by John Bierce
“How… thoughtful,” Sabae said, struggling not to laugh.
Talia just glared at the spellbook, which was giving her a hopeful look. It finally wilted and slowly flapped away.
“It’s really trying to figure out the whole apology gift thing,” Hugh said. “It’s, uh… not quite there yet.”
Talia just snorted at that.
Finally, it was Hugh’s turn to give Talia her present.
“I got this for you even before Midsummer,” Hugh said. “Kanderon helped me pick it out for you. I thought about getting you something else today, because I was pretty sure it was a good present for you as a friend, but I wasn’t sure if this was a good present for you as a girlfriend, but Godrick told me I was being an idiot, and I’m rambling and I’m going to shut up now.”
Talia gave him an affectionate look, then opened her present. It was an old, battered book with a cover made entirely of laminated bone. Faded letters on the cover read simply Raultha’s Ossuary.
Talia flipped it open to find page after page of intricate drawings of skeletons of a dozen different species, cross-sections of specific bones, and long discussions of different uses for bones by bone mages.
“This is amazing, Hugh!” Talia said, and kissed him on the cheek.
“It’s also banned in at least a dozen city-states and the Havathi Empire,” Alustin said. “Raultha was a peerless scholar and mage, but he was also an absolute madman. He believed that you could calculate moral outcomes mathematically, which among other things, led him to decide that it was more ethical to remove bones from animals via vivisection than killing them for their bones. He was said to have kept a boneless drake alive in his lab for nearly two years at one point, in constant agony.”
“Ah guess ah’m not sleepin’ tonight after hearin’ that,” Godrick muttered.
“I should also note that he tried to become the first bone lich,” Alustin said.
“Did it work?” Talia asked.
“Thankfully, no,” Alustin said. “Especially considering that it would have taken the bones of literally tens of millions of humans and animals to finish his blueprints. Heliothrax caught wind of his plans and ended him, destroying most copies of the Ossuary. That last was probably unnecessary— there’s nothing too insane in there. It’s mostly just banned for Raultha’s monstrous reputation.”
Talia flipped through the pages, tons of new ideas for bones to add to her necklace already running through her head.
“How did his whole calculating morality thing work?” Sabae asked.
“It didn’t,” Alustin said. “I have no idea how many different thinkers have attempted it over the years, but it almost always leads to monstrous conclusions, like the idea that parents should be allowed to abandon or kill crippled children to make their own lives happier, or that suffering is the greatest enemy and should be defeated by killing all life.”
“I’d much rather calculate the yield of explosions than calculate morality, so you don’t need to worry about me turning into a monster,” Talia said.
Alustin just sighed at that.
Soon after, Alustin began covering the nearby glow-crystals with sheets of paper he pulled from his tattoo to block out their light.
When he was done, he frowned, apparently dissatisfied with how much light was still coming up from below, and started constructing what looked like a tower made of paper.
“I’m going to go talk to Sabae really quick,” Hugh said.
Talia nodded, and joined Godrick and Artur to watch Alustin build his weird paper tower.
“Do either of you know what he’s up to?” Talia asked.
Godrick shook his head. Artur smiled, but refused to say anything.
Talia glanced over at Hugh and Sabae. Hugh’s spellbook was hovering next to them, and Sabae was listening intently as Hugh gestured repeatedly at it. Talia suspected that Hugh was using the spellbook’s ability to block scrying— he hadn’t told her what he wanted to talk to Sabae about, but it was probably serious.
After Alustin’s paper tower had grown to around fifteen feet or so, Sabae and Hugh returned to the group. Sabae looked thoughtful, but just shook her head when Talia started to inquire.
Within a few minutes, the paper tower grew twenty feet up from the platform. It was around ten feet to a side, and a series of flying buttresses connected to each of them. Between the walls of the tower and the buttresses, a narrow staircase wrapped its way around the tower to the top.
“Well, are you coming?” Alustin asked, and began walking up the stairs.
The group hesitated, except for Artur, who started up the stairs immediately. Talia expected the stairs to buckle beneath the huge mage immediately, but they hardly even moved.
The rest of the group followed behind a bit more cautiously.
“Why not just lift us all up on a big platform, if you wanted more altitude?” Talia asked.
“I’m not actually lifting you with my magic,” Alustin said. “The tower is structurally sound on its own.”
Everyone except Artur gave him skeptical looks, and the paper mage chuckled. “You’d be shocked at how strong paper can be if you fold it right.”
More paper began flooding out of his tattoo, and it spread outward from the tower, just below the platform at the top, eventually creating a wide shield to block the light from below.
“Don’t step on that part, it’s not structurally sound,” Alustin noted.
“So… what are we waiting for?” Sabae asked.
Alustin just smiled and pointed to the north.
Talia was waiting patiently for her eyes to adjust when Hugh gasped. She looked over at him, but he didn’t even notice, he was looking so intently northward.
“Starting already, is it?” Alustin said.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity of staring into the dark, with the only light coming dimly from below and from the lightning flashes of the distant storms, Talia began to see it too.
Glimmers of golden light were escaping from the forest to the north of them. As Talia watched, it slowly began to grow brighter and brighter, until the trees to the north were illuminated from below nearly as brightly as the city below them. The delta channels were outlined brilliantly, and Talia could see how they slowly converged, and where dry land started to appear in larger quantities to the north.
Hugh stepped over and wrapped his arm around her, and Talia leaned her head against him.
No one spoke for what felt like an eternity, they just watched the gentle shifting of the glowing river to the north. Finally, to Talia’s irritation, Alustin spoke up— the paper mage wasn’t exactly good at handling quiet.
“It’s some sort of freshwater algae that lives only in the Lower Ylosa River and in Lake Nelu,” he said. “On nights with particularly low tides and strong currents from upstream, it can sometimes reach all the way to the city itself. On those nights, the inhabitants dim all the glow-crystals of the city, to let it be illuminated from below.”
No one bothered to respond to him.
Talia didn’t know how long it had been after that when Hugh stiffened beside her.
“Uh… there’s something to the east,” he said. “Something big.”
Everyone turned to the east.
Talia didn’t understand what she was seeing. It looked at first as though the moon had started to rise, but it looked disorientating and wrong, somehow. She realized, with a start, that it was hovering just above the land and was in the midst of tearing through the east-bound storm.
“Ephyrus,” Alustin said.
Talia blinked and realized that what she’d thought was the moon was a jellyfish of truly immense scale. It had to be a third the size of the city below them. Its flesh was slightly translucent, and she could see flashes of lightning through it. Its hundreds of tentacles reached nearly down to the treetops, and lightning occasionally crackled between them.
The great jellyfish lunged halfway out of the thunderstorm but then seemed to stall. Even f
rom this distance, Talia could see a great wind spring up, one that tore entire branches off the trees below it, and slowly forced the immense creature back into the storm.
“What was that thing?” Talia asked.
“Ephyrus, the Fallen Moon,” Alustin asked. “It showed up in southeastern Ithos three hundred years ago and has roamed its storms ever since. It’s always been one of the most inscrutable great powers, but I’ve never heard of it coming this far west before.”
“My grandmother was never up to… whatever she’s up to, before,” Sabae said.
The storm slowly closed over Ephyrus again, and it was lost to sight.
Talia leaned in a little closer to Hugh, and his arm tightened around her.
The six of them returned to their inn soon after that, the mood of the evening a little overwhelmed by what they’d seen. Talia would normally be impressed by watching the paper tower dissolve and be sucked into Alustin’s tattoo in far less time than it had taken to assemble it, but she just kept glancing south, in case Ephyrus might reappear.
The sight of Zophor at night did shake her out of the pensive mood a bit— the streets of the city were well-lit, and descending down from the canopy was a truly spectacular sight. The trees seemed even more immense than they had been during the day, somehow, and the bridges and markets of the city took on something of a festival air, with musicians and illusionists entertaining the crowds.
As they descended the stairs, Talia looked behind her. At the back of the group, she spotted Artur and Sabae whispering about something, Hugh’s spellbook hovering just behind them. Talia somehow knew that it was blocking scrying again.
Talia pushed it out of her mind, and tried to focus on walking hand in hand with Hugh.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Upriver
Their expedition upriver set out just before dawn.
Their boat, the Despondent Toad, was a far cry from the Rising Cormorant. It reminded Hugh of nothing so much as a runty barge, with a wide, flat bottom. Its lower deck was cramped and dark, too short for even Talia to stand up straight. There wasn’t anything approaching actual rooms below— just a couple of thin canvas walls dividing the sleeping area from the galley and storage areas. There weren’t even proper bunks, just haphazardly strung hammocks.
The deck of the Despondent Toad wasn’t much better. Much of it was crowded with gear, and there were several weak spots and even a couple holes in the deck. The one sail was dingy and threadbare, and the canvas awning above the back half of the deck sagged, and had more than its share of holes.
The captain of the Toad was equally as battered and worn as the ship. Captain Narsa, or simply Old Narsa, as everyone referred to her, was a wiry old woman with a huge shock of white hair and more wrinkles than should possibly fit on a single face. She was constantly spitting, making horrible noises in the back of her throat, and glaring at everyone near her.
Other than Narsa, the ship’s crew consisted of only four others. Her husband— a toothless old fellow who never spoke, but always had a smile for everyone— served as the cook. The remaining three were water mages that she’d hired— apparently on the condition that they never tell her their names, because she fully anticipated young idiots like them dying in the jungle. The only reason they’d come along was that they were being paid enough to not have to work for a full year afterward.
And, apparently, because they were idiots.
It somehow didn’t surprise Hugh that Talia was immediately fascinated with Narsa.
Strapped to the sides of the battered, splintery railing were a number of long poles. When Hugh asked what they were for, Narsa cackled at him.
“When the aether gets all thin like bad soup, lad, how do you think we were going to keep moving upstream, eh? Not afraid of a little work, are we?”
This was, to Hugh’s regret, the only ship Alustin had been able to arrange on such short notice. There was only a handful that went as far north as Lake Nelu.
It took most of an hour for them to pass all the way through Zophor. There were dozens of the mind-bogglingly huge mangroves that comprised the city, and Hugh’s respect for the lich grew even more. He was somewhat glad he hadn’t met and spoken to the lich like Sabae and Talia.
The Despondent Toad put on a surprising pace once it got moving at full speed outside of the city, propelled by the ship’s water mages. Captain Narsa seemed rooted to the ship, as though she never intended to move from the tiller.
When they finally exited Zophor, Hugh could see at least a dozen of the great tree faces tracking their movement.
They slowed down a bit as they entered one of the countless channels upstream, between two thick stands of mangroves of a more modest size. It was high tide, so the waves lapped at the base of the branches. Somewhat counterintuitively, this was the most dangerous time to sail upstream on the Ylosa— the currents were more treacherous during high tide, and there were numerous submerged branches eager to puncture the hull of an unwary riverboat.
Alustin, of course, promptly had the four of them training again. Hugh and Godrick worked on controlling ice produced by Hailstrike, while Sabae continued her training with using both armor types at once. Alustin didn’t want to risk damaging the battered riverboat with bonefire explosions, so Talia was restricted to practicing with her swarm of dreamwasps.
It started drizzling an hour upstream, and didn’t stop the rest of the day. The rain was warm and fell in unpleasantly large droplets. Much of the abundant life of the jungle seemed to simply vanish, though Hugh spotted a few soggy looking flocks of parrots huddled together miserably. The river drakes were the only creatures that seemed to ignore the unseasonal rain, save for the crocodiles.
Training became a wet, miserable business.
A little after lunch— which was a sorry affair compared to Radhan cooking— they entered one of the storms that Sabae’s grandmother had apparently sent throughout the region. Hugh could hardly tell where the rain ended and the river began, it was coming down so hard.
Captain Narsa had her crew take down the sail— too much risk of a strong gust driving them into the trees alongside the channel.
The canvas awning was little use against the rain, it had so many holes in it. The rain battered so loudly against it that you had to shout to be heard. Everyone but the two on-duty water mages and Captain Narsa hunkered down in the cramped belowdecks. Even there, the rain struck loudly enough against the ship that it was a struggle to be heard, so most of them curled up with books. Or, in Alustin’s case, diagramming dozens of sheets of paper with elaborate spellforms and glyphs.
Talia somehow managed to struggle into the same hammock as Hugh. She was cutting off the circulation to his arm, but he didn’t complain or try to free it.
He did try not to glance too often at the contents of Raultha’s Ossuary as she perused it. There were a lot of profoundly disturbing illustrations and diagrams in it. Likewise, Talia pointedly didn’t look at Hugh’s spellbook, where he was rereading one of Kanderon’s lessons on stellar affinities. There was a shocking amount of math involved, and Kanderon was insistent that Hugh needed to master it. Their spatial affinity took even more math still. He wasn’t bad at math by any means, but he really wished he was as good with it as Godrick was.
The storm passed just as suddenly as all the rest, its trailing edge cut as though by a knife.
Within half an hour, the unpleasant drizzle from earlier had returned, and they started making slightly better time as the tide dropped. This far upstream, low tide was only about ten feet below the first branches of the mangroves— which didn’t grow any higher than they had to, apparently.
By the time the Toad arrived at its camp in the evening, everyone on board was cramped, tired, and grumpy. Camp didn’t make them feel particularly better. Spots of exposed land were still few and far between in the delta, so camp was just an old, sagging waystation built suspended between several large trees. It didn’t look like anyone else had been there in ages, and
the whole thing smelled strongly of mold. A determined enough child could probably batter its way through the walls of the wayhouse.
It was, apparently, the last time they’d get to sleep off the Toad for this trip. There were no other waystations farther upstream, and sleeping on land was considered too dangerous in the Mage-Eater’s territory.
As they were docking, one of the mysterious floods raced through.
It only raised the water level by a foot or so, but that was enough to tear the ship loose from the waystation. One of Narsa’s water mages almost fell into the river before Hugh caught him with a levitation spell. It took nearly twenty minutes to maneuver the Toad back into position and rig up a new docking tie to replace the one that had broken off the waystation.
It was after the ship was tied back up that Artur and Sabae chose to confront Alustin.
“Captain,” Artur said. “Could yeh and yer crew wait on the Toad fer a bit? We need ta’ have somethin’ of a private conversation.”
Captain Narsa didn’t bother responding. She just spat on the floor of the wayhouse and led her crew onto the ship.
“Hugh, could you make sure this conversation is private?” Sabae asked him. “I’d appreciate it if you could have your spellbook do its thing and put up a ward as well.”
Hugh’s spellbook flew down from the rafters at his call, and quickly threw up its weird anti-scrying ability. As Hugh pulled out a stick of chalk to draw a ward, Alustin waved him off. “I can take care of the privacy ward, Hugh.”
His arm tattoo lit up, and a swarm of paper began flying out of thin air near Alustin’s hand. The papers assembled themselves in a ring filling most of the room, segments of a privacy ward drawn on each vertical sheet.
It was decent work, though a bit less elaborate than Hugh usually preferred. Alustin’s prior claims about his wards were obviously correct— Hugh could see how easy it would be to have them function modularly, and achieve different ward types by switching out the relevant sheets of paper.