Many Words

As Eirik opened the door, the smell of fish hit him like a slap to the face. The Wandering Spirit was normally a fishing vessel, and even though her hold was empty on this trip, she would never be quite free of the scent which revealed her true purpose to anyone with a functioning nose.

Two of the crew slept peacefully in hammocks, their oilskins hanging nearby and still dripping onto the planking, while the rest could be heard moving around on the weather deck. Eirik went up the ladder to find them busily hauling crates up from the dock. He ducked below some ropes which served to turn one of the spars into a makeshift crane, and headed toward a man with graying hair who was directing the effort. “Angling for a fast turnaround, Captain Eriksson?”

The captain spared him a glance and a smile. “Good morning, milord,” he said. “No reason to waste time.”

“I suppose not. Could you spare one of your men to help me with my things? I feel I’ve probably been in the way more than enough.”

“Well, now,” the captain said, giving Eirik a hearty clap on the shoulder, “what kind of host would I be if I made an honored guest work when I have a perfectly good crew for that? Ragnar! Haakon! Below decks with you, and bring the master’s luggage up!”

Eirik pressed his lips together. The captain was only trying to be polite, but deference where he hadn’t earned it had always put Eirik on edge. He knew better than to complain—all it seemed to do was cement his reputation in Mikelsfjord as a friend of the common man. The two sailors returned, carrying Eirik’s chest between them, setting it down and waiting impatiently as Eirik said his farewells to the captain.

Eirik went down the gangway, the sailors grumbling as they lifted his luggage and followed him, and engaged one of the dozens of coaches littering the docks for the rest of the morning, and before long it was rattling away over the pavement. Eirik steadied his breathing, closed his eyes, and then opened them to see the world in an entirely different light.

He had tried to explain it to the captain over dinner a few nights ago. He’d thought his metaphor very clever—he had stretched out a napkin, had the captain drop utensils on it, and held it overhead, but the captain and his officers had gotten bogged down in the details, and Eirik had given up. The next night’s attempt proved more fruitful when he realized that there was a much better way to put it.

“Picture yourself standing on a riverbed,” he had told them. “You can see the rocks, the shoals and sandbars, and the old wrecks. They change the way the water flows, but you can’t see how. Then suppose you looked up toward the sun. The light moves to reflect the currents.

“The riverbed is the world all of us can see—the world where physical things exist, and where I can do this.” He rapped on the table. “The water is magic—invisible unless you know how to look, but an important part of the world, and one which pushes and pulls at us all, even if we don’t realize.”

It had been a good one, Eirik thought to himself. Misleading in a couple of ways, and outright wrong in at least one, the metaphor had nevertheless been near enough to the sailors’ collective experience to get the general point across.

He had tried to explain spirits, then, and clarify a few of the points he felt he hadn’t done justice, and that had gone very badly; the sailors’ protested he’d contradicted himself, and their tone had gone from good-natured curiosity to anger in a matter of minutes. He had decided to quit while he was ahead.

He’d done his best, though. He smiled to himself and turned in his seat to watch the spirits out the coach windows, playing at might-have-beens in the fog.

The sun rose over Vrimderheimdalskaagerholmegvorrighrimdalholm. Its light, diffused to gray by the fog hanging over the city, spilled into the after cabin of the ship Wandering Spirit and fell upon a man of eighteen or twenty, with a tall, slight build and brownish hair, asleep in bed. Eirik Eskilsson stirred, blinked, and covered his eyes as the gentle rocking of the boat brought them, the sun, and an inconvenient gap in the curtains into line. He grumbled and blinked until the spots went away.

He stood and went over to the table where his papers, still disorganized, lay. He made a half-hearted effort to get them into some sort of order, sighed at the magnitude of the task, and settled for stuffing the papers haphazardly in between the cover and first page of a book, which he returned to the chest beneath the table.

From the same chest he took a set of robes, in a style and color that marked him—to those who took the time to learn about such things, anyway—as an aendemancer. It was, unfortunately, Guild business that brought him to the city, and although he would have much rather been relaxing at his father’s estate in Mikelsfjord, the Guild’s bylaws demanded that he and every other aendemancer lacking a matter-of-life-and-death excuse be present for a General Assembly. The last one had been called years before Eirik had joined the Guild, but more alarming than that was the letter Eirik had received from one of his old mentors. It seemed to suggest that there had been a foul-up, the Guild was looking for a scapegoat, and Eirik was on top of the list.

He had some idea why, too. There had been the dead girl out in the west, and the bumps in the road there always were when he’d brought her back. He had collected the fee, given the speech, and done everything else protocol required, but it was out of the ordinary to bring back someone who wasn’t on the lists, and it wasn’t as if Eirik was free of rivals. The fact that he’d been able to perform a resurrection at his age almost certainly had some of his guildmates jealous and others fearing for their own positions. He had always found it funny how quickly people abandoned meritocracy when faced with someone more meritorious.

Of course, it was possible that it was all in his head. The letter had been quite vague, and Eirik would be the first to admit that the conclusions he’d jumped to were based more on hints and implications than any actual facts. On the other hand—

He stopped himself, closing his eyes and rubbing at his temple. He was thinking like an aendemancer again, letting his talent to see past the masks most people wore—past the letter and to the spirit—run wild while he guessed at motivations and relationships and constructed elaborate scenarios which all turned out to be completely wrong.

He smiled ruefully, changed into his robes, and packed and closed his chest. Leave worrying about the future to the diviners, he told himself, and dragged the chest to the middle of the room. Straightening, he stepped out of the cabin to the ship’s lower deck.

On the far side of the bridge, the stone buildings gave way to wooden ones as Rakel returned to the Riverfronts. The buildings here were old growth compared to the area around Rakel’s house, where a fire too big for even an army of heliomancers and hydromancers to control had reduced quite a large area to cinders and ash. They weren’t any smaller, though: where the architects elsewhere had planned for tall buildings, the buildings here had simply grown upward. They had a bit of a slapdash look, the only common element from building to building and even from story to story being the steeply-peaked roof.

Rakel turned to the west, passing Yngvar’s Tavern on her right and, after a few more turns onto progressively narrower streets, reached her destination. On seeing it, she smiled—Henrik had known exactly the sort of place she was looking for. The building was four stories tall, the top two having been added to the original ones much later. A stone chimney ran up one side.

It was far from unique—taverns and inns were an absolute necessity in a city Vrimderheimdalskaagerholmegvorrighrimdalholm’s size—and Rakel figured it probably had a low-rent but cozy feel, a small group of dedicated regulars, all of them tradesmen of one sort or another, and a name with two nouns separated by “and” and prefixed with “the”.

The sign over the door featured a hammer and anvil. One of three, she thought, grinning and going inside. One and a half, she thought. Cozy the cushioned chairs in groups of twos and threes were, but at the center of the room was a lordly tafl board, which added a hint of wealth and sophistication she hadn’t been expecting.

A young woman of about Kajsa’s age—about half a dozen years younger than Rakel—stood behind the bar, and from her Rakel engaged a room for the night and bought a piece of paper. She dashed off a letter to Kajsa, flagged down a messenger in the street to deliver it, and went back inside.

It was a long day, and Rakel spent most of it relaxing at the inn, reflecting how nice it was that there was, for the moment, nobody actively trying to kill her. At lunch, smiths, smelters, and merchants flooded through the doors. Rakel played a few games of tafl and lost a few chieftains betting on others. The flood receded an hour or two later, and Rakel spent the time grilling the innkeepers for useful information under the guise of a pleasant conversation. She was largely unsuccessful.

As afternoon wore on toward evening, two letters arrived for her. The first was from Henrik, which piqued her interest, but all it said was to expect another letter tomorrow. She rolled her eyes at it, figuring he’d had a laugh at the reaction he would’ve known he’d get, and set it aside.

The next was from Kajsa, and much more interesting. Rakel skimmed it briefly, and was delighted at the head for subterfuge the girl apparently had. “Hidden depths,” she mused. She refolded the letter neatly and tucked it into a pocket.

Travelers were beginning to arrive for the night, and presently the tavern was filled with men and the occasional woman, all eating, talking, and laughing. One pulled out a deck of cards, and Rakel’s eyes lit up. She had been a mediocre student at the School of Conjurers, but a fearsome gambler. With a light heart she stood and went to win her money back.

Henrik said nothing more, and his manner made it clear that the meeting was over. Rakel stood and fell in behind the other mages, and lingered by the door as the rest filed out. Henrik raised an eyebrow at her.

“More to say?” he asked.

“A few details,” she said. “First—they have diviners too, don’t they?”

Henrik answered reluctantly. “We can’t say for sure, but the fact that we can see so little does seem to suggest forces working against us actively.” Before she could ask, he added, “We’ll be doing everything we can to help you escape notice, of course.”

“Mildly comforting,” Rakel said brightly. “You’ll be in contact with us, too, I hope. Second—Kajsa knows I’m back in the city, and that something’s going on.” Henrik gave her a questioning look. “My assistant. I trust her, but I don’t know if I should tell her anything more than what I’m doing. That won’t be a problem?”

“Telling her what you’re doing shouldn’t be a problem,” Henrik said. “I’d warn against saying anything about what we’ve foreseen, though.”

“That’s probably for the best anyway. Third—if I’m going to be working under a false name I don’t want to be anywhere near places people might recognize me. Know anywhere I could stay for a few days while you set things up?”

“There’s an inn a mile or so from Yngvar’s,” Henrik said, and went on to give detailed directions. “Is that all?”

“There is one more thing,” said Rakel. “Will I be compensated for my expenses?”

“Of all the people we’ve brought in to work on this, you’re the least in need of financial help,” Henrik reproached.

“That is a no, right?” Rakel said. Henrik gave her a look, and in reply she spread her hands and smiled. “Worth a try.”

Henrik shook his head. “We’ll be in touch.”

Rakel found her own way out of the building and a guard waiting to escort her out of the compound. She saw no reason to return home, and to get to the inn it would be quickest to cut through the High Quarter to the Bridge of the Five. The Conjurers’ Guild house was well out of the way, and so she was no more likely to be recognized here than in the Riverfronts. She started off along the wide boulevards and let her mind work.

The conference had been very short. More than anything that was what had her worried. Henrik enjoyed the sound of his own voice, and his being unable to draw it out any longer suggested to Rakel that he had, in fact, laid it all on the table. She double-timed past the Guild of Heliomancers, looking up at every sound from the massive edifice and hoping that none of them presaged a gout of flame and the attendant cloud of ash. Judging by the thinness of the layer on the street, one was overdue. Luckily, she made it past, and her mind turned to preparations. She’d send a letter to Kajsa and have a few things sent—a mail shirt, leather gauntlets, a construct. She added talismans to her list, and made a note to have Kajsa see what she could do about some protection from divinations. A copy of the Code, too—she had never really read the section that said what she was allowed to do on the other side of the law.

There was the matter of a false identity, but that was the sort of thing Henrik would take care of. She crossed the Bridge of the Five and kicked a rock down into the Heimdal, turning her thoughts toward the more minor things she’d need to do. No less important, though, in the long run—if there was one thing her masters at the School of Conjurers had pounded into her head, it was that she had no excuse for being caught without the right tools.