Felun

Once he’d come to his senses, Silverwater and a couple of other faeries had borne him out of Shadowsong and back to the Hive. Iolite and the others had fucked off to do…more murder, probably. He felt ill if he thought about it properly, or for too long, so that was the way he’d think about it for now; just another callous word without true weight. Gloss it over like the punchline to a joke—murder, how absurd.

Technically speaking, he hadn’t actually seen what they’d done in that room. But that pile of Magician-corpses they’d gathered while waiting for Iolite to show up—he wasn’t stupid. And he’d been the one to open the door. Instrumental, really.

Instrumental. He was used to the concept.

The faeries had left him in a hastily-constructed room: a ‘human chamber’, as he’d heard ones of the synthesisers refer to it. It looked like a prison cell and might as well have been. He couldn’t go out into the other parts of the Hive without select supervision. Normally, he’d be talking to Zekore the Archivist, but things were…happening, he deduced. Political things, and violent things. It wasn’t like he especially wanted to venture outside anyways, especially down to the Archives. It was weird and uncomfortable there, in a way that reminded him of the Higher Library—sections plunged into pure darkness, tunnels that that made him feel like he was walking upside-down.

Also, the faeries looked at him like he was an intruder, like he hadn’t been practically forced to stay here. They’d fed him on plain biscuits and brown rice at first, before Thorn had the sense to listen to his entreaties. Then someone had liaised with his family to send him a bunch of canned vegetables and enough bags of dried jujubes to drown in, so he had that going for him at least.

So he’d spent days cooped up in his designated room, tending to his blistered, weeping hands as best as he could. Sometimes, he woke up in the middle of the night from scratching at them through the bandages. He went through two bottles of tincture, which didn’t seem to help.

He tried to distract himself by reading the singular book he’d brought with him: Fools Without Limits: A History of Doomed Expeditions into Shardlike Mountains. It was one in a very long series; the next book in the sequence was named Researchers Without Remorse: A Chronicle of Mishaps in the Deadly Desert Mists. He’d picked it up from a shoddy Glisterian secondhand bookstore—both because the title had been amusing and because the seller had been pushy. He regretted it halfway into the first chapter.

The book mentioned sentient crystals that hunted people, and the author used descriptions that dripped with a dark familiarity; ridges and veins in the rock, glassy reflections. It caught him off unawares, and he was thrust back into his time as a dungeonrunner—too painful, raw like a fresh bite wound…

A tunnel of crystals—

Pain crawling up his arm as his jaw tensed and he bit down hard—

His rune-wards shattering, shearing away in a wave. Green light searing into the backs of his eyelids—

And the afterimage.

He’d gotten away with singed fingertips and a bloody bottom lip. The others…

There was nothing he could salvage after that; word traveled fast. From then on, they all saw him as a murderer by proxy. Worse than being the odd, foreign boy with an unnatural predilection for breaking and unraveling was being the odd, foreign boy who had allowed his helpful, accommodating crew to die.

Don’t go talking to that Breaker now, people would whisper. Tyirn’s crew was softhearted enough to give him a chance, and look where that got them.

It had been the beginning of the end.

The door clanked open, startling him from his guilty thoughts. Thorn poked his head through, the light flashing dully off his whorled horns.

“Zhao of Sungrazers,” he chirped; his voice was somehow both scratchy and melodic, like cricket-song. Not that Felun would make that comparison to his face; the faeries didn’t seem fond of being compared to insects, no matter how similar the chitin looked. “Iolite wants to see you.”

“Okay. In, uh, in the…lab…place?”

“Yes,” Thorn said, and gave a disgruntled, whistling sort of sigh.

Felun picked himself up and stowed the book back into his trunk. Then he grabbed his runequill, sketched a few scent-blockers into the air, and stuck them to his nose. He’d learned to do that pretty much immediately after they’d dragged him through the Hive for the first time.

Thorn lead him down a twisty set of tunnels. He swore that they changed in maddeningly subtle ways each time he went through them. Most of the faeries flew overhead, but the ones that they walked past—often tugging carts along, piled high with baskets of their synthesized, pitch-like building material—stared at him.

They stared as if he were a monstrosity, some sort of bleeding, wailing, dungeon-creature that had crawled out from the bowels of their mountains. At least Iolite and her helpers only snuck glances now and again, instead of pretty much constantly. He’d gotten used to it. Mostly. Thorn ushered him into Iolite’s rooms, and the relief at not having suspicious eyes on him washed over him for the briefest of moments. It was quickly replaced with trepidation.

Iolite welcomed him with a bared-teeth-smile and a pat on the shoulder. Gone was the human-disguise; she glinted blue-violet like a bouquet of irises under the odd, watery light of the laboratory, and her wings shimmered like slices of opal.

“Felun,” she said. “Very good to see you again.”

“Hello,” he said as his eyes darted around.

Aside from Iolite, there was another faery sitting off to the side—grey-coloured like a stormcloud, with huge, wicked-looking spurs at her wrists and shoulders and elbows. She’d been with Silverwater’s crew back at the palace, he recalled distantly. Maybe they were siblings? They looked similar enough, but Felun had no idea if family resemblance was a thing among faeries.

Sets of lamps rotated on a tangle of interlocking rings overhead. The laboratory had been altered since he’d last come here: clean, sleek surfaces at odds with the row of tarnished silver cauldrons bubbling away on the far side of the room—and a man in the corner, crumpled up in a pile of red robes.

He was a human, as far as Felun could tell. Probably not dead? Hopefully just unconscious? He had brown skin and relatively short, dark hair. Combined with the loose robes, he was probably a desert-dweller—from the Shadowsong kingdom? There was a thin film of spell-light surrounding his body, and if he squinted, he could make out the traceries of runework on its surface—signs for binding and stasis, and other ones that would give him a headache if he tried to untangle them at this distance.

Iolite followed his gaze and grimaced. “Oh, don’t mind that. And do not worry, either. He has not come to harm. I know humans can be delicate about that sort of thing so please, be reassured.”

Felun didn’t feel reassured in the slightest.

“Uh,” he said. “Of course. So, you wanted me for something?” He hoped that it didn’t have anything to do with unraveling, or her mystery prisoner, or both.

“Yes, yes, of course.” She nodded, tapping at her chin with one claw-tipped finger. “Felun, my plans have changed. We are no longer returning to the outstation. There have been…difficulties. Suria is relocating to a safehouse in Glister and I shall accompany you. Along with—” She made a vague gesture with her hand. After a beat, he realised that she meant to indicate the unconscious man in the corner. “We are taking a skyship.”

“A skyship?” he asked, then winced inwardly at how inane he sounded. But still. He’d been in the Songian palace not days ago. And the battle, from what he’d heard of it, had been a half-decent success. “Uh. From the Songian port?”

“Where else, Felun?” Annoyance bubbled up to the top of her voice like oil on water.

“I just…well I just thought, with the whole…fighting thing that happened not long ago…” True, Iolite had her Suria-spun disguises, but he was shocked to hear that the port was even running, let alone open.

“Thaumaturgy never sleeps,” she said cryptically. And then: “thankfully, the trade winds carry ever-onwards. I requisitioned some gold. The ship leaves at noon,” She turned to the faery off to the side. “Saiphenora, please fetch Mister Zhao’s belongings from his chamber. And Thorn, fetch me a carrier large enough for the other human.”

===

The skyship rose steadily and gleamed beneath sunlight, winking with the patina of freshly-polished teak.

Felun stood on the upper deck, the wind ruffling at his coat. Several people milled around them, mostly deck crew and small throngs of weary-looking merchants. He squinted up at the bright strings of runework that skimmed merrily over the sails. Well, he thought, that was…different. He hoped that they weren’t the only enchantments dedicated to keeping the ship afloat. Possibly they were even just for show, to reassure the uninformed passenger that why yes, this ship is very safe and very magical. Yes, that must be it. This was probably safer than the sea-ship he’d taken for Sihai, for all it looked the same.

Iolite was comfortably settled in a human-disguise, one that she’d grumbled fit less comfortably than her favoured one. She looked much shorter, with close-cropped hair and leafy tattoos that snaked their way down both arms—she’d rolled up the sleeves of her shirt as if to show them off. Her black skirts were embroidered with alchemical symbols in flashing silver thread. Felun felt a prickle of unease standing by her side. They looked in no way related; quite possibly it would appear to passers-by that he had been kidnapped by a traveling sorceress. Which wasn’t all that far from the truth.

He avoided looking at her suitcase, which was very large, very warded, and probably heavier than it should be.

“What a wonderful takeoff,” Iolite said, sounding almost genuinely pleased. She peered down the staircase leading to the lower decks. “It was good for your morale to see that, yes? Now come along.”

Their room was plain and modest. Felun’s attention skimmed over the plain beds and peeling wallpaper; not too different from the usual type of ship lodging. He made straight for the window, a circle of thick, warded glass that took up half of the outer wall.

Miniature dunes rolled on far below, the shadow of the ship a wavering blot moving with them across the sands. He touched a hand to the glass and dipped into the enchantment, ever-so-shallowly—not touching, only looking. The flow of spellwork within was coiled and knotted, a singular section of a weave that was composed of thousands of parts. He could not break the ship by accident if he tried. Below the main weave, he glimpsed the contours of fail-safes, ensuring that the ship remained airborne, and below that, different fail-safes to allow for a slow, gliding descent if all else fell apart. He breathed a quiet sigh of relief as he withdrew.

Something thumped, dull and heavy. He whipped his head round, tensing reflexively—but it was only Iolite dropping the suitcase by the locked door. She began to rummage through her leather travel bag as she perched on one of the beds. She withdrew something—it looked like a wide bracelet, engraved with unrecognisable symbols and the colour of a polished tooth. She paused as she caught him staring.

“I am working,” she said. “Preoccupy yourself with other tasks. That porthole should be of adequate interest; we will be passing over the forbidden grounds soon. That is interesting to you, yes?”

He shrank away from her glare and retreated to the window, staring at the influx of heaving white fog below. It was like a false-sea. Just looking at it made him feel slightly colder. He shoved his blistered, itching hands into his pockets and shivered.

It couldn’t be all that far below them, he thought. The shadow of the sky-ship was larger now that they were drifting over the bulk of the fog instead of the sands over proper ground. He’d heard things about it from his time in Glister, of course: that a breathful of the stuff would kill a man instantly and other such stories. He let his mind empty as he watched the roiling of the white below.

Before long, they entered a cloud bank and the window fogged up all over. Felun backed away. The room suddenly seemed a little too small, yet not small enough—hardly airtight. He imagined the poisonous fog rising up, masquerading as clouds, cupping the prow of the ship in its spidery hands. He turned back to the room, gaze skipping over the suitcase by the door. It made his skin crawl to think of the man inside—folded up and locked in a silent stasis. He was hidden, tucked away, but his non-presence was a weight in of itself.

Iolite sat cross-legged on her bed, a soft, warm glow at her fingertips. She was working on the big bracelet—feeding magic into it, as far as he could tell. Just pouring a steady stream of the stuff deep into the material. He watched her for several moments before she looked up and pursed her lips at him.

“Felun, I do not appreciate being stared at.”

“Sorry,” he said quickly.

“Are you feeling dispirited?” She glanced over at the window, now a panel of pure white. “I see. Well, come over and take a look at this. Investigation is enriching for your kind, yes?” She held out the thing she’d been working on. “You are a clever boy and I hate to belittle your capability for critical reasoning, but I must make this clear: do not try to wear it, in any way, shape, or form.”

He walked over and hesitated. The item gleamed oddly under the room’s cheap runelight. Was it just his imagination, or did the grooves and channels formed by the surface-carvings look almost…wet?

“Go on,” she said. “I wouldn’t let you hold it if it would harm you. It isn’t even completed yet. Just don’t put it on like a fool.”

He took it gingerly and turned it over, half-expecting it to sear his skin on contact. But the material felt cool and solid in his hands; no note of unusual spellwork on the surface.

“Is it enchanted?” he asked.

Iolite scoffed a little. “Of course it’s enchanted. Dormant, though. Do that Breaker thing of yours, take a look. It won’t hurt you unless you put it on.” She reached into her bag and withdrew a matching bracelet. And a matching necklace—no, not a necklace. A collar.

A tendril of unease wormed its way up his spine. The bracelets were really more like cuffs, he thought. Gaol-cuffs, shackles without the chain. It was a set of restraints. For…what, exactly? Him? No, surely not. The man in the suitcase, probably. He reached softly into the material—it was a little colder and heavier than he’d expected, like a mixture of ceramic and white jade—and examined the shape of the enchantments within.

His mind touched against a false-surface of sunlight and quicksilver. Beneath that lay something darker: ropes of flesh and cutting bone, swarms of rot and things that hissed when they were observed. In the spaces between and further down still, slithered something old and fat and slow and scaled and starving…

Felun flinched his way back out.

“Good?” Iolite asked, sounding pleased.

“This is…very strong,” he said.

She smiled, a gleam of blunt, human-like teeth. “Yes. Alas, I cannot claim credit. I am simply, how shall we say, waking it up.”

She held out her hand and Felun placed it hastily back into her open palm.

“Would you like to look at these ones too? They’re not done yet, but they are part of a set. Quite similar, but not the same.”

“No, thank you,” Felun said quickly. “I’ve got, uhh, some books to read. I’ll get out of your way.”

She was still feeding magic into the things when he went to bed, a softly glowing spot on the other side of the room. The suitcase cast a looming shadow against the door. He rolled over and pulled the covers to his chin.

===

Felun stumbled down the gangplank and into the Glisterian dockyard, still bleary with sleep. The suitcase was heavy, even with the handle to drag it by and rollers offsetting the load. Iolite looked back at him and tapped her foot meaningfully against the cobblestones. Her arms were full of empty glass bottles—he had no idea where she’d gotten them from—and her bulging travel bag was slung in an artless lump over her shoulder. He tried not to think about the dormant restraints that lay within.

“Come on, Felun. We don’t have all day. Do you need assistance?”

The last thing he needed was for her to think he was a weakling.

“No, I’m—” He grunted and tugged harder at the handle. The suitcase yielded, and rollers clattered across uneven cobbles. “I’ve got it.”

“Then let’s go.”

She set off without deigning to clarify where. They weaved through small, grimy alleys flanked on all sides by high-rise blocks. It reminded him a little of home. There was the occasional person—a man walking with armfuls of packages, an elderly lady peeling vegetables on her doorstep—but it was too early for anyone to really be out yet. A slice of pre-dawn sky mocked him from overhead. They dove deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of alleys, up tiny stairs and over rusting pipes. Felun flinched as a drop of cold water hit the back of his neck. He squinted up to see wet laundry drooping on a line overhead.

Iolite stopped at a moss-choked brick shell of a building, small and squat, wedged between a set of crumbling wooden shacks. No windows. When she knocked, the door sounded surprisingly solid.

The woman who opened the door was unfamiliar and startlingly human—she had her hair in two braids and a basket full of wheat stalks and root vegetables propped against her hip. For a moment, he was sure they’d come to the wrong place before her gaze slid from Iolite to glare at him.

“Come in,” Suria said, stepping aside. Her disguise, illusory basket included, melted off as soon as she locked the door behind her. Spines, wings, and carapace unfolded from thin air—her barbed tail glinted in the near-dark, a line of gold swishing back and forth in her wake.

The room was small and plain, coated in dull carpet and ragged floral wallpaper. It was lit by what looked like an old-fashioned oil lamp overhead. A curtained doorway hinted at more similarly miserable-looking rooms, deeper in the building. Iolite dropped her armful of bottles onto a sagging, dust-covered couch in the corner.

“So. Suria, how have you been holding up?”

“Well enough.”

Iolite sighed and waved her hand, dispelling her disguise. Suddenly, she was here—actually here, Felun realised; not human-masked half-Iolite, but the storm-blue, sharp-edged, mildly-terrifying faery Iolite. She lashed her tail and hissed, a low, sibilant sound—aimed at Suria, not him, but it made his ears ache all the same. He took a careful step backwards.

“Ezphorza is fine,” Suria said stiffly. “She is recovering. There were some injuries. All taken care of.”

“I see you neglect to mention little Saiphenora in detail,” Iolite said, voice gone dangerously soft.

Suria flattened her spines. “Saiph is…adapting. Recovering. The first time is always the worst.”

“Communication is the backbone on which all great plans lie,” Iolite snapped, punctuating her words with a click of her teeth. “You cannot belie the fact that two mages broke into the outstation and almost killed one of our own. You cannot belie the fact that you failed to contain them.” And then, softly again: “Suria, you are free to tell me the truth— no matter how disastrous the situation. Put aside your own petty little fears for your reputation, because that has nothing to do with it. It is unfortunate and now out of your control.”

“The lack of syrup was…” Suria trailed off and stared at the ground, lashing her tail all the while. “…unprecedented. No one’s fault, of course. The incident with the mages is a loose end. I will bring it to rights.”

Iolite made a rough sound of acknowledgment and shut her eyes. When she opened them, her expression had settled into one of blankness. A good sign? Self-restraint, maybe. The set of her shoulders still looked as though she might like to punch something.

“Bring that here,” she said.

Felun dragged the suitcase over. Iolite did something to the wards around it before she unzipped it.

“Help me with this.”

Suria made a cut-off sound of surprise as they dragged the man’s limp form out of his unfortunate carrier. The stasis tingled cold and sharp against Felun’s still-blistered hands and he let go as quickly as he could.

“Who is that?”

“An asset from Shadowsong,” Iolite said, shrugging her travel bag off her shoulder. “Another of those strange mages, from one of their ships. I doubt thaumaturgy—not blue and see here, the silver emblem. It is another class. Took down a dozen of the fodder, but they did get him in the end. I shall honour their sacrifice, indeed.”

Suria narrowed her eyes. “With all due respect, why did you bring him here? If he is Songian—and one of their disgraceful fighters no less, with the foul intent on killing us on sight—then I doubt he will cooperate.”

“He will be made to,” Iolite said calmly. She took out the enchanted collar and cuffs and knelt back down to fasten them to the unconscious mage. “I will need your help once the stasis wears off.” She closed the first cuff around his wrist.

There was no coloured spark, no glowing or chiming sound, but Felun felt a certain frisson ripple through the air as the cuff restraint clicked shut. A definitive undercurrent of locking that made the joints of his hands ache. And the same for the other two, a feeling like pins driving home.

Suria hissed softly. “Is that from the Library, also?”

“From ours,” Iolite said. She offered a thin smile. “What’s left of it, anyway. Quite far down. The other Breaker collapsed much of the stable infrastructure getting to it. She succumbed, in the end. Poorly skilled, she was. Ah, Felun, perhaps we should’ve used you instead.”

Felun shivered inwardly and said nothing. He hadn’t known the other Breaker. It made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up to hear, all the same. In some ways, her legacy stalked at his heels like a ghost—Iolite seemed to like reminding him she’d gone mad.

“I see,” Suria replied. “I hope that they are what you hoped for.”

“Yes. We will discover more in due time.” Iolite rose to her feet and turned to Suria. “Tell me about the outstation mages. More information than the pittance that you sent with Saiph.”

Suria glanced over at him, frowning. “Does he need to be here?”

“I do not like to repeat myself, Suria. It was humans, correct? He might know something useful. It is good to speak in the human-tongue around Felun, and plentifully. It would not do to have him sip at the well of madness, like the other one.”

Suria’s wings gave an agitated flap. “The intruders…they were certainly from the palace—reeked of it.”

“And the tracker-mark?”

“Active. She is—” Suria furrowed her brow, and a glint of spell-light flashed through her gaze. “Still in the city. Hasn’t been near the City Hive, but—they have their people around. I fear it is only a matter of time.”

“Fear less. A more detailed description, please.”

“The mage in question could, as far as I could tell, regenerate parts of herself when wounded,” Suria said. “She had an artefact, some sort of key imbued with a spell that made me sick to my stomach. But what she did to Ezphorza was—if I had not been convalescing, I would have partaken of the syrup and…” Her expression twisted darkly, and she clenched her fists until the joints clicked.

“Interesting,” Iolite said, turning to frown down at the man in stasis. “And the second mage?”

“The other one was less dangerous. Could cast, shield, use a sword with low-to-moderate proficiency. Either of them alone, we would have captured them easily. But. I made a mistake. The one that I fought—I should have killed her there and then.”

“Do not speak heedlessly,” Iolite said. “Is that your plan? To immediately dispose of her?”

“I defer to you, of course.”

“You have the advantage of a tracker-mark, yes. But you cannot question the hand of the enemy if you have already cut it off. Why did you immediately choose offense?”

“Like I said, she stank of the palace,” Suria said, looking distinctly uncomfortable. “It is not just the thaumaturges which we have to be wary of; it is all who are under their poisonous influence. I wished to take advantage of the element of surprise. Immediate threat assessment was low; I was mistaken.”

“Do you know whether she is an asset of the Kingdom? Her hierarchy, how she fits into their plans?”

“No, I…I do not know. It seems likely and yet, I am hesitant to send anyone after her. I doubt we have anyone with the suitable skillset…” She trailed off and looked over to Felun.

Iolite suddenly looked very pleased with herself. Felun grimaced. A sinking feeling made itself known in his stomach.

“Ah,” Suria said. “I see.”

“Yes,” Iolite agreed with bared teeth. She turned to him as well. “Felun, we wish to ensnare a target. Let us speak of strategy.”