inside-out and backward and inverting itself in every other dimension in the qualia-vector that made up the image projected in Shera’s mind. She turns up her nose.
“It means you’re fucking weird, Shera.”
“—”
“What’s that you said the other day? You measure your laps by their standard deviation?”
“Y-yeah—”
“What, do you just like periodic orbits?”
“I m-mean, y-yeah—”
“Does it make you feel like the moon?”
“Yeah, it d-does! I l-like b-being the m-moon!”
“Aww, that’s cute! You know, I think your way of thinking is kinda helpful sometimes. Sometimes an unusual perspective is just what I need.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, sometimes.” She looked absentmindedly over Shera’s shoulder. “Though I really could use—”
Shera forced her gaze into the night sky. Stars would calm her down. Her attention caught on a clump of stars that looked kind of like a waterfall. A soft streak through the sky ran like a river, bending downward around a much brighter patch. She’d never heard of anyone considering this group as a single constellation. Shera was pleased with her identification.
◆
Early on the morning of November 16, the 11th day of the loop, during the deepest phase of Myra’s sleep cycle, she was prodded awake.
There was momentary confusion, Geel’s hand was on her shoulder blade, the result of her mind filling in the blanks of her context. For some reason it had picked Geel. Then there was the reorientation, seeing Shera’s outline, smelling her smell, and getting everything a bit more in order.
“What’s up?” She muttered groggily. She lifted herself, put her arms around Shera’s neck, and released her back muscles, pulling the other girl down with her weight. “You wanna sleep here?”
“N-n-no, I need you to c-come, quickly.” She yanked up and dragged Myra out of bed. Myra followed unconsciously, trailing Shera and mimicking her light-footed half-tiptoe jog maneuver, not properly gaining awareness until they were outside.
“Where are we going?” she finally asked.
“There’s a client. Two of ‘em, came across the bridge ten minutes ago. Geel’s meeting with them.” Shera led her into the underground area of the platform. “Geel was thrilled, he couldn’t contain his excitement, he was doing this… little dance thing on the way to meet them.”
“Do you know their names?”
“No, s-sorry. I overheard them, but they kinda slipped away. I still don’t quite g-get Unkmirean phonology.”
Shera continued to lead her and eventually brought her to a secret tunnel in the underground. To her surprise, it led to a dilapidated sitting area.
“When’d you find this?”
“Last night, it’s not actually that interesting, it’s from the village, but there’s this—” Then she stopped and shushed Myra, a finger to her mouth. Then she pointed to the ceiling. There was a ventilation shaft, and distant, echoing voices reverberating out of it.
“It’s connected to that lounge in the main building,” she whispered. “You know, where Geel does his negotiating.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t make this out at all—”
She tele-floated herself up to the vent, then for good measure, she took the cover off and stuck her ear in. “I can hear, kinda… they’re—they’re negotiating price.” Shit, I missed the terms of the job, didn’t I?
She listened in for a while.
“Wow, this price is really close to what he quoted me last loop,” she muttered. And when I was negotiating last loop, this deal would have already been in place.
“W-what’s the job for?”
“I don’t know—I missed that—Shhh.” She listened to the end of the conversation. It seemed they were finalizing the deal.
“I think they’re done.” Myra floated back down. “Sorry, I didn’t get much. But they definitely said ‘Ralkenon’ a few times. And the clients want as many soldiers as possible.”
There was a loud thudding above them. “What the hell—”
It was periodic. There was something that sounded like a rolling motion down the floor followed by a thump at the end, which then repeated but shifted slightly down the floor. It slowly made its way to the side of the room.
“I think Geel is c-celebrating,” Shera said.
“Forget about Geel,” Myra said. “Let’s go catch a glimpse of the clients.”
They maybe weren’t as careful as they could have been. Myra was prioritizing learning something over not being caught. Anyway, with the bridge rune setup, it wasn’t hard for her to justify hovering around the bridge.
The two clients barely glanced at her, nodding politely as they proceeded to the suspension bridge, but that one glance was enough for her to get a good look at their faces. And she did learn something.
At the peace summit, there were four men from Unkmire. Obviously, there was the ruler, King Niwal. There was (as she learned from Benkoten), Cultural Minister and High Ambassador Lluruma, the man who had apparently been bribed to participate in the event hall massacre until Ben had discovered it.
And there were two other men who, despite all her efforts, and not even with the help of Sky Mishram, had Myra been able to identify.
She still didn’t know who they were, but she now knew that on November 16th, the 11th day of the loop, these last two men hire over a hundred murk bogs to be in Ralkenon on that night.