by Demi Harper
"At least we solved the mystery of where the skins came from," she said brightly.
"True. I'm sleeping much better at night now I know that."
"Pah! You and I both know that if you did sleep, it wouldn't be at night."
"How many times, Ket? I am—I was—a dark elf. Not a vampire. They're not the same thing." Before she could argue to the contrary, I added, "Besides, it's always dark underground. Night and day are meaningless down there."
"Is that why you still refuse to go up to the surface yourself even when the sun is down?"
Here we go again.
"I don't need to go up to the surface," I told her. "We have everything we need down here. And the scouts—"
"The scouts provide the rest, yes. But don't you feel a little foolish?"
"Why should I feel foolish?"
She shrugged. "I mean, you're basically ignoring half—half!—your entire Sphere of Influence because of your irrational fear—"
"Irrational? A fear of spiders is irrational. And anyway, I'm not afraid of the surface."
"No?"
"No."
"Okay."
"Right, then."
Why does it feel like I lost that argument even though I had the last word?
I spent several minutes scowling down at my scouts before I realized something. "Hey, where are Swift and Cheer?"
There'd been a bit of a kerfuffle recently, which I'd gathered was a result of Swift and Cheer somehow fixing the outcome of their beetle races—something the builders betting on them did not take kindly to.
Seeing the glowering looks sent their way, I'd decided to order the two recalcitrant gnomes to accompany the scouts' latest expedition. Mostly to keep them out of trouble, but also because they'd proved themselves surprisingly useful on such missions in the past. They'd often returned with resources that had proved invaluable to the tribe, such as puffball mushrooms, as well as other things that they should not have realistically been able to obtain, like the numerous dead possums whose hides had provided life-saving armor for our warriors.
"Why don't you go up to the surface and look for them?"
I ignored Ket and instead opened my Augmentary map.
Among the glowing golden lines—lines which designated the various passages and levels of my Sphere of Influence—were different colored dots. Some of these were moving, while others were still. Apart from a very small cluster of blue dots gathered around my shrine, signifying active worshipers, all of the dots were green in color. I felt a certain smug satisfaction to see it. It wasn't all that long ago when the majority of them were gray and non-faithful.
With a few mental swipes I was able to rotate the map, zooming out so that the dots grew smaller and I could see more of my Sphere at once. After some careful searching I finally spotted them: two green dots had just entered my Sphere from the north-east. They were moving slowly. Had something happened to them? Were they injured?
I recalled the red symbol I'd seen beside Longshank after the mole-rat encounter, and reassured myself that something similar would be showing here if that were the case. Furthermore, the scouts' support of Shanky had shown that they would not have left their comrades behind if they were wounded.
Unless they've been up to their swindling antics out there as well...
When they did finally show their faces in the Grotto, the reason for the delay in their return was obvious.
"What... is that?" Ket sounded like she was going to throw up.
"I believe it's a severed head," I told her. Formerly belonging to a sheep, I presume.
The head barely fit through the entrance, and it took Swift and Cheer an excessive amount of tugging on the ropes they'd tied around its ears before it finally came clear. It landed on the ground with a heavy thud and immediately began to roll away.
"Oh gods... its eyeball is hanging loose," Ket moaned. "Look at its eyeball! And the congealed blood... and the way its tongue is flopping out of its mouth... hnnghhh..."
Completely unfazed, Swift and Cheer attempted to take their prize in hand, hauling on the ropes and making "Woah!" noises as though it were a runaway horse rather than a decomposing cranium. A group of children playing nearby caught sight of the monstrosity rolling toward them and fled, screaming.
"Yep, Swift and Cheer are definitely back," I said with a sigh.
The pair had always been... different from the rest of the tribe. At first, it was the extent of their apparent incompetence that made them stand out. Then it became clear that their ineptness was not the sign of a lack of skill but of willful disobedience. They ignored everyone and everything, including the drill sergeants and Gneil.
Not even assigning them a vocation had changed this; I'd made them both warriors weeks ago, yet still they'd abandoned their posts in the barracks and joined the militia instead, the better to be around their beloved Granny.
There were only two things I’d ever seen them heed: direct orders from an overseer, and compulsion abilities like Scout. Both lasted for a limited time only.
As they reined the skull to a halt, patting it approvingly, I toyed again with assigning them the scout vocation.
I'd learned through trial and error that there was a limit to how many vocations I could assign each of my denizens. Back when we'd been focused on strengthening our defenses, I'd been forced by circumstance to reassign most of my builders and other construction-related professions to military roles.
Now that things were safe, I'd found I could re-assign those warriors as builders and such once more, but not any other vocation. Most of my gnomes, it seemed, only had the capacity to learn a maximum of two professions.
As a militia fighter-turned-scout-turned-hunter, Longshank was an exception to this rule. The only reason for it I could see was that the Augmentary described hunter as an 'advanced' vocation, which perhaps meant it counted as an extension of the scout vocation rather than its own separate thing. I wished there was someone I could ask about it, but Ket didn't know either.
"I can't watch them anymore. What are you doing?" she asked me now.
"Nothing exciting."
"I don't care. Just please, please distract me from the sight of those two little monsters pulling maggots from a sheep's brain and feeding them to the badgers."
"That's the sort of image you can't unsee," I agreed. "I was just thinking again about the vocation stuff. D'you think I should... huh."
"Huh?"
"Look."
Straight away she spotted what I was referring to. "Huh. She unlocked a new vocation?"
"They both did. I must have missed the notification." That was annoying. It seemed if I didn't catch the initial ding from the Augmentary, as obnoxious as it was, then I remained unaware of whatever new development had just taken place.
Adding it to my ever-growing list of things to look into improving, I focused now on the new vocation option for Swift and Cheer.
Scavenger
Vocation type: gathering
A scavenger is skilled at finding objects and materials which have been discarded by others. They are also competent at repurposing items which might otherwise be overlooked as useless.
"Scavenger. Seems more than appropriate," said Ket.
I nodded, watching them toss the sheep’s now-detached eyeball into the air for Clyde the badger to snap up. I could sense the sprite had meant it in a negative way, but the scavenger description really did fit. Recently I'd seen more and more evidence of what Ket had called gnomish innovation amongst the tribe—and from these two individuals more than any other.
Swift and Cheer had designed the weighted nets now carried by our farmers, which they used to keep whip spiders in place until the nearest badger could be called over to dispose of the deadly arachnids safely and inhumanely. The pair also had their own personal shroomery in a corner of the Grotto, where they'd been the first to discover how to cross-breed the different types of shrooms they'd gathered—much to the chagrin of the tribe's actual mushroom farme
rs.
I can't think of any other profession they'd be better suited to.
Before I could overthink it, I assigned both Swift and Cheer their new vocations.
The scavengers were looking mightily pleased with themselves. Cheer was currently engaged in cutting out bits of the sheep's brain, washing them, and then preparing them on a wooden block, presumably for cooking. She had a flat stone already heating over a fire, and was rubbing oil into the chunks of brain before rolling them carefully in a coating of crushed hazelnuts.
Swift, meanwhile, was hacking away at the exposed bone of the skull's lower jaw. Every time a sharp fragment was chipped away, she examined it, then either tossed it over her shoulder or tucked it into the bandoleer she wore across her chest, already bristling with other sharp things that could potentially be used as weapons.
She already looked like a walking junk heap. They both did. Since they'd started holding—and apparently fixing—their beetle races, they'd been accessorizing with the spoils of their ill-gotten victories. Items the spectators had bet and lost—pebble necklaces, woven grass belts, carved shroomwood fetishes, even a bracelet made from shiny beetle carapaces threaded onto a knotted root—adorned their person. They wore all the things all of the time, as though afraid their former owners would steal them back if they left them unattended. Which, to be fair, they probably would. Still, what was it with gnomes and terrible fashion?
There was a sudden cheer from across the stream. The two scavengers both glanced over, then returned to their own tasks, apparently unconcerned and uninterested in what the other gnomes were doing, as usual.
My own curiosity was overwhelmed by a sudden surge of ecstasy. For a long moment—though not nearly long enough—my entire being was filled with a sense of power and fulfilment that left me incapable of speech. I basked in the tingling warmth even as it began to recede, like a cat lounging in the last rays of sunlight.
“You’re purring again,” Ket told me.
Ignoring the smirking sprite, I opened my Augmentary—noting with satisfaction the glowing “9” in the triangle at the bottom—and scrolled through my list of abilities. Sure enough, there was a brand-new entry at the bottom.
Adjure
Tier 9 ability
Grants deeper insight into denizens’ vocations and unlocks advanced skills. Denizens can now be assigned to more specific construction-based tasks.
Mana cost: none
I’d long since passed the point of hoping for showy, destructive skills—skills past-Corey would have described as “god-like.” Now, I experienced a thrill of excitement at the possibilities hinted at by the Adjure ability. I might still be unable to strike down my enemies with a thought, but I could drastically increase our tribe’s efficiency, and in the long run that would prove more valuable to my gnomes than any number of fireballs or lightning bolts.
A glance across the stream showed me the cause of my latest Ascension. Over by the barracks, a small group of gnomes were patting each other on the back while Longshank looked on approvingly. The flood barrier was now five sacks deep and three high, and it seemed the water level beyond them had finally started to recede. The workers’ jubilation at a job well done—and their increased Faith in me—had been just enough to push me into tier nine.
"Clever Shanky!"
Still floating on the afterbuzz of Ascension, I let the sprite sense my grudging agreement. My lingering worry about the rising water I kept to myself. After all, it would probably sort itself out soon enough.
Probably.
Thirteen
Too Easy
Tiri
Tiri rubbed her lower back and grimaced. That's going to ache for days.
She should have been feeling angry at the ranger, Sinica, for the aggression with which she'd treated her. But when she thought about it, she couldn't really blame her. It wasn't as though her reaction had been totally unjustified. Excessive, perhaps, but she had caught a complete stranger in her bedroom. How else was she supposed to react?
And the way those other rangers had spoken to her... Tiri couldn't help but feel bad for her. Those women hadn't cared about Tiri's plight; they'd barely even glanced at her face. They'd just wanted an excuse to threaten and insult Sinica. No wonder she seemed so angry at the world.
Trust no one.
It was as though Lila's words were warning her. Sinica could have been a concerned roommate (concerned to the point of deranged, but still). But she could just as easily be another of the Guildmaster's agents, determined to tie up those 'loose ends' Lila had mentioned in her journal.
Focus. Find the cells and free Coll. Then you can worry about everything else.
Logic suggested the cells would be somewhere underground. Shrugging off her discomfort at the very idea of their existence—the Academy had nothing of the sort, at least as far as Tiri was aware—she descended the nearest staircase.
As she made her way along more corridors and down more flights of stairs, she took the time to look more closely at her new ability.
Find Text
Discern the location of writings made by a specific author. Can be used to unearth stashed evidence, or to assist with the discovery of long-lost tomes hidden away for centuries. Or just to impress a librarian.
Note: Chance of success is increased if user is in possession of an item belonging to the author.
Skill type: passive
Prerequisite(s): any scribe class
Required for: Detect Intent
Most people assumed that only those with access to mana had an Augmentary. Tiri was as nonmagical as a brick, yet her devotion to studying—natural history, museum specimens, living things, not to mention hundreds of hours spent poring over texts both factual and fictional—had unlocked an entire new realm of possibilities.
Most of her skills related to the cartographer profession—such as Scrivener’s Origin, which allowed her to roughly sense where a person was when they wrote something, as well as how long ago it was written—though there were others, like Identify Lifeform and Assess Anatomy, which synergized more with her research into semi-mythical insects.
Find Text was undeniably useful, but Tiri was more interested in the very last line of its description. Assuming Detect Intent did what its name suggested, it could give her insight into the actual person behind the account beyond the simple facts of time and place. Knowing how someone had felt while writing, say, a memoir would provide valuable clues as to their motivation—and the overall trustworthiness of the work in question.
She felt a real thrill as another possibility crossed her mind. Did this mean she'd also be able to tell if whoever had written it had been truthful? To debunk false testimony and verify conflicting accounts, not just in matters of history but also of justice? The applications were potentially limitless.
She stared at the text, only half seeing it, so focused was she on pondering its implications. Luckily the corridors of the Guild were relatively empty, so she didn't bump into anyone. Presumably they were all in the cafeteria.
Her personal knack for going unnoticed also helped. Though that was mainly because those in the Guild looked down on those of the Academy, and vice versa. The two institutions might be on separate campuses, but it was a common enough sight for research and errands to take academics to the Guild and adventurers to the Academy. With her head down and her stride deliberate, Tiri looked too shy and dull to bother, but also just confident enough to appear like she belonged there.
Her tired mind turned from her new ability to processing the facts, and quickly reached a somewhat urgent conclusion.
The Guildmaster seeks a purple God Core. The Guild are sworn to destroy all God Cores. Therefore he intends to destroy the purple Core—which means the last gnomes in Kelaria could disappear into extinction.
I can't let that happen.
She was also concerned about this 'Lord of Light' Lila had mentioned, though the (admittedly generic) moniker was not familiar to Tiri. If Lila and the Gui
ldmaster were working at the behest of some secret religion, that was definitely something she needed to know.
Her mind was so busy that she was halfway down the next stairwell before she spotted the pair of guards at the bottom of it, standing in front of a heavy wooden door.
Looks like I’ve found the cells. And they’re guarded, because of course they are.
How was she going to get past the guards?
She'd need some kind of distraction. Perhaps she could knock over one of those ugly suits of armor that adorned the nearby hallway.
She was about to retreat back up the stairs when the guard on the left cleared his throat. The one on the right stood straighter and placed a hand on his weapon.
They've seen me.
Now she had no choice but to keep walking downward. Turning around would look too suspicious.
But what could she say to them? "Morning, I'm here to interview your prisoners for a feature in the Academy Gazette: 'Barbarians Behind Bars.'"? It was unlikely they'd believe the bluff but it was the best she could come up with on the spot.
As she came closer, though, a dreamy expression crossed the face of first one guard, then the other. The one on the right actually started drooling. Ew. Both stared vacantly off into the distance. It was as though they were looking through Tiri at something up the stairs.
She glanced over her shoulder—had she been followed? Was Sinica readying for a matching punch to her other kidney?—but there was nothing there but an empty stairwell.
She was forced to flatten herself against the wall as both guards suddenly stumbled past her and up the stairs, zombie-like in their single-mindedness.
"... only five minutes until shift change..." one of them muttered.
"Can't wait... bacon butties..." moaned the other.
A moment later and Tiri was alone.
Well, that was… weird.
Utterly baffled by the guards' behavior but unwilling to squander this opportunity, Tiri made for the wooden door the guards had been flanking.