Chapter Eighty-Three
How Iron Rusts
Unaware that anything else was going on thirty feet below her, Rose walked into the library about two minutes after Sarah had followed Michael down the hidden passage. She smiled at Dolores as she wandered up and the librarian’s eyes latched onto the steaming coffee in Rose’s hands.
Rose smiled and carefully placed the cup on a coaster on her desk. “One and a half sugars, right, Dee?”
Dolores looked at the steaming coffee and picked it up, plainly asking, “You want something?”
“Just need to take a minute in the General Archives. Amekot signed off, but he’s told me not to share the details of the investigation.”
Rose drew out her orders and folded the parchment so that the mark of permission was the only sentence visible on the document before handing it over.
Dolores straightened her glasses and clicked her tongue as she read. She glanced up at Rose, standing patiently. “Come on, then.”
Dolores opened a low drawer and produced a small, silver key. She then led Rose around the right side of the library to an ornate door, above which was inscribed General Archives. She unlocked the heavy bolt and pulled it open, waving Rose toward a darkened, descending stair.
Rose had visited the General Archives many times before, and she quickly realised that bringing Dolores a cup of hot coffee nice and early was the easiest way to smooth the process over. Her shoes echoed on the wooden steps until she came to the bottom where another door sat.
Dolores followed her down and pushed the key in once more, turning it with a hollow, metallic click. She opened the door and gestured Rose inside before glancing back up to the steps. She smartly handed Rose the key and said sternly, “No smoking, eating, drinking, or talking. If I smell, hear, or suspect any of it, you’re banned.”
Rose nodded and stood aside as Dolores turned toward the pitch-black archive and spoke chantingly beneath her breath. The air puffing from the mystic words turned to white smoke and Rose watched as it tumbled through the darkness within the room. Slowly the wisps of white magic ran through the shadows like a wildfire, eating up the dark and leaving it empty of shadow, and somehow empty of light. All things sat in shades of desaturation, as though the very colour was pulled from the room.
It was a piece of archivist’s magic. Since light faded parchment and ink, and some of the documents in the archive were older than the fortress, it was a handy way to see without damaging the texts.
Dolores finished the casting then turned and wandered back up the steps again.
The General Archives room was effectively just a lower level to the library itself, but rather than being filled with wall-to-wall with tall bookshelves and thick tomes, it was crammed with chest-high filing cabinets, each meticulously labelled and filled with rather unexciting fortress information.
Rose walked down a row of cabinets and stopped at one marked with a thin white label which read, Arcancy Information. She searched the alphabetical labels on the three tall drawers and stopped when she found Cloaking & Concealment. The mage pulled open the draw and a thick wad of files flittered out in front of her.
Her assignment had asked her to gather all the Legacies with some form of stealth Arcancy so that they could more accurately form the sabotage plan. She looked at the stacked drawer and Rose sighed. She grabbed every file and bundled them under her arm, pushing the drawer closed with her foot.
She sauntered back up into the main library complex, locking each door behind her and smoothly tried to walk out when Dolores frowned over her glasses.
“I know you’re not removing files from that room, Miss Hawthorne.”
Rose bit her tongue, wondering if she could somehow get a fresh loaf of banana bread in the woman’s hands. “I need them, Dee. It’s important.”
Dolores crossed her arms and glared at Rose as she walked by her desk toward the door. “Rose, I’ll tell you what’s important; ensuring we don’t lose classified documents. Return those files, now.”
Rose slowed to a stop and a tired scowl rolled onto her face. “Hillborn asked me to do something. This is how I’m doing it.”
“And who do you think makes me sit here all day? I won’t ask again.”
Rose turned to face her properly and firmed her grip on the files. “So, come take ‘em.”
Dolores blinked and straightened her glasses but didn’t stand.
“No? Great. I’ll bring them back later. Bye, Dee.”
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Rose strolled out of the library and down the steps onto the fortress grass, feeling her heart threatening to blow out through her ribcage.
If you were that confident every day, you’d rule the damn world by the end of autumn, she thought, beginning to chuckle from pure nerves.
Rose opened the first file as she walked, spotted the name, Karmine Winchester, and adjusted her heading toward the Forges. Before long, she arrived at the door to the building walked through the plumes of smoke and steam, spying Avery across the room.
The one-armed noble was busy tinkering with a beautifully ornate shortsword, lightly inscribing runes onto its blade as Rose wandered over.
“Avery, is Karmine around?”
The young noble frowned and rubbed their tired eyes. “What day is it?”
Rose pursed her lips and said, “Arloday.”
Avery nodded and waved to the dark stairway behind them before returning to their inscribing. “Conjurement. He’s there every Arlo until Rising’s end, so you might still catch him.”
Rose thanked them and darted down the dark steps into the command room. She looked through spectator glass and found Karmine had conjured up an enormous field of long grass, above waist height, seemingly sprawling on forever, dotted with tall, spindly trees, nearly barren of leaves. She scanned through the scrolls left open on the main table and saw the word Scalprum titling one.
Rose shivered as she remembered her last encounter with a Scalprum. They were wolf-size creatures, with bony legs, spiny backs, and flat faces filled with long teeth and wide eyes. Their name meant ‘Tail-Blade’, creatively describing an enormous, shovel-shaped weapon on the end of their tails made from sharpened bone and smaller jagged thorns.
Rose looked back to the fields and frowned, wondering if perhaps Karmine had already left, when three patches of grass erupted with movement, shivering and shaking as tail-blades stuck up from the foliage like shark-fins.
The beasts scuttled to the centre of the room, huddling around one particular tree as they screeched in a hideous tone.
Rose considered just deactivating the spell when Karmine appeared out nowhere, leaping down from the branches above and roaring as he slammed a great, dark maul, into the skull of the nearest Scalprum.
One of the others reared in shock as the second twisted and swung its bladed tail at his head, only for the tall man to duck sharply beneath it and crack the creature upside the head with his weapon, sending it hurtling into the fields as it turned to dust.
The last beast screeched and snapped at his stomach and Karmine narrowly cracked it away with the butt of his hammer, knocking it to the ground, dazed. Before it had time to regather its senses, the man brought his maul down once more and the room resounded with an echoing crack!
Rose blew out an impressed breath and spoke the disabling-words to the man’s spells, resetting the room as he wandered back inside.
Karmine stepped inside and saw Rose, immediately lighting up and yelling, “Miss Hawthorne!” in his deep, melodic voice.
Karmine was what Rose imagined a bear would look like in the shape of a person, if it was also the heroic prince in a faerie-tale and the unconditional grandfather to every young person to cross his path. He was a tall, ebony-skinned, bright-smiled man with a shaven head and strong arms. His eyes wore stories and his skin was wrinkled from the sun, but not time, which everyone thought was unfair because he was technically the oldest person at Fort Guardian. He had two Arcancies, a cloaking power, much like Nichole’s, and an idle power, quite unlike anyone else’s, allowing his body to age at half the speed of any regular Draendican. In short, Karmine had lived seventy-seven cycles on Draendica, but his Arcancy meant he was only showing about thirty-eight and some change. This made for a grandfatherly knowledge intertwined with a smug amount of energy and young man’s build.
Rose wrapped the tall man in a hug as he asked in her native tongue, Ri, “To what do I owe the pleasure?” His Crekaen accent was thick, but always poetic.
Rose took a seat on the table and replied in Ri, “Hillborn’s sent me around to gather troops for an upcoming mission. Before I can sign you up, however, I’ve got to ask... are you hanging around for the siege?”
Karmine leant his maul up against the command table and ran his hand across his sweat-glistened scalp before grabbing a small towel he’d brought with him. “It’s a tough one. I suppose it depends if he has any kind of a plan?”
Rose wrinkled her face in uncertainty and said, “Claims to. Normal I’d be worried too but Jack seems to have faith, so that’s good enough for me.”
Karmine leaned against the bench and combed his fingers through his thick, chestnut coloured beard. “Well, I love Jack, he’s a good man, but are you sure he’s thinking of the here and now? I’d hate to find out he’s fighting this war out of some need to quench that old, burning itch.”
Rose thought on it for a moment and idly shook her head. “If it were just about himself, sadly, I’d say you might be right. But if he really didn’t have faith, he would’ve sent me packing.”
Karmine threw both hands up and shrugged. “Sounds good to me, what’s the mission?”
Rose did a small, excited dance and said, “Fantastic. Our first job is to find everyone else.” She held up the thick stack of files and Karmine sighed.
“Ah, the admin, of course.” He opened the first file and looked pleasantly surprised. “Well, we can start with the tavern, because Nydol will still be sleeping off her hangover.”
*****
Michael’s mind was trapped in an endless swirling of flashing light and bursts of pain as he failed over and over again to find the specific moment in time. His eyes clamped shut could see far more as Arcancy tore through them, but none of it was anything he was looking for. Flashes of darkness, of a world long before Fort Guardian, glimpses of forestland and wilderness untouched by any hand, neither Legacy nor mortal. His mind ached like a small metal rod was being pushed through one ear and out the other. Michael could feel his fingernails, far, far away digging into the wood of the table.
The true world almost seemed like a distant dream.
And then the light blinding him within his mind vanished and cold breath rushed into Michael lungs. The words he focused on settled in his mind, like sand was flowing through his fingers and he’d finally tightened his fist.
Michael opened his eyes again to find he was no longer in the room, but outside it, walking down the hallway again.
The eyes were not his own and with every step it became more and more clear. Their walk, their stride, the very plant of the foot were all so different in peculiar ways that he would have to be drunk to miss them.
Michael even felt slightly taller, and immediately searched his mind, trying to think of all those in Fort Guardian who had any noticeable height over him.
The unseen figure stalked toward the sealed, metal door and reached out a long-fingered hand, ushering it open with a measured push.