She slept for at least ten hours, then woke feeling refreshed. The room she’d paid extra for in the Kivinotsuur had its own hearth, and the warmth from the little spell engine kept the room warm despite the raging winds that blew down from the Endelice. Fur rugs and the stone construction retained that heat, while two glyph lamps’ comforting glow was a nice contrast to the streets outside; out there, the world was tinged blue by the heavy clouds filtering the light.
The work room was small, but would serve her needs. It had two polished stone tables and several shelves for her to stock tools. She started by unloading what ink bottles had survived her encounter with the glaciavore, and took stock of what she’d need to replace. Supplies were scarce in Frostland’s Gate, but she could always distill some of the magichemicals she needed herself.
She and Respected Jei had talked about how Mirian would eventually need to explore new concepts in magic, because nothing they knew now could stop the apocalyptic leyline storms or the crashing moon. She’d also had long talks with Xipuatl, Arenthia, and Lecne, and had learned enough soul magic that she was beginning to see places where arcane magic and soul magic might connect, or perhaps even overlap. While what she really wanted was access to Torrian Tower’s advanced arcane physics laboratories, there were experiments she could do here. Some of the small myrvites that lived up in the area, like frost minks and rime beetles, might be perfect.
That, she could have done anywhere, though. What she really wanted was to study the materials from the Labyrinth. If there was something that would really bring together Xipuatl’s theories, she thought it would be there.
Lily had talked about her sister, Beatrice, and her work up here. Three months from now, her team was going to be shipping back what artifacts they had found and data they had collected to Torrviol, but, of course, that would never happen. So she needed to get into Beatrice’s expedition group.
A few months ago, Mirian would have just walked up and told Beatrice what was happening. It was simple, easy, and she had the glaciavore eyes to help prove it. However, she had no idea if the Akanan spies had made it this far north, or if the Syndicate smugglers up here could have their information bought, or even if there might be another time traveler who had their sights set on this village for some reason. She didn’t know if Sulvorath took his airship skiff in a wider route now. Hopefully, he was dealing with the fallout of having the spy’s headquarters burned down and would be too busy, but she couldn’t be sure. She had to approach this endeavor with caution.
After breakfast, her first stop was at Elsadorra’s Appraisal Shop. She already had a pretty good idea of what the glaciavore parts were worth, but she needed to start getting to know the people of the town.
Elsadorra’s shop was as stark as it was organized. She apparently wasted nothing on comfort, with only a single hearth stone in the center of the shop, and even that seemed to be set to a low heat spell. Elsadorra, who was arranging glass vials with magichemicals in them into perfect rows on a shelf, turned as she entered. She was middle aged, and didn’t seem at all bothered by the cold. She was wearing a band with several lenses attached to one side. They looked to be jeweler’s lenses, though they had more glyphs than Lily’s glasses.
“What do you want?” she asked.
Mirian’s first thought was that she had already offended her somehow. “I was advised that I should get my items formally appraised by you,” she said. “The soldiers at the gate and the cook at the Kivinotsuur both said it, so I figured I ought to.”
“They were correct. What do you have?” she said in the same dispassionate tone, and Mirian realized that was probably just how she talked.
“Glaciavore eyes and a mashed coldheart.”
Unlike everyone else she’d mentioned those to, Elsadorra didn’t even have an ounce of skepticism or surprise. “Put the eyes on the table. This part of the table, with the cloth on it. Let me get a container for the heart. Put the heart in the container. Do not get cryoblood on the table.”
Mirian did so, and Elsadorra pulled down one of the lenses so it was in front of her left eye. She spent some time peering at each one, her gloved hands turning them over. One of the lenses had a light beam that shone at the object. When she was done, she set them down.
“These are high quality crystalline eyes. One has a hairline fracture. Very fresh. Worth three doubloons and one drachm each.”
The heart she took more time to examine. “Coldheart is high quality too. Pity about the damage, could have sold it to Cediri. Myrvite biologist in town. As it is, the alchemistry shop will buy it. Worth two doubloons and three drachms. I will prepare papers certifying that value. The cost is sixteen beadcoins.”
That was well below what appraisers usually charged. It barely covered the cost of the paper and the wax. “Why don’t you charge more?” Mirian asked, curious.
“I give good deals so that you will like me more, and then when you have something I actually want, I will be able to get it. I am not interested in money. I am interested in novel things, from either the Labyrinth or the Endelice.”
“Ah,” Mirian replied. It was a startling amount of honesty from a merchant. As she looked around the shelves, though, she could see that several of the objects behind the counter were of labyrinthine origin.
That itself, she realized, was important. She hadn’t been to the Labyrinth yet.
But she had dreamed it. And the large stone block behind the counter, the strange formation of multicolored pseudopipes, and the wall fragment overgrown with prismatic fungus that was beneath a glass globe—she’d seen them all before in her dreams.
“That’s my plan. To go down into the Labyrinth. I need to find artifacts with magical properties. Things on the edge of human understanding. Who’s a good person to talk to about that?”
Elsadorra used a thin glass pipe to put exactly five drops of wax on each piece of paper, then stamped it with her signet, then washed her signet ring and the glass pipe in a basin. “The Torrviol Academy Expedition is doing research you would be interested in, but they don’t take recruits. You might be able to pay them for their notes. Aelius heads the Ennecus Group looking to go to the lower levels. There are two other groups, but they stick to the first level of the Labyrinth. Caution is not overly lucrative, but neither has lost any members in three full years.”
“Thanks,” Mirian said. “I’m Niluri, by the way. It’s good to meet you.” She held out her hand to shake.
“I will remember your name,” Elsadorra said, and didn’t even look at Mirian’s extended hand. “Goodbye.”
Mirian dropped her hand and walked out the door, feeling only a little awkward. When she glanced back, she could see Elsadorra’s shoulders relax as she crossed the threshold. Not a people person, Mirian thought. She could sympathize.
She sold the heart, mostly because the cryoblood was starting to seep through her bag, then stocked up on materials for the experiments she was planning. Once her room had a functional workshop, she went off to find Beatrice’s research team.
It turned out they liked to chat and eat at the local taverns. There were only two taverns in the village, which made searching them quite easy: End of Civilization (which due to a pun in Friian, also meant ‘no civilization’) and Lager Then Life. There was also a restaurant on the adjacent block called A Mazing Eats, so clearly the town was run by very funny people.
Stolen novel; please report.
Beatrice’s group ended up being at Lager Then Life, which had an old fashioned fire running in an actual fireplace. Well, there’s certainly enough trees up north.
It took everything for Mirian not to run up to Beatrice with a smile on her face. She wanted to. She’d always liked Lily’s sister, but she wasn’t wearing her real face, and she needed to be cautious. Instead, she walked up and said, “Mind if I join you?”
“Yes,” said Beatrice instantly, as her two companions said, “Not at all.”
“Beatrice,” said the first man, sighing. He was a large man with dark hair and a well-trimmed beard.
“People only ask that before they start annoying us and end the conversation with a bad deal,” Beatrice protested.
“Go ahead,” said the second man, who was larger than the first and had a warhammer that was leaning up against the wall near him. The way he carried himself, she had no doubt he knew how to use it. Unlike his companion, his dirty blond beard was as wild as the north forests.
Mirian sat. What she wanted to say was, ‘hey Beatrice, good to see you too,’ but she restrained herself.
Beatrice rolled her eyes and leaned back in her chair.
“Niluri. New in town, but you knew that. Elsadorra told me about your group. I’d like to learn more about what you’ve been doing and what you’ve discovered in the Labyrinth. I’m willing to pay.” She figured that was a good start.
“Great,” Beatrice said. “Let's see the coin.”
Mirian put a doubloon on the table and slid it her way.
That startled Beatrice, then her eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“I’m researching the leylines. There’s some anomalous readings, and I think the Labyrinth is connected. That, and I think the Labyrinth has new magic that could be used to better understand the leylines.”
“Then you want Torrviol Academy. You might have missed it on your way here, but it’s easy to find. Head south. Look for the fancy buildings and the really tall tower,” Beatrice replied, dripping with sarcasm.
“Beatrice,” the first man said.
“Cediri,” Beatrice said, annoyed.
“You’re not giving her a fair shake. Remember what we talked about? The successful academic pays attention to the business side of things too,” Cediri said, tapping the gold coin on the table.
“No, you said that, I just made noncommittal grunting noises so you’d shut up faster. Right, Grimald? Don’t roll your eyes at me. Listen, Niluri. What you’ve just done is suspicious as hell. Who are you working for and why do they want to steal our research?”
Gods, Mirian thought. She hadn’t expected Beatrice of all people to be this difficult. Here she was, needing to pull pages from Nicolus’s book on manipulation on her best friend’s sister just to keep the conversation going. “A small research group out of Madinahr. We were nobodies, until there was a magical eruption between the tracks to us and Alkazaria. Then we got a bunch of funding so that we could find out why it happened and make sure it didn’t happen again. Train derailments are expensive. I drew the short straw, so I’m up here.”
“You have measurement devices? Instruments?”
“Wouldn’t fit in my pack. I’ll be building them here.”
“I think I’d have heard of an artificer of that caliber, and I’ve never heard of you. Who mentored you?”
Mirian sighed. “I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect a full interrogation.”
“We are under contract with Torrviol Academy,” Grimald said.
Cediri groaned. “Letting her glance at the notes for a fair price wouldn’t hurt anyone. What Ferrandus doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Besides, he’s busy with that secret project, and I’m inclined to think he forgot we exist, given the last budget cut we got. And the fact that the last shipment of materials seems to have gotten ‘lost.’”
The three of them exchanged meaningful glances, and Mirian got the sense this wasn’t the first time they’d had this kind of conversation. “If I can’t see the notes, can I join your team in the exploration?”
Grimald said, “Yes” at the exact same time Beatrice said, “Absolutely not.”
They both looked at Cediri. “What? Oh, it’s up to me, then. Great, now someone will be mad at me no matter what.”
“She’d be a liability. She’s clearly never been down there.”
“She killed a glaciavore by herself,” Grimald said, which made Mirian wonder how he’d found out that fast. Grimald knows the soldiers, she noted.
Cediri sighed. “Sorry, Beatrice. We’ve had too many close calls. Another spellcaster of even moderate competence would do a lot of good.”
“Or found a dead one on the road,” Beatrice muttered under her breath, which made Mirian glare at her. She really wanted to call her out for being a jerk.
After that, Grimald and Cediri took turns asking her about the spells she knew and what she’d already heard about the Labyrinth while Beatrice stewed in silence. When Grimald tried to slide the doubloon back to Mirian (while Cediri stared at it longingly), Mirian said, “Keep it. As an act of goodwill, and because it sounds like you could use some more supplies after the lost shipment.”
Grimald and Cediri thanked her, but that only made Beatrice’s eyes narrow further, and she could practically feel Beatrice thinking ‘what’s your game?’ at her. She wanted to tell her I’m on your side.
“Our next expedition is in two days,” Grimald said. “We eat breakfast here and go over the plan. Can you have the spells we need scribed by then?”
“I can,” Mirian said. If there was one thing the time loop had gotten her, it was the ability to speed-scribe since she’d done it so much. She was missing a few magical inks, but some of them she could make, and others she could do without.
“Good,” Grimald said. “Now, for the most important thing.” He waggled his eyebrows. “Lunch.”
Lunch was yak steak, yak bone-broth stew, and bread with berry jam. It was horrifically under-spiced, in Mirian’s opinion, but it still was far beyond all the dried food she’d been eating. To be fair, all the spices she liked grew a few hundred miles south of them. Frostland’s Gate had yak herders, some woolly pigs, and several greenhouses full of hardy vegetables on the outskirts of the village, just inside the spellward. Only a few berry plants and the notoriously tough winterleaf grew in the small fields.
In the day, the yaks roamed out to munch on whatever they could find, then they were all herded back into pens inside the spellward. Both the greenhouses and the herd were the lifeblood of the village. Without them, the village was untenable.
Grimald was happy to talk about anything and everything to do with the region. Everyone deemed fit enough in the village had to take turns doing a monthly patrol around the area to cull myrvites, and there were giant bells people rang in case of a myrvite encroachment. The spellward created an ambient field that disrupted spell organs. It would kill small myrvites outright, but larger ones just found the experience intolerable enough that it repelled them. However, a glaciavore motivated by hunger could breach it, as could large swarms of frost scarabites, and the bells would summon everyone to the defense.
“How often does that happen?” Mirian wondered. Beatrice’s arm was still bandaged from the wyvern attack Lily had told her about.
“About once every two years, and even then usually only at the end of winter when the big predators are the hungriest,” Cediri said.
“What’s the biggest myrvite that’s attacked?”
Cediri and Grimald looked at each other. “Ice carnipede, some twenty years back. Killed half the herd of yaks and smashed a few greenhouses before people could chase it off. They had to bring up an archmage and a bunch of Praetorians to hunt it down. If a carnipede attacks, I’m running for it.”
Professor Viridian hadn’t covered those in class, so Mirian asked about them.
“Imagine a centipede the height of an elephant, covered in carapace about as strong as steel armor. It can breathe an icy gale, stab a leg through an entire yak effortlessly, and let out a roar that makes your ears bleed. Or to put it another way, they eat glaciavores and polar bears,” Cediri said. “They usually stay up in the Endelice, which is yet another reason no one not suicidal goes hiking up there.”
After lunch, Mirian wandered around to get a better sense of the town. Most people were friendly enough, though everyone kept busy enough that any smalltalk she made was always cut short. Snow had to be shoveled to keep the streets clear, roofs patched up, and fossilized myrvite distributed to every spell engine and spellward tower. The good news was, it seemed not much was out of the ordinary.
Of course, Torrviol had seemed fine enough on the surface, so Mirian stuck with her story and kept her ears and eyes open. That evening, she started putting up wards in her room.