Chapter 41 — Advanced Window Shopping
Mountains pressed against the oncoming storm clouds, taking their toll of rain water and distributing it to the countless lakes and labyrinthine river valleys. But no matter where the rain fell in the western Serric Highlands, nearly every drop would eventually enter into the Easruth River and pass through the city of Westreach — though some drops took a more direct route.
Night had fallen over Westreach hours ago and, not to be left out, a deluge of rain had chosen to fall with it. The streets had emptied soon after, with people taking shelter either in their homes or in their watering hole of choice. Every now and then the latter would produce a laugh or a shout loud enough to pierce through the din, but otherwise the only thing to be heard throughout the city was the thunderous patter of raindrops on stone.
As countless people warmed themselves by one fire or another, others were less fortunate. Some without a roof over their head had to face the storm on its own terms. Others were their superior’s least favorite and were stuck on patrol duty. And others still were… well, ‘skulking’ was far too pointed of a term.
No, some were just being… locationally unobvious. Or perhaps visually ambiguous… while also being within line of sight of a certain cosmetics shop owned by the Doukas family.
The shop in question was called The Passionate Pearl and only a few minutes ago its last employee locked up and went home for the night. In contrast to a small town apothecary, there didn’t seem to be any living quarters as part of the shop — just the storefront and workshop. Therefore it should be completely empty, making now the perfect time to… perhaps play it safe and wait for the next patrol to come and go before Rína made her move.
Rína found herself jittering, but not from the rain. She was wearing a long coat woven by her aunt that was as warm as it was waterproof. She was practically cozy, at least physically, with her jitters coming from the… extralegal ingress that she had planned for her evening.
Part of her wanted to just burn the shop down, sending it straight to the hells in a fireball large enough to make a pyromancer blush. That was genuinely her first thought, but her experience fleeing Leighton was an unfortunate reminder that… architecturally exothermic solutions tended to have a mixed bag of results. Plus, well, even with the rain, the odds of the fire spreading were too high for Rína to stomach, especially among the dense city blocks.
Her second thought was to maybe try to spread rumors about the products being dangerous, and do so anonymously to avoid getting put on any aristocrat’s shit list. Rína ran the plan by Theo to maybe get his help, but he shot it down immediately. Apparently the three aristocratic families that ran Westreach pretty regularly ran baseless smear campaigns against each other’s businesses. So without hard evidence, the story wouldn’t go anywhere — and of course if any such evidence did turn up, the person holding it wouldn't be long for this world.
Her third thought was to send the shop to the hells with an even bigger fireball.
And her fourth thought was more or less what she was doing now.
Rína stood just beyond the mouth of an alley, trying to stay out of sight, though she may as well have been dancing in the middle of the street for all it mattered. Light was hard to come by, with its only sources being the odd candle or oil lamp shining out from a night owl’s window. And with the veil the deluge put over the city, the night may as well have been pitch black. Rína carried no lantern or similar for obvious reasons, however she nonetheless had no problem seeing.
Rína’s magesight spread across the street, each spec of her aether brushing against a different crevice of a cobblestone or grain of a door’s wood. She and her aunt had been making trips to the old clock tower every couple of nights, with Rína working on polish and practice in equal measure. And though her magesight was still nowhere near what her aunt was capable of, Rína could see all around herself — perhaps out to about twenty meters.
Although ‘seeing’ wasn’t exactly the right word. It was more like ‘feeling’, like groping around in a dark room to create a mental map. It wasn’t perfect of course. It only gave material densities; it entirely lacked color; surface texture had to be inferred; and small, fast moving objects — like raindrops — appeared more as a vague, collective haze. But still, she could see. She could see things like a pair of lantern and truncheon wielding patrol men walking down the street in her general direction.
Rína pressed her back against the wall of the alley and unconsciously held her breath. Thankfully the pair of men seemed to be more focused on complaining about the weather than anything else. And as their lanterns could barely illuminate their surroundings in the rain, the light sources served more to let others spot the patrol than the other way around.
Regardless, they passed by a minute later, so if ever Rína was to move, it would be now. Rína took a deep breath, steeled her nerve, and did just that.
Her eyes were practically useless at present, so she relied entirely on her magesight, quickly closing the distance to the shop while avoiding any of the large puddles. She made it to the front door in a moment, and there was met with her first hurdle.
The door was of course locked, but she assumed there would be a knob or something on the inside that she could turn with a bit of kinesis. After all, the spell aether of her kinesis moved through the Astral, so a door on the physical being between her and the opposite side of the lock would be irrelevant. But as her magesight came into range of it, Rína saw that no such knob existed.
“Not ideal…” Rína mumbled to herself.
Well, plan B would have to be her picking the lock somehow. Rína obviously didn’t have any flesh threads like her aunt, but Rína could fully see the lock’s internals with her magesight and there was nothing stopping her from using her kinesis on those instead.
Both she and her heart rate were fully aware that she was on a timer, but Rína tried to calm herself as she inspected the lock. Unfortunately, she had absolutely no experience with locks or lockpicking, and had only seen vague drawings of some common designs. Though being able to see the mechanism in three dimensions with her magesight did absolute wonders for her comprehension.
The internals were still a mess of spring loaded levers and ratcheted gears, but with a bit of imagination Rína could just see how the teeth of a key might get everything to click into position.
As she looked it over, a couple of things stuck out to Rína, mostly because they weren’t sticking out anywhere. In a couple of places there were locking levers that looked like they were already ‘solved’ — like they wouldn’t get in the way of the lock opening.
It didn’t make any sense. A lockpick would probably be able to get at the already ‘solved’ parts, but what would be the point? And it looked like the regular key wouldn’t be able to touch those bits at all.
Rína shrugged. She wasn’t a locksmith and really didn’t have the time to figure out the ‘why’s, so she just started trying to get the thing opened.
She first started just trying to figure out the shape of the key she would need to mimic with force. Even though most of the internal parts had pretty distinct shapes, they were still so small that Rína had to admit that she had a little trouble. She wasn’t sure if she should be impressed by the craftsmanship, or annoyed that her magesight — which she specifically designed to be able to spot small details like this — wasn’t just breezing through this step.
A few minutes of her heart pounding in her ears later, Rína was sure she had her solution. And that was when the ‘why’ of the weird pre-solved parts made itself known.
Rína applied a minute amount of upward force on the first lever, just enough to get it into place. However it wasn’t the only lever that moved. Even though, like her magesight, Rína had optimized her kinesis spell for small scale use, all spell aether naturally spread out at least somewhat. So when she applied enough force to get the first lever into position, a bit of that spell aether carrying upward force bled onto the next unsolved lever, as well as an adjacent, previously solved lever.
“Fuck…”
So was it a lock specifically designed to be resistant to kinesis mages? Or maybe mages in general since there were probably other ways a mage could open it non-destructively, like if they—
Rína shook her head. It didn’t matter, not right now; right now she just needed it open.
Rína took a deep breath and tried to constrict her spell aether to prevent any bleed over. It took a fair bit of focus and concentration to get the spell so focused and concentrated, but as the spell’s scope gradually narrowed she saw the ‘trap’ lever slowly return to its starting solved position.
Rína sighed in relief, moving on to the next unsolved lever.
She got two more levers in place before she was at her limit. Rína could feel a headache coming on, just trying to keep such tight control on her spell. Even now the ‘solved’ levers were wavering, Rína not quite able to keep the precise amount of force steady. And of course every few heartbeats some spell aether would bleed over onto one of the trapped bits.
Rína dropped the spell with a gasp and tried to collect herself. She pointedly ignored the bobbing pair of lights slowly approaching from the far end of the street and tried to take stock of her options.
Anything destructive would ruin the rest of her plan, so…
Rína chewed her lip, reapplying her kinesis to the lock’s internals. This time, instead of narrowing the spell onto the unsolved levers, Rína let it spread out naturally. The trap levers were of course moved out of position, but Rína then applied a counteracting, downward force to get them back into position. However this counteracting force also bled over, so Rína had to adjust the force she was applying on the original lever, which was already bleeding over, which meant that she had to readjust the trap lever, and all the while the second and even third levers were being shifted about which she’d need to account for by…
It quickly turned into a kind of balancing act. Specifically, it reminded her of a plate spinning act she had seen on her first day in Westreach, where each newly added plate — or lever in her case — required all the rest to be adjusted ever so slightly to keep things from toppling over.
As taxing as it was to keep things balanced, it was far easier than her previous approach; something made evident by the welcoming click the lock made just a minute later.
Rína darted inside, the small bell announcing her arrival letting out only a single chirp before it was grabbed and silenced by her kinesis. Rína then closed the door behind her as quickly and quietly as she could before dropping out of sight of the windows.
“...but we're due for one aren't we? Hells, one could be above our heads right now, just waiting for the rain to clear.”
“Aye, but if the rains don’t quit soon, they might just pass us by…” came the muffled voices of the patrolmen.
Rína waited for them to pass before she let herself breath. As she did, The Passionate Pearl introduced itself, the smells of rain and wet city streets immediately replaced by Peridot-Plum Perfume, Shy-Shamrock Shampoo, Lily-Lilac Lotion, and about a dozen other artificial scents mixed in a mad cacophony.
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Rína tried to ignore her nose’s objections as she surveyed the shop. Her eyes were even less useful in the pitch dark interior, so she had to rely entirely on magesight. Hers spread over the entire shop, but there was so much detail that she’d have to focus her mind’s eye to get anything more than the broad strokes — something she was honestly grateful for. When looking around a building, it didn’t matter too much, but whenever a person and their… anatomy stepped into range of her magesight, it meant that so long as she didn’t look too closely, she wasn’t in danger of seeing something she didn’t want to.
Regardless, Rína slunk between the shelves of products, past the clerk’s desk, into the back rooms, and to the door of the shop’s small back office. The door itself was locked, but unlike the front door, this one had a simple knob on its opposite side that Rína turned to get inside.
The office seemed to be filled with ledgers and loose sheaves of paper. Here and there Rína spotted an impression on a piece of paper that might have been a letter someone had penned a bit too hard, but all told the papers may as well have been blank to her. So with more than a little reluctance — and after triple checking that there wasn't a way for any traitorous light to escape the office — Rína struck a match and lit the smallest candle she could find.
“Now where would you be…” Rína petitioned the papers before her.
What she had assumed would be banal paperwork and sales ledgers turned out to be exactly that. She set those aside and continued searching the office. The office’s desk and cabinets all had small locks on them, but they were cheap, simple things that only slowed Rína down by a few seconds.
But no matter how she searched, she couldn’t find the most prized possession of any apothecary-adjacent shop: the master recipe book.
Not every recipe would be put to paper, and it was rather common for the most valuable recipes to only ever be memorized and passed down orally. But Rína was hoping that that wouldn’t be the case for the mercury laden products Theo used as well as any other toxic crap the shop was selling.
And once she got her hands on the recipes? That’s when Rína would have to start improvising based on what she found. Well, ‘continue improvising’ would be more accurate. Honestly, the entirety of her plan was: step one, break in; step two, improvise; step three, profits dry up and the shop goes out of business.
It was a genius plan if Rína had ever seen one, and it would be greatly helped along if she could find that damn book.
Rína huffed. She’d been looking for maybe ten or fifteen minutes now and the thing still hadn’t turned up. It was possible it wasn’t on site at all, instead being stashed somewhere inside the owner’s house, but that seemed a bit too impractical to be the case.
“Are you maybe in a hidey-hole?...” Rína once again inquired, but once again was rudely left without a reply.
She spread her magesight out a bit further, looking for anything out of place. Unfortunately, she didn’t find anything. Thankfully, she found nothing.
“… the hells?”
She hadn’t been looking too closely at the ground beneath her feet — mostly because there wasn’t a basement — but there under the floorboards of the office was a cubic cavity, about half a meter on a side.
Her magesight wasn’t picking up anything inside the cavity, implying it was filled with air. However…
Rína pulled aside the office’s small rug, revealing the flush handle of what could only be a trapdoor. And as she opened it, she was met not with an empty void, but with a small bead of golden light casting a faint illumination on a block of metal. Upon the metal was set a numbered dial and beside that was a simple handle that completed the face of the floor safe Rína had found.
The office having a floor safe wasn’t a surprise, but that golden ball of light? It was slightly transparent, about a centimeter or two wide, and seemed to be fixed perfectly in space, just above the safe. And incidentally, painted on the safe’s face, just beside the light, was the word ‘Status’.
Rína knelt down, frowning. Though she already had an idea of what she was looking at, she gingerly gave the little sphere of light a poke with her finger.
Her finger went through the light without any resistance. In fact, she didn’t feel it at all. There was no tingling sensation, no bit of heat, no nothing. It was like the light didn’t exist at all. And it wasn’t as if the light just winked out as her finger passed through it either. It just kept shining on, even seemingly from inside her body if the dull red glow her fingertip acquired was anything to go by.
“Lumimancy…” Rína said in a whisper, her face sprouting a grin that quickly grew into an ear-to-ear smile.
True, it wasn’t as impressive as the stories she’d heard of archmages melting entire mountains with columns of light. But the little sphere of magical light was still, well, magical as far as Rína was concerned.
Rína wiggled her fingers in and out of the light; she moved her palm so that it looked like the light was emerging from the back of her hand; and—
Rína shook her head.
—and she was letting herself get distracted while she had much more important things to be doing tonight.
Rína extended her aura towards the light and, unsurprisingly, it winked out of existence. Continuing in the same direction, her aura bumped into something. She retracted her aura slightly to mitigate any fizzling, and then wrapped her aura around it to get an idea of its shape.
It was a dome — or at least a higher dimensional one. As far as Rína could tell, aether crystal was somehow anchored to the exterior of the safe — even including the dial and handle — and then rose up from the physical in a taper to converge on a single point. Thus the safe’s contents and internal mechanisms were all shield by walls of steel on the physical and a dome of aether crystal in the Astral.
“Well, damn,” Rína frowned, “But if it’s a single dome, then how does the safe’s door open?”
Did the door have its own separate enchantment — its own sixth of a dome — that lined up with the rest of the safe’s enchantment and Rína just couldn’t feel the seam? Or was the door unenchanted and the dome actually was a single piece? A single piece that was shaped to press against the physical where the door would be?
The latter design would probably be easier to make, although if the dome was a solid piece then it couldn’t be opened. Rína supposed that wouldn’t be a problem so long as no one tried to put an enchanted item — or a living creature — inside the safe.
Although, speaking of, what would happen if someone tried to do that? None of the physical bits would be colliding, it would just be the aether crystal the two objects were enchanted with that would be the problem. Would physical objects be unable to move? Would one of the enchantments be ripped from its mooring?
Yvette hadn’t gone over enchantments besides a few oblique references here and there. The reason was that Weavers couldn’t really use traditional enchantments, as almost any useful one would create enough blight to cause problems for a Weaver’s threads. But that didn’t mean that Rína couldn’t—
Rína shook her head once again. Maybe the safe only existed to distract any advanced window shoppers long enough for the shop owner to find them and call the city guard.
Whatever the design was, Rína wasn’t getting through it. And with her magesight presumably fizzling against the dome, she wasn’t seeing into the safe either. She could probably attune the aether dome or just break it with her aura. However the ‘Status’ written next to the marble of light made Rína think that maybe said light was involved in stopping a mage from doing exactly that — or at least it was there to alert others that it had been tampered with.
“They take security seriously, I’ll give ‘em that. I can’t imagine how much one of these would cost though,” Rína mumbled to herself as she tapped the safe. “Seems it’d be a hassle though: popping open a trapdoor and unlocking a safe just to double check a single recipe… in fact…”
Rína’s eyes blinding snapped in the direction of the store’s workshop. She tried to return the office to how she had found it before almost running to the workshop.
Relying on her magesight, it didn’t take her more than a minute before she found a few scraps of paper tucked away here and there, each with a small scrawl of shorthand written on them.
½ 0.7He 48.1t8 lh30 3dM p+ 2z …, one of them read.
“Haha, gotcha!” Rína cackled as she took them to the shop’s reagent store room, “Now what might all of you be?...”
Before her were racks upon racks of sealed containers. Some were relatively simple, only meant to hold stable powders, while others were like miniature vaults containing substances that had to be submerged in inert oil lest they get a bit too friendly with the oxygen in the air.
But despite the differences of storage, each container had a neatly written label that Rína could just read in the low candle light.
“‘½’... no units and it’s the first figure, so…” Rína muttered to herself. As she did, her gaze fell onto one of the workshop’s storage cabinets, inside of which were large, eight-ish liter beakers that seemed to be the standard for batch recipes, “I’m guessing that’s four liters of water to start with, and then ‘0.7He’... I seriously doubt that’s helium…”
Rína mulled over each of the reagents as her eyes raced across their labels.
“You’d never start a recipe with hefle petals, mashed hentish seeds could be a perfuming agent, but that’d come near the end of… whatever this is… and hapsin extract?” Rína raised an eyebrow as she came across a container of pale blue powder, “Point-seven kilos of that would thicken things and make a good base for a cream…
“‘3dM’ could be ‘three drops of mequai oil’, but it’d just boil off unless it was added after… ‘lh30’, ‘low heat for thirty minutes’,” Rína nodded to herself as she pulled out her notebook and began scribbling notes.
She was working both literally and metaphorically in the dark, having no idea what any of the recipes were for. Despite that, she was gradually making progress. There were setbacks here and there, of course; any incorrect assumptions about one ingredient or step would turn her off course and require some backtracking. But an hour after she had stepped into the shop, Rína was confident that she had decoded the cheat sheets that she had found.
And that’s of course what the scraps of paper were: cheat sheets. They were inevitable in a way. Given how inconvenient it was to access the safe and how specific the recipes could be, jotting down a quick little reminder of the recipes would save an apothecary — or their apprentice — quite a lot of headache.
Now, did Rína know this because she did exactly this when she was training under Master Andreou in Leighton? Did Rína ever seriously compromise the secrecy of her teacher’s recipes by scribbling them down somewhere they wouldn’t see? Had she only mostly rid herself of the habit since joining up with her aunt?
To compare Rína to the apothecaries working in the Passionate Pearl would be to assume a great many things, but now that Rína had a handful of recipes, she could start making some cosmetic changes to the cosmetics.
Part of her wanted to just sabotage all the stock and reagents the shop had on hand. It was certainly tempting, and would set their finances back a bit, but doing so would be a clear giveaway that it had in fact been the result of sabotage.
No, instead Rína decided to add a little something extra to all the reagents that contained mercury, as well as any of the respective products that were currently on the shelves. The hope was that people would then stay away from those products and the shop would switch back to the more reliable and less mercurial version of their recipes — assuming the shop managed to stay in business. The only problem was that out of all the reagents in the shop’s storeroom, none of their labels read ‘Extremely Toxic Quicksilver; only for use in cosmetic recipes if you are evil’.
However, what Rína did find was ‘calobar-7’. The substance itself looked unassuming — just an off-yellow paste that could have been mistaken for melted beeswax. But of all the ingredients in the storeroom, calobar-7 was the only one that didn’t have a ‘literal’ name that gave an idea of what it was made from. Furthermore, the paper of its label looked relatively new, implying it had been made in the last few months — around when Theo would have been first exposed. And above all, calobar-7 was the only reagent that, when mixed into one of the test vials Rína had prepared, precipitated out a small but damning amount of mercury.
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The deluge greeted Rína as she left the Passionate Pearl, its seemingly endless sheets of rain promising to conceal her escape. And though every little voice in the back of her mind was crying out that she’d be discovered, with her magesight Rína was able to sneak past the night patrols and through the labyrinthian streets of Westreach.
As she slipped through the night, Rína could feel fate tempting her to tempt it right back. But she avoided claiming victory even within the confines of her mind.
Beyond superstition, the reason she didn’t was because hers was not a complete one. Before leaving the Passionate Pearl, Rína had checked the small office on a hunch, and sure enough found a record of calobar-7 not being made on site, but ordered in bulk from someplace written out as ‘DAE’. The letters didn’t mean anything to Rína, but whatever it was, she’d be sure to give it a visit sometime soon.
It was a toss up whether the apothecaries of the Passionate Pearl knew what they were working with, or if a family higher-up simply gave them a new recipe, a mystery reagent, and told them to get to work. But whatever ‘DAE’ was, they had to have known what they were supplying and what it’d be used for.
But all of that was for another time, because the final reason Rína wasn’t celebrating was because her night wasn’t over just yet. She still had to infiltrate one last location without raising any alarms. And though her second target was much smaller than the Passionate Pearl, it was far more secure, with a powerful mage known to be guarding it throughout the night.
After turning down the last in a seemingly endless series of streets, Rína finally came within sight of her quarry: an enormous wagon the size of a small house that was parked on the side of the street.