As I reluctantly looked towards the next phase of my life, Faith went to the Sensorium to revisit an old one. There, she drew Madame Keitel into the secret archive for a private conversation (by now, my archivist was so used to shadowing them that he didn’t give it a second thought) and declared, “I think it’s time.”
Accustomed to these bold, ambiguous proclamations, her old friend merely asked, “Yeah?” and waited.
After a pause – almost a hesitation, really – Faith stated, “I want to remember Dunvil.”
Now it was Madame Keitel’s turn to go silent. Eventually, she answered, “All right. If you’re sure.” There was no trace of enthusiasm in her voice; better than anyone – including Faith – she knew what those memories would do to a patron.
Seeing her reluctance, Faith heaved a theatrically reassuring (and reassuringly theatrical) sigh. “It’s the end of an era, Madame Keitel.” She gave an elaborate, helpless shrug, disclaiming responsibility for the passage of said era. “I don’t know what I’m going to do after this.”
Madame Keitel’s grim expression didn’t change, although she did try to comfort her old friend. “I don’t know either, but…I’m sure you’ll find something.”
At that, Faith flashed a grin, signaling that she’d had enough of being serious. “Well, I’m sure I’ll find something to replace the pink.” (Here, the archivist gave me a shocked, questioning look. I just nodded.) “Maybe I’ll try steampunk chic next time? I’ll need to build a totally new wardrobe! And we’ll have to get a new couch for the Pink Salon – which won’t be the Pink Salon anymore! The Steampunk Salon? Hmmm, I’m not sure whether I like the ring of that.” (Apparently alliteration was another personality trait she intended to shed.) “Well, I’ll leave this tragic effort to another day. In the meantime, shall we?” Ruffles aflutter, she sidled out the door.
Drawing a deep breath, Madame Keitel followed. “You’re going to do it, then. You’re going after Dunvil.”
Faith waved a hand. “No time like the present.”
“Then…I suppose I’ll have to decorate this place again.” Opening the door to the Soon-to-Be-No-Longer-Pink Salon, Madame Keitel ushered Faith in.
“Indeed.” In a cloud of pink froth, Faith twirled across the floor and plopped onto the couch. Pulling her knees up and propping her chin on them, she surveyed the room. “Don’t you think it’ll look better with some clockwork mechanisms over there, instead of those pink ribbons? A steam-powered clock, perhaps?”
“I’ll call my decorator tomorrow, dear.”
Just before she shut the door behind them, the archivist heard Faith cry, “Not just yet! We may fail! We may have to make a second attempt!”
Madame Keitel’s voice was bleak. “I don’t think he’d let you make a second attempt.”
“Well, then, I’ll just have to make sure that it’s me not letting him not let me make a second attempt!”
“That’s my girl.”
After a few hours lost in her own memories for a change, Faith emerged with an extra-bright grin on her face. “Well,” she informed Madame Keitel, “I think I won’t ask for these to be erased from my mind quite yet. I’ll hold onto them for a while.”
The archivist, on the other hand, looked as if he would very much like for all of these events – dating all the way back to the first time he laid eyes on her – to be expunged from his memory.
----------------------------------------
While I was embarking on a career in education (modeled on hers, no less), Faith was starting to cut back her on teaching responsibilities. At her first time reporting to me solo, the Kinclaith lady’s maid told me that Faith had raised the topic of Andrel’s schooling during her and Irimina’s latest date. While the couple lounged on a sofa in front of a cozy fire, Faith mentioned that Andrel had been learning arcane techniques rapidly.
“He’s a clever lad,” beamed the proud mother.
“Very much so,” agreed Faith with unwonted seriousness. “He reminds me a lot of myself when I was his age.” Irimina cocked her head a little, trying to picture a miniature version of Faith, all dimples and curls and genuine sweetness. (Maybe she did a better job than the maid or I could.) “I hope you can provide him with a better direction than the one I took.”
“I’m not letting him join the Church, if that’s what you’re wondering,” Irimina retorted.
Faith smiled and let that pass. “I want to do something special for his last lesson. I want to set up a score. A fake score, of course,” she reassured Irimina, who knew something of the jobs we undertook and recoiled at the idea of exposing her son to so much risk. “We don’t want to put him in any real danger.” (Well, Irimina didn’t want to. Faith, I was less sure about.) “However, if you only study in controlled environments, you miss out on so much of what it means to be a Whisper. You need to see what your nerves are like when there are hordes of ghosts screaming down at you, the item you’re trying to steal is about to disappear from under your nose, the Bluecoats are coming, and all of your friends are down. It’s how you cope with the stress – the moments of excitement! – that distinguishes a good Whisper from a bad one. And I want your help setting this up for Andrel.”
“You think he’s ready.” The tone might have made it sound like a statement, but Irimina’s expression made it clear that it was a question, and that if she didn’t receive a satisfactory answer, she was going to veto the enterprise.
Pulling a rueful face, Faith confided, “Irimina, I don’t think I’m ready. But he’s ready enough to do something with what he’s learned. It’ll just be a trial run. Something safe. We’ll have our eyes on him the entire time.”
Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.
With a sigh, Irimina capitulated. “I can probably set something up.”
They spent the rest of the night designing obstacles that would test how well Andrel could apply his lessons under pressure without overwhelming the fourteen-year-old. Initially, Faith envisioned a scenario in which he would steal an item from a warehouse. Irimina, on the other hand, intended for Andrel to join and eventually take over her crew, so she nudged the score towards smuggling instead. (I had to wonder if she were looking for a replacement for Taji, although I couldn’t imagine her sending her son into the Hadrakin’s home turf.)
“Oh, that could be fun!” Faith exclaimed. “We can play Capture the Flag! He has to transport something from one side of Doskvol to the other, which gives us plenty of opportunities to screw with him!”
Predictably, Irimina looked a lot less enthusiastic about the prospect of screwing with one of her darlings.
Pretending not to notice, Faith bubbled on, “If you want him to practice his leadership skills, we’ll give him a team too! How about some of the orphans from Strathmill House?”
As if picturing smelly, dirty, thieving, raggedy street urchins, the noblewoman wrinkled her nose. “Do you have any suitable candidates?”
Faith smiled in a way that bolded ill for her protégé, Wester. “I do indeed.”
After hammering out the details, the two finally retired to bed.
As the lady’s maid finished her report, a thought struck me: “Wait, is Faith going to break up with Irimina after the fake score?”
The maid lowered her eyes. “I couldn’t tell, miss.”
I couldn’t either. Faith’s lack of human emotion made it nearly impossible for me to judge which people she cared about, besides Madame Keitel and Nyryx. You’d think that after two years of living and working with our crew, the human remnants of her soul would have grown just the tiniest bit attached to us, but apparently not. I’d have to wait to see whether she’d abandon all her acquaintances from this chapter of her life – or just Ash and me.
----------------------------------------
Once the preparations for the fake score were complete, Faith summoned Andrel to her orphanage office and informed him that it was time for his practicum. Handing him a note with a Silkshore address, she ordered, “I have a client who needs something moved. Meet with them and do what they say.”
Then she called in several orphans, all of whom were reasonably clean and clad in nondescript outfits of indeterminate social class that wouldn’t stand out in any district. (Lurking in the hallway outside her office, I noted that she had indeed included Wester, thus laying the groundwork for future connections between a Church dignitary and the scion of a leviathan hunter family.)
After introducing the children to one another, Faith instructed Andrel, “This is your crew. Identify their strengths and use them accordingly.”
Obediently, Andrel interviewed the orphans to determine their skills, most of which had to do with skulking, before he led them to Silkshore. At the address on the note, one of Irimina’s smugglers handed him a briefcase that supposedly contained a spiritually-active object (it didn’t) and ordered him to get it to Gaddoc Rail before the next train left. As the little band set out, Faith, Cricket, and Irimina tailed them and observed from the shadows.
For all his disheveled-absentminded-scholar air, Andrel was General Helker’s son, and he chose his route and deployed his allies intelligently. Wary of people he’d just met, he took charge of the briefcase himself (which was wise, because Faith had already instructed the orphans to “lose” it if he entrusted it to them). He also correctly assumed that there would be fewer Bluecoats and Spirit Wardens in the poorer districts and circled south instead of cutting across Charterhall. Expecting interference from ghosts and possibly Spirit Wardens, he sent half of the orphans to scout ahead and directed the rest to form a defensive perimeter around him. At all times, he kept his lightning hook charged and at the ready.
That was for the best. Faith didn’t even wait for the little band to leave Silkshore before she sent the first ghost at the briefcase. One of the scouts shouted, Andrel cracked his lightning hook around, and an arc of electroplasmic energy vaporized the ghost. After a quick, intense conversation with the orphans, Andrel had them keep lookout while he reinforced the wards on the briefcase. Then they went on.
As they progressed through Charhallow and Coalridge, Faith sent increasingly vicious ghosts in increasingly large groups at him, forcing him to split his attention between shielding the briefcase and protecting his crew, none of whom knew how to attune. He’d only just fended off a particularly ferocious specter when one of the scouts “fell” out of a tree and starting shrieking about a broken leg while hungry ghosts swarmed her. Clutching the briefcase to his chest, Andrel dashed over, drove away the ghosts, assessed her (fake) injury, diagnosed a sprain, and ordered one of the other scouts to get her to safety. Realizing that the slower they went, the more crewmates he’d lose, Andrel pulled his scouts in and sprinted for the bridge to Nightmarket.
As they monitored his progress and analyzed his decisions, Faith remarked, “He’s already better than half the Whispers in the city. He can self-learn from here. As long as he keeps practicing instead of losing himself in books and theory,” she made sure to add.
Irimina was too tense for anything more than a quick, proud smile.
Meanwhile, Andrel and the remaining orphans finally burst into Nightmarket and slowed to a trot so they wouldn’t draw attention. As soon as they entered Gaddoc Rail, a beaming Irimina and an almost-smiling Faith stepped forward to meet them. Andrel panted to a halt as, behind him, the orphans melted into the crowd.
“Congratulations,” Faith announced while he stared around, disoriented by how fast they’d disappeared. “You’ve graduated from my class.”
Torn between pride and dismay, he protested, “But Miss Karstas, there’s still so much that I don’t understand!”
Taking the briefcase, Faith began to guide him out of the train station with Irimina on his other side. “Andrel,” she consoled, “there’s still so much that I don’t understand. I’ll get there. You’ll get there too. There are always more things to learn, and the best way to explore them is to be confused. Encounter your own problems. Figure out your own solutions. Practice, Andrel. Challenge yourself.”
He blinked up at her. “All right….”
“And, if you encounter a problem in your studies that you can’t solve, you are always welcome to come to me.”
“All right, Miss Karstas – ”
“I will, of course, make fun of you and leave you to solve it on your own. Because I have the utmost faith in you.”
He sulked a little, but it was obvious that she’d already doomed him to researching the arcane for the rest of his life.
Stretching out her free hand, Faith ruffled his hair. “Off you go now.”
It was the first sign of affection she’d ever shown him.
As Irimina led him towards the waiting cabs, Andrel kept glancing back over his shoulder.
----------------------------------------
However, he didn’t have long to brood over losing his mentor.
Being a Whisper was illegal, of course, but the government acknowledged that the Spirit Wardens couldn’t be everywhere, and sometimes it was useful to have civilians who could handle problems themselves instead of overwhelming the authorities with their pleas. In fact, it was an open secret that the Gondoliers helped protect Doskvol and that the Lord Governor turned a blind eye. At Faith’s suggestion, Irimina reached out to them and set up an apprenticeship for her son.
Poor Andrel! Instead of reading to his heart’s content in the comfort of his bedroom, he now spent his days on the canals, learning how to clear spirit wells and fending off ghosts.