Re: The Vivacious Deadlock: S3G6: Round Three: The Sable Masque
11-20-2012, 01:54 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by SleepingOrange.
In the half-darkness of his twilit den, Samuel sighed, more out of habit than any particular present annoyance. His fingers flew over the keyboard in a practiced, if awkward, dance; rather than his usual hobbyist drabbles or analyses on the efficiency of an injection tool, his typing was the beginnings of an electronic manhunt. It had been days, and Jake clearly had no intention *of contacting him, wanted nothing to do with all this. He'd been right, anyway; Norm would have been a better choice, even if he'd be harder to find. It was hard to blame Jake for staying out of it; he didn't have the damn book glowering over his shoulder all the time, didn't have to keep acknowledging that the horrible events they'd set in motion hadn't been stopped. Sam had done his best to put it out of his mind while he waited hopefully to hear that he'd have an ally in Jake after all, but when a few new sentences wrote themselves every day -- never while he was watching, though, they always showed up between closing the book and opening it -- it was hard to keep calm. Especially when those sentences seemed to be building to another destructive head.
And so it had to be Norm. It shouldn't be too hard; he hadn't gone into hiding the way Alexis had, he'd just drifted off. Hell, if he was still as insistent as he had been that they couldn't just stop, he'd have made himself easy to find, right?
He hadn't, particularly, but it turned out not to matter. Most of the results were scattered and about several different people; there was one who was a doctor, one who was in high school, one who ran a restaurant, none of whom were important. Things looked like they were going to drag on and on until he found exactly the right combination of keywords -- assuming Norm hadn't become unlisted or gone off the grid entirely -- until the search engine helpfully popped up with News Results for Norman O'Malley, when everything became abundantly, chillingly clear.
Local Man Killed in Rare Shooting
Suspect Detained in Gun Crime Investigation
Sam bit his lip as he clicked the links, feeling ashamed even as he hoped it was the restaurateur or the doctor who had met their fate at the end of a gun. No amount of hope could change the reality, though, and the picture of the victim – thankfully one taken from before the shooting – confirmed his worst fears. Another one of his friends had died. Another one of the only people who could help him atone for his sins and stop the catastrophe that continued even now was gone. Even thinking Macy’s name still made him sick after all these years, to say nothing of remembering her face or her scream as the building had been destroyed. And now it was continuing. And now people were dying again.
But, surely… It had to be a coincidence, right? Norm was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, or had gotten mixed up in something dangerous but mundane. It’s not as though Sam had seen any signs of realities overlapping, any indication other than the book that the battle had any influence here. It had to be a coincidence.
That Nalzaki had been the last one to die and now their creator had been murdered.
Sam kept reading. The first article didn’t mention much of anything about the suspect, merely that one had been detained. Kept talking about crime statistics and how to protect YOUR family and a bunch of sensationalist bullshit, but didn’t say anything useful. The second one was briefer, more succinct, and named the suspect as “an unidentified young woman who seemed confused and terrified when police arrested her”; she’d apparently destroyed her own apartment and may have been in the process of killing herself when she’d been found. Arrested and put on suicide watch pending a mental health assessment.
Knowing even as he thought it that it was the stupidest thing he’d ever thought, Sam murmured “Jennie.”; they’d arrested Jennie, who was dead and killing people and writing a book. He’d been to her funeral and it couldn’t be her, it was a coincidence and he was being crazy. The book had her handwriting in it and his and everyone else’s, so was it really so hard to believe that even more bizarre things were happening? The battles were no strangers to resurrection. But… This was all real.
Forget finding the rest of them. He had to find her. Had to find out.
---
“… But the most dangerous one calls herself Cascala,” Klendel was concluding. Misinformation and half-truths and manipulation were all fine and good to a point – especially if he planned to pull the rug out from under the Kings as soon as he had them where he wanted them – but Cascala of all the contestants he’d seen seemed to have the most capacity to ruin his plans if left unchecked. Assuming she wasn’t still in whatever trance had made her so strange in the last round, at least; even then, though… Better to be certain. And what better way than to have someone else do all the work for him?
---
“The most dangerous one…” There was a short pause. “Calls himself Sir Cedric.” Of the three she’d was certain had survived, it was probably accurate. If the hydra had lived, she was probably wasting a huge opportunity, but Harmon and the boy were gnats, one of whom had simply gotten lucky; if the hydra had died, than Cedric was almost certainly more of a threat than Phere or the shadow. Targeting him was the safest bet, and there was no sense dwelling on what-ifs.
“He’s an enormous, muscular man. Heavily armored, carries a sword. Seems to favor Heat, but his magic is clumsy and amateur. Bearded, overconfident, blond. May be very dangerous at close range, but I believe he will be an easy kill if you keep your distance. He is not likely to have the Sight to detect a curse or missile, nor the skill to neutralize it.”
Several of the Tea Clubbers gave her blank looks. “That’s all well and good,” one of them eventually muttered. “But what’s his signature like?”
“I suspect,” Cascala sniffed disapprovingly, “He is probably illiterate.”
The speaker narrowed his eyes and mouthed the last few of her words incomprehendingly. “Illi– No! His thaumatological signature! Tell me about his etheric warping.” He gave a look communicating his increasing doubt to the baron.
“Do I look like an impotent diviner?” She sneered, hastily quashing the internal rejoinder that if she had been then most of her problems would have been solved by now.
“The ways of outsiders never cease to surprise me,” smiled the baron. “It will be harder to find him without a signature to trace, but I can contact our other cells, and we can hijack some of the–“
“I don’t care how you do it. Just find and eliminate him, or if that proves too difficult for the whole cult of you, herd him to me so I can do it myself.”
“How… Pragmatic. Businesslike, even. Alright, you have a deal. When we’ve taken care of your little interloper, you’ll–“
“Save it. When the warlord is dead, we can discuss what exactly you need me to do for your little anarchy party. The longer we wait, the more likely he is to become entrenched or difficult to find. After we’ve killed him, I’ll have all the time in your world to play regicide or revolution or whatever it is you want.”
You couldn’t have convinced her of it without a mirror, but Cascala’s smirk wasn’t nearly so well hidden as she believed it to be.
“Mmm. I suppose you have a point. We’ll get started looking, and Alonzo will take you to–“
Without warning, a woman in the corner who hadn’t said a word since Cascala had arrived slammed her eyes open.
“I’ve lost surveillance outside.”
---
“She’s a powerful mage. Focuses on weather and ice magic, and seems pretty creative with it.”
“A Talent we can deal with.”
“Regardless of her grade.”
“Does she have any skills that make her dangerous without her magic?”
Not that I’ve seen, but… Still, it was better to sound confident. “No. I don’t think she’s ever needed anything else. I mean it, I can’t overstate how powerful she is with the stuff.” That music thing she did in the opera house must have been her magic in that world. There’s no other reasonable explanation. Don’t overthink things.
“Very well.”
“Then she shall be dealt with like the rest of them.”
“Swiftly.”
---
For the first time since she met him, the baron’s face wasn’t suffused with a smile, knowing, forced, or otherwise.
“Severed or dampened?” He barked.
“Dampened.”
“Dammit! This shouldn’t be happening, but the Men are here and they mean business.”
One of the Clubbers shrank against the wall. “You said you were going to throw them off the trail!”
“I should have. I did! And even if I didn’t, as far as they should know we’re only notable for our incendiaries experts. They shouldn’t have spared dampeners unless someone’s been feeding them information.”
“What do we–“
Herrastel shook himself, knowing he didn’t have time to dwell on the whys. “Everyone, draw in as much ambient as you can. Even tool users, the rest of us can use whatever you can hold.”
Cascala felt for her staff in its artfully-concealed sling on her back. It had a fair amount of mana stored, but she was no artificer. It just gathered it on its own, and she didn’t really have the expertise to condense raw magic. It’d have to do; she could probably leech off one of her new disposable friends if it came down to it.
“Angela, get out of here before the ways close; try to make it to Emerald, you know who to talk to there. Alonzo, stay close to the outsider. I don’t know what the dampeners will do to her, and I need you ready to get her out of here if things go wrong. Grigori–“
Cascala never found out what Grigori was supposed to do; the baron’s next words were downed out by the sound of the wall she’d come in through shaking itself apart. As the barrier fell, raining stone and statues and cloth that seemed to disintegrate before they hit the ground, Cascala felt a wave of numbness wash over her. It was a bit like being back on the beach at Santa Nada, but instead of a total absence of magic, it was simply actively pushed away from her. She could feel it, distant but totally unreachable; she could also feel the reassuring bubble of it at her back, and vaguely sense it in the silvery veils several of the Clubbers had drawn around themselves. She drew her staff and stepped forward; nothing else seemed to be happening to her, “outsider” or not.
Outside – or what would have been outside if the room hadn’t been forcibly joined with the corridor – there was a group of lanky, domino-masked humanoids forming a semicircle in front of a smaller cluster of grey-robed men. Despite the masked figures’ weapons and obvious power, Cascala felt her attention drawn to the grey people; they were gagged and blindfolded and their legs shackled, only their arms free to move and their ears free to perceive. She knew instinctively that they were the ones holding back the familiar tides of magic. They had to be killed.
Before she could make any kind of start on their extermination, though, the masked man in front lowered the large, two-handed contraption it was holding and the ones flanking it stepped forward; they brandished a pair of pistollike implements and sighted at two of the closest Clubbers: the swan-woman tried to raise a shimmering barrier of light, but the robed men gestured in tandem and her shield crumbled instants before a darkly-crackling steel dart struck her in the gut, leaving her limp and twitching; Herrastel was somewhat luckier, his eyes dilating as the weapon fired and his hand moving inhumanly fast to pluck the dart out of the air and toss it aside, but everyone could hear the sound of twanging cartilage and snapping bone as he did. Judging from the limp way his arm hung after the interception, his fingers hadn’t been the only victims of whatever had let him snatch the bolt.
Behind them, Cascala was already preparing a spell; she intended to simply transmute all the vapor in the corridor into essential acid, reasoning that it should be effective against however organic or unliving the things she faced were. Even as she began shaping the mana, she felt unseeing eyes focus on her; hands raised and bade her magic suppress itself, and she felt it twist and pervert in her grasp. The spell eventually bent too far back on itself and snapped, striking her with the energy she’d tried to put into it before dissipating. She stumbled backwards, trying to catch her breath, feeling as though her lungs were filling with blood. No-one had ever managed to counter her before. Never. Was this how it always felt? How had they managed to suppress a Grand Magus?
Around her, the fight continued unabated, but she was only aware of it in the vaguest sense. The masked men were doing something, the anarchists were doing something, people were falling, there might have been explosions. There might not. Cascala’s eyes rolled back in her head and she struggled to stay standing. After an amount of time she could never hope to measure, she heard a voice call out nearby, sounding as though it was coming through fathoms of murky water.
“Alonzo, get her out of here! Everyone else, scatter! There are too many, we can’t handle this!”
She felt a hand grab her wrist and heard a clicking noise. She didn’t feel much else but a pulling sensation for several seconds until she was suffused with cold; when that cleared, she felt an inrush of the glut of mana this world held, and with it an inrush of lucidity. Her eyes opened, and she found herself being half-lead, half-dragged through another sumptuous hallway. The man she supposed was Alonzo was pulling her forward, so fast she struggled to keep up even fully conscious. They sprinted towards a corner, but as Cascala prepared to bank right he just kept going straight, gripping what looked like an ornate pocket watch in his other hand. She tried to pull away but he held her tight and leaped, yanking her into the air with him and pressing a button on the device.
She braced to collide with the wall, but was shocked to find herself merely phasing through the with a brief chilly sensation. Alonzo released the button after they were clear but before they landed, then kept running without missing a stride. Cascala on the other hand hadn’t been ready to land, hadn’t even been ready for the jump in the first place, and tangled her feet in the ridiculously extravagant gown she’d been put in. She crashed to the ground, pain blossoming in her ankle in what she prayed was just a short-lived sprain, and Alonzo collapsed with her.
He made as though to push himself back up, but crumpled, panting. “That’s probably far enough anyway. For the moment.”
Cascala struggled into a sitting position, the dress surprisingly compliant with the effort. A number of questions swam through her still-reeling mind, but one fought its way to the fore, demanding an answer before anything else.
“How did you do that? Get us out of there with those… damper. Things.”
The unsaid half of the question hung in the air. “How did you do that when I couldn’t?”
The man waved his trinket and groaned, propping himself against a wall. “Oh, this isn’t magic.”
She narrowed her eyes dangerously. “We moved through solid stone like a ghost. Of course it’s magic. Explain yourself.”
Alonzo took a drag on a colorful rollup he produced from a sleeve, exhaling with relief as the world went comfortingly fractal. “Nah, it’s just a tunneler. Exploits some fun quirks of physics and probability, but it doesn’t let you do anything impossible. I mean, it uses a little magic to find where in infinity the improbable bit is and bring it where you need it, but… That’s not much of a spell, and it’s got its own battery for that. Too fast to cancel and doesn’t use ambient power.”
Almost nothing about that was a satisfying answer to Cascala, but the part she mentally filed away was “It’s a baroque sort of wand. You can’t counter a wand, it’s automatic.”
Instead, she said “Now what?
A shrug. “Same as before, yeah? Nothing’s really changed. I’ve got to get you where you’re going, and the plan should move forward like you discussed. We’ll get you your information or your head on a platter either way.”
“How will–“
“Someone’ll contact us when they’ve got something to say. It’ll just be a little harder now that we’re being followed. For now, we just need to keep moving. Tireless Men aren’t too easy to keep ahead of.”
Without another word, he grabbed her wrist and the tunneler, and the pair of them fell through the floor.
---
Elsewhere, after a fair bit of scurrying of his own, Baron Herrastel gazed dispassionately down at the flayed and pinned flesh of his arm.
“Only three dead. Not bad for a Tireless raid of that size. Could have been a lot worse.”
The needle-fingered woman delicately rearranging his sinews and bones gave a facial sigh. “Could have gone much better. We usually have something to gain from an encounter with those things.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I rather think we did! Don’t you? The way I see it, we’ve learned something big. The Tea Club is barely a blip on anyone’s radar, as closely as we’ve held our cards. But today we were attacked by one of the biggest and best-armed Tireless raids I’ve seen. That means either we’ve got someone telling secrets to people in high places, or – and this one’s my favorite theory – something about that outsider woman has the Kings or the Stones very scared. Scared to devote a lot of resources to tracking her, even during the coronation party. Scared enough to want to detain her, too. Did you see? They didn’t break out the lethals until she was gone.”
“Maybe so.”
“I’m willing to bet on it. A lot more than three lives, too.”
There was a busy silence as the woman continue to refit his arm. Eventually, she broke it.
“You suppose she really thinks we believe her?”
He shrugged with one arm. “I doubt it matters one way or another. I’ve got Alonzo putting her somewhere she’ll end up doing what we want anyway.” The silence returned for a few beats, then: “But, yes, I think she does.”
“She seems very trusting for a wildly destructive outsider.”
“Doesn’t she, though?”
“What about the man she’s looking for?”
“Eh, it might be helpful information to have if we ever need to twist her arm down the line. I made my recommendation to Felliri to send a couple of spare physiognomists off looking for him, keep him out of her way if they find her. It’s his decision now.”
“Hmm.”
“Don’t hmm at me like that. As long as she thinks we’ve got what she wants, it’ll be easy to make her disrupt things. Not too canny, that one. Almost too easy to lead.”
“Well, John, you may be right. I’ve just been through a few too many coronations to really believe this changes enough. But… Maybe you’re right. Maybe.”
In the half-darkness of his twilit den, Samuel sighed, more out of habit than any particular present annoyance. His fingers flew over the keyboard in a practiced, if awkward, dance; rather than his usual hobbyist drabbles or analyses on the efficiency of an injection tool, his typing was the beginnings of an electronic manhunt. It had been days, and Jake clearly had no intention *of contacting him, wanted nothing to do with all this. He'd been right, anyway; Norm would have been a better choice, even if he'd be harder to find. It was hard to blame Jake for staying out of it; he didn't have the damn book glowering over his shoulder all the time, didn't have to keep acknowledging that the horrible events they'd set in motion hadn't been stopped. Sam had done his best to put it out of his mind while he waited hopefully to hear that he'd have an ally in Jake after all, but when a few new sentences wrote themselves every day -- never while he was watching, though, they always showed up between closing the book and opening it -- it was hard to keep calm. Especially when those sentences seemed to be building to another destructive head.
And so it had to be Norm. It shouldn't be too hard; he hadn't gone into hiding the way Alexis had, he'd just drifted off. Hell, if he was still as insistent as he had been that they couldn't just stop, he'd have made himself easy to find, right?
He hadn't, particularly, but it turned out not to matter. Most of the results were scattered and about several different people; there was one who was a doctor, one who was in high school, one who ran a restaurant, none of whom were important. Things looked like they were going to drag on and on until he found exactly the right combination of keywords -- assuming Norm hadn't become unlisted or gone off the grid entirely -- until the search engine helpfully popped up with News Results for Norman O'Malley, when everything became abundantly, chillingly clear.
Local Man Killed in Rare Shooting
Suspect Detained in Gun Crime Investigation
Sam bit his lip as he clicked the links, feeling ashamed even as he hoped it was the restaurateur or the doctor who had met their fate at the end of a gun. No amount of hope could change the reality, though, and the picture of the victim – thankfully one taken from before the shooting – confirmed his worst fears. Another one of his friends had died. Another one of the only people who could help him atone for his sins and stop the catastrophe that continued even now was gone. Even thinking Macy’s name still made him sick after all these years, to say nothing of remembering her face or her scream as the building had been destroyed. And now it was continuing. And now people were dying again.
But, surely… It had to be a coincidence, right? Norm was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, or had gotten mixed up in something dangerous but mundane. It’s not as though Sam had seen any signs of realities overlapping, any indication other than the book that the battle had any influence here. It had to be a coincidence.
That Nalzaki had been the last one to die and now their creator had been murdered.
Sam kept reading. The first article didn’t mention much of anything about the suspect, merely that one had been detained. Kept talking about crime statistics and how to protect YOUR family and a bunch of sensationalist bullshit, but didn’t say anything useful. The second one was briefer, more succinct, and named the suspect as “an unidentified young woman who seemed confused and terrified when police arrested her”; she’d apparently destroyed her own apartment and may have been in the process of killing herself when she’d been found. Arrested and put on suicide watch pending a mental health assessment.
Knowing even as he thought it that it was the stupidest thing he’d ever thought, Sam murmured “Jennie.”; they’d arrested Jennie, who was dead and killing people and writing a book. He’d been to her funeral and it couldn’t be her, it was a coincidence and he was being crazy. The book had her handwriting in it and his and everyone else’s, so was it really so hard to believe that even more bizarre things were happening? The battles were no strangers to resurrection. But… This was all real.
Forget finding the rest of them. He had to find her. Had to find out.
---
“… But the most dangerous one calls herself Cascala,” Klendel was concluding. Misinformation and half-truths and manipulation were all fine and good to a point – especially if he planned to pull the rug out from under the Kings as soon as he had them where he wanted them – but Cascala of all the contestants he’d seen seemed to have the most capacity to ruin his plans if left unchecked. Assuming she wasn’t still in whatever trance had made her so strange in the last round, at least; even then, though… Better to be certain. And what better way than to have someone else do all the work for him?
---
“The most dangerous one…” There was a short pause. “Calls himself Sir Cedric.” Of the three she’d was certain had survived, it was probably accurate. If the hydra had lived, she was probably wasting a huge opportunity, but Harmon and the boy were gnats, one of whom had simply gotten lucky; if the hydra had died, than Cedric was almost certainly more of a threat than Phere or the shadow. Targeting him was the safest bet, and there was no sense dwelling on what-ifs.
“He’s an enormous, muscular man. Heavily armored, carries a sword. Seems to favor Heat, but his magic is clumsy and amateur. Bearded, overconfident, blond. May be very dangerous at close range, but I believe he will be an easy kill if you keep your distance. He is not likely to have the Sight to detect a curse or missile, nor the skill to neutralize it.”
Several of the Tea Clubbers gave her blank looks. “That’s all well and good,” one of them eventually muttered. “But what’s his signature like?”
“I suspect,” Cascala sniffed disapprovingly, “He is probably illiterate.”
The speaker narrowed his eyes and mouthed the last few of her words incomprehendingly. “Illi– No! His thaumatological signature! Tell me about his etheric warping.” He gave a look communicating his increasing doubt to the baron.
“Do I look like an impotent diviner?” She sneered, hastily quashing the internal rejoinder that if she had been then most of her problems would have been solved by now.
“The ways of outsiders never cease to surprise me,” smiled the baron. “It will be harder to find him without a signature to trace, but I can contact our other cells, and we can hijack some of the–“
“I don’t care how you do it. Just find and eliminate him, or if that proves too difficult for the whole cult of you, herd him to me so I can do it myself.”
“How… Pragmatic. Businesslike, even. Alright, you have a deal. When we’ve taken care of your little interloper, you’ll–“
“Save it. When the warlord is dead, we can discuss what exactly you need me to do for your little anarchy party. The longer we wait, the more likely he is to become entrenched or difficult to find. After we’ve killed him, I’ll have all the time in your world to play regicide or revolution or whatever it is you want.”
You couldn’t have convinced her of it without a mirror, but Cascala’s smirk wasn’t nearly so well hidden as she believed it to be.
“Mmm. I suppose you have a point. We’ll get started looking, and Alonzo will take you to–“
Without warning, a woman in the corner who hadn’t said a word since Cascala had arrived slammed her eyes open.
“I’ve lost surveillance outside.”
---
“She’s a powerful mage. Focuses on weather and ice magic, and seems pretty creative with it.”
“A Talent we can deal with.”
“Regardless of her grade.”
“Does she have any skills that make her dangerous without her magic?”
Not that I’ve seen, but… Still, it was better to sound confident. “No. I don’t think she’s ever needed anything else. I mean it, I can’t overstate how powerful she is with the stuff.” That music thing she did in the opera house must have been her magic in that world. There’s no other reasonable explanation. Don’t overthink things.
“Very well.”
“Then she shall be dealt with like the rest of them.”
“Swiftly.”
---
For the first time since she met him, the baron’s face wasn’t suffused with a smile, knowing, forced, or otherwise.
“Severed or dampened?” He barked.
“Dampened.”
“Dammit! This shouldn’t be happening, but the Men are here and they mean business.”
One of the Clubbers shrank against the wall. “You said you were going to throw them off the trail!”
“I should have. I did! And even if I didn’t, as far as they should know we’re only notable for our incendiaries experts. They shouldn’t have spared dampeners unless someone’s been feeding them information.”
“What do we–“
Herrastel shook himself, knowing he didn’t have time to dwell on the whys. “Everyone, draw in as much ambient as you can. Even tool users, the rest of us can use whatever you can hold.”
Cascala felt for her staff in its artfully-concealed sling on her back. It had a fair amount of mana stored, but she was no artificer. It just gathered it on its own, and she didn’t really have the expertise to condense raw magic. It’d have to do; she could probably leech off one of her new disposable friends if it came down to it.
“Angela, get out of here before the ways close; try to make it to Emerald, you know who to talk to there. Alonzo, stay close to the outsider. I don’t know what the dampeners will do to her, and I need you ready to get her out of here if things go wrong. Grigori–“
Cascala never found out what Grigori was supposed to do; the baron’s next words were downed out by the sound of the wall she’d come in through shaking itself apart. As the barrier fell, raining stone and statues and cloth that seemed to disintegrate before they hit the ground, Cascala felt a wave of numbness wash over her. It was a bit like being back on the beach at Santa Nada, but instead of a total absence of magic, it was simply actively pushed away from her. She could feel it, distant but totally unreachable; she could also feel the reassuring bubble of it at her back, and vaguely sense it in the silvery veils several of the Clubbers had drawn around themselves. She drew her staff and stepped forward; nothing else seemed to be happening to her, “outsider” or not.
Outside – or what would have been outside if the room hadn’t been forcibly joined with the corridor – there was a group of lanky, domino-masked humanoids forming a semicircle in front of a smaller cluster of grey-robed men. Despite the masked figures’ weapons and obvious power, Cascala felt her attention drawn to the grey people; they were gagged and blindfolded and their legs shackled, only their arms free to move and their ears free to perceive. She knew instinctively that they were the ones holding back the familiar tides of magic. They had to be killed.
Before she could make any kind of start on their extermination, though, the masked man in front lowered the large, two-handed contraption it was holding and the ones flanking it stepped forward; they brandished a pair of pistollike implements and sighted at two of the closest Clubbers: the swan-woman tried to raise a shimmering barrier of light, but the robed men gestured in tandem and her shield crumbled instants before a darkly-crackling steel dart struck her in the gut, leaving her limp and twitching; Herrastel was somewhat luckier, his eyes dilating as the weapon fired and his hand moving inhumanly fast to pluck the dart out of the air and toss it aside, but everyone could hear the sound of twanging cartilage and snapping bone as he did. Judging from the limp way his arm hung after the interception, his fingers hadn’t been the only victims of whatever had let him snatch the bolt.
Behind them, Cascala was already preparing a spell; she intended to simply transmute all the vapor in the corridor into essential acid, reasoning that it should be effective against however organic or unliving the things she faced were. Even as she began shaping the mana, she felt unseeing eyes focus on her; hands raised and bade her magic suppress itself, and she felt it twist and pervert in her grasp. The spell eventually bent too far back on itself and snapped, striking her with the energy she’d tried to put into it before dissipating. She stumbled backwards, trying to catch her breath, feeling as though her lungs were filling with blood. No-one had ever managed to counter her before. Never. Was this how it always felt? How had they managed to suppress a Grand Magus?
Around her, the fight continued unabated, but she was only aware of it in the vaguest sense. The masked men were doing something, the anarchists were doing something, people were falling, there might have been explosions. There might not. Cascala’s eyes rolled back in her head and she struggled to stay standing. After an amount of time she could never hope to measure, she heard a voice call out nearby, sounding as though it was coming through fathoms of murky water.
“Alonzo, get her out of here! Everyone else, scatter! There are too many, we can’t handle this!”
She felt a hand grab her wrist and heard a clicking noise. She didn’t feel much else but a pulling sensation for several seconds until she was suffused with cold; when that cleared, she felt an inrush of the glut of mana this world held, and with it an inrush of lucidity. Her eyes opened, and she found herself being half-lead, half-dragged through another sumptuous hallway. The man she supposed was Alonzo was pulling her forward, so fast she struggled to keep up even fully conscious. They sprinted towards a corner, but as Cascala prepared to bank right he just kept going straight, gripping what looked like an ornate pocket watch in his other hand. She tried to pull away but he held her tight and leaped, yanking her into the air with him and pressing a button on the device.
She braced to collide with the wall, but was shocked to find herself merely phasing through the with a brief chilly sensation. Alonzo released the button after they were clear but before they landed, then kept running without missing a stride. Cascala on the other hand hadn’t been ready to land, hadn’t even been ready for the jump in the first place, and tangled her feet in the ridiculously extravagant gown she’d been put in. She crashed to the ground, pain blossoming in her ankle in what she prayed was just a short-lived sprain, and Alonzo collapsed with her.
He made as though to push himself back up, but crumpled, panting. “That’s probably far enough anyway. For the moment.”
Cascala struggled into a sitting position, the dress surprisingly compliant with the effort. A number of questions swam through her still-reeling mind, but one fought its way to the fore, demanding an answer before anything else.
“How did you do that? Get us out of there with those… damper. Things.”
The unsaid half of the question hung in the air. “How did you do that when I couldn’t?”
The man waved his trinket and groaned, propping himself against a wall. “Oh, this isn’t magic.”
She narrowed her eyes dangerously. “We moved through solid stone like a ghost. Of course it’s magic. Explain yourself.”
Alonzo took a drag on a colorful rollup he produced from a sleeve, exhaling with relief as the world went comfortingly fractal. “Nah, it’s just a tunneler. Exploits some fun quirks of physics and probability, but it doesn’t let you do anything impossible. I mean, it uses a little magic to find where in infinity the improbable bit is and bring it where you need it, but… That’s not much of a spell, and it’s got its own battery for that. Too fast to cancel and doesn’t use ambient power.”
Almost nothing about that was a satisfying answer to Cascala, but the part she mentally filed away was “It’s a baroque sort of wand. You can’t counter a wand, it’s automatic.”
Instead, she said “Now what?
A shrug. “Same as before, yeah? Nothing’s really changed. I’ve got to get you where you’re going, and the plan should move forward like you discussed. We’ll get you your information or your head on a platter either way.”
“How will–“
“Someone’ll contact us when they’ve got something to say. It’ll just be a little harder now that we’re being followed. For now, we just need to keep moving. Tireless Men aren’t too easy to keep ahead of.”
Without another word, he grabbed her wrist and the tunneler, and the pair of them fell through the floor.
---
Elsewhere, after a fair bit of scurrying of his own, Baron Herrastel gazed dispassionately down at the flayed and pinned flesh of his arm.
“Only three dead. Not bad for a Tireless raid of that size. Could have been a lot worse.”
The needle-fingered woman delicately rearranging his sinews and bones gave a facial sigh. “Could have gone much better. We usually have something to gain from an encounter with those things.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I rather think we did! Don’t you? The way I see it, we’ve learned something big. The Tea Club is barely a blip on anyone’s radar, as closely as we’ve held our cards. But today we were attacked by one of the biggest and best-armed Tireless raids I’ve seen. That means either we’ve got someone telling secrets to people in high places, or – and this one’s my favorite theory – something about that outsider woman has the Kings or the Stones very scared. Scared to devote a lot of resources to tracking her, even during the coronation party. Scared enough to want to detain her, too. Did you see? They didn’t break out the lethals until she was gone.”
“Maybe so.”
“I’m willing to bet on it. A lot more than three lives, too.”
There was a busy silence as the woman continue to refit his arm. Eventually, she broke it.
“You suppose she really thinks we believe her?”
He shrugged with one arm. “I doubt it matters one way or another. I’ve got Alonzo putting her somewhere she’ll end up doing what we want anyway.” The silence returned for a few beats, then: “But, yes, I think she does.”
“She seems very trusting for a wildly destructive outsider.”
“Doesn’t she, though?”
“What about the man she’s looking for?”
“Eh, it might be helpful information to have if we ever need to twist her arm down the line. I made my recommendation to Felliri to send a couple of spare physiognomists off looking for him, keep him out of her way if they find her. It’s his decision now.”
“Hmm.”
“Don’t hmm at me like that. As long as she thinks we’ve got what she wants, it’ll be easy to make her disrupt things. Not too canny, that one. Almost too easy to lead.”
“Well, John, you may be right. I’ve just been through a few too many coronations to really believe this changes enough. But… Maybe you’re right. Maybe.”