Their only fortune was that their supplies remained in good order. Robur knew some medicine while Eris had a sophomore’s grasp of herbalism, so together they managed to treat their myriad burns and cuts before splinting her leg. The fracture needed to be set.
With Supernal Vision Robur located the point at which the bone was broken. He peered through her flesh as if it were glass.
“Normally I believe two more people would we used, to hold your leg in place while it was pushed together..." he said.
“Would you like to fetch Kauom and Vlodmir?” Eris growled.
He stared at her, confused, and answered with sincerity, “They’re dead.”
“Set the bone now!”
A moment, then a nod. He found the location of the fracture and placed his hands on either side of the leg, then pushed the fractured parts together.
Eris screamed. She felt like the skin below her left knee was about to slough off, along with her foot.
“Done,” Robur said. “I will bind it now. We should still visit an apothecary soon, however.”
“And pay him with what?” she said, eyes on the mineshaft overhead.
“I can sell some of my books. You still have much jewelry. What about the Manastone diadem?”
“That is too valuable to sell.”
He hesitated. “I don’t understand.”
“I mean there is no buyer for such a thing in this miserable, freezing, stunted principality.”
“What about your armbands?”
She folded her arms to cover her biceps. The gilt armlets were worth a great fortune. But they were enchanted and worth far more to the right buyer, and moreover she liked wearing them herself.
She groaned in despair again.
“Do not torture me with such decisions till I have survived the return to town,” she muttered. “Death may yet spare me the indignity.”
Her leg fogged her thinking. She wanted to hide within her bedroll from the world and all its cold. She felt as though everything was being taken away from her. When next she glanced in a mirror would she see an old crone, too? What followed?
“We should decide at least where we next intend to go,” Robur said. He gathered bandages and prepared makeshift splints—boards of wood salvaged from the mineshaft.
“Swep-Nos is our only choice.”
“That is a long way to walk on one leg…”
“Then I am lucky the way is downhill.”
“That may be harder.”
“Luckier still to have you to use as a crutch.”
A pause. “We passed another village by on the way to Akancar.”
“Feel the air. Do you see the snow? We will be stranded in your village for all winter if we do not move now. There is no other choice.”
She was right. As always. Robur knew it, and he relented, and he agreed, so that when they were finished treating themselves, they wasted no more time.
Her Essence was still tapped from Robur’s subdual of the Manawyrm. Robur himself was drained, but he did have an idea: he conjured a small forcefield around Eris’ leg as an additional brace, so that she could walk without buckling over. That helped for so long as he could sustain it—which was only as they made it down through the hills, past the still-deserted upper streets of the town, and onto the highway that led out of the mountains.
The pain was very bad. It was the sort of pain that took over, that demanded vocalization, that banished all other thoughts and didn’t even have the good decency to pass quickly as it came: it lingered more or less permanently, especially when she walked, which was whenever it was bright out. She also now had no cloak.
The snow did not stick. The whole journey down the mountain froze icicles through her bloodstream all the same. When she did manage to think, Eris’ mind incessantly returned to Kauom. She found herself annoyed. She was worrying when there was nothing to worry on. He was dead, so he was no longer worth any thought. Why did she think on him anyway? And why did she wonder how things might have gone differently? Was there anything more pointless to fret over than the past?
The barrage of introspection was so relentless that she was almost grateful for the distraction her leg offered.
By now the defeated return to Swep-Nos was familiar. The guards recognized them on their entrance, and they recognized Kauom’s absence for what it was. Whether they were delighted or appalled beneath their helmets she couldn’t say. The people adored adventurers when great treasures came back to town and loathed them otherwise. So it went.
Robur found a buyer for his books. Fifty drachmae on resale. That was enough for a while, plus a trip to the barber-surgeon. There Eris crawled downstairs into a typical Dwarven basement, where a typical—that was to say hideous—Dwarven woman with fingers like earthworms rebound her leg. Incidentally she did not have a beard. Eris may have preferred her if she had.
“So what was it?” she said. She applied a strange sort of paper bandage that hardened when smeared with rancid-smelling honey.
“What was what?” Eris replied, eyes and jaw both closed.
“You’ve got a bruise the size of the Prince’s jewels and a bone flattened ‘n’ fractured, and burns all up and down your leg. So what was it? Your husband didn’t do this to you, did he?”
She had been given a tincture to help soothe the pain, but it wasn’t working. Still her answers came with a spot of distraction: “My husband?”
“The young human man you came in with,” the dwarf said, “we’ve all seen you two together.”
Eris gave her best mocking laugh. “You think I would marry Robur?”
“That’s what all women say,” She leaned in and smiled. “You should’ve seen me when I was a debutante. Striking thing, I was. Hold still. One push. Just—there we are.”
“I very much doubt that,” Eris hissed.
“So? Did he do it? You’re too young to be coming to visit me over family business like that—”
“He is not my husband! Gah! Is the pain of my leg not enough? Must you interrogate me?”
The woman retreated to a reagent counter. “Just making conversation, miss. So what did it? Fall onto a forge?”
“I was hit by a staff wielded by the white steel fingers of an Arkwi infernal golem in the depths of a mine.”
She considered this. “He isn’t worth the lie, dear.”
“You are even—” stupider than you look, you miserable, stunted, idiot of a dwarf, she tried to say, but when the woman moved her leg, the pain blinded her. She screamed instead.
“That should be done for now,” the woman said. “We’ll need to cut the cast open in six weeks to see if it’s healed right. Make sure to put as little weight as possible on it, or it might not heal all the way. Then you’ll walk with a limp for all the rest of your life.”
Eris panted against the operating table. Focusing on breathing. The pain spiked, but for the first time in days it slowly faded.
She felt fingers grab her scalp.
“Look how lovely your hair is. My, I’ve never seen thicker in years, and so deep brown, but so matted too. You could use a cut.”
“My hair is not matted,” Eris protested distantly. The tincture’s effects were becoming more pronounced.
“I’ve seen worse, but…come now. Let me clean you up and give a trim. You can hardly limp away from me, can you?” she laughed.
It was a joke. Probably.
Eris took fierce care of her hair. She rated it nearly as valuable as her body’s appendages. But she was here now, and she was incapable of moving from this spot except by force. She a felt sort of distant anger as the procedure commenced, too tired and beaten down to resist, but felt quite different when a hand mirror was leveled before her eyes.
Her hair was still long. Still beautiful. But it was thinned and straightened and detangled, and now she appeared much more manicured than had ever seemed possible to her after so long of trying to manage the length by herself. The barber put it all up in one of those ghastly Dwarf styles for ladies, with a dozen knots and horns like a goat, but even still she was grateful for the treatment.
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Eris spent all day reading whatever she could find, except fiction, which she loathed. If she felt the need to dwell within a world of lies she felt certain she could construct them herself. But that was only half her time in convalescence. The rest was spent before a mirror, determining what to do with her hair.
An entire day passed in which she did nothing but experiment. She bunned, tailed, braided, and knotted until her scalp went numb and her fingers cramped. It was the sort of thing which she knew was pointless, since studying would better herself more and regardless of how she put her hair she felt certain she would be beautiful, but did anyway to waste time.
It was while she was engaged in just this cycle of vanity that Robur knocked on her door, a potion in his wineskin. It smelled of overcooked lamb and strong alcohol.
They sat beside each other on the bed.
“Has it said anything to you since the mines?” he asked.
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“No,” Eris said.
“It may be scared for some time. It was in the chamber with the ley line that—”
“It will be back.” She gazed into the potion. It was tarry. Black and viscous. The longer she held the skin, the more she noticed a numbness in her fingertips. Her nostrils tingled. She thought aloud, forced to confront the situation before her, still weighing all sides: “I barely escaped its intercession…”
Robur stared at the ground. “It is a liability,” he agreed.
She had been trying to read up on this notion of a ‘manashunt,’ but Robur spared only one book, the one with instructions on how to brew the potion, when he sold his library. She was unconvinced it was as easy as he made it out to be. “How have you made this?”
He explained the principle. A special procedure was used to drain Manastone without turning it to ash. It was then treated with chemicals extracted from common plants, to make it sensitive to human blood, before finally it was enchanted to absorb mana as easily as it once might have radiated it in its pure, unrefined form—in effect inverting the stone’s normal effusive properties. The stone was then crushed, mixed with water, and ingested. The concoction would end up in the bloodstream, where it would sap the Essence and absorb a magician’s natural supply of mana—and her ability to channel it—into crystals still flowing throughout her veins. These were like icesheets holding water captive. Until they thawed again, her Essence would be frozen. Time would reverse the effect, eventually, as would an anti-potion.
The scientific principle made sense to Eris. She remained apprehensive about its reversibility.
“Where did you obtain the refined Manastone?” she asked.
“In the Archon’s Vault,” Robur admitted. “I found a small gem.”
She looked at him. “You have carried it all this time?”
“I knew I would need it for this potion early on and didn’t wish to waste it.”
“I told you I did not want your potion. You could have used it in the battle with the owlbear. You nearly died from spellsickness.”
“I was fine,” he said matter-of-factly. “This seemed more important.”
If he had died, she thought, it was his shield that would have failed, and her neck the owlbear would have torn out. She did not agree with his pattern of risk assessment. She was irritated by his apparent generosity, for she still felt certain some ulterior motive lurked beneath the surface of his unemotive eyes. Still…he was useful yet.
She brought the potion to her lips.
“I will be defenseless,” she whispered. “Like a normal woman.”
Robur didn’t answer. But his silence gave her time to think, and she saw herself again in the mirror. She saw her own golden eyes and her beautiful hair, and all the rest of her, and she realized that she did not need magic. She would still have her mind. She would still have beauty. And with those things together, she would get her magic back.
So the potion tilted upward, and its numbing liquid slid down her throat.
At first there was nothing. The potion was very thick and very cold and she felt it all the way down through her esophagus, every inch, numbing all the way. It settled like tar in her stomach. That was it.
Then the pain began.
Tightening in her gut. A feeling like being crushed. The urge to collapse on her side. “Leave me,” she said. Robur obeyed, and soon she was alone, left on her bed as it overcame her.
No word could describe that night save agony. Frost crept through her bloodstream like the hand of winter over a window pane. The compaction in her gut grew only worse, not better, as time passed, so that she could do nothing but put her head against a pillow, open her mouth, and wail. Her appendages numbed until she felt nothing except her torso, not even her head, so that she was like a floating, dismembered carcass chucked in the ocean. Now she was certain the potion was wrong. She was dying. She would drift from the shores of consciousness and never wake back up. She never should have trusted Robur with something so important.
But mercy came soon, because the blood drained from her eyes, from her mind, fleeting, until she passed out.
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Her joints were rusted. Nose clogged. Lungs collapsed. She spent an hour staring at the ceiling before she managed to stir. She felt like an embalmed corpse.
But she didn’t feel pain, except in her leg.
After another thirty minutes she managed to sit up straight and grab her crutches. Her breath came heavy, but she could breathe. She felt her limbs. She glanced in a mirror, and she saw…
Her eyes. She stared at her eyes, feeling like news of a loved one’s death just arrived as she blinked back at herself.
Her eyes were brown.
Everything around her was silent. She felt nothing. Not a single breath of mana in the air. She focused, inhaling…
Only air.
She hurried out of the inn and tried again. Nothing but cold snowfall. It was like her ability to sense the breeze or the temperature in the air was amputated. She had every sense—but she couldn’t sense everything. Around the corner two merchants spoke Dwarvish; she tried to cast Wisdom of the Sages to understand their meaning, but her attempts to weave her spell were met with silence, like attempting to speak without a voice. She tapped mana from the air—yet suddenly she didn’t know how. She didn’t know what ‘mana’ in the air felt like.
A dwarf pushed past her. She nearly toppled over.
Her heart raced.
She fled back inside.
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Eris hid. She hid for weeks. Every time she ventured outside she felt naked—yet worse than naked, because at least nakedness showed her for what she was, while now she was rendered helpless, defenseless, useless, a wretch…she felt a fear unlike any she knew since her childhood on the streets of Katharos. Like she was waiting to be anyone’s victim.
Her only reassurance: her beauty, and her mind. They were fantastic reassurances, yet not so great to overcome despair when she could hardly walk. And throughout that time, no further word came from the Manawyrm. He stayed silent.
They were broke by the second week. Unwilling to part with anything so valuable as that Manastone circlet, she sold one of her gilt armlets. That was enough to last them through the end of the first month, while she waited to heal, but it was a long way until winter ended yet. And so what when it did? What could they do? Where could they adventure when she was useless without her magic?
She tried to sell one of her enchanted rings the second month. Her leg still wasn’t healed, not entirely, and they needed more funds. By now the Sanguine Forest’s trees were black and the snow came down throughout the woods. Swep-Nos quieted, its commerce hibernating until spring. The coldest days were still yet to come. The market for jewelry vanished. She checked the forum every day for new arrivals, and for two weeks she found no buyers—no buyers who could afford a ring from the Old Kingdom.
Yet one particularly cold day she saw an old dwarf with a handful of axe-wielding bodyguards as they stumbled their way through the gates. He wore fine silks. In tow behind him were pack animals and two wagons of goods, and as was always a common sight in summer he proceeded to the town’s market square to offer his merchandise—where there he did business alone.
A merchant from Kem-Karwene on his last trip west to Rytus. There would be no better opportunity than this.
Children perused Dwarven toys. A woman considered pots. The bodyguards kept close watch on everyone.
Eris approached the merchant.
He turned as he heard her crutches in the snow. He was a mouse-faced thing with long white whiskers. “What’s it you want to buy, human?” he muttered. Dark, dwarven eyes glanced her over.
“I have something to sell,” she said.
“Do I look like a pawn shop?”
The air was cold. She felt numb like she hadn’t since she was a child. Before there was always the sheathe of the air around her; now there was nothing. “Forgive me for thinking you might be interested in something more valuable than petty baubles.”
Eris pulled the orange ring from her finger. In the daylight it looked passingly valuable—a rare gem set within some sort of metal. Yet she covered it with her palm and presented it toward him. Against the darkness of her shaded skin, the gem glowed.
The merchant made no reaction. He stared for a time at the ring, then up at her. “May I?” he whispered.
She hesitated. What if he didn’t give it back? Before she had recourse. Now she would be able to do nothing. She felt a swell of helplessness—but tried to look confident, and she offered him the ring.
He inspected it closely. “Is’t Dwarven?”
“Found in a ruin of the Old Kingdom.”
“Magnificent…”
“The enchantment is true. It will not wear off in time. I ask only one talent for it.”
He considered the offer. Then he slipped the ring on his finger. “I’ll give you one hundred drachmae.”
“One hundred? Are you mad?”
“Pure silver. Isapar, fetch my purse.” One of the bodyguards climbed into a wagon and began searching for a lockbox.
“I will not sell it for one hundred,” Eris sputtered. “Nor even two. Give it back to me.”
“One hundred is a fair deal for a human.”
“Give it back to me, dwarf, or I will turn you into dust!”
He looked to one of his guards, then another. They all burst into laughter. “Ye got some other magic on ye, human?” one of them said, raising his axe. In fact she did—quite a lot of it—but she shook her head. She realized only then how ridiculous she looked threatening these armed dwarves. Unarmed, on crutches, a young woman, and apparently mundane.
“This is banditry. I will fetch the guards,” she tried.
“Fetch the guards to report that you’ve been trying all day since I arrived to steal my enchanted Dwarven ring?” the merchant said. “Take one hundred.”
The guard on the wagon opened the lockbox, counted out one hundred silver coins, and deposited it in a small cloth sack. He then tossed it at her.
She caught it. But she was furious beyond expression. She tried to let slip mana from her fingertips. She tried to call down lightning to incinerate these hideous, stunted creatures around her. She tried to tear them to pieces with her mind, but all she did was shake in place. She was trying to move a limb that no longer existed.
So she took her money, and she crawled back to Robur.
It must be said that one hundred coins of pure silver was no small sum of money. A frugal person person could live well on one per day. But one hundred was split to fifty with Robur, and new travelling supplies still required purchase, and it was another three weeks before Eris returned to the surgeon-barber and had her cast removed.
“Looks good as new to me,” the barber had told her. “Marvelous quick recovery. Half an inch higher up you might never have walked again, and an inch lower it might have taken another month to heal. Think about how lucky that is!”
“I think, were I truly ‘lucky,’ I would not have been wounded at all,” Eris said.
Meanwhile Eris continued to be Eris, which was to say anything but frugal. She rationed herself down to two silver pieces per day. That meant they were out of funds completely just as the very depths of winter arrived.
At least she could walk. Injury did have a way of making her grateful for the smallest things.
News came from Akancar in this time. A battalion of the Prince’s own Rangers had arrived to save the people of the town, only to go missing in the mines. Dwarves, apparently, very rarely went missing in mines, so much talk was made of this strange disappearance. And whatever had happened to the great Magister from Katharos who vanished nearly two months ago? Was she yet living? Whispers on the wind could do little but speculate. Eris tried to stay away from such conversations.
Robur read to her a list of bounties, rumors, and quests from around town. Whereas all seemed trivial before her majesty not two months ago, nothing felt possible now.
“What is it the mundane do to survive?” she said one night in her room, staring at their dwindling reserves of cash, quite honestly baffled.
“Work?” Robur said.
“‘Work?’” The word didn’t fit in her mouth. Its syllables were unfamiliar.
He nodded. “The barber is offering two assaroi per day for a hand who sweeps her shop.”
She stared at him in disbelief. “An assaros is a copper coin.”
“Yes,” he said.
“I would sooner starve than touch such a thing. No human can survive on two assaroi per day. Nor even a dozen.”
“Many do.”
“Then they are more like goblins than men.” She put her hands in her face. Another glance at the mirror. There her eyes were. The wrong eyes. Mundane eyes. Someone else’s eyes. An unescapable reminder that she was no longer living in her own body. But then every breath she took reminded her just the same. “There must be something we can still do.”
“You could sell the remainder of your jewelry…”
She glared at him.
“…or perhaps we might consider exploring the ruins around this place. I have found one only a few miles away that seems quite interesting. You can still adventure.”
“But I cannot fight! Nor do anything else, with which I have dragged you across Nanos for the last year.”
Robur hesitated for a moment. Then he withdrew his dagger in its sheath. It was a small, poorly made thing, but it would be effective enough come time for battle—in emergencies. “Here. Take this.”
“Do I look like a thug in need of petty weaponry?”
“I think you’ll feel much safer armed.”
She pulled herself away. “‘tis beneath me.”
“Only so long as you have spells at your disposal. Few mundane humans feel the same way.”
Mundane humans. She sighed hard enough to collapse her lungs. The notion of fighting skirmishes while armed with steel sickened her. But then he was right, and if they were to leave Swep-Nos, it would be exceedingly foolish to leave herself defenseless.
So she took the dagger. Immediately she felt empowered. Instantaneously. She would be able to defend herself once again. She would be able to threaten others, too. It was a small taste of the way she always had felt since her Manasearing as a child. Perhaps she had been too blind to realize before, even when she used them, that steel weapons were power just as magic was. Cruder, perhaps, but power all the same.
“So be it,” she said. “What is this place you mentioned?”
“An old suburb of Swep-Nos. I investigated because I heard it was haunted, but I saw no ghosts there.”
“Nor anything to steal?”
“There may be something,” he said with a shrug.
She sighed. Graverobbing and banditry had far less flair without the romance of mana about it. But Eris decided then that, if, for the time being, graverobbing and banditry were her only avenues for enrichment beyond copper-a-day, she had no other choice. So she would be a mundane raider, then. At least she would look her best while doing it.
That gave her some encouragement. All her life she strived to be the most powerful magician she could be. And so she would be again, soon. For now, she would settle for being the most stunningly alluring graverobber ever known to mankind.