I hesitated for a moment. While hudau mana was so rare that I wasn’t even sure that Meadow, Orykson, or Ikki would know, I did think that it was possible Edgar might. Not that he knew more than the three of them – he simply was uniquely suited to have information on these specific spells. Heck, if he didn’t, he might be willing to try them.
I wasn’t saying no to the spell entirely, but I’d hold off for now. What were the odds I’d need this, specifically, before I got a chance to speak to Edgar?
I spent a bit more time studying the manuals before stopping by the front desk to have them make copies of everything Alvaro hadn’t already copied. The woman working there hassled me over where I’d found these spells, right up until I handed over my new card. The woman made a choking noise.
“How in the primes did you get a lapis seal? You’re so…”
She glanced me up and down.
“You can’t even be twenty yet,” she muttered under her breath, and that caused Dusk to laugh. I just pretended that I couldn’t hear her.
“Are you really Malalchi Roth Baker?” she asked, and I handed over my ID this time, glad that I’d had it updated to reflect the tail and eyes.
She skimmed it over, then sighed and went to go make copies of the spell. When she returned, she passed them over, hesitating only on the one for the Curse of the Wild Spirits. She gave the standard warning about illegally distributing spells marked as a combat spell, then passed it over too. I thanked her, took the copies and put them in Dusk’s realm, then left the library.
I spent the rest of the day wandering around the city, working in my dad’s bakery, practicing my spellcraft, using all of my spatial mana to begin constructing and overcharging a teleportation platform in the backyard, and chipping away at more tiles in my second beastgate. I was getting along well now, and I didn’t think it would be too horribly long before I could start sketching the full-gate spell. I wondered how much faster or slower my Beast Mage’s Soul would make the practice?
On one hand, it wasn’t actually speeding up the mastery phase, just creating a bio-spiritual array that I could fill. On the other hand, having the bio-spiritual array eating up all my mana should probably be enough to count, since it would still consume all of the mana there?
I shrugged and let the topic go.
The one other errand that I did do that day was a far less dramatic, but far more important one – at least for me personally.
Housewarming and engagement gifts for Ed and Liz.
While my budget was anything but massive, I’d worked up a good bit of extra silver when I was at the sanctuary. I might not be able to get anything incredible, but I could still do a few things.
Figuring out what gifts I should give them was surprisingly hard. I didn’t have any specific ideas for either of them, and while I knew my brother, I didn’t know enough about Liz’s needs to get her anything worthwhile. I knew she was working as a part of her grandfather’s naval guild, but that was so nonspecific as to practically be useless. What could I even give to her that she couldn’t just buy?
In the end, I passed into the Ghost Market and went to buy a bottle of a vintage Vinopaen red wine. Buying it properly would have cost an arm and a leg, but for all that I wasn’t sure about Orykson’s casual acceptance of smuggling for profit, as opposed to what I’d done to help save an endangered specifies, I didn’t have enough of an ethical problem with it to not act as a patron.
I was a bit surprised to learn that the Ghost Market operated during the day, but Dusk told me that I was being silly – they would naturally do more business during the day. Too many people going to the park at night might be good for ambiance, and made it easier to access, but breaking in had been Orykson’s test of Dusk and myself, not an objective truth of how it worked.
After I dropped the bottle off at home, I headed to the hardware store and purchased a set of decent quality tools, then to a kitchen store to get some knives and a cutting board, grabbing the same brand that I’d used at the butcher’s shop to cut meat. They weren’t anything spectacular or fancy, but they were strong and sturdy, and should last a long time.
Finally, I headed to Every-Budget Enchanters.
I hadn’t been to the generalist enchanted item store since the visit with Ed almost a year ago, when I’d gotten the spatially warped suitcase. It was odd to think of how far I’d come since then.
The shop’s layout was every bit as chaotic as it had been the last time I was there, though the flying canoe in the center of the room had been replaced with a giant skeleton of some sort of dinosaur. Enchantments had been carved into its bones, and it swung its head one way, then the other, looking over the crowd of people.
If it weren’t for the fact that the mana running through it was so weak, barely pushing into third gate territory, it would have been a little scary. As it was, I was confident that a single cycle of Mantle Dragonfyre would obliterate the construct.
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I wandered through the store, looking at assorted items until I finally spotted what I needed – sports bags.
Both Liz and Ed were the sporty type, and Liz threw herself into combat much more than I wanted to, so I thought that this might be the kind of thing that would be able to help either of them.
I purchased two bags, each of them with basic spatial expansion to make them a bit bigger on the inside, but that wasn’t their main function. No, that would be the array of seventeen different cleaning spells built into the bags, which would scrub, cleanse, polish, wash, and more. Considering how easy it was for things to reek in the field without a solar mage who had a cleansing spell, like Kene, or the ability to take consistent showers and wash clothes consistently, like I could with my cauldron in Dusk’s plane, it felt like a good purchase.
My dad and I got to visit Ed and Liz’s apartment that evening. It was a cozy spot, with two bedrooms and a small side office. The kitchen was small, but functional, and all in all, it reminded me a surprising amount of the cabin in Dusk.
A large, battered gray tomcat was perched on the windowsill, and I waved at it. The cat ignored me, as cats were wont to do, but the moment that Kerbos spotted the cat, he turned and bolted. I let out a snort – Kerbos was the size of a golden retriever now, but I was guessing that the cat had established dominance when he was still small.
Liz and Ed had made a baked pasta dish, and as it was finishing in the oven, I presented my gifts to the newly engaged couple.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here for your actual housewarming, or for the proposal,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Ed said, though I could tell that he appreciated the apology. Liz waved her hand.
“You had stuff. That’s the nature of life.”
I studied her, but she seemed to actually mean it, and I wondered if the fact her parents and grandparents had to spend time at sea had gotten her used to people leaving for a while.
“Oh, these are perfect!” Liz said as she eyed the knives. “They’re the same sort I used when I worked in a kitchen when I was fifteen or so. I was using some old chipped knives I got fourth-hand, but with these… Kerbos!”
At her call, the armored and spiked dog-dragon wandered over and sat down in the kitchen, his tail wagging. The rivulets of metal on it made thumping sounds as it whacked into the counter, and I felt bad for the downstairs neighbors.
Liz opened a drawer and pulled out a knife, then put it on the cutting board and snapped the handle off, before tossing the blade in the air for Kerbos to catch. He leapt up and snatched it out of midair, then began chewing on it. There was a tearing and grinding noise as he munched on the blade.
I had a moment of panic as he chewed, but Ed laughed.
“Oh, right, you weren’t here for that. As Kerbos was getting bigger, he started gnawing on metal. It freaked me out the first time. You know those cheap metal chairs that some restaurants put outdoors? He took a bite out of it and started chewing on it like it was a slab of meat.”
As if to demonstrate Ed’s words, Kerbos put the knife blade, now mangled, on the floor and held it with his paws. As if it were a bone or a bit of jerky, he then tore off a bit and swallowed it.
“Huh,” I said. “Do you think he’s a Draigg-Blaidd Packlord?”
“I don’t know,” Ed said, “It seems unlikely, considering I just picked him out of an old stasis spell.”
“That makes it more likely, no?” Dad asked, speaking for the first time in a bit. “It’s old, and they’re extinct. And where did you even get Kerbos. You said a trial, but I assumed it was something from the Lightwatch.”
Ed told us about how Meadow had offered to take him through the trials of a thousand iron threads, from some old, now defunct sect in what was now wilderness, actually not too terribly far from Kene’s village.
Dusk chimed in, saying she thought it would be worth taking Olive, Thea, and Kater there, if Ed was okay with it. After all, if it wasn’t anything, then it would just be a waste of time, but if it was a source of Draigg-Blaidd packlords, then it might help save another species.
Ed readily agreed, and then pulled the casserole from the oven. As we ate dinner, punctuated by the occasional ripping of chunks of metal from Kerbos, I looked up at Liz and Ed.
“Are any of you thinking about joining me at Port Ruby?” I asked. “I’m sure that there would be opportunities for all of you. I mean it – opening a new base for your guild, working to help set up the lightwatch, or even just opening up a new branch of the bakery.”
“That’s well outside of my ambitions,” dad said. “I’m already running a decently done bakery, with a good amount of steady employees. Branching out wasn’t really something I ever had much of an interest in doing, and I don’t think this will change that.”
“My grandfather did consider it,” Liz said. “So far, the guild presence on the Isle of Crysite is still small, they’ve basically only established Port Ruby as a low population density town, and are now rolling out the work of connecting to the mainland and getting steady supplies. If we could work as protection escorts through the untamed waters, we could use the growth of the city to grow our guild.”
“I haven’t really looked at it,” Ed admitted. “In the Lightwatch, they’re offering a premium for transfers out there, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. My family is here.”
Dusk looked up and made a burbling-brook noise, telling them that she and I were working on creating a portal network. It was going to be limited, especially in the beginning, as we weren’t Arcanists, but we could, in theory, open gateways between Crysite, here, and Delitone, if we got one set up in Crysite.
“That’s… good to know,” Liz said. “I’m sure there are arcanists working on establishing those sorts of portal networks on their own, but we don’t have an in with any spatial arcanists, and my grandpa’s range with shadowstepping is a hair under twenty miles.”
She looked at Dusk, then at me.
“Would you two be willing to transport a few key individuals back and forth on occasion, if we did? We would pay you, of course – maybe a bit less than a normal, registered private portal service, but we would still compensate you.”
Dusk and I shared a glance, then we both nodded our agreement.
“For you and Ed? No charge. But we could work something out with your guild,” I said.
“Given that this is a relatively dangerous region, still being settled, property will likely be cheap,” dad said. “If you really can open portals to take us back and forth, then it might be worth looking at taking the raise by working there, Ed. Cheap property that’s going to raise in value quickly? The two of you could build a house out there, much sooner than you could here.”
Ed looked contemplative, and we spent the rest of the dinner talking over various possibilities, before my dad and I headed back to the bakery for the night.