Visits from Marsh had become a daily thing, complicated only by the fact that he was living in a tent and she lived with four other people. They needed some place to be together, and eventually they had settled on an entad taken from his team’s stash, a blanket that allowed access to a very small little interior room. It was only just big enough for a bed, and cramped if they were doing anything but laying there together, but it was cozy most of the time, and inside it, their privacy was almost absolute.
Hannah was worried about the sheer velocity that their relationship seemed to have. After their long liaison at the hotel, she had thought it would be good to pull back a bit, to slow down, and she had utterly failed to keep up with that. Marsh would give her a call, and she had yet to turn him down.
“I think the fact that we never found good housing put a lot of pressure on us,” said Marsh. He was, she had found, often hot and heavy when they first came together. Roving hands led to the feeling of his curly beard as he kissed her body. It was good, great even, but she found herself drawn to the way he liked to talk, after the act.
“I think it was Lola that caused the problems,” said Hannah.
“Oh, it was,” said Marsh. “But if we’d had some kind of mobile house, or full-range teleportation we wouldn’t be compelled to sell, then maybe we could have spent the time when we weren’t in the dungeons away from each other.”
“Or gotten different tents?” asked Hannah.
“The tent was magical,” said Marsh. “And nice, as tents go. You know, thinking about it, maybe the big problem was that we were a team that Alfric had put together, and we focused too much on trying to be efficient. Separate tents would have been great. Even better would be to just have different places and come together when we were doing dungeons. It’s not like we don’t have a party channel.”
“Mmm,” said Hannah. “We’re doin’ fine in one large house.”
“I’m green with envy, truth be told,” said Marsh.
“No luck finding a fifth?” asked Hannah.
“Two interviews, actually, no one who passed muster though,” said Marsh. He sighed. “It’s slim pickings here, and I think we’re being picky.” He paused for a moment. “Did you want to hear about them?”
“Sure,” said Hannah. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“I wouldn’t want to bore you with talking shop,” said Marsh.
“Not at all,” said Hannah. “Shop interests me.”
“First one tried to extort us,” said Marsh. “She was a bright young girl, had broken up with her party not too long ago, some speciality in close combat that you don’t normally get in a woman. Taller than me, actually, beastly good with a sword, she claimed. But she came into it thinking that we were desperate, and she spent a lot of her time trying to say what a bad position we were in, and how bad we needed her, then said that she’d need a third share rather than a fifth, at least to start.”
“Why would a person do that?” asked Hannah. “Well, I can guess, aye, but I want to hear your guess.”
“Her old team retired,” said Marsh. “All but her. Not too many more dungeons under her belt than we had, but she had a puffed up idea of herself, or maybe just wanted to extract as much money from the business as she could, another ten or twenty dungeons.”
“Mmm,” said Hannah. “And given that you’d just kicked out an unequal member, you didn’t want another.”
“I think it was that demand for more,” said Marsh. “It grated, even if we are in a bind.”
“Knowin’ not enough about the situation, I’d think she was after validation,” said Hannah. “It wasn’t so much about the dungeon as knowin’ that she was good enough, knowin’ that she was wanted.”
“Maybe,” said Marsh.
“And the second reject?” asked Hannah.
“Oh, a nice man, but not right,” said Marsh. “He was the right elevation, but clearly a bit touched, and ten years older than any of us. Simple sentences, things like that, and he got confused rather easily. We never really got it out of him, but it seems like he suffered a head wound in a dungeon and wasn’t quite right afterward.”
“Oof,” said Hannah. She was, of course, thinking of her own head wound and the seriousness with which Alfric treated it.
“Yeah,” said Marsh. “He seemed happy, and he’s had dungeons under his belt since that happened, but yeah, oof. If you catch them early, sometimes you’re fine, but either they didn’t catch it early, or it wasn’t enough. I hate it.”
“It, meanin’?” asked Hannah.
“The reminder that we’re mortal,” said Marsh. “The idea that the dungeons really can kill a person.”
“Ah,” said Hannah.
“You never feel that?” asked Marsh.
“I do,” said Hannah. “Just … less keenly than you, I’d expect.”
“I’ve done a lot of dungeons,” said Marsh. “Scraped through plenty of times. Of course, sometimes the scrapes grow in your mind, the times that it was just an inch between skin off my knee and missing a whole leg. And Josen lost an arm recently, of course.”
“No major traumas for us,” said Hannah. “Broken bones, lacerations, that sort of thing, a few hard hits. Mostly in Alfric’s direction, honestly, which is for the best. He’s got the right mindset for pain.”
“Which is?” asked Marsh.
“Pain is temporary,” said Hannah. “In the old days, or without a healer present, pain was a sign that something was critically wrong, but now, it’s just … not really necessary. The pain is the worst part of breaking a leg, not the break itself. You just get a cleric, or get someone to get you a cleric, warp to the center of the hex if you’re somewhere civilized … I don’t know, there’s a whole Oeyr sermon on this, and a lesser one for Garos.”
“What’s the Garos version?” asked Marsh.
Hannah appreciated this deeply. She was rarely asked about Garos by the party, and without being a proper part of the temple, there were no sermons to give and no one coming in needing the advice that Hannah was trained to give.
“In short,” Hannah began.
“It doesn’t need to be short,” said Marsh. “I like listening to you talk.”
“To my words, or the sound of my voice?” asked Hannah.
“Both,” replied Marsh with a smile. In his defense, she’d set him up for that.
“Well, the short version, because I have things to do today that don’t involve hiding out inside a magical blanket,” said Hannah. “There’s at least a part of the Garam Ashar that’s about responsiveness, the ways in which one thing reflects another in far more abstract terms than you normally see or think about. If there’s a problem, there’s a solution, that sort of thing. The positive implies the negative, and vice versa. So that leads to interpretations of somethin’ like this, where the body’s response to a problem, to callin’ attention to the problem, is pain. And eventually, it gets divorced from that purpose. The object creates its negation, then the object is gone, leaving only the negation, a form of lamentable asymmetry. It happens all the time in human realms, where a law outlives the subject it was legislating, or the organization outlasts whatever its origin was.”
“This is some deep religion,” said Marsh.
“Mmm, no,” said Hannah. “Because it’s actually in the holy book. The true deep religion is all the things that were built up over time, implications of implications, or just inventions. A lot of it has been excised in the various reformations though, especially those that came with the unity of the churches. It used to be that the Church of Garos denied the other gods, in their philosophy if not their existence, and it had to explain everything through symmetry, where nowadays sometimes we say ‘oh, go talk to the cleric of Xuphin’.”
“Does a part of you still wish it was the old days?” asked Marsh. “When you could be in a place where it was all Garos?”
“Oh, there was a time when I did,” said Hannah. “When I was, say, sixteen, still doin’ all the deep dives on theology, my head afire with it all. I’m still not a moderate, obviously, but I’ve mellowed, and I think I understand what it would actually be like, to be in a society that had only Garos. More people payin’ lip service, more contortions of the holy book, more politics within the Church … seems to me that I’d find that a special kind of terrible, and if I’d gotten my idle wish at sixteen, I’d have soon regretted it.”
“Mmm,” said Marsh. He stroked her hair. “This is nice.”
“It is,” said Hannah. She hesitated. “Sorry if I talked too much.”
“Not at all,” replied Marsh. “I don’t think about this sort of thing often.”
Hannah slowly disentangled herself from Marsh and escaped from the blanket into her room. There, she got more properly dressed and brushed her hair for a moment while Marsh came out. He was quite fine to look at, in part because of the smile on his face. It was what she’d said she didn’t want, and now she was worrying that she was a liar. She had been worried that she was talking too much, that she was boring him, instead of just being herself, come what may.
“Ah, Grig is coming,” said Marsh. “With an offer for Alfric, seems like. I might as well be here for it. Alfric hates me least, I think.”
“Does he?” asked Hannah.
“Sure,” said Marsh. “He thinks I’m simple.”
“Are you not simple?” asked Hannah with a smile.
Marsh grinned. “Simple enough.” He moved to her, and they kissed, with his hands finding her waist. “You said there were other things you had to do today?”
“There are,” said Hannah, disengaging. “Tomorrow though, if you’d like?”
“Mmm,” said Marsh. He rested his nose in her hair and held her close. “You spoil me.”
“Yes,” replied Hannah. “That’s the worry.”
Marsh paused for a moment, holding up his hand. “Oh, Grig is actually almost here, when he said that he was coming, I’d thought he meant later.”
“If it’s business, I’m going to go down to see what it’s about,” said Hannah. She checked herself over in the mirror above the dresser. She was slightly disheveled, but there was nothing for that, and it wasn’t enough that she imagined anyone but Mizuki would comment.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Hannah went downstairs, with Marsh following after, and she was just in time to see Grig coming into the dining room. He was carrying a heavy case.
“Alright, why do you have a lute?” asked Alfric, who was still standing in spite of Grig taking a seat. Alfric didn’t sit down until everyone else had. Isra and Mizuki were nowhere to be seen, but Verity was there with her fingers steepled.
“It’s for Verity,” said Grig, taking the instrument out of its case. “Eight strings, which is too many, but she’s got the thing that gives her more fingers. The actual entad effect allows parallel playing to give accompaniment, so you’re effectively playing a few lutes at once, and it’s a resilient instrument.” He picked it up by the neck and made as if to smash it against the table. “Er, I was going to demonstrate, but I just realized that I don’t want to hurt the table.”
“We’ll take your word for it or get independent testing,” said Alfric. “And this is just a gift, presented to someone you barely know, or is it more than that?”
“It’s a trade deal,” said Grig, smiling. “All we want is some chrononaut insurance.”
Alfric grimaced. “That’s not a business that I’m in.”
“Well, no, and I know that,” said Grig, he was still smiling, and he was a good enough actor that it didn’t feel forced. “But you see, in this particular case, you wouldn’t be managing a lot of clients, it would only be us, and we wouldn’t need to set up separate channels, because we essentially already have that. The only thing that we’d need is coordination on which days we’re doing dungeons.”
Alfric sighed. “Verity, I’ll need you to test the lute and see whether it’s worth using. That’s step one.”
“Wonderful!” said Grig. He slid the lute across the table to her, seeming quite pleased that it was going even that well. “I was thinking that we’d do it contingent on your schedule, arranged in the morning, with a message from us at night, and reset contingent on either a negative message or no message at all.”
Alfric held up a hand. “Slow down. I need to think about it.”
“Sure,” nodded Grig.
Verity had picked up the lute, and was looking at the ‘head’ of it. “There are no pegs. How is it tuned?”
“It’s not,” smiled Grig. “It’s self-tuning.”
Verity frowned, then pushed her chair out a bit and held the lute in her lap, plucking each of the strings in turn. “They’re at least standard notes,” she said, plucking the strings. “But this seems like it would be exceptionally annoying to play, at least to start, and I’d be hamstrung by what the lute thinks about tuning.”
“It’s a problem, yes,” said Grig. “But Marsh was saying that you’d been complaining about the tuning of your lute, and the problems of going into wet environments, and this will handle moisture really well.”
“What time period were you thinking?” asked Alfric. “Chrononaut insurance, with you as my only client, limited to preapproved days not exceeding one in every three, how long would you need for this lute?”
“Let her play it first,” said Grig. “But you are interested? It’s just insurance, in case something goes wrong, hopefully we won’t need it at all, but Josen is adamant that we have a failsafe, especially since we’ll be adding a new member.”
“So this is to keep Josen as part of the team?” asked Alfric.
“No,” said Grig. “This is to keep Josen from spending a huge chunk of our money paying one of your family members. In my opinion he doesn’t have enough faith in the team, and got too used to doing this with a safety net.”
“Under Lola’s leadership you had a lot of resets,” said Alfric. “That’s one of the things that I’m thinking about, when considering whether to take the offer.”
“Lola said we reset a lot, but who knows,” said Grig. “And we’ll be a different team, obviously, hopefully one that’s more, er, functional.”
Verity began to strum the lute with her extra fingers, and the sound was striking, like a full chorus of lutes. Looking at the fingers was a mistake though, as they made Hannah’s eyes water. Verity didn’t just have extra fingers, whatever the lute was doing, it caused multiples of the fingers to appear, superimposed on top of each other, and moving through each other. Verity took her time with the song, thirty seconds or so, and brought it to a close.
“What was that?” asked Grig. His eyes were wide.
“Hrm?” asked Verity, looking up at him.
“That song,” said Grig. “That was amazing.”
Verity frowned at him. “Just something I threw together.”
“You wrote that?” asked Grig.
“I improvised,” said Verity.
“You improvised?” asked Grig.
“You are a professional musician, aren’t you?” asked Verity.
“I’m a bard,” said Grig. “I play, but it’s all from a set list, it’s not — to put something like that together on the fly —”
“It wasn’t entirely on the fly,” said Verity. “I knew the direction I wanted to go in before I started. And I have been playing my lute for several hours a day practically since I was old enough to hold one.” She forced a smile. “Sorry if it was a bit much.”
Grig’s mouth was slightly open. He looked at Alfric. “Well now I understand why you came all this way for her.”
“Most of that is actually incidental,” said Alfric. “I mean, she’s very good, but that’s of only marginal utility when it comes to doing dungeons.”
“Which makes the ability to do multiple parts at once somewhat worthless to us,” said Verity. “It’s a fine instrument, and solves some of the problems that I have, but sound output and harmonic layering aren’t really the issues that need to be addressed.” She shrugged, then looked at Alfric. “I do want it, but not that badly. If I got it, the only thing that would replace it would be something equally sturdy that also had an effect worth writing home about. Not that I would write home.”
“Do you want to smash it against something?” asked Grig, seeming hopeful. “It was going to be quite impressive.”
“A better test would be to get it wet,” said Verity. She leaned down and spit on the lute, right on the strings, then strummed it. Whatever she was looking for, she seemed impressed. “It’s fully waterproof?”
Grig nodded, then turned to Alfric. “Here’s what I’m looking for,” said Grig. “Coverage for the entire time we’re in the region of Greater Plenarch.”
“There are seven hundred hexes,” said Alfric. “So, no.”
“At most, it’s two years' coverage,” said Grig with a frown.
“One year of coverage,” said Alfric. “No more than a hundred days total, and a cap of five resets.”
Grig stroked his chin and thought about that.
“This is mostly for Josen, right?” asked Marsh. “Seems like we only run into issues if we fail too many times.”
“Does this work out, money-wise?” asked Hannah. “No good havin’ a deal like this if there’ll be problems down the way.”
“The lute would be hard for us to sell,” said Grig. “And for Alfric’s side of things —”
“It doesn’t work out,” said Alfric. “Chrononaut insurance is expensive, more than the lute is worth.”
“Okay,” said Grig. “Well.”
“That doesn’t mean that I won’t do it,” said Alfric. “I’m just saying that the reduction in cost, for me, doesn’t come close to keeping this even.”
“I could sweeten the pot,” said Grig. “Our counterparty was provided by Lola, and they’re gone now, having dumped a virtual warehouse full of things on our doorstep. Two or three trifles?”
“Mizuki does love trifles,” said Alfric with a sigh. “Four trifles, then we can call it even.”
“Five,” said Verity. “One for each of us.”
“You have the lute,” said Grig with a frown.
“Yes,” said Verity. “But it’s not something for me, it’s something for the job I do.”
“Fine, fine,” said Grig. He held out his hand to Alfric. “Deal?”
“Deal,” said Alfric with a sigh. “We can hammer out the details later.”
“You’ll have to come to Liberfell for the trifles,” said Grig. “But that can be later. And they do need to be trifles, tiny things, minor entads.”
Alfric nodded.
“It’s good that we can work together again,” said Grig. “Even if it’s just in this capacity.”
“Mmm,” said Alfric. He turned to Hannah. “You’re fine being the conduit? With the message entad, it shouldn’t be much of a burden.”
“It’ll be fine,” said Hannah.
“If things don’t work out between us, someone else can take the marble,” said Marsh. “It shouldn’t need to be a big deal.”
Marsh and Grig left together, toward Liberfell, and Alfric ended up beside Hannah while Verity played with the new lute.
“‘If things don’t work out between us,’” said Hannah. “Implying that there are things which might or might not work out.”
“And?” asked Alfric. “Is he wrong?”
“Not strictly, no,” said Hannah. “There was also a bit of casualness to it which … I don’t know.”
“You’d prefer he clung to you a bit more?” asked Alfric.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Hannah, waving a hand. “Doesn’t matter. Or it does matter, but I don’t think it does to think about too much.”
“You’d prefer a symmetry of affection,” said Alfric.
“Aye,” said Hannah. “Hard to know how things stand, other than that he likes spendin’ time with me, and I with him, and we’re not partnered, but …” she shook her head. “I’m bein’ a bad friend. How do you feel about the deal?”
“It’s awkward,” said Alfric. “Grig wants to pretend that it’s water under the bridge.”
“Has he apologized?” asked Hannah.
“He has,” nodded Alfric.
“Good first step, that,” said Hannah with a nod. She was pivoting back into clerical mode, trying to see things from Alfric’s perspective. Maybe what he needed was just a friend, someone to offer support, a shoulder to cry on or someone to say ‘I agree, that’s terrible’, but she would try the clerical approach first, an actual solution to the problem.
“It feels a bit like cheating,” said Alfric. “I wanted to work my way up, not take money for being a chrononaut.”
“Ah,” said Hannah. If that was the direction he was coming from, it was quite different than talking about the betrayal. But perhaps he was coming at it from multiple different directions. People were like that sometimes, a ball of different thoughts that were difficult to disentangle. “And were you fine with this solution, bein’ slightly underpaid?”
“Significantly underpaid,” said Alfric. He was looking off in the middle distance, not focused on the here and now. It was a nice day outside, though slightly warm for Hannah’s tastes, the kind of day that made her wish for a good breeze or a deep shade. “You know, I could be a part of that side of the family business for six months or so and make enough that I could outfit the whole team in entad gear. And it would feel so hollow, but standing here not doing that also feels hollow.”
“I have to ask — did a part of you just want to help them?” asked Hannah.
Alfric shrugged. “Maybe. I put the team together, did most of the planning, it would be good to see them succeed. Vindicating, in a way. A testament to my knowledge of dungeons, maybe.” He shook his head. “I don’t think they’re good thoughts to have, they’re not true, the success of Vertex doesn’t actually reflect on me, but for them to scatter to the winds would be sad in a way that does feel personal, as much as they’re not my friends.”
“But they were your friends, and at least for Grig and Marsh, it seems like there’s still some affection there,” said Hannah.
“I don’t know if we were friends,” said Alfric. “It’s one of the things that I’ve been thinking about. You? You feel like a friend to me, and I’ve only known you for a month. I care for you.” He was still focused somewhat on the distance, but he turned to give her a glance. “Sorry if that’s mushy.”
“Not at all,” said Hannah. “I care for you too. For the whole party, naturally.”
“I think with Vertex, we spent time together, and learned each other's idiosyncrasies, but we weren’t friends, not really,” said Alfric. “We were business partners, heavier on the business than the partners.”
“Aye,” nodded Hannah. “And that was difficult to realize.”
“It means that I never really had friends growing up,” said Alfric. “Or they were just this particular sort of friend, the business friend, or the school friend that you lose touch with the moment school lets out.”
“I had friends like that in seminary,” said Hannah. “Drifting-apart friends. It would be easy to keep in touch, but we never made any effort to, not even a flimsy pretense of us makin’ the effort.”
“That’s how I thought this would be,” said Alfric. “Our party. We’d do a few dungeons, then go our separate ways.”
“Not now?” asked Hannah.
“No,” said Alfric. “I think it was the offer from Lola that made me realize that this is the party I want, come what may. Maybe it would have happened with Vertex too, if we’d been living together and doing the dungeons.”
“Or maybe we’re just more in line with you,” said Hannah. “In our own ways. The difference, perhaps, bein’ that you didn’t pick us.”
“I did,” said Alfric, frowning.
Hannah laughed. “You picked Verity, who’s similar to you in many respects, and who is probably least close to you, if you don’t mind my sayin’ so. The rest of us were picked up because we were warm bodies who could fill the right roles, more or less.”
“Well,” said Alfric. “True, from a certain point of view.”
Hannah laughed again. “I’m havin’ some tea, would you like some? It’s a lazy day today.”
“Of course,” nodded Alfric. “And thanks for listening to me whine.”