Chapter 207 – Continuing the Search

Ravatha looked at Nurea. Nurea looked at Ravatha. Mirian, lounging in a chair, observed them both as they both had what could only be described as a stern-look contest. After a bit, the competition seemed to resolve in Nurea’s favor, because Ravatha looked away. “This is absurd,” she said.

Nicolus, who had been amusing himself by reading a book from the small shelf in Ravatha’s office, said, “Yeah, but it’s also true.”

“I said I would handle negotiations,” Sire Nurea said.

There’s probably a faster way to do this, Mirian thought.

“She’s a Prophet? She looks as old as my daughter.”

“Her eyes are literally glowing. I can promise you they didn’t do that a few days ago,” Nicolus said.

“Nicolus,” Nurea said quietly, and her ward rolled his eyes. She turned back to Ravatha and said, “I was equally skeptical, if not more so. But you just watched her do magic that is completely unknown to any academy. She fixed the Torrviol train, knowing exactly what parts would be needed. One of her professors said she opened some sort of ancient Gate. And she knows secrets. She knew about you. She knows about…” Nurea was still hesitant to speak about it, so she lowered her voice, “…knows about what my Lord Marduke is… planning.”

Mirian had demonstrated the blink spell to them and summoned her spellbook as well. For the time being, she was keeping Eclipse hidden, since Liuan and Gabriel still didn’t know about the soulbound relic.

Ravatha looked at Mirian skeptically. “And you want me to… analyze the books of a port in… where did you say it was?”

Mirian piped up. “Falijmali. The southernmost port on the East Sound.”

“I don’t speak Adamic.”

Mirian shrugged. “You don’t need to. It’s mostly tables of numbers.”

“What’s in it for me?”

She felt her mood shift from amused to furious. It happened so suddenly, as her outbursts of anger often did. She stood. “Sire Nurea just explained that the world itself ends without intervention. The price you gain is your life. Is that not enough for you?”

Ravatha’s eyes widened. Then she shivered.

“You see me now,” Mirian said, voice a whisper. Before, she’d seen Mirian, the young student. Now, she saw the age behind her.

The Syndicate woman looked at Nurea one more time, this time, looking much less sure of herself. Finally, she said, “Very well. It will help if we take one of my associates. He usually works in wards and forgery, but he’s also quite adept at bookkeeping—”

“Numo. Yes, I remember him. I’ve worked with him.” He’d helped her analyze the wards at the Temple of the Four to save Arenthia. Mirian thought of the old priestess. She had worked for the Deeps, and most of her acolytes were former criminals. She would be executed the next day at noon. “Hmm. I know someone else who will be a good asset. I’ll meet you at the train going to Torrviol. Get Numo and meet me there.”

“Why are we going to Torrviol first?” Ravatha asked.

Nurea looked at Nicolus, who shrugged. “I’m just enjoying the fireworks, you know? She seems to know what she’s doing.”

Before, Mirian had needed to arrange a special heist where she stopped the bullets from killing Arenthia at the moment of her execution, then hired smugglers to take her away while a fake corpse was ‘burned’ by a corrupt worker at the morgue. Now, she would have no trouble breaking into the prison.

The anti-divination ward scheme was simple enough to crack. Once she’d done that, she could locate the wards that existed to detect illusion spells and burnt out the key glyphs involved on the route she planned on taking. She used telekinesis to pick-pocket a guard’s glyphkey, then disguised herself as a guard and moved into the cells. Once inside, she cast zone of silence in the area. Then she could kill the two guards on duty on the cell block. That was, unfortunately, the best solution; while she could immobilize them with force binding, maintaining the bindings and zone would grow exponentially in mana cost at great distance, and the disturbance could lead to a pursuit she wanted to avoid. Rostal had shown her a way to choke someone so that they went unconscious, but that only lasted a few seconds. It was much easier to kill them.

She used the glyphkey to enter the door, where Arenthia was sitting by the window. The old priestess started when the door opened.

Mirian dismissed her illusion and stepped inside, telekinetically dragging the corpses of the guards into the room and propping them up by the wall. “Hello Arenthia. I’m Mirian, seventh Prophet of the Ominian—though the more I learn, the more it seems that number is a bit low. I’ve worked with you and Lecne is past time loops, and need your expertise. You can send a letter letting your cult know you’re fine, and I still intend to keep my promise saving you in whatever the final cycle is.”

Arenthia looked at Mirian, then looked at the dead guards. Mirian hated seeing her like this. She was so scared before she died. Arenthia didn’t deserve to languish in that fear, not when she was so wonderful and full of life without it.

“I’ll explain more on the train ride to Torrviol. All I need right now is for you to walk with your head high. That, I know you can do.”

She cast disguise illusions on both of them, then marched them out the complex. An hour later, they were on the train going north.

***

Mirian first brought the lotuses through the portal to the professors. Getting the results meant flying back to Mahatan to return through the portal before the end of the world, but the inefficiency of the route was outweighed by the efficiency of spreading the research out through multiple loops. Since she could use total camouflage, moving around alone was simple.

Next, she brought Numo, Arenthia and Ravatha through. Nicolus wanted to go, but then Nurea would insist on joining too and Mirian didn’t want to carry that many people.

Ravatha, when behind her Syndicate desk and surrounded by her allies, was unshakable. It turned out she wasn’t always that way. Bringing her through the Gate caused her to go pale faced and get a pronounced tremor in her right hand. Mirian flew them over to the prince’s eximontar stables and had them steal six of the beasts. As they galloped northwest, she used shields to protect them and force blasts to knock the prince’s pursuing riders off their mounts repeatedly until they gave up.

Ravatha, who hadn’t flinched at all when the prince’s riders had started slinging spells and firing rifles at them, said, “Coming through and just… the water closing in all around us—I didn’t know water could be so dark. That was terrible.”

Arenthia laughed, now well recovered from her ordeal in the Cairnmouth prison. “Gets the blood stirring, doesn’t it! I haven’t been chased like that since those street thugs tried to grab me when I was twelve!”

Numo said, thoughtfully, “I thought it was a fascinating experience. I think everyone should try it.”

“Hah!” said Arenthia, while Ravatha muttered to herself.

The ride north was, in Mirian’s opinion, quite uneventful, though Ravatha got jumpy about all the desert drake and the manticore attacks. From the amount of pacing Numo was doing when they camped, she could tell he was concerned, but he kept it to himself.

When they got to town, Mirian got them all different rooms to stay in. Arenthia went straight to the bathhouse, complaining of sand getting in her unmentionable places. Ravatha didn’t complain, but quietly went to join her. Numo started unloading his pack onto the table in his room, ordering the objects from smallest to largest as was his habit.

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Mirian got to work on her ward scheme. She’d developed some tricks to making sure the rooms didn’t look like they were vandalized. She could use shape wood to carve out little sections of the floor, scribe the glyphs in the furrow, then use shape wood again to replace it and erase any trace of the scheme.

Numo apparently noticed her doing this—using divination, since Mirian kept her door closed—and commented on it at dinner.

“It took me some time to pick up on it. But why use the taraj and muno glyphs?” he asked.

“There’s dozens of flux glyphs that can be paired to get the same result, but are uncommonly used and therefore not searched for with standard divination spells. How did you know to look for them?”

“It was the sarang glyph.”

“Used in glyph lamps though. It should read as a false positive.”