Chai didn’t consider the Void Sickness to be a mental disability. Most Voidlings, he suspected, did not.

Voidlings were very different from mages who simply used a Void sense. The Void sense, unlike most other senses, gave one a sense of perspective, tying multiple pieces of information into a single scene. Most people described it as looking down on a transparent, miniature version of the real world, with all the little details a little fuzzed. Most people who had a Void sense had to focus before that scene even existed in their head, and then it was small. A few had a faint knowledge in the back of their head that the scene was there, and they only needed to spend a moment to switch their attention towards looking at it.

Voidlings always had that scene in their awareness, although they often chose not to look at parts of it. Those who were void sick had an enormous, almost world-sized scene, with every detail perfect, and they could not turn their eyes from any part of it, to such an extent that they could no longer see, hear, and feel normally. That made it difficult to think and act normally, too. His whole being, now, was full of far more information than he could possibly process. All his instincts, including those he normally used to talk and walk upright, were bombarded with knowledge they didn’t need and mostly couldn’t use.

Since arriving in Seyona, Chai had been mentally wandering through a wide diorama, one so grand it was difficult not to be lost in it. He had enough of his senses left over to know if someone was talking to him, but it was difficult to keep perspective when everything else was constantly doing something. Yes, there was this squabble with the nobility, but there were also more common crimes being committed among the peasants, animals hunting, people having sex, and a worried horse wandering around feeling lonely, wondering why it had been left behind.

It’s so easy to suggest that perspective means focusing on what’s important, but it takes a certain kind of selfishness to declare murders, rapes, and theft not important just because they don’t relate to your job. That made it difficult to do your job, for a voidling, and that feeling was far stronger during the Void sickness.

From where Chai sat now, in the Order’s carriage, he was in the middle of a whole huge steaming pile of nonsense. So many people here were only having trouble because they lied. So much effort was being put into maintaining a house of cards. Many servants made the worst possible decisions, when they could have escaped or made things better. The things going on here seemed so much smaller than the world, but he had to fix them, and gently, so long as he was representing the Order. So many things here and nearby felt like he should personally intervene, except that he was one person, small, vulnerable, and not granted the seemingly unlimited access to magic that the full Void Sickness had once given him.

The frustrating part was that while Chai could still cast magic in this state, his magic, unlike his senses, still obeyed domain rules. He could not cast fire on people he could not physically see, and he could not control minds without having touched them. If left to his own devices, he would have walked through the doors, single-handedly slaughtered the murderers and torturers while leaving the innocent behind, then quickly moved on to the next place that was out of balance to do the same once again.

Which, typically, is what a Voidling does when affected by the full Void Sickness. It’s something they are barely able to control, and usually something they are barely aware of at the time. Intervening felt as natural as offering solutions to a riddle which was posed aloud. If you knew the answer, you wanted to say it. But in the same way, intervening was rude. The world didn’t want you to decide its fate. Erron had said the same thing.

So he sat in the carriage, watching. He knew what was going on, but how could he describe the flavor of a puppet’s emotions as it danced around on stage? How could he draw a distinction between two people who seemed identical, did the same evil things, when he knew one had innocence left in them while the other did not? Especially if it would take very specific actions to reveal and preserve that innocence?

The messenger that approached almost caught him by surprise, and likely would have if the sickness worked like that. But, from the moment he noticed her, Chai was flooded with her connections to other people, and could with a glance locate the investigators of the King.

Who were not coming.

It was strange that Chai knew that when they, themselves, did not. They had been told to muster, but they were going to be delayed. The reasons why were a complicated knot that even he couldn’t immediately pierce, and unfortunately, being Void Sick meant that he had trouble focusing in order to pick apart a given problem.

Chai dimly heard the news delivered to Marin, but he was watching the messengers of the house speaking to the Lady in charge. He knew, sooner than she did, that the audience would be delayed.

But then, he had known that hours ago, if not quite why.

Now that he knew why, a few things fell into place. He nudged Marin gently after she shooed off the messenger. The look of concern in her eyes was charming, but misplaced, for a number of reasons.

“Have Wilke come back, when the trouble starts.” The request made perfect sense to him.

“When will the trouble start?”

Chai paused. How did he describe it? He had no grasp of time and space like this, or at least, none he could easily convey. He could only really wait until the trouble started, he supposed. “Give it a minute.”

He watched Wilke prowling around near where he needed to be. The jackal girl was being well cared for, but the hall to her room was hidden, now. There was no way he would be able to get to her, but he needed to fail to get to her so she would be moved. That was the trouble.

It was Rin who noticed the crack in the wall. Wilke was too focused on his senses, and the panels were designed specifically to block that. She let them pass by, then whispered in his ear, and he made a quick lap around, coming back to the same spot.

He was still standing there, looking at it, when the messenger for the Lady reached them.

That would have been more of a problem if Chandra was as innocent as she seemed to be. But she had been left alone in the dark too long. The enchanter’s binding was incomplete, mostly because he didn’t know how much work she had been doing to remove the old ones. Deep things had stirred in her, and he had not done a great job of suppressing them.

And she could hear unfamiliar voices outside, even if she could not sense them. If the messenger had caught them anywhere else, Chandra might have slept through it.

Chandra couldn’t oppose the house without the consent of the King’s Own or the enchanter himself, and she could neither aid nor oppose the inspectors. But she had not been explicitly forbidden from aiding herself. In fact, she had been ordered to do so by the Lady of the house. So, she could remove things from her hidden storage and leave them out where they could be found.

And she could scream in pain.

Chai tried not to think about the enchanter, now, because he was at this moment being tortured, and if Chai thought of him, he would be forced to witness it. But it was impossible to sense Chandra’s pain without feeling a connection to the man. When she screamed, it was almost impossible to avoid seeing him.

But Chai did manage to remember something important.

“That would be the trouble starting,” he said seemingly out of nowhere, as he and Marin sat in the silence and darkness of their carriage.

Obligingly, Marin focused on her signalling stone.