VIII: The Crown and Clasp

I immediately wished I hadn’t.

The familiar not-falling experience was repeated, at a slightly more modest intensity owing to my ability to prepare, mentally and physically, for it.

What I was not prepared for was the rush that followed in its wake. My nostrils filled immediately with a familiar sickly-sweet metallic stench, overlaid with pine and smoke. My eyes took in a blur of human movement and a smear of fabric through their dizzy swirl. My ears were buffeted with pounding and yelling.

And then I took an elbow to my temple.

The shock robbed the strength from my limbs for a moment, and I fell. As I was already sprawled on all fours on the wooden floor, slick and slightly sticky, I didn’t have far to fall. The other side of my head crashed against the floor, and then raw, animal fear seized control of my mind and body. I flailed and rolled, first onto my back and then onto my side, scrambling out of the way with frantic violence, just in time for a large cloaked figure to land hard where I just was. I rose into a fearful defensive crouch, arms in front of my face, and I read the scene.

I was in a small room: floor, four walls, and ceiling were finished pine, with a closed door opposite myself. Lord Hester was rolling to his hands and knees in front of me, having just been knocked down by the two violent-looking men who stood between us and the door. There was a shuttered window behind us, a lumpy bed beneath it, and the floor (and now my robes and the left half of my face and beard) were soaked in fresh blood.

The men wore black, hooded cloaks, though both hoods were thrown back revealing deeply tanned bronze skin and shaven pates. The one on the left had his cloak partially torn, revealing a turquoise-blue tunic of exotic dye and cut beneath. He held a bloody dirk in his left hand. Both had steely, contemptuous gazes and gritted teeth.

I yelped and scrambled back against the bed. I began clambering up onto it, my ultimate objective (before even thinking it all the way through) being the window: the most direct path away from these would-be murderers.

Hester had different ideas. He rolled to his feet with abrupt, martial grace, and he leapt, gods help him, for the man with the dagger.

The man was no fool. He was ready, and he offered his right hand and shoulder to absorb Hester’s charge, his left side away and winding up a mortal thrust of the blade.

But Hester was even more ready. He crashed into the man and grabbed the blocking arm, and as the man attempted to slay him with the dirk, Hester gave a yell that shook the floorboards and wrenched. The man screamed in pain, his right arm bending in anatomically impossible angles in two different places, and his planned thrust of the dirk with the other arm became a feeble, distracted thing, failing to bite into Hester’s coat.

The man’s comrade was shouting something unintelligible, trying to find a way in to the fight. Hester kicked his dance partner’s leg out from under him and twisted his arm again, extracting another scream, and dropped him. By this time, the second man was closing in with a whirl of the black cloak. The fight pivoted and I chanced a glance at the window shutters. As I did so, the first man’s screaming terminated in a gruesome, hair-raising crunch. The shutters were barred, so I threw off the bar and glanced back in time to see Hester begin exchanging blows with the second man.

I tried the shutters and they were stuck. I never did find out why; perhaps the hinges were damaged or perhaps the motion was obstructed somehow. But my mind, in its zealous fear, discarded the window as an escape route immediately. I looked back at the fight: Hester’s midnight blue cloak and coat in a visual tangle with the black of the attacker. The only way out was through that.

Gods help me, I ran up, I grabbed two handfuls of the man’s black cloak, and I pulled with all of my might.

He gave a muffled yell as it caught around his shoulders and neck and pulled him to the ground. Hester was on top of him before I could think of what to do next, and he balled his two fists together above his head and pounded down with one more mighty yell.

The man lay still and bloody.

After a few seconds of breathing, just breathing, Hester and I checked each other for injuries. I would have a nasty bruise on my head, and his left arm had a shallow laceration that would take some time to heal, but it blessedly did not seem to impede his use of the arm too much.

“It’ll make a fine scar,” he quipped.

I looked over at the horror he—we—had just inflicted. Of the first man: one arm and shoulder was contorted in a way that was painful to look upon, for the involuntary imaginings it produced of ones’ own body in a similar configuration. And from the looks of it, Hester had given the same man a blow to the back of the head strong enough to break skin and bone. The other man’s face was pulverized, nose and one cheekbone broken. Both were breathing. The latter’s sounded pained and shallow.

Those scars would not be so nice, I thought.

“Oh. Horwendell…”

I followed Hester’s gaze over to the bed.

It was lumpy not by long years of wear or by uneven stuffing. It was lumpy because beneath the scarlet-stained wool blanket was the source of most of the blood that now decorated this room.

Librariarch Theodric’s body lay on the bed, positioned as if he were sleeping peacefully.

“Oh,” I said.

Hester stood abruptly.

“Where are we?” he demanded, as if a handy squire might be available to provide an answer.

I let it sit for a moment, as if to reinforce that we had no handy squires. Meanwhile, my finer thinking skills slowly emerged from their hiding places somewhere deep within my roiling stomach.

“Say,” I said, “I’m surprised someone hasn’t burst in here yet.”

“That’s what I mean,” Hester said. “Shouldn’t we be in Anteianum? In the city proper? The shouting in this room can have reached no less than a dozen ears in nearby rooms or buildings.”

“I should think.”

“Now not only will we have to explain a fight with two injured ruffians…”

“If they’re not dead by the time we’re doing the explaining. Those are ghastly injuries,” I remarked.

“… but now also a dead high-ranking clergyman. Are you not worried about this, wizard?”

“Apprentice,” I corrected, much to his consternation. “And no. They’re not coming. If nobody came within two minutes…”

Hester relaxed. It was nearly a slump. You could be forgiven for thinking that he was eager for the oncoming trouble. “… It can only mean nobody is coming at all. But how?”

“We shall need to find out shortly,” I said, sounding a note that I hope sounded like agreement to make up for a few bars of being a smart-ass. I looked over the bodies, did a mental calculation, and resigned myself to some conclusions. “Check the door,” I asked Hester. “Hide your injured arm if you can. Determine where we are, besides Anteianum. I’m going to see if I can figure out what happened here.”

“Right.” Hester stood, shifted his cloak a few times to try to hide splotches of blood and cover up his arm, and made for the door.

Meanwhile, I set myself about the task of examining the three bodies—two living, one dead—in this room¹.

I didn’t imagine I would need to cut anything open, but inspecting Theodric—and worse, the men Hester had bested, who looked as though they would live but could perhaps be breathing their last even now—was quite a bit more repellent than any examination I had ever made of any cadaver.

But inspect I did. I began with the two men, as theirs was the more urgent, time-sensitive case. Their injuries were severe. The first’s broken arm would require months of convalescence and expert care to heal properly. The blow to the back of his head was bleeding terribly where Hester’s boot had cut the skin open, but the bone was intact. Even mild head wounds bleed an alarming amount, I recalled—the body provides for abundant pressure and circulation up there. This man would live.

The second man, however… his breathing was steady, but his face was a bloody mess and he would do well to receive care within the day lest he choke on teeth or blood. I still wince to recall the damage Hester had inflicted upon his face.

I was rolling him over to clear his airway when the door opened. “We are at the Crown and Clasp,” Hester said.

“That was fast. Did you…” I replied as I turned to face him… and Sister Gena. She took in the scene with cold, practiced, analytical eyes.

“Explain,” she demanded.

“We were attacked!” I squeaked, right as Hester said “the gods have entrusted us with a life-and-death mission.” I felt a bit undermined.

“We… Hester, what happened?” I said, my voice giving a single tremble as my heart quailed with enough vigor to send tremors through a whole choir.

Hester nodded. “Sister Gena, we followed your instructions and, in the library, we spied Librariarch Theodric fleeing Justina’s wrath. He ran with unnatural—diabolical?—speed, and we were unable to make good the chase. But…” he looked to me, handing this part of the explanation over.

“We asked around a bit. Spoke with apostles, did some supposition and some reading. Theodric hadn’t been seen at the front gate, which meant he had to have made his escape through some sort of secret passage or sally. We found it by the Hall of the League. It wasn’t what we expected. I think it was… a coterminous firmament, but never mind that.”

“We expected a tunnel under the mountain,” Hester clarified, “but we found instead a path through a strange and beautiful… world. One of the exits was here.”

“And then… well, Hester went through first. What happened when you got here?” I asked queasily. I had arrived here with the fight in progress, and I had trusted Hester’s good faith and good judgement without second thought. Well, at the time. By the time we had gotten to this part of the story, the second, third, fourth, and fifth thoughts were running amok in my head.

“When I arrived, this man,” he said, gesturing to the first assailant he had downed, “was standing over the bed, there. The other was leaning by the door. My instincts told me all was wrong. I grasped this man’s shoulder to pull him back so I could see the bed, and I immediately marked a corpse. He bared steel. We struggled. Horwendell arrived through the entrance moments after I, and the two of us prevailed over the two of them.”

“Afterward we identified that body as Theodric’s,” I finished, breathing an enormous sigh of relief within. I had been right to trust Hester.

Sister Gena took a beat to reflect upon this—to correlate the claims, array them alongside the evidence, to judge them. Then, she said, “you did not think to speak to the men?”

Hester shook his head. “I listen to my instincts, which told me that these men were threats. In such cases one must act swiftly and with no forewarning.”

Gena nodded, the movement precise, measured, and measuring. “The scholars of war tend to agree. In any case you seem to have been vindicated, if the man replied to a rough shove on the shoulder with deadly violence.”

“This was the blade he tried to kill me with,” Hester said, offering Gena the dirk. “It was probably Theodric’s doom.”

Gena looked over the blade but did not take it. “We’ll see the body, then.”

“Wait,” I said. “This is a travel house, is it not? Shouldn’t there be about a score of people to have heard what happened?”

Gena’s eyes flickered with interest. “I heard nothing. I was surprised to see Hester come down the stairs. I supposed it meant he had earlier passed through the common room without my notice.”

Hester and I shared a look.

“Nobody heard? There was… a great deal of yelling,” I said.

There was silence between the three of us.

“Count yourself lucky, Howe,” Gena said. “You look like an ogre getting finished with dinner.”

I probably blanched a little at that. “Yes, probably. There’s not much in this room that isn’t soaked in blood. I’ll need some help cleaning up, but first… first I need to know what happened here.”

“Right.” Sister Gena tiptoed over to Theodric, trying to avoid the pooling blood. I returned to work on the two assailants, and Hester searched the room itself.

At the end of our inspection, we shared our findings.

“Stabbed, with that blade, I would say.” Gena said, gesturing to the dirk in Hester’s hand. “Three times in the abdomen and once in the chest. A painful way to go.”

“And not an accident,” I said.

“Certainly not. There might or might not have been a struggle. But what’s more interesting…” Gena opened a small coin purse filled with glittering bronze coins. Each was rimmed and struck with a face in profile with a long, braided beard and a tall crown.

“The God of the East,” Hester muttered.

“Yes. Desheret-Nemes, The Old King. And I expect…” she prompted, looking to me to continue.

“It’s just what you’re thinking, sister. Odds-on they’re easterners themselves. One of them shouted something to the other during the struggle, and the language sounded… right, anyway, judging from names and transliterations I’ve read. The hardest evidence, all told, is their clothes. The dyes used in their tunics originate in the east. Crushed and processed turquoise and rubyroot extract.”

Hester’s eyebrows rose. “Spoken like a true-born merchant’s son.”

“You pick things up when you read as much as I do. And it’s a breathtaking color if you can look past the, uh, bloodstains.”

“So,” Gena said, “You outed Theodric by requesting the Great Work. When Justina noticed, she confronted him or both him and Effelham, and either way, Theodric crumbled and fled. He came here, to his friends…”

“His friends?” “Who killed him?” Hester and I exclaimed in bewildered unison.

“Shush. They’re his employers, or, more likely, his handlers. Why they’d offer to pay him in their coin I’m not sure, but with some hassle he’d be able to get some use out of it. Anyway, he fled to them…”

“Employers?!” It was a little late, but as my hopes she would explain were beginning to expire, the question just burst forth.

“Yes, now let me finish, you clod. He fled to them thinking he could ask them to take him east to safety. He brought some coin back to bribe them or get started on his new life or both. But the easterners saw his haste and knew he would be followed.”

“The order,” Hester said.

Gena’s eyes narrowed. “Only Theodric would have known that; his friends would only have a guess. A good one, however. At any rate, if he’s being tailed, Theodric is an immense liability to them. And if he’s outed, what further use is he? I can’t say exactly how it ended up like this, but you could see how it might.”

“It all seems plausible, but isn’t it a lot of supposition for a few coins and some foreigners?” I wondered.

“I have a question for you, first,” Gena said, rising.

“What’s that?”

“What do you know about the order?” Gena hissed. Her voice was low, concealed, and nearly as deadly as the bloody dirk. I froze in terror.

“A tree told us,” Hester said.

“The firmament! The coterminous firmament!” I shouted in a mad scramble to save the situation. “Theodric fled through it to get here. We had to find it to tail him. There was a man guarding it, who Hester had to, ah, wrestle out of the way. Finely done, that. Quite safe and sporting and he’ll have naught to complain about but a headache. Anyway, the… spirits of the… firmament, the Halls, they called it, seemed close to the Lightbringer and her college. They warned us that we would be followed, given what happened.”

“That’s both ludicrous and impossible for me to believe you’re clever enough to fabricate.”

“Honestly I think I would rather be a good liar in this situation,” I said with a despondent sigh. “We don’t know anything else about this order, other than that the man, who we suppose was one of them, was armed, honorable…”

“And quite well-trained for an apprentice. The master-at-arms of your order is formidable,” Hester added.

“And I shan’t breathe a word more about them,” Gena ruled. “Hester, what did you find?”

“Little. The passage back to the Halls is under the bed, there. Theodric and the easterners may have struggled. There’s a wall panel there by the door that’s splintered; you can see out into the hallway. Can’t see into it, though.”

“What do you mean?” Gena asked.

“I mean,” Hester frowned a bit, not sure how to explain. “There’s no… you can’t see through… come see. Or not, as it were.”

My heart caught in my throat. “I want to see. Hester, make sure the hallway is empty for me; I can’t be seen like this.”

Hester gave the all clear and I leaned out through the door into the hallway.

There was no hole in the wall out here.

“Gena, you can see me through this, yes?” I asked, waving my arm around the undamaged, opaque wall.

“Of course,” she said, from inside the room.

“Come here.”

The reverse was clearly not true, much to Gena’s surprise. I pulled them both back into the room.

“You’re right, they were his handlers.” I said, lobbing out the conclusion my instincts had reached while my mind raced to fill in the logic behind it.

“And?” Gena said with a grain of impatience but a heap of curiosity.

“This,” I began, “is a mirage. The room has had a very… simple, but fine and powerful spell cast upon it. Like an expertly forged spear: simple, but fine. The principle is the simple part: the place—in this case, the room, give or take—should appear as if all is well and peaceful, even if it is not. That’s why nobody heard the thunderously loud fight we had in here, and that’s why the damage to the walls is undetectable from without.”

“And the fine part is that it requires a deft hand, I take it,” Gena said.

“Right. I don’t think these goons could have done it.”

“Why not?” Hester said.

“Call it a hunch. But there are a few dozen court wizards, a dozen apprentices, and another dozen or so known people with the Talent. Certainly there will be a few more sorcerers and hedge magicians running about, but what are the chances that these poor sods, who couldn’t handle Lord Hester in a two-on-one…”

“I didn’t do it alone,” Hester corrected.

“… are arcanists with the skill to cast a mirage?” I continued, reddening a bit. “And had nothing to show for that during a mortal struggle? I rate it unlikely.”

“But whoever is behind this—possibly behind the theft of the Great Work—is such an arcanist with this skill,” Gena said.

“Yes.”

“That’s worrying,” she said.

“Well, yes.”

“It’s worse than you know. Horwendell—apprentice wizard you are—forget, for a moment, that the Doctrina Tempestas is a holy relic. Suppose it were a nicely-bound, heavy codex written by just anyone. If you, my friend, were an arcanist, which you are, and you were paying a librarian to steal for you a book, any book, what sort of book would you steal?”

“I… oh no. Is it?”

“It is. They all are.”

My heart skipped a beat.

“What?” Hester said, not quite following the logic but his voice betraying that he knew we were about to tell him something very bad.

Gena closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “The Doctrina Tempestas, as you know, was written by the Lightbringer herself. The title translates to The Law of the Storm.”

“It’s one of her seven spellbooks,” I told him.

We resolved quickly on our next course of action: we would leave Theodric and his murderers for the order (or the king’s men, if it so happened) and we would not be there when they were discovered. Distressing as this was for all of us, Hester was firm in his belief that he was chosen for this quest and would not allow the order to force him to surrender the mission to them, and Gena seemed to still somehow believe that we might accomplish it where the college’s agents and hierarchy might not. For my part, joining them just seemed natural. It would be a few days before the lunacy of undertaking such a quest without a particularly good reason—or my spellbook—would sink in.

This meant that we would not be following through with Gena’s planned stay at the Crown and Clasp. “Besides the proximity to the scene,” she said, “many apostles frequent here. It’s why I chose it, and probably why Theodric chose it. They’d be thorough about this place for possible witnesses and connections.”

“Well, the street at night makes for a poor hiding spot. In our case, anyway,” I replied. I was hurriedly changing into a plain black tunic Gena had given me after speaking to the inn keep. It smelled unpleasantly of lard soap, but I wasn’t complaining.

“We’ll ask the princess,” Hester said.

“We’ll do what?” Gena asked.

“We’ll ask Princess Lorea for her hospitality.”

“The Princess of Anteianum?”

“Yes. She is the king’s eldest and heir. You know of her, right?”

“Of course. But we’re just going to ask for a room for the night?”

“Well, no, it doesn’t quite go like that. We present ourselves as guests in their realm and ask the courtesy of their hospitality…”

“I don’t think she means the form, really,” I interjected. “We’re just surprised that you think we could ask to stay at the palace and they would say yes.”

“Well, of course she would,” Hester said. “I am the heir to the House Eastmost.”

After we snuck me into the washroom to get the crusting blood (mostly Theodric’s, though possibly some of it belonged to the easterners) off my face, Gena pulled us back into the room. Hester and I stood awkwardly in the middle, watching her watch us from the doorway.

“Now, before we go,” she said, “show me the Halls.”

“I… what?” I said with a grimace. “That’s where the order will be coming from. We can’t go that way.”

“We can. We will.”

Hester had a keen look on his face. “You agree with me, do you not, fair sister, that we cannot have the agents of the college detaining us? They’d spend more effort on your… whatever passes for a court-martial in that place.”

Gena remained still in the doorway, a mass of ice to rival Mount Caelias. “Do not ever waste a word calling me ‘fair’ again, good sir knight. Yes, I am sure a disciplinary committee would be convened. And we would lose the trail on the Great Work. It’s a risk I am willing to take.”

“For what reward?” I asked.

“To know the truth. You tell tall tales of coterminous planes and spirits and divine visions and epic struggles, all conveniently out of my sight. I have seen pretty-boys like the lord here and their lackeys before. I have been trying to determine the truth of this all since we first met. So show me.”

Hester replied immediately. “We’ll show you.” The pang of anxiety, the thought of heading toward the goddess’s mysterious armed enforcers, almost hurt worse than being called a “lackey.” Almost. I eyed both of my companions, and then scraped together what was left of my dignity.

“Hester, you enter first. The natural vanguard and all. Also, I think I know how to explain what to expect to Gena. She can decide whether to enter second or third.”

“Aye,” Hester said, before reaching down and grasping at the mystic bough beneath the bed.

Nothing happened.

“Huh,” he said.

Gena was watching, unmoving, unblinking.

“Gena, perhaps you and I must go first,” I said, suddenly understanding. “Hester will remain here. I’m the key to open the door.”

“Explain,” she said, the word wedge-flat and sharp.

I produced a sign in my mind and in my hand, and the little magical wizard-light shone from the tip of my right index finger. “The spirits allowed us to exit without any special effort, but entry… they must be reactive to magic. That’s how we got in half by accident last time.” I offered her my left hand.

She stared at it, then at me.

“Gena,” I began. “We need to be able to trust each other. Hester and I are what we seem.”

“Are you? Is he?”

Hester leaned cooly against the wall. I’ve come to admire how, in this critical moment, he chose valiantly to remain there, to allow me to finish the fight.

“You see him for what he is. You see me for what I am. You have trusted us, practically speaking, for the last two days, have you not? You’re asking for the proof now not because you need it, but because it presents itself.”

“And why shouldn’t I? Certitude kills.”

“Of course. That is quite wise of you. But if you want to see the proof, you need to trust me. Ironic, hm?”

She sighed and took my hand. “Or take a risk. Suppose I don’t trust you?”

“Suppose you don’t, then,” I said, looking at the little white light on my finger. “Will you believe me when you see the Halls?”

“I couldn’t say. Can we choose what we believe? What we really believe?”

“Perhaps not. Anyhow,” I said, changing the subject. “I will grasp this oak wood that Hester says is to be found under the bed. It is the root of the tree, which may have been fashioned into something like furniture on this end. When I do, we will sense a place on the other end and we will move toward it, as if a hatch has opened and we’re falling down it. But it’s not… down, quite. It will feel disorienting and alarming. When you land, I’ll be nearby. Hopefully just me, and not a disciplinary committee.”

Gena ignored the gag, to my mild disappointment. “I’m ready.”

So we went.

My anxiety to avoid a confrontation with the order—how far were they behind us? One hour? Six?—kept our time in the Halls brief. Gena’s determination to maintain her composure was commendable, though she did look a bit green after the transport. And her eyes—the eyes that saw everything—saw the otherworldly beauty of this other world.

I gave her a minute to recover, and then I discussed with her what little we knew about the Halls: (“a place where thought and will flow freely,” the tree-spirit-gateway to the college, and the unfamiliar sky²).

At the end of it, she gazed back out over the forest.

“And each of these with its roots in the Mundus Medias.”

“I had thought that perhaps only these huge sentinels were the gateways,” I said.

“Simply because they’re smaller? Think.”

“You imply that they, too, are gateways, but smaller? So many ways to this place, and nobody has noticed?”

“Of course.”

“Hmm.”

I took one last look at the strange stars. With that, it was time to go.

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