Many Words

There was a sound like thunder, and Rakel and Two appeared in the safehouse. Rakel tripped and swore, kicked at one of the chunks of stone scattered around her feet, and regretted it instantly. She’d apparently left a pretty fair crater behind her; without access to a telemancer she’d had to settle for a talisman which took a spherical volume and moved it, without regard for what it held.

Rakel set Doorman to cleaning up the debris, and had Two empty its cargo onto the floor. She opened each of the bags in turn and grinned—she’d hit the jackpot. The smallest coinage she found was the one-crown piece, and the rest of the bags were significantly more valuable. She was no good with large sums of money in small pieces, but she was willing to guess that she’d escaped with something in excess of ten thousand crowns, enough to set her up comfortably in the High Quarter for the rest of her life, if she’d been so inclined.

She wasn’t, though, and in any event she’d probably have to give the money back eventually. She told Two to start counting the take, and left a letter for it to take to Kajsa when it finished. They’d have to figure out how to move the money, but that was a problem for another day.

Rakel left the safehouse and started on her way back to her inn. On her mind was the problem for today—how to placate Henrik. He was likely to be hopping mad at her, and not without reason. She’d broken dozens of rules, only some of which she had permission to break, and more than that had committed a very obvious crime using magic, which would no doubt bring the Council and probably even the Chieftains themselves down on henrik, and he certainly had more important things to do.

She half-expected the call before she got to the inn, but she made it without hearing his disembodied voice shouting at her. She shivered at the thought of it; normal as it was for a diviner to study scrying and illusion together, the way a voice so projected sounded simply raised the hairs on the back of her neck. She waited in her room for a few hours and, finally, frowning thoughtfully, decided he had nothing to say. She went downstairs and spent the rest of the day at tafl.

She had just reached her room on her way to bed when she heard Henrik’s voice, echoing all wrong. “What did you do?”

Rakel quickly pulled her door closed and held up her hands. “Look,” she said, “I had very good reaons, and—”

“No,” Henrik cut in. “I want to know what you did. We’re hearing stories about a crazed mage and quite a lot of money spent on a cover-up, but nothing specific and nothing official.”

“Oh.” Rakel scratched at her neck, and was a few moments in answering. “I, uh, robbed a bank.”

“What?!”

Rakel was ready for it, though, and kept talking before Henrik could say more. “If I want to get in fast, I have to draw attention to myself. I’m prepared to give the money back if I have to. Talk to Kajsa and she’ll handle it, only I think the money should officially come from the Magehunters. Better if people don’t ask too many questions about it, right?” No response was forthcoming. She filled the silence. “Is that alright?”

She heard an incredible frostiness in Henrik’s voice. “We’ll talk about this later.”

Rakel waited a minute or two, then shrugged to herself. As her head hit the pillow, her last thought was that she hadn’t expected it to be that easy.

Rakel woke to the sound of her door exploding off its hinges. As splinters rained down around her, she launched herself out of bed and pulled her dagger in the same motion. One tough by the door, she saw, which she could handle, and two crossbows in the hall, which would be a bit more problematic.

Something silvery flew at her head, and she threw herself out of the way. It clanked off the wall and fell right in front of her. She had just enough time to come up with an appropriate word before the talisman triggered and she felt her muscles lock.

One of the crossbowmen leaned down into her field of view. “The boss says nice trick,” he said, tugging a bag over Rakel’s head, “and he’d like to talk to you.”

The square was perhaps one hundred and fifty yards across, divided into rings by broad avenues by lines of trees. The bank stood alone in the middle. A few of the paths ran straight from the outside edge of the square to the bank. Guards patrolled the whole of the park, and others were posted along the spoke paths to stop those without legitimate business from getting too close. Rakel suspected that some of the citizens wandering around in the square were actually the Shadow Brotherhood’s men, but she hadn’t been able to prove it. It was a good thing, she thought, starting down one of the spoke paths, that she wasn’t planning on leaving by the front doors.

The pain from the casino incident had become manageable, and so she had left her armor at the inn. That freed her to wear something which made her look a bit more well-off; although she hadn’t gone so far as to put on a dress, her shirt and trousers were of a fine cloth and a fine cut, which made the pendant she wore look less out of place than it would have otherwise.

It was, of course, not simply an ornament, and it hadn’t always looked like one either. Rakel could recall instances when it had been a fork, a coin, and in one particularly memorable incident, the key to a set of manacles. What it was was a tool: an abjurer and a conjurer, working together, could create a few varieties of talismans which prevented the use of magic in their areas of effect, and Rakel had decided that a tool to defeat those was a nice thing to have. To her knowledge, there weren’t any other ones in the world. As she neared the checkpoint midway along the path, she felt the pendant stop its gentle buzzing against her neck. She reached up and touched it idly. She was inside the bank’s wards now.

One of the guards hailed her. “Might I ask your business?”

Rakel stopped and answered amiably. “I’m here to open an account.”

“With what funds?”

Rakel waved vaguely at Two, which opened one of its hands to reveal a coin pouch. “Three hundred crowns,” she said.

The guard eyed the construct. “I’m not sure,” he said, picking his words with obvious care, “that he’ll be allowed inside.”

“Nonsense,” Rakel replied shortly. “It’s no different than a porter, and I saw you let one of them past on my way here. If there’s nothing else…?”

The guard looked to his fellows for support and found none. Rakel walked past him, and he offered no further challenge. She let out a deep breath once she’d made it a few steps. She reached the steps to the bank, and went up them and through the front doors. Nobody tried to stop her or Two, and just inside she touched her pendant again.

The bank’s wards would of course be talismans, trinkets to which a conjurer had bound a spirit, to which another mage had in turn given directions. It was a significantly less expensive way to protect a place from magic than hiring an abjurer full-time, and no less effective; if the ward broke, it would take some time for a new talisman to be put in place, but any mage working magic powerful enough to bring down the ward would certainly be noticeable enough before he finished to meet his end as a repository for crossbow bolts.

Of course, minor magic in sufficient quantities was also perfectly capable of breaking a ward, and so one quiet afternoon Rakel had asked herself what would happen if she made a talisman that didn’t actually do anything, but did so with great energy. It sufficed to say that she had nearly torn a hole in the world itself, and that, after a very stern lecture from Henrik Gunnarssen, she had spent several weeks fixing the damage to both the real world and the Weave.

Her pendant was a refinement of that first design. Even now the spirit bound to it was vigorously doing nothing, and very shortly—

The pendant buzzed again, and there was a piercing whine. Rakel frowned. An alarm on the ward was an innovation she had not foreseen, but she was committed now. She took two more talismans from her pocket, dropped one, and tightened her fist around the second. The first hit the floor, and Rakel felt her muscles lock in place. The second fired a moment later, and she could move again. Everyone else remained frozen, but the guards outside had probably heard the alarm, and so she didn’t take the time to admire her work.

She hurried to the vault door, placed a third talisman against it, and glanced at the entrance. The first two guards to rush in had been paralyzed as soon as they got within her talisman’s range, but the others, keeping back, were aiming crossbows—

Rakel dove behind a heavy wooden desk, and bolts clattered off the wall behind her. She looked back over at the vault door; it was already starting to soften and sag. “Go!” she shouted at Two.

The construct pushed through the door, dragging taffy-like strands behind it, and Rakel began to count the seconds. More than thirty, she figured, and things might get a bit hairier as the bank’s security brought its own stock of talismans into play. A count of twenty-seven later, Two emerged from the vault, bags of coinage hanging off it, and ran to her side.

Rakel stood and ducked behind the construct as the crossbow bolts flew again. She pulled the last talisman from her pocket, said a few words at it in Elvish, and grinned.

There was a sound like thunder, and before the guards’ eyes, the mage and construct vanished.