Amber and I drift over to the table, hailed and assailed by the five people at the table. They’re trying to argue with Sara about, if I understand correctly, whether Rei’s party would have already left, which seems like a really stupid thing to argue with her about, and possibly just something they were doing to pass the time. With us showing up, they shift to make space for us, and the least expected of those present looks up to catch my eye.
“You can half dance, Adam.”
“Spirebirth Maarah.”
“Just Maarah.” She waves a hand dismissively. “Don’t mean any rudeness by it. Woulda taken you more for the wall-shroom type.”
“I was, way back…” I pull up my visor out of habit to run the calculation. “Back more than thirty years ago. I had a habit of trying to make people happy; I learned to dance, learned to mingle.”
“To be seen.”
I nod at her and ease myself into a chair, muscles starting to stiffen up a little. There’s a plate of food, and as soon as its odors hit my nose my stomach growls audibly to remind me that I’d only barely grazed, and I’d been doing some joyfully intense physical activity. “Khetzi. I’m glad you’re still around. With us to the end?”
“Magelord. I admit that you have brought joy to me in turn; by the Lady’s grace, I have leave to enjoy these last hours.”
I remind myself to chew and then swallow before I ask any questions, which gives me time to actually think about it before doing so. These last hours is a no, then, but maybe they’ll be one of the last Imprints to fade back into the machine. “So would it be more appropriate to call you Khetzi, or… Adn? Gvet?” I frown, mentally poking at my Visor. “Those names are cognate, says Omniglot, with some genders? And your clothes are sort of ambiguous on gender coding.”
Khetzi blinks at that, making a hand gesture I don’t recognize. “It is kind of you to ask, Magelord. It is easiest to call me Khetzi.”
“Okay, but I didn’t ask about easiest, I asked about more appropriate. Kinda like how if you’re not on duty, maybe you can call me Adam?”
“I…” Khetzi does another one of those hand gestures, and catches my sorta-glower, sorta-stare. “Apologies. We speak with our hands a great deal, we who are in Her service, in our own language of sorts. Adam.” He pauses, shoulders coming up and then back down, like he’s either having his hackles raised or silently laughing. “I do not think you capable of distinguishing between Adn and Gvet, and lack the inclination to teach you.”
“So it’s a moment-to-moment thing. Okay.” I narrow my eyes, thinking. “And Omniglot doesn’t work for your language, because you’re speaking, as it were, a language that never reached the Surface. But why? The System still reaches down into here, and it can still adapt. Void knows it’s adapted plenty of tools out of my hands.”
“The System and the Temple.” Khetzi leans back, chair making a creaking sound. “What is their relationship?”
“Hm.” I chew on that while I chew on my food. It’s blessedly well-chosen; pastries of some sort, a flaky dough with something almost but not entirely unlike margarine permeating it, stuffed with a fruit paste that’s homogeneous enough that I can really enjoy it. It’s incredibly flavorful without being too much of a challenge, and it’s a good body-occupier for while I’m thinking. I don’t know what exactly Khetzi means by a relationship between the System and the Temple, but if the Temple’s the… filling… no, that was just me being ridiculous.
Well, and the food being delicious.
There’s something to the point. The Temple is an actor in its own right, though not precisely a sophont one, if the conversations I’ve had are true. As more of a really complex automaton, it might plausibly be acting only when it’s… not exactly compelled to act, compelled implies that there’s a compulsion enacting constraints on an otherwise empowered, agency-ful person. But if I take that notion for the moment, it’s certainly possible that the language propagation just isn’t important to the Temple, or doesn’t fall under the category of things that trigger a response. Meanwhile, my breaking shit by, for example, rewriting the state of an encounter in order to complete that encounter? That could easily be categorically different, not just a difference of degree but a difference in kind, where the Temple passes on… something, maybe a call to action or just a report, and the System enacts another restriction.
Or I could just be wrong about how my Skills work. It’s not like I’m an expert; it could have been all along that I won’t be able to engage in hypercomputation once I leave the Temple bounds, because it’s a Skill that only works here. In that case, the System isn’t even involved; it’s just the Temple updating its own constraints on my Skill so as to deny me access.
For that matter, both could be true at the same time.
“Is there anyone alive who would know how to distinguish between magic that is granted by the System and magic that is regulated by the System or works through it?”
“No.”
“Yes.”
I raise an eyebrow at Zidanya. “Amber, Maarah, Khetzi, Vonne, Sara. What do you know that they don’t?”
“Ain’t the Lady.” Maarah’s voice is halfway between a grunt and a low growl. “She’s good, but she ain’t never been mortal. Makes for a difference.”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
“Not dearest Lily,” Zidanya agrees, smiling a little wider. “For, perhaps, different reasons. But there is one living.”
“That reminds me.” I know I’m being rude, cutting off the line of conversation, but I get the feeling that Zidanya doesn’t want to say who it is, and I can always talk with her privately about it. Besides, this is more important, and I absolutely need to not forget it.
I straighten my back, swigging some water to clear my mouth and buy time to put words together deliberately. The conversation dies like I took an ax to it, which is convenient, since I’d probably be distracted otherwise, and I dab my mouth clean with a napkin before talking.
“Maarah.” I look at the heavily-muscled gamahad, and she looks back at me steadily. “The work that you and yours engaged in on our behalf, and the equipment that came out of that work, was exemplary.” I pause, and she tilts her head a little at me, staying silent. It’s as good a signal as any that I should continue. “It played a significant part in our beating Ghosts Numbering Five; it played a significant part in saving my life when my attempts to avoid violence failed; and while I love and respect my Paladin, Amber would not have taken Rei to a tie without the work of your craft.
“I owe you a debt. I won’t say that anything that’s in my power to grant is yours, but ask for what you want, and if I can’t give it to you, we’ll… we’ll talk.”
Maarah nods at me, slow and deliberate. “I want yer fifth for one’a mine, of course.”
I blink at that, but only for a moment, because in hindsight that’s absolutely obvious. “Oh. Oh! Obviously, of course, yeah.” My mind whirls. “Not you, because you said for one of yours. Okay. That’s…” I take a deep breath, biting my lip. It’s a cost, a tremendous cost, it’s exactly the cost I was so terrified of incurring in the fighting. “Of course. I’ll need a… a name, at a minimum, probably some sort of token, maybe to meet them? I’m not sure—”
“Khav Ertov. A worker in cloth, good friend t’all. Shto crafted yer clothes with shto own hands, yeah? Erry scrap a’fabric in yer fuckin’ gear. Can’t meet shto ‘cause if yer not a fuckin’ whiterobe or one a’us right here, ye ain’t ‘round.”
“Okay, okay.” I look around. “Sara, you met … shto?” Nods from both of them, that’s good; I’m not getting anything from Omniglot on grammar, which means that this is some sort of neopronoun that’s exclusive to the Temple in the same way that Khetzi’s hand-sign is. Still, there’s a few basic pronoun forms, and this seems like it fits within them pretty conveniently as an example of a singleton pronoun; subject, direct object, possessive, all the same word. The word itself isn’t translating properly, but, as usual per Omniglot, it’s cognate with what, whatever that means. “I am fairly confident that I’ll be able to get that done.”
There’s a weird, scrunched-up look on Maarah’s face. “Ye talk like it’s easy.”
Everyone at the table makes some sort of noise, but my cough, water coming out my nose, wins out over all of them. “Scuse,” I gasp, and a moment later, my airways are cleared and I set my shoulders and let my breath whuff out dramatically. “Fuck. Easy.
“Maarah, look, you named your boon and I can do it.” I squash down the anger and the scorn and the hurt, all the unproductive emotions that are so obviously the result of miscommunication and misunderstanding. “Maybe it costs me a trick, and I want to be a hundred percent clear here, by a trick I mean something that nobody in the Temple other than maybe, maybe the sed matriarchs have seen before, and I can only use them once before it’s taken away from me forever. None of this is easy. You’ve just asked for something I was already preparing to do, as a contingency plan if I… if one of my companions died in battle.” I blink a few times, my throat feeling tight. Amber’s hand is on my shoulder, and I focus on that. There’s another thing, another reason I might be able to do it, something that won’t cost me as much. But I don’t say anything about it, just staring down Maarah instead, until she nods, slow and serious.
“I’m minded to go.” She stands, pressing her hands together in front of her belly. “Wasn’t intended t’give offense. Clean air.” She says that last like a benediction, and then she’s walking away, around a corner and probably gone.
“Betimes we forget, an we grow accustomed, who leads us.” Zidanya’s murmur cuts through the silence, and the others chuckle as I look at them quizzically.
“My lord is impressive.” Amber smirks conspiratorially at me, which clears up my confusion but throws me for another loop.
“I don’t want to touch that with a ten-foot manipulator extension. Impressive? In the same room as Zidanya?” I relax as everyone snickers and laughs in good humor, and look down at my now-empty plate. “Huh. That… went. And was really good. Thank you to whoever grabbed it for me, genuinely.”
“I had the provisioning of it.” Amber nods at Vonne. "She had the provisioning of our sweets, for which we’ve waited on you.”
I look at Vonne. My eyes rest on her for maybe a quarter-second before moving to the tray in her hands, covered by a shiny silvery topper. It’s carved with shapes of sed, dozens of them, each one of a different… species, or origin-species, however they reckon them around here. “Is that…”
She pauses another moment for the drama of it and whisks the top off of the tray, revealing thick, steaming-hot slices of spectacular-looking cherry pie. I hardly even notice the serried little balls of ice cream next to them.
“I’m.” Vonne puts the tray down in the center of the table, hands shaking a little. “I’m going to miss you. All of you.”
There’s a thickness in her voice, and a heaviness, and on instinct I go in to hug her. I’m not the only one; Amber does the same, and when I glance up, I see that Zidanya is half out of her chair and sitting back down.
“Gonna miss you too, Vonne.” I say it into the thick, silky softness of her fur, as she hugs me back with what feels like three tails and an arm.
“Not gonna—” Vonne hiccups, interrupting herself. “—gonna ask?”
“Nah.” I rub her back under the fur, up one side of her spine and down the other. “This is your home.”
We stay like that for a fair moment as she tries and fails to gather her composure, cries for a while, and then tries again, more successfully. It’s almost meditative, Amber and I maybe both crying a little too.
We’d gotten attached. Even knowing we’d be leaving, even knowing she’d stay behind, we’d gotten attached.
Eventually, she runs out of tears, by which I mean we all run out of tears but Amber and I finish crying first. Sara’s shamelessly already eaten her slice of pie and has started carving pieces off of ours, which has us all bursting into laughter and Vonne bursting into tears again for some reason while laughing, and she does something with the tray and pulls another slice of pie out of nowhere.
The pie is glorious, and the company is convivial, and we talk about puzzles and math and esoteric, useless bits of magic until it’s time to go.