The stage-coach was a large, polished affair, made of heavy oak and brass; four enormous horses stood in front, connected to reins held by a wiry, twitchy-looking driver who perched atop the carriage. Pellamin opened the door for Cheis, who fumbled a curtsey, scowled, and climbed up into the seat. Linduin started up after her but was roughly brushed out of the way by Pellamin, who clambered up after her and fixed a gimlet stare down upon him. "You'll be riding up top with the driver, boy."

"Actually," interjected Cheis, fiddling with her bags, "he'll be riding in here with me, and you'll be riding up top with the driver, at least until I say you can come back in."

Pellamin gaped at her, smoothing his mustache in agitation and disbelief. "You cannot possibly be serious, Cheis. With this leg?"

She shrugged. "My apprentice and I must discuss the secret mysteries of the arcane. You're welcome to sit in on the conversation if you want, Pels, but last time you got involved with my business it didn't end so well for you." Pellamin turned slightly redder, but obligingly fumbled his way up onto the top of the carriage next to the driver. He mumbled something about wanton perversions, but Linduin didn't know what those were and didn't have the situational awareness to be concerned in any event. He climbed up next to Cheis and watched the scenery begin to move as the coach began its long journey.

After a few minutes, he became aware that Cheis was hitting him with something. He returned his attention to the carriage's interior and found that she had been trying to hand him a black strip of cloth for some time at this point; taking it, he looked at it quizzically. "What's this? A scarf?"

"It is called", said Cheis with some asperity, "a scholar's stock. You loop it or tie it around your neck. There's a bunch of different ways you can wear it, or something -- I don't know, ask Pels. But the important part is that it is enchanted to help you with your training. Put it on."

Linduin sighed and began tying the stock around his neck. "I expect you're going to use it to choke me, or shock me, or something."

"I can, in fact, use it to shock you," said Cheis, doing so; Linduin yelped and gave her a glare. "But you're supposed to use it yourself." She unfolded one corner of the cloth, pointing out a runic circle in silvery thread. "It has a large number of functions, but the only ones you need to know right now are these two: if you speak the words 'ataxi-zeugma' while touching this the activation rune and thinking of something, the stock will zap you every time you stop thinking of that thing until you stop touching the rune. If you do the same thing, but say 'lepto-hyperbaton' instead, the stock will zap you every time you think of the thing again."

Linduin was now regretting putting the stock on without knowing its function. "It sounds like you've given me a magic item that lets me shock myself, but with extra steps."

"Imagine how much your suffering anguishes me," muttered Cheis, who was still quite frustrated with everyone involved in this debacle including herself. "The point is that you use it as a training tool to build your concentration. As a mage, there will be a lot of times where focusing your attention on something without distraction or deviation will mean the difference between life or death; similarly, there will be times that you need to not think about something in order to avoid experiencing dire consequences. You're going to spend the entire journey to Vortsmir practicing with this until you can reliably do both for an hour without failing."

Linduin nodded and sighed. "Okay. This is lame, but I understand. I can be all stoic and stuff."

Cheis rolled her eyes, although she was in fact very much looking forward to Linduin being silent for the next several days. "It's also enchanted with a bunch of other stuff that I'll show you once you've mastered the early parts, including some self-defense spells that you will almost certainly use to hurt or maim yourself or innocent bystanders or possibly both. But I will go ahead and warn you now that it also has a 'kill wearer' function, so I would recommend not trying to experiment with it." Linduin gulped and nodded. "Great. Now go sit up top with the driver and send Pels back down here."

Linduin chuckled and started to obey, climbing up and out of the carriage; however, he stopped halfway there and looked back at Cheis. "The magic words... they don't mean anything, do they? They're just triggers. They could have been 'apple' or 'weasel' if the enchanter wanted them to be, right?"

Cheis nodded. "Score another one for you, smart-ass. Now get the fuck out of here."

Linduin fled, to spend the remainder of the day staring at the scenery and shocking himself repeatedly. Pellamin, breathing heavily and very put out, eventually managed to locomote himself back into the carriage and fell back upon the cushions with an expression of tremendous offense. "Finished already, Cheis? I can't say I think much of the boy's stamina."

"I am not", gritted Cheis, "having relations with my apprentice. I'm almost old enough to be his mother, damn it. Besides, what the hell do you care? You didn't waste any time with Ursula or whatever."

Pellamin scowled. "Umbria and I did not even become acquainted until you and I had our little... falling-out. And it's quite unfair of you to think so poorly of her." Abruptly, his mien became regretful and pleading. "You can despise me if you like. I... won't deny I could have handled things better. But Umbria has never had anything but kind words for you, and worries about you often."

Then maybe she shouldn't have fucked my boyfriend, Cheis did not say. "How very noble of her."

Pellamin chuckled. "You probably think she's terrified of you, which I suppose would be sensible. I can't imagine you're an easy act to follow." Cheis, who had in fact met the young lady in question and knew that she was a demure, willowy blonde who made Cheis intensely jealous, did not dignify this assertion with a response. "I'm sorry, Cheis, I truly am. I know this is deeply awkward for everyone involved. But if they'd sent some functionary you didn't even know, would you have even answered the door? I think they thought you would just skeletonize the poor bastard without even hearing his message."

Cheis laughed bitterly. "So they sent my ex-boyfriend instead. You have no idea how close you came to getting skeletonized yourself."

She'd meant it as a joke, sort of -- wanted desperately, in fact, to explain that he had misunderstood what had happened at the cottage -- but Pellamin's eyes grew sad, and that made her feel brutish and petty. "So... you do hate me, then." He turned away to stare out the window, apparently giving up on conversation.

Cheis started to protest, but stopped herself, her words dying in her throat. What could she say? Please, let me have a second chance at getting you killed? Please, give up your hot sexy girlfriend for me, a dumpy, uncultured psychopath who risks her life out of boredom and self-aggrandizement? She sighed and looked out the window herself, and called up one of her stored texts to read on the backs of her eyelids with a mental command. If they were going to sit here in uncomfortable silence, she at least wasn't going to be bored.

***

Velinaer wasted no time creating and executing his plans. He drew up designs, discarded them, drew new ones, and revised those until he was satisfied, then tested them using a crude signal attenuation simulator he cobbled together. He found a core flaw in his model, started over, and went through the whole process again. After nearly two days, when he was certain the plans he had would be functional, he finally began committing his resources. He ordered his minions to begin construction; they chopped down trees, smoothed and sanded the logs, then began to join them together. He quickly noted problems with his operations; his class-fours were terrible about remaining with the others and seemed intent on following him if he walked away, and it rapidly became apparent that his total number of minions was woefully inadequate for the task. He wandered around the deserted village of Pols Sedis, looking for more raw materials, and lucked upon an old graveyard which yielded up another four dozen skeletons. He noted sadly that two-thirds of them were the remains of babies or small children, and deanimated those -- too small to be useful, and creepy besides. But the remaining dozen or so were all serviceable, and seemed to obey his commands reliably; he added them to his command queue and set them about their tasks as well. Within a few days, the structure began taking shape atop the burgon's manor.

To a native, the tower would have looked bizarre and unwieldy; a tall, skeletal edifice constructed entirely out of darkened logs, with no floors and only a few flimsy ladders and walkways to reach the top. Velinaer experimented with a few different conduction mediums, hoping to get good signal through something common like rope or wire, but the degredation on the first was too rapid to overcome and the second was in short supply around the village. Eventually, however, he hit upon a solid workaround.

The construction took nearly a month of night-and-day labor; at one point the top half collapsed, taking out the remnants of the burgon's livestock pens with a crash, and had to be rebuilt. But eventually, the signal tower began to take shape; a black, twisting spire of pitch-covered logs, bound together with rope, tar, and iron spikes (he had raided the blacksmith's shop for every ounce of iron and set a pair of skeletons to smelting and hammering, which had been funny to watch). If one had the fortitude to climb it, it was possible to see the full scale of the spiraling, intricate designs running up and down its frame which channeled, amplified, and boosted the signals fed into it. The line noise was much lower than he'd expected; he was impressed. Who'd have thought linked bone would have had such a great resonance? And to think, he'd nearly thrown out all those child and baby skeletons! Those old shows about liches just kept making more and more sense all the time. He double-checked all his connections, ran a final diagnostic, and powered it up.

The signal from the tower, boosted with a precise and superbly adroit arrangement of repeaters, transformers, and modulators, had nearly a hundred times the range of Velinaer's initial broadcast. The effects it had were wide-ranging and varied; a flock of birds turning inside-out over Tinseymock, the Bundalmond sea boiling like a pot of soup, and hundreds of demons bursting out of containment cells in what had once been Shul Aran and immediately being snuffed out by millions of fathoms of salt water, because Shul Aran was now at the bottom of the ocean in the hundred-mile crater that had once been the western part of the continent.

There were, to be sure, a few eruptions of honest-to-goodness mayhem. An asura was spawned in Sidan, terrorized a few villages, and was put down without too much trouble by the local suriya in exchange for a month's supply of yak-milk tea. In Skapjuk, an entire barrow of draugr came ravening out of the slumber of death, conquered the entire fief of Wignar, and were poised to make siege on Vinsland when a traveling hulgrim cross-infected them with contradictory paradigms that resulted in the emergence of anthropic sapience among some of their number. The draugr fell to fighting amongst themselves, which would occupy them for quite some time; eventually, the anthropic survivors would win out, and establish a reclusive but surprisingly stable and well-regarded dominion of undead witch-kings over a small valley. A few craftsmen in Moratrakashi went insane and started making clothing out of bones and flesh, but in Moratrakashi this barely raised an eyebrow. And in Brastedge, barely fifty miles from Ciel-Upon-The-Sea, a hantu that had escaped the cleanse during the initial outbreak was poised to begin its breeding cycle when a resonance overload disrupted it at exactly the wrong moment, preventing the formation of a genius loci which would have killed thousands, tormented millions more, and possibly spread throughout most of the tectonic plate. And so, on the whole, things were much less horrific than they might have been.

There was, however, one particularly noteworthy result. A hundred miles to the south, at the exact moment that Velinaer triggered his broadcast, the Black Oak stopped, took notice, and made an immediate shift in its priorities; its army turned around in its tracks and began marching back northwards towards Haelid. To the soldiers who were desperately trying to escape with a barely-surviving Galar Kayle, this could only mean one thing: that his valiant and heroic miracle had turned the entire tide of the war.

At the base of his tower, Velinaer received seven thousand, eight hundred and fifty-three error messages, overloaded, and blacked out. His jujora crowded around him, staring down, but had no protocols remotely capable of helping him. A bird landed on his head, pecked a few times experimentally, and started building a nest.