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  ?Chapter 13. Decorum

  It was several weeks before anything came of Marquette’s favor. It came about, in typically dramatic fashion, past midnight, as a knock at Jeremiah’s bedroom door.

  “Whas goin on,” mumbled Jeremiah, squinting at Delilah’s lantern.

  “Pack your things,” said Delilah. “Prepare for anything. We’re leaving.”

  “Tonight?” With the surge of adrenaline, Jeremiah’s mind flooded with a panicked jumble of tasks and to-do’s, none of which were very important.

  “Now.”

  Jeremiah rushed around his room, haphazardly packing his bag in the dark, and ran down the stairs after her. His heart thudded as he took in the scene. Bruno was pacing, a leather bag over his shoulder. He could hear Allison and Delilah’s muffled voices from Allison’s room. From the sounds of it, they were working out how much of Allison’s arsenal would fit among Delilah’s things in the Giant’s Bag.

  “What’s going on?” Jeremiah asked. He looked to Bruno, hoping some pithy explanation would aid his understanding.

  “Got me, this is all Delilah,” said Bruno. “She won’t tell us anything besides there’s a carriage coming. I will say I’m not a fan of hasty jobs to desperate people, but she’s got that lawyer voice going on, so I do as I’m told.”

  The only revelers left awake in the city at this hour were too drunk to pay the travelers any notice. Lightly leaden, their carriage rocked more than normal as they rumbled and creaked through the gates of Dramir. Most of their possessions had been placed into Delilah’s Giant’s Bag to, minus the gear they would need in case of an ambush.

  Finally they were rolling along the quiet roads of Dramir’s surrounding farmland. “Alright, can we talk?” Jeremiah asked.

  Delilah shook her head and pointed toward the front of the carriage, indicating the driver might be listening. Bruno opened the carriage door, leaning out over the road.

  “Whose ee’ pullin?” he called up to the driver.

  “Just summee gander sir, just a nightie.” the driver called back in an accent heavy with gnomish influence.

  “Feefee Trick? That you, brother? It’s Riddy Tom!” said Bruno.

  Delilah crossed her arms and sighed.

  “Oh, Mr. Tom! Didn’t know tita too! Simpapa free, then?”

  They continued back and forth in gnomish, each using a spare hand to gesticulate wildly. Finally, Bruno returned to the carriage “Feefee’s a goodun. He’ll keep anything quiet.”

  “Do you know everyone in this city?” Allison asked.

  “I’ll put it this way—whenever someone dismisses another person’s presence, I make it my business to get in good with the dismissed. I get more info from scullery maids, dung shovelers and carriage drivers than I do from the professional skulks.”

  Despite Bruno’s reassurance, Delilah motioned them to huddle close and spoke in a barely-audible tone. “We’re going to Elminia. We got a job offer, I don’t know what or who for. But they demand utmost discretion and a tight timeline. From the way they’re handling everything, this has to be for someone big. We can only hope they’re bigger than the conspiracy.”

  “Elminia is a long trip,” said Allison.

  “Correct,” said Delilah. “We need to meet our contact at a specific street corner, at a specific time, and we get one chance to be there. If we miss it, offer’s closed. And we don’t have any more favors to cash in.”

  “Okay, I consider myself a bit on the naive side, but that sounds fishy even to me,” said Jeremiah. Allison and Bruno grunted their agreement.

  “I know! Believe me, I know. But I’ve checked it out in all the ways I can, and I do trust the source. I ask for your trust in turn. Don’t let your guard down or anything, but let’s do our best to approach this in good faith. Agreed?”

  They agreed. “ Not like we have any better options ,” thought Jeremiah.

  The boring two-week carriage ride proved a grand opportunity to focus on enchanting. Jeremiah’s frenzied packing had included anything he could conceive of as being useful, which meant the books and materials Thurok had lent him had found their way into Delilah’s bag. After the sun rose enough to read by, he set about his new plan to identify the unknown rune.

  “Should we get you your own carriage?” asked Bruno, trying to shift position without ruining Jeremiah’s setup. There were two enchanting books open on the floor and a third propped against Allison’s dozing form.

  “Sorry!” said Jeremiah. “This is tricky stuff. It’s quite literally finding the definition of a word no one knows.”

  “How does that work?” Delilah asked.

  “Sometimes you can draw clues from what other known runes it looks like.” He braced the plate in his lap and drew a short, thin wax line. He had learned that shorter lines were less likely to be ruined by bumps along the road. “You can also plug it into known enchantments and see how it changes the result. That’s what I'm working on now. Usually you use one technique to inform the other, back and forth, till you get it.”

  “Isolating your variables, I get that,” said Delilah.

  “Mm-hm,” said Jeremiah. He had no idea what that meant.

  It was five days into their journey when the effort paid off. “It works!” Jeremiah announced, startling everyone from their travel hypnosis.

  “Gods, why would you yell? Who does that?” asked Allison, resheathing a dagger.

  “Look, look, look!” said Jeremiah, holding up his plate. The glow of magic had just begun fading from the runes inscribed upon the face of the metal. He picked up a rasp and dragged it across the metal, leaving no sign or mar.

  Bruno closed his eyes again.

  “Elaborate,” said Delilah, without lifting her head from its spot against the window.

  “It’s a Strengthen rune, I finally got it to actually work!” His friends’ listlessness couldn’t dampen the swell of pride Jeremiah felt. “Thurok wouldn’t tell me why, but it’s just like the backpacks. ‘Strengthen, Pause,’ which I had been using, doesn’t give the enchantment a chance to work. Or it does, but only for an instant.”

  Delilah blinked. “One rune says to strengthen the material, the other says to stop. You had them placed too close together…or something.”

  “More or less, yeah. I had to slow the magic down. So I expanded the diagram to go all over the place first, so it takes longer to activate the Pause rune,” said Jeremiah.

  Allison rubbed her eyes and peered at the plate. “Is that why it looks like two spiderwebs stacked together?”

  Jeremiah nodded, patting the plate. “Pretty ingenious, I think.”

  “Didn’t you say nodes and conduits alter the flow and properties of magic in diagrams?” asked Delilah.

  “Yes, that’s true,” said Jeremiah.

  “Could you have used one of those to slow down the magic traveling between the runes?”

  Jeremiah took a breath to answer, but didn’t. A truth slowly broke over him, one that made his hand ache profusely and cast the last few days in a miserable light. “Yes. That is also a thing I could have done.”

  Delilah smiled at him. “Don’t worry about it. Good job, Jay. Really. You’re making progress.”

  Jeremiah fought back a fleck of bitterness. “You’re right, I am. And this means I finally have a tool to start testing our unknown rune.”

  “Proud of you,” crooned Bruno, without opening his eyes. “Now, don’t wake me up again until it’s time for magic daggers.”

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  They rode towards gathered storm clouds on the final day of their journey. Jeremiah carving a line in his plate in the start-stop rhythm he had grown quite adept at during the journey. His tests hadn’t yet elucidated the meaning of the rune, but he felt he had to be getting close. It would take some time though, as he was resorting to a guess-and-check method that he was sure Thurok would disapprove of. He brushed some metal shavings from the line and was startled when his fingertips came away blackened.

  “Elminia is a little…industrious,” said Allison.

  Jeremiah looked to the looming clouds with new understanding. Crawling across the horizon was an atmosphere of heavy black smoke. Soon, the single immense tower of Elminia’s palace appeared, wearing the smog like a thick woolen scarf. Soon the city proper came into view. With no monolithic wall to separate it from the countryside, the sprout of huts simply grew taller and denser until they formed a great labyrinth of buildings, stacked haphazardly at dangerous angles.

  Their carriage rumbled past the first jagged teeth of the city. The streets were packed with carts, animals, and people. While Dramir always bustled with a pleasant vibrant life, the hum in Elminia was different. It felt dangerous and pervasive, like a hive of wasps. “This place is kind of overwhelming,” Jeremiah said.

  "Oh yes!” Delilah was beaming. “Elminia is extremely resource rich, between coal, oil, and ore. It's like a great kiln where ambition is forged into success or failure. Elminia produces more technological, economic, and scientific advancements than anywhere else in the world!”

  "Elminia is a chewing mouth," Bruno whispered to Jeremiah, “and if you don’t have the right flavor, you get spit out into the Pit.”

  “What’s the Pit?” Jeremiah whispered back.

  “I thought the metaphor was pretty self explanatory,” said Bruno. “It’s where the lowest of the low and the poorest of the poor live. It also happens to be a literal massive hole in the ground

  Delilah enthusiasm continued unabated. “Elminia is a risk. A hundred rolls of the dice, a free spin of the wheel, a peek at the top card, but only for those brave enough to bet on themselves!” She finished her speech with a raised fist, accepting the challenge.

  “Surprised you don’t live here,” said Jeremiah.

  “Oh, no thanks,” said Delilah, crashing back to baseline, “it smells funny here. Architecture is…uninspired? And there’s a truly astonishing number of fires.”

  "Bad food, worse people, great bars, excellent steel," said Allison. "Oh, and huge guard corp! Incredibly well funded.”

  “It’s gotten bigger since I was last here,” said Bruno, his eyes darting about.

  “Never stops growing,” said Delilah, “the empress has been notable in her policies of unregulated expansion and construction.”

  The palace tower stood at the center of the city like a harpoon that piercing the earth. In addition, Jeremiah spotted little nodes of wealth. The hypnotic repetition of dirty, leaning tenements would suddenly coagulate into a fortified street of more sophisticated architecture, tiny islands of generational stability in a sea of roiling ambition.

  “We’re getting close,” said Delilah. She leaned out the window and yelled up to the driver, “We’re headed to the corner of Museus Boulevard and Tornn Avenue.” Bruno glared at her. “What? Oh, umm, please and thank you, driver,” she added. Jeremiah noticed she had forgotten the driver’s name. Then again, he had too.

  “Bruno, run ahead and make sure this isn’t an ambush, yeah?” asked Allison. Bruno was out of the carriage and vanished into the crowd before she could even finish the request.

  “You’re sure this is a good contact?” Jeremiah asked Delilah.

  She looked him square in the eye and nodded. “Absolutely. Or, if it’s a trap, it’s overly elaborate and they deserve to get killed by us.”

  The carriage turned down another street, identical to many of the others. Jeremiah kept felling compelled to craning his neck upwards. Elminia’s buildings all seemed to have settled into a state just shy of collapse.

  Bruno leapt back into the carriage, startling them. “No ambush I can detect. I think we’re in the clear.”

  The carriage bumped to a halt a few minutes later. “Here’s we is, ma’am,” called Feefee from the driver’s seat. “Museus n’ Tornn.”

  “Thank you, erm, driver,” said Delilah. They gathered their belongings and disembarked. With a final wave to Bruno, the carriage and driver merged into the streets of Elminia, becoming one more player in the symphony of noise.

  “What now?” asked Allison.

  “Now, we wait till someone—oh!” A stranger had hooked his arm in Delilah’s, like a couple out for a stroll. He hadn’t managed two steps before Bruno had draped an fraternal arm across the man’s shoulders, an accompanying friend. Allison and Jeremiah had to press their way through the jostling crowd to keep Delilah in their sights.

  The new acquaintance was a human man dressed in finery. He was pontificating about the coal industry, audible even over the hum of the city. Bruno bantered with the man while Delilah was pulled along awkwardly. Jeremiah saw a brief glimmer of metal underneath Bruno’s hand, likely a blade positioned to slip into the man’s neck at a moment’s notice.

  Finally the man altered course and diverted them into a hat shop. “Here we are!” he announced. An old gnome at the counter fastidiously sewed a patch onto a cap. He didn’t acknowledge their arrival.

  “Hello, friend haberdasher!” said the well-dressed man, still tightly arm in arm with Delilah.

  “Hullo,” said the haberdasher.

  “I’m in the market for your finest bonnet, with matching satin wings and a tulip,” the man declared.

  The gnome harrumphed and did not look up from his work as he waved them past the counter and towards the back rooms. Jeremiah noted as they passed that there was a small crossbow under the counter, bolt set and ready to fire.

  A false wall at the back of the shop clicked open, revealing a secret stair. “Off,” said Delilah, shoving the man away as soon as they reached the bottom.

  The man led them down a cramped tunnel. Jeremiah sensed other tunnels branching off into the darkness, a sprawling network beneath Elminia. The only light came from the occasional slits of sunlight that made their way through tiny metal grates over their heads. “Does every city have these?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Bruno. “But Elminia has even more than just your standard tunnels. Even further below these are entire ancient abandoned cities, all linked up together by kobold dens. Used to be the city would send groups down to try and clear out the kobolds, but they gave up ages ago. Now these tunnels are the only ones anyone uses.”

  Their guide made several attempts at conversation as they walked, which were rebuffed. Jeremiah sensed the tension mounting in his friends as they finally approached the conclusion of their journey.

  At last they reached a miniscule door, hardly larger than a cupboard, upon which their guide rapped a series of complex knocks. With a metallic click, the door ground opened to reveal a pair of fully armored elven guards, clad in armor gilded with looping golden embellishments. Both had a spear leveled at the open doorway.

  The guide closed his eyes, his face a mask of concentration, “Six, six, six, six, six, five, five, five, five, five, five, three, three, two, two, two, and that’s it. And you say ‘that’s it’.” The guards raised their spears, and stepped aside. The guide gave Delilah a curt nod and disappeared back the way they’d come.

  Jeremiah followed Delilah through the door and found himself in a hallway utterly unlike the previous. In fact, it reminded him much more of the palace in Dramir.

  “Ah, shit,” he heard Allison say as she emerged behind him.

  “Are we…” Delilah trailed off as she took in the mosaic marble floors, the immense vases holding trees formed a canopy across the ceiling, the portraits depicting royal and noble figures of elven descent. “Oh my gods, we are!”

  “Lady Fortune,” said one of the guards, “you and your entourage are to follow us. You are to follow us at all times. Open no doors, do not stray. If any of you, any one of you,” the guard eyed Bruno, “disobeys an order, all of your lives will be taken immediately. Do you understand?”

  Delilah nodded dutifully. “Yes sir. Can I ask where we’re going?”

  “You are to meet with the Empress Aubrianna. You will be respectful in the presence of the Empress. You will kneel in the presence of the Empress until given permission to stand.”

  “What if I need to—OW!” Before he could finish his remark, the guard behind Bruno pressed a spearpoint between his shoulder blades. The leading guard spun on his heel and closed the distance to Bruno in an instant, his hand darting out to close around Bruno’s neck before he could react.

  The guard strangled Bruno with complete dispassion, squeezing so tightly Bruno’s eyes bulged. Bruno swiped at the guard’s gauntlet, then spasmed as the spear point pressed again into his back. “Please do not make any jests during this meeting,” said the guard. “Nor sarcastic remarks. The Empress is quite busy and we request that you respect her time.”

  Allison moved to break them up, but Delilah grabbed her arm, eyes glued to Bruno’s face, which was turning a blotchy red. Bruno’s attempts to dislodge the guard’s grip became weaker until his eyes fluttered. Only then did the guard release him, letting him fall to sputter and gag on the floor.

  “Your cooperation is assumed and appreciated. Come along,” said the guard. The bruised outlines of armored fingers were already appearing around Bruno’s neck.

  As they followed, Delilah tended to Bruno’s bleary staggering by striking him on the shoulder repeatedly. “What is wrong with you?” she hissed. “We are about to meet Empress Aubrianna! She’s an elector for the crown of Dramir! She voted for King Hector! She’s going to vote for me one day!” Each statement was underlined with another blow.

  “Anyone else not thrilled about this revelation?” Jeremiah asked. He was noticing the lack of people in the palace. They had not passed a single a servant or attendant. It all seemed quite ominous.

  “Not thrilled,” said Allison. That was an understatement—she looked like she was walking to her own execution.

  “No, hush!” said Delilah. “Listen everyone, this is the real deal. If anyone can help us escape the conspiracy in Dramir, it’s Empress Aubrianna! I have no idea what she’s going to ask for, but we need to get her on our side. We are never going to get another chance like this!”

  At her words, Allison’s grave expression only deepened. The knot in Jeremiah’s stomach grew tighter. The secrecy, Allison’s worry, their need to accept this job, whatever it was—it was all making him miss his early days as a necromancer, when he could simply skip town when things got rough. “ But I didn’t have my family then,” he reminded himself. Despite everything, this was better.

  Delilah flitted and fretted over the impending meeting, somehow pacing back and forth even as they walked. They finally stopped before an unassuming door, identical to many they had passed. The guard addressed them once more, his voice never wavering from bland monotone. “Empress Aubrianna awaits through this door. You may take time to compose yourselves. Past this threshold, your lives are in the utmost jeopardy. You have never been closer to death than when you enter this room.”

  Jeremiah and his friends arrayed themselves to enter. Delilah checked briefly with each of them. She held Jeremiah’s eye for a long moment before he nodded his readiness.

  The guard’s eyes flicked once more towards Bruno, then he pushed open the door.