Chapter 147 – Trial and Error

Mirian woke up, already feeling annoyed. “I hate having to deal with stinky bog lion hair.”

“What?” said Lily groggily.

Then, she was annoyed at Lily, even though it wasn’t her fault.

As she left her dorm, she muttered, “Alright, Troytin, you asked for this cycle to be extra annoying.” She got to work.

***

Mirian decided the next easiest way to make money would be to use one of the noble houses. It seemed the simplest way forward, and the least likely to be preempted by the other time traveler.

Nicolus, when she told him her plan, didn’t like the request.

“Nurea knows a bunch of people are trying to exploit my status as heir. If I tell her you want gold, that’ll raise her hackles,” he said, pacing back and forth on the little tower overlooking the lake. “And my father’s worse. The money we have left is key to his plans to revive the family’s fortunes.”

“Yeah, and it’s useless because the world ends.”

“That’s a really… hard sell. I mean, I believe you, but I also sorta don’t believe you, you know?”

Mirian sighed. “Oh, I know.” There were some things that would be extra helpful in convincing him, she knew, but she didn’t want to do something like start waving Eclipse around in front of Marduke Sacristar, someone she knew was already implicated in the conspiracy. If Troytin got word about the sword, he might start looking closer at the holy vaults of the Grand Sanctum, and that was the last thing she wanted. That damnable man, she thought. Patience. Stick to the plan.

Nicolus frowned. “Maybe you’ll be able to convince him. A demonstration of… knowledge? Power?”

“I wish that worked as well as it should work. People are stubborn. And the problem is, I have to convince people to work against things they’ve been working on. Try to convince a merchant to stop making money, a noble to give up power, and a spy to give up secrets. They can’t argue with the evidence I put forth, but as you have been so fond of telling me, people are emotional creatures. It’s great when they just need a push, but impossibly annoying when you’re trying to change their mind about something they have every motivation not to want to move on.”

“That does sound like something I say. Said. Will say? How do all the timelines, uh, compare to each other?”

“No idea,” Mirian said. “Right. Let’s go over what you’re going to say to Nurea. We have several days and a train ride to figure out what we’ll say to your dad.”

“Several days? We could leave tomorrow.”

“No, I need to set up some more sabotage contingencies first. Troytin’s gotten better at preventing Archmage Luspire from attacking him, but I think I can manipulate him in a way he won’t see coming this cycle.”

Nicolus inhaled through his teeth. “Man, you have gotten nasty. Yesterday, I’m pretty sure you had a panic attack when Professor Seneca mentioned the upcoming exam. Well, yesterday for me. How long has it been for you?”

Mirian looked at him and shook her head. “You really don’t want to know.”

***

On the train ride down, Mirian and Nicolus argued, while Sire Nurea mostly stayed silent, cleaning her revolver.

“Troytin is trying to corner Baracuel’s money supply. He’s also finally wormed his way back into the graces of the conspirators. He’s going to know what the usual communications look like, which means even if your father merely changes his behavior, he’ll be on the lookout. As soon as he pushes them for actual information—even tangential information because he’s being subtle—Troytin’s going to send his little minions down. And I’m not going to give him information on my true capacities, which means we have to run. Do you really trust him not to check with his allies? I can’t tell your father about the time loop. It has to be another angle.”

“He’s going to know something’s up.”

“That’s fine.”

“No, it’s not fine! He has to be in control. If he doesn’t know all the cards on the table, he folds. And he never bluffs. Nurea, back me up on this.”

“That sounds accurate,” Nurea said without looking up.

“Nicolus, I don’t play card games. I’ve never played card games.”

“You’ve never… wait… how have you never…?”

“I know about them a little bit.”

“You’re the math expert! You calculate probabilities in your head all the time. You’d fucking clean up a table, sorry Nur.”

“I’m not learning to play cards to make money. Gambling dens deal in pocket change compared to what I need.”

“Yeah, most of them. I mean, there’s probably a high stakes table… right, whatever. But you get what I mean, right? If he knows you’re hiding information from him, he’s not going to buy into the pot—great, now all I can think of is card analogies.”

“He’s looking to reestablish the family fortune. Surely I can represent something irresistible. I can demonstrate a unique scribing capability, and show him glyphs no arcanist would recognize. New technology?”

“The time of single inventors is passed—that’s his view of the matter. It’s about industrial capacity, not neat little innovations. Besides, the expensive applications are in the complexity of the spell engine. You know what the Akanans are making, right?”

She sighed. “I do. Alright, different tactic. I can impersonate people. Illusions that can’t be detected.”

“Bullshit,” Nicolus and Nurea said simultaneously. Nicolus then gave Nurea a mock stern look and said, “Language.” His knight rolled her eyes.

Mirian drew from her soul repository, creating a binding that would change her hair color, skin tone, and jawline. The latter was devilishly hard, but she couldn’t exactly explain why to Nicolus. Then she forced her soul energy currents to speed up, accelerating the change.

She then handed Nicolus her spellbook. “There’s a divination spell for detecting illusions. Try it.”

Nicolus cast it three times, then handed the spellbook to Nurea. “You try it.”

Nurea narrowed her eyes at Mirian. “How are you doing that?”

“Not really interested in telling you that one, either. Again, Troytin just launched an attack on me last cycle, and I don’t want you possessing knowledge he might find useful. For all our sakes.”

“Well… he’s interested in getting an in with the Akanan industrialists, hence Uncle Alexus taking a trip over there. But you’d have to speak Eskanar.”

“I’m fluent enough to pass,” Mirian said in Eskanar.

“Oh. Wow. You have been at this a while.”

She could see Nicolus doing some calculations in his head. Estimating how many hours of language lessons it would have taken. “Look, don’t bother trying to guess,” she said. “We could try an Akanan industrialist looking to start up factories here.”

“They’re, uh, usually men,” Nicolus said.

“That’s not a limitation,” Mirian said. “I just need a bit of instruction on what to say and how to act.”

***

The good news was, she avoided Troytin’s net. The bad news was, Marduke Sacristar refused to be moved and excoriated his son and his knight for falling for, quote, “common parlor tricksters,” then asked Nicolus if the smell of a nearby bog also caused him to dump all gold in.

“In retrospect, that was probably the worst idea,” Nicolus said. “He knows more about Akanan industries than anything except maybe the family business. You’d have to really put in the work to fool him. Like, a language teacher that can help give you an Akanan accent, maybe some acting lessons, and definitely you’d need to get a better feel for what the upper crust over there looks and sounds like.”

That all sounded to Mirian like it would take too long. There’s a quicker path. I just need to find it. Troytin already knows about my connection to Nicolus anyways. If I continue down this road, he’ll disrupt whatever I do. The only reason he didn’t this time is he probably thought it was a feint.

They found a quiet place to live out the rest of the cycle. In addition to her usual exercises, Mirian researched the construction of bank vaults, then used the end of the cycle to investigate a few examples in Palendurio.

***

The next cycle, Mirian tried breaking into various vaults around Cairnmouth. With her mastery of glyphs, she could occasionally open one without triggering the alarms. However, the vaults were checked routinely, and it didn’t take long for a massive manhunt to begin. That, and the heretic priests had been right about the modernization of the financial sector: there were notes with special seals, but not nearly enough physical gold. She would have to hit multiple vaults, and now Troytin would be watching them even closer so she couldn’t rely on simple iterations. He was a fool, but she wasn’t going to make the mistake of underestimating him.

The author’s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.