To someone who has never worked with ley, it is a very fickle material. There is a misconception that stone, the fundamental manifestation of earth, of solidity and matter, is somehow stable. This is not true, even less so for ley. As a material heats and cools, it expands and contracts respectively. This is most obvious with ice, but ice is in fact a peculiar example because of its crystalline simplicity. In general, everything grows with more heat. Materials often used in homes, such as wood, also grow and shrink with humidity and water.
Ley grows and shrinks with magic. More than that, when exhausted of magic, it becomes almost as soft as clay. Shaping it can still be difficult, but the differential firmness creates an almost living reaction to a mass of ley. With the tenacity of a root, it spills over and drags itself toward the fundamental source of magic. In seasonal time scales as the shifting of the firmament crushes and relaxes upon the vein, it is able to refill and change its shape to squirm closer to the font of mana.
In the case here, it approaches the barrier of the world and drills into it where it is weakest. Thus, the ley mine of the sunless desert was once a mountain, long ago when man was still exploring the world he found himself in. Over the centuries, it has been dug down, leveled, ripped open, excavated, and burrowed into like ants.
In fact, the upper layers of what were once the roots of the mountain had been rebuilt with masonry to create sifting platforms, quarrying and sculpting regions, and of course all the places of basic life needed for miners.
Lucius blundered down one of the extraction ramps, charging with eighty injured wastelanders right against the crude defensive barrier the bishop had put up to protect her rag tag missionary force.
Naturally, they confronted him as though he were an invading force, or perhaps just shy of it. They didn’t start by pumping grapeshot out of ley cannons at his face, but they didn’t throw down ladders or open any gates or anything of that sort. The captain of the guard bellowed, “Not one step closer.” He spoke in Giordanan, which was not particularly comprehensible to the wastelanders, but men of all times have that sort of personal bias.
Lucius pushed through the mob of warriors around him and raised an open hand. “I’m here to help,” he called. “I’m Vassish, can’t you see?”
“You some kind of captive?” the defender asked.
This rankled my pupil deeply, for he had been a captive only recently. So, he sucked air into his chest and shouted. “My name is Lucius von Solhart, hero of Rackvidd and leader of the Misty Isles. I have been dispatched here to rescue you stranded explorers now let me in so I can save you. That’s my army out there protecting you, so stop wasting time.”
His name was known to several of the men, and all could hear the shouting in the dunes beyond. There were rattling drums and the pounding of slings on shields, war cries and perhaps death throes. From their depressed vantage, none could see how the distant battle fared except a few secluded scouts.
Alas, while I had been able to get word to Anubi, the bishop was wholly ignorant of what form her salvation would come in. For a stressful thirty minutes, Lucius was kept outside the camp, in danger of being smashed upon the rubble wall by the wastelander forces. He was contemplating jumping off the side of the ramp and into the pit of the mine, for only one side of the ramp was hemmed by stone and the other by air.
“Bring them in,” a new voice ordered, and rope ladders were tossed over.
Lucius set about cajoling his forces into climbing over, but soon saw that while the bishop’s army had let them in, they were not at freedom. A hundred wary Giordanans blocked their further progress with rows of shields. “Very pretty,” he said, standing before his battalion.
The man who had let them in stepped forward. Middle aged and bearded, he bore a striking resemblance to Medorosa, but aged a decade more. With age, came temperament. He stood with crossed arms and nodded. With a rumbling voice, loud enough for all to hear, he said, “I never expected to meet the Gambling Lion here.”
“I have come at the behest of the King of Vassermark! Rejoice.”
The Giordanan frowned. “My name is Abdul Alraaei. I must ask, if you are here, who is out there?”
“My second and third in command. I wouldn't trust them to do anything decisive, but they can keep the savages in check.”
“And so you bring your own?” Abdul asked, thrusting his chin at the battalion behind him.
That was when Lucius brought out his mischievous grin, that trick of charisma from long ago when he worked in a minstrel’s troupe. “If all goes to plan, they won’t be for much longer. If you want to see me pull that off however, I must speak with the bishop.”
“She’s not available at the moment,” Abdul said.
“Then I’ll leave,” Lucius said at once. He turned and signaled his men, bringing them back into formation and pointing them back to the wall.
Abdul started, shock breaking through his demeanor. “Are you mad?”
“No, I’m a gambler and I know when to cut my losses.”
“You expect us to just bring you to the bishop? What if you’re an assassin?”
“I am here at the command of the king of Vassermark. How dare you call me an assassin! You all know my name. Does one among you doubt I am who I say I am? Here, let me prove my name,” Lucius shouted as he began unbuckling his armor. He shed it down and bared his divine sigil, the mark of his stigmata.
Not one of the men could have read anything about it, but the complexity was clear, and his undying nature well known.
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Abdul grunted and shook his head. “Leave your men here, if you can. I’ll take you to her.”
Down through the masonry layers of the mine, they eventually reached a strata wherein the stone of the world had been carved into, not to chase minerals and ley, but for permanent settlement in the mine. Nearly half a city was prepared by the King in Yellow before his downfall, on the belief that the mine would one day lead to the underworld. In a sense, he was correct.
His temples were a queer form of blasphemy to the Giordanans however, because he elected to have Helios worshiped in the land where the sun did not touch. This obscure, archaeological fact was what drew Jean to the mine to build her religious outpost. Of course, she underestimated the difficulty of creating a self-sustaining monastery even of the most poverty seeking monks.
Still, of all the places in the wasteland aside from Anubi’s city itself, she chose the best known local. While the mine was often showered with water from the sky, it was also so deep in the stone that natural spring water filtered down across the bedrock and oozed out of fractured channels. It gushed into root-like chasms and filled them with year round water, deep and as cold as the north.
Bishop Jean de Jeameaux spent her days in meditation before the great shrine to the sun wheel, sheltered in shadows and surrounded by the purest water–which she had been forced to allow bailing from to support the army’s rations. Rather than the austere dress, the immaculate form of angelic beauty, she had stripped down almost to bare flesh. Barely more than a few strips of cloth wound about her now-tanned body. Her hair was tied up and kept out of the way so that she could turn her body into a work of divine art.
The sight brough Lucius to his knees. His head throbbed and blood burst from his nose. His eyes watered and his heart clenched within his chest as he tried to stagger closer and compose himself. Every furtive glance at her assaulted him anew until the sandstone scraped across his knees and hand.
Abdul abandoned him with scorn, writing Lucius off as an immature youth taken by a woman’s beauty. This was not so. The lad knew his way around women as fine as the bishop in form. What assaulted his body was the overflowing force of the human angel; completely unleashed from her form.
“What are you doing?” he demanded, clotting her face to his oozing nose.
“Lucius?” she asked, rising to run over to his side. Her radiance tried to blind him like a lantern thrust below a ship’s deck.
He grabbed her by the shoulder, hauling himself up and snarling. “Are you trying to kill yourself?” he roared.
The bishop blanched and pulled back, but she couldn't escape the swordsman’s grip. “What are you doing here?”
“I came here to save you, and I find you martyring yourself?”
She held up a hand and began to speak, taking on the tone of a proselytizer. “It is my duty as a steward of this world to spread the truth and to enforce the will of the–”
Lucius clawed at her belly, raking his bloody fingers through the ink she had scrawled there. He ripped through the boundary markings, the ancient lettering, the crude will she was attempting to force onto her own body with the life of her body.
The divine glow of her body abated, as did Lucius’ pain.
Enraged as a bull, he grabbed the bishop by the jaw and forced her to stare into his eyes. “Who taught you this?”
Jean nearly collapsed as the spell broke. The recoil and exertion innervated her body but Lucius’ grip kept her upright. “What would you know?”
“More than you, clearly! They don’t teach this in temples. Who taught you this and what did they say it was?”
“Nobody. Nobody taught me,” she said, her glasses almost falling off her face as Lucius glowered down at her. “I mean, I studied it. I put it together myself. We’re in a godless land. The works of the gods need to be brought here!”(1)
Only by his knowledge of how ridiculous a claim that was did he manage to stay his frustration with the well-meaning idiot. “Show me,” he ordered.
Several armed guards had to be waved off by the bishop so that she could bring him to a stone garden whose only access was through a narrow, and defensible tunnel–aside from jumping down to it from above. It had served her as private enough for her needs, given the respect the Giordanans gave her. Here, she had an unassuming codex by the standards of a temple library, but most unusual in the sunless desert.
Perhaps a reader will object to this, saying that Anubi had many books, tomes, codexes, lexicons, scrolls, and so on. Technically true, but his knowledge of useful things he kept encoded in magic. He also kept all of those protected.
Jean’s tome was almost larger than the table she had set it on. It was the kind of leather-wrapped, gold-bound brick of vellum that a new temple would have fawned over for the sheer status it would exude to the rubes of their laity. Or rather, they would have if it had been marked with anything approaching a divine symbol. The tome was barren.
When Lucius opened it up, expecting to see the very blueprints, examples, philosophy, and logic constructs that I had shown him in his youth, blank pages stared back at him. Jean gasped as he flipped back and forth from cover to cover. He ran it open from front to back and back to front without spotting a smudge of ink.
“How did this teach you that?” he asked, throwing it back upon the table with a crash.
The binding hit first, ringing hard against the sheet of stone before the pages fluttered open. Ink marked that page. Jean shook her head and slumped into a chair, one hand clutching her bloody belly. “I don’t understand. Did the heat destroy it or something? The humidity?”
Lucius put a hand to the tome and read. “I showed her what she wanted,” the book said.
With his finger stuck to the page, pinning it in place, he turned back to the bishop. “What was it you wanted to know when you began reading this?”
She pulled back, glancing about the mine to where several men were not-so-discretely watching. “I wanted to know about the lost regions of our world.”
“And then?”
“I became interested in the desert. There are ruins out here, not just the mine. But, obviously, we know most about the mine because of the ley.”
“And then?”
She rose, lifting her chin with practiced dignity. “What are you getting at? I can only give you so much leeway for who you work for.”
“Do not think of who I work for!” Lucius roared, slamming his hand on the page again. “When you have no idea who you work for yourself.”
At this outburst, a familiar man stepped out from the shadows of the temple, with his hands clasped behind his back. Nikolai Tolzi asked, “Is something wrong?”
Lucius twisted back to the tome, but the ink had already vanished. He hissed and pointed once more to the bishop. She was practically fleeing to the northman for support as Lucius asked, “How did she mark the small of her back?”
The northmen stepped between her and him like a butler, his bushy brow wrinkling. “Not even a hello after so long?”
“Answer the question, Tolzi. You people are going to get us all killed if I don’t do something. How did she do that? Did you write it for her? How?”
Jean couldn’t meet his gaze as she said, “It appeared there on its own.”
Lucius turned back to the book. Seemingly, an errant breeze had turned the page. New text appeared. “Do you want to save her?”
He threw the book on the ground. “Where is a fire? I’m burning this."
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1. On behalf of Anubi, I resent this statement.