Many Words

Two’s body lay disassembled on the floor, and its head sat atop a nearby crate, watching Rakel work. She sat cross-legged by Two’s knees, a shin piece and a thigh piece in her lap. Her eyes were closed, hands resting on each piece, and she murmured to herself. Under her hands the metal slowly shifted, and a few minutes later the knee joint had knit itself back together. Rakel moved it carefully through its full range of motion, and, satisfied, pushed it away.

She scooted over to start on the other leg and let the magic flow. She watched the metal move with a painful lack of speed, willing herself not to lose patience without much success. She could have had Two together in five minutes if she didn’t have other magic to work today; taking Two slowly was disproportionately easier on the Weave than taking it fast. She toiled onward, keeping the part of her mind that housed her growing desire to finish the rest with a snap of her fingers strictly separate from the part of her mind working the magic.

Despite its leisurely pace the work was still exhausting, and when Rakel slotted Two’s head back into place at midday, she did so with a long yawn. She put her hands on the neck joint and focused, and a handful of heartbeats later she gave the head a tug to make sure it wasn’t going anywhere. There was one more step, though; Kajsa would have had to fiddle with the truebinding if she didn’t want Two’s bound spirit flinging pieces of the construct around the shop. Rakel stretched out her senses and felt it, the old familiar spirit straining against the bars of its prison. Rakel worked slowly and carefully to expand the cage; it was one of the few things she could claim to be conscientious about. Once, she had witnessed a truebound spirit make an uncontrolled escape. The crater was still there, and the conjurer wasn’t.

She wiped away the sweat that stood out on her brow, gave her work one final once-over, and let Two’s spirit into the newly expanded cage. A few seconds passed, and Rakel let out a breath. It wasn’t as if she’d ever pay so little attention as to get it wrong, but it never hurt to be cautious.

Two stood up, radiating a faint air of malevolence. Rakel paid it no mind. Every truebind went that way until the spirit probed its prison to the extent that it could and resigned itself to servitude. Two had existed in one form or another for almost a decade now, and quickly lost heart. Rakel sent it to the other room while she started her second project.

Rakel was, in many ways, a nontraditional conjurer. She chalked it up to getting all the practicality her fellows at the Guild seemed to lack. It was fair to stereotype them thusly: a conjurer’s entire life consisted of producing talismans for the Guild to sell, making weapons and armor for themselves, building a couple of constructs, and then taking them on glorious charges into armies of hiisi and falling back only when their constructs were so clogged with gore they could barely swing a weaponized arm. It was a simple life, though not, Rakel would readily admit, one without its attractions. It was also very dangerous, and Rakel had had the luck to train under a conjurer with a healthy sense of self-preservation. He had pointed out that even if a conjurer could account for ten thousand hiisi before, inevitably, he stayed in the fight for a moment too long, found his retreat cut off, and was himself cut down by the savage brutes, he wouldn’t have come close to paying for his training. In short, a dead hero is still dead.

It was a point Rakel had taken to heart, and, when working for the army, she had always fought with her brain first and her martial skill as a last resort. Along the line she’d had an epiphany about her talents: they weren’t an end but a means, nothing more than a way to make tools which could keep her alive.

By contrast, most conjurers saw their creations as something more than that; many of them treated their constructs as friends, or at the very least comrades in arms. Either way, a construct was something owed great respect, and building one was an act of great gravity.

Smiling cheerfully, Rakel wondered if they would be more shocked that she’d turned the abomination before her into a construct, or that she had such a menial task for it in mind. It was a creature of boards, nailed and lashed together into a very roughly humanoid shape, one arm tipped by a claw just small enough to grasp the handle Rakel had nailed to the bar across the door, and the other a massive unbalanced club of a limb that probably outweighed Rakel herself.

“Welcome to the land of the living, Doorman,” she said.

Rakel irritably refolded Henrik’s letter and stuffed it back into the envelope. The man had a finely-tuned ability to get under her skin, and it seemed to Rakel that he never missed a chance to use it. She reflected that prescience was quite the advantage when it came to being deliberately inflammatory, and then felt guilty for the thought. Henrik would have been quite rightfully offended if he’d heard her voice it; it was a sure thing he had less petty things to focus his talent on.

He was being deliberately inflammatory, though. Rakel had a theory that something about divining inspired a measure of miscreancy in its practitioners, and if Henrik’s measure was an infuriating capacity for writing annoying letters, Rakel could handle it. It was certainly better than going around robbing banks, wrecking families, or dreaming up inventive new ways to murder people, just to name a few of the instances of which she had heard.

She put those particular unpleasant memories back in their box. The Hammer and Anvil’s tavern was still empty but for Rakel, a yawning innkeeper, and the smell of frying ham. Rakel sipped at her tea. Even with the early start, it was going to be a long day.

Twenty minutes later, Rakel hit the road with a breakfast under her belt and the second part of Kajsa’s plan ahead. Kajsa had been busy after Rakel left, reasoning quite correctly that a bolt hole was an asset when working undercover. She had also reasoned that anonymity was a good quality for such a place, and had sent the constructs out to find one.

Find one they had. It was a boarding house owned by a man who skirted the boundary between legitimate and shady, if willingness to take a large, upfront payment from an anonymous source was any indication. Kajsa had paid for a pair of rooms opening onto a back alley, about an hour’s walk south of the Hammer and Anvil.

That had been a bit of luck. It was only a mile or two from Rakel’s assigned area, and while she didn’t mind a long walk, a shorter one was almost always better, provided it went to the same place.

Rakel gave the landlord a signed letter from Kajsa and got her key, and then went around to her door. The lock was new and, as far as Rakel could tell, quite a formidable one. As she swung the door open she saw it had a heavy bar as well. She looked at it speculatively, an idea forming, and grinned, heading inside.

The rooms were as Kajsa had described—each about fifteen feet on the sides, windowless, unfurnished, and dusty. Spacious, compared to most city lodgings, but otherwise, Rakel thought, a thoroughly unpleasant place to live. Fortunately that wasn’t the plan. She let the door stand open and looked over the neatly-arranged things covering the floor.

There were quite a number of them: two extra swords, a mail coat, and a box of talismans, to start, but Kajsa hadn’t stopped there. Rakel saw a box of candles, two lamps, a flint and steel, a bedroll, boots, snowshoes, and a parka, writing paper, and a wardrobe’s worth of clothing among the rest of it. Two must have had to make a few trips, she mused, and Kajsa had thought of everything.

Speaking of Two— but, when Rakel looked out the door, it hadn’t arrived yet. She had some other things to do to pass the time, and set about them. She lit the lamps, hanging one in each room, and began to move her things into the back. When she finished, she locked the door behind her and set out toward the last market square she’d passed on her way to the boarding house. A few purchases later, she had a coil of good strong rope over one shoulder, a hammer and a bag of nails in her hands, and a boy following her with a wheelbarrow full of arm-length planks.

She had him empty the barrow at the mouth of her alley, and shrugged expressively when he asked about the construct standing a few yards away with a cartload of crates. She tipped the boy a handful of chieftains, and with an impish look and a half bow he was off. Rakel waited until he turned a corner and approached the construct. It wasn’t one of hers or one of Kajsa’s, but it held out a note as she drew near.

“Excellent,” said Rakel, reading over it. It was what she had been expecting; Kajsa must have borrowed the construct for the day. “Are you able to help me move all this inside?”

The construct responded by effortlessly lifting one of the man-sized crates, and a few minutes later they were all inside. The construct had helped with the lumber while Rakel had signed the note “Rakel Andersdottir”, and added, “Received. Regards to Kajsa Asgeirsdottir” below her name.

That done, she gave the note back to the construct and sent it away. She fetched a prybar from the back and levered the top off of one of the crates. From it she lifted Two’s head, smiling at it and saying, “Hello again.”

She set it aside and got to work.