by Demi Harper
Could it be that Gneil was unhappy in his god-given role as my high cleric?
"Maybe we should give him a house of his own, or something? Make him feel a bit more important," I suggested, mostly to myself. "A high priest probably shouldn't be slumming it with the other gnomes anyway. Ooh, maybe the next stage of the shrine's development will be a temple? Gneil should definitely have his own temple."
I realized Ket had gone quiet, and sensed something that felt dangerously like pride from her across our bond. "What?"
She trilled softly, giving off a shower of pinkish-white sparks. "You've come a long way, is all. I remember when you wanted to set him on fire."
"I never wanted to set Gneil on fire!" I told her, horrified. "Just those who were being mean to him."
"Yes, but you always used to complain about him. Now you want to build him a temple?"
"I want him to build a temple for me," I corrected. "I suppose he can live in it afterwards if he wants to."
Gneil reached the top of the hill, still with a big grin on his face, and waved up at Binky before kneeling beside the two acolytes. The instant he joined them, their mana grew brighter. Having a high priest in the tribe really did inspire the others to greater feats of worship.
"Well, that's very generous of you, Corey. And I for one am happy you've moved on from your initial dislike of the gnomes. And that you haven't once said you want to set Shanky on fire."
"Shanky has other things to worry about right now." I frowned down at a sudden flurry of activity in the barracks. "What's going on down there?"
Someone had apparently informed the on-duty farmers about Longshank's mishap. Leaving his companion to continue their delicate ministrations in the shroomeries, the other farmer had marched on over to the infirmary room in the barracks, his ever-present bucket swinging at his side.
Now he had hold of one end of Longshank's amputated leg and was trying to deposit it in his bucket. But holding on to the other end of the leg was Longshank himself. Still sprawled on the ground, face drained of color, he was clinging to his former foot as though his very life depended on it.
"What on earth is he doing?" Ket's voice was muffled by her hands, which were pressed against her mouth.
"It's... unclear. Why does he want to keep it? Does he think they're waiting to just stick it back on again or something?"
"Not Shanky—the farmer!" Ket sounded appalled. "What does he want with a random leg?"
"Oh. Probably intends to use it as fertilizer, like they did with the bodies after the battle."
"How undignified! No wonder Shanky doesn't want him to take it!"
"Shanky helped them bury those bodies all over the shroomtree farms. He knows it's for the greater good. I'm surprised he's getting"—I almost choked—"cold feet."
"Too soon!" hissed Ket, sparking furiously.
The farmer, clearly realizing he was no match for Longshank even in his weakened state, let go of the limb and backed off. Rather than looking triumphant, Longshank just slumped over the limb. After a pause, the farmer edged forward cautiously. He crouched beside the wounded scout.
After a short but seemingly heartfelt conversation, the farmer nodded, wiping his eyes. He eased the severed leg away from the now-unresisting Longshank, wrapped it more firmly in its blanket, and placed it carefully in his bucket. Then he stood and extended a hand to the scout.
With an impressive minimum of wincing and moaning, Longshank climbed to his feet—foot—and then, supported by the farmer, hopped his way out of the room. The agony must have been intense, but Longshank endured it with gritted teeth. His pain threshold must be on par with that of a mole-rat. That, or those mushroom elixirs are stronger than I thought.
The pair made their way painstakingly over to the nearest field, the one on the south side of the stream. There, the farmer dug a hole amid the shroomtrees, then offered up the bucket to Longshank and held onto him while he unsteadily placed his lost limb in the hole and bowed his head over it.
Once buried, the flesh would decompose and become part of the soil, nourishing the shroomtrees that provided the foundation for the Grotto’s buildings. The bones would remain for a while longer, joining the crumbling skeletons of almost a hundred kobolds. They'd only died here a couple of weeks ago, but dead organic matter decayed extra quickly in my mana-rich Sphere.
After a few minutes, they filled in the hole together, covering the leg from sight. Both gnomes flinched a little when a figure detached itself from the shadows of a looming shroomtree, but they relaxed when they saw it was just Ris'kin. I watched in mild surprise as my avatar approached Longshank and offered him a long, knobbly walking stick—a stick I recognized as once belonging to Granny, the tribe's former overseer.
I didn't have a body, therefore I didn't have a throat, but somehow I had a lump in it. So I did what any reasonable person would do when faced with the discomfort of fresh grief: I channeled it into more familiar outrage instead.
"Why would she do that? I didn't tell her to do that!" I exclaimed. "And after he's been such an arsehole with Gneil, too!"
"Well..." Ket sniffled. Apparently she'd found the gesture a lot more moving than I had. Typical. "Ris'kin is your avatar. She's her own person, but she's also the embodiment of your will. I doubt she'd do anything you didn't also approve of, even subconsciously."
I grumbled something about how both Ket and Ris'kin were subconscious pains in my arse, mostly to make the sprite stop talking. I suppose Longshank had earned a little of my (grudging) respect. He'd shown determination and fortitude in the face of great pain. And the way he'd brutally murdered the monster that injured him had been pretty spectacular in its own way.
"Whatever," I told Ket. "He can have the walking stick. But if he thinks this means I'm promoting him to overseer, he's got another thing coming."
Nine
The Lair of the Enemy
Tiri
The lock clicked open. The sound seemed louder than it should, amplified by the heavy pre-dawn silence. Tiri glanced over her shoulder, muscles tensed for flight, but the dim alchemical light globes along the wall showed the corridor remained empty.
Tiri held her own chemsphere—modified to give off pink light rather than white, the better to spend long hours reading through the night without eye strain—higher, withdrew her hairpin from the lock, and slipped inside the room.
It was a mess.
A narrow bed lay along the wall just inside the door. Its pillow and coverlet were barely visible beneath a jumble of papers, books, clothes and random items. Stepping further into the room, Tiri could see some of the papers on top were lecture notes: 'Advanced Tracking (Swampland)', 'Ten Essential Forest Ranger Skills', 'Wild Beasts and How to Harness Them'. Scattered atop these and books with similar titles were assorted oddments: a handful of polished stones, an acorn, several ink-stained feather quills, and a torn archery glove.
More books—Eusocial Species of Kelaria, Inside the Hive Mind, and The Way of the Warlock—sat haphazardly stacked on the bedside table, the now-empty drawers of which had been yanked wide open and left that way. They gaped accusingly at her, reminding her that she was intruding upon a dead woman's private space. Though the chaotically strewn nature of it all suggested she was not the first to come prying amongst Lila Mornier's personal belongings, seeing the relics of the ranger's short life laid out so carelessly before her made her swallow a lump in her throat and look away.
Her breath caught when she saw the second bed on the other side of the room. For some reason it hadn't occurred to her that Lila might have had a roommate. Luckily the pink glow of the alchemical lamp revealed no sleeping form but rather more notes and books.
Thank the philosophers.
That would have been hard to explain, lockpick in hand, rifling through the possessions of her now-dead adventuring companion in the dead hours of the morning. She was growing careless.
She'd assumed those high up enough in the Guild, like Lila, would have their own rooms
. Tiri herself had shared a dorm with seven other women back in the Academy. The lack of privacy was one of the reasons she spent so much of her time in the expansive library. Well, that and the fact she generally preferred the company of parchment over people.
But I'm just a humble academic. Lila is—was, she amended, blinking back the sting of tears—a high ranger, one of the elite. She’d expected her to have a room of her own here, or maybe even an apartment in the private accommodations located just off-site.
Focus. It doesn't matter.
She pushed her braids away from her face, pinning them back in place with the makeshift lockpick, then massaged her temples. Yet another night spent among the library's records had left her gritty-eyed and muzzy-brained. And for what?
The Guild's library contained a host of texts that were off-limits to residents of the Academy. Tiri had practically salivated at the thought of sneaking in and gaining access to them.
However, most of those she'd spent the night perusing had been little more than picture books. She didn't need to know how armor designs among the warriors of the northern civilizations had evolved over the past few decades. Nor did she care that the color of a scrying mirror changed depending on the user's elemental alignment. And she certainly wasn't interested in which parts of the human anatomy you should stab to most effectively disable your opponent.
She needed answers. Answers to the questions that had been burning in her breast for nearly a month now.
Why had the Guildmaster seemed surprised—no, outright dismayed—to see them return in one piece? Why hadn't he seemed surprised (or dismayed) to learn of the tragic demise of both Lila and Cassandria?
And why had he refused to send a larger force to deal with the red God Core and its army of kobolds?
It didn't add up. He'd sent them to investigate rumors of a hostile Core in the area, one which was potentially responsible for recent raids on the surface—raids none of them had heard word of until then. When Tiri, Benin and Coll returned with confirmation of the kobold Core's presence, the Guildmaster had looked flustered, almost alarmed. He'd stammered assurances that there was nothing else they needed to do, and very forcefully suggested they each retire to their own rooms and await debriefing from one of the senior adventurers.
Together, the three of them had decided to ignore these downright suspicious orders. Instead, they'd tried—and failed—to recruit allies to their cause, then raided a supply cupboard and set off on their own.
The gnomes had been a surprise. Helping them above all had convinced her they'd chosen to do the right thing. The world thought them extinct—which was perhaps the only reason they weren't—and their primitive existence in that cave was a puzzle. It was so close to the surface; so close to the Guild; so humble, so unprotected, and was clearly not the ancestral home of what had once been a thriving race of artisans and engineers.
It wasn't safe. They had to be warned. Hence the dual nature of Tiri's research these past couple of days: the history and decline of the hill gnomes, and how to communicate with God Cores.
She'd found a few spells in the Guild library that Benin might be able to repurpose to help with the latter. The gnomes, however, were trickier.
She recalled only a few basic facts from one of her cryptozoology lectures. Gnomes were benevolent, and focused on innovation and cultivation. They were a secretive race, kept themselves isolated in self-defense, because of their size but also because they feared that their inventions, if discovered, could be stolen by other races and used for violent means.
A century or so ago, a mysterious catastrophe wiped out all known gnomish civilizations. Some said it was collateral damage, an unfortunate consequence of the devastating war with the gods, and that the gnomes were unintended casualties. Others believed the little folk had been deliberately targeted—that their technological advances were deemed a threat to organized religion, making them some of the first targets in the gods' war on progress.
Tiri had used the limited additional information she'd uncovered in the libraries to plot out areas that might contain the ruins of their lost civilizations, but it would need a lot more work before she could confidently present it to the Core and suggest it uproot its denizens from their current home.
So why was she wasting what little research time she had by breaking into a dead woman's bedroom?
She'd told Coll and Benin she'd be in the Academy library, where she was much less likely to be accosted. As far as she knew, it was only the Guild that wanted them.
But something had drawn her to this place. First, she'd followed her own instincts to the library, where she wasted several hours perusing books intended for students of the physical and magical spheres. Eventually she'd realized the same feeling that drew her there was pulling her to a different part of the building.
And now she was here, and the same sense that had drawn her to the room was now pulling her toward the bedside table. It felt similar to her Orientation skill—a perk of the Cartographer profession that allowed her to read, say, a travel diary, and then triangulate the area described by the writer on a map; or to sense the intent of a map’s creator, so that even the most abysmal maps could be deciphered by high-level cartographers.
Right now, she was drawn by a sense of secrecy, and of suspicion. Someone had hidden something in those drawers.
She knelt and brought the chemsphere in closer. Both drawers were empty. But something was still pulling her toward them; toward the back.
She tilted her head. The movement brought the light lower, and something flickered at the very back of the empty drawer.
A shadow. A... keyhole?
New skill unlocked!
Startled by the sudden appearance of the glowing text, she froze, then silently cursed herself for being so skittish.
Find Text
Discern the location of writings made by a specific author. Can be used to unearth stashed evidence, or to assist with the discovery of long-lost tomes hidden away for centuries. Or just to impress a librarian.
Note: Chance of success is increased if user is in possession of an item belonging to the author.
Skill type: passive
Prerequisite(s): any scribe class
Required for: Detect Intent
Despite the tension of her current predicament, Tiri couldn’t suppress a small thrill of delight at having unlocked a new skill. She had a sudden urge to return to the library and—
Mind on the job, Moon.
Swiping the writing from her vision with a (somewhat reluctant) mental wave, she focused instead on using her fingers to probe the strange slot at the back of the drawer. It was too narrow for her fingertips to penetrate, but the mechanism inside was too large for her hairpin to negotiate.
Frowning, she looked around the room for something she could use. Then the text she'd just seen floated back in her mind's eye.
An item belonging to the author…
This time, she could not swallow the lump that rose in her throat as she reached into her satchel and pulled out an arrow. Tears prickled the backs of her tired eyes as she gazed at the now-ragged fletching, the smooth wooden shaft, and the finely whetted arrowhead.
All of a sudden she was back in the endless dark, lost in tunnels leagues beneath the earth, and Lila was speaking to her.
"This arrow didn’t begin its life as a sharp weapon. No, it was a hunk of stone, a broken tree branch, a bundle of bird feathers. Only after being put together and carefully honed to a specific purpose did it become dangerous. The same goes for people."
It's our experiences that hone us to our purpose. What was Lila’s purpose? What is mine?
She looked again at the arrowhead-sized slot hidden in the drawer.
Right now my purpose is to find out what Lila was hiding, and why.
Subconsciously thinking how unusual it was that Lila had chosen to use arrows with stone heads rather than iron, she pushed the arrowhead into the slot. It gave a soft satisfying click, and when
Tiri went to remove it, the entire back panel of the drawer came with it. And there, behind the false panel, was a bundle wrapped in a blanket.
Tiri withdrew it reverently, placing the chemsphere on the floor so she could unwrap the bundle with both hands. They started to tremble when the edges of the blanket fell back to reveal a leather-bound journal.
The cover was cracked smooth, well-worn, and the edges of the pages were soft, as though they'd been thumbed through many times. A leather cord was wrapped around the book, presumably to hold it closed against the wad of loose pages that had been stuffed inside it. Tiri imagined them straining to get out.
Here, let me help you.
Undoing the cord was the work of a moment. She freed the jumble of loose notes from their prison and set them to one side, then turned her full attention to the opened journal. After flipping back a few pages to find the beginning of the most recent entry—and glancing over her shoulder yet again to make sure she was still alone in the room—she hurriedly began to read.
Ten
Trust Nobody
Tiri
85th day of summer, 521 PC
Today is the day. V finally handed me my death warrant. And, Lord of Light help me, I signed it.
The order? To travel, accompanied by a standard party, to the Subgardia cave system and investigate the possible presence of a malevolent God Core. This is in itself nothing out of the ordinary. After all, one of the Guild's prime directives is to identify and remove such threats before they become a problem for those of us on the surface.
However, the justification behind the order is... questionable. I've heard of no raids in that region, nor any other concerning activity that would indicate the presence of a Core.
Also strange are the companions V has assigned for the task. They are as follows: Cassandria Karst, a worker-caste assassin-thief; Collson Rutherford, a guardbreaker-class warrior; Benin Fitz, a fire mage (of all things!); and Tiriani Moon, a student at the Academy.
