53 – Awful secrets

Lisette was standing stock-still, staring at Lucius who was sitting at the head of the table. Guards had rushed into the room, brought to stillness by a single hand gesture of the regent who was staring at Ishrin intently, as if Lisette was not even there at all. Another mind game was being played, and it was hard to tell who was winning.

Except, Ishrin thought as his face betrayed nothing of his inner amusement, he was not playing the same game that Lucius was playing. If the regent was playing chess, then he was playing a shooting FPS game from Mekano’s world. Impossible to compare the two, and his gameplay was at the same time much simpler and infinitely more complex. Again, he mused about the application of raw power, but stayed his hand. His gaze met the regent’s.

“Where is the bathroom? She needs to go and is too shy to ask.”

Melina, who had held her breath all this time, felt that her head was growing light. The regent didn’t seem to be taking the whole joke well because—

Lucius exploded in laughter. He roared and roared, wiping his face with a napkin, and taking a drunk swig of wine. Melina noticed, finally letting herself breathe again, that for the first time Lucius was letting them see that he was drunk, and on the opposite side of the table Ishrin too was smiling and his face was slightly flushed from the alcohol.

“Ohh, man. That was a great one. You sure know how to make me laugh.” Lucius said, then with a nod one of the guards appeared from the shadows. He looked at Ishrin for a moment, as if to say something but said nothing and turned to Lisette. “Follow him, he’ll take you.”

There was an unsaid there. Lucius recognized Ishrin as a fellow player although he did not know the game was rigged. There was a flash of something, a sort of heaviness to the air that made it hard to breathe, and for a moment the whole party was suppressed by a cultivation of a Tier higher than their own. Then it was gone. Melina’s mind summoned a conversation she had with Ishrin about Tier differences: they can be overcome, although it’s quite hard, if one has the right tools and enough time to prepare.

She still didn’t know what the dinner would devolve into, if it was going to devolve into something at all, but she knew that she did not like the strange creature one bit.

Lisette nodded and left with the guard. On her way out of the room she looked back at Ishrin, and this time Melina did think that it was strange of her to do that and followed her gaze until she saw Ishrin’s hand moving in a blur, his fingers spelling out words in a language she didn’t know. She suppressed the urge to frown at the sudden unknown development—feeling left out and wondering when they had even had the time to develop their own secret language, and why they had left her out of it—and tried her best to act normal, but it proved to be very difficult and by the time they had their meal, she was exhausted.

They were escorted to their room, one single room for all three. Ishrin seemed to think that the regent had assumed the two girls to be his concubines, and had done nothing to disabuse him of the notion. She didn’t complain. Ishrin had always been more than a gentleman in that regard, and she felt much safer knowing they were all together rather than in separate rooms. As soon as the door behind them closed, Ishrin finally allowed himself to relax, although the first thing that he did was cast a spell.

Dispel Eavesdropping, she thought, supercharged to Tier 5.

“There, they can’t hear us now. We should be fine.”

They all heaved a sigh of relief.

“As I suspected,” he said after casting another ritual, “he has us watched and locked inside. We can’t go out until it’s morning. But that is all within plans. Lisette, did you do the thing?”

The girl nodded.

“What thing?” Melina asked.

“I had her take a look around while she pretended to be in the bathroom.” Ishrin said.

Stolen story; please report.

“The guard was easy to fool.” Lisette said with a satisfied nod.

“…and?” Melina asked. “What have you seen?”

Lisette narrowed her eyes at Melina, then turned to face Ishrin with her back turned to her.

“I confirm your suspicions.” She said. “This place does give me the ‘creeps’. Chills. It does unsettle me.”

“Me too,” Melina said, allowing herself to voice her own feelings on the matter, since they happened to match the mood of the room. “I don’t want to spend a minute more than I have to in here.”

“We won’t.” Ishrin said. “The caravan we are supposed to escort sets out at dawn, and we will be out of this hellhole of a place and never come back.”

“I like the idea.” Melina pressed on. “But there’s something that doesn’t sit well with me about this place. I feel… guilty, leaving like this. It’s like it’s not right, you know?”

Lisette sighed from the other side of the room, where she was sprawled on the bed. “You have no idea.”

“What?” Melina asked.

“Nothing.”

“It’s not nothing.” she said. “What have you seen?”

“Trust me. You are the last person who should be told what I have seen.”

Her words were surprisingly caustic. Even though she could feel that most of her angst was not directed at her, rather perhaps at Lisette herself, she could not avoid feeling very hurt by the words and their tone. They were striking chords that were still sore, broken and bleeding after so little time since the incident. Chords that Melina suspected would keep hurting for a long time, if perhaps less.

Lisette looked at her for a moment and seemed to… deflate? Sitting upright, she cast a look at her leather boots that were shiny and clean, then forced her gaze to meet Melina’s. “I did not mean to say it like that. I am sorry.”

Ishrin looked troubled, but then added his own thoughts to the heavy air of the room. Not knowing whether they would help or not, especially since the woman had taken to listening to all he said like he was some sort of prophet. But still, it was wisdom he felt like sharing.

“Not all of us share the same moral compass, or the same set of values. What for someone is right, for someone else is not. There is no such thing as a universal moral good. What you did at the mountain was good if seen from your or even my perspective. Your actions avoided a forceful ejection of a pocket dimension into the prime material, but… if Lisette doesn’t see it that way, you need to respect it, even if it hurts.”

Melina was about to open her mouth to speak, but he was quicker.

“And you, Lisette, need to be more tactful. Good that you apologized, but you need to learn how to forgive people. Holding grudges is never good.” Then he smiled, “plus, it upsets your cultivation.”

If the first part had Lisette looking down, the second sentence had her outright scandalized at the mere thought that her mood could affect her magic, and the way her future power would develop. She immediately schooled her face, assuming a pensive expression, muttering a low “thank you.”

“Thank you, Ishrin,” Melina said. “I’ll reflect on what you said.”

He smiled at her warmly.

“And thank you for taking my side as well.” She added. “It makes me feel much better that you could see the value of what I did, even though I regret being so rash.”

Her eyes were glistening with unshed tears, and she looked ready to burst into crying at any moment. Ishrin was moved by the sight, even though he felt quite guilty for having let the situation come to this point in the first place. But he knew that feelings of guilt would not help, and the whole room was filled with them, with each member of the party feeling guilty for their own brand of perceived sin.

“We are all tired, we should rest. Okay?” He spoke to the room. “Don’t worry about it, there’s a reason I sent her to investigate, you know? If I was going to sit here and do nothing, I would not have sent her. But we need to focus on the important things first: tomorrow we leave, and we can’t mess everything up or we would have come all the way here for nothing. This place, the town and the palace have been here for decades, what’s a few more days?”

“We will come back?” Melina asked.

“Oh yeah, you can count on it.”

Later that night, Ishrin was lying awake on the ground, having let the girls have the single, large bed. He had requisitioned the pillow, though, and had closed his eyes as soon as his head touched the pillow in hope to catch sleep before his brain decided to become lost in thought. It was not a usual occurrence for him to become lost like that—his mind had been his own for a long time, ever since he developed the discipline to seize back control of himself from his subconscious—but there were times where he still struggled.

He could see them. Thousands of little creatures, their fluttering wings losing strength as they were stripped of their life force. Pixies, taken by force from their plane and tortured, forced to give up their dust so that they could be turned into profit. Crates upon crates filled with the yellow, golden powder and even more crates filled with tiny corpses.

He saw Liù among them. Even though it was just a dream, what Lisette had told him she had seen on her tour of the mansion had shaken him to the core. He had lied to the girls. They were not going to ever set foot in this wretched city again. But he was. He alone.

Tomorrow, he thought to himself even as sleep was reclaiming his mind once more, tomorrow I’ll make him pay for what he’s doing to them.