Chapter Twenty-Two: Renegotiation

+++++Anise+++++

Anise barely made it out of her uncle's place with Ezra in tow. He was pretty out of it, barely conscious and badly burned, the skin around his arms and face black with cracked lines of red underneath, though they were slowly fading to pink and expanding, even as she watched, as if the less-burned skin was consuming the charred bits. Before her eyes, a broken bone popped into place and visibly straightened. She'd seen healing decoctions at work plenty of times, but Anise couldn't guess at the long-term effects and implications having one constantly at work within your body. There was even a healing decoction syndrome where too many in too short a span could permanently impair your natural healing ability. Ezra pretty clearly didn't have that problem.

The last of her energy reserves were fast-depleting - she'd been supporting most of Ezra's weight with magical force alone, his shoes barely dragging along the sidewalk as she stumbled along and pushed him in front of herself. It must have looked as if she was trying to corral a man counterweighted by an airship balloon. He shook his head and managed a bit of a stagger under his own volition.

"Rill…" he mumbled.

They'd left Rill back at Fenrik's… what else could they do? None of the three of them were in any shape to square against a fully-energized 8th elevation mage, and it was better that two of them escape than none at all. Right? Of course Anise felt terrible about leaving Rill behind, but she'd been forced to make the best of a bad situation. Part of her wished that Ezra had stayed unconscious, because she didn't feel like reasoning him through the strategic calculus of regrouping before figuring out how to rescue his… whatever Rill was to Ezra. Anise had never asked.

"Rill… where's Rill…"

"Come on, just another block to your coach," Anise said.

Every few seconds, she looked back over her shoulder, expecting to see her uncle there, hovering through the air, surrounded by horrible energies and his face projecting rage. But each time, all she saw was the plume of black smoke wisping upward and no other signs of pursuit or battle. People were coming out of their homes and shops, mumbling speculations about what had just transpired and making their way back down the promenade to inspect the damage. A carriage packed with constables rumbled past, alarm bells rattling, but none of them paid Anise or Ezra any mind.

"Is your friend hurt?" a shopkeeper asked as they passed.

Yes, Ezra was pretty obviously hurt, but he'd be fine soon enough. Well, physically fine. "No," Anise said.

Ezra finally came to his senses and definitively realized that Rill wasn't with them. He pulled himself free from Anise's grip and, when she released her magical support, he collapsed to the ground, gasping in pain - the nerves in his skin were growing back, so the pain was going to get worse before it got better. He looked up at her, anger in his eyes, his teeth clenched in barely-suppressed fury.

"We have to get her…"

"Look at yourself," Anise said. "I'm not a quarter strong enough to face off against my uncle when I'm not completely drained of energy, and you're no match for him when you can stand on your own. You don't defeat a beast by forcing yourself into its gullet - we need to get out of here and regroup."

"Damnit… you're right…"

After he described the exact location of their carriage, Ezra allowed Anise to pull him to his feet and help him along, though not with magic anymore. Anise was completely spent, and the vague nausea and pounding migraine of energy exhaustion were throbbing to life in her head, like a mechanical spreader had been placed inside her cranium and some sadistic lictor was slowly turning the crank. Despite having to squint at everything to bring it into focus, Anise eventually spotted the carriage Ezra had described and pulled the boy in after herself.

"Come on, let's go," she said.

Their coach driver bent down to peer in the window. She had the strange, faintly-glowing amber eyes of a prismoline, an infernic spirit of light. "Miss Berhu said not to take you if you were being chased." She gestured across the street, where a tetrad of two constables and their prymen were clearly canvassing the neighborhood.

Anise pinched the bridge of her nose. "They're looking for us, not chasing us. Your options are to either take us… wherever… or I'll scream and you'll get arrested, too. I'm sure you know what they do with escaped infernics…"

Anise didn't know what they did with escaped infernics, but she imagined it wasn't pretty. And their coachwoman must have had a similar understanding, because she juked the carriage into gear and took off down the street. A little too fast, in Anise's opinion… but, then again, maybe people who were looking to escape detection drove conspicuously carefully. Anise didn't know because she wasn't an inveterate criminal. But she was getting there.

They rolled northward toward the Old City, driving for perhaps two kilometers and pulling onto an inconspicuous side street before rolling to a stop. Their driver hopped down and opened the door for them, her expression so neutral she must have practiced it in the mirror.

"Where do we go from here?" Anise asked.

The driver shrugged. "Not my problem. Good afternoon, miss." With that, she hopped into the passenger control seat and rumbled off into the meandering streets of the Old City, leaving them to fend for themselves.

"Well… that's just wonderful," Anise said. She sat on the edge of an empty, deteriorated fountain, a dozen pairs of eyes upon Ezra and herself. They were probably the only two humans (or, in Ezra's case, human-bodied persons) for blocks around, and they stuck out like a silver par in the beggar's bin. She rubbed at her temples, willing the headache to go away - though, she knew from past episodes of energy exhaustion, that it would take an hour or so to regenerate enough energy to make the symptoms ebb.

"Two of Plenakton's people are nearby," Ezra said. He was vastly improved from before their ride, his skin slowly un-reddening, his singed hair slowly uncurling into straight, ash-blond strands… which was odd. Hair couldn't heal. Could it?

"How can you tell they're Plenakton's?"

"They're whispering about us… they're debating whether or not their boss would be happy if they stole Fenrik's plans from us."

Anise lifted the safe boxes from where she'd placed them at the lip of the fountain, bringing them close to her chest. "He'd be very happy," she whispered.

Ezra nodded and hopped to his feet, making his way down the nearby alleyway and into the back of a little dorthek bodega adorned with the strange scrawling swish of Thekic script. Anise followed after him, even though she was convinced it was a terrible idea to do so. The two infernic-dorthek people inside the back entryway were so surprised at their arrival that one of them shrieked and bolted. Ezra grabbed her by the tail but she pulled loose in a flurry of feathers and sprinted past the annoyed proprietor of the shop. From his expression, the other one wished he'd bolted and was surely coming to realize that openly accosting Anise and Ezra would have been a massive mistake.

On top of their gliding abilities and mechanical acumen, the dorthek were known for their agility. Case in point: this one leapt a meter and a half vertically, pushed off the wall, and boosted toward the exit, only to be intercepted by an even faster Ezra. And if Anise hadn't watched him intercept two bullets meant for her just a bit earlier that day, she wouldn't have believed anybody could move that fast. The infernic dorthek's eyes pulsed a glimmering ruby color and he prepared some sort of magical fire attack - and Anise ducked out of the way, but the attack never came. She could feel the energy form, shape, and then suddenly dissipate. The dorthek gasped, and Anise gasped when she realized what had just transpired: Ezra had somehow siphoned the energy right out of the man, absorbed it into his own strange Earth soul.

"Take us to Plenakton," he said.

+++++Anise+++++

The infernic dorthek was terrified, and Anise couldn't entirely blame him. Who'd ever heard of somebody just annihilating a person's magical energy before it could form a spell? True, at that point the energy had gone to the outer orbits of the soul, so it wasn't like sucking somebody's soul out, but another mage couldn't just rip energy away. Not without many, many times more energy - you were better-off just casting a shield or other counterspell that didn't take much more than the attack itself. But Anise's suspicion was that Ezra hadn't used any energy at all to do it… what did such a thing even mean?

They passed through the back alleys and the crowded projects of the Old City. As they did, hundreds of people watched in morbid curiosity - mostly urmal, but with plenty of dortheks and kao-etema and the occasional byoun… the 'undesirable' races of the city. Anise was suddenly very self-conscious of what this must look like to them: two humans escorting a visibly-terrified dorthek through their neighborhood.

And perhaps Ezra had more common sense than she gave him credit for, because he'd removed the light-absorbing lenses he used to hide his pupils, and now his eyes shone with the terrifying light of some inscrutable cosmic entity. I am not a human, either, his demeanor said. They continued through the Old City. Whenever the three of them got within five or six meters of anybody, the locals would back away to continue watching from a psychologically safe distance. Anise could hear faraway traffic, the drip of water from a nearby gutter, the mewling of a feral cat, and the shuffling of feet, but nobody uttered a word or lifted a finger to stop them.

"Here… it's here," the dorthek said. He gestured toward a stoop along a surprisingly genteel-looking street.

It was a different building than the ruined hotel Plenakton had been holed up in last time. At the very worst, you could say the place looked a bit shabby - an old brownstone that wouldn't have looked out of place a mile south in East Shore if you gave it a good pressure wash and cleaned the windows. But the windows were barred, the door had been heavily reinforced, and at least three sets of strange eyes peered out from those windows. The door unlocked and swung open, and there stood a glowering Berhu.

"Come on, then," she said.

Anise held Ezra back and lifted a safe box for her to see. "We want Plenakton's promise of safety," she said. She trusted the infernic leader about as far as she could throw him (and he was over two meters tall and sturdily built), but she did trust Berhu. A bit. She was too self-righteous to take a promise of safe harbor lightly.

"I promise you'll be safe."

"Not good enough," Ezra said. "We'll hear it from the man himself or we'll risk going back to Mr. Teak…"

Thank the lord, Anise sighed. Agitating people who could easily have you killed was very much Ezra's forte, not hers. Pain pulsed through her head and she winced. Apparently, Anise's expression came off as an angry sneer because, when Berhu looked to her, the infernic relented.

"Fine… wait here."

The next thing she knew, Anise was looking way up into Plenakton's faintly-glowing violet eyes as he emerged from the dark to fill the doorway. He made what must have been the most ingenuine smile Anise had ever witnessed and gestured within. His teeth were pearly white, except for a half dozen that had been replaced by amethyst-colored magic crystals. Plenakton liked to bring his mana reserves with himself.

"Please, honored guests, enter our humble abode. I'm sure we three have a lot to discuss."

+++++Anise+++++

During their days of love-addled bliss on Sidoade Island, Anise and Franyi had slept in the Jashopo vacation house's guest room and, from there, she'd upgraded to a room at the Jashopo's house in Augur's Hill just to the east of the Parliament district… though Franyi was back at St. Quillia's, which actually made it an audacious downgrade, in her opinion. Each moment away from Franyi was a moment lost. Now, she was in the dubious hospitality of one of Plenakton's guest suites… it was an actual guest suite and not a makeshift jail cell, thank the lord. Even so, her estimation of the infernic leader hadn't improved much.

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He'd promised them safe accommodation and then proceeded to coerce them into handing over her uncle's papers. With a casual gesture from Plenakton, one of his men shuffled over and pulled a knife on Anise.

"You promised us safety!" she said.

"I did," Plenakton agreed, and he produced a healing decoction from his pocket. "If Wyreth should accidentally slip with that blade, I'll be sure to get this to you immediately… though it sometimes takes me a few seconds to remember how to invigorate the thing."

Berhu hadn't looked to thrilled about her boss's trickery, but she hadn't objected, either. To Anise's surprise, Ezra was on board with turning over the contents of the safe box, whatever they might be. They still had no idea what was inside, since the things were heavily sigiled and Anise hadn't had nearly the time to magically unweave the things. If she could unweave them at all - her uncle's designs were fiendishly complex.

"I can't believe you're just giving them the plans," she'd whispered.

"I'm not," Ezra said. "Plenakton's got professionals who can open the boxes, and I'm going to stand there the whole time, learning how they undo sigils… wouldn't that be a useful skill to have? And then I'll get a good look at everything so I can reproduce the plans…"

Anise had to admit: it would be nice to learn some of the shadier elements of magic. St. Quillia's didn't exactly have a Magical Criminology course in their curriculum. "How will you reproduce the plans? You don't even know sigilic…"

"Just like I didn't know Unilog?"

That was fair. Ezra had come to Medias without the demonic gift of speaking in whatever language their master thought in (sometimes even two or three languages if their master thought in them interchangeably). For a week, he hadn't spoken anything beyond phrases of the basic words that Anise had taught him. Then there was another week of halting, accented speech, and then full fluency as he devoured every book within reach. He'd learned a whole language in maybe two and a half weeks. He might be able to reproduce the plans, then. But Anise couldn't get much out of the plans from a few minutes' examination.

Ezra shrugged. "You wanted to destroy them, anyway."

That was harsh but fair. But why go to Plenakton in the first place? She wondered why he hadn't just chanced a trip back to Sidoade Island to give the boxes to Mr. Teak… he probably had a reason, but Anise couldn't deduce what it was. The answer became clear soon enough.

Anise awoke the next morning to Ezra tapping at her chamber door. She yawned and patted the mattress in front of herself. She missed Franyi - missed her warmth, missed her smell, missed those amber eyes looking into hers as she awoke. There was no better way to awaken than with Franyi snuggling close and, after only a few weeks of cuddling with her girlfriend at night, sleeping by herself felt horribly lonely, her slumber reduced to mere physiological need rather than something to be cherished and luxuriated in. She missed feeling contented and loved.

Ezra tapped on the door again - Anise could tell it was him from the strange pattern of his soul's aura. She could feel it even four meters away and through an oak door. His soul was that strange, and she was now 5th elevation, so she could detect these things. She eased out of bed and rubbed the sleep from her eyes.

She padded over and unlocked the door. "Yes?"

"Plenakton's sigil-cracker is here," he said.

The sigil-cracker was a kao-alta woman - not an infernic, Anise noted - with unbelievably nimble fingers and a habit of muttering to herself in High Kaoan at about ten words per second. Her claws were filed to fine points, which she used to trace over the surface of the safe box, swirling at patterns as she muttered, tapping… tapping… swirling… and, when she felt satisfied she'd found the weakest link in the network, she'd gradually unspool it. It took her twenty minutes to unspool the first symbol, working Uncle Fenrik's fiendishly complex patterns, twists upon twists, out of the box.

"I must speak with the mage who constructed these," the cracker muttered. "They are either a genius or quite mad…"

"Both, I think," Anise said.

After that, the sigils went a lot faster to unspool, though it took nearly two hours to open the first box - it was filled with about thirty carefully-folded sheets of notes and diagrams pertaining to some sort of new thrall-plug. Anise didn't quite understand how it worked, beyond that it would be even deadlier to remove than the standard sort.

The second safe box went more quickly, perhaps an hour and a half instead of two. The cracker would occasionally ask for a tool or a crystal, but mostly they just watched as she parsed out the interlocking sigils and expended the opposing color of crystal energy to induce the stored energy out of the sigils. Anise's focus drifted in and out - it had been interesting to watch the cracker's technique at first, but three and a half hours of it was a bit much. Still, she thought she could do a basic cracking job… really, this was the sort of practical, real-world training they ought to offer at an etudium, but the magisters and magistresses of the world were too stuffy to ever do so.

The sigil-cracker stretched her fingers, the knuckles popping and cracking, and yawned. "Next time, tell Plenakton I'm charging double if he's going to give me something by that sorcerer… the logic was so warped, I'm going to have a headache all day." Anise could sympathize. The cracker stacked the papers into a little pile, but Ezra snatched them right out of her hands. As nimble as her fingers were, you just couldn't challenge the reaction speed of somebody whose 'nerves' conducted at the speed of light.

"Give those back - those are Mr. Plenakton's," the cracker said. Her hand shot forward to retrieve them, but Ezra pulled back far more quickly.

"These are mine. I agreed to give them to Plenakton under duress, and now he'll have to renegotiate under duress if he wants them."

"Ezra, what are you…" Anise said.

Then Ezra held up his free hand and did magic. It wasn't impressive magic - a little puff of flame that Rill might make by accident or that a 2nd elevation Initiate might practice for a few weeks to impress her classmates during recital (Anise had some experience with this). But… Ezra did it again… it was definitely magic, and she was fairly certain that he'd never done magic before. Nothing that didn't involve draining or invigorating crystals. It was just a little puff of flame, but it might well destroy a page or two if he put them into it.

"This was your plan all along?" Anise asked.

Ezra nodded. "I discovered I could do that last night… I felt something change after I stole the spell energy from that dorthek ifrit, and now I can copy the pattern… though it's a bit less fire than I'd hoped for…"

"You should have told me," Anise said. He should have told her! She'd been helping with his very dangerous gambit and he didn't even have the courtesy to tell her about his newfound ability to burn papers with baby fire spells?

As if reading her thoughts, Ezra said, "it was a secret plan."

The cracker harrumphed and stormed off to get Plenakton, who arrived with Berhu and Wyreth and a lot of angry questions, such as: Do you want us to kill you? You know we could hurt your friend, right? Are you completely insane? And the answers Ezra gave were: no, yes, no. What he wanted was for Plenakton to help find and rescue Rill.

"You really want to betray me in my own home?" Plenakton asked - and when he was angry, his voice took on this low, level neutrality, even lower and more neutral than his normal voice. Anise's thumb itched. She could imagine the infernic leader cutting off her fingers one at a time with that same neutral expression, just to spite Ezra.

"I'm not betraying you," Ezra stated. "You coerced us into giving these documents over for our safety - and so we agreed. Now I'm coercing back - if you want them, then help us rescue Rill…"

Berhu scowled but ultimately admitted: "the sorcerers cannot have the fire goddess - one way or another, she must be removed from their control…"

Anise noted that one way to 'remove' somebody from another person's control was to kill them. From Ezra's expression, he made the same connection. "Promise you'll help us find her and free her," he said, "and I'll give you the plans for the thrall-plug. And then, when you actually do it, I'll give you the plans for the synthetic soul crystal…"

Plenakton snorted. "Or we could simply… no! No, you fool!"

His panicked response was because Ezra started to incinerate the stack of papers with little puffs of flame. Plenakton lumbered toward him with his huge hands, but Ezra darted away and then ducked under Berhu, crisping up one paper at a time until the whole stack was nothing but ash. What in Medias was wrong with him? Now, Anise would consider herself very fortunate if Plenakton didn't have them both killed… he might well do it with his bare hands. His great fists clenched and unclenched, his violet infernic eyes flashing - he usually kept the glow hidden, but he was surely equivalent to a 5th elevation mage if not a low-level 6th… and he would hardly need his magic to rip Anise limb from limb.

"You've broken your deal, your forfeit your safety… I might yet have use for you…" his eyes turned toward Anise. "But I have no use for her…"

Anise's heart thumped in her chest and she fought back tears of terror. Plenakton could kill her, was planning to kill her, but she wasn't going to make it easy. She concentrated on her energy, pre-shaping it to defend herself at a moment's notice.

"Wait!" Ezra shouted. He grabbed a stick of charcoal from the nearby workbench and traced out a diagram right there on the wall. Even Plenakton was impressed and confused enough to put whatever brutal retribution he had in mind on hold. Anise soon recognized the pattern - a side-view of a thrall plug… of her uncle's new design of thrall-plug. Ezra carefully traced it out, even writing in the tiny labels in handwriting so neat it might have come off of a printing press. Then he wiped the charcoal smudges from his fingers and tapped at his temple with a still-smudged finger. "The plans haven't gone anywhere. You'll still get them… but you promised the safety of my friends in exchange for them, and we wouldn't have gotten them without Rill. I'll do whatever it takes to get her, but you've got connections that I haven't got…"

Plenakton didn't look happy, but at least the murderous rage seemed to be ebbing. He took a step toward Ezra and clenched his fists again. Berhu touched his elbow, nudging the huge infernic.

"Very well… it seems you've made yourself an information broker, Mr. Wormwood," he said. "Here is my offer: you give me the plans to the synthetic crystal now and the plans for the thrall-plug upon your friend's rescue… which you will be responsible for, once we determine her whereabouts…"

"It makes more sense to give you the plug schematics now and the crystal plans later," Anise said. "After all, isn't it your primary goal to learn how to bypass and remove the plugs, should they come into common use? You aren't planning on summoning more infernics like Rill, are you?"

"She has a point," Berhu said.

Anger flared in Plenakton's eyes again, but he did not threaten violence. "Yes… fine. The schematics and then the crystal. It's settled." He grabbed Ezra's hand in his and shook a bit too vigorously. "That's how the humans do it, is it not?"

"It is," Ezra said, wiggling life back into his fingers. "In that case, I'll get started on recreating those schematics and directions… and you'll let me know when you find Rill?"

"We want to find her, too," Berhu said. "I'll make it happen."

+++++Anise+++++

As soon as their negotiations with Plenakton ended, Anise stormed off with Ezra jogging to catch up.

"Anise! Wait, Anise!" When he touched her elbow to get her attention, she spun around and slapped him upside the face. He was so surprised that he didn't bother to block or duck it, though he surely could have. "What… what was that for?"

"Really?" Anise glowered at him. How could such a brilliant boy be such a complete idiot? Well… truth be told, Anise had some experience with being brilliant and an idiot. But she'd never almost gotten somebody murdered over it. "Plenakton was about fifteen seconds away from having me killed. You had a plan that directly involved me… that involved putting me in harm's way… and you didn't tell me about it."

"There wasn't time…" Ezra muddled.

"We sat and watched that woman opening my uncle's safe boxes for three and a half hours, Ezra. Don't feed me that tripe - there was time and, for whatever reason, you didn't think it was important enough to, I don't know, pass me a little note? Do a little hand signing? I'm sure you know how to do that because you read my book on the subject."

"Sorry…"

Anise took another step toward him and took some satisfaction in watching Ezra cringe slightly - the self-sure, often-arrogant demeanor he'd had of late seemed to wither before her righteous anger. "Good. I believe you - I believe you're sorry. But you're going to have to make it up to me, too. Do you remember when you were a thrall and I said that I didn't think you were even a person?"

Ezra snorted. "Of course. I remember everything. Or close enough…"

"Good. Think about how that made you feel. It wasn't pleasant, was it? Well… that's how you made me feel just then. I'm a 5th elevation Mage and, beyond that, I'm your friend. Your first friend in medias. You will respect me, or else we're through. I may be an expelled disgrace, but I've still got enough opportunities available to me that I don't have to be gallivanting around the darker corners of St. Arbalest committing treasonous crimes with you."

This was a bit of an exaggeration, as Anise had no idea what she was doing with her life now, nor whether any school worth a cloudy crystal of magic would be willing to have her, nor whether her parents had disowned her and she was now penniless and homeless, but for the pity and grace of Franyi's parents. But it got the point across. Maybe a bit too well - Ezra's lip trembled and he looked to be on the verge of tears. She wished Ezra would decide whether 'vulnerable and personable' or 'cool and arrogant' was going to be his go-to personality, because she vastly preferred the former, even if it was a little hug-heavy.

"I… I just want Rill to be safe," he said. "I'm worried… what if I never see her again?"

"Um…" Anise said.

Ezra wrapped her in a hug and, despite the fact that she was still feeling a bit of pique toward him, she let him cling on and sniffle into her shoulder for a minute. "It's okay," she whispered. "We'll get Rill. I promise. But… Ezra, I can't be around here. I'm not staying with Plenakton another night…"

"We don't know if the constabulary is after you," he said.

She pulled free from his hug. "I don't care. What's one more dark-haired human girl in the city? I'm going to see Franyi… we can meet tomorrow… somewhere safe… hmm…"

"Mochine-wei clinic?"

Anise nodded - the events of that night were seared into her memory, even if she'd give her left thumb to forget most of them. She actually had given her left thumb. "Sure. We can meet there. We'll make it tomorrow at noon?"

Ezra nodded back. "Okay. Look… I'm sorry I was an ass. Stay safe."

"I will," Anise said, "you, too." She turned to leave but spun back around. "Um… since you, you know, owe me money… you did sell my jewel cutting set, after all… do you have some money for a couple of street car rides?"

Ezra shrugged and pulled a blue note out of his pocket. "Only if they can make change for ten stacks."