Journeyman Cat

by Virginia Ripple

  Toby jerked into a sitting position. Was it possible that something from that mission so long ago might have found its way to the OKG? The office was a recent addition to the multiple levels of government through the High Council, but it had been inspired because of his father’s final mission. It would make sense that at least some information would be available. But where?

  The orange tom leaped to the floor and raced across the room to a table holding a tower of papers still needing to be filed. Another giant leap landed him on top of the largest pile, which tottered from his weight. One last leap landed him on the top most shelf amongst a row of large crystals.

  “What are you doing?” called Lorn, kneeling on the floor to pick up the files Toby’s leap had scattered. The tom looked back at the human.

  “Remember when we were first appointed to the OKG and we went on that tour?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well do you also remember Master O’dorn telling us how there was a big push to magitize all the old files before they crumbled away?”

  “They were doing what?”

  “Magitizing. You know, creating magical backups for paper copies for long-term storage.”

  “Okay. What about it?”

  “Most of those files are stored here.”

  “In those rocks?”

  Toby gave the human a pained look. “You really should do more reading.”

  “I’ll put that on my to-do list right after learning to fly.”

  The orange tom rolled his eyes, then went back to prowling the shelf of crystals.

  “These aren’t just rocks. They’re quartz crystals and sandstone globes. I was intrigued at the idea of using these rocks, as you call them, to store information, so I did a bit of research. Apparently quartz is a great conductor of magic and sandstone is so porious it holds almost anything.”

  “So all the old files are on that shelf full of crystals and globes?”

  “No. This is only a fraction of what could have been done.”

  “By “could have been done” I’m assuming something went wrong.”

  “If you call shutting down a great program wrong, then yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “Politics. Someone from on high started complaining it was taking away too many resources and so the council decided the program wasn’t cost effective.”

  “Figures.”

  Toby pawed a label around to read it. He stared at the clear shard as large as his head.

  “I think I found it. But it’s too large for me to lift.”

  “Can’t you float it?”

  “I’m not sure what using magic would do to it.”

  “I thought you researched this stuff.”

  “I did, but I never got the opportunity to find out how these things work.”

  Lorn looked around for a stool, then carried the only nearby chair he found over to the end of the shelving unit. The orange tom flattened his ears as he stared at the rickety thing, wondering if the mismatched legs would hold without all four stretchers intact. The chair wobbled as the human reached toward the crystal.

  “Careful,” he breathed. Lorn cast a glare in the cat’s direction. He stepped down, cradling the gem in his arms. Toby let out a relieved sigh and leaped onto the man’s shoulders.

  “Now what?” asked Toby.

  “I don’t know. This is your project.”

  “Let’s put it on the table.”

  Lorn pushed a stack of papers aside, making room for the quartz. The tom flowed into a narrow space between two more stacks and nosed the gem. His tail twitched as he stared into the clear crystal, seeing his green eyes reflected.

  “Is there an incantation we’re supposed to say?” his partner asked.

  “I don’t think so. From what I understood these were supposed to be available to anyone, whether they could use magic or not.”

  “How is that possible?”

  Toby scrunched his eyes and clamped his whiskers together, trying to remember what he’d heard. The memory wouldn’t come. Then he realized he had fallen back on old habits and took a deep breath. He relaxed his mind and allowed his thoughts to settle. A moment later an image of pine needles filtered through his mental fog, followed by the memory of his mother, Master O’dorn, Lorn and himself gathered around a Solstice tree. He opened his eyes and looked up at his partner.

  “You remember helping me make that wheeled contraption with Master O’dorn, the one for mother?”

  Lorn nodded, squinting at the orange tom. “You think these gems fit inside some sort of contraption, make it possible to read whatever’s on it?”

  “Essentially. The question is, did it get made?”

  Lorn looked up toward the shelves. “There are quite a few of these. Do you remember anything about the crystals being tested to see if they work?”

  “It wouldn’t make sense to create so many if you didn’t know if they’d work, does it?”

  “And, it would make sense to keep everything together, even if they canceled the project. My guess is the contraption is in here somewhere,” the man said, waving toward the large filing room.

  “Okay, assuming it’s here, where is the most likely place to keep it? Near the gems.”

  The partners began pacing the area near the shelves holding the crystals. They opened cupboard doors and boxes. They peered up at the tops of shelves and crawled on the floor, looking under anything that might hold something large enough to put the crystals in. Nothing.

  “Too bad there aren’t any dragons here like there are in the High Temple Library,” said Toby.

  Lorn shook his head. “Council’s too cheap to hire any. That’s why we’re the ones doing the filing.”

  “Politics,” spit the orange tom, bellying along the floor for a second time. Lorn disappeared around a corner at the end of the aisle.

  “Hey, what’s this?”

  The human stepped back around the corner carrying a large cube-like object. He paused beside the file-laden table and frowned. A moment later the stacks of paper floated to the floor. Toby hid a smile. A few years ago, had Lorn attempted the same thing, they would have been trying to extinguish a giant blaze. His partner had come a long way, though he still had problems focusing when under stress.

  Toby leaped up beside the strange box. It was made of metal rods held together in the shape of a cube by more melted metal in the corners. One side held a circular plate of metal with copper wires attached to the bottom. The wires led to a small ceramic barrel and attached to two strips of metal. A white crystalline substance caked the inside of the container. Toby leaned over and sniffed it.

  “Smells like salt.”

  Lorn bent down to inspect the container, sighting across it toward the box.

  “Look there. Above where the wires run under that plate. Is that a lever?”

  Toby turned to see what the man was talking about. He tried pushing it down with a paw. It gave easily. He turned back to his partner, who was staring into the container.

  “What do you think? Push the lever down and it turns the contraption on?”

  “Probably.”

  “What do you suppose goes in there?” the orange tom asked, nodding toward the salt-encrusted container.

  “Have you ever been to the sea?”

  “No.”

  “There’s a little village my family visited when I was a boy. They made these toys that would move by themselves – without magic.”

  “How’d they do that?”

  “With wires like these and salt water.”

  “Do you suppose that’s what was in the container? Salt water?”

  “It would explain the salt around the inside.”

  “Let’s try it.”

  “But we don
’t know how much salt to use.”

  “Why don’t we just start with water, see if there’s already enough salt left in the container. If not, we can add more and see if that does anything. We can keep doing that until it either works –”

  “Or we break it,” said Lorn, quirking a smile.

  The partners poured the water and salt into the container a little at a time, checking at intervals to see if the thing worked. A little while later, Toby felt a zap from the contraption similar the times Lorn had scuffed across their rug in their room and then decided to touch him.

  “That’s it,” said the tom, shaking his tingling paw.

  “Shall we put the crystal on the plate and see what happens?”

  “No time like the present.”

  Lorn carefully picked up the gem and placed its flat bottom on the metal circle. They looked at each other. Toby squinted, wondering for a moment if the contraption might emit sparks, and depressed the lever. An image flickered into existence, projected a couple feet away in the air. Toby smiled. It worked.

  Now to find what they were looking for. It took a little time to figure out how to navigate through the material, but within a short time the partners found the information relating to Victor’s last mission. Most of it was stuff they already knew from their research six years ago when they figured out how to put an end to Chivato’s plague. However, there were a couple maps and some intelligence reports they hadn’t seen before.

  The first map was labeled HT, with no other identifying marks. It looked like a bunch of squiggles and not much else. The second map Toby recognized as the Northern Province, showing its county borders and the larger towns and villages. Nestled in the north-westerly area was the hill country. A small triangle marked the temple. Toby nodded toward the spot.

  “That’s the temple, alright, but look at the name.”

  “First Temple of the Hills. So?”

  “When I talked to Hanif, he called it the New Life Temple and School.When did the name change?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. It’s just that the way he talked about “new life” made me feel like he was talking about an actual person.”

  “You mean like how the Followers talk about the One?”

  “No. I mean like a real person I could meet. It raised the fur on my neck.”

  Lorn shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you. It’s all mumbo-jumbo to me.”

  He turned back to the map. Toby shook his head, trying to flatten his fur. Just thinking about his conversation with the temple cat made him uncomfortable. Lorn pointed to another place on the map.

  “Isn’t that Heilberg County?”

  The man placed his palm on the virtual map and waved it slowly up and to the left. The picture of the hill country moved in the same direction, dragging more of the map with it. A jagged line showed the border between the hill country and Heilberg County. Several glowing red dots appeared in the county.

  “I bet those are the places dragon willow rings were taken down,” Lorn said.

  “That would mean father had been to those places. Nothing surprising there.”

  They searched the map a little longer, then decided to move to the next file. Lorn swiped his finger from right to left across the map, letting the contraption know he wanted the next file. It was another log entry detailing supplies. The man turned to stare at the contraption.

  “You know, this little thing is amazing. I wonder who figured out how to make it work.”

  “A master artificer,” said Toby, distractedly.

  “A master what?”

  The cat sighed and stopped reading to glance up at his partner. “Exactly what do you do with the documents they send us to read?”

  “Wait for you to read them and tell me what’s important,” Lorn said with a grin.

  Toby rolled his eyes. Some things never change.

  “A master artificer makes contraptions like these to help non-magical folks with tasks the rest of us take for granted. That’s how Master O’dorn and I found out how to make mother’s wheeled contraption. He talked to an artificer about what we needed and that man gave us some ideas on how to do it.”

  “So is there a school for these artificer’s?”

  “Not at the moment. They’re still doing it the old way with fathers teaching sons and fosterlings the trade. The High Council is debating over a ruling that could create several new schools for them.”

  “That’ll never happen,” said the man with a snort. Toby raised his eye whiskers in question. Lorn crossed his arms over his chest and scowled.

  “When have they ever agreed on a ruling?”

  “Point taken.”

  The tom went back to studying the supplies list. A notation at the bottom caught his eye.

  “Could you enlarge that bit down there?”

  Lorn placed both his palms on the bottom of the virtual document and spread them apart. The writing grew larger.

  Old Route no longer open. Find alternate through HT. Ask BH’s aid.

  “That looks like directions from someone, or maybe Victor was letting someone know what his plans were. Possibly Uncle Hecktor? The real question, though, is what is HT?”

  “And who is BH?”

  Toby stared off into space. They hadn’t run across BH’s name during their first investigation over Victor’s disappearance. Of course, they had been focussing on things relating to the moment and operating under the assumption that only Hecktor Ribaldy had any knowledge about Toby’s father’s mission. The young cat looked back at the notation. What was HT? In a flash, he remembered where he’d seen those letters.

  “Go back to the maps.”

  Lorn swiped the virtual screen left to right until he was back to the squiggles.

  “There. On the bottom. See where it says HT?”

  “So this is a map of the alternate route, but where is it?”

  “And where was the old one?”

  Toby lashed his tail and snarled. For every piece of information they gained, it seemed it gave rise to more questions than answers. Lorn patted his shoulder.

  “Remember. It took us a long time to figure out your father’s clues last time. This isn’t any different.”

  The young tom took a deep breath and closed his eyes. It had taken them the better part of a year to follow the combined clues of his father and Lorn’s uncle. They’d only been at it this time a few hours. When he opened his eyes again, he gave Lorn a grateful smile. The man nodded and turned his attention back to the image. He swiped to the next map.

  “What if we compared the red dots on this map with the dates the black market rings were busted? Maybe that’ll show us what direction your father was headed.”

  “Good idea.”

  Toby jumped down and headed to a shelving unit further away. With a twitch of his tail, he floated a box down from one of the shelves. He checked the list on the front of the box, then concentrated on lifting the file he wanted from the box. The sheet of paper floated along behind him as he returned to the table.

  “I’ll read the dates while you check the map.”

  Together they traced a northerly path through Heilberg County to the border of the hill country.

  “That’s the last date.”

  “So it’s safe to say your father was headed in the general direction of the temple, but there’s nothing here that shows he actually crossed the border.”

  He crossed his arms again, one hand rising to stroke his beard. The man leaned forward, nose almost going through the image.

  “Wait a minute.”

  “What?”

  The human stepped back, stared at the image, then stepped closer again. Toby flattened his ears and glared at his partner.

  “What?!”
<
br />   Lorn continued to stare at the image. He put his palms beside a smudged spot on the jagged border line and swiped them apart, enlarging the image. Toby leaned forward.

  “There’s writing there. How did we miss it before?”

  “It’s small and smudged. I thought it was just another little hill symbol until I got closer. Look here,” Lorn said, pointing to a short squiggle with writing next to it. “This says Old Route. Didn’t that note say something about the old route being unusable?”

  “Yeah. Is there anything there that says HT?”

  Both human and cat studied the map for several minutes. At last, they admitted defeat. There were no other words near the Old Route that began with either H or T. Toby’s ears flattened, his whiskers clamped tight. Lorn depressed the button on the contraption, shutting it off.

  “Look at it this way: you may not know where your father went, but you have enough information now to estimate. From what we’ve gathered that puts Victor somewhere around the temple just after the last ring was shut down.”

  Toby looked up at his partner, a smile forming. Lorn nodded.

  “It seems to me,” the young tom said, “the head temple cat might have a few more questions to answer.”

  The brown tabby paced the receiving room. This was not a call he wanted to make, but there was no help for it. The High Council’s questions were getting troublesome.

  “You’re going to wear a groove in that stone.”

  Hanif jumped, bowing belatedly to the large black tom in the mirror. When he looked up, he kept his eyes on the cat’s massive paws.

  “My apologies for disturbing you, my Lord, but I have encountered something I cannot handle.”

  “Go on,” the tom growled.

  “The High Council has been asking a lot more questions than we expected.”

  “What do you mean? Precisely who has been asking you questions?”

  “Besides the partners you warned us would be coming, I’ve been contacted twice by a Journeyman Toby. He says it is merely routine, but his questions seem designed to uncover something I believe you would rather keep hidden.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “He has asked about a black tom in a cage someone says they saw brought to this temple and about information regarding HT and Old Route.”