Usruldes the Wraith

As spymaster, I told the King almost everything I discovered through my efforts and the efforts of my agents. There were a few things I never revealed. For example, the King thought he had a roster of everyone who worked for me. I did not disabuse him of that quaint notion. It shielded many prostitutes and Coyn. It also kept my most precious agent, my wife, safe. She knew what my cover job was and she also knew that I was one of the spies who reported to the King. She did not know my real identity as the realm's spymaster. Regardless, everything that happened in the craft guilds in Is'syal or between the guilds and the Shrine of Giltak was also known to myself and the King, thanks to my wonderful wife.

My wife was accustomed to the King. He sometimes showed up alone at our back door, looking for company that wouldn't judge him or expect favors from him. My growing family treated him like family. When he spotted my oldest daughter's first white hair, he gifted my daughter her first crystal when she was nine and taught her how to cast her very first charm. There were tickle fights and pillow fights at our house next door to the Kay'syo Brewery on Brewery Row. Sometimes we dressed in work clothes and hooded mantles borrowed from the brewery to take my son fishing. My home was the King's refuge three to four times every season.

The King called me his little brother and I called him my big brother. When we first met, we shared a half rotation of life-threatening danger that forged a deep bond between us. I was 16 when we met and knew magics unknown to any Foskan, including some of the forbidden and lost charms. Through those magics, I killed all the assassins who almost succeeded in murdering him and healed his wounds.

I recognized him as the King of Foskos, which is why I never dropped the charm of circular light in his presence. When he asked me my name, I told him to call me Usruldes, which in the tongue of the Tirmarans means "spider child." It was the name my teacher gave me. When he asked me why I didn't show myself, I told him that my face would condemn me to a life of suffering imposed by my family. He shocked me when he cast the geas of blood oath on himself and he swore that he would never reveal my identity.

When I dropped my invisibility, he knew my face and understood my caution. My powerful father and even more powerful mother would drag me back to the soul-destroying duty that drove me to run away from home. It was then that I learned that my father was dead and my sister inherited the lordship that I had fled. She resigned her position as an adept of Landa to assume the position I was born to inherit: Lord Gunndit.

With my contrary father removed from obstructing me, Imstay asked if I could return to my family, and I said no. It was both my father and the lordship I fled. My mother was and still is the epitome of duty. She would insure I became Lord Gunndit. I was even more frightened of my mother than I was of my father. I was also frightened that my sister would not forgive me for forcing her to leave the Shrine of Landa, where she was considered one of the candidates to become the next high priestess.

Imstay took me in and employed me to run a safe house in Is'syal for his agents. He taught me many of the magics I would have learned had I attended a shrine. We went hunting or fishing, just the two of us, at least once a season. As time passed, my persona as Usruldes learned spycraft from the kingdom's more experienced agents, until one day I found myself appointed his spymaster.

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Emily, Healing Shrine of Mugash

Thuorfosi woke me after my third night in my own little room. I was sleeping soundly in the comfortable bed that the big teddy bear Wolkayrs made for me,

"If you can manage to wake up, oh sleepy one, the bacon, cheese, and onion rolls may still be warm." Thuorfosi was a fiend, bribing me awake with food I couldn't resist.

"The rest of your clothes have arrived, by the way," she put a towel on the blanket to catch any crumbs and handed me the plate as soon as I sat up. "There's also a flying coat and leggings you will want to try on." She pointed at a long sheepskin coat and what I would have called chaps, also made out of sheepskin, laid on the top of one of the two storage chests. There was also a drawstring pouch made out of what looked like cotton with something in it. I pointed at it and made a questioning face.

"Are you pointing at this?" she picked up the pouch and handed it to me. "That's just dried mothsbane sap. It will keep out the moths and the wool worms from the clothes during the planting and growing seasons."

It took just one whiff to confirm that there was naphthalene inside the cloth pouch. I cursed Tiki for being a sideway god. I had been just been handed one of my two starting ingredients for making phenolphthalein according to the recipe from that pain-in-the-butt deity with the bad taste in Hawaiian shirts.

Now all I had to do was make phenol, the other missing ingredient.

"I know you can't talk, but I would really love to know why you are smiling like that," Thuorfosi said, both eyebrows floating somewhere up near her hairline.

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Aylem, Healing Shrine of Mugash

There was enough real governing work back in Is'syal that it was a full ten-day rotation before I was able to return to Aybhas, where the Healing Shrine of Mugash is located. There were just two rotations left before things got going in earnest in Uldlip. I needed to be sure the usual small-time theft of the kingdom's assets was kept to a minimum before the boats with our trade goods made the seven-day trip down the river. The trip from Is'syal took five days to Black Falls on the river, a day to make the portage around the falls themselves, and then another day on the river to Uldlip.

I also had some trade goods of my own that needed my attention after I was done with the palace. My villa had specialized in these top-fermented beers which I had introduced to this world. They sold at a premium since the Sea Coyn had not yet figured out my recipes for ale or stout. I had my brewers working on lambic too but we hadn't produced any that was acceptable for distribution yet.

I was sending four boats of my own with stout and ale to Uldlip this year, which was twice as much as last year. All the ale and stout were shipped in Coyn-crafted firkins, which commanded a premium price of their own. The firkins were finely made from the wood of river olive trees, which were highly resistant to rot. Anything made of river olive wood was prized by the Sea Coyn since that tree did not grow in the Salt Desert or on the coast. They also preferred firkins to barrels because of the size difference.

This year I wanted more linen, cotton, and sugar than I had previously purchased. After I left appropriate orders with my staff at the villa, I made my first visit to the shrine in a rotation.

When I arrived, Lisaykos was making her rounds of the healing ward. In her study, I found Wolkayrs writing out something in presentation-grade calligraphy and Emily with a pile of books, reading.

Wolkayrs immediately got up from the table he was working at and knelt with his right hand over his heart, "May the blessings of the Gods be upon you, Great One."

"And also upon you, Scholar Wolkayrs. Please rise."

"I will tell my mistress that you are here," he got up and headed for the door. Asgotl, who had followed me into the study, tried to trip Wolkayrs with one of his talons as he rushed past. For a man who looked like a soft pudgy scholar, Wolkayrs nimbly hopped over the talon and kept going.

"My win, featherhead," he said as he passed through the doorway into the hall.

"Bah," Asgotl grumped and flumped down next to Emily, resting his beak on the cushions where she was sitting. Without looking up, Emily absent-mindedly scratched him between his eyes, which was one of the spots he liked to be scratched.

I strolled over to look at what Wolkayrs was writing and discovered he was making copies of the Revelation of the Blessed Emily. "You decided what to include in the revelation?" I asked.

Emily looked up at me, grabbed a tablet off a pile of blank ones next to her, and started writing. I was astounded to see that she was writing entirely with Fosk letters. I sat down on the other side of the griffin's beak and scratched Asgotl behind the ears while I waited for Emily to finish. She wrote a lot so it took a few minutes.

She handed me the tablet. "Tiki gave me just the recipe but said nothing about where to find the ingredients. So I have written out just the recipe with some additional comments on making sulfuric acid, chlorine gas, nitric acid, zinc, and mercury, all of which are needed either to make intermediate chemicals or to catalyze reactions.

"I decided to exclude instructions on how to make phenol from coal tar or tar seeps, or how to make glassware. Tiki's starting ingredients were naphthalene and phenol, so that is what I've written up. No one will understand any of this besides me, so Tiki will have to be happy with what I've done. It's not like I'm getting paid to do this, and frankly, I can think of better things to do with my time."

Some of her vowel choices were interesting but still understandable. She was making direct phonetic assemblages of letters to write out words without the advantage of spending years reading properly-spelled Fosk words. I was impressed at what she had accomplished so far. I had to conclude that she was probably extremely intelligent, more so than my original estimate of her.

Her written comment was also the first time I was exposed to her sharp wit, plain speaking, and rather caustic view of life. No native of Foskos would ever have referred to Tiki irreverently, saying only that he was the Twisted God at most.

I was left wondering what Tiki was up to with this strange revelation. Granted, he had delivered some odd and some humorous revelations in the past, like the Revelation to Lymoep. That piece of scripture was a manual on how to pasteurize and preserve food using glazed ceramics. Let's not forget the Revelation to Haybruyalinob, which was a manual on how to write and present a love song to one's lady love, revealed to a third-in-line prince who was too shy to approach woman. Then there was the Revelation to Yud, revealed to a spinster shrine priestess, on how to pleasure one's marriage partner from both the male and female perspectives. It is forbidden to read this scripture before marriage.

Tiki really is an inscrutable god.

Here is what Emily wrote as her revelation:

"Instructions from Tiki on how to make a laxative.

Mix five parts by weight of phenol plus four parts and a tenth of phthalic anhydride made from naphthalene, grinding them if necessary. Place the mixed solids in a vessel. Then add one part by weight of concentrated sulfuric acid. Heat the vessel in a boiling water bath and stir until the contents liquefy. Remove from heat and allow contents to cool. Filter through a very fine cloth or paper.

Take the filtrate and put it back in the vessel. Add water and place back into a water bath. Since phenol has a melting temperature of 40.5 °C and phthalic anhydride has a melting temperature of 131 °C, on a scale where water freezes at zero °C and boils at 100 °C, both will go into the liquid phase, leaving the phenolphthalein behind. Decant the solution and discard. Again, add water to the phenolphthalein in the vessel and place it in the heated water bath. Decant the solution and discard. Do this at least twice to wash and purify the phenolphthalein.

I looked around the table and spotted the other supplementary instructions. Sulfuric acid was the most complete, starting with either copperas or chalcanthite and ending with electrolysis to precipitate metals and gasses out of the solution. I knew that copperas and pyrites were closely associated since England used to have factories dedicated to processing copperas to make dyestuffs. I had no clue what chalcanthite was.

Emily's notes included making chlorine gas, which also used electrolysis, in this case with saltwater. The naphthalene had to be reacted to the chlorine to make naphthalene tetrachloride. That compound was then reacted with nitric acid to make phthalic acid. Phthalic anhydride is made simply by heating the phthalic acid to dehydrate it. She had also written out instructions for making nitric acid by reacting sulfuric acid and saltpeter.

Looking at all these instructions on making chemicals, I got to thinking about how much knowledge was living inside Emily's head.

"Emily?" She looked up at me. "Are you remembering all of this science from your previous life?"

She grabbed another tablet, wrote on it, and held it out for me to take. She wrote: "No, there is more in my head now than there was ever before. I have total recall right now for things I used to look up in references. I was not like this in my previous life. If this were an isekai novel, this would be my cheat."

"What's an isekai novel? I've never heard of such a thing." Was it one of those odd American things, I wondered. Emily did a facepalm on herself.

She then wrote: "They were a genre of Japanese literature where the protagonists were reincarnated or sent back in time with all the knowledge of their previous lives and were usually placed in fantasy settings. They became popular in the 2010s."

I sat down on the lounge next to Asgotl in shock. The 2010s? I had always assumed that we had lived on Earth at around the same time, but now it looked like I was wrong about that.

"Emily, when were you born and when did you die?"

She wrote: "born 1950 in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Died 2021 in Missoula, Montana. Married twice, no children. Bachelors in Mineralogical Engineering, 1972, Columbia University. Masters in Chemical Engineering, 1974, Stanford University."

I realized I had misread Emily all along. She was much more knowledgeable than I imagined and she had twice the life experience that I had. There was an old brain inside that 14 or 15-year-old body.

"You look like a fish, gaping like that," Lisaykos walked into the study with Wolkayrs a step behind her.

"Did you know, dearest, that when Emily died, she was 71?"

"Is that the reason for the fish face?" Lisaykos studied Emily as if seeing her for the first time. "That explains many things, like her self-sufficiency despite her current age. How very interesting. By the way, we have found one of the two starting materials for Emily's revelation." She picked up a cloth bag from off her work table and handed it to me.

It had a unique smell. "Lisaykos, this is just mothsbane."

"Exactly," Lisaykos sat down at her table.

"Mothsbane is an ingredient in Emily's recipe? It's such a common plant." The smell of mothsbane was the same as the mothballs my mother used to buy in Coventry for storing our winter woolens.

"If mothsbane was the source of one ingredient, could there be another plant with the other starting ingredient?"

"That's what Emily thought. She's been searching books about plants for several days now."

"No luck?"

"Not yet," Lisaykos replied.

"What a twisted god," I groaned. "It was so kind of him not to mention mothsbane. Emily, does phenol have its own smell?"

She took just a few seconds to write down her reply, which stated: "Both tarry and sweet at the same time."

"Huh," I tried to think of any plants which might smell like that but couldn't come up with any. On the other hand, I didn't know much about plants outside of those used in healing potions.

I finally broached what I needed to discuss: "Emily, where do you want to spend between now and planting next year? The king's agents have already gone through the rubble at your cave and taken everything salvageable. There's now a ward of watching around the cave. It's a good ward and it won't decay for several months. I would make a case for not returning there in the short term.

"You have options. You could stay here until planting, with or without trying to fix the speech problem. You could also stay at the Crystal Shrine of Tiki. As a blessed revelator, you're entitled to your own quarters there. You could also stay at the Coyn quarters at my villa. I would argue that might be the best place since you would have room to make things if you wanted.

"You could even go your own way if you were set on doing that. My point is that you do have options."

Emily was making the most amazing face which was both dubious and frowning at the same time.

"You also do not need to make a decision right now. Take your time and think about it."

Emily grabbed that last fresh tablet and wrote: "I want to check on my magnetite, which is not at the cave. It's several miles to the northeast."

"Magnetite is just a mineral, yes? Why do you need to check up on some minerals? It won't get up and walk off by itself."

Emily wrote in reply: "Making magnets. Magnetite + lightning = magnet."

"Alright, but why do you need magnets?" I felt like I was missing something here.

Emily wrote: "Magnet + rotation inside metal ring = direct current for electrolysis."

"So that's why," I finally got it. "It's too late in the day to cross the lava plains today, but could we go tomorrow?"

"Oh, joy, another trip across those stinky volcanoes," the griffin muttered just loud enough for everyone to hear him.

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