Chapter 108 – The Rot Spilling From the Walls

With a steady supply of myrvites from her new Syndicate contact established, Mirian spent her next day trying to replicate the runes she’d seen in the sanctum. When she’d learned about ‘glyph probing’ from Professor Eld, she’d thought it was a stupid thing to learn. After all, she didn’t plan on learning a glyph unless it had been well established. However, now, she could use the same principle that researchers used to discover new glyphs, and discover new runes. The technique involved scribing a single line of a rune and seeing which direction it was most stable in. Then, she scribed the most stable line four times, then added a second line in four different places, again, analyzing which was most stable. If it burst into flames, that indicated a problem. If it sparked and smoldered violently, that was progress.

The earlier Arcane Mathematics classes she’d taken had discussed efficient ways to narrow down the possible geometric patterns. It was time-consuming, but the smugglers here also had access to several myrvites she’d never used the souls of before. Once she could establish a basic construction of a rune on the page, she could analyze the resonance and look for similarities.

After that, she planned to begin researching combining two different resonances and seeing if she could find an intermediate resonance. In that way, she might be able to combine the souls of two different myrvites to get a soul-energy that would let her craft a third unique rune. She was relying heavily on the waveform mathematics she’d learned in Torrviol and hoping that her ‘light’ analogy was as applicable to different forms of magic as she thought it was.

Mournfully, she thought of Xipuatl. It would be nice to talk it over with him.

At night, she levitated around with her night camouflage spell on, getting a sense of movement around the city, and as an excuse to let loose after a hard day of studying. It also was good practice, and it felt wasteful to go to bed before expending most of her auric mana. After all, she was still well below Archmage Luspire in power, which meant she had work to do.

The next morning, Mirian went to the Great Library again to check out books about waveforms, and ended up borrowing a book on magical telegraphs. While the technology had never taken off, the principles behind the design of sending and receiving signals looked quite applicable to what she was trying to do with soul resonance. Access to the Great Library was a huge boon; whatever subject she needed information on, they had something. Except runes, of course.

But that led her to wonder: she might not be able to sneak into the celestial classes instructing priests in the Grand Sanctum, but she might be able to steal books from them. Most of the knowledge the priests had was passed down orally, because secrets were harder to steal if you didn’t write them down, but at least some of their knowledge of celestial runes was recorded somewhere. Neither Lecne nor Arenthia had known where those sacred texts were kept. She also still had no idea where and how they were manufacturing orichalcum for the Arcane Praetorians.

That meant there were secret passages in the Sanctum that were not on the maps she’d studied.

Mirian started scouting around the northern canals that would be beneath Kingmont Hill, and therefore beneath the Grand Sanctum. The Sanctum was isolated from direct contact with the canals, but the cave networks were close enough to each other that she could use divination magic to start looking for where unmapped caves were. Once again, her work in exploring the Torrviol Underground was coming in handy.

Then on the 18th, an obituary in one of the newspapers mentioned a familiar name: Hamel.

Mirian had been reading between ten and twelve different broadsheets each day, usually during the evenings after dinner, just before her nightly flying sessions. There was plenty to read, and lots of small presses that churned out a daily sheet, though plenty of it was inane. Other articles, she couldn’t tell; maybe some detail would end up being important later, but for now, it all seemed relatively normal. Nobles and rich merchants acting out little dramas. Neighborhood crimes.

Then, predictably, news from the war in Persama had overtaken the papers and created quite a stir in the city. Plenty of it was rumor and conjecture, and more of it was useless. She read up on it, but learned little she didn’t already know. Besides, the details were likely to change as the southern time traveler iterated.

Hamel’s death, though, caught her eye. She read it twice to make sure it wasn’t a different man by the same name, but no, he was listed as an acolyte. Tragically, the coroner reported he’d died of an apparent heart attack at age 37.

That struck her as suspicious.

On the 19th, her eyes happened to pass over another obituary. Likely, Mirian wouldn’t have noticed anything, except it was another heart attack, and another person who was far too young to have had one. It seemed a journalist named Celine who helped write for the Magrio Broadsheet had died, again tragically, at the age of 32.

Then she went through the newspapers she’d collected for the day and noticed she didn’t have a copy of the day’s Magrio Broadsheet.

Mirian went on a search of the corner stands for a copy, but no one seemed to have one. Finally, near River Station, the woman at the stand lowered her voice and told her, “Their building was broken into last night. The whole place was ransacked, and the printing press smashed. Means they stuck their nose somewhere it shouldn’t have gone. Young man like you has too much sense to miss the point, hmm?”

Mirian made some noises of agreement. Well, someone had certainly wanted to send a message, she thought.

She went back to her research on runes and continued to scout out the tunnels beneath the Grand Sanctum. She’d added quite a bit of detail to her maps; there were dozens of passages and rooms that appeared nowhere on the blueprints she’d acquired. However, her divination spells weren’t precise enough to locate how to get into them.

That night, Mirian staked out the Akanan Embassy.

She’d picked out the roof of a clocktower a few buildings away from Tenedor Plaza, using a warmth spell to chase away the night’s chill. It was a long and boring vigil, and she was just about to give up when she noticed some unusual activity. The Akanan guards on patrol vanished—but no one replaced them.

Nothing else happened.

She noted the time. It was clear something at the embassy wasn’t normal, but it was hard to say what yet.

Exhausted from going the entire night without sleep, Mirian ate breakfast back at the inn then took a long nap. Then she went back to her vigil, though this time she just sat on a bench just outside Ducastil, blending in with the rest of the people milling about.

Just before noon, she caught sight of some twenty members of the Palendurio Guard, suddenly marching in column past the spires of the palace. She hadn’t seen where they’d come from, but they certainly hadn’t come from the Governor’s Mansion. Checking her map of the city, she thought they might have come up from the canals; there was a stair and an elevator for moving goods and people around, just around the bend.

Mirian followed the guards from a block back. The group made no effort to deviate. They were heading straight for the plaza.

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Got them.

There was no way to identify them yet. The Palendurio Guard wore thin metal masks that disguised their faces. This seemed to Mirian like a stupid idea, because it let the guard stay anonymous. How could misbehaving guardsmen be held to account? Here, it made them the perfect attackers. Even if the rest of the crisis didn’t develop, how could one distinguish between the conspirators and the innocent?