By the time they made it across the hidden sea, Jay was curled up in the bottom of the boat with his hands over his ears. [Sense Magic] hadn’t stopped pinging in a day. Some of it was coming from below him, some from behind, and even some from above. Overwhelming wasn’t an intense enough word to describe the deluge.
He didn’t know where it was all coming from. The currents, maybe? Cinri had said they weren’t natural. Maybe whatever was keeping them going was tripping his newest sense. Maybe the horrifyingly tentacular things that looked to be swimming below them had some form of innate magic that was pinging it.
Now that was a horrifying thought. An underground ocean full of magical giant squids. From the glimpses he’d caught before the overload had gotten too bad, that’s certainly what they seemed like. Unless they were krakens, which would be way worse.
Still, for a second he considered jumping in. Maybe he’d be able to kill one fast enough to resurrect it and really have something worth being a necromancer instead of a snake around his arm and a half snake, half dragon familiar. His common sense told him not to, but if he was ever back here and strong enough to not die from one of those things sneezing on him, he might not be able to stop himself from giving it a shot.
All that to say he was very relieved when Cinri jerked herself awake and announced that they’d almost made it. How she did it, Jay had no idea, but she had lived up to what she had said about sleeping the whole time they were in the boat. He definitely wasn’t going to ask how long she’d been awake before that.
She only paused to tap a couple of the jingling charms she was wearing before starting to talk. “We’ll be coming up inside the walls of an old Kisyonic monastery.”
That name rang a bell for Jay. Kisyonic. Kisyon. “The Order of Kisyon?”
“Unless you know another organization dedicated to the god of justice,” Cinri said, sarcasm hanging heavy on her words.
Great. A place full of inquisitors who had – at least at one point – hunted necromancers as their sole job. At least one of which he knew had driven himself the next best thing to insane hunting after Rukai.
Cinri could clearly see the dread on his face, because her tone softened into reassurance. “Look, I don’t know what kind of myths your little backwater had about the inquisitors, but they don’t just haul people off at random. You have to do something to attract their attention first, then stay in the same place to get found. And being a first-time visitor to actual civilization instead of mud-and-thatch villages isn’t an inquisition offense.”
“Good to know,” Jay said. He meant it, too, even if he wasn’t going to gamble on the truth of that until he’d had a chance to look carefully first. “What are inquisition offenses?”
“Necromancy. Mind magic. Wanton slaughter. Cult activity. The usual, really.” As the boat ran aground, she turned to look at him. “You aren’t going to tell me you’re involved with any of that, are you?”
Jay wished he had a better poker face. “I’ve never chosen to be involved in any of that.” Technically he was telling the truth. Hopefully she couldn’t read between the lines to tell that the qualifier was there.
Cinri eyed him for another second before turning straight again. “Good. Now get out of the boat. We’ve got a last bit of walking to do and then we’re there.” She gestured to a path cut into the side of the cavern that was only visible from the bottom as a series of terraced switchbacks. “Get walking.”
The window popped up as he hopped out of the boat and headed toward the ramp. It was just insulting really, especially the way it was phrased, but at least it meant she had probably believed him.
*
It was night when Cinri pushed the hidden door open from the cavern side. Better for them, honestly, since Jay hadn’t been looking forward to getting blinded by the sun after being underground for so long. With the way his luck worked, if it had been daylight, there would have been some high ranking inquisitor right outside the door the moment he stepped outside.
But it wasn’t daylight and there wasn’t an inquisitor that Jay could see while peeking out from behind the doorframe, so he eventually joined Cinri in the wide courtyard. Agensyx followed, barely able to squeeze through the door, but he made it and took a moment to stretch out under the night sky. Jay noted that there were two moons while he did the same, even if his stretching involved less sprawling wings and legs.
“I feel like all I’m doing is following you around places,” Jay said. “Where to now?”
“You aren’t going to like it,” she warned.
He braced himself and motioned for her to go on. It was going to be something horrible. She was going to have some hideout in a sewer or something and he’d have to crawl through sewage to get there or something.
“You have to meet my family.”
“What?” Jay shook his head, trying to clear the cotton out of his ears to hear what she’d actually said. “Say that again?”
“I said you have to meet my family. Don’t make a big thing about it. It’s the only place we’d be able to stay for as long as it takes to get a solid plan in place.”
“You’re not concerned about the city guard or something finding them?”
Cinri snorted. “Please. The only guards this city ever had that took their jobs seriously were the Kisyonics that lived here.”
“I hope you’re about to tell me they’re gone and not just that we’ve dropped ourselves in the middle of a spider’s web,” Jay said.
“Do you hear any of them? Did you hear me call this place an old monastery? They got kicked out to make room for the current group of complete failures.”
“And they didn’t just take this place?” Jay asked.
“No,” she replied. “Or at least not for long. Turns out the entire place is enchanted to keep alcohol off the grounds and they couldn’t stand it.”
Jay just nodded. They were a fraternity. Cinri’s disdain for them made a lot more sense under that light, especially if they were even a quarter as bad as some of the truly large frats got. “So where are we going? Some slave-specific portion of the city?”
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“That’s the rough concept, yes. It’s not far.” She started walking, leaving the abandoned monastery like she could have walked it blindfolded. Jay followed, and Agensyx started to as well before she spoke again. “You might have to stay here for now, snake. Seeing a giant monstrous-looking thing running down a street at night would draw too much attention.”
To Jay, that didn’t feel right, but his familiar just nodded and said he’d be exploring the monastery for anything left behind. Who was he to protest when the spirit in question wasn’t? He kept following Cinri and resolved to enjoy the sights of a new city while he could.
The city itself was quite a change from what he’d seen in the rest of Halea; there was an odd mismatch of stereotypical medieval and almost modern. The roads they walked were cobbled and the buildings had rough stone bricks for walls, but there were tubes running down the edges that glowed somewhere between gas lamps and neon lights, with similar illumination coming out of some of the windows.
And there were a lot of windows. None of the buildings were quite skyscrapers, but they were all several stories tall and terraced like townhomes, even the locations that seemed to be nonresidential. The most common type of glass seemed to be frosted, though Jay didn’t know if that was intentional or the result of some crafting flaw.
He hadn’t gotten his fill of gawking at all the unique smells and sights the city offered when Cinri turned down a side path that was barely too wide to be called an alley. The tubes of lighting didn’t follow, and it seemed like the majority of the windows were facing the main street and for a second Jay felt like he’d closed his eyes. Cinri waited for their eyes to adjust then motioned to a carved wooden door set into the back of the alley.
“It’s going to be bright and loud. Brace yourself,” she warned.
He nodded and she threw the door open. Aggressively bright light flooded out in a harsh yellow that was only barely not white. Noise gushed out at the same time, of many high-pitched voices undercut by a few lower ones.
Cinri ushered Jay through and then shut the door behind them both. There was a shelf by the door with twenty cubbies in it, and Jay quickly mimicked her as she took her shoes off and placed them within one. More than half of them were already occupied, presumably by the people that were up the stairwell ahead of them.
“Alright,” Cinri whispered. “We might be able to sneak away before they notice.”
A voice called down immediately after she finished talking, maternally commanding. “You don’t get to hide away quite that easily! Stop whispering and get up here! It’s dinner time. Bring your friend!”
“Hells. I didn’t think they’d be able to hear us.”
“Well, you did say I’d end up meeting your family,” Jay mentioned. “Better to get it over with, right?”
“Just don’t panic. They might swarm you,” she warned.
Jay squinted at her. “Are they bees? Piranha?”
“No to the first and I don’t know what that second thing is, but they might do it anyway.”
They didn’t have piranha in this world. Weird. Good to know, but weird. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
*
Jay had never been trapped in a hurricane before, but if he ever ended up in one in the future, at least he felt like he’d be prepared. Cinri hadn’t been joking about the swarming; seven younger kids with a bent on climbing anyone tall enough to be worth clambering up certainly qualified. The food had been good, though. Flatbread wraps with a heavy spice to them, weighed down by an improbable amount of meat that had been somewhere between lamb and alligator.
After the chaos of the meal had ended – replaced by the chaos of what sounded like trying to get that many kids in bed – the pair had retreated to a back room that was deceptively large for having been built into the space below the staircase leading up from the entryway. The only thing in the room was a single octagonal table with four chairs around it. The wooden top was inscribed with a map of the city.
“So how do we do this?” Jay asked. “I’m assuming somewhere in this building is your duke.” He gestured to a large square building on one end, comedically oversized next to the other buildings on the map. It was clearly a castle of some sort, with what looked like diagrams of towers at the corners.
“Somewhere, yes. Where, I don’t know.” Cinri pointed to a cross-hatched section of jammed-together buildings crowding around what looked like a miniature version of the large castle. “This is where we are. This keep is the monastery we just came from.”
Okay, he was oriented now. “It doesn’t look too far away.”
“It’s not. Nothing is, or at least nothing inhabited. We’re functionally at the center of the city here, it’s just uphill all the way to that side of town and downhill to the other.”
That was an insane city layout to have and Jay said as much.
“It’s what we have.”
“In addition to having the issue that getting there is the easy part, right?” Jay snarked.
She gave him a flat look.
“What else do I need to know about the Duke? System-wise, what is he? Does he have some pet assassin hanging around?”
“What are you even talking about?” Cinri asked. “Pet assassins? No one does that. The [Assassin] class isn’t something people take. At least not openly enough to be hanging around a ruler of any sort.” She shook her head. “Your home is a weird place.”
He shrugged.
“Basic information is easy. His class is [Warden], subclass should be [Duke] unless it’s changed somehow, and he should be about level fifty. That combination is part of why we needed someone from outside Kinicier’s Haven to help and why we need to do this so fast. The longer you’re here, the more weight his [Ducal Command] will have for you. For those of us who live here, belong here, it’s nearly inescapable.”
“Back up. You said he’s ‘around’ level fifty?”
Cinri nodded.
“And what level are you?”
“Thirty.”
“What level do you think I am?” Jay questioned.
“Twenty?”
“Knock the zero off of that and you’ll be right.”
“No, really, what level are you?”
“Two,” he insisted.
“Hellfire,” she cursed. “No wonder you were willing to help. You didn’t have a clue.”
He nodded. He would have liked to have said he was reluctant about acknowledging it but at this point there wasn’t any more reluctance to have. Honestly, hearing the flat-out difference between his level and theirs was shocking.
Sure, he’d known he wasn’t going to be strong by any measurement that mattered. But that was huge. Jay had been hoping that the levels maxed out at twenty. That would have been classic. A workable difference, by luck if nothing else. What even was the maximum?
God, that library hadn’t had enough information. It had felt like a lot, and maybe there was more that he just hadn’t found, but he needed more.
“What are the chances you’re wrong about his level?” Jay ventured.
“Not likely. There’s not a lot of hard information, but with some of the things he’s done, there’s no way he’s less powerful than that by much.”
He put his head in his hands. Remind me to get the full information next time before getting here, Jay sent to Agensyx.
I believe I told you to do so before, the spirit replied.
That was fair. Hurtful, but fair. You don’t happen to know a way to gain a ton of motes really quickly, do you?
When the response came this time, Jay could almost hear the snaky smile. As a matter of fact, I just might. Courtesy of the Order’s monastery.
His head shot up. I’ll be there in the morning.
He swapped to talking out loud. “Agensyx says he might have a way to make up the difference. Something in the monastery.”
“Clearly you’ll need it,” Cinri said. “You go do whatever that is and I’ll sit here trying to figure out a way to do this by myself. Again. With hopefully more success this time, because by the time you manage to get anywhere near anything necessary to do what needs to be done, you won’t be any good for doing it anyway.”
“Can I at least stay here tonight? I’d kind of like to sleep in a bed,” Jay asked.
“Fine,” Cinri spat. “Figure it out. Plenty of open bedrooms.”
