There were many reasons Jay had chosen to go to college for a history degree instead of literature. He liked writing well enough, so the essay quantity had never been an issue, but he was never very good at spinning up a thread of credible interpretation for a poem. It was too much like lying, something he had been – and probably still was – notoriously bad at.
There was a lot less of that in history and a lot more direct arguing. He could handle that a lot better. His normal response to a situation where lying was the best choice was to get out of Dodge as quickly as possible.
He didn’t really have that option here, but apparently he’d thrown some nervous glances at the flap of the tent, because Kallin’s voice softened with his next words.
“Look, I know it might be hard to talk about, but it is vitally important that you tell me if there’s more of whatever did that to you down there.”
“Why now?” Jay asked. And then, in response to his questioning look, “Why now, days after it happened are you asking this? Why was this not one of the first things Warinot – hell, or Morios – asked me when I woke back up?”
“They didn’t know to ask,” Kallin said.
“You’re going to have to elaborate on that.”
“Point of fact: I don’t have to do that. It would be well within my rights to have Pixt come back in here and execute you immediately. Wouldn’t take half a word. The only reason he hasn’t done it already is for the same reason no one else knew to ask that question. It’s a bit of a secret, if you can believe that.”
Jay gave him a flat look. “Are you going to tell me or keep being vague and ominous?”
The earth mage laughed deeply with a sound like bells pealing. For all that the rest of his vocalizations had sounded very human, this one couldn’t have been more clearly otherwise. “I’m debating. Like I said, it’s something of a secret, kept tightly held within my family.”
That sounded… oddly promising. Some form of long-held secret related to necromancy? It would probably be a bad idea to get too excited about that, but that definitely sounded like something that was too good to just drop into his lap from nowhere. There were only two options Jay could think of that would qualify for being talked about with such a hushed tone, and either one would probably serve his purposes to some degree.
If they didn’t get him killed first.
“Well that certainly got your intention,” Kallin said. “I’m going to spare a guess to say that you probably came to the exact wrong conclusion, just like every one of us does when we’re first told. Go ahead. Ask the question.”
“Only if you tell me afterwards,” Jay tried.
The metal man chuckled. “I’ll consider it a mark in your favor if your question raises any interesting implications.”
That was probably the best he was going to get in terms of assurances, so he might as well just go for it. Not like this guy – automaton? Jay wasn’t sure where he fell on that line, now that he came to think of it – actually needed Warinot’s help to execute him if it came down to it.
“Either it’s something about the ways necromancer magic behaves inherently or you have some special knowledge about the curse that drove them all mad,” the hidden necromancer guessed.
At the back of his mind, Jay felt the first thing from Agensyx he had in days: a spike of bright emotion, something close to victory or celebration. He couldn’t discern what it was about or what the snake was doing, but something good had just happened. Maybe that meant he’d be seeing him again soon, or maybe it didn’t mean anything of the sort.
The brief flare of emotion died and the bond went dull again.
“Hmm,” Kallin hummed. “That’s not the normal first guess. Most people ask whether we’re all secretly [Necromancers]. Points for originality.”
“So does that mean you’re going to tell me?” Jay checked.
“I think perhaps I will. Both of your guesses fell somewhat close to the subject at hand anyway,” Kallin said. “That deserves a reward.”
Warinot poked his head back into the tent and the metal man waved him off.
“Realistically, you had no way to make an accurate guess,” Kallin said. “It’s not something anyone would have known about, not even something that gets written down, and we did our damndest to make sure that it never made its way into any loreholds in a form that could still be found.
“So congratulations on being the first person outside my family to know that we were the rulers of the entire continent of Ayor in its heyday.”
Jay’s face was blank. That was it? That was the big secret? It didn’t have anything to do with necromancy, didn’t even have anything to do with what they’d been talking about before the so-called revelation.
“Now hold on,” Kallin cautioned. “It’s not as bad as all that.”
Maybe his face hadn’t been as blank as he’d wanted it to be.
“Then what is it as bad as?” Jay asked him. “Why is this connected to anything about what happened to me?’
The other man formed a chair out of the ground’s material beneath the tent and sat. “It’s related because of one simple factor: beneath every major city of Ayor – and several more on the other continents – was a labyrinthine city. It was the one place we couldn’t go within our own cities, the one place that remained off limits no matter how much we begged, bargained, or blustered at its inhabitants.
“Its [Necromancer] inhabitants,” he said. “Only people with focused necromantic Classes were allowed in; it was used as the main training grounds for every single one of them from their earliest days to the day they died.”
“And you think the goblins tunneled into a portion of it,” Jay realized. “That some lingering remnant of undead power leaked into their warren and infected me while I was kept there.”
“Precisely! That is precisely it!” Kallin exclaimed. “So tell me, was there anything like that down there?”
Oh, hell. He was going to have to try lying his way through this. Somehow without making his answer too interesting, since if the metal man wanted to go down and inspect the warren himself, nothing would line up if he was too outlandish. Was it worth trying to come up with a way to deflect?
It was probably his best option.
“Hold on. Back up. You said something about hidden benefits to a Class earlier. Is that something that actually happens?” Jay asked.
Kallin dipped his head in a brief nod. “I get it. You want to try to get information to make sure whatever you tell me is worth it, never mind that I’ve just delivered one of the greatest secrets I have to offer completely free of guile. Fine. Yes, that’s something that happens with a lot of Classes. It’s not always as explicit as it could be, but there’s generally at least one bonus in various places. The System likes to hide things sometimes, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, including some things that would really be better off out in the open.”
“You’re telling me there’s more to the summary sheets? And I’m just supposed to know about it?” He was pretty much beyond bewildered at this point; literally nothing and no one had mentioned this up to this point. Jay knew he’d unlocked the skill section of his sheet early on, but given that it hadn’t registered anything beyond the first one, he’d thought that was everything.
“You poor bastard,” Kallin said. “I’m not sure where this Ohio of yours is, but it must be in a pretty sorry state if you’re all using just the core functions.”
“It definitely is.” He was only half joking. “How do I get those to display on my sheet with the rest of it?”
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
The earth mage clicked his tongue. “So that is something you’d want? Good. Then I’ll tell you, but not until you’ve told me exactly what it was that did that to you.”
That was a good deal, Jay was reasonably confident about that much. The real question was how much extra Jay could get thrown in if he tried. Was there more he could push for? More benefits he could gain? Clearly he was missing more of the basics than he had thought he was, at least of the sort of thing that was so basic no one would bother to write it down.
He was abruptly reminded of a joke he’d seen once about an old Polish dictionary’s definition for a horse and he had to suppress a laugh as the memory flashed up. The exact translation hadn’t ever been something he’d bothered looking up, but he remembered the definition boiling down to knowing a horse when you see one. Clearly Halea wasn’t completely immune to that kind of thing in its own right.
More importantly than old jokes, something at the back of his mind was telling him that there was more he could get out of Kallin. The same thing whispered that he should push the other man’s goodwill as far as it would stretch. Maybe it was just him being greedy. Maybe he just wanted to get as much of a bright side out of whatever was going to happen afterwards as he could.
Kallin, impatient with the time he’d taken to think it over, verbally nudged him. “Well?”
“Seems like a good enough deal to me,” Jay said.
Despite that little voice’s urgings, he didn’t want to push it too far. He could probably figure out how to get the System to show him the rest of the information that now he knew it existed, but costing himself the chance to learn it from someone who knew for sure what it included wouldn’t do him any favors. If he missed something this time, who knew what he’d have to do to get that information from another reliable source, much less getting basically handed to him on a silver platter.
“As long as you’re willing to do more than just throw me in the deep end with a whole array of new information to wade through,” he added.
“Now that’s just insulting,” Kallin replied. “As if I’d do something like that. Who do you take me for, a Kushi?”
Jay gave him a blank look.
“Right, backwoods yokel. Greedy family. Doesn’t matter, don’t worry about it, just don’t take out a loan from them if you have any other options,” the metal man warned. Then, after Jay nodded, he continued. “Now that we’ve got that deal struck, start talking.”
He leaned forward again as if to demonstrate his interest. “Don’t spare a single detail.”
Jay did his best. He gave as many details as he could in an attempt to make it seem real, starting from being locked in the goblins’ larder. He spun as much of a believable-but-unverifiable tale as he could.
It started with being surrounded by green goop he likened to a marinade that soaked into him, trying to pin that as the culprit behind his skin change. Jay retold the whole tale, never mind the fact that Kallin had been there the first time he’d told it, filling in some portions of what he’d elided last time with an urging toward bloodthirst. He blamed that on the injection as well.
When he was done, Kallin nodded for a few seconds before responding. “Thank you. Now, for my half, here’s what it takes to make the System reveal those last sections for you…”
*
Warinot walked with Kallin as he left the tent. He let the [Rarified Zone] dissolve in a wash of white motes. Then, only once they were far enough away that the young man in the tent wouldn’t have been able to hear them, did he bring up something that had been bothering him.
“Once you asked me to leave, you know he did basically nothing but lie to you, right?”
His friend’s signature grin returned, widely self-satisfied as ever. “Trust me when I say that I am well aware. Untrue does not mean unhelpful.”
“But what was the point?” His shield swung out as he gestured his pleading confusion to the other man. “If he wasn’t going to tell the truth, you should have pressed until he did.”
“You sound like an Inquisitor,” Kallin said, reproach clear in the words. “I didn’t press for a very simple reason: if he thinks he got away with the lies, if he thinks we believed him, he’s more likely to lead us to the actual goal.”
“And the more ability he has to cause chaos,” Warinot pointed out.
The [Magus of Earth] nodded, acknowledging the point. “Perhaps. But you’ve known me for quite some time. Do you really think I’m going to just leave him free reign until then?”
“I have known more people who would do exactly that in this situation than would do otherwise,” the taller man said. “Forgive me my doubt, but something of an explanation would go a good distance toward reassuring me.”
They reached the clearing in the middle of the island in the time it took Kallin to think that over. The duo stopped there, as it was the best place for the steel elemental to create one of his flying platforms. But eventually, he spoke again.
“I have left a [Stone Eye] in his tent. It will observe him physically and magically until I retrieve it or it is destroyed. In either case, I will receive the information it gathers and use it as necessary.”
Warinot sighed. That was relieving in a way he couldn’t fully put into words. “Thank you. Whatever has him in its grip, we will find it.”
Kallin nodded. “We will. And we will purge him of it.”
As the elemental rose into the air on a thin length of stone, they both left the second half of the thought unsaid. Warinot had no illusions that the other man hadn’t considered the worst-case option. Some things didn’t bear talking about.
But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t think about it. Truthfully, he couldn’t stop himself from at least considering the idea. Hopefully he’d never have to enact any of the solutions that would be their only options.
What happened if there was no other source? What if it was something inherent to the young man? What if he was tainted down to his very Class?
Faced with the prospect of having to do what that situation called for, Warinot had never wanted to go to bed more.
*
Further out into the ocean than Jay had ever gone, Agensyx swam. He was near to his goal, he could feel it, could almost smell the very thing he’d gone out in search of in the first place. He had needed to convince Jay to come to what remained of this continent, or what was being recovered of it, but had found his words lodged stuck in his throat every time he’d tried to say it directly.
It had taken the warped Parasite catching a glimpse of the inside of his mind to break the binding the newer portions of his spiritual anatomy had placed on him. And only just for that one subject. He could feel a plethora of other forbidden topics like weights on his thoughts.
Whoever his contracted partner’s Divinity had come from, they had clear ideas of what he should and should not be allowed to know before discovering it himself. Now those restrictions were part of him. It was infuriating, to say the least, but they didn’t stop him from simply going out and doing things.
Like hunting down Ayor’s Central Armory in an attempt to take anything that was left.
The not-quite-a-smell of the enchantments had been wafting through the water since the [Necromancer of Earth] had driven the continent into the depths. He’d been following those remnants for a week now, deciphering their every twist and turn, worming through chasms and crevasses only to have to start again every time. But no more.
This time, he’d found it. The sense of the inlaid magic had led him to what had clearly been a landside in the last moments of this area being dry ground, the “smell” around it stronger than it had been ever before. Agensyx dug through the ground feverishly, uncovering the etched lintel of the Armory’s entrance first, then the rest of the doorway.
The hall inside needed some excavation too, but the protections around the place had kept the rocks and silt outside. The dragon swam through and into the space itself, hoping above all else that there was something useful left. Most of it was likely scattered beneath the accumulated sand and drifting grit of the ocean floor, but surely they wouldn’t have tried to keep the equipment best suited for necromancy.
What breed of absolute idiots would keep things designed to amplify the very power that was destroying their home? Not the Classbound of Ayor, clearly, because inside an alcove were all the things he’d been looking for. The plaque that read “Necromancer” was hanging halfway off its hooks and the items within had clearly been jostled around in the chaos, but they were there.
He swam closer, past the deactivated gateway circle set into the wall, to take a closer look at the offerings. Agensyx tapped into [Shieldsense] to help guide him as he chose between them. The ability would help him tell what could do the best job protecting someone – or a lot of someones, if necessary – and it would be the only way he could tell which of the pieces had which effects without touching all of them one by one.
The sense, corralled by his goal of protecting his bondmate from the Curse and helping him grow into a protector in his own right, worked swiftly. The weapons were removed from contention first. Then the singular shield, made of various bones set into a sickly green metal. The set of emeralds went next, then the hair pins.
It flickered a few times over the armor, as if unsure of whether to count the set as in or out, before finally discounting it as well. That left the rings. There were three of them, each very different despite their nearly equal value.
Two were metal, one the same green as the shield where the other was tarnished silver. The third looked to be either ivory or bone, the pure white standing out amongst the rest of the artifacts. That one was removed from the running first. Between the two that were left, the green went next. [Shieldsense] left only the silver ring, and Agensyx snagged it on the edge of one of his talons immediately. The other he swallowed.
He had to get back. There was an odd feeling rocketing around the back of his head, as if something was happening that he should be there for. That feeling only got stronger as the gateway swirled to life.
Agensyx didn’t consider taking it for even a breath. Whatever was causing it to reactivate now, there were good odds that the destinations weren’t calibrated correctly anymore and would only sieve him to his core if he did. Instead, he swam.
He hadn’t thought the young [Necromancer] could get into significant trouble over just a few days of his absence. He was beginning to think he may have been wrong.
