Prime and Aide watched on anxiously as A’Ferun and Kinser made their way to the core room. Those two were tight lipped, and Kinser especially displayed a state of hyper-vigilance.
Their quiet made it easier for the mages they had left behind to draw some of Prime’s attention as they continued to wrangle. The humans wanted to follow regardless of A’Ferun’s orders. The elf surprised Prime by disagreeing. He had been one of the most obviously interested of the lot of them. The blue robed man said something about elven caution, earning him an irate “Hush!” in return.
The rudeness made the two human mages puff up a bit. The elf, however, flared his aura, suppressing the others into silence. It was a subtle thing, something more belonging to a Cultivation World than this more fantastic one. The elf pointed out, “The dungeon is obviously communicating with us.”
“To lead us into a trap!” the green robed woman snapped out. Prime wasn’t sure if she slipped the suppression because of her own ability alone or if the elf had just failed to let his aura firm up.
The elf turned an arch look at the woman and challenged, “Have you seen anything in this dungeon that is a threat to all four of us? Or to the sa’desh and his servant?”
“That doesn’t—,” began the woman in green.
The elf cut her off. “—mean there won’t be danger, yes, but you are so focused on right now that you are ignoring tomorrow!”
That turned the woman’s focus from hostile arguing to offended curiosity. “What do you mean?”
“Dungeons don’t communicate. They don’t make pictures we can recognize ourselves in. That demonstrates both intelligence and understanding. This illusion image right here is a very clear request. We know the sa’desh’s lady is somehow caught up in all of this. If we ignore the requests of the princess of the nation we’re traveling into and the noble in charge of the vessel we’re on, not to mention our employer, what do think will happen to us?”
That got the human mages to sag out of their puff ups.
And about then Kinser got through the not-quite-a-fireball-trap leading into the core room.
«Here’s hoping this works,» Prime muttered. She had her doubts, but it was the simplest of their plans.
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The change in the core room was immediately obvious. A large, freestanding archway tiled with a mosaic mural stood near the far wall. The tiles were a combination of the colored quartzes used to decorate the core room’s wall carvings and polished wood of all natural shades. Along with those materials A’Ferun had seen in the dungeon before, there were also tiles of stone and marble. The archway was set upon a stone base with an understated luminance that A’Ferun would have to study to identify where that feeling came from.
The luminance wasn’t of primary significance, though, and A’Ferun directed his attention to the mosaic murals. He found a scene of two men that might be himself and Kinser bringing bundles of things and leaving them in the archway, things that looked like they might be staves or unstrung bows as well as bread and vegetables.
Another scene showed him letting in a clear crew of slaves with an overseer into the first hall of the dungeon. They were shown killing the dire rats and then glowing, the seals binding them into slavery fading. Some snuck deeper into the dungeon.
There was a final scene of the freed slaves sneaking through a city with food packs slung over their backs, with N’kieran smiling as she floated with her legs crossed next to a standing A’Ferun as they watched the exodus of the former slaves.
A’Ferun’s gaze lingered on that last image. After maybe a minute of scrutiny and deep thinking, he asked, “Lady N’kieran? Can you hear me?”
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«In for a penny,» Prime muttered, and expended a mana unit to make all the mana stones in the core room brighten. The effect lasted for maybe one of Kinser’s breaths before fading.
«This isn’t a Regency Story World,» Aide pointed out. «The smallest coin is the dracha.»
«Whatever, smart ass,» Prime tossed back, grateful for the teasing to defray her nerves.
A’Ferun closed his eyes and sucked in a deep breath. “Are you hurt? Or in pain?”
Kinser piped up to suggest, “One flash for yes, two for no?”
Prime flashed the mana stones twice.
“Are you trapped?”
Again, two flashes. Prime thought dungeons cores had a lot in common with trees, and though a tree’s roots might prevent them from walking around, they hardly constituted a trap for their tree.
“Do you know what happened to you?”
One flash, not that she could tell him.
“Are you in danger?”
That would require nuanced communication to discuss. Prime flashed three times.
“Lord, perhaps your question is too vague,” Kinser suggested. That man had always been quite insightful, and his loyalty to A’Ferun was unshakable, which was why the agents had decided to include him. A’Ferun was often too direct and used to being obeyed to stop to consider how others might view him.
“Vague? If the dungeon’s spirit is threatening her—”
Oh, that needed two flashes right now to nip that thought in the bud.
“—we need to do something!”
As the second glow started up, A’Ferun’s shoulders sagged, if only briefly.
Kinser asked, “Lady, is there a dungeon spirit with you?”
This could be dangerous, but lying around the Lead Halos tended to get a body slapped with a Villain Halo, so Prime flashed twice.
And, yep, the dangerous question. “Lady, are you the dungeon’s spirit now, then?”
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A’Ferun turned a look of wrath upon his boundsman that promised a good strangling. Again, though, lying was probably more dangerous than a harsh truth, and the guess was too close to being correct. Prime flashed the mana stones once.
A’Ferun just crumpled, landing on his knees, his features slack and his eyes dulled.
That was very concerning.
Kinser glanced to his master, but kept on asking questions. “Are you—? Do you need to kill people?”
Oh that was much simpler. Two flashes.
Color and the first hints of confusion returned to A’Ferun’s features.
“Are you happy, Lady?” Kinser asked.
Micro-expressions of dawning fury began tightening A’Ferun’s dead-eyed face and accelerated the return of blood to his head. Those micro-expressions twisted toward grief with the second flash began, and smoothed into confusion at her third flash.
Happiness was weird, and while Prime wouldn’t say she and Aide were happy, they also wasn’t unhappy, either. They were newly begun in this dungeon core life, with far too many unknowns to explore.
“Can you make the pictures while we’re in the room?” Kinser asked.
Two flashes.
“While we’re in the dungeon?”
At this point? Two flashes.
A’Ferun got back into the questions game, though he more stated than asked, “You know about the slaves Captain desh Shalante has us transporting?” His voice croaked like a parched man hoping for water.
Prime still answered the statement with one flash.
“You want me to free them?” he asked.
That was a pretty typical response from Muscle-Head, assuming everything fell on his shoulders. In answer, Prime tried to make only the mana stone chips in the portal arch shine. It wasn’t a perfect success, but they were the brightest source of the flash, if not the only one. A’Ferun and Kinser even got the message and went back to study the mosaics again.
When A’Ferun rose to do so, he rubbed his knees. Wood was a more forgiving surface than stone, but it hardly qualified as “soft”.
Kinser pointed without touching the fading seal on one of the depicted slave’s backs. “Lady, do you have a way to unseal slaves?”
One flash, because Prime was confident that Aide would have everything ready, even if they both had to go into another use of the absurdly expensive Bullet Time to get Prime up to making four dimensional sigils.
“And what happens after their seals are lifted? The slavers will just reseal them and declare this dungeon too dangerous. They will demand the dungeon’s destruction.” A’Ferun fell into frowning and growling very easily, not that Prime actually blamed him.
He also hadn’t been looking at her plan that deeply to skip over the part where the slaves were granted sanctuary in her dungeon. Not only that, but his challenge wasn’t exactly something she could answer with one flash or two.
While Prime debated if it was worth flashing the archway again, Kinser spoke up. “Lord, I think the lady intends for the slaves to hide in her dungeon.”
“That won’t free all of them, and if we come into port missing every slave desh Shalante contracted us to transport, we will have to deal with the Evans’ inquisitors. The Evans is going to be hard enough to to sneak N’kieran by on the way back to Lus’Idahl. If she can hold N’kieran hostage against the Idahl, she will use every bit of scheming and back dealing it takes! Without her human body, N’kieran is too vulnerable to be treating like simple property!”
And again, lack of words meant that Prime couldn’t verbally smack A’Ferun upside his head for his obliviousness. Lady Lucretia Evans, the Evans now, may have been stuck in her clan head’s seat, but that just meant that her obsession with A’Ferun had turned into her scheming up ways to get him to give up his bid for the Hiralt clan seat.
The nation of Lusfal was once a league of city states, each ruled by a great clan. The Idahl great clan may have achieved supremacy during the Warring Cities period some three hundred years before, but the great clans in their cities were still essentially the kings of their kingdoms. The present Idahl clan head was more like a mediator between the other great clans, with most of their power stemming from their diplomatic ability. That did include maintaining a standing army that helped secure the roads and waterways of Lusfal, but when it came time to choose the next clan head, martial feats played second fiddle to able administration.
As part of cementing peace between the great clans, the Idahl clan encouraged marriages between them. The names of the members of great clans came to include honorifics meant to make clear a person’s contractual loyalties. The sa honorific in N’kieran sa Volmar desh Idahl meant that she was obliged to consider the Volmar clan’s interests and they were obliged to treat with her like one of their own non-inheriting children. The desh in her name signified that she was important to the Idahl clan. Inheriting children, those who were groomed to take up the leadership of a clan, were the sa’desh of their clans.
The sa’desh of a clan could marry the desh of another clan, but not the sa’desh.
And as for how Prime knew that the newest Evans’ schemes had all been directed toward A’Ferun, well, they were close enough in age to be stuck together in the hob-nobbing of the Idahl’s court. The experienced agents had quickly spotted the signs of Lucretia’s attraction, and even helpfully sent opportunities her way. After all, they had been charged with breaking N’kieran free from the Female Lead Halo. Dropping it on Lucretia would have been fantastic, as far as Prime had been concerned, and she had even grown close enough with the young sa’desh Evans to share nicknames.
However, ignoring how wrong A’Ferun was about the Evans, he was right that there would be some kind of official response if all the slaves disappeared. Moreover, the slave trader’s overseer wasn’t likely to throw them all into the dungeon at once, nor would they continue to send in slaves for the leveling if they lost them. A certain amount of loss would be acceptable for being able to claim they were experienced with dungeon delving, but beyond that was just lost profit.
Prime needed to respond in some manner, though. She could feel how low their core’s mana reservoir was, which gave her an expedient way to start a mana siphon to briefly dim the glow from the core room mana stones. Without a formation to direct things, the siphon would get mana moving, but do next to nothing for filling her reservoir, so after the brief dimming, she dropped it. Hopefully, the dimming would convey a sense of her conceding A’Ferun’s points without him thinking she was promising not to free them.
A’Ferun reacted differently to her show of dismay than he had in the past. He didn’t leap immediately to cheering her spirits or promise to do anything rash or foolhardy while knowing how stupid it was. Instead, he rubbed his forehead, his own ragged emotions clear in every line of his body, along with a pained empathy stiffened by a mature steadfastness.
He said, “I understand you hate slavery. Even though we only began to turn away from slave laborers in Hiraltan for your sake, the arguments you made that I mimicked back to my father have already proved true. And the testimony of the slaves the Hiralt has freed have given me my own reasons to despise the slave trade. I do understand.
“We are not — yet! — in a position to truly stop the trade, though, and both of us have several paths to that power laying before us. Do not toss aside the thousands across Lusfal for the tens on this ship.”
«I think there may be a man worth respecting under that absurd Halo,» Aide said.
«He’s a lot less of a Muscle-Head without the impetus of the primary Lead riding him,» Prime agreed. «Too bad he’s still trying to bring N’kieran along as his Female Lead. We need to go explore how the world’s settling into this Branch.»
The responses Prime could think of were too complicated for their simplistic communications so Prime made the mana stones flash thrice, and then drew the glow to highlight the puzzle located in the base of the archway. The stirred up mana from her siphon kept the mana stones from glowing as bright.
«Looks like we’re on for Plan B,» Prime observed.
«Have you found the Control Rod, then?» Aide asked.
«Not yet, but the other ship isn’t close enough to us for it to be there. The overseer has to be keeping it on his person. Even so, it will just make Plan B go off easier. It’s not crucial.»
Aide hummed along their connection and withdrew to work more on the design of the chain breaker trap.
Prime was starting to run low on mana so as A’Ferun and Kinser asked her more questions, she put fractionally less and less mana into each flash with which she answered them. It didn’t help that most of their questions were variants on whether she had a way to get back into her old body or something like it, what she needed, and what they could provide for her, and finally, why she was acting like a dungeon in the first place. Those were not easy questions to translate for easy yes or no answers.
She also narrowed down her focus on what she was trying to flash, mainly the puzzle at the base of the archway. When she had stepped her mana usage down to the point where the humans couldn’t see her answering, she stopped answering. They got the right idea that she was low on resources to answer them with and finally worked the puzzle, another sliding image one that, when finished, covered the arch with an illusion that it was covered in carved wood to match the walls.
A’Ferun smiled at that, and finally allowed himself to be dragged back off to collect the mages and go get lunch.