Felun

“So that was a disaster,” Suria said.

Felun cracked his eyelids open a fraction. His head ached faintly at the effort. Suria glowered down at him through the gloom.

“Thorn has assured me that your work has side-effects,” she continued. Her wings flickered with the shadows of warning, dangerous colours.

“Oh,” he said stupidly. “Hello. You’re back.”

“Yes,” she scowled. “I have been here for many hours. And without Iolite’s quarry. It is disgraceful.” She punctuated that last sentence with a whip-crack slash of her tail. Felun hid his flinch in a cough.

“So, Iolite…does she want rune help again or something…?”

“I suspect that she will be needing you shortly, though I cannot imagine why. Wake up and get yourself in order. Do not whimper at walking around, else she will be upset. Hive knows we don’t want that.”

With that, she disappeared into the depths of the safehouse.

He struggled to sit up on the creaking cot, wincing as a heavy sensation throbbed at his temples. His fingers were itching again. He resisted the urge to scratch, just barely; sometimes, the memories of raw, weeping skin weren’t enough to convey the futility of it all. Sometimes, he woke up from clawing at half-healed blisters in his sleep.

Weak lamplight illuminated the windowless room: the bare cot, scratched floorboards, the bag that he’d dropped at the foot of his bed. It really wasn’t a pleasant place to stay at the best of times. He tugged on his boots and ventured out and down the corridor.

The safehouse reminded him of the Hive, but worse in some ways. The limited exploration he’d gotten in had revealed far too many rooms able to fit inside a rundown building, and twisty corridors leading into uglier, lower levels. In some places, coarse fur sprouted from gashes in the wallpaper. Iolite had implied that the house had been…grown…that way: brooding dimensional hallways spiraling out to who-knows-where. Most of it was dark and grimy, too. There were no windows: he knew that for a fact, because he’d gone looking. Maybe the faeries didn’t mind, but it gave him the creeps.

He made his way to the kitchen, perhaps the most normal room in the whole place. It was decently lit with a cheerful brass chandelier and it had a kettle-contraption for boiling water, as well as a cupboard stocked with tea and tinned fruit.

The room was already occupied. Winterbird was perched at the center table, speaking to one of Iolite’s helpers. The purplish one, newly come from the Hive—Ezphorza, he recalled. Both of them sported bandages encrusted with herbal residue. They looked up as he approached.

“Sungrazer Zhao,” Ezphorza said falteringly. She spoke with an overly-exaggerated enunciation, and had a tinge of what he’d come to think of as a faery accent around the edges of her words. “It is…good to see you, awake. Thorn has said it is…not fortunate? For the human to languish so.”

“Thanks” he said, scratching awkwardly at the back of his head. “How long was I asleep? And where’s Thorn?”

“Some number of hours,” Winterbird said curtly. She had a patch over her eye, where Kion had wounded it. “Thorn is recuperating from the effects of your spellwork.”

He winced. “Right. Uh, okay. I hope he’s alright? And you too, of course. I’ll just, uh.” He edged over to the kettle.

“Make two cups of the lichen-brew for us, if you would,” Winterbird said. “The green jar, with the baubles inside.”

“Yes,” said Ezphorza, brightening visibly. “It is very restorative.”

“Not for the human,” Winterbird said, and gave a dark little laugh. “Don’t mix it into your own brew, little Zhao, lest you become quite ill.”

He nodded awkwardly as he fetched the jars from the cupboard. Iolite had already pointed out to him the kitchen supplies of which he was to avoid, with small snippets of lurid detail to accompany her advice— he’d felt particularly queasy at her description of some poor, naive merchant sneaking a sip of her wares and proceeding to projectile-vomit masses of grey worms all over the cobblestones. She’d laughed as she’d recounted it, too, a scratchy little trill that almost made his ears hurt.

Winterbird and Ezphorza returned to their susurrous faerie-chatter as the water boiled. Felun fetched three mugs and dropped spheres of lichen into the first two; they floated to the surface when he poured the water in, fraying green buoys in a slowly simmering sea. The scented steam given off made him feel slightly lightheaded. He stuck with willow bark for his own cup, grimacing as a muscle twinged in his back.

Sometimes, he wondered if that whole mess with the dungeon hadn’t happened…

He shook his head in a vain effort to clear it and carried the tea over to the table. It was a solid, beaten-up thing, that table; the bases of the mugs rumbled as he slid them over the scarred wood. He tried not to think too hard about where Iolite had gotten all the furniture from, and how.

“Much thanks,” Ezphorza murmured, sipping eagerly at her tea.

Winterbird simply nodded at him and warmed her hands around the mug.

“So uh,” Felun said. “Are you guys doing…okay?”

Winterbird scowled faintly. “As much as can be expected, little Zhao. Iolite is…helping, in her own way.”

“That false-sustenance is little comfort,” Ezphorza sighed. “Alas, were it but the Hive troubles…”

“Hush,” said Winterbird. She flicked the tip of her tail against Ezphorza’s arm. “She does not like that, you know. Take heed, Zhao. Do not call unfalse things false.”

“Right,” he said slowly, and sipped at his tea to avoid saying more. It tasted bitter, of course. But a shadow of a headache still hummed at his temples and it was a small price to pay— he’d tasted worse herbal soups, back home.

Ezphorza made a sullen sort of faerie-sound before falling silent.

Winterbird looked at her, sighed, then leaned over the table and spoke softly. “Ay, but you are able to walk the streets freely, are you not, Zhao?”

“I’m not sure,” Felun said cautiously.

Winterbird smoothed a hand over Ezphorza’s slumped shoulder. “Perhaps, if Suria is amenable and you are willing, perhaps you may seek out an independent faerie willing to part with a few drops of Hive honey? When you have the time, of course. It would be…more helpful, I believe. Would aid the healing process.”

He hesitated. “Uh. But doesn’t Iolite already make that kind of stuff for you…?”

Winterbird gave him an inscrutable look. Her spines flicked ever-so-slightly. “Iolite works hard to keep us happy. Best this request not reach her hearing, yes?”

“Ah,” he said slowly. “Yeah, okay.”

He noticed Winterbird sliding her untouched tea over when Ezphorza finished her own share. Ezphorza gave her a look, with a rippling movement of spines to match. Winterbird nudged her until she took it and drank. Ezphorza took two mouthfuls and passed the mug back to Winterbird. She sat up a little straighter, tipping her head fractionally.

“Someone is coming,” she said. “…Curlew?”

“Curlew,” Winterbird agreed as Curlew walked in.

His horns were draped in various bandages, and he looked a touch less shiny than usual.

“Breaker Zhao,” he said with a polite little nod. “Iolite has sent for you.”

Felun winced inwardly. “In the lab?”

Curlew made a tired, chuffing sound. “Where else?” he asked, then shot him a look that probably counted as a sympathetic glance. “Cheer up, Zhao. I’ve got work too.”

“So soon?” Winterbird asked sharply.

“Orders,” he said simply. His spines twitched in an interested sort of way. “Is that lichen tea you’re having?”

The faeries began to lapse into their own language as their focus drifted away from him, words displaced with song-like hissing. Felun put his empty cup in the sink and headed for the door.

“…You’ll have to—sssssttt—boil a new pot,” he heard Winterbird grumbling as he left.

===

The safehouse laboratory was far more cramped than the one back at the Hive. Bundles of softly-glowing stones hung from the ceiling like windchimes and moss dripped from the walls. Iolite hovered over a row of little cauldrons, all of them bubbling away in a dim corner. Suria was there too, and she didn’t look happy about it.

“It is the boy Zhao,” Suria said, sounding disgruntled. “Fortuitous, finally.” She said something fluting in the faerie-language, probably not very complimentary.

Iolite said something back, slower and kinder.

Suria frowned and picked up a vial from the benchtop—freshly-synthesized faerie honey, Felun gathered. She glared at it, sighed, and downed its shimmering golden contents in one go.

“Just a moment, Felun,” Iolite murmured. She dropped a handful of pink powder into one of the cauldrons and stirred it with a silver rod. Plucking an empty bottle from the bench, she ladled a measure of dark red liquid into it.

“Hm,” she said as she held it up to the light. “It will do, for now.” She made a low, sweeping gesture with her tail and the cauldron-fires dimmed. “Thank you for your patience. Suria, if you would chart our course.”

Suria nodded, a single, sharp jerk of her head. She strode past, leading him down the way of the corridor leading deeper into the labyrinth of the safehouse. Iolite’s presence floated close behind, like the flicker of a dark candle at his back.

As they walked, the corridors began to shed all pretense of normalcy, morphing into tunnels of fossil-pale plaster; Felun saw faerie-glyphs scratched into the walls by the golden lights of Suria’s wings. Somewhere in the distance, there came the sound of water dripping onto stone. Squat grey clumps of mushrooms sprouted from cracks in the floorboards; they reminded him a little of the outpost, back down in the tunnels beneath the poison salt deserts.

His skin crawled; some vestige of dungeonrunner instinct was telling him to retreat, up sticks and make a run for it. ‘Raise sail’, as Tyirn used to say, on account of a colourful childhood on the docks. ‘Shut up, pretender,’ as Vilette used to shoot back. ‘You haven’t so much as stepped on a boat, let alone sailed a day in your life.’

The memory made him feel ill. He stopped thinking about it, concentrating instead on the way the wood beneath his boots faded into a patchwork of silver stone and hard-packed earth. He almost ran into Suria when she came to a stop before a doorway formed of iron bars.

The place did resemble a dungeon, in a sense; not his old dives, but the old use of the word, the one that meant imprisonment. The lock glowed and hissed at Suria’s touch; a scent of dried flowers and sour wine filled the air as the door swung open.

“Perhaps avoid closing any doors if you come down here alone,” Iolite murmured at his back, closer than he would have liked. He almost jumped. “It would be a terrible shame if you got yourself locked in one of the littler chambers. Not that we doubt your fine abilities, of course. But we would like to keep such doors intact, and I did such fine work on them, too.”

The room beyond was near full dark; only the glow from Suria’s wings cast weak illumination over a slumped-over form against the far wall.

“Oh,” Felun said. He’d almost forgotten about the Songian hostage, what with all the playing at being a thaumaturge.

Iolite made a clicking, chittering sound behind him, and the half-shimmer of stasis spells around the unconscious Songian flickered out.

“Just in time, too,” Iolite said softly, sounding pleased. “Take heed, Felun; even a great working such as mine may rot a captive’s bones if left too long.”

Felun was glad that she—probably—couldn’t make out his grimace in the dark. He saw Suria tense out of the corner of his eye and realised the red-robed mage was starting to stir.

“At ease,” Iolite said. “He is restrained quite well.”

Felun squinted through the gloom and noted the cuffs at the mage’s wrists, the pale band about his throat. A mixture of relief and vague discomfort settled over him, like oil over water.

The mage coughed and raised his head, squinting at them.

“…Hello?” he rasped. “What is…where are my colleagues?”

Iolite stepped smoothly forwards, stopping alongside Suria. “I wouldn’t know,” Iolite said. “What matters now is your situation, I would think. My name is Iolite. What is yours?”

“Are you going to ransom me?” the mage asked. He coughed again, and spat onto the dust-floor.

“We have questions,” Iolite said. “The first of which is: who are you, and in what relation to the crown? Not a thaumaturge, that I can see.”

“I’m no one of importance,” the mage said dryly.

“We would appreciate truthful answers,” Iolite said, tone verging onto dangerously pleasant territory. She held up the bottle she’d brought, half-full with red liquid. “I would not like to be made to make you cooperate, yes?”

The mage shifted and sighed. “I suppose you will not let me go once you are done asking your questions.”

“A shame you think like that,” Iolite said. “Is it a human thing, to kill captives once they are finished with them? Or is it a quaint fashion of your kingdom alone?”

“Hm,” the mage said, and lunged.

He moved so quickly that Felun only realised after he’d finished flinching; all he registered was a blur of red movement, Iolite snapping a shield into place, and—

Suria’s arm shot out and brought the mage to a crashing halt.

“Don’t try that again,” Iolite said.

Suria’s hand locked around the mage’s throat, squeezing tight enough for him to be prying at her fingers with both hands. She made a gesture with her free hand; a soft, twirling motion that summoned glowing lines of spell-made string into being.

“Suria,” Iolite admonished. “I don’t think that will be necessary.”

“I respect your spellwork always,” Suria said. “But while the boy is here, the mage is not safe to move. Perhaps we should send him away?”

Felun realised that she was referring to him. Well, shit. It wasn’t like he wanted to be here, but the way she’d said it made him bristle inwardly.

“Ah,” Iolite said. “No, Felun stays. Felun must know that he is helpful, yes? He will be of help interpreting the subtler nuances of human body language. Thank you for considering his weaknesses, Suria. How thoughtful of you. Carry on.”

Suria let the mage fall. The spell-twine followed him down and bound his arms to his sides as he hit the ground.

The mage coughed, sounding like he was trying not to gasp for air.

“You see,” Iolite said, turning to address the mage. “It would be much easier for you to answer our questions.”

“I see you’ve done something to my magic,” the mage said. He sounded more insolent and curious than afraid, though Felun had heard the same tone used among fresh adventurers facing their first sets of falling trapdoors; very likely it was an act.

“You are not very good at fishing for information and I am running out of patience,” Iolite said. “What is your name?”

“Is that a faerie thing? Asking names?”

“That misconception is wholly myth,” she said with grim amusement. “I can do nothing with your name in the way of spellwork. It is simply helpful to know who we have under our care. It is the easiest question, really.”

The mage tilted his head and remained silent.

“Hurt him a little bit,” Iolite suggested.

Suria kicked him in the stomach, hard. Felun flinched inwardly.

The mage coughed and made a cut-off sound of pain.

“And now?” Iolite asked.

“You’ll kill me either way,” the mage snarled, chin held high with defiance.

“No,” Iolite said. “We are not senseless murderers. But we will cause you a sufficient amount of pain if necessary. Perhaps, Suria—”

Suria said something to her in the faery tongue, all incomprehensible, piping song.

Iolite frowned, said something back, gesturing with the bottle in her hand.

Suria shook her head. Iolite sighed and nodded.

“Felun,” Suria finally said, turning to him. “Follow me.”

He did, feeling unsettled as she led him out of the holding cell and a fair ways back up the plaster corridor. She came to an abrupt halt and turned to face him, scowling.

“Listen clear, yes?” Suria said. “I will be trying a questioning method. It involves illusion. It will be quite tiring for me. Understand now? So do not appear surprised in front of the mage.”

“Okay,” he said, bewildered.

Her wings flared with a pulse of light and he realised that her pupils were shrinking-small, her face set in concentration. He felt his ears pop as she cast a spell, something illusion-related. Next to him, a form flickered into existence.

“What…” he said.

It was a life-size copy of the mage girl Scionsong, right down to the fearful look on her face.

“Does that look correct to you?” Suria asked. “Sometimes, I have difficulty with the facial proportions.”

“It looks very realistic,” he said uneasily.

“Good,” she said sharply. “That is the point. The texture of the cloth is good to your eye?” she added. “We do not observe fine detail in the same way and this is a damnably rushed working.”

“It looks real as far as I can tell,” he hedged. “Good…job…?”

He knew it was an illusion, of course—Suria had just made it. But it looked so real that he felt uneasy looking at it; even more so when Suria pressed a hand against her own torso and pulled out a handful of carapace in the shape of a knife.

“Why make the illusion?” he asked, though some inkling had already formed in his mind. He did not like the answer he came up with.

“They are of the same sort,” Suria murmured. “The same type of mage that is dangerous to the touch—moreso than usual, yes? The kingdom is a small one. Perhaps he knows her role. Perhaps they are colleagues, like an echelon of Generals. This is a leverage. We will see.” Saying so, she looped illusion-cuffs and illusion-twine around Scionsong until she matched the red mage. A bundle of cloth faded into existence, looped around the lower half of the illusion’s face like a makeshift gag.

“Are you going to, uh…?” Felun asked, looking at the knife in her hand.

A faint grin touched her features. “Perhaps. But it is only an illusion.”

“Right,” he said, as his mind drifted uneasily—don’t think of what could be done with that knife. Don’t think of dungeons or medic’s tents or piles of severed arms—ugh. Too late.

She shot him an almost pitying look as she looped an arm around the illusion-Scionsong’s throat. “Don’t look, if it displeases you. Look at the mage instead. Iolite seems to believe you are better versed in noticing clues of human expression. Do not let her down.”

He followed, silent at her heels as she brought their false-captive back to the holding cell. Watching her move the illusion like a puppet was disconcerting. Illusion-Scionsong walked with the natural gait of a real human, shrank away from the knife clasped in Suria’s hand as if she were truly afraid. He tried not to think about Suria cutting the illusion open, focused instead on Iolite and the red mage as they reentered the room.

“I have brought a friend for you,” Suria announced. “A little palace rat, poking her nose where it did not belong.”

The mage looked up from where he’d been propped back up against the wall, presumably by Iolite and, if the faint scratch-marks across the ground were any indication, against his volition. His eyes widened almost imperceptibly, before his expression fell flat.

“I have no idea who that is,” he said blandly.

“Scionsong does not sound familiar to you?”

“There are many Scionsongs,” the mage said, his gaze darting from Scionsong to Iolite. “You don’t know of our legions of unclaimed lowborns? Scion of Shadowsong—child of the kingdom—poor bastards. How should I know this one? And who is that other human?” He jerked his head in Felun’s direction. “I had thought it was just you and your own kind.”

“We are asking the questions here,” Iolite said, gesturing meaningfully with the bottle in her hand. “I am still willing to test this on you, understand?”

The mage sighed. “I am a rather unimportant individual in service of the Songian crown.”

“You seem to forget we were there when we captured you,” Iolite said lightly. Her tail swished.

As if on cue, Suria raised her knife to Scionsong’s shoulder and cut. Scionsong jerked in her grasp with the movement of a real human and made a muffled, too-real-sounding cry of pain. Felun looked back to the red mage, who had gone very still.

“We found her in the tunnels,” Suria said. “She has not been cooperative. She injured one of my fighters and turned a vile enchantment of keys upon us. It would not pain me to slit her throat open.”

“I see,” the mage said slowly, sounding faintly troubled.

“I would like to ask you again,” Iolite said. “Who are you?”

“A Healer,” he said, not moving his gaze from the knife in Suria’s hand. “I’m of little use to you, and that wayward civilian even less so.”

“I will make my own judgements as to your use,” Iolite said, satisfaction creeping into the set of her spines. “Fleshcrafters. I suspected as much.”

“Fleshcrafter—hah, what a name.” Suria scowled. “Filth like the thaumaturges. Your kind would best go the way of necromancy and die a quiet death. The same kind as the girl?”

She gave the illusion a prod; Felun felt his skin crawl when it flinched and cowered.

“He is more dangerous,” Iolite said. “But this one is not insignificant neither, no? An underling, perhaps?”

“I don’t know who she is,” the Healer said. The line of his shoulders was tense.

“Claiming no relation will not spare her,” Iolite said smoothly. “Suria, let her speak. Perhaps she will have some betrayal to express.”

Suria frowned and yanked the cloth from illusion-Scionsong’s mouth. Scionsong coughed and spluttered convincingly.

“Well?” Suria asked.

“Help,” the illusion said with Scionsong’s voice. It sounded weak and terrified. “I’m so tired. My eyes hurt and they won’t let me close them. Please help me, Sir Healer—I can’t…I tried to fight, I really tried…”

The Healer froze. For a moment, he was as still as if he had been painted upon canvas. Then he barked out a laugh.

“I don’t think so,” he said, shaking his head. His voice had a fresh edge to it now. “This is a spell, isn’t it? Some sort of drug or mirage—you people still use illusions, I suppose? And ‘Sir Healer’, really? The real Aliyah would never say that.”

Iolite sighed. “She is severely sleep-deprived. That tends to have an effect on humans.”

The Healer narrowed his eyes. “Not like that, it doesn’t.”

Illusion-Scionsong swayed in Suria’s grasp and let out a whimper. “It’s me,” it mumbled. “Hey, it’s me. I…please help me. They put me in a room like an eggshell…for a long time. I don’t know how long. It was so dark and small. I couldn’t move…” The illusion trailed off and gave a hollow, wretched-sounding sob. “I don’t want to go back. Please just tell them the stupid answers, I don’t want to go back—”

“Is that so,” the Healer said with a bored affect. “And I suppose you’re going to bring in a whole fleet of apprentices next? A long-lost colleague? Perhaps old Algorab, moaning about how you got the best of him? The king himself?”

“You are not afraid of the possibility that you could be wrong?” Iolite asked keenly. “We have kept her in most uncomfortable lodgings, with poor fare. Are you so quick to dismiss a lack of recognition as a falsehood rather than genuine distress? Are you not afraid of the consequences staining your conscience?”

“Not particularly,” the Healer said with grim, false cheer.

“Very well,” Iolite said, nodding to Suria.

Suria shrugged and rammed her knife into Scionsong’s stomach in one smooth movement. The mage flinched. The illusion screamed. Felun looked away, several moments too late.

“No,” the illusion screamed, through a horrible gurgling sound. “No, no, please, please help me—”

The smell of blood filled the air. It really was a good illusion, Felun thought as his stomach turned.

“Take her away, Suria,” Iolite said.

“If you insist on keeping up this farce,” the Healer said, though Felun noticed his eyes tracking Suria’s movements as she dragged the limp illusion-form away.

Iolite ignored him and stroked the neck of the potion bottle in her hands. Under the shallow gloom, the contents almost resembled blood.

“Felun,” she said with a voice like poison dripping into an open wound. “If you would keep me company? We are not quite finished, yet.”