by Dave Dickie
I took a carriage back home, which took a while. I decided to have a dinner of roasted chicken out on the plaza along with a beer. While I ate, I thought about the case. I had some idea at this point what the vial was, or at least a good guess. I was fairly sure Ralin had been trying to steal the vial for the Sambhal temple even if I didn’t know why. I was still unsure who had taken the vial, although I thought I knew how they had done it. And I still didn’t know how Maizon fit into the picture. Still, I was making forward progress. It was just that there was just a fair amount of forward progress to go. With that in mind, I went back to my apartment and went to bed.
Chapter Fourteen
The next day I spent a little time at the Nitheia temple doing research on primordial chaos. I wanted to know as much as I could before I went to what I hoped would be the definitive source. There wasn’t much information on it, more theory than practice. I stopped off and asked Yimmy what he knew about it, and he once again asked me what I’d gotten myself into, which I declined to answer. He didn’t know much, calling the topic “demon counting,” by which he meant very theoretical.
I did, however, pick up a few new toys that Yimmy had purchased for me, a magicked cloth shirt that would turn a blade like chainmail, a few protection charms, an emergency back door - a teleport to a safe spot I could trigger if I was in real danger - and the demon protection spell in a small, smooth stone disk that would have been the perfect size to skim across a pond. “I did it as fast as I could. It’s a one-shot artifact,” Yimmy had said. “And no guarantees,” he’d added. I still had the lightning stone in my pocket as well. I was as ready for trouble as I could be on a few days notice.
That was a good thing, because sometime in the past day I’d picked up a tail. Unlike the Silver Ring that had started this entire thing, they were professionals, and there was more than one of them. They kept their distance, and if I wasn’t paranoid I would never have noticed. But a few hours of the same person a half block away from you is a tell if you watch for it. I tried a few times to double back and confront whoever it was, but they always melted away into the crowd. So I did the next best thing and used a telemage to port me to Krukkort Park, with the statue of the doomed Kethem Guard Colonel it was named after in the center. The park was near the center of the city and was known as a nexus of telemages. I had the first one I ran into teleport me to a random location - Beeze Street, somewhere near the west side of the city - then found another one to teleport me back to Krukkort, then found one to teleport me to Brindle Avenue. Even if whoever was following me had a teleport trace spell, or coerced the telemages into saying where they had sent me, by the time they unwound it all I would be lost in the crowd. It was an expensive way to lose a tail, but I thought it was fair to consider it an expense, so Grafton Hold would ultimately foot the bill.
Three streets over was Appleton’s square, with the Traveler’s temple and dozens of trendy little eating spots and shops. Just east of there was my destination, the most likely place I could think of to ask questions about primordial chaos and get answers.
The Elvish Embassy is a swan among ducks. Ugly ducks. Kethem’s buildings, whether built from stone, marble, brick, or wood, could be stylish and elegant. When you saw the Elvish Embassy, you realized they would never be graceful. The building itself was a cylinder about fifty feet high, with a white top that extended slightly over walls made from mosaic tiles that formed a smooth gradient of color from white to pink. But it was wrapped in giant metal-ribbed petals in fantastic hues of purple, yellow, orange and red, making it look like a flower opening to the sun. It made the boxy Kethem buildings around it look squat and ugly.
I went to the entrance. Two of the tall, thin elves stood there in their polished black armor, sporting gems that I understood were charged sorcerous items packing enough firepower to take out a squad of Kethem Guard light infantry. Peaked helms covered their fair hair, and long, thin swords in sheaths with ornate guards and handles were hanging from belts that I understood also held a number of charged items. On their backs were the long, ebony wood bows and quivers full of arrows with charged heads that would fry anything they hit from the inside out. They had pale complexion with darker lines and shapes that looked like tattoos running across their faces, marks that looked like they had been painted on to make them look intimidating but that I understood were natural. Behind them were two dozen salsenahain, the humans from Tawhiem that had been bound to the elves in some way that made them fanatically loyal, and somehow less than human. The salsenahain were in leather armor with spears and short bows. They had a reputation as fierce and capable warriors with their own sets of spells and charged items, willing to charge into certain death if their Elvish master asked them too. Why they had a small squad standing guard at the embassy was something I didn’t know. The elves had more sorcery, and more powerful sorcery, than any other race around the Lanotalis sea, and you did not screw with them unless you were suicidal, or mad, or both. Maybe it was for show. Maybe it was to be intimidating. Maybe there were more dangers in Bythe than I knew. Maybe elves liked to stand around in armor. They’re a strange people.
If there was indication of rank or insignia of some kind, I could not tell. I picked one at random and walked up to them. Blue eyes looked at me impassively. When a Holder is staring you down, you know it’s because they think they are superior. With these guys, it was because they know they are superior. I said, “Gur Driktend to see Ambassador Prenanala.” I was proud of the fact I said it correctly. Elvish names are a mouthful of syllables.
“Inside,” replied the elf, then went back to scanning the street. I walked by them and into the main room. The entire first floor was one large room, large enough to hold a thousand people. Rich reddish wooden beams curved up in simple, delicate arcs to the ceiling overhead. The entire ceiling glowed with a soft, white light. If it was a glow disk, it was the largest glow disk I’d ever seen. The floor was polished granite with bright speckles from chips of mica, dark and smooth. In the center, there was a ring of chairs around a circular table. Behind each chair was a small, slightly raised circle of white stone, a few feet across and maybe an inch thick. Elvish teleportals, a tenth the size of the human counterparts. I’d heard the elves could port all the way to the Evael, their home. Which made me wonder why they had ships visit Bythe at all.
The room was empty. I looked around. Finally, I walked to the circular table. As I approached, the center of the table began to glow with a translucent white light. After a few seconds, it cleared, leaving the image of an elf’s head about the size of a tool shed, with a face I recognized, one belonging to the elvish ambassador to Bythe. His darker spots ran down his forehead and circled his eyes, make him look like a raccoon, less angular and slashing than most elves. I’d often wondered if he’d been selected as an ambassador because he looked less threatening than most elves, but couldn’t find a polite way to ask. “Faeranduil,” I said. It seemed wrong to bow to a giant head, so I just nodded my own in greeting.
“Gur,” the giant head responded back. “Hang on a minute.” The head disappeared. After a moment, it returned. “Step onto the glowing disk.”
I checked, and sure enough, one of the Elvish teleportals was phosphorescing. I stepped onto it, and I was in a different room, the only thing unchanged the thin disk I was standing on. Well, that had changed as well, but it seemed as if it had moved with me. Faeranduil was standing a few feet away. The room was all warm wood and strangely curved furniture, thin and sleek and very uncomfortable looking. There were no windows.
I raised an eyebrow. “Are we still in Bythe?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” he responded. “Same building, up two floors.” I almost shook my head. Using a teleportal to move inside the same building was like using a shovel made of gold to dig dirt. It was ostentatious. Or it would be if Faeranduil was human.
“Thank you for seeing me on such short notice,” I said, and this time I did bow.
“No, no problem, my boy,”
he said. “You have served us well in the past, impressed us with your ingenuity and your discretion. I am more than happy to make time for you.” I wasn’t sure which bothered me more, the “my boy” or the “served us.” Faeranduil looked to be about my age, but then, I didn’t know how quickly elves aged. I’d done jobs for the elves before. They liked to hang back in the shadows. I wouldn’t call them devious. Just covert. Anything they could do outside formal channels, where it wasn’t obvious where it was coming from, they did. That frequently meant using people like me as a surrogate, hiding their involvement. Still, there’s a difference between working for someone and serving them.
For all that, Faeranduil was a mate of Hasamelis, companionable and missing the frosty demeanor of most elves. He was a little over seven feet tall, short for an elf, with the spindly body type and pallid complexion common for his people. He was in more normal clothes, a loose yellow shirt and baggy pants with a woven belt at the waist, soft leather shoes and a couple of jeweled rings on his fingers. He waved me over to some of the uncomfortable-looking furniture and indicated I should sit, which I did. Appearances can be deceiving with elvish furniture, as it turned out, because I swear the thing molded itself to my body.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Faeranduil asked. I wanted to say yes, because whatever he served would be Sambhal’s choice, the best of the best, but I shook my head no.
“Working a job,” I explained. “I was hoping you might be able to help me with something odd I’ve come across, something no one in Bythe I know can identify.”
He looked attentive. “Certainly, Gur. Please, go on.”
"I only have a description. A vial holding perhaps a quart of a phosphorescent green liquid. It would be very valuable.”
He frowned. “That isn’t much to go on. How valuable?”
“Extremely,” I answered. “What would be the most valuable thing that matched that description you could think of?”
He looked thoughtful. “Green phosphorescent liquid. Something available in Kethem?”
“No,” I said.
“There are a set of potions that have those characteristics. Polymorph is probably the most valuable of the lot,” said Faeranduil.
“And what would that run in Kethem rimii?” I asked.
“Possibly a couple of hundred thousand,” said Faeranduil. “The ingredients are not easy to come by. Dragon spit,” he added.
That couldn’t be it. Unless this was a sample? Could it be the first of five million rimii worth of potions? But that didn’t make sense. The anti-scrying item decayed too quickly for this to be a drawn out negotiation. And I didn’t think for a second that anyone would trust Ohulhug to deliver in installments.
“What about primordial chaos?” I asked. I saw a note of caution suddenly creep into his eyes.
“That would be extremely unlikely. Why would you think it was raw chaos?” Faeranduil said.
I shrugged. “Just a thought. I know it’s considered impossible to access raw chaos. The gods have locked it all away. But I have an artifact that seems like it might have been designed to hold chaos. So humor me, because otherwise I’ll have to spend days at the Nitheia temple digging through dusty tomes.” Which served as both a subtle warning that if he tried to misdirect me, I would find out, and that if he didn’t say anything, I had a different source of information. A rather skimpy source, but he didn’t need to know that. “Does it fit the bill?”
Faeranduil took a moment but I could see him come to a decision. “It would, I believe, look like what you describe. We do not deal with it directly. It’s too unstable, too easy to make a mistake.”
“But it’s not impossible to obtain it?” I asked.
“It is impossible, at least here. There are … other places where you could find it,” he said.
“North of Pranan?” I asked, eyes narrowing.
He laughed. “Oh, heavens, no. I mean on other planes, other universes, where chaos is not as tightly bound as it is here.” That was a little jarring. Bending space-time to make teleports work is about as far down the ladder of weird things you can do with magic that I’d ever wanted to go. Alternate planes of existence? Not something I would be interested in. But it certainly made chaos rare enough to be valuable. Five million rimii valuable? It was hard to say.
“Primordial chaos… what could it be used for?” I asked.
Faeranduil went into professor mode, leaning back, putting his fingertips together, and putting his “you are about to get a lecture” face on. “It’s a very raw source of power. If you could determine how to extract small amounts and convert it into mana, you could power spells that would be orders of magnitude more powerful than the ones cast today. But that’s very difficult to do. Chaos tends to destroy anything it touches, even in small quantities. You could use it to open holes to other planes, other universes. That’s actually easier, because to do that you’re ripping holes in space, which is a kind of destruction. But again, it’s more theoretical than practical, because it is hard to know what you will open a hole to, and chances are it’s not going to be any place you want to go. Probably the most obvious use really is pure destruction. You release a teaspoon of that stuff, it’s going to start a chain reaction, bind with matter around it to turn into more mundane energy, heat, light, that sort of thing.”
“How big would this … energy release be?” I asked.
“Explosion, really. Several city blocks, I would imagine,” Faeranduil answered.
“One quart of this stuff is that powerful?” I asked, stunned.
“No, no. One teaspoon. A quart would level Bythe several times over,” said Faeranduil. “It’s nothing to be trifled with.”
It took me a moment to wrap my head around that. Would the ability to flatten cities be worth five million rimii? I’d have to guess yes. And maybe Leppol had found some way to harness primordial chaos and turn it into something more directly useful. It would put the humans several notches up the sorcery food chain, maybe make Kethem more powerful than the Elves. They had a seemingly unending supply of sorcery, but it didn’t seem much stronger than human sorcery, there was just more of it. “What about religious use?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, your gods.” As far as I knew, the elves didn’t worship anyone. “Not my area of expertise, I’m afraid. I know that there are chaos pools, used to channel a more direct representation of a deity, but that would use a fraction of what you are describing, and it’s dangerous to boot. It sounds fine to have a god take a direct and personal interest in you, but quite frankly, I suspect that it is better to let sleeping gods lie. Or gods that are only manifest as the fabric separating the regular world and chaos, at least.”
I thought about Sambhal. A demon that had somehow dispersed himself into one of the weaves of rule and law that structured our universe. “So a more direct representation… by that you mean a god that was self-aware, sentient? But just as a … I don’t know, spirit?”
“Basically, yes,” said Faeranduil. “But again, not an expert. You should ask a priest.”
“What about a full instantiation? Like, back in the flesh?” I asked, but I thought I already knew the answer.
“Well, in a vessel of some sort, yes, it would take that kind of power. If it would work at all. You have to remember, your gods are more constructs than people. They have never had corporeal bodies. They existed as ideas, as a set of principles that give the universe structure,” answered Faeranduil.
“Some of them,” I said, a little grimly. It seemed to add up, seemed like a reason Tessa and crew would be so obsessed with what had happened. I couldn’t see everything, like why a Silver Ring like Ralin would throw away everything to give the Sambhal temple the ability to reconstitute their god, but it seemed to fit together neatly.
Faeranduil waited patiently while I was thinking. And I was glad he couldn’t read minds, because his reticence to talk about primordial chaos had me thinking about other possibilities I needed to check that I didn’t want to
share with him just yet. “Is there anything else I can help you with?” he asked, gently.
I nodded. “It’s a favor. Could I borrow an Elvish dagger?”
His eyebrows notched up a bit. “May I ask why?” he said.
“I may need to demonstrate to some people that I know you, but it needs to be subtle. I flash an Elvish weapon, it will be recognized without my saying anything,” I replied. It wasn’t my best story, but it was the best I could do on the spur of the moment. Elvish weapons are not impossible to find, but they are rare, and they are prized because of the unusual workmanship and the materials. Elvish weapons stayed sharp and straight even when they hit armor, something like Cidan steel but even stronger. No one knew where they mined the material from or how they worked it into the razor sharp, extremely thin blades, but they were superior to anything Kethem fielded. An elvish dagger would run around ten thousand rimii on the street, but it could take weeks or months to find a seller. I didn’t have that kind of time.
Faeranduil looked doubtful, but finally nodded. “Besencalthien, one of the guards at the door, see him on your way out,” he said.