Chapter Ten: Chartham

+++++Ezra+++++

Ezra had no idea how typical his arrival into Medias had been. From what he'd gathered, it had been at least a bit atypical, for when Fenrik first captured his soul and trapped it in the body he currently inhabited, Ezra came to almost immediately, only to be bombarded by a slew of sensations with the gain turned up to eleven - this was why he now had welding goggles bolted to his face, Anise's enchanted ear plugs in his auditory canal, and he took pills once every two day that muted his other senses. Shit… he was due for more in about twelve hours…

In any case, he'd awoken just about immediately, which had taken Fenrik by surprise. He'd dosed Ezra with some sort of alchemical super-chloroform and, for all he knew, it had been days before he came to again, still overwhelmed by a world of sensations far too intense for his mind to handle. He didn't know if that was a typical experience, and nor did he know whether the unconscious young woman had been treated in a manner similar to him.

He kept her on the little musty mattress while he slept fitfully on the floor, not daring to leave 'their' room at Mama Pathula's boarding house until she stirred. Maybe she'd never come to - maybe Fenrik's synthetic soul crystal had been an utter failure and she was still a vegetable. In some ways, that would be preferable, because the old sorcerer being able to make high-caliber soul crystals at will was a horrifying notion. But, of course, that would also mean…

"Uhh…" the young woman moaned.

Ezra jerked awake. It seemed like he'd just closed his eyes a moment ago, but dawn's pale light already glowed through the tiny, mucked over window of their room. He rolled to a sit, an odd sense of energy and urgency pulsing through him. His first instinct was to check the contents of his bag - a handful of decent-quality crystals and two thrall-plugs caked with old blood but otherwise in excellent condition, albeit without their soul crystals…

Which was, itself a bit odd. Ezra's crystal would have dissolved into the humors of his body (or so Anise's text had claimed), but the young woman… the lovely young demon(?) stirring to consciousness beside him… had only been ensouled for a few hours at most. That meant the crystal was still probably lodged at the back of her chest cavity. As she stirred, she moaned and appeared to be in distress. He scooted over to see if he could help and, as he reached out to nudge her shoulder, her eyes shot open. Russet eyes pulsing with internal flame.

"Uh!" A slim hand shot out and clamped to Ezra's wrist.

"Fuck!" Pain immediately seared into his wrist, and he yanked away, the force of his pull forcing her head right into his lap, her crimson hair draping about like a silken covering. And, of course she bit his thigh and then grabbed his knee, more burning pain shooting through him as his pants burned through and his flesh sizzled. "Stop it!" He pushed her back, sending the young woman rolling to the corner of the room with a wooden clunk.

Ezra looked to his wounds - a little blood on his thigh and two red, hand-shaped wounds speckled with small blisters. Nothing serious, but boy was it painful.

"Wuhaouomnnndph…" the woman said, perhaps consciously using a mouth for the first time ever - most demons had been disembodied for their whole existences. The woman held her hands aloft, little bursts of fire flickering out from her hands with little crackling noises like burning tinder in a campfire. "Whouyizz…" she frowned. Finally, she got her new mouth to work: "Wwwhy isn't my fire working?"

Ezra held up his blistered wrist - it throbbed with pain, but it was far less than Fenrik threw at him daily. "Clearly, it is working… but you now find yourself the enviable owner of a human body. My understanding is that your magic will return in time, but it'll be less powerful than what you enjoyed in your old world, unless you really work to cultivate power…"

Her eyes narrowed, the fire within them intensifying. It was a bit frightening. "And why have you brought me to… to… here?"

Ezra scratched his head. "Well, that's an interesting story…"

+++++Ezra+++++

Karill took the news pretty well. That was her name: Karill - pronounced ka-rill like somebody was adding an extra syllable to 'krill', which reminded Ezra of tiny marine invertebrates. When he asked whether he could call her Rill for short, she agreed that it was a good name and told him of her life before Medias.

"We ifrit are children of fire - and fire is the child of ifrit. We are born of it, and it is born of us, consuming and alive, bringing warmth to a cold world. Ours was an icy land, but we were mighty. My sisters plumed through great sea vents, my brothers raged through dry, frozen forests, and our parents dwelled deep in the earth. The tiny little folk who lived upon the snowy surface feared and worshiped us, tossing bones and blubber alike into our yaw, for we were the goddess of many… I was the goddess of many… I am one woman now, yes? I was a great mountain with a roiling caldera and feet of liquid stone reaching deep into the earth, and when my anger was piqued, I might rain ruin upon any who displeased me, anywhere as far as the eye could see. And when I felt loved, I made warmth for baths, fire and molten ore for forges, and steam for their tiny little drills…"

Ezra's suspicion was that the 'tiny little folk' weren't tiny so much as that Rill had been very, very large. "You were a volcano…"

She shot him an odd look. "No, I made the volcano, built it about me. It served my desires." She shrugged. "I miss it not - there's only so much adulating worship and shivering terror one can take before it all becomes blasé."

It was Ezra's understanding that greater demons were sometimes reasonably powerful in their past lives. Infernics like Franyi's family's thrall, Qinzi, a water demon who could stop small boats, form a detailed fox-person likeness without much trouble, and drag unwary fishermen to their doom out of pique. But, unless Karill was vastly overstating her old abilities, she'd been far more powerful than any infernic he'd ever heard of. A literal fire goddess…

"You were brought here to be a slave… that's why you have the circular wound on your chest…"

He pointed to her sternum, right between the bottoms of her modest breasts… rosy-tipped breasts on proud display, for Rill had no nudity taboo instincts whatsoever. She had no experience having a body at all, unless she'd had the ability and inclination to possess people (she had neither, she'd later report), so essentially everything was new to her. Fortunately, demons generally took to bodies pretty well when forced inside them and she was no exception. Karill pushed at her lower abdomen and grimaced.

"What is this… urgency?"

"Uh… you probably have to urinate - your body exudes waste… like volcanic fumes, I suppose…" this last observation seemed to please her. "If you need pointers…"

"I do not need pointers to urinate," she laughed… and her stomach growled. "Now… bring me sacrifice… er… bring me food while I puzzle over urine."

Ezra lifted his blood-spattered shirt to reveal his own circular scar. "I just got finished with being a slave, myself, and I'm not about to start scraping to you. Try again…"

Rill seemed genuinely puzzled by this, her delicate face drawing into an adorable, pouty frown - manners hadn't been much of a concern in her past life, either. Ah, the privileges of goddesshood. Eventually, her brain came up with the word. "Please bring me food?"

"Better."

Downstairs in the common room, Mama Pathula doled out a bowl of fish porridge - unpleasant stuff, but it would fill you up. Back at Fenrik's he hadn't even got meat in his porridge, so it was an improvement. She slid the bowl toward Ezra but held it fast for a moment, her stubby, horn-tipped thumb clamping down and dipping into the porridge. "You'll get me the ten par you owe me today, won't you?"

"Yes, ma'am. And for next week, too. I think I can come by two brown…"

That was the right thing to say - Pathula released the bowl and continued to ladle for the other boarders. "Good… that's good. That pretty friend of yours better after her spell?"

"Yes, ma'am," Ezra said. "She roused a little while ago. I'd like to bring her up a bowl if it's the same to you…"

"So long as you have it down here and washed before supper - and don't think I won't notice."

"Yes, ma'am."

"You could learn manners from this one Jowsuthe-Faith," she said to the kao-etema boarder next to Ezra. The woman just grunted in response. Clearly, she was not a morning person.

+++++Ezra+++++

After devouring her porridge so quickly she coughed bits up a few times, Rill groaned happily and collapsed back onto the mattress, asleep. When Ezra tried to rouse her, she frowned, grumbled, and swatted his hand away - it seemed that she was still exhausted after having been inserted into a new body. Whether this was normal or not, Ezra had no idea. At least the girl wasn't insensate, so Ezra felt a bit better about leaving the boarding house to sell his ill-gotten goods - if anybody tried to get at Rill, she would singe their face off. Ezra would have liked a lock but, for now, what he had was a demanding young woman with literal fire in her eyes and the mighty power of about twenty Zippo lighters.

Speaking of which… Ezra looked to his burned wrist. Already, the redness was nearly gone and the blisters were nonexistent. He wondered whether that was a side-effect of magical fire. To be certain, his healing in this body was no faster than usual, and he had the splinter wounds and hard labor nicks on his hands to prove it… though, come to think of it, he didn't. They'd all been healed when he drank the 3Z potion. He ambled down the stairs and made his way to the Chartham Market.

The first thing Ezra did was to trade the cloth bag from Fenrik's car (it was a pretty nice bag) for a dark, broad-brimmed hat for himself, hoping it would make his bolted-on eyewear less obvious. With the hat on, an onlooker might think he was wearing the heavy sunglasses that kao-alta sometimes wore during the daylight to protect their nocturnal eyes. To be sure, somebody who was much taller than Ezra (like, say, a borrenkin of above average height) would have difficulty even seeing his face up close. Then he proceeded further into the market to find somebody to sell his crystals to.

It was perhaps overgenerous to call what the Chartham Canals had a market. It was two long promenades along either side of a stinking canal crisscrossed by dozens of makeshift (and one or two sturdy-looking) bridges. To either side, crammed right up against the deteriorating stone walls of much older buildings, were dozens upon dozens of ad hoc stalls. Where the stall vendors in East Shore and even Old Town had semi-permanent structures with cinderblock walls on one or two sides and corrugated tin roofing above, the 'stalls' at the Chartham Market seemed to have been thrown together in a hurry after some sort of natural disaster, with wooden planks, bent metal poles, and lengths of rusty fencing holding up cloths and tarps and occasionally sporting hand-painted signs of highly questionable grammar.

Hundreds of people streamed about them, mostly from the underclass races of the city, arguing and haggling with the merchants, crisscrossing the bridges (or just gliding across if they were dorthek), and hauling endless bags and carts of cheap, questionably-obtained merchandise in and out of the area. Very few of the merchants seemed to specialize in any one thing, putting for sale whatever odds and ends they'd managed to get their hands on. Surprisingly, theft didn't seem to be much of a problem, and Ezra soon found out why: an argument erupted across the canal from him, and Ezra watched as a burly byoun plant-man tossed a screaming urmal man into the canal. People gathered around and beat the man with boat oars and pelted him with rocks as he thrashed about, trying to stay afloat. Only when he stopped moving did they drag him out of the water and toss him unceremoniously to the ground - Ezra couldn't tell whether he was still alive.

"I reckon he got off easy, eh?" the woman behind Ezra said.

"I reckon so," Ezra said, though he really had no idea, just the horrifying realization that this was a far more desperate and dangerous place than the shabby warrens of Old Town.

Most of the merchants didn't specialize in much, but a few of them did - anything that required actual expertise, including a kao-etema crystal dealer with a scowling purple prymen for muscle. Since the kao-etema usually possessed bad eyesight, that made them a poor fit for gauging the color and clarity of crystals… but the merchant woman seemed to get by through feel and sound alone, suggesting that she had substantial magical sensitivity to boost her perception. Why an elevated mage would be in the Chartham Canals was a good question - probably the same reason that Ezra was there.

"These stolen?" The merchant felt the crystals carefully, tapping a tuning fork against one of them and holding the thing to her floppy, downturned ear.

"Not from anybody near here," he said.

"I'll give you two brown for them," she said. She gauged him to be the desperate type, and was not unreasonable in doing so.

Ezra almost laughed - they were nice crystals. He could've gotten ten for them from Gladion or bought them for fifteen, and that man was a ruthless haggler. But Ezra was also in the Chartham Canals and he needed money. "Six," he said.

"Four and I won't have Prod toss you in the canal for thievery," she said.

"Canal," the glowering prymen agreed.

"Four brown and no canal," Ezra agreed, and they made the exchange.

That gave him two brown to give to give to Mama Pathula and another two for clothes - two sets for Rill and one for himself, since she had only a blood-stained underskirt and his only set was the shabby brown trousers and blood-spattered tan shirt he'd worn as Fenrik's thrall.

Perusing for decent and nondescript clothing, he'd spent himself down to the two brownbacks he owed Pathula plus three brushpins, which he thought to use to buy a piece of fruit but reconsidered when he saw the quality of produce the market had on display. No thanks. He adjusted his hat and turned back south when he spotted a pair of borrenkin men, their heads and shoulders above the teeming press of the market. They were asking questions, circulating some papers that, if Ezra had to guess, featured a sketch of a young human man with night-black goggles bolted over his eyes. That was enough of a scare for him. He bundled the clothes under his arm and bolted from the market.