by Kim Wedlock
"Thanks, beautiful," one of the ditchlings puffed as the startled daze lingered over the four, "but we weren't the ones what needed saving."
"Neither were we," Kienza replied sternly, her hands on her shapely hips.
"That much is obvious."
"Now," another ditchling added.
The seven childlike warriors then looked towards Aria. She still clung to her father's side, but she seemed unconcerned even as everyone else finally became aware of his unconscious condition. The ditchlings, however, ignored it just as she did, and stepped towards her with familiar smiles, their oversized silver-green eyes glinting joyfully.
She smiled back, though she didn't display the same recognition.
"Nug says 'hi'," said one of the girls as she had her turn of hugging her. She had various twigs tied into her hair - woven, Aria noticed, into plaits.
Aria's smile brightened. "You know Nug?"
"Never met 'im." She shook her head with a vaguely baffled frown, and Aria returned her confusion.
Kienza knelt at Rathen's side and gently patted his cheek. He grunted and twitched, his relaxed expression slowly knotting as if his sleep had been both voluntary and comfortable, and when his eyes finally opened, it took him a moment to recall his settings. He had to look twice at the seven big-eyed faces that peered down at him from behind Aria.
"What happened to him?" Petra asked, stepping over with the others as Kienza rose to her feet and helped Rathen to his.
"After what happened yesterday, all this could have triggered a relapse." She smiled at him apologetically, but he returned it with a very flat look. "I thought it better to remove it as a possibility." She turned towards the red-haired duelist as she noticed her clutching at her chest, and shooed her hand away to see to the long gash that extended from her breast to her shoulder. Evidently she'd narrowly avoided being snatched herself, but with an easy pass of the sorceress's hand, the blood cleared and the skin resealed itself.
Petra's eyebrows rose in surprise as she pulled at her blouse and looked closer at her skin, but just as with the others' the previous night, it was entirely clear and unmarked.
"Is everyone else all right?" She asked, moving then towards the injured ditchlings who lined up quite readily before her, presenting their wounds with pride. Everyone else stayed where they were.
"What did you say to them?" Aria asked, watching with her usual curiosity as her magic healed their bony shoulders.
"I told them to leave or I'd curse their forests."
"Can you do that?" Anthis asked with a note of concern.
She smiled at him, baffled. "No, of course not. ...Well...actually, I suppose I could. As far as appearances go. And isn't that all a curse really is?"
"Where did you all come from, anyway?" Aria then asked their rescuers.
"And why?" Garon added.
The seven exchanged amused glances. "There's all kinds of ways in here that ain't the front door," a particularly muddy one replied. "Just have to know where they are. And as for why, we had summit to give you. We saw you when you got to the city."
"Why didn't you give it to us then?"
"Had to write it down, didn't we?"
They rolled their eyes, as if it should have been obvious, then one of them stepped forwards from the group. She extended her skinny, mud-crusted arm towards Anthis and offered him a few sheets of parchment. He took them carefully, surprised initially that they could write at all, then that they'd done so on paper rather than leaves. But as soon as he looked down he discovered they'd simply torn out pages of an elven book and scrawled over them in charcoal. And it was almost illegible.
"What is it?" He frowned.
"Stuff about magic."
"You could sound more grateful, y'know," the twig-haired girl scowled. "We're tryin' to help."
"We're smaller and faster than you are," another declared quite proudly, "we can get into smaller, higher and more per-carious places than you - and we know 'bout places you don't. So we been in and we got this for you."
"Say 'thank you', Mister Karth."
Bewildered, he glanced towards Kienza, then back to the ditchlings. "Yes, thank you, of course...but where--"
"It's all on that, Mister Karf," the girl told him, tapping the back of the parchments, "but don't ask us about it. We don't get it, but we know what you're after."
Anthis's doubt only increased, but he, and the others, hid it well enough.
"But this don't come for free - not now, anyway. We wanna know summit ourselfs." The muddy boy's tone had become serious - it reminded Rathen of how much Aria could age in a single moment when a difficult subject weighed on her mind. "It ain't just the harpies what are after us now, you big 'uns have started attacking us, too. And not just when we try to steal yer pies."
"What do you mean?" Garon asked warily.
"People, hoomans like you, coming into our forests and trapping us, killing us, dragging us away. We wanna know why."
Everyone exchanged confused glances.
"We don't know anything about that," the inquisitor replied.
All seven pairs of far-too-sharp eyes narrowed at him in scrutiny.
"All right," the boy said, finally, "we didn't think you knew. Otherwise you wouldn't be doing what you're doing."
"Which is?"
"Not attackin' us." Then the ditchlings turned around together and made for the door. "Good luck with everything," they threw back, "oh, and make sure you don't forget to un-magic the others. Would be a shame if they missed dinner forever." And then they hurried away, leaving the others blinking after them.
Anthis looked back down to the parchments. "I guess our progress is important to ditchlings outside of Wrenroot, too. They must have spread the word..." He chuckled grimly. "No pressure, then."
"What is it?" Rathen asked, peering over towards them.
Anthis squinted at it. "I...can't tell. I need time to pick it apart...but, from what I can make out, it is about magic - the intricacies of elven casting; practice, structure of spells, things like that." His eyebrows rose. "This could actually be really, really useful..."
"It could help us to understand the artefact."
"Or to recreate the spell."
Rathen managed not to shoot Garon his instinctively doubtful look. Instead he glanced towards Anthis and found him looking hesitantly back at him.
"I will need help understanding it..."
Rathen's jaw knotted at his dubious tone. He knew it had nothing to do with the parchments. "I'll do what I can," he replied as neutrally as he could.
"What about the harpies?" Petra asked as she peered out through the broken wall, fully expecting them to return while they were distracted. "They'll be back."
"They will," Garon agreed. "We've been tracked all along. They're obsessive in their pursuit. We should leave." Petra, Rathen and Aria were close behind him as he made for the door, while Anthis tried desperately to stuff as many books and papers into his satchel as he could. Kienza had to turn him around and usher him along herself.
"We covered three days' travel in an instant," Petra reminded him as they moved along the short, tattered corridor towards the stairs. "How could they track us through that? And how can we get them to leave us alone?"
"Harpies are masters of the winds," Kienza replied from the back. "Three days' distance in a second isn't enough to shake them - it's also possible one saw or heard us last night."
"And didn't attack?"
"They don't attack alone. And as for leaving you be...I hesitate to ask, but have any of you tried talking to them?"
Garon grunted. "If I'd been given the chance."
"You were given the chance," Rathen reminded him sharply, "and you ran with the rest of us."
"The harpies think you've sided with the ditchlings--"
"Arkhamas."
Kienza smiled obligingly at Aria. "Arkhamas. And just as the Arkhamas thought you were responsible for the magic, so, too, may the harpies. The difference is that the Ar
khamas gave you the chance to explain. That doesn't necessarily mean they're any smarter than the harpies, just that one of them had the idea not to attack right away and shared that thought with the others. But, of course, at that point none of you had expressed any form of alignment in their conflict to provoke them."
"That doesn't explain why they're so focused on us, though."
"Well, the magic is a concern - for us, for them, and for everything in between - and if they think you're responsible they might want to displace you first, take you somewhere you won't have an advantage, and then question you about it. You wouldn't quiz someone you considered a threat on the spot where you found them, would you? They could have anything up their sleeves!"
"So we should just let them carry us off?"
"Goodness, no, anything could happen. This is a war, if one of talons and slingshots. But I suspect you will get your opportunity to speak."
"We will?" Petra asked sceptically.
"Of course." Kienza grinned. "They're obsessive in their pursuit, remember?"
Chapter 30
After racing through the tower and crypts as quickly and carefully as they could, their pace hastened by the threat of returning harpies, they continued off into the forest until darkness had firmly set in. They made camp amongst the densest trees they could find, but already so far north, Turunda's forests were beginning to thin and the air was growing drier - but before too long they wouldn't have any cover at all and far more to avoid being seen by, so they tried to make the best of it and stifled their concerns while they could.
That evening, Anthis was bent firmly over his books while the others ate, scribbling across numerous pages. His expression was twisted in unbreakable thought, and he periodically returned to some of those scribbles, crossed them out and rewrote them elsewhere, only to cross most of those out once more, ponder for a while, sigh and turn to Kienza in defeat - to which she would reply that he'd had it right the first time. Clearly, her correction of his earlier translation had thrown him through a loop.
"Well," the sorceress began once the last of them had finished eating, a dubious note of finality to her voice that not one of them had missed, "thank you for dinner, and for the exciting day out. I wish you the greatest luck in your search - I'm sure you'll find something more substantial soon."
"You're leaving?" Anthis asked with barely concealed alarm, sparing a moment from his work to protest as she rose to her feet and dusted off her long, bark-coloured skirt.
She smiled apologetically, "I only remained because I needed to make sure Rathen was all right. He is, so now I have my own matters to attend to."
"Which are?"
Rathen shook his head to himself at the inquisitor's brusque question, and looked up to find Kienza giving him the disapprovingly raised eyebrow he'd expected. Surprisingly, however, she answered - which meant that it would either be only part of the truth, or that it would be needlessly complicated in order to put him off of asking her again in the future. She was always so very secretive.
"The magic is expanding in range, circumferentially, which suggests that it isn't just appearing on its own but rather spreading out from a single point and accumulating at these ruins, drawn by the magnetism and then spilling over onto the next. I've been following the magic backwards, ruin by ruin, broken spell chain by broken spell chain, to find the centre and, hopefully, its source, because - if I am correct, and I'm certain that I am - this flow of magic will need to be halted before the rest of it is removed or it will just collect all over again."
"How do you intend to halt it?" Garon asked as the others slowly processed the information.
"I don't," she replied simply. "I'm hoping he Zikrahlehveyn can do it. But, as there's no sense in waiting for you to find it first and dragging the whole matter out, I'm tackling it from that end while you continue your hunt. And," she turned towards Aria, "aside from that, Oat needs feeding.
"But first..." She turned then towards Rathen, who looked back at her with bereaved disappointment. It was a gaze she received every time she left him, but following such an episode, it was always coloured by a pleading desperation that pulled at her heart more than she could let him know. She smiled sadly and her tone softened. "I'd like a word with you."
He nodded with resignation, making his usual decision not to beg her to stay, and rose to his feet. He glanced down to Aria, who worked as vigilantly in her own sketchbook as Anthis still did over his notes, then to Garon and Petra. "Could you--"
"Of course," Petra smiled, and shuffled a fraction closer to the girl, making a point as she did so to turn away so she wouldn't appear to be trying to look at her drawings.
Rathen nodded his thanks and turned to catch up to Kienza as she wandered off into the trees.
Darkness enveloped them. The reach of the campfire's glow was weak, but it was a small flame, its heat undesired in the warmer northern air, and Rathen pondered as they walked over the uneven terrain the fact that it could get so warm so suddenly just by moving a few days north.
"Tell me," Kienza began in her soft, beautiful but knowing voice, catching his willing attention, "how long has your cuff been causing you pain?"
He blinked at her in surprise and quickly mulled over how to answer, but when her dark eyes fell upon him, he sighed and looked away in defeat. There was no point even trying to lie. "Since Stonton. I probed the magic there, deeper than I have before, and then it just happened."
"And it's been happening since?"
"Not that often, at first, but now it feels like every time I try to cast a spell it starts to heat up." His lip curled as he considered how rotten his fortunes had recently become.
"What does it feel like? Tight?"
He looked back at her, frowning lightly at her curiosity, for it was that more than it was concern, and he found her peering back at him in a thoughtful consideration remarkably akin to Aria's. For once she seemed genuinely uninformed about something, rather than just playfully ignorant.
And in that case, he would answer her as best he could.
"Like fire," he replied, failing immediately. "Like the metal is suddenly red-hot, searing my skin and burning my veins...like..." he growled in exasperation. "Like fire. As if someone had truly set my arm aflame... I can't do better than that."
She nodded in understanding. "That's all right."
"You couldn't get it off, could you?"
She gave him a sad, crooked smile. He'd asked only partly in jest; he already knew the answer. "No, I'm sorry..." He nodded, but she noticed that his disappointment was more pronounced than usual.
"So," he said, brushing it off as best he could, "this magic. You've been analysing it closer than I have, I'd wager - I don't suppose you have any other ideas about how to stop it?"
"Beyond what I've already told you, no. ...How has that been going, anyway?"
He didn't need to look at her to know her forest green eyes were shining with their usual acuity. He sighed wearily. "I've identified the accumulation, and there were a few small chains in Stonton which eradicated any doubts that the magic can be shaped, but when I tried to affect it in the Wildlands, my cuff burned again."
She looked at him steadily even as she navigated a drop in the earth, despite it being perfectly concealed in the darkness. "You know that you could well not find this artefact, don't you? In all this time searching, how much luck have you truly had with it?"
His jaw knotted. "Only what we found in the Wildlands."
"And that's it." Her tone was stern. He didn't like it. "Anthis Karth is leading your search, he knows well what he's doing so it was inevitable that you'd find something, but even leading experts have been proven wrong in their fields in the past. You can't neglect your own task based on a single, feeble stroke of luck."
"I'm not neglecting it," he objected.
"You're afraid to try again, though, aren't you?" Her gaze didn't waver, and Rathen shifted beneath it even as she smiled. "Next time, push through the pain. It won't k
ill you."
"Isn't that what pain is supposed to prevent?"
"Fundamentally, yes, but it's also an automatic response that can be overcome in many cases. This is one such case. Don't fear it."
He sighed in exasperation. "Can't you just help me? You know more than you let on, you always do. You can keep your millions of secrets, just give me one piece of advice!"
She pursed her lips as she reached for his hand. "Have you not asked the others?"
"How could they help?"
She giggled, a wonderful sound that made him smile despite his woes. "You're so dependant on me - it's quite sweet, really."
His smile vanished and he looked back at her humourlessly. Perhaps a different, more direct approach would work. "How would I create a spell to interact with magic?" He asked as plainly as he could.
"How do you usually do it?"
He blinked at her in confusion. "What?"
"Well you interact with magic every time you form a spell, don't you?"
"Yes, my magic, formed in my heart, flowing through my veins. Not floating around crumbled stone..."
She waved her free hand lazily. "And yet..."
"No," he assured her, wondering if she'd finally lost her senses. "That's not possible."
"No, I suppose it isn't."
"Then why suggest it?"
She smiled. "To open your mind."
Rathen felt his stomach lurch. Their surroundings became a fraction lighter, the unnoticed song of insects was replaced by an oppressive silence, and the unmistakable quiver of magic permeated the air.
He turned her another flat look. "Would a warning kill you?" But she only smiled impishly. He surveyed their new surroundings as his heart settled under the familiar, unnatural tranquillity, and he found the small, modest houses, exposed by the slightest sliver of the moon, curiously beautiful even in their desolation.
He stepped slowly into the abandoned village, rocks crunching into the shattered road beneath his feet, and stopped cautiously at the edge of a black chasm that had opened in the ground, splitting the village and swallowing the buildings unfortunate enough to have stood along its fault. He knelt at its edge and swished his hand through the abyssal space. "Halen."