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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 146, Meetings
🕑 Added 2022-11-09 18:07:10 +0000 UTC~~~~
“You need to be more circumspect,” Ria told Verity. “Cagey with what you know, and how you know it. You came back the last two times, and we’re probably going to have to keep if you come back again, just because we’re running low on days. Cool and imperious does seem to be the way to play it. She's serious about wanting to have it go right this time, and seems willing to say that she’d made mistakes in the past, but if you press too hard, you’re likely to run into trouble.”
“Alright,” said Verity. “But you’re not really learning anything from this anymore, right?”
“We’re learning some,” said Ria. “Not as much as I would like, which is why we have to go into the next day. If we want to end this peacefully, which we do, then we need to find some kind of leverage for concessions. What would be ideal would be a permanent monitoring station of some kind, but it’s not like a normal demiplane, because the core is, apparently, inside her. That means entry would be through her say-so every time, and obviously that’s a non-starter if we want to make sure that she’s not, for example, dropping a bunch of people off to starve on an island.”
There was a fast, clipped way that Ria spoke sometimes, which made Verity feel like it was something rehearsed, a formality to be gone through, a conversation that was, for her, perfunctory. Alfric had never made her feel that way about undone days, though he hadn’t had so many of them with her.
The coaching felt, to Verity, like the rehearsals that her mother had put her through before important engagements. They had sat at the family dinner table together, talking as though to their guests, running drills, thinking through scenarios. Her mother had felt it vital that Verity knew, at a minimum, the names of everyone who’d be at any given function, their business interests, their professed hobbies, and their relations, as well as whether they had children or marital interests. The memorization required for the task was extreme, especially when Verity was meant to be memorizing music sheets at the same time. As she’d grown older, she’d spent less and less of her time on the social instructions her mother had given, much to her mother’s bitter disappointment.
Verity knew that it wasn’t fair to have those feelings projected onto Ria, but she also felt it wasn’t entirely fair that she be subjected to all this. Under better circumstances, it would be someone else who was dealing with Cate, and Verity would be in the village, doing something else. Alas, it was not to be. She’d commiserated with Isra about it.
“Do you think that I want to be out in the woods, listening to the plants and animals? Not seeing through their eyes, mind you, but getting secondhand information?” she asked.
“That does seem a bit rubbish,” said Verity. “Not being able to stretch your wings.”
They were laying together in one of the nested extradimensional layers, separated from the others by an entad. Not ‘together’, but side by side, elbows touching every now and then. Verity still held a candle, a large and bright one that was probably obvious to everyone, and was trying to respect that Isra was doing her best to move on, or at least have some breathing room. The last thing Verity wanted was to cling to a relationship that was now in the past. She didn’t want to become Kell.
“What would you do, in your ideal world?” asked Isra. “How would you take down the dragon?”
“I’m not sure she needs to be taken down,” said Verity. “I really would prefer to get her side of the story, and not her side of the story as filtered through Ria.”
“You think it’s excusable somehow?” asked Isra.
“I don’t know,” said Verity. “Maybe? Not excusable, but maybe not a reflection on this current project. She said it was a mistake.”
“She said it was a mistake, then did nothing to correct it,” said Isra. “She left those people there on that island, only coming to give them aid later, and never bringing them back to wherever she got them from.”
“I know,” said Verity. She wished that she hadn’t known, not because she wanted to turn away from the truth, but because knowing would mean that any future conversation she had with Cate would be tainted by the knowledge. Verity would have to act ignorant, rather than feigning it. “So in your ideal world, how would you be using your skills, if it’s not skulking about in the woods?”
“That’s an excellent question,” said Isra. “You go first.”
“Playing music,” said Verity, almost immediately. “I would somehow save the day through the power of song. Cate would hear my lyrics and think ‘oh, I guess I should listen to you’.” Verity wasn’t even sure that would work, or what specific changes she wished would be made. She didn’t think that the government of Inter really needed to be able to come and go as they pleased, she just wanted to make sure that there was a safe way home for the people who didn’t want to stay, and she wanted some assurance that Cate wouldn’t burn people alive with dragonfire.
“I think I would hunt,” said Isra. “Some kind of proper hunting.”
“Hunting … Cate?” asked Verity.
“No, she’s a person,” said Isra. “Hunting as in … stalking through the woods, in my element, bow in hand, on the trail.” She looked over at Verity. “That sort of thing.”
“That does sound better than what you’re doing now,” said Verity.
“On the plus side, I did make a friend,” said Isra. “Unfortunately, I don’t think he’s going to be a friend once we finish things here, and I’m not staying in the demiplane a moment longer than I have to.”
“I actually quite like it,” said Verity.
“You get to move around freely,” said Isra. “Or mostly freely.”
“I wouldn’t call what we’ve been doing free movement,” said Verity. “I’m just being a spy, very badly.”
“Well, good luck with it,” said Isra. “Come back in one piece.” She reached over and gave Verity’s hand a squeeze.
When Verity made her way to the palace, she was thinking about that moment, and what it meant, if anything. She was also thinking about Isra’s new druid friend, who she’d apparently spent the better part of the day with.
She shook those thoughts off once she was inside the palace walls, and spent some time moving through the now-familiar halls, looking for Cate. She wasn’t looking forward to the conversation, not even a little bit.
She eventually found Cate in the palace bathhouse, a large room with a pool in the center and places for people to sit and steam on the sides. Cate was, as before, surrounded by people, though it was less structured this time, and some of them were talking amongst themselves. Cate was partially nude, as some of the people in the bathhouse were, draped with white towels that didn’t cover everything. Verity felt herself blushing and tried not to stare, tried to treat it as though it was as uninteresting as a textbook, but it was one of those things that was difficult to reframe in her mind.
Cate excused herself when she saw Verity, which Verity was thankful for. She found the idea of getting naked mortifying, but she’d have done it if it needed to be done. Instead, Cate dressed herself with a flourish, the clothes coming as if from nowhere, and after brief goodbyes to the others, they were walking down the hallway together.
“I’m hoping you had time to think?” asked Cate as they walked. “You needn’t have been so prompt in getting back to me.”
“I know,” said Verity. “But I think I have some things that might be worth saying.”
“Excellent,” said Cate.
“I was discreet,” said Verity, which was a lie, and didn’t really need to be said, but she was nervous, and none of the preparation she’d done with Ria seemed like it was helping.
“I appreciate that,” said Cate, which made Verity feel worse.
They went through the library, to the same office room with its kaleidoscope windows. Verity had hoped that they would be different, less distracting, but Cate had made no changes in the intervening day.
“Now then,” said Cate. “What thoughts do you have?”
Verity folded her hands in her lap. She felt awkward, exposed, and a bit out of sorts. “I think you do yourself a disservice with the half-truths,” she said. “To answer a question but not answer it fully is to give people room to think you’re hiding something, even if you’re not. Letting people draw their own conclusions is one thing, but what you’ve been doing is just giving rope to hang yourself with. To say that you’re not human, to let people find their own interpretation — you’re a dragon, right?”
Cate watched Verity for a moment, then slowly nodded.
“Alright,” said Verity. She had already known that would be the answer, since she’d heard her own reports from the undone days. “That raises questions, but at least if you say it first instead of leading people to the conclusion, you can answer those questions in the next breath. You can say that you’re a dragon, but the human understanding of what a dragon is doesn’t really match the reality. Do you see how that would be better?”
“I do,” said Cate. “It goes against my nature, but I do see it.”
“And I would like to know how dragons are different from what I might expect,” said Verity. “I went to the museum in Dondrian and saw their dragon there, and read through what there was to read, but I’m sure that some of it is wrong, because there was almost nothing mentioned about demiplanes, or shapeshifting, or … anything.”
Ria had warned that Cate would be cagey — was simply cagey, as a person, maybe — but how it came off was that she was hiding things even when trying to be forthright.
“And you want those answers … now?” asked Cate.
“You can take your time,” said Verity. “You were raised in secrecy, have lived a private life, it’s not my place to push you — but if you tell people that you’re something that has a name, and they guess you’re a dragon, it’s better to tell them at the same time that you aren’t going to eat them, that you won’t burn them to death.”
The richness of nearly everything in the demiplane was stunning, but the office in particular seemed like it had taken thousands of hours of dedicated labor from skilled craftsmen. The windows whose panes each showed a different area were magical and impressive, but the window frames were carved with characters cavorting around oversized leaves and plants, and the rug was patterned exactly so it could match the footprint of the desk, and the desk itself was a huge, impressive thing of hard wood that had been polished to perfection.
Cate was frowning. “Those are the things they’d think?”
“They would think of the implied power, yes,” said Verity. “Sorry, have you been to the museum in Dondrian? Have you seen the wingspan of the dragon they have there?” This was something she hadn’t gone over with Ria, either because it wasn’t important, or possibly because she’d never asked it before.
“I have been to see it, yes,” said Cate. “My feelings are complicated. It’s an impressive specimen, and it’s a central part of the largest museum in the largest city in the world, which is a better end that most people could ever ask for, a monument to the might and power of a dragon. But there’s something in the regal viciousness they use to frame it that displeases me. It’s what people will think of, if I say that I am a dragon.” She gave a small shiver. “It still feels odd to say it after keeping silent for so long.”
“You’re true form,” said Verity. “How, ah, large are you?”
“I’ll let you see sometime, though not today,” said Cate. “I don’t know whether you’ll find my wingspan impressive or disappointing, having seen the one they have in the museum.”
“And you can breathe fire,” said Verity.
Cate gave a slow nod. “I would prefer that people not think about that.”
“It’s what they’ll think about,” said Verity. “I’m sorry.” She was sorry. Verity knew what it was like for people to focus entirely on one specific thing they knew about you, and no, being Chosen of Xuphin wasn’t exactly equivalent to being a dragon in human guise, but it was parallel.
“I think you should help me reveal myself,” said Cate. She had a far-off look.
“Sorry, what?” asked Verity. Ria had made no mention of anything like that.
“I’d like to commission a song,” said Cate, focus snapping to Verity. “A song whose message is that I am a dragon, and not to be feared on that score. Something that smooths out the edges.”
“I — I’m not a songwriter,” said Verity.
“You’ve written songs, and performed them for an audience,” said Cate.
“That’s not the same thing,” said Verity. She was feeling slightly desperate. “I’ve never been commissioned to write a song, never finished a commission — I don’t think that I would be capable of doing it.”
“Then I’ll commission you to try, and if I hear the song, and we agree that you’ve come up short, we can be the only two that need to hear it,” said Cate. “Though I suppose ‘commission’ is the wrong word, since we don’t have money here.”
“I think this is what people worry about,” said Verity. “That you’ll ask for things, and expect them done.”
There was dead silence in the office, a moment of pure tension, and Verity really did think that she’d be roasted alive, if just for a moment. She couldn’t get the words out to undo the damage she’d done, only sat there with her mouth hung open.
“You are right, of course,” said Cate, sighing as though there had been no moment of shock or anger. They both deflated slightly. “Many of the people I’ve asked to come to this place, I’ve asked with the intent that they serve a role, but I’ve made the mistake of having no lever to move them with. I didn’t want a world of levers, you see. It seems to me that there are levers all over the place in Inter, which make things unseemly. But then those matters I can’t deal with myself, or don’t want to deal with — I’m not talking about songs, but in general, issues like clerical healing or policing the inhabitants — it’s too easy for them to be pushed off to the side.”
It seemed, to Verity, like a bald admission that this second attempt at a colony already had its own flaws. “If you make labor a condition of people staying here, I think almost all of them would,” she said. “But we don’t really know what happens if we want out.”
“There is no getting out,” said Cate. She sat up slightly. “That was one of your questions, was it? Well I have said, always, that the answer is that moving to this place is forever. Forever is a word I take seriously. If people could leave, they would slowly drain away, and they would follow each other, leaving as the place felt more empty, each loss compounding.”
“Meaning,” said Verity slowly. “That you wouldn’t do as you’d done before, put them on an island, they would just be … here? With the rest of us?”
“Off in the Wildlands, which have more than enough room for people who dislike our society so much,” said Cate. She huffed slightly. “Yes. I admit that it’s a problem, but slowly bleeding away people needs to be prevented as much as it can be.”
“Because it’s hard to get people to come in,” said Verity. “Or, not hard, because there are thousands that would jump at the chance to be here in a place where they don’t have to work, can pursue their passions, and be free from their obligations. It would be hard because you want to maintain your secrecy and keep this place private.”
“It’s not the first time I’ve heard a suggestion that I open the gates,” said Cate.
“You have, ah, advisors?” asked Verity. “Others who know more of the truth?” She knew that Cate did, because Hannah had already spoken to one of them.
“I do,” said Cate. She didn’t elaborate.
Verity’s view of Cate was changing. She had known most of what Cate was saying, having heard it through Ria, but at least some of the conclusions she was drawing from the actual conversation itself weren’t things she’d been told. Cate seemed more childish in this light, the secrecy less that of an old woman who had seen too many atrocities and more that of a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar.
That would have been fine, save for the fact that Cate had enormous amounts of power and no accountability. The childishness made her more threatening, not less.
“And you’ve ignored their advice,” said Verity, slowly, as though it was a question.
“Power ultimately rests with me,” said Cate. “But no, I didn’t, there are only certain concessions that I’m not willing to make. To become a government-in-fact, one which interfaces with other governments, those with incredible amounts of power and resources, cannot be stomached.”
“I see,” said Verity. She sat still in her chair.
“But you wish to press the point, yes?” asked Cate. “I do like that about you.”
“I don’t want to press the point,” said Verity. “But there’s a point there that wants pressing.”
“Press on then,” said Cate. She had the same imperious pose as before, serene and a bit haughty.
“There’s no release from the pressure,” said Verity. “For myself … my mother put enormous pressure on me, it’s the entire reason that I came here, and I tried to escape it in various ways, to talk with my mother about what I didn’t like and get her to agree to … well, anything, really, fewer social engagements, less practice on the lute, anything. She didn’t relent. She didn’t give me space. But if you build up pressure high enough, if there’s no vent, something is going to give. In my case, it was something beyond the bounds of what my mother had expected of me. I ran away from home and hid myself somewhere she couldn’t find me.”
“And you think that’s what will happen here?” asked Cate. “Is not the village a vent from the palace, the Wildlands a vent from the village? People are free to live elsewhere within this realm.”
“They’re not free to live outside this realm,” said Verity. “And power ultimately rests with you, so if you’re worried about being attacked by someone who feels they have no other options, then giving them an option seems necessary.”
“And the drain?” asked Cate. “The flow of people out of here? How would you deal with that?”
“I don’t think there would be much drain,” said Verity. “Personally, I’m not planning on leaving, even if you are a dragon.”
She worried that the joke was too much, but Cate laughed, and Verity felt a wave of relief.
“You understand I need to do it personally?” asked Cate. “Moving people here and there?”
“Yes,” said Verity. “But you’re open to the idea of letting people leave? Giving them a possibility of escape? Maybe not exactly when they decide, but once a season? Because that’s the thing that people fear, that they’re trapped here. If they weren’t trapped, if they knew that they were lucky to have been chosen, it would be different.”
Cate was silent. “I did let everyone know what I had done,” said Cate. “Back on Inter, the truth is out. I hadn’t been lying about that. They don’t understand who or what I really am, but that creates problems, if I’m meant to be coming and going. There’s vulnerability for me.”
“Is it possible to kill a dragon?” asked Verity.
Cate laughed. “You’ve seen a dead one. Of course it’s possible. The Pyros and the Blades come in to deal with threats to the country, and beyond them, there are all kinds of entads, some of them hidden away in secret government vaults just on the off-chance that they’ll be needed. If Inter wanted me dead, I think they could manage it, and that would make this living demiplane just another dead one.”
Ria had wanted the question asked, and Verity was glad she’d been able to do it in a way that felt natural, though she was very aware that she wasn’t a good liar.
“Do you think they would?” asked Verity. “You were a member of the government, weren’t you?”
“Of Greater Plenarch, yes,” said Cate. “A special person who got many things done.” She steepled her fingers. “I didn’t leave on good terms. I left with secrets people didn’t want me to have, and a few of those government vaults, those I had access to, were left a bit lighter.”
“Ah,” said Verity. “You … stole.”
Cate tapped her fingers against the desk. “I flew over Plenarch and the response was immediate. They called in the Blades, tried to track me with chrononauts and entads, walked in my shadow and bristled like porcupines.”
“I recall,” said Verity. “Our party was in the area for some of that.”
“Will you ask why I did such a thing, or have you guessed?” asked Cate.
Verity cleared her throat. She already knew, of course, and now needed to pretend to guess, though she didn’t think it was too much to get it right. “Dragons build their demiplanes, then leave,” said Verity. “But unless you can have your young without a mate, that means that most of the time everyone is away from each other, hidden in their own house. If you wanted to be with another dragon, you’d need some big, splashy way of letting them know that you were out and about. It was, ah, a way of finding a mate, is my guess.”
“Of letting a mate find me,” said Cate. “I keep close tabs on dragon sightings, naturally, though they’re very rare, and most often it’s someone who’s mistaken a bird or flying lizard for something much larger.”
“It didn’t work though?” asked Verity. “No one came?”
“No,” said Cate. “It’s very difficult to know how many dragons are left out there, but we might be so few in number that no one would come.”
“I’m sorry,” said Verity. “That must be difficult.”
“We’re not social in the way that humans are,” said Cate. “With another dragon, I would be worried about their strength and power.”
“The same as you’re worried about Inter’s strength and power,” said Verity.
“An interesting parallel,” said Cate. “Though of course you know little about draconic coupling.”
“Do you?” asked Verity.
That hadn’t meant to be a slight, but Cate’s raised eyebrow made Verity shrink back in her seat. It wasn’t the difference in power between them so much as the precarious position that Verity was in with all the things she knew and wasn’t supposed to know, the ways that she was on a knife’s edge.
“I do like you,” said Cate, softening slightly. “And I will take your counsel under advisement.”
That seemed to be the end of their meeting, which had stopped before Verity could get all that much more from it. She hadn’t learned things that she’d apparently learned in other undone days, which was a problem, because she would have to keep track of these things going forward.
There had been, in some other version of the day, some extended conversation about what it was like for a dragon to be young, eating and killing with relative abandon. Cate had said that it wasn’t unthinking so much as the thoughts of a starving woman, a focus on food and where to find it, devouring a herd of cattle and still not sated. When that time had passed — fifty years of scouring the lands, being a terror to farmers and cities — Cate had been like a different person. In Verity’s opinion, it was that aspect of transition that allowed her to think of her ‘mistakes’ as being the actions of someone else.
But now Verity didn’t know that, or wasn’t supposed to, and if she wanted to help Cate, or even to find a way around Cate, she was going to have to pretend that she didn’t know.
“Did you still want the song?” asked Verity.
Cate nodded slowly. “I do. If there’s some compensation I can give you, some favor, do let me know, but I give freely. I can’t promise there’s anything you could ask for that I wouldn’t give you if you asked for it without a song.”
“I’m mostly going to be focused on making it good,” said Verity. “But I may need to talk with you again, to make sure that it’s what you want.”
“Thank you,” said Cate. She stood. “And I appreciate your continued discretion.”
Verity swallowed and nodded, but didn’t let out her breath until she was far away from the office.
~~~~
“It’s the way in,” said Ria. “She doesn’t know that I’m here, which means she thinks that the threat is on the outside. All you need to do is ask for something from back in Inter, it doesn’t matter what, and we can sneak an entire battalion in.”
Verity let out a breath. They were all together again at the end of the day, having gone their separate ways, and it very much appeared that the day was going to be kept. Alfric had his hands folded across his chest, as he often did when his mother was speaking, at least of late. These small meetings had become a regular thing, though annoying, they were all done standing, perhaps because with a table and chairs it would have felt too formal.
“I’m not doing that,” said Verity.
Ria paused. “Why?”
“It’s escalating to war before we’ve tried other means,” said Alfric. He looked at Verity. “She seemed receptive to the idea that she was making mistakes?”
“It’s hard to say,” said Verity. “I’ve seen people admit fault and then continue on making the same mistakes enough times that I can’t tell whether this is genuine regret or something else.”
“It’s a plan for the back pocket then,” said Ria.
“You need to start talkin’ with people in the government,” said Hannah. “Get them to understand how it needs to go.”
“Harmon has been talking,” said Ria. “And the overall feeling is that Cate has engaged in some of the worst crimes of the modern era. The island she left behind is enough for anyone to call for her to be stripped of power, and we’re working on ways of doing that. She left the previous colony on an island.”
“If she gets killed, this whole place goes away, right?” asked Mizuki. “Isn’t that kind of … not what anyone wants?”
“The Wildlands need to be preserved,” said Alfric.
Ria raised a skeptical eyebrow in his direction.
“Unless there’s a catch, we can pull entads from them more safely than from dungeons,” said Alfric. “There’s no element of escalating threat, no pegging to elevation, nothing that normally stops people from going into the dungeons. With the right entads, some of them easily found, a wilding party could outpace a dungeoneering party in terms of their returns.”
“It would be hard to adventure without the consent of the dragon,” said Ria, who seemed to dislike the idea. “And getting the consent of the dragon means that centuries of crimes are allowed to go by without so much as a whisper. Remuneration would be a start, given the largesse of this place, but there are crimes for which there is no possible remediation.”
“I think it’ll have to be forgiven,” said Hannah. “Unless you do mean to sneak a battalion in and kill her that way, which might be where Inter lands on the subject, and which we wouldn’t have too much say in one way or another.”
“We do have a say,” said Verity. She looked at Ria. “If your intent is to bring in help, then it’s going to be after we try to bring her around to some kind of conversation. The nations of the world haven’t been at war in a long time, and there’s no reason for there to be a war here, not yet.”
“There are reasons,” said Isra. “It’s just whether you think those reasons are enough.”
“Our time here is limited,” said Ria. “We were never meant to stay here. Keeping to the village seems like it won’t be enough, not in the long term. How long are we allowing this attempt at stealth diplomacy to go on?”
There was silence all around.
“I’m actually overdue for the mage academy,” said Mizuki. “And really, I’ve seen as much of the village as I want to see. These don’t seem like my sort of people.”
“I’d rather be out,” said Isra. “Only once we’ve helped these people.”
“But it would take more than an assurance, ay?” asked Hannah. “There would need to be some way of knowin’ that it wouldn’t go sour in a few years, that Cate wouldn’t seal the place up with impunity. Gettin’ her to say that people can leave if they’d like, that’s one thing, but makin’ sure that they’ll always be able to leave is another. And I don’t know how that’s goin’ to happen, frankly. I don’t think any of us want to be mired here forever.”
Verity looked at Alfric, whose lips were thin.
“I’m not sure how many more days I can take,” said Mizuki. “And I think for Kell’s sake I should get out of here, should probably never have come in the first place, if I wasn’t going to confess my love. Which I wasn’t.”
“I’m fine staying,” said Alfric. “The Wildlands have more secrets to give up, more opportunity. I don’t think I have much to offer when it comes to Cate, but I do want to exhaust some of the possibilities of this place, especially if it’s going to come to blows.”
“I don’t think it needs to,” said Verity. She looked at Ria. “Give me a week. Let me speak with her advisors. Let me try to talk with her.”
“An entire week?” asked Mizuki. “That seems like a long time.”
“Well then how long should it take to talk a dragon into changing their mind?” asked Verity, feeling slightly exasperated.
“I don’t know,” said Mizuki with a shrug. “Depends on the dragon, I guess.”
They broke for the night not long after, having concluded nothing. Verity was feeling even more frustrated than she’d felt at the start of the day, in part because of the circumstances.
She fell asleep thinking about the conversation that she hadn’t had with Cate, the one about being a ravenous teenaged dragon whose only thoughts were food and how to get it, and how to deal with what was in the way. She hadn’t spoken about it with Cate, and Ria hadn’t pressed the issue, but it seemed important to Verity, something that needed to be reckoned with but wasn’t. Was it understood that Cate was a different person then? Or was it only that the deaths were so far in the past that they’d become irrelevant to everyone?
Verity was half asleep when the first line of a song came to her, the hunger had abated, which she thought was a good start. She hoped she would remember it when she woke up.
