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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 135, The Last Days III
🕑 Added 2022-09-07 16:41:39 +0000 UTCAlright, as far as my break goes, I think the 14th and 19th won't have chapters, and the 21st maybe won't, depending on whether I get much writing done on the plane and how much backlog there is before that. In theory, I'll be in the air for 20 hours with another 8 hours of layover, but I don't know how good of conditions that will be for writing. (Part of my problem is that the last seven chapters have averaged 7K words each, which is 2K more than they're supposed to be, creating problems with backlog generation.)
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They had gotten a number of travel entads from the haul of lutes, and far too many of them had bound to Isra. She had seven lutes, which was seven more than anyone but a bard needed, and worse, they had quite a bit of overlap between them. She had the Commute Lute, which allowed for up to a hundred hexes of travel through repetitive strumming, the Many-Bridges Lute, which allowed for travel to nearby bridges, the Leaping Lute, which allowed for large leaps with a buildup of song, and the Duet Lute, which would transport you to someone playing the same song. She’d spent quite a bit of their lute testing day touring the country and then walking back home.
Then, when Alfric had taken their lutes to Filera for testing, one of the two unidentified lutes she’d bound to was also a transportation lute, this one allowing her to run extremely fast over water.
It seemed a bit like a sign, or possibly some worry of Verity’s made manifest. Isra now had all the geographic freedom she could ever have needed, and with what had bound, could even take a carefully planned day trip to Dondrian. By running across water, she could get to Tarbin, which filled her with worried excitement. When Tarbin had been far away, weeks of travel or tens of thousands of rings, she had felt comfortable putting the past in the past and simply moving on. Now though, when she could be in far-off Tarbin by noon, it felt like the barrier was so small and thin that it couldn’t possibly be put off for too long.
On top of that, all the resources that the party was using to find Kell — or Cate — could easily be turned in other directions. Isra’s mother and father were dead, but it was possible she had family out there, aunts or uncles, cousins, maybe even grandparents. She didn’t know how hard they would be to find, especially without knowing their names, but with all these tools, if she could be allowed to borrow them … the idea was growing. The desire was growing. She had unbelievable amounts of money, and would have more once they’d sold some of the better lutes that the party couldn’t use. With either the garden stone or Lutopia, she would have mobile housing. The only reason not to go digging into her past was because she didn’t want to, and she was increasingly of the opinion that she did want to.
Isra did more travel over the two days following Kell’s disappearance than she had in the entire rest of her life. Traveling by the Commute Lute was not at all like flying through the air with the helm, and even less like ‘riding’ in the garden stone. Every warp point was different from the last, most of them decorated in some way, with the mark of the hex placed on them, or sometimes with a good view of a prominent building. In some hexes that were virtually empty, the warp point was just a collection of stone that had been placed to prevent the growth of weeds on that spot, with nothing more than a few trails heading out from them, though that level of wilderness was pretty rare.
There was so much beauty in the world. Isra had known a lot from the books, but she’d never traveled except for when the party had gone to new places, and those had both been cities. The wider world, especially as seen through its warp points, had all kinds of interesting trees, odd rabbits, enormous birds, special soils, and shapes to the stones. It made Isra’s collections seem small and pointless, but only for a moment, until she resolved that eventually she would have an entire museum to herself, or find an entad that could hold a limitless quantity of objects, or possibly that she would go to work for a museum herself and could bring them the special things she’d found.
Merger’s Point, ten hexes north, was set in a gorge with peach-colored sandstone walls that had been eaten through by a river. There were houses clinging to the sides of the gorge, and some houses that were carved from the sandstone itself, individual windows bored out by human hands. She’d been there to speak with the censusmaster, and to see whether Kell or Lin had passed through, and she’d stayed a touch longer than necessary, admiring the greenery that spilled out from the windows and the way the mild river flowed below.
Fennel City, to the east, beyond the huge Lake Gornorian, had a huge number of tall spires, which she’d learned were created from a bound entad that was now non-functional. There were more than sixty of them, dotted all around, some parts of a building, others freestanding, and the censusmaster had invited her into one. There were steep stairs in the interior, but each floor had plenty of room, and more than a few families lived a vertical life in a spire, with the children traditionally taking the top floor.
Canter’s Isle sat in the middle of a deep lake, and wasn’t a natural island at all, instead having been built using enormous stone pillars that descended down five hundred feet. It was ancient engineering, probably using significant amounts of magic, and the town was built on top of those pillars, with thick wooden arches spanning between them, and a few houses that jutted out over the edge. The lake was deep and filled with fish, and the smell that filled the air was only mildly off-putting.
Isra was supposed to be looking for Kell and Lin that first day, and she did look for them, but her mind was elsewhere, on the splendors that Inter had to offer. And this was only a collection of hexes that weren’t even that far away! They had seen things in their travels as a party, but she hadn’t quite realized how much the world had to offer. Especially with the Commute Lute, it was as simple as strumming to find herself in some fascinating and interesting new place. She felt like a fool for not taking some time to fly around with the helm, though that had a much more sedate speed, and going from one hex to another would take ten minutes or so, rather than happening instantly.
She liked meeting new people, even though many of them were suspicious when she began asking who the hex censusmaster was and where they might be found. With her new understanding of the world, the suspicion bothered her less than it might have. Most people seemed to think that she was a jilted lover or something of that nature, not taking the story of missing persons entirely seriously, especially since she was so far from Pucklechurch. She thought that was at least somewhat fair, and so long as she did eventually get the information she was after, it was nothing she was too worried about.
Understanding that she was a druid, with everything that came with that, and that other people were essentially deaf and blind to the natural world, was really quite freeing. She almost wanted to tell people when she met them, to give her a bit of leeway, but Verity had said that wasn’t the best thing to lead with, and would make people think you were odd for other reasons.
It was actually funny how long it would take people to cotton on, or how much they would ignore. Eventually, she’d made a bit of a game of it, not saying that she was a druid, but calling their cats to her, or speaking with birds that landed on her finger, or watching as a school of fish swam up from the depths. Sometimes people would raise an eyebrow, but often they’d just have some banal comment about how their dog normally didn’t like people, or wasn’t she lucky that the rain cleared up right when she got there.
The second day, she’d been doing virtually the same thing as the first day, only now she was looking for Cate too, talking to censusmasters on the west coast near Plenarch. She’d done this a number of times, apparently, and felt a bit of jealousy for the other Isras who had gone to other places, their adventures known only through a little mark on a piece of paper to say ‘no, none of the people we were looking for were there’.
On the third day, their focus was still apparently on finding Cate, which was a necessary prerequisite for confronting her. This was related to her over breakfast. The Seeker of Secrets was proving elusive.
“It’s all dead ends,” said Alfric. They were staying at Penelope’s large, square house again, though Penelope herself was in Dondrian, in a final attempt to gain aid. They did have one higher chrononaut though, Alfric’s mother Ria. She was wearing a diaphanous silk dress of sea-foam green, and had a serious expression on her face that showed the family resemblance.
“She’s not on this plane of existence,” said Ria. “That actually does narrow it down somewhat.”
This was, from what they’d said, the tenth time through the day, which included Ria, Penelope, and Alfric taking resets. It was almost certainly going to be the last time through the day, even if something new was discovered.
“Same with all the others that went missing,” said Alfric. “We’ve got six options, essentially.”
“Three realistic options,” said Ria. She’d raised an eyebrow in his direction.
“I’d still like to hear them,” said Mizuki. “I think maybe we went over this when Kali went missing?”
“Alright,” said Alfric. “The ‘realistic’ ones first. Those are dungeons, which entads don’t penetrate into and where you’d have to get around the limit of five, doable, I guess, demiplanes, which are much more likely, and certain entad storage options, like the garden stone.”
“Wait, you can get around the limit of five?” asked Mizuki. “Why have we not been taking extra people in?”
“You need the right kind of entad,” said Alfric. “Extradimensional storage doesn’t work, but there are a select few entads that turn people into something that’s not, per the dungeons, a person, which means that they can slip through and be reconstituted into a person. It’s a rare thing for an entad to do, and usually pretty dangerous for those involved, so doing that with hundreds of people … I don’t see it.”
“And you only get to enter a dungeon once for each party member,” said Ria. “I agree it’s unlikely.”
“I really want to hear the crazy ones,” said Mizuki, leaning forward with a smile on her face.
“They’re not that crazy,” said Alfric. “The first is somewhere in space, where entads don’t work, which you could in theory get to by accelerating hard enough.”
“Which people have tried, dying in the process,” said Ria. She gave a little laugh. “Alfric wanted to be an astronaut when he was younger.”
“People have actually succeeded,” said Alfric.
“Yes, you’re just whipping through the sky in a metal coffin with no protection whatsoever, and getting to a very technical definition of ‘space’,” said Ria with a sigh. “There’s no air up there. Look, it’s very unlikely that Cate took them into space.”
“I’m just talking about what the bounds of possibility are,” said Alfric. “I don’t legitimately think that they were taken to space or, I don't know, landed on the moons.”
“Which brings us to the other possibility,” said Ria. “Beyond the Barrier Storms.”
“Which also has the magic problem,” said Alfric. “And yes, same applies, it’s really not likely to be that, even if she had taken them to a different location with a ship that could non-magically handle transport.”
Isra was frowning. “What’s the third then?”
“Something else,” said Alfric with a shrug. “The unknown.”
“Lame,” said Mizuki. “You know, if I was going to disappear people, I would take them up to the Fractalwoods and just zap them into the future.”
“Creative,” said Ria with an approving nod. “But I don’t think it fits with the facts.
“You didn’t mention that they could be dead,” said Isra.
There was some silence around the table.
“Elaborate way to kill someone, ay?” asked Hannah.
“Sorry,” said Isra. She hadn’t felt that squirming discomfort in far too long. Apparently it was a bad thing, to mention that the missing persons could just have been slaughtered.
“No, it’s possible, and should be considered,” said Ria. “Though I agree that I’d be surprised if this was all a ploy to kill hundreds of people. Normally murderers don’t get the consent of their victims.”
“You know,” said Verity. “It’s possible that she’s spoken to us.”
“Er, she has spoken to us,” said Mizuki. “Several times.”
“I’m going to roll my eyes so hard I strain something,” said Verity, and she did roll her eyes, but still seemed amused, flashing a grin. “Do you think that any of us would have touched that black orb?”
“Without knowin’ what it does?” asked Hannah. “Absolutely not.”
“If she explained it, I might,” said Alfric.
“I’d do it,” said Mizuki.
“No,” said Isra. She hadn’t gloated about being right about Cate, though she’d felt no small amount of satisfaction. That the dragons were off with Cate didn’t feel particularly good, but at least her instincts had been correct.
“Well at least you have some smart people in your party,” said Ria. “I forgot what it was like to be so young. I suppose when I was seventeen I might have touched such a thing without asking pointed questions first.”
“It might still work if people ask pointed questions first,” said Alfric. “We don’t really know. Also, I’m eighteen.”
“I’m your mother,” said Ria. “I know how old you are. But when I was eighteen, I think I’d have known better.” She gave him a wide smile and a playful nudge.
There was a lot that they apparently knew through Alfric’s investigations the day before. That orb of Cate’s could erase memories, including a bit before and after the conversation, so it wasn’t just like it hadn’t happened, but they wouldn’t even remember her coming or going. Knowing what it did, Isra thought she’d never have done it.
“And Cate never said where she was takin’ him?” she asked.
“No,” said Alfric. “Just ‘someplace else’. The way she described it, it would be a community of like-minded people who wanted a new adventure. One that was permanent and would have some hardship, but a chance to prove themselves.”
“That’s what I don’t get,” said Hannah. “Why wouldn’t Kell ask after the specifics?”
“He did,” said Alfric. “I think, anyway. This is all secondhand through Penelope from my own observations. Cate refused to tell him though, which is no surprise given the lengths she went to in order to cloak what she was doing. If Kell or Lin —”
“Or your cousin Kali,” said Ria.
“Right,” said Alfric. He shifted in his seat, which from what Isra knew of him meant he was suppressing a need for clarification. “If they had known, then potentially the memory could be recovered, or it could be seen through watching the past.”
“Okay, but she might just be gone,” said Verity. “Right? This might have been the very last thing she did before going elsewhere.”
“That’s very much possible,” said Alfric with a nod. “But we’ll keep up the search for at least the next day, and from there, Penelope will keep searching with entads. If Cate steps foot back into this world … we won’t necessarily know, but there’s a good chance.”
When they broke from their entad-made breakfast, Isra was supposed to travel the world with the Commute Lute, going to places that Cate was, per her office, known to have gone. So far as everyone in Plenarch knew, Cate was still Seeker of Secrets, and if she had made her final exit, she hadn’t communicated that fact to her superiors or her staff. She had no guild, nor a party, no one to watch her.
But before Isra left, she found Verity, who apparently had little to do with the day.
“I’d offer to bring you with,” said Isra. “But we’d need some kind of storage for you, and I don’t think it would be all that fun.”
“Plus I would cramp your style,” said Verity with a small laugh.
“That too,” said Isra. “But with the lute, I should have more than enough time. This is no longer the low-hanging fruit. It’s an adventure with no real purpose.”
“I don’t really know what I’m going to do with myself,” said Verity.
“Explore the city?” asked Isra. “Go to the beach?”
“Maybe,” said Verity. “There’s something nagging at me. Do you think that Cate would have visited us?”
“Why would she?” asked Isra. “She knew that I smelled something off about her.”
“Literally?” asked Verity.
Isra frowned, thinking about that. “I don’t know. Everyone has their own smell. Usually no creature with a good sense of smell is close enough that I can smell. She smelled different, but she was different. City smell, for a start.”
Verity turned to look out the view from the house, which looked over the water. “Lin was a cleric, though not terribly accomplished. Kell was a promising young wizard. Kali was … disaffected, but maybe held some promise. Cate knew me. She knew I’d run away, that I had no one other than the four of you.”
“You’re wondering why she didn’t go after you?” asked Isra.
“No, I think she might have,” said Verity. “I want to know.”
Isra considered that. “You’ve been living out in the cabin. If Cate knew where that was, it wouldn’t be hard for her to get you alone. But you do have us. Would you have gone?”
“I don’t know,” said Verity. Her eyes were following a flock of birds that was flying over the water. “Alfric’s been talking about replacing me.”
“He’s been talking about confirming the severe dungeons are because of you,” said Isra. “Which they might not be. And if they are, we’ll deal with it.”
“I think I’d have stayed,” said Verity. “But it’s so hard to say.”
“Leaving was an option?” asked Isra.
“At points,” said Verity. “I don’t want to make running away a theme of my life, but I suppose it’s possible. There’s something attractive about it, isn’t there?”
“This world is so big,” said Isra. “I’ve been all over two relatively small areas of Inter in the last two days and I found so much. How big could the world Cate is offering be?”
“I’m not sure it’s about ‘big’,” said Verity. “What attracts me, at least, is a place where everything isn’t so … settled? Dondrian had this giant horrible society of people who had all these expectations, and Pucklechurch was better, but it’s still a collection of people who have largely known each other for decades. It doesn’t bother me, but I can see where it could bother other people. If I had come into the party and you’d all known each other since childhood, I think I might have hated it.”
“Do you wish she had come to you?” asked Isra.
“No,” said Verity, mouth firm. But it softened. “I think I’d have made a good candidate. Not allowed to talk about it with anyone else, because I wouldn’t remember, not able to be talked out of it, maybe only mentioning some longing to be elsewhere, like Kell did … being in a society that was built from the ground up, which is what I’ve been imagining?”
“There’s appeal,” said Isra. She held silent for a moment. “What happens if you change your mind, do you think?”
“Surely Kell asked,” said Verity. “We could talk to Alfric and see what he overhead, but it’s secondhand, which is annoying. I would think that the answer is that you can’t change your mind, or maybe that you’d have your memories erased, if she can do that.”
Isra frowned, caught herself frowning, and smoothed her face. “If she comes to you, don’t take the deal.”
Verity gave a little laugh. “I’d only ever have accepted in my darkest moments. You don’t need to worry about me.”
Isra nodded. “I should get going though. Thank you for the talk.”
“Anytime.” Verity smiled and then spun, causing her dress to flare out. She stalked off as though she had important business to do, and Isra took a moment to watch after her.
Verity sometimes seemed as though she was composed of far too many ‘darkest moments’. By her own confession, the winter after leaving Dondrian had been spent brooding, enough so that Cynthia, the barkeep at the Fig and Gristle, had said something about it. It had been good only for a time, and then the ‘darkest moments’ had been almost the entirety of the time when Edil was breathing down Verity’s neck about the concerts, and then also after the big concert when she’d gone off to live in the woods.
In Isra’s opinion, it wouldn’t be difficult to get Verity to agree to go off somewhere else. That was a bit scary to think about.
She had been told to keep quiet about what she was doing. They hadn’t talked to Cate’s office except in the undone days, mostly to keep from letting her know that they were onto her. There were still risks there, but mostly from the possibility of someone chrononaut with a higher priority unwittingly taking a message back after an alarm was tripped. It was all very cloak and dagger, and there had apparently been some discussions about whether provincial or national authorities should be involved where it concerned Cate. But she was, unfortunately, a member of the government, even if she hadn’t been in the office in the past few days. She did that sometimes, they had said, either because her work took her elsewhere, or for unspecified reasons.
When Isra came to Plackard’s Hollow, on the coast of the Plenum Sea, she didn’t explicitly ask for Cate, she instead talked with the censusmaster and asked about Kell and Lin, then inquired about anyone else who had passed through, knowing that Cate had been there a month ago. This pretty naturally moved the conversation toward what she’d been doing at the time, most of which was already known, but Isra enjoyed the conversation nonetheless. Cate had visited as part of her role as Seeker of Secrets, as there had been a few sightings of an enormous sea beast, one that had bumped up against a fishing boat, almost capsizing it. There hadn’t been much to learn about the actual incident, but Isra had learned that there were two disappearances from a week after that visit. It hadn’t been connected to what was happening in Plenarch, and it certainly hadn’t been connected to Cate.
This pattern apparently wasn’t uncommon. Almost everywhere that Cate went, people vanished in ones and twos. Isra had, after all, been all through Greater Plenarch tracking Cate in the undone days, and these were just the lesser targets, those that needed to be tried but which weren’t expected to provide all that much information. Many of them were from up to a year ago, and provided nothing more to the party than more entries into a logbook.
In Frensel, Isra walked along the high walls of what had once been a castle while she spoke with the censusmaster about Cate’s visit. Cate had come by because of an atmospheric disturbance, green and yellow clouds that had swirled over the town, and apparently it was the business of the Seeker of Secrets to come when someone had said that something was weird.
Manse Perimont was primarily Chelxic village, where Cate had come to inspect some artifacts, and there was a boy her age who seemed smitten with her from the moment he’d first spotted her. She had practiced her flirting with him, and he’d practiced his flirting with her, which it seemed like he badly needed. He was cute enough, but more than a hundred miles from where she lived, and she let him down gently.
Isra had nine such adventures before returning to Plenarch with a small notebook that contained her findings. Cate had been taking people, many of them, it seemed, but the pattern was rather clear, and whatever Isra was doing, there didn’t seem to be any way that it would actually help things. Still, it was a very pleasant way to spend a day, and she liked having an excuse to talk to strange new people in strange new places.
When Isra came back to Plenarch late at night, Verity announced that she had made a discovery.
“It’s in the book,” she said, slamming it down on the table with no small amount of ceremony.
Alfric gave the book a raised eyebrow. Dinner had come and gone already, and they were gathered around the large dining table under the soft lights of the cubic chandelier and the cavernous roof of the space.
Isra gave the book the same skeptical eye that Alfric had. It was the entad book they’d taken from their very first dungeon, the one which recorded conversations in the immediate area. They had last used it when Lola had made her confession, getting everything in writing to go with all the eyewitness accounts.
“You have a conversation there?” asked Alfric. His eyebrow hadn’t gone down.
“She did come for me,” said Verity, who had the book open to a particular page. “At least twice, though I haven’t found the other one, and it’s possible that it wasn’t recorded.”
“Wow,” said Mizuki. “Does this actually help us?”
Verity face fell, just a bit. “Well, it’s … I mean, it’s important, isn’t it? I spent all day reading, the book is poorly organized and it turns out that we’ve talked a lot.”
“Let’s hear it,” said Alfric. “I think it’s a good find, information that we didn’t have, which is something that’s to be lauded.”
“So it’s just been sitting there, waiting to be found?” asked Mizuki.
“Hush, let the girl read,” said Hannah.
~~~~
“Hello?” Verity asked. “Cate?”
(The book provided no names or speech tags, just some punctuation, but said nothing else about what was going on. Verity was inferring the names from what was said, assuming a back and forth.)
“Verity,” said Cate.
“I have a rare entad,” said Cate. “It blocks the party channel. Stores it, actually, but the effect is the same. I wanted a private conversation, and this helps to ensure that.”
“If this is about the dragons —” said Verity.
“No,” said Cate. “Place your hand on this.”
“What is it?” asked Verity.
“It ensures confidentiality, which is quite important to me,” said Cate. “I mean you no harm.”
(Isra was burning with curiosity about what might have transpired. Sometimes the book recorded, if not gaps, then places where the same person spoke twice in a row. It was hard to say though.)
“We’ve had this conversation before,” said Verity. “This entad — no, I know all this.”
“You do,” said Cate. “Take a moment, it will come.”
“I still think it’s unnecessary,” said Verity. “The cloak and dagger, I don’t understand it. This is hard for me. I’ve had hardly any time at all to think about it.”
“We have the entire day ahead of us,” said Cate. “You can remove your hand now, and take some time. May I come in?”
“Yes,” said Verity.
(This was not at all what Isra would have said. She wondered when this had happened, when Cate had been let into the cabin.)
“Can I tell you what happened today?” asked Verity.
“Of course,” said Cate.
“I don’t think I should tell you, actually,” said Verity.
“But you do want to,” said Cate. “And I’m the Seeker of Secrets, as you know. My discretion is assured.”
“I think about what the others would say,” said Verity. “Alfric would urge caution. Isra doesn’t trust you. With good reason, I think, having had these conversations.”
(Isra tensed on hearing her own name, but Verity continued on reading out loud.)
“I’m a secretive sort,” said Cate. “That does make it rather hard for people to trust you. People want something from you, to have their trust. They want the things that you carefully guard. You’ve experienced that, with your music, haven’t you? Not the music itself, but what comes after, or before, meeting with people who want some slice of you, which your mother was always willing to serve up.”
“Mother tried to keep it from being personal,” said Verity. “‘The anecdotes should be anodyne.’”
“But they were so much more loved when they were personal,” said Cate. “People like when you give a bit of themselves, when you show vulnerability. They trust you, after that. I seem untrustworthy because I’m so unwilling to do that.”
“I love these people,” said Verity. “What Alfric said yesterday — he said that I was selfish.”
“And are you?” asked Cate.
“I don’t know,” said Verity. “I think I might be. I think it’s why Isra
~~~~
“Welp,” said Verity, staring down at the page. “I see now that I definitely should have read this in full before sharing.” She had stopped mid-sentence and her cheeks were flushed. Her eyes were still tracking across the page.
“Read it in silence then,” said Alfric. “Let us know if there’s anything relevant.”
Verity frowned at the book, doing a poor job of hiding her embarrassment.
“Wait, is there a chance that I was scouted?” asked Mizuki. “That we all were?”
“Possible,” said Alfric. “Extremely unlikely that she’d go after any of us when the others were around, and I’m a chrononaut, which means that I could get around the memory entad with a reset. From what we know, I don’t think she’d take the risk.”
Ria leaned forward. “This might be our in.”
“Our in?” asked Verity, looking up from the page.
“She was patient with the herb dragons,” said Ria. “She’s patient with people too. If she’s gone to ground for good, I’m not sure we have any hope, but we can set ourselves up to catch her, if we know who her prey is.”
“That seems dangerous,” said Alfric. “It seems really dangerous.”
“Yes,” said Ria. “And it will take some planning.”
“Then if I’m going to be prey,” said Verity, “Let me be prey.”
Comments
fbt
the plot thickens... or was that gravy that thickens...I forget. TFTC! Nice views deeper into several of the chars, ty!
