Kayseo, Pinisla, Harvest Season, 6th rot., mid-afternoon of the 3rd day – Foskos time
“Lady,” the Coyn crew boss stood in the doorway, uncertain if she should enter the sitting room where Kayseo was working, “we have found the adit. You said you wanted to know when we found it.”
“Well, that’s good, isn’t it, Suli?" Kayseo looked up and smiled at the middle-aged former spoot slave.
“We have good access now, Lady, into the adit and it’s not collapsed. The slide penetrated into the workings about two hundred hands. The air isn’t good, though. We need to vent it before it’s safe.”
“Why do you look so grim, Suli?" Kayseo asked. "I thought you and your workers would be happy that you made such good progress before the snow arrives.”
“Lady, we found the remains of many miners where the slide invaded the adit. We don't know how many. The air is bad, so we didn't go in to count. But we can tell that they tried to dig their way out. They didn’t make it.”
Kayseo gasped and was immediately distraught. "Oh gods, those poor souls." She put both hands flat on the arms of the chair and took a deep breath to steady herself, forcing herself not to weep. She had known some of the miners.
Fire opal was too valuable and fickle to be worked by the condemned, who were sent to the copper and tin mines in the mountains east of Omexkel and Rigdit. Pinisla had built up its own professionals over the centuries who dug the drifts and adits and carefully coerced the fire opal nodules and slabs from the silicic veins. They were killed along with the rest of Pinisla's inhabitants on the day a massive mudslide wiped out the town and manse.
Kayseo collected herself and turned a somber face to Suli, "Please come in, Suli, and sit down. I need to consult with my mother.”
Suli looked around the room at all of the Cosm-sized furniture doubtfully.
“Let me give you a lift, Suli,” Kayseo stood up, walked over to the dirty and dusty Coyn, and picked her up.
“Lady, I’m filthy. You can’t put me on your new furniture,” Suli protested.
Kayseo, holding the Coyn at eye level, frowned at her. Then she put Suli down, got a dish towel from the sideboard, and placed it on the chair next to her own. She picked Suli back up and put her on the chair.
“Thank you for reminding me, Suli,” Kayseo gave the Coyn a brief smile. Then she mindcasted for her adoptive mother.
*Mother Tyoep, the diggers have found the mine. There are complications. Please come to the sitting room. The crew boss is here with news.*
*I am on my way.*
“I really need to get some Coyn-friendly furniture,” Kayseo shook her head and looked at Suli. “Sorry for the inconvenience.”
"Lady, you're the heir of the holding. You don't need to apologize to your workers." said Suli, the former spoot slave, bemused by Kayseo’s consideration.
"If I want to keep my workers happy and productive, I do," Kayseo disagreed. "Is your crew out of the hole and away from the bad air?"
“Yes, I pulled everyone as soon as the air lamps went out. It smells off, too. Some of the crew got headaches, felt dizzy, and were sick to their stomachs. One passed out.”
“What? You should have called for a healer immediately.”
“I sent a runner to the healers,” Suli said. “Someone from the chapel shrine is already at the diggings.”
“Oh, good thinking, Suli,” Kayseo was relieved. “How many took ill?”
“Six. Jost was the one who breached the adit first and got the bad air right in the face. He got it the worst. We sent for a healer as soon as we got him out of the hole. He fell over. We had to hoist him out. That was about a half mark ago on the water clock.”
“Wait a moment, Suli,” Kayseo held her hand up and then tranced, searching for the feel of healing magic on the mountainside. She found what she was looking for and extended her clairvoyance. Two healers attended the sick Coyn: Thuorfosi and the new addition, Nutwesee Drover, who arrived on Weeding Day. As she watched, Kayseo was startled when Thuorfosi cast stasis on her patient.
*Thu, what’s up?* Kaysea mindcasted.
*Kayseo? I guess you just heard. That was fast. This guy got a face full of stinkdamp. I can feel that his blood has gone wrong, but I can't figure out why, so I cast stasis. We should send him to Aybhas because the bad blood is affecting his brain.*
*Is his name Jost?*
*How did you know that?* Thuorfosi cast back.
*His crew boss is sitting next to me in the manse. She came to report. I’ll send a garrison gal and an eagle right away. I’ll send up a wagon for the other sick Coyn.*
*Thank you, dear heart.*
Kayseo broke the connection and sighed. “I’m afraid Jost will be going to Aybhas,” she told Suli. “Please bear with me because I need to do more mindcasting now."
Kayseo contacted Pinisla’s small garrison and sent a lieutenant and her eagle to take Jost to the healers in Aybhas. She also sent a wagon up to the diggings to carry the sick workers back down to the new townsite. When she finished, she found her adoptive mother, Tyoep, sitting next to her.
"The diggers found the mine," Tyoep stated, glancing at Suli, who must have told them. "What have you arranged so far, Kayseo?"
“Eagle transport to Aybhas for the Coyn who got the worst of the bad air and a wagon back to town for the rest. That’s all I’ve had time for so far, Mother Ty.”
“I suggest you send some garrison gals to cast a barrier around the diggings until you can fence the area off,” Tyoep suggested. “You want to prevent accidents, especially for kids who tend to discount the risks and decide to explore."
“Good idea,” Kayseo said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
"Because I've been a garrison captain who's had to deal with these sorts of things, and you've been a healer who hasn't. Don't worry, dear. You're picking up on what you need to run a holding faster than I thought you would. So, what should you do next?” Tyoep fell into coaching mode since Kayseo was new to the responsibilities of a lord holder.
“I’ll ask Otty to erect a fence around the diggings,” Kayseo decided. “We can pull one of the house building crews to do that. I will need to send a bird to the King and a bird to Father Bobbo to tell them we have found the mine. I also need to contact the Singing Shrine, the Building Shrine, and the Hospitable Shrine for help. Then I need to find room in the budget to pay for their services where applicable.”
“The Singing Shrine?” Tyoep frowned, wondering why.
“For a windshaper, Mother Ty,” Kayseo explained. “A windshaper can move the bad air out and good air in. Then the Building Shrine can help us fix the ventilation in the mine so this doesn’t happen again.”
“And the Hospitable Shrine?”
“Suli’s crew found remains,” Kayseo grimaced. “We will send them off in the proper way to Gertzpul.”
“Kayseo, love, you don’t need to. Their souls passed on four years ago. A simple cremation should suffice in this case.”
"I disagree, Mother Ty," Kayseo said in a voice that would accept no compromises. "Funerals are not for the dead. They are for the benefit of the living. We will have a proper funeral. Then we will set up a consecrated space for future cremations of any mudslide victims we uncover, since I envision we will indeed find some. And I need to write twenty-six notes to the other survivors of the Pinisla disaster, to alert them that we will hold a ceremony for the remains we recover.”
“Well, if you put it that way, all I can say is, 'What can I do to help, dear heart?'" Tyoep said.
"I'm sure I will need help arranging a funeral, especially since I'm not fast on my feet," Kayseo sighed. "I may need to go to Black Falls to deal directly with the Singing Shrine. I will try to get to Aybhas tomorrow to check up on the injured Jost. What else? Oh, yes. Suli, you and your crew will have the rest of today and tomorrow off, with pay. Check in with Lady Tyoep or me around the sixth bell tomorrow to see if you'll be working the day after.
"Mother Ty, will you please post guards at the diggings? I'll get my messages sent while you do that."
“Are you sure you should be running around this much, Kayseo?” Tyoep asked. “You need to be careful not to exhaust yourself while pregnant.”
Kayseo laughed, "Being pregnant certainly hasn't stopped you, Mother Ty. I'm sure I'll be fine. I won't tire out sitting on an eagle flying around for a day."
"Dear heart, it's not the sitting on the eagle part I worry about. Running off the Healing Shrine is where you'll get into trouble because you can't say no if someone asks you to lend your healing magic. Don't give me that face, young Lady. You know you have difficulty saying no when asked to help."
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Kayseo pouted. Tyoep knew her too well.
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Moo'upegan, at sea, Harvest Season, 6th rot., 4th day – East Coast time
I don't know what I expected the Prophet to be like, but whatever that was, the Prophet wasn't it. I certainly didn't expect someone so young and so cute. She looked maybe thirteen or fourteen, though she said she was older. The Beloved thought she was sixteen or seventeen.
From my healer probes, I knew she had her second molars, but her third molars were not developed yet. She said her second molars came in while she was still living in the wilderness, more than a year before she started living in Foskos. Going by teeth, she could be sixteen. She didn't look sixteen, but I think that was due to her size. It’s easy to be mistaken for a child if you’re smaller than the norm.
The Prophet was tiny. I had to bend my knees to pick her up if I was standing. And she weighed nothing at all. It was alarming how little she ate. I found it amusing that she was more concerned with feeding me than feeding herself. She was so thin it concerned me.
I found the Prophet adorable, witty, irreverent, and mysterious. Sometimes, she even scared me, especially when she was annoyed and the godmarks flared.
This tiny thing made me feel like I was the child at times. It made no sense to me that she knew so much. She looked so young but spoke like a wise, experienced elder.
I mentioned this to her after a few days. She just nodded her head and said in her teaching voice, “You are experiencing what is called cognitive dissonance. This occurs when something or someone fails to meet normal expectations, like a kitten beating up a snow bear. Strangely enough, people cope better with cognitive dissonance when the mismatch between expectation and reality is large, like the kitten and the snow bear, than when the mismatch is subtle, like someone who looks like me but talks like a mature adult with a vast education.
“The uncanny valley is a form of cognitive dissonance. Research at San Diego on the uncanny valley effect has shown that the human brain becomes active and agitated, especially in the parietal cortex, when the gap between reality and expectation is narrow rather than large – especially when the perception of the gap is visual. The...”
“Wait!” I cried, lost once again as this child pontificated like an instructor at a temple or shrine. “What are you talking about. What research? Where’s San Diego? I don’t understand.”
The Beloved looked at me with a surprised face and then smacked herself on the forehead. "Dammit!” Then she sighed and collapsed to sit next to me on the steering platform. "I guess I need to tell you everything about why the gods picked me to be their Prophet, so you aren't confused when I say something outrageous again. Wait, Moo," she pointed off the left side of the boat, "what's that?"
Then I saw it. It was a rising plume of smoke. I tranced briefly to get a better look with my clairvoyance. I saw a small merchant ship on fire, pursued by a larger ship.
“Unacceptable,” I stood up, alarming the Beloved.
“Wait. What?” The Prophet scrambled backward, away from my feet.
“Piracy,” I stated as I levitated. “Let me take care of this. I’ll be right back.”
The first thing I did was put out the fire on the smaller ship. It had a crew of Coyn out of Souk. Then I flew over the attacking ship, which was crewed by Cosm. The pirate ship looked Mattamukan to me. Without a navy trireme to back me up, I didn't have the luxury of taking the pirate crew captive. I did not have the means to keep them alive and imprisoned to put them on trial later in Kwabin. I would judge them here and sentence them now. The punishment for piracy is death, so now they would die at my righteous hands.
I contemplated roasting the pirates with a fireball. Then I remembered the Prophet's anxious scouring of our half-wrecked boat looking for stores. Because I knew the Beloved would want to salvage stores off the pirate ship, I decided to cast the charm of death on everyone onboard.
Only the most powerful mages can cast the charm of death. It took a bit out of me, but I stopped the hearts of all fourteen pirates. I had to do it quickly before the one silverhair onboard attacked me. Then I flew over to the Coyn ship. Because I had already learned that my size and small boats don’t mix, I did not set my feet down on their ship but levitated off to the side.
“I greet you, Souk ship. Do you have any injured who need immediate care?" I asked. "I do know some healing magic.”
“Greetings, Lady Mage, who appeared out of nowhere,” an older Coyn man bowed. “If you set down and then sit in the center of our ship, we can bring our worst of the wounded to you." He gestured to a spot between the mast and the steering deck. I slowly levitated myself there and then carefully sat cross-legged, watching to ensure I didn't rock the boat. I had learned my lesson the hard way about balancing the load on a ship. I regretted that the Prophet couldn't see how well I had progressed.
The Soukian Coyn had two badly injured sailors, both with Cosm-scaled arrows in them. I cast stasis on both, slowly removing the arrows and repairing the incision wounds. I lost track of time after removing five arrows and healing the two Coyn. When I finished, I was surprised to see the Cosm pirate ship tied alongside the Soukian vessel.
The Coyn captain got my attention and pointed at my ketch, which I could see was now only a few thousand hands away.
“Do you recognize that boat?” the Coyn captain asked. “It looks like it’s in bad shape.”
"That's the boat I'm with," I replied, feeling more tired than I wanted to admit. "It looks like my companion took the opportunity to catch up while I took care of the pirates. That boat is a Chem ketch of war. After our trireme broke up during the Demon Wind six days ago, the Prophet and I spent the night on a hatch. I spotted this ship the next day. When we boarded it, it was empty, and both masts were broken. We've been on it ever since. I've been hoping our northerly course would take us to land, so we could find a port and get help."
“Well, now that the pirates are no longer a problem, I have no difficulty taking you back to Souk with us. Help at sea is universal. We have some problems to solve first, like replacing our burnt sail. I'm also concerned whether we have stores adequate to keep someone your size watered and fed. We're not equipped to feed Cosm."
“We have the means to make fresh water," I said, though I wouldn't have the energy to cast the water charm until after I rested, "and the Prophet is an exceptional catcher of fish. We can feed ourselves if that is your concern."
When I said that, his face relaxed, and he let out a sigh of relief. Then he looked up at me, "Who is this Prophet you're talking about? All I can see is a girl at the tiller of your boat."
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Kayseo, Pinisla, Harvest Season, 6th rot., 3rd-4th days, Foskos time
I spent the last two bells of the third day sending messages, with birds off to all the relevant shrines. The Holy Sutsusum sent a bird back before the seventh bell. She wrote that I should give her two days' advance notice, and she would come to consecrate a site and perform the funeral. I felt honored and grateful for her response.
I had a bird from my Mistress first thing in the morning. The Blessed Lisaykos had spent the better part of her evening solving the problem of Jost. She wrote that Jost had been poisoned by something called hydrogen sulfide. It sounded like an Emily thing to me. Then I remembered my Mistress's revelation from Mugash, which was about gasses and how they affect blood and body organs. It may be an Emily thing, but if a weird gas was in the blood, it would also be a Lisaykos thing.
The Blessed Lisaykos’s solution to the poisoning was to replace all the blood in Jost’s body. The hardest part was finding enough people whose blood matched Jost’s. While replacing his blood improved his physical state, the toxin had damaged the Coyn’s ability to exchange oxygen at the cellular level and had caused dispersed cell death in parts of his kidneys, lungs, and brain. When the High Priestess tried to bring him back to consciousness, he went into convulsions. My Mistress had put him back into stasis for now.
Lisaykos called an immediate emergency session of the Convocation with the addition of the King and Queen. She requested that Thuorfosi and I both attend. A request from a revelator was nothing less than a binding command. I delegated my arrangements for making the mine site safe to Mother Tyoep and my wonderful man Otty. Then I sent for Thuorfosi, chose to take crutches rather than the walker, and requested my griffin and an eagle from the Mounts Residence.
“Crutches?” Thuorfosi met me in front of the Manse. “I thought you preferred the walker.”
“We’re going to the Healing Shrine, which has all those stairs, Thu,” I explained as I approached Drilfetl, my new griffin. He was big for a griffin, but I was big for a silverhair. If I still had feet, I would have having passed twenty hands earlier this year. Even without my false feet strapped on, I was now a full head taller than Thuorfosi, who was now the shortest of our little trio of friends.
Drilfetl was the son of Pibl, the Holy Kamagishi’s mount. Pibl had heard I was looking for a mount and recommended him. He was young, barely an adult. He recently flunked the maneuverability tests to be a military mount, which I believe was the unfortunate fault of his wings. He had long wings compared to their width, which cut down on his agility in slow flight, but his primaries were too slotted for fast flight. He was a griffin whose wing anatomy was best suited for comfortable cruising over long distances.
Because he was born in captivity, he didn’t have the hunting skills to survive on his own and lacked an aerie to support him. Most silverhairs avoided larger griffins because of the feeding cost. But Drillfetl was a good match for me. He was big enough to carry me without undue exertion. He wasn't a speedy flier, but he was fast enough to get me to Aybhas in half a bell. His ride was so smooth, which was important since I had no feet to help my balance. Drilfetl also would lie down for me to mount and dismount, which was unheard of for a griffin. Like Asgotl, he didn’t have the usual arrogance that most griffins suffer from. We had sealed a one-year contract, but I already knew I wanted to renew it.
My local leather shop in Pinisla Newtown built me a saddle with straps for my thighs and an elevated backrest with a seat belt so I wouldn't fall off. The only purpose for the stirrups was to help me mount. I often used a levitation charm on myself rather than pulling myself up and getting my other leg over the raised saddletree. I got scolded when my family and friends caught me levitating to mount. They would nag me that magic power was finite and that I should conserve my magic for more important purposes. But I have magic to spare, so why shouldn't I use it? Sometimes, the mores of using magic made little sense to me.
“Uhg! Crutches,” Drilfetl gave me a reproachful look. He hated carrying the crutches. Even with the bottom piece folded up, he sometimes clipped the ends and broke secondary feathers when he beat his wings to land.
“Sorry, Drilfetl,” I bonked my forehead against his beak in greeting. “We’re going to the Healing Shrine with all its horrible stairs.
“My eagle could carry them,” Thuorfosi suggested.
“If someone holds them up so I can grab them with my talons, I can do that for you, Lady Kayseo,” said Thuorfosi’s eagle.
“Welladay,” I said to the eagle. “Which one are you?” I had a terrible time telling eagles apart. We had contracted with five retired military eagles to provide mount services for the holding. I liked hiring eagles who had been with the army. They never complained on the rare occasions that we asked them to carry more than one passenger or freight.
“I’m Elledees, Lady.”
"Thank you, Elledees," I said, and I meant it. Crutches were not as comfortable as the walker but they were the most practical alternative for traveling because of stairs. I didn’t use them much in Pinisla because Father Bobbo, mindful that I had no feet, decreed that all the buildings in Pinisla Newtown would be one story.
“My wing feathers and I thank you, Elledees," Drilfetl bonked beaks with the eagle.
"Anytime, youngster," Elledees replied. All the retired military eagles were kind to the very junior griffin. It made me happy that our contracted mounts got along well. Amicable relations between the three flying races didn’t always happen within the same mounts’ residence.
“Do you know why our Mistress called the Convocation?” Thuorfosi asked as I got up on Drilfetl.
“All I know is that it has something to do with Jost,” I replied as I strapped myself to my saddle.
The day was bright, cloudless, and clear. Once we were aloft, I could see across the Great Cracks to the mountain ranges to the west, whose summits were already wreathed in snow. It reminded me of almost a year ago when Emily, Asgotl, and I ran off to the hot springs in those mountains.
That thought led to the next, which was my desire to develop the hot springs southwest of White Lake. Emily had told me about this thing called tourism, and I wanted to see if I could improve Pinisla's wealth by selling some. It could also be a good way to employ Coyn in service tasks that suited their smaller stature. I had taken to heart the Holy Rakkalbos’s message in her letter to crafters and holders, On the economic benefits of Coyn work creation.