Wilke found himself in a very peculiar situation very quickly.

The footsteps in the dust that Wilke was following led straight to an audience chamber. Although the panel that led into the room was disguised to his magical senses, the hidden wall chamber also led up to some very small, very well concealed observation points, with thin slits hidden behind some very sheer silks up near the top of the room. Without question, these were meant for guards with crossbows to aim and shoot at anyone in the room.

Naturally, Wilke's next question was where those guards were at the moment. A peek through the hole told him that the lord of the house was not in the audience chamber, although the jackal girl was; she was standing politely and almost serenely next to a guard, in a position that suggested that when the lord of the house returned, she would be speaking privately with him, rather than being received as an audience. If they weren't having a real audience... perhaps no guards were coming.

The girl was attractive at first glance. Her jackal features were understated; a small black nose, sharp teeth, claws, and strange hip and knee structure, but that was about it. Her ears were not completely canine, as many halfbreeds were, but more like human ears that were wider, pointed at the top, and probably would adjust to let her hear her surroundings better.

Her face, though, was pinched into a grimace-smile that Wilke had often seen on very dangerous enemies--the kind who were too far gone to reason with, the kind who would pull truly suicidal maneuvers, using arts their body was not ready for, and so on. It was the kind of grimace that spoke of being ready at any moment for this damnable thing called "life" to finally be over.

If you see the jackal girl, slap her. If you see a piece of paper, burn it. Wilke reflected on what Chai had said. Although he had interpreted it before as two options, now that Wilke had the paper in his hand and the girl before him, he wondered if he was meant to do both, and in what order. Rather than acting, he pushed at his Void sense, gaining a bit of perspective on other things going on around him. The jackal girl was alone in the room with the guard, but... only for the moment.

After that moment, a woman and her attendant guard entered the room through a different concealed entrance and made a beeline for the girl. The jackal, politely, turned and bowed to the woman with a seeming grace and relaxed poise that seemed entirely at odds with the stress Wilke had seen on her face.

"Chandra. I have spoken with... the one who did this to you. I need you to trust me." The woman took a deep breath and looked at the sheet of parchment before her. Then, slowly, she sounded out a series of nonsense words. "K’annam... d’uordvek... zininaam, k’ultuurva medivh ...konsharm’a."

Wilke felt a snap through his void senses, the kind of snap that often accompanied an unpleasant supernatural event. It didn't feel like any one element, per se; it felt like something more primal, the kind of thing that Wild magic would usually be used to read and Light magic would be used to manipulate, but it was too intense, too jumbled, and too short-lived to make sense of. After that, Wilke sensed what was clearly an arcane spell over the girl rearranging in the space around her.

Arcane spells were weird, and to a simple mage, they often seemed kind of gross. Wilke, who had learned four elements worth of elemental magery and learned a lot about the rest in his studies of martial arts, detected subtle differences in the energy that made up the spell that he couldn't begin to understand or replicate. They simply didn't use elemental energies correctly. They worked, so they must be correct, but they were correct in a sense that were of no use to him.

The spell that was over the girl--Chandra? A nice name, he supposed--rippled in the air around her, invisible to anyone without a well developed magical sense, and it clearly had an effect on her. The girl stiffened and then went limp, but the guard who was there caught her immediately. There was a long period of silence, during which she could only twitch helplessly.

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But then she stood up, as though of her own volition, although Wilke's senses suggested otherwise. No, whatever was going on was not so innocent.

"How may I serve the Master." Chandra's voice was icy, but from where Wilke stood, there was new life in her eyes--new intelligence.

"We need the formula to create the new metal." Janinda's voice was hard. "We need it now, and we need you to prove that it works. We will give you whatever you need."

"The Master commanded me to report to him about the metal he was trying to create." She paused, and faced Janinda directly, speaking as clearly as she could. "I will write down what I know about the metal, but I must give it to the Master."

Janinda shivered. "Yes... I will see that he gets it."

"I must give it to him."

Janinda paused, frowned, and nodded. "You must also prove that it works. Create a new bar of the metal and I... will bring you to the Master."

Chandra relaxed immediately and nodded to her. "Take me to where I must work."

They exited the room--from the main door, Wilke discovered with relief, and he used his senses to guide him through the hidden ways of the house. The guard post he was sitting at allowed him to go a little further up, into a space perhaps four feet high, which went overtop the hallway; that was just enough room that he could scamper on hands and knees to follow them without banging into anything, although he had to tuck his sword into the back of his belt so it wouldn't bang on the stone beneath him.

This space had peepholes only rarely, but Wilke didn't need them. With his void sense, Wilke was able to get just enough of an impression of their position that he didn't lose track of them. Mostly, that was his Earth sense reporting on the sounds of their passage through the hall, but using his Earth sense directly would have required that he keep contact with the stone. Using his Wind sense alone, in contrast, would have required that he actively send a sensory thread into the hall below, or constantly attach it to and detach it from the stone.

The void sense, however, did require incredible concentration, and Wilke felt like he couldn't focus on three things at once, so in order to make sure he could scamper quickly and not lose track of the target, he had to finally let go of the Light magic spell that was--should have been--keeping the guards from thinking about him.

The room that the girl was led to did not have an observation hole like the last one, but it did have a passage from the ceiling space to what was clearly an entrance panel. Wilke went straight to it, but paused. The panel, like many of the hidden things in this house, blocked senses; that would conceal him, but it also made it very difficult for him to sense what was going on. He could hear well enough--the panel was thin--but that was all he had.

For his own safety, though, he stayed there. He really didn't like the scampering over the hall ceiling, not when his own magical sense told him that the sound of his movement was obvious--more obvious to him, probably, than anyone else.

"Is this all you require?"

"Yes, lady."

"I..." suddenly, the woman's voice brightened. "I will write down your instructions for the master. You focus on the work. I will give you the written directions when we are done and you can give them to the master. I will need to inspect the work to be sure it is genuine, first. Speak clearly about what you are doing."

"Of course, lady." Some shuffling and banging. "These metal ingots... are the same. Good. The liquid... is the same. The essence ratio is two Green, two Red, two Amber, one Silver, one Blue, one Purple. The amount... should be just enough to fill up the ingot. The ingot is in the liquid... now. The position of the stones is important; they must form a circle... like so. Connect the stones so that the Green and Red and Amber energies merge... they become a new essence within the ingot. Connect the other three stones into the ingot..."

Wilke drew in a sharp breath. Combining the lesser three essences normally created Yellow Essence--the same energy that was used for Thunder Magic. However, Thunder magic shouldn't combine with the other three essences; the elements were split in half, and they were on different halves. As far as he knew, that was simply a rule of elemental magic.

But then, this wasn't elemental magic exactly, was it?

"I... am not sure that I performed the technique adequately. I am certain that part of this sample has transformed, but the entire ingot has not. Perhaps--"

"Let me see it." There was a pause, then several rings of metal against stone. "Yes... half of the sample was converted. The other half is not." Another pause. "I will... get you more supplies. You will wait here for me to get them. When you create a perfect sample, I will bring you to the Master."

Wilke was sure from the tone of her voice that it was a transparent lie, but Chandra simply replied, "Of course, Lady."

There was a sound of a door being shut, and Wilke, gambling that any guards would be posted outside, slid the wall panel aside and stepped into the room.