The next cycle, when the Torrviol guard went to raid the spy’s headquarters, Mirian and Jei accompanied them. By now, Mirian knew far too many details about the guards for them to be able to dismiss her, and like with Luspire, she’d had practice navigating the conversations with them. She did the verbal equivalent of strong-arming them into accepting her presence, then helped carefully direct the raid.

“There,” she said after they were past the first trapdoor and the second glyph-trap. She pointed at the nondescript spot on a rug, beneath which was the paving stone with the runes. “Avoid that spot at all costs as we get into the room. There’s a special trap there, completely undetectable by standard divination, and I don’t know how to disable it.” No need to tell them about the runes or the possible necromancy connection. And no way was Mirian duplicating an unknown rune and imprinting it on their souls, even if she had the faintest idea how to do that. Mirian had already checked the souls of these guards for that telltale rune last cycle, so she knew they weren’t spies themselves.

“Then how do we get in?” Roland asked. “Is there another secret door?”

Mirian jerked her head at Jei. “Through this wall,” she said.

Jei looked at Mirian, raised an eyebrow, then shrugged and brought out her orb. She started transforming the bricks in the wall, then telekinetically peeled the section away. Several shelves full of paper came with it, splashing across the floor, but the room lay open.

Her heart raced. No fire. Had they done it?

She’d never been inside the room before. It was disappointingly typical; it looked just like a small office, complete with organized filing systems.

“We need to get as many papers as we can to Magistrate Ada’s office. Which is hopefully all of them. This building is still rigged to burn.”

Mirian tried the drawers in the large wooden desk and found them locked. She didn’t bother picking them; it would take too much time. Instead, she used force spells to crack open the drawers, tearing apart the wood. Bottles of magical ink and scribing tools clattered onto the floor. She rooted through the rest of it, finding more arcane materials, but not what she was looking for. Mirian had scribed several divination spells already, and deployed those now; a refined version of the detect passages spell she’d started using so long ago.

A faint glow settled in on the back of the desk. There seemed no way to access it. Likely, there was some secret switch or sliding compartment. Mirian didn’t bother looking for it. She tore the entire top of the desk off.

Jei said, “Good channeling efficiency and precise force application. You have been practicing.”

Mirian smiled. “I’ve had a good teacher.” Inside the desk, she could now see the small mechanism that protected the hidden compartment. Inside that compartment was a small, ornate chest, about two handspans wide, and half as long. The chest was wooden, with silver bands wrapped around it. The dark wood was carved with swirls and whorls reminiscent of the statues in the Luminate Temple. When she attempted to rip it open with magic, the spell’s energy dissipated like it had just hit an especially strong aura. Interesting, she thought.

“Try to open it,” she told Jei.

Jei’s spell also fizzled. She tried again, pouring enough power into the spell that Mirian felt the flow of mana through the air near her. Again, the same result. “That must be studied,” she said.

Mirian didn’t need any convincing. The guards had called a wagon to transport all the papers to the magistrate. She tucked the chest under her arm, and followed the guards as they headed to Ada’s office.

***

It didn’t take long for them for their bounty of papers to yield results. Most of the documents didn’t even need Jei’s algorithm to be deciphered, just a simple translation.

“Gods above,” Magistrate Ada breathed as she started sorting through them. “This is everything. This is… everyone. I’ve never seen such a well documented scheme.”

Ada’s self-control was usually unflappable, but as they continued going through names and documents, Mirian watched her fingers start to shake. She could see why. Mayor Wolden wasn’t the only official implicated. Several professors and city councilors, a dozen well-regarded merchants, and half the Torrviol guard were implicated. All of them had either been blackmailed, intimidated, or bribed. The spiderweb had wrapped around the entire economic and political power apparatus of Torrviol. Mirian even recognized a Bainrose librarian’s name on a list of bribed officials. There was also an ominous note, unsigned, that read ‘I’ll take care of the Archmage.’

Mirian hardly had to manipulate Ada; with so many people implicated, she needed someone who she could trust, and Mirian was the obvious choice. Mirian recruited her Eskanar language tutor extra to come help decode the documents, which Ada paid the woman for. The tutor had no soul-mark, and didn’t seem to be one of the targets.

While Ada’s office worked on the translation and documentation, Mirian worked on studying the strange chest they’d found. They kept it in the Magistrate’s Building, with guards on the lookout for anyone that might come to try and retrieve it. It was clear to her the box was using some form of soul-magic, and while she helped ward the room with arcane glyphs, she knew those glyphs might very well be useless at stopping celestial divination magic—if such a thing existed.

Her attempt to use Xipuatl’s Elder reliquary failed utterly. The runes he had taught her were insufficient for affecting the chest in any way, though it was interesting to try to analyze it. As far as she could tell, there was mana inside the material of the chest, somehow, not in a flow-state.

“Another thing that contradicts the standard theories,” Xipuatl noted. “I wonder how many people know how to do something like… this.”

Mirian contemplated the chest. The silver bands were not actually made of silver, but some other metal she couldn’t identify. “It doesn’t look ancient. But maybe it came out of the Labyrinth?”

“Either way, it should have been a discovery presented to the wizards of Baracuel, not hidden away for whatever nefarious purpose.”

With magic unable to open it, Mirian brought the chest down to the crafting center, where Ingrid could help her use more mundane ways to crack it open. She made sure to have an escort while moving the chest around; she still didn’t have any idea what the Impostor did during the cycle. So far, nothing she’d done had brought her out of the shadows, but Mirian suspected that if successfully cracking open the spy’s headquarters didn’t lure her out, nothing would.

First, they tried chiseling open the gap between the lid and the body of the chest so they could fit a bar in and lever it open. However, the chisel only sparked and blunted as they hammered it in, and it would neither fit in the gap nor damage the wood enough to make one.

The band saw broke trying to cut the chest open, sending out a shard of metal that nearly hit Ingrid. With the drill press, Jei and Mirian maintained force shields around the device while Ingrid lowered the machine down. The drill scuffed the hells out of it, but it also made a horrible screeching noise and started melting the drill bit, so they stopped.

Ingrid, now more determined than ever to get it open, next suggested they make the chest cold. Since they couldn’t use magic on the chest directly, Jei and Mirian worked together to use heat displacement spells to get a bath of water below freezing, with a special mixture of salts keeping the water from actually turning solid. Then dunked the chest in there, let the metal turn brittle, then set it on the anvil press.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The anvil press did the trick.

As the pressure increased, the silver bands groaned, then cracked apart. Mirian jumped back as cobalt flames engulfed the chest.

“What is it?” Jei asked.

It took Mirian a moment to realize no one else could see the flames. She still had Xipuatl’s Elder reliquary with her. “The soul-magic is doing something,” she whispered to her. Gingerly, she put her hand towards those flames, then snatched it back when she felt the burn. Not on her flesh; she’d glimpsed the flames searing the weave of her soul, and felt a sensation like no other. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good. “Stay back from it. Some sort of spell. It looks like an enchantment undergoing rapid exomagical decay, though.”

Gradually, the ghostly flames subsided. The wood was no longer dark, but bleached and yellowed like a rotten tooth. “I think it’s safe now. Those silver bands—they were some sort of binding agent. Like a Girad sequence for stabilizing flux glyphs,” Mirian told Jei. She wondered if celestial runes had their own stable and unstable runes.

The lock was still intact, so Jei used a shape wood spell, and this time, there was no magical resistance to stop it. The wood split apart into thin tendrils, revealing the contents of the chest.

Inside were three small myrvite skulls. Each had been engraved with what Mirian was sure were runes, so that tight bands of writing criss-crossed the heads and jawbones. Next to them was a wand. The strange texture and color of the wood reminded her of Xipuatl’s Elder reliquary.

“Necromancy,” muttered Ingrid, and made a holy sign against evil.

The problem was, Mirian had opened the chest in public, so there was no hiding the contents. Ingrid had immediately summoned Magistrate Ada, and Ada demanded it be locked away.

“I understand you’re a… you have extra knowledge. Maybe future knowledge. An undeclared Prophet, I don’t know, but I can’t make an exception,” Magistrate Ada told her when she protested. “Studying necromancy is illegal. This thing must stay locked up here.”

Mirian argued the point briefly, then accepted the verdict. She knew where it was. She knew how to open it. There was always next cycle. She would figure out how it worked.

***

Near the end of the cycle, Mirian was lying in bed with Nicolus, staring up at the ceiling while Nicolus read his uncle’s latest letter. Nurea had just handed him the letter, then left. It had taken Mirian a bit to get used to Sire Nurea walking in on them, completely unimpressed by whatever state she found them in, but apparently she was used to this sort of thing. Minus the time travel, of course.

“Let’s see… blah blah blah it’s actually from him, here we go, the interesting part. The investigator he hired—eugh. Dead. Had his tongue cut out too. Wow, these guys are serious. I mean, of course they’re serious, they’ve got wealth that makes the Palamas family look like paupers. But someone is watching their backs, too. How many times have we tried to get information on this business magnate?”

“Three times,” Mirian said absentmindedly. She hadn’t expected a different outcome. She’d memorized a list of names of Akanans who had foreknowledge of the assassination, but had learned nothing real about them except that Nicolus’s uncle was in the circles of a bunch of very wealthy Akanans. He’d actually seen Sylvester Aurum, the richest man in the world, at one of the parties. The people she was trying to get information on were relatively smaller players, though they were still richer than any one individual in the Sacristar family. Uncle Alexus had sent them plenty of cryptic comments by these people that were incredibly suspicious, but had gotten nothing else.

Nicolus said something else, but Mirian’s mind continued to wander. “What kind of person will I become?” she asked the ceiling.

“Whoever you want to be,” Nicolus said, only hesitating a moment.

“Can I, though? I don’t want to be a liar and a manipulator, yet here I am, lying to the Archmage himself, trying to move your Uncle about like a board game piece.” And getting Valen to do whatever I want, because every cycle start she’s still smitten with me. And it’s easy now, especially now that I know what she likes. But she didn’t say that thought out loud.

Nicolus was silent for a while, then he said, “Those are the traits that society selects for. Like how we were talking about Sylvester Aurum. He’s smart, sure, but imagine if he refused to manipulate people on principle. No one would know his name. People who are too honest are too willing to charge a fair price, and a fair price never made anyone into a fossilized myrvite mogul. He had to be absolutely ruthless when he was acquiring his competition, because there’s certain character traits that get you power, and certain character traits that don’t. At least, the way things are.”

Mirian sneered. “That’s from that damn book.”

“Yeah. But he’s not wrong. Imagine the most honest, kind person in the universe,” he said.

“Grandpa Irabi,” Mirian said instantly.

“Great. And is he ever going to be rich or powerful? Is he ever going to rule the world?”

“No chance at all. But he should. That’s what I’ll do. Reinstate the monarchy and name him King Irabi.”

Nicolus laughed and put his arm around her. “You know, that wouldn’t be so bad. That’s one thing I’ve started wondering about, you know. See, under ordinary circumstances, people are constrained by historical circumstance. We make the best choices we can, but those choices only come once, and we can never go back to them. But you….”

“Yeah,” Mirian said, liking the way his arm felt around her. She had a list of spells to practice and a meeting with Mayor Ethwarn later, but she just wanted to lie there, maybe all day. You could, she told herself. There’s always next cycle. But something in her wouldn’t let her. Too much was at stake. She could glut herself on free time, but it felt wrong to waste it when she didn’t know how much she had left. Still, it was nice to take these moments.

Naturally, that meant Nurea burst in again. “Mirian, Captain Cassius wants to see you. The militia found something as they were working on the perimeter defenses out in the forest. Something Cassius was pretty sure you’ve never mentioned.”

Mirian closed her eyes, just for a moment. Shit, she thought. “Alright. Let’s go.”

They dressed quickly, with Nicolus tagging along because he was curious.

Cassius met her near the dorms, where several students were working under a militia volunteer to dig yet another trench west of the hills. “It’s several miles past the spellward,” Cassius said. “I assume you know nothing of that area.”

“Correct,” Mirian said, wondering what her old combat magic professor thought of her. Throughout the cycles, he had stayed reserved; a committed patriot for Baracuel, and serious in everything. What would it take to get you to open up? What might you tell me? she wondered, and disliked the thought, because it felt like she was thinking about him the same way she’d thought about that secret chest she’d found with the wand and the skulls in it.

They walked quickly, but it still took quite some time to get there, winding through a makeshift trail while the trees loomed over them. Several militia members were standing around what they’d found, and what they’d found was impossible to mistake.

Mirian’s heart raced. “Is that an airship?”

It was about twenty feet long, the wooden hull reinforced with a whitish metal she assumed was titanium, since that’s what she’d heard they reinforced airships with. It had a small cabin, with room for supplies and the pilot seat and not much else. This was like the other ones she’d seen in Baracuel, and nothing like the titanic warships that would be coming in a few days. Its long slender wings folded to the side, the fabric that connected each skeletal pole hanging loosely. A branch was firmly wedged in one of the wings, probably from when it descended through the canopy. The whole thing was covered in pine needles.

“Indeed,” Cassius said. “Akanan design. Sadly, it appears to be missing its most interesting components. The levitation enchantments have been stripped, the fuel is used up, and the spell engine is missing its glyphic core. Completely unusable without them. But very interesting. It seems to have been sitting here for some weeks.”

How many weeks? Mirian immediately wondered. Would the airship be here already when the cycle started? Or had something she’d done caused it to appear? She wracked her mind for what she would have done. It was an Akanan airship. She wasn’t interacting with them.

Except you are, she remembered. As the spies were captured, one could have easily sent off a zephyr falcon back home and triggered some sort of response. It could easily be something the Impostor had requested. Or, it might even be someone figuring out that Nicolus’s uncle was being suspicious, and deciding to check up on his family members. Or maybe it was always here.

Either way, there was another player in this game of war and death she hadn’t accounted for.