Chapter 15

  Hugh shook his large, shaggy head, unsure what to make of what was just said. He took out his earpiece for a moment, inspected it, and then put it back in, satisfied that it hadn’t broken, but rather merely malfunctioned.

  “I am sorry, I didn’t understand that. My speech assistance failed to understand that. Could you repeat it?” Hugh asked, still standing in the entryway.

  Hugh and Sam had talked about his translation device’s gaps in vocabulary, and after several long, tedious conversations, had helped Hugh understand what those gaps are like, and how to deal with them. Sam pulled on his long history of telling people what they wanted to hear to get what he wanted to help Hugh learn a little about how to choose his words. Phrases like “talkchanger” may seem natural in Hugh’s own tongue, but to most others, would seem awkward and strange. Sam focused his lessons on how to approach his own language, that of the Timberfolk, but fortunately the local language of the Snif was similar enough in grammatical structure that his lessons paid off, Sam’s suggestion of “speech assistance” proving to be a marked improvement. He expected a period of awkward acclimation as he encountered any given new language, but was excited to have this tool in his belt. With it, he felt better able to approach any given situation. Now, that was a gift he was grateful for.

  “Oh, it was nothing,” Malthus said, glad his faux pas wouldn’t be remembered, “Come in, sit down. You said your name was Hugh Stonegazer, did I catch that right?”

  Hugh gave his affirmation as he attempted to sit in one of the small chairs. His large frame couldn’t fit into a chair meant for a creature a quarter of his weight, however, and compromised to sit with his legs folded beneath him in front of the desk.

  "I apologize for not having proper accommodations for… such as yourself, Mr. Stonegazer, but if I may be frank, I’ve never seen anyone like you before! What in the world brings you here? You said you want to learn gears. Not machinery, just… gears?”

  Hugh cocked his large head at that last phrase.

  “Hugh is fine. And forgive me, again, my speech assistance is not up to the task. I do not speak your language, and so this helps me.”

  He pulled out the earpiece again and removed the choker, then placed them onto Malthus’s desk so he could inspect them. Malthus readily took them, eyes darting all over the delicate inscriptions and magical minutiae that he could see, but not make sense of.

  “Gods below,” Malthus breathed.

  He slid the items back, and Hugh replaced them onto himself.

  “Tell me,” Malthus eagerly asked, leaning forward onto his desk, “What is that exactly? It seems magical, but it's not any magic I am familiar with. Is it even magic at all? It’s no magic I’m familiar with.”

  Hugh blinked against the rush of questions.

  “It is,” Hugh answered, hesitating before giving answer in full. “It is an inscribed set that allows me to understand the meaning of others, even when I do not know their words. It is magical, however I am searching to understand more of this magic. This has been my only point of reference as I search to create more items of this nature.”

  Hugh thought about what Malthus said again. “What do you mean, no magic you are familiar with?”

  “Ah! Well, most magical items make use of a magical core, typically some kind of energized crystal or some other rock that’s been sitting in the right place for so long, its become infused with some kind of magic. I’ve heard of other things being used, maybe a kind of magical plant, the heart of a kind of tree, the heart of a Miracle-”

  Malthus shuddered at this last point before continuing.

  “They use this core to direct their magic and run until they’ve depleted it. Different cores let you do different things. The basic rule is the stronger the effect, the shorter the core lasts, and the bigger the effect, the bigger a core you need. Not physically bigger, magically bigger. More energy! Ironically, this means that bigger cores last less time, which is rubbish if you ask me. Part of the reason I stayed away from the whole business- it only works until you run out of sparkly rocks. I’d rather’d make things work from the rest of the rocks. Give me anything, wood, stone, or metal, I can make you a device that can outdo and outlast magic any day!”

  “You seem to know a lot about magic,” Hugh observed.

  Malthus made a so-so gesture as he leaned back in his chair.

  “Only enough to know why I don’t want to know more, I suppose. Except, what you have?” Malthus pointed at the choker. “That’s different. How does it work?”

  Hugh opened his mouth to reply, then stopped. He thought about his situation, and how interested the man in front of him seemed.

  “How about a deal?” Hugh offered.

  Malthus raised an eyebrow.

  “Sure, I’ll listen.”

  “You teach me as much as you can about these gears- mechanics- for the next month, and I shall tell you everything I can about this choker and earpiece.”

  Malthus played with his whiskers as he thought. He thought for several minutes, making Hugh anxious that perhaps he had overstepped some boundary, but finally the gearmaster spoke.

  “I shall tutor you for one month if you tell me all you know about these items and allow me to experiment with it myself,” Malthus finally offered.

  “I-” Hugh began, but again stopped himself. He had meant enrollment in the course, not direct tutelage. This new direction was a strict upgrade, and so he prevented himself from blundering the opportunity.

  “I accept your counter-offer, under the understanding any experiments must not damage it. It is, after all, the only way for me to speak to you.”

  Malthus broke out in a laugh so exuberant it felt out of place in the wide, empty instruction hall.

  “A deal it is, Hugh! I look forward to our time together,” Malthus said as he stood up, sweeping up the loose papers into his arms.

  “Meet me here tomorrow at sunrise, before classes begin. Now, I must be off,” Malthus said as he pranced out of the hall, a giddy grin on his face.

  Hugh remained seated for a moment, taking in what an overwhelming success the encounter was. He stood up and went to exit the hall, stopping as he looked out upon the darkened street.

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  “How do I get back?”

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  After several hours of trudging through the dim, damp streets of Hearth, Hugh finally found his way back to the Slippery Jack in, the place where he, Elody, and Sam would be residing at for their stay in Hearth. As he rounded the corner and saw the lights of the inn, a small silhouette that could only be Sam was pacing in front of the inn. Sam turned to Hugh, his hands shooting up as he yelled in exasperation.

  “What took you so long!”

  “I ah,” Hugh mumbled as he slowly approached the tiny merchant, “I got lost. I do not have a map.”

  “Great,” Sam mumbled, “You got lost and wasted a whole day. Shoulda figured. Fine, fine, I’ll get you a map in the morning, then I’ll be sure you get to the Gear Barrel or whatever its called.”

  “You misunderstand,” Hugh said, “I found the Gear Barrow. I’m returning in the morning.”

  Sam lowered his arms and looked up at the enormous man with a raised eyebrow.

  “Uh-huh. You just.. Wandered around and found the place from sheer dumb luck, and then got back again by wild chance?”

  Hugh thought about it for a moment, then nodded assent.

  “That is about how it went, yes.”

  “Goddess of luck have mercy,” Sam breathed as he pinched the bridge of his nose. “So you have no idea how to get back?”

  “Correct.”

  “Did you accomplish anything?”

  “The Head Instructor will be tutoring me-”

  “Head Instructor? A personal tutor?!” Sam exclaimed. He looked around frantically, as though someone were hiding around a corner, waiting to jump out and say it was all an elaborate joke. Sam resumed his pacing, muttering to himself repeatedly.

  “Are you alright?” Hugh asked after a moment.

  “No I’m not alright!” Sam shot back. “We wind up in the right place at the exact right time for you to stumble yer way into the exact thing that you need to complete yer grand task. I don’t trust like that! Worse, I’m caught up in it! You didn’t have any big revelations on yer way back, did you?”

  “Well, I had a question for Elody, regarding something that Head Instructor Malthus mentioned-”

  “There you have it!” Sam interjected. “I should go find a chapel to Luck or Prose or someone and make an offering, or something! I am not ending up on their bad sides again!”

  Hugh shook his head in confusion.

  “I thought you said that you weren’t religious?”

  Sam was already hurrying off when Hugh asked. He turned around but didn’t stop walking away when he replied.

  “Well I ain’t stupid, neither!”

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  After Sam had hurried off into the night, Hugh went looking for Elody. He went to the stable, as that was where the wagon was stationed. He couldn’t see the animals, though he guessed they had all bed down for the night. The cart was not where he remembered, but rather tucked away in a stall, one of several in a row meant for housing wagons. Two other wagons were present, but neither were visibly staffed. Neither was the one he was looking for, so he went into the wagon to look for Elody. Sure enough, she was amidst the luggage, struggling to stay awake.

  “Oh. You. You’re back,” Elody stated with the matter-of-factness that comes with the twenty-fifth hour of consciousness. “Wait, that is you, right? You’re not some shadow demon or a thief?"

  “Shadow demon? Did I hear that right?”

  Hugh was becoming increasingly concerned for the other two members of his group. After Sam’s scare with fate, he was hoping Elody would be a more helpful conversation. Seeing her in such a state was atypical, as she was typically quite rigorous about maintaining a consistent sleep schedule.

  “Have you not slept yet?” Hugh asked, despite knowing the answer.

  “Nope! Good ol’ Sam out there wanted me to watch the cart all night on the grounds that he wouldn’t be awake to do so! But then you didn’t show back up when it got ‘dark’, even though its always dark around here, so he stayed up to make sure you got back, even though that does nothing to help the situation, but said he still needed me with the wagon, so now at this point even if we do get robbed, I can’t do anything about it!” Elody heaved with breath as she finished her manic rant on the state of affairs.

  Hugh decided against trying to make sense of her previous comment, and instead waited for her to continue.

  “But! I see you’re back, so where is our ever-so-gracious employer?” Elody said, regaining some measure of composure.

  “He went out to make an offering?” Hugh said with little conviction.

  Elody’s face screwed up for a moment.

  “But he’s not religious.”

  “He claimed that he was not stupid.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” Elody asked.

  “I-” Hugh began, only to shake his head. “I do not know how to explain what happened. He is away. I have a few questions for you, if you could help.

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “I met with a man named Malthus, the Head Instructor of the Gear Barrow. He agreed to teach me if I tell him all I know about these,” Hugh explained as he pointed to his magical accommodations. “A ready deal. However, as I wandered back, I was thinking about these, and something you said. When you told us about how you got stranded, you said you got pulled through a ritual circle, yes?”

  “More or less, yeah.”

  “Malthus told me that most magic is unlike these items. Most are powered by an item that has magical potential stored within it. These are not like that, nor is the ritual you described. More importantly, Elody, how did you recognize the ritual?”

  Elody gave Hugh a bemused look.

  “Hugh, I was dragged into the middle of it. How could I not recognize it?”

  “If Malthus, a very well educated man, had been dragged into it, I do not think he would have recognized it. How did you have the knowledge to make sense of what you saw?”

  Elody raised a finger as she planned to retort to the implicit accusation that she was less educated than some random man Hugh had met the same day, but stopped as she realized that he had a point. Her face took on myriad expressions as her sleep-deprived mind rattled through memories to figure out how she knew what she did about rituals.

  “I remember a few small snippets,” She eventually said, “The circles are present in a few places in Ade. We are told they are marks of the Medeah family, proof of their divine right. They do things. It’s rumored that one of these marks is at the head of the river that the city is built upon. Another one marks Paron’s Stand, just outside of town, where he slew an encroaching army with a flash of light. At least, that’s how the stories go. And then, there was this one girl… boy? Person. This one person who came into my shop and was talking to Rudy about those marks. They called them rituals, and was talking about them in the back. They drew some, but they didn’t do anything, and said that the magical ingredients in the shop must have been making them malfunction. That’s why when I heard that the Medeahs were snatching people, I thought something like that, some magical powder might mess up one of their marks. I meant it as a rebellious gesture, but instead, it saved my life.”

  Elody looked around as she spoke, letting the movement of her head and eyes focus her thoughts. She had never really bothered to think about these memories, and now that she was examining them a pattern seemed to be emerging. Elody’s addled mind struggled to put her finger on exactly what that pattern was, and lost the mental trail.

  Hugh was making observations of his own.

  “So then, there is magic like this where you come from? In Ade?” Hugh asked.

  “I suppose so, yes.”

  Hugh’s mind raced with the knowledge that there was somewhere else to learn more about this magic. Somewhere else he could dig up the secrets these sigils and glyphs and inscribed markings held.

  “Your homeland seems to be an important destination for us both, now,” Hugh observed.

  “Funny how that works out, right? It’s like we’ve both been put on the same path-”

  Elody cut herself off at that word as both of them looked at each other. Hugh, with concern, and Elody with weariness. Elody let out a groan at the realization.

  “I think I understand Sam’s actions better now,” Hugh said with a deep sigh.