by Aaron Crash
“I’d like that,” Lillee said quietly, though she had no idea what kind of a favor it might be.
Chapter Sixteen
YMIR KNEW LILLEE WAS in the feasting hall, drawing and drinking kaif. He saw her on his way up to his table in the Librarium. Sunday afternoon, Della Pennez wasn’t in her mezzanine office. He’d been thinking about the Princept, how uneven she’d been that night. Something was bothering her.
Ymir grimaced, sighing, shaking his head. All of these women had something bothering them. With battle brothers, if emotions were simmering under the surface, you either drank it away, fought it away, or, if it was particularly bad, talked about it, right away, to be free of it. However, most of the time, there were no such emotions at all.
How these southern women boiled in their own angst frustrated him. When he couldn’t take Lillee’s sighs, or Jenny’s chatter, he escaped to his table to study. Other than that night’s cooking session, he’d been working on three things: the Midnight Guild, those strange words, Akkir Akkor, and the documents he’d gotten from the Scrollery that might be close to the works of Octovato.
He was paging through another dictionary, this one from the Wootash College in Panseloca, on the eastern edge of the Holy Theranus Empire. The dictionary was written at the very end of the Age of Withering, the year when the Holy Theranus Empire was founded, in 5450. That also officially marked the beginning of the Age of Isolation, which they were currently in. The new empire had no real power, and the foolish new vempor kowtowed to the guilds. This was so unlike the Vempor Aegel Akkridor, who had ruled all the races with a hard fist. He crushed any army with his armies and his magic during the last half of the Age of Discord.
After Aegel Akkridor’s death, The Age of Withering began—both the Akkridorian empire and the birth rates withered. Less boys were born and the races kept to themselves, mostly, in the current Age of Isolation.
Ymir chuckled. He had learned something in Nile Preat’s history class.
His thoughts returned to the dictionary, written to celebrate the opening of Wootash College, an old school but only half as old as Old Ironbound. The Majestrial would be celebrating its one thousandth year the same year Ymir graduated.
Flipping pages, Ymir found the first word: Akkir. It meant royal or kingly. That made sense. Aeno Akkridor had been born Aeno Asraelus but later renamed himself Akkridor, in 2486, when he made it clear he wanted an empire. That was the beginning of the Age of Discord. Aeno had been hungry for conquest, and with his descendants, the wars waged back and forth until, thirty generations later, Aegel Akkridor was born in 3910. He would rule for a thousand years, as a human, until his death in the year 4914, on the mysterious Night of Fire. Well, depending on which history you read, which all varied greatly based on who did the writing. No one could agree on what happened on the Night of Fire, if Aegel wasn’t an Ohlyrran, and how he’d been killed. Or if he’d been killed. Some said he still wandered the world, retreating to his favorite fortress, on the Sorrow Coast, near the small fishing village of StormCry.
That was unlikely. Ymir had walked every hall, been in every room, and he’d never seen the grand Vempor. The clansman laughed at the idea of the vempor’s ghost haunting Old Ironbound.
Suffice to say, translating akkir was easy. Akkor was more difficult to decipher. This dictionary said it meant “other-spirited.” Did that mean angels, demons, or something else? You could argue that the clans of the Ax Tundra were other-spirited, since they didn’t have magical cores.
What if akkor meant demon? Was it like the thing that had attacked them on StormLight Island? That had been a summoned creature, and the summoner had to be close. Yes, the assassin could be in StormCry, but Ymir was certain it was someone at their school.
Ymir frowned and found himself reading other ancient Homme words before Jenny caught him.
“May the seven devils lick me,” Jennybelle gasped, flopping down in the chair next to him. “I knew it. I caught you reading the dictionary. Now, that’s just embarrassing. You’re embarrassed. Aren’t you?” She wore a tight black shirt, cinched to show her cleavage, and silken black pants, tight at the hips but loose at the legs over her black boots. She was getting ready for their night’s work.
Ymir closed the dictionary. “There. I have memorized every word.”
She smirked. He did too.
“Shouldn’t you be sleeping, Jennybelle Josen?”
She pulled down the skin under her blue, blue eyes. “Tried. Then I figured no one else was sleeping, and we’d stay up all night together. It wouldn’t be the first time, and it won’t be last. That’s why the old gods watered the Tree of Life with kaif, to keep us all awake forever.”
“That’s not how I understand the story.” He frowned to let her know he didn’t like her keeping secrets from him. “What is fucking bothering you, Jennybelle. My Grandmother Rabbit said—”
“Ugh!” The swamp woman let out a cry. “Yes, I know, Grandmother Rabbit would say we heal through our mouths. Talking is the salve we put on our butts. Yes, Ymir, I know.”
“So, out with it!” he said, a bit too loudly.
A few people looked up from down below.
Jenny took his hand. “Not ready. I have my reasons. You trust me?”
He looked directly into her eyes, smiled, and said, “No.”
He knew his gaze told a different story. He’d trust Jenny with his life. He told her about the words, kingly and other-spirited.
Jenny sat staring, thinking. “Other-spirited. It reminds me of some swamp magic—orishas. Those are spirits we can supposedly summon to help us, though every tale ends with an orisha eating you.” She shrugged. “Which is why summoning anything is a bad idea. You figure out a way to get us the Scrolls of Octovato?”
Ymir nodded. “I’ve found some Flow cantrips that work directly with our dreams, though the magic is complicated. They were written by Rona Aroon. Alphabetically, that puts us in the As. We need to be in the Os.”
“We could ask Professor Leel,” the swamp woman suggested.
That made them both laugh.
“We need a good spell, a believable spell, written by an author whose name begins with ‘O.’ The Princept has made it clear she is watching us, and we have to be careful, very careful.”
“Especially during the Third Exam.” The smudges under Jenny’s eyes seemed to darken.
Ymir thought of a passage in the Sacred Mystery of the Ax. The Axman held his ax over the world, and at any time, he could let it drop and destroy all of reality. The clansman had spent his life not caring, trusting in the Shieldmaiden to stay her lover’s hand. And if not him, there was the Wolf, who wouldn’t want his brethren slain by the god. Regardless of the grace of women and wolves, there was nothing Ymir could do to save himself or the world. If the Axman dropped his ax, that would be the end.
However, now Ymir felt the impending doom keenly. They had six weeks until the Third Exam, at the end of March. There were four major exams—five if you included the Open Exam—during the school year. The First Exam started the year. The Fourth Exam ended it. June was a long way off.
He needed more time to prepare, and that meant he had to quit this work study business. That meant money, which should be taken care of when they started selling their xocalati.
“We’ll be ready,” Ymir said. “The Princept wasn’t given much information, only that time frame, and a couple of images. You’ll be lying lifeless on stone stairs. I’ll have two hands wrapped around my throat, choking the life out of me, while I turn blue.”
“Well, that’s lovely.” Jenny sighed. “It must be this Midnight Guild. They’re afraid of you and want you dead.”
“Or afraid of us.” He emphasized that last word. “The demon went for you, Jenny. It turned its back on me to get to you.”
“Which means it could be Auntie Jia sending her love.” The swamp woman shook her head. “It’s not our way, though. Sure, maybe there are swamp witches who can summon orishas, but Josento
wn royalty would want a murder to be more personal and bloodier. They’d hire a girl here. Fuck me dry, but Nelly would do it for free.”
“Any more sand letters from Auntie Jia?” Ymir asked.
“A few. Just normal auntie business, is all.” Jenny grew distant.
Ymir understood the basics of the sand letters. There was a room in the Imperial Palace where sand fell in a stream. You took a letter, written in magic ink, and set it under the fall of sand. Casting Form magic, the sand took the ink from the paper and sent it across the world to another chamber, where more sand fell. If you held paper under that sand, in that distant place, the ink would appear. It was Knowing Lore, and powerful Form magic, and useful. It also made him uneasy. Was he breathing in the ink when he drew too close to the room? Could someone access the words, to read them, or to ruin them? What if, using Form major arcana, they wrote something different? In a war, that could be devastating.
Jenny rolled her eyes. “Auntie and I are having the conversation without having it. I say there’s no way you would ever marry Arribelle, even with the Lover’s Knot. Auntie says she understands. I say I’ve found others. She says she’s happy. It’s all just the piss, shit, and spit of a watertooth terror.”
Ymir had looked the animal up. It was a large lizard-like creature with rows and rows of sharp teeth. They could grow to be twenty feet long.
The Josentown princess frowned. “I mentioned this Midnight Guild to Auntie. She said it was a story. She also said that I shouldn’t dig any deeper into it. I shouldn’t even mention it. Because, and I quote, ‘it is bad luck.’”
“So the Guild is real,” Ymir said.
“And a total mystery,” the swamp woman agreed. “To make matters worse? It’s scared the hell out of Auntie Jia, and nothing scares her. Nothing. Have you found anything?”
That was a difficult question to answer. Ymir shrugged. “As you know, sand letter lore isn’t just used to send letters. They also spread news, and there are many bulletins from the many guilds, newsletters from so many universities, and then you have the sand criers.”
Jenny laughed. “Sand criers, like town criers—every hamlet and two-bit city thinks their news is so important. It’s a waste of sand and parchment. Can you imagine it? All those sand chambers getting those letters all the time. There are indexes for some of ’em. You checked those?”
He nodded. Bulletins, newsletters, and the sand criers were sometimes bound and kept in the periodical shelves. Some poor librarian—not Gatha, she wouldn’t lower herself to that—went through and tried to index the main topics. No one was talking about the Midnight Guild. No history mentioned it. If it had only been a rumor, someone would have written about it, but the very absence gave it more weight, like a tribal taboo or the words of a ghost spoken by a soothsayer.
Auntie Jia’s reaction had been the same as the Princept’s. They said it was a story. Then they left it unsaid that the story scared them.
“They think I’ll rise to power,” Ymir said. “They think I’ll storm the continent as another Aeno Akkridor.”
“Worse,” Jenny said. “You’ll be the next Aegel Akkridor, and we’ll have a thousand years of Ymir, son of Ymok, of the Black Wolf Clan.”
Hearing his full name, that old name, made him shake his head. “No, Jenny, I’m Ymir, love of Jennybelle Josen and Lillee Nehenna, of the Majestrial Collegium Universitas. The clans will never accept me again. Perhaps if I returned to conquer them, but even then, I would only gain their fear and not their love. Sometimes I think that would be enough for me. Other times? I would imagine that would be its own special kind of hell. Holding someone is far different than strangling them.”
“Unless they liked to be choked,” Jennybelle said.
He raised an eyebrow at her. He was being serious.
She wasn’t. Her laugh proved it. “Love and hate, pain and sex, fucking someone while choking them—certain people like that. I’m sorry. I’m too tired and nervous to be serious. Tonight?”
“Tonight,” he said. It had taken weeks of work, money, and planning, but they would make their first batch of xocalati later that night.
Ymir, Jenny, and Lillee ate together that night, and they made sure everything was as normal as possible. Tori worked in the kitchen, Ymir and the princesses sat at their table, and after dinner they went their separate ways. Lillee went to her sea cell, and Jennybelle went to the Unicorn’s Uht with some of her Swamp Coast friends who sided with her over Nelly.
Ymir was back on the second floor, paging through a bound copy of the prior year’s Four Road’s town crier. The criers were filled with gossip, some fiction, some reports on petty crimes, and long treatises on the wonders of the Holy Theranus Empire, which had few lands and less power. He did find an interesting piece on Morbuskor women, and how rare and wonderful beardless dwabs were. It seemed men loved having them around because they were easygoing, loving, and ingenious.
He could understand all those sentiments. One complaint, however, was that the dwabs didn’t much like sex. Since most of the empire’s men had multiple wives, that wasn’t an issue. It meant less jealousy and more work, since dwabs liked to work.
There was no mention of the Inconvenience and what that might mean.
Ymir couldn’t imagine kissing a woman with a beard. Perhaps that was why the southern men preferred them beardless, or was there more to it than that? With the Morbuskor, there always seemed to be.
Sandals slapped the stone, and Gatha walked by with an armload of books. She didn’t say hello. She didn’t acknowledge him. She did let her thigh swish the back of his chair, just barely. After just the merest touch, she kept on walking.
For the she-orc, that was like a loving kiss. She’d meant to let him know that she liked him sitting in his normal seat with his books.
Ymir smiled and wondered if he wouldn’t win her heart over yet.
At midnight, he left his seat and left the Librarium.
The school had relaxed into the peace of a Sunday night. The rain stopped for once, allowing the stones and rooftiles a much-needed break from the constant pounding. Downspouts gushed into gurgling gutters. Every cistern was full. Even the moat around the citadel was filling, and Ymir had thought that it was infinitely deep. All those thoughts of pounding, gushing, filling, and depth made him think of more pleasant things than rain. Maybe he’d stir up something more than xocalati that night. He smiled as he leapt down the stairs, taking two at a time.
In the wet night, he smelled the fires of the kitchen, still hot, though they should be cool. More than likely, people would just assume it was the fires of the scholars, keeping their cells and apartments warm.
Ymir went directly to his sea cell. Inside were the three women: Jenny, Lillee, and Tori. All were dressed in dark clothes, Jenny in her blouse and pants, Lillee in a black tunic and cape, and Tori in a black dress. Their storm cloaks hung from their shoulders.
Tori had found velvety black paper and red ribbons in a kitchen storage room—that was her story, though Ymir thought she might have bought them herself. Regardless, they could package their xocalati in finery. Ymir wanted to pay her back, but the dwab refused, saying the xocalati would be payment enough.
The dwab was a good worker and strong enough to haul a single bag of beans herself. Jenny and Lillee would share their bags. As for Ymir, he would haul up the dwab’s processing machine on his first trip. They’d have to make several as they dodged the Gruul guards. That wouldn’t be too hard. Their movements were scheduled, and Gharam, who was in charge of security, made sure they were disciplined and punctual. That was good if no one timed their watches. It was bad if someone did.
By the time they hauled their contraband up the Sea Stair, the taverns were closing, and few people were there. Those still there were too drunk to care about some people in storm cloaks.
Ymir and his friends made it to the kitchen without a problem. The clansman and Tori made extra trips while the princesses gathered the ingredients and s
et up their work areas. It was a little after one by the time Tori cast the Form magic, a simple cantrip, to get her machine working.
Tori stood next to a crank. “Lutum lutarum,” she whispered.
The metal arm circled around as metal ground on metal. She grabbed a measuring glass, scooped up nibs from one of the bags, and poured them into the grinder. The machine churned a bit louder, but not much, and a black paste oozed out into a beaten tin container in the middle of the machine. She turned that container on hinges and spooned the thick paste into the left part of the device, under a flat sheet of tin.
She ran several glasses of nibs through the grinder until they had enough to try the press. She pulled the left lever, and the tin pressed down. A clear, viscous liquid oozed from the spouts into little trays that collected the xoca oil. Raising the crank, a fine powder was left. Tori had even thought to include a brush as wide as the tin, as well as another collection tray.
Brushing it off, they had the oil, and they had the powder, and could start the cooking. Ymir kept watch as Tori handled the machine. Lillee worked the pots. As for Jenny, she had a bag full of her supplies to do a modified version of the Lover’s Knot.
They’d processed half of the xoca nibs when Tori cursed. “Bless my stone bits, but this xoca oil is dense. And that powder isn’t as fine as I want. I forgot a tool in your cell, Ymir. I have to go. Keep this running.”
“With what Form magic?” he asked.
Tori giggled, then had to quiet herself. “I gave it enough juice to run some.”
“Hold for a moment.” The clansman had to think. The Gruul guard would be down in the Sea Stair, doing their sweep.
Lillee, as an Ohlyrran, was quieter and stealthier than anyone. He suggested she go. But Tori said her toolkit was far too complicated for her to explain what she needed.
“Why didn’t you bring it with you?” Ymir asked, keeping his voice patient.
Tori grinned and shrugged. “Well, you know, I was bringing beans up. Figured I wouldn’t need it. Of course I do. Funny thing, if I’d brought it, I wouldn’t have needed it. Since I didn’t, I do. Ha. Life can be a crazy thing.” She snapped her fingers. “I got it. Lillee can run ahead to make sure the coast is clear. I’ll follow up. We’ll be right back.”
