by K. G. Wilkie
Jackie,
Go with the vamps. Bring the wiz kid along while you're at it, might as well.
Be sure you guys don't dawdle or I'll cut everyone's pay.
-Boss Guy
She rolled her eyes. Of course Aeron would have chosen to sign off that way. Besides, she couldn't help but think that she wasn't actually being paid for this particular job and just had a house in her name she couldn't get to until she came of adult age and a savings fund with the same problem, along with all the costs of doing the job covered. But she had no wage and she complained about his reminder of the fact. The rest of the party wasn't particularly affected by her grumpiness, though, and they set off for the start of their journey.
When they were a scant league closer to their destination, the vampire stopped abruptly. "I feel so lucky," Cillean theatrically gushed. "There are so many friends eagerly awaiting us just so they can say hello." He wiped away an invisible tear. Layel carefully laid Priscilla down on a clump of pillowy ferns and grabbed his weaponry. The girl smiled up at him and obediently stayed where she was placed.
Jackie, however, refused to be put out of the way and moved to stand in front of her sister and act as a guard. She bared her fangs like a daemon whenever someone else came near, so the men felt it was best to continue at some distance from the two of them.
"I do not think they intended to greet us. It is surely atypical to hide a greeting party," the majordomo retorted to his king, brusquely laying his own burden down.
"Ah, don't be a party pooper!" Cillean exclaimed, slinging his arm around the other`s shoulder. "See those tablecloths they're holding and their bright smiles? You can tell they're all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed about seeing us," Cillean continued with a goofy grin.
"You never remember the difference between smiles and shock," the friend said, shaking his head morosely. "You have no sense of, how you say, realistic," he continued.
"Reality," the other corrected. "Anyways, what brings you out here?" he asked, coldly turning his attention to the other party.
They shrugged. "We are here because we were commanded to be. When our prince tells us to come, we come." Daerick relaxed his guard but Cillean stood firm. "And why should we trust random strangers on the road to tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Come forward now and show us that you bear his seal, and then I will trust you."
The leader of the other group smiled at him. "You are wise to reserve your trust. I have tricked many people with false papers, however just asking for the seal in the first place is a good step towards better safety." They both looked at Daerick, and the younger vampire blushed at his mistake. Cillean clapped him on the back. "You are still learning these things, and you don't have to worry too much about keeping security in mind at all times when you are by my side, but I know in the future you will keep this in mind and do better. There's no need to worry about all of this for now," he said. The other man seemed comforted by his words.
The leader cleared his throat. "Ahem, yes, well I'm glad you've sorted things out. Anyways, here are our papers." He held them out. The papers themselves were on the right paper, a sturdy linen and ruskweed combination that only the royal family and their monopoly on the rusk weed farms could have produced. The monarch knew that such paper could have as easily been obtained by agents of Richard, however. He continued evaluating the document, checking that the signature curls in the tail, spurs, and terminals of the letters were done the way Aeron's scribing office copied official documents. It all checked out, so he continued to look at the seal. He poked it with a finger and it moved under his body heat unlike the hard sealing wax most commoners used. He held it up to his nose and sniffed to find the unmistakable scent of moonflowers. So far it all checked out, but he still had one final test left. He pinched a small portion of the seal off and placed it on his tongue. It was spicy and bitter and tasted a bit like the Resting House for Beleaguered old Harpies smelled--just like it was supposed to.
He handed the papers back. "I'll admit it all checks out perfectly. It would still soothe my conscious to hear in your own words why you are here and what you are doing in service of the prince," he said.
The man before him snorted. "Fine, I can talk all day if you'd like to do things that way. We are here because we were ordered to work with your lot. I am Alabastor Fyojhan, the general of the Blue Crows." The two vampires looked at him, confused. "What, you haven't heard of us? Good. That's the point of our branch. Our job is to be the personal guard of the crown prince and work to prevent incidents that might require guarding. Right now you are working towards preventing an incident that would risk our prince, so here we are to work with you guys. It's not that complicated, really," he added.
Jackie rolled her eyes and walked over. "Why are we still fighting about this? He's got the papers, and the scent of that seal is strong so it's obviously legit. And now he tells us he was specifically sent by your boss to work with you. What more is there to talk about at this point? It's time to just go and get to work," she said.
They protested at her skipping ahead through the process, but still they had to agree that she was right on the matter. They started to amble forward.
"So where have you lot been assigned to go," Cillean asked them. The rest of the group listened in.
"Same as the rest of you, I suppose. We've been sent to comb both worlds to try to find if anyone has heard more about the specific plans of the wizards, or more likely any news on where they might be hiding right now. It would probably be a lot easier to stop their ridiculous plans if we at least knew where they were hiding out so we could bust some brains," Fyojhan said.
Cillean and Layel looked at each other. "We already know where the Domed City lies. It does move around a bit on the map but it is always located in the Western Wastes. Finding it is easy-peasy. Our jobs are just to go to them and capture the leaders to bring them in for questioning and a trial for treason."
Jackie looked over at him. "That's impossible." The nymph shook her head. "Why would Aeron have assigned two nymphs for a dangerous job like that? We're supposed to be going to visit the city of the witches to see if they are allied with, or against, the wizards."
They all looked at each other. "Why the heck did he assign all of us to do this trip together if we are all supposed to be doing different things?" Darien asked. He'd been moping and quiet since they'd left Layel's Hall, but now he brought up something that had been on all of their minds. The group individually argued that their own mission outweighed the orders of the others and tried to force all of them to attend to their own duties. Finally Aeron grabbed the orders from Fyojhan and the vampires and wizard looked over the document. It proclaimed that they were all supposed to go together to the same place. It then went on to enumerate that they were supposed to go together to the Witch city, the Domed city of the Wizards, and do espionage work and listen for any rumors of where the leaders of the rebellion might be hiding. On the bottom of the page the word "Alchemists" was heavily underlined.
Darien twisted his hands inside his pockets. His regular human gear, and the hoodie that completed the outfit, stood out from the rest of the group in their local garb, but at some point he'd left his initiates robes behind and taken to exclusively wearing the clothes he'd picked up in his time working in the Mundane. "He assigned us to do all of this work by next week? I don't think anyone can travel that fast outside of the royal family. It's not like we can all use transportation spells. And what's that about the Alchemists at the bottom? What do they have to do with any of this?"
Priscilla poked her head into the circle of adults and smiled up at them. "You guys didn't get it? The Alchemists are the means to reach our goal and the goal itself. It'll all work out if we do it together like that, you'll see," she said.
The rest of the group looked at her. "What does that even mean?" Fyojhan whispered to the vampire sovereign. He shrugged and turned back to his horses. He slung his pack back behind his saddled and stuck a
foot in his stirrup and turned back to them. "I don't understand exactly what she means, but they always say to listen to wisdom from the mouths of babes so I'll go with it." He hefted himself in. "I guess that means we're to travel together, to no particular destination, but if we find the Alchemists along the way that would be a good thing, so I'm up for that."
Priscilla shook her head. "No, he said we are going to Siberia," she said. She held up a dragon scale scarf. "He gave this to me because he said 'the rest of that lot will be fine in the cold, but I want you to wear this so you can stay safe over in Siberia' so that means he wants us to go there, doesn't it?" The group had to agree that was probably where they were meant to go, though a few muttered protests against how confusing and convoluted their directions were for their trip but continued for the rest of the day as they made the preparations necessary to cross to the Original.
A night passed as they toiled away. Come sunrise they finally had a magical gate ready to take them through the Divide. Pris stopped to ask them what their plans were when they got there. "You know, Siberia is actually a very big place. I know it's just one part of a single country, but it's about as big as the Western Wastes and Great Forest combined into one. Do you really think it will be that easy for us to just walk in and find where the Alchemists are posted?"
The rest of the group looked at her. They'd been so caught up in taking the leap to get to the right planet, they hadn't kept track of how they were going to find their goal once they got there. Jackie pulled out her cell phone. She'd needed to get one when she'd been assigned to become a student at Tybolt Hall so she could fit in. Over time she'd grown to like the device and now kept one on hand all the time. "It has a navigation function. I can probably use this to help us figure out where we are over there," she said.
Daerick shook his head. "That will be insufficient. It is one thing to know where we are; it is another thing entirely to figure out where they are. The whole point of this expedition is to locate the Alchemists, not ourselves," he said.
Jackie drooped. "Oh, you're right of course." She stopped. "I don't know if they get reception in most of the place anyways, I hear it is a wilderness."
Priscilla nodded. "Oh it is. Siberia covers seventy-seven percent of Russia. Siberia is so expansive that it would be the largest country in the world even if it separated from the rest of Russia. Even so, Siberia has a population density of less than eight people per square mile so it wouldn't be economical to have a ton of cellphone towers all over the place," she said. The rest of the group just looked at her. "I do read things, you know. It's more weird that you guys haven't," she defended herself.
Cillean shrugged. "You aren't unusual for knowing a lot of random factoids. Kids do that a lot. It just seems odd that you know so much about a different world that all information about it is supposed to be restricted from the access of children," he said.
She blushed. "I sometimes ask Durin about things I don't know, so I haven't actually read everything I know about. But I still have learned a lot, so I'm still very smart!"
Jackie patted her on the head. "It's okay, kiddo. I know you're smart, you know you're smart, and Durin even knew it so well he decided to contract with you a decade or two before most kids your year would. There's no need to be defensive over it." Pris just pulled her dragon scale scarf over her head to bundle deeper into it in response.
"How are we going to find where the Alchemists are hiding, then? I assume they've likely enchanted their base camp so it would resist being found by the typical means, magical or physical," Alabastor said.
Cillean had to agree. "It's likely that we won't be able to find them in an efficient manner, with or without cell phones. It will be nice to have yours around, just in case, to know where we are, but I feel if Russia is anything like the Lumila in our world which I think is the corresponding Shade of the Original's Russia, then most of the Mundanes' electronics will not work well there. It might even break your phone if you bring it."
Jackie clutched hers to her heart at that. "I will not be taking my baby there if that would make it die," she told them all. "Scratch the cell phone plan; we are going to have to go in without the help of GPS. Does anyone else have any bright ideas on how we can make sure we aren't going over the same places we've already been again and again, though? That was the main point of taking this along."
Darien scratched his head. "I suppose we could lay out a Trouver Trail then." He brought up the image of a glowing ball of yarn on a quick scrying screen. "It's like the old legends with people conquering impossible mazes and escaping them. All you do is spell the yarn and it will lay down a magical trail of where you've been so you can always find it again. We could follow it back if we wanted to, of course, but I think we could also use this to avoid an area we've already been to. We'll just have to listen to it calling to us and basically walk in the other direction," he said.
Cillean snorted. "That's a great idea, kid, but I doubt a few feet of string is going to help us crisscross this entire region. That area is huge. We'd need miles and miles of the stuff before it started to be very helpful."
Darien cast daggers at him with his eyes. "I am not a child," he said. "Back to the point, though, the old mazes weren't a string of a few hedges. They were set up as a way to torture a lot of people all at once. Mazes are miles long, even the size of a city. Besides, we're not going to just use a single little ball of yarn. You put the spell on a ball, yes, but once the spell has been set, it continues to lay the magical thread. You don't actually use the physical thread you base the spell on at all. You obviously have not studied different spelling methods very much. You should probably take care of that problem, old man," he jabbed back.
Jackie waved it away. "None of that matters really. What's important is that we get to where we need to be. Now," she pulled her sister forward to the gate, "we have places to go, things to do, and a way to get where we need to be, so I think we've done quite enough talking about this and that. It is time to actually go," she said.
They didn't go right away, but they all set to work getting ready for it. If they'd decided they would have to travel through Russia in the cold season manually, then carts had to be gathered. Thankfully, they were at least self-propelled and had no risk of running out of fuel along the way or freezing up in cold temperatures, but bringing them also meant another day would have to be spent creating a new gate that would be big enough to fit them through. When they'd originally built the gates they'd only compensated for the space needed for one person to walk through with some extra wiggle room to fit the unwieldy dimensions of their packs, but this new addition would need much more room than they'd allowed for.
Then they realized the small packs themselves that were filled with enough supplies for a week or two's journey would not be enough for a long trip. So then they had to stop and go back into town and pick up more food. They ordered cured meats and smoked cheeses and vegetables and as many crackers as they could fit around people in the carts.
Then again Cillean pointed out that Priscilla was the only one with a method to keep warm in even the coldest winters. The rest had fall supplies, which were warm enough even for autumn in Wisconsin but were completely insufficient capes and tunics to be wandering around in snow fields. None of them would freeze to death in any temperature of weather, but they would be slowed down a lot by frostbite. Even if that weren't a concern, actually freezing was very uncomfortable and not an experience any of them wanted to have.
Eventually, all the new supplies were gathered to be properly outfitted for the trip ahead of them. Another day wasted away making a brand new gate that could fit their carts and they were ready to set off.
Still they stood before the gate, hesitating to go in.
"You guys do realize that we can't get to work until we actually walk over and get there, right," Darien said. He too did not move forward yet.
"More than that, you all realize what will happen if we don't go forward," Cillean muttered.
It was all good and well to realize you had to go forward, but none of them were willing to take the leap yet. They were all weighed down, not by fear of their destination, but of the failure they knew they were likely to face with such a large area to search and such a small chance of actually succeeding.
Priscilla looked at the older people around her, standing still, holding off on taking the leap; and she stepped forward through the gate alone.
The older ones looked on at the child and then quickly scrambled to follow after and save whatever dignity they had left after the shame of being proven less brave than a child.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Chemistry and Alchemy
The dimensional gate dumped them out in a place packed with Mundanes walking in a solid wall of humanity that looked and sounded very different from the Mundanes Darien and Jackie had seen in their time at Tybolt Hall. The camouflage spells on their charmed carts guaranteed they'd blend in to any environment as much as possible, and they crawled through this crowd in their vehicles which now looked like mid-size sedans. Still the people gawked and yelled at them for daring to take up more space when it was already close to nonexistent there. The gate had placed them in the closest destination that had some trail of the Alchemist's magical essence, but now their carts would have to take the long, slow journey onwards to follow that path until they eventually came to the end of it and found their quarry.
There was an hours-long traffic jam in a city that called itself Beijing, but most of the other delays in their journey were of a more endurable duration. After a few days of slogging through these obstacles, they finally came to a point where the carts could go at their top speed because they no longer had to worry about blending in for the sake of any Mundane onlookers as they were beyond where many of those humans lived. Just the spells were enough to distract any stray onlookers from being shocked at their three-hundred-mile-an-hour velocity.
