am-books Chapter 143 - The Ennecus Guild
Chapter 143 - The Ennecus Guild
with her amulet now bound to her, mirian spent the last two days of the cycle learning about the other artifacts they'd recovered. as the eruptions intensified, none of the delvers could bring themselves to hold to their original exclusivity agreement. there just was no point.
it turned out, her divination devices were fairly useful for discerning glyphs they couldn't see in the tri-bonded glyph constructions. this let them figure out how the triplicate bonds worked, though it didn't give them the slightest idea of what those glyphs did.
the other liquids they'd found in the vault were equally as mysterious. one of them was a powerful acid, but no one was sure what its actual function was. another that glowed with golden light seemed to be able to absorb vast quantities of heat to no effect. elsadorra placed a sample over a fire for an hour, and the substance didn't so much as move.
the tools they'd found were equally unfathomable. no combination of channeling or energy inputs seemed to stimulate them.
near the end, aelius fell into a deep depression. he'd spent so much of his life in the vaults, but now that they'd actually made it to the end of one, the world would end before he could understand its mysteries. and, as beatrice explained the situation with the other time travelers that mirian had conveyed to her, he realized he couldn't even share his triumph with the world.
he took to his bed, and stopped coming out even for meals. when it was mirian's turn to deliver one to him, the only thing he said from the depths of the shadows in his room was, "it's not fair."
she could only agree.
mirian spent the rest of her last hours madly conducting experiments with the artifacts they'd recovered, making a mess in elsadorra's shop that nearly got her kicked out, end of the world be damned.
and that was all they had time for. a great wind began to howl across the frostlands, sounding like the world screaming, and then divir came crashing down again.
***
the first thing mirian did when she woke was manifest her new amulet. since it included a celestial focus, with focused meditation, she could tap into it just enough as it orbited her soul and use that to summon the whole thing. when it coalesced around her neck, she elated. she looked over at lily, and wanted to tell her—but dreaded having to explain why it was exciting. also, it would create what general hanaran would have called an 'operational risk.' it was imperative that troytin didn't see what was coming, didn't even see what was possible, until it was too late.
she conducted her usual sabotage operations in torrviol, and confirmed that the celestial focus material from the shrine in the underground was indeed gone. then mirian made her way back up to frostland's gate and battled through the labyrinth again with the torrviol and ennecus groups, purely to take a single measurement. this time, they sent the second group back so they'd be at the vault entrance when mirian's group was opening the final door.
when they got to the end, she confirmed what she'd suspected: relicarium use, like the binding of eclipse, was permanent. the amount she'd found was finite. with no end to the cycles in sight, she decided she'd take all the time her next project needed. troytin was still making no moves into palendurio beyond intelligence gathering, and even in that he seemed to be focused on finance and politics. ibrahim was still smashing his armies into alkazaria. for all she knew, the relicarium she'd found would be the last she'd find. she didn't want to settle for making a spellbook that was merely functional. she needed as much magical power at her disposal as she could manage. for that, she had a plan.
they made little progress on the other artifacts from the end of the vault, even with mirian's aid. there was something critical to be learned with those things, she was sure, but she would come back to it.
she said her goodbyes to beatrice, not sure how long it would take until she was back north to visit her.
the moon came crashing down.
***
the next cycle, she headed to cairnmouth with mayor wolden's fake florinian ingots. while heading south, she resumed her disguise as micael. after depositing the ingots and withdrawing a nice pile of gold, she checked in with lecne so troytin would see disruptions in the city. once she'd done that, she took another train out east to the town of second cairn.
second cairn was significantly larger than torrviol, but still much smaller than any of the port cities. half of it was carved into an old quarry that had given so much stone to cairnmouth. once the spellwards had gone up, the city had expanded out from its fortifications, so the second half of the city was atop the cliffs, overlooking the buildings that were set into the quarry. the town had experienced regular spring floods for decades before modern spell engines and tunnel engineering had been added to bring those to an end.
the quarry itself had been closed not because it ran out of stone, but because it ran into an entrance to the labyrinth. unlike the frostland's gate section, no vault had been found, even with expeditions that had bravely probed down into the fourth level. instead, they'd found numerous abundant econodes, complete with valuable flora and fauna. myrvite hunters regularly went in, coming out with rare magichemicals and myrvite parts.
beyond the town, but still within the spellward, ranchers kept pens of myrvites. most of them were low-threat creatures, but several dangerous kinds were kept as well, locked behind their own spellwards.
mirian's conversations with calisto and aelius had given her a decent idea of what to expect. the ennecus guildhall wasn't exactly hard to find; it was made of the local marble and decorated with banners showing the old coat of arms of the family. the stripped knighthood is a really sore subject for them, she noted. there was a cursory guard at the wrought-iron gate, wearing the kind of regalia one might expect of a knight. between the gate and the guildhall was a nice looking garden.
"hi. i'd like to arrange a meeting with cain ennecus," she said.
the guard looked at her with that sort of tired contempt that guards were so fond of looking at her with.
"can i see a secretary, or...?"
"no visits without an appointment," the guard said.
there was no way to be sure, so she didn't spend too much time speculating.
this time, when she and calisto studied together and she brought up the myrvite titan, she had a different suggestion.
first, she showed calisto a report she'd fabricated. after that got her excited, she said, "you know, before i came to baracuel, i was working on an artifice project for detecting myrvite energies. the distances it covered... this apophagorga wasn't detected too far from second cairn. i think i could recreate the device, given enough resources."
calisto got very excited. "really? i knew they were working on some advanced stuff in akana, but i didn't know that. a device that did that could be used to track sustainable ecologies. maintaining spellwards and cages is expensive, so a tracking device could save... but i've never heard of anyone who could do it."
mirian stroked her chin. "let me see if i can make a proof-of-concept," she said. "if we could find a myrvite titan though... i mean, my academic career would be set!"
"i can think of four different ways we could become rich," calisto said. "and famous. the legendary myrvite hunters, micael and calisto." she gave her a smile. "if you can make a proper myrvite detector, let me know. i'd love to see it in action."
mirian had two ideas for that. the first was to create a fake device that she could manipulate any way she wanted. but that wasn't very interesting, and it wouldn't progress any of the research ideas she had, so she shelved that as the 'backup plan.'
the better idea was using her apprenticeship with endresen to access the labs and artifice in torrian tower. detecting myrvites can be done by detecting the magichemicals specific to them, but with glyphs it's complex and power intensive. the range on the devices is just as bad as standard divination. the leyline detector worked on the principle of letting energy come to it, not projecting energy out, so the range was hundreds of miles. i can't make something sensitive enough for those kind of ranges for smaller creatures... but celestial magic is so much better at detecting life energy, and works on the same principle of simply detecting energy that's already radiating out.
the key would be to tri-scribe a triple-bonded glyph set that incorporated the key rune that her celestial detect life spell used. with torrian tower's precision tools, she could put together something capable of rapidly testing pairs of glyphs to see if they could work with the rune.
and then i'd have an actual working celestial-arcane spell. i already know it can be done from the labyrinth. xipuatl, if only you knew!
she just needed to make sure troytin didn't get wind of her project. she also needed to depart with calisto before the eruptions—or bombs—prevented their journey.
mirian sent nicolus south to palendurio, hoping troytin's attention would follow him.
he didn't. troytin continued to send zephyr falcons back to akana praediar. presumably, most of his changes were taking place there, but mirian had no good way of knowing what he was up to. nicolus's uncle had been her only contact there, but troytin knew about that connection, and if he wasn't outright assassinating the man, he was certainly monitoring him.
through the professors, mirian at least knew that no one was making any progress on the divine monument. troytin still didn't know about soul magic or that jei's equations implied the need of a second device.
she turned her focus to the tri-bonded glyphs. she worked in parallel on a second project for professor endresen, using that as cover for why she was spending so much time in the artifice labs of the tower. in truth, she could finish that part of the project in under an hour each day, leaving most of her hours for the tri-scribing experiments.
it was nice to conduct the experiments in a place where the room already had automatic fire suppressing spell engines at work and mobile kinetic barrier projectors, as well as blast-resistant tools. it made the hundreds of failed glyph-pairs that exploded milliseconds after being scribed much easier to deal with.
unfortunately, there were a lot of combinations to try, and it seemed clear that she would need to include a flux glyph, which meant she had to pay close attention to what she was pairing it with. that at least narrowed down the possibility, though even she didn't have all the pairings memorized. she spent plenty of time paging through giant reference books.
it was attempt number 214 that worked. mirian had already been in motion, ready to clean up the inevitable mess and start over again when she realized the tri-scribed sequence wasn't exploding. she had to blink a few times.
the rest of the divination artifice was trivial. she simply had to connect the new tri-bonded set to a relatively simple detector and an illusionary projector so the results would be easy to read.
she brought calisto over to the myrvite studies building.
"it'll show red lights to represent cockatrice, blue-green for the wyverns, and green for the drakes," she said. "very small myrvites are displayed a pale red." she activated the device. her explanation wasn't quite true; what was really going on was the device was turning the intensity of the soul energy into a color in visible light, cross-referencing that with the location it detected it, and then putting that on a two-dimensional grid. non-magical life like humans and extremely weak-souled myrvites like viridian's plants wouldn't show up because they weren't within the range she'd scribed the device to project. as a flourish, though, she'd also made a short sequence that mapped large stone obstructions of a certain thickness and height to show up on the illusion as gray shapes, which made the map look extra fancy.
calisto practically swooned when she saw it. "you made this? oh my gods, i can even see the sigil bees moving around the gardens! you think it can detect something bigger?"
"i know it can detect something bigger," she said. "you think your dad would be interested in this?"
calisto licked her lips. she's thinking about how much money this could help her family make. i've got her. "you think professor endresen might loosen your leash a bit?"
"i'm sure i could convince her of that," she said, suppressing a smile.
morning the next day, they were already on the train, heading toward second cairn.