A bartender is just a pharmacist with a limited inventory.

Pre-Fall scientist

Watching the bartender operate was slightly fascinating. She was officiating at the inn evenings from Fridays to Tuesdays, which is how Johanna had missed her the first day.

For almost everyone, preparing a Petra’s Special was simple. Petra, the bartender, poured whatever drinks she thought would go together, and then ran slowly her finger around the glass. There wasn’t anything else, but the drink cooled and she delivered it chilled, despite the base drinks coming out from the shelf at room temperature. Some patrons still thought it was some kind of trick.

Johanna, of course, knew better. The little glow of colorless manalight that sprang at the tip of Petra Veldhuis’s finger when she did her ceremonial told her the truth of it. Although she couldn’t sustain it for long, maybe 25 or 30 seconds. House rules were three specials an hour, which highlighted for Johanna how small the adept’s mana reserves were. She exhausted them in less than thirty seconds and they refilled fully in under twenty minutes, where she needed an entire night to recover from exhausting hers.

If adepts are truly sorcerers with the lowest version of a spell, then they are stuck at tier 0, she thought.

That was her hypothesis after most of her spells had upgraded mid-training in Maistry’s Keep. Adepts had the smallest version, she had begun with a standard one, then the abrupt change – lowercase ‘c’ – had given her an improved version. And somehow, with bigger effects came bigger reserves.

Then an idea struck her, and she pulled her notebook and looked at the equivalence she’d written between known forms of spells and the parchments of power’s names.

At the bottom of the page, she wrote a temporary note.

Names? How does a parchment specify what level of power a Talent has…

Level. The label on the first parchments for both Catherine and Valentin suddenly struck her.

Did it symbolize how you raised levels of power? Adepts were normal people, and until you got granted a level, or maybe two in her case… No, that couldn’t be right. The earth-type roots Talent, before it vanished, had dropped in power to adept levels, while everything else had improved. Her original idea, that each Talent had its specific potential, separate from the rest, was still the best explanation she had for what happened to her.

She still jotted down the potential idea that level might be associated with power ranks, before snapping the notebook closed again.

Peter and Laura finally made it back to Timothy’s and found Johanna and Tom waiting for them with a cleared table. With the semi-heavy fall, Timothy’s was getting packed with drinkers and eaters. The city’s streets were cleared but with bad weather, activities were curtailed, leaving people with more leisure time.

“We went to the city hall. That was our primary objective, after scoping the city.”

“Anything interesting?” Johanna asked.

“I got a map of the county area, at least. We can get more general maps of the Western Dakota Marches or even larger ones at the bookstore if we want them.”

“I saw them. Good to know. Anything else?”

“Stuff about the legal status. Since we looked new around, the receptionist wanted to know if we were immigrating. Told the receptionist that at worst, we’d be gone by spring.”

“Hopefully before,” Johanna added. “I don’t want to stay here any longer than necessary.”

“So, no citizenship then. In any case, you need to rent something or buy housing for that. Note that there are local taxes that are higher for non-residents.”

“I think Timothy’s collecting them from the room price. But I’m not going to look out for citizenship. I remember those two scavengers and what happened to them with the draft. I’d like not to be officially a citizen of the Montana any longer, to be maybe a bit safer from a legal standpoint, but that’s certainly not going to happen unless we know what it entails exactly,” Johanna stated.

“We may need to if I’m with child,” Laura said.

Johanna startled. She had not thought of that problem, despite “listening” to yesterday’s conversation through the auspices of the Ancient. A child would delay them. Traveling across the continent would be immediately more complicated either before, or just after birth. She was careful, but it might happen to her as well. After all, they were all long children, borne of families with lots of them.

“We’ll figure it out if that gets confirmed,” she said.

She looked at the windows, but they were already shuttered. In any case, the weather had not been that good.

“We may have to stay a bit longer in any case.”

“At least it’s a good place,” Peter replied.

“Good how?”

“It’s about Valetta-sized, I’d say. Oh, different, certainly, and not just because it is snowed in. But it felt a little bigger, somehow. More snacks and restaurants, and even a couple of dance halls. Of course, it isn’t on the scale of New Benton, which I had explored discreetly while officially being confined in the barracks, but Zahl… Zahl feels a little looser than Valetta.”

“Trust you to find dance halls,” Johanna laughed.

“Hey, just because you like better to curl up and read doesn’t mean we all have to do it. Besides, it will offer a better perspective for your Ancient.”

“It’s not my Ancient,” she protested.

“Well, at least it’s going to be less boring for him.”

Johanna spotted Laura looking pensive.

“You’re okay? We’ll make it through, don’t worry. Besides, you could still be very irregular. That shit the Warden’s men used was potent.”

“It’s not just that. It’s… well, the idea that the Skeleton was watching us all had been an abstract possibility, distant and not too much worth speculating. But your dream vision had driven the point home. There is an Ancient still there, somehow, fifteen decades after the Fall, and he is watching us.”

“You worry too much. It’s just bones, he doesn’t have the, you know, down there,” Peter replied.

She threw him an exasperated look, and of course, he couldn’t stop himself, “the thing I’m jealous of is that he probably sees this from both me and you at the same time.”

She batted at him, totally ineffectually as the dodge automatically happened, even seated.

There was a public library, one associated with the main city school. It was full of books mainly for children, unsurprisingly, but there was a section for adults, filled with an eclectic selection of books. Johanna quickly learned most were hand-downs by the city’s bookseller, who cleaned his stock that way from time to time, or even put the first book of a novel series so that people would look up the rest when they didn’t find it in the library.

Still, she found some stuff outside of novels. There were a couple of books about the east coast, but mostly about the economy and modern history, like the post-Unification period.

She wasn’t a resident, so she wasn’t allowed to take out books, but she could read them in their reading salon. Cheap tea and some kind of biscuits for cents, and you could read one book at a time. She just had to refrain from going to relight the stove when it went out, lest she attracted attention – they used logs that were too wet, she swore – and let the staff do it.

The coast was indeed a death zone, she learned, much to her dismay. She knew the west coast was full of Changed beasts, with just the port of New Willapaga far west of Valetta a safe port for fishing in the Montana, but the east coast seemed worse. That was the only place where you still had real Changed swarms. Every ten-twelve years, masses of Changed beasts suddenly erupted out of the wilderness across some hundred-mile-wide fronts. That was why there were no living cities closer to two hundred miles of the coast, save in the far north, beyond the borders of the Union, or down south near the Florida peninsula.

There was a book about the ancient cities of the coast, but after she spent an entire afternoon reading it, she was no closer to figuring out the ruins she’d seen in the Ancient’s Dream Realm. She could now recite – at least until she forgot the useless garbage – facts about how each city had its distinctive flavor and concentrated some things. And casinos. She knew about poker, but pure gambling?

The one thing that had sparked her interest was a description of a rectangular park in one of those great cities that matched a bit the rectangular forest bordered by ruins. Assuming that wasn’t some kind of displaced bit by Changestorms. But New York – that was a surprisingly modern name for an Ancient city – was some kind of island or peninsula, and that didn’t seem to match what she remembered of the zooming-in city on the table. There had been a huge bay to the east, and another further out, but the city itself didn’t seem to be set on an island surrounded by large rivers.

“Not much on precise geography,” the librarian admitted, after looking through some school books. “Maybe this?”

Johanna browsed. The kids’ coursebook was mostly about modern state borders and geography stuff, but it had maps. Including some of the east coast. There were many bays all over the Atlantic, but one place, mid-coast, jumped at her. Two bays, no islands. And if they matched the vision in the Skeleton’s dream realm, then the city near the end of the second bay was the right one.

The librarian found a book that mentioned it, and she quickly devoured it. The more she looked, the more it seemed her hunch was the correct one. When she spotted it, she knew it was the right place.

The Congress, she read, was at the heart of Washington D.C., at the end of the park called The Mall.

That was the long rectangular area of greenery she’d seen, now overrun with trees. With a tall “obelisk” which she found out was a slim tower-like stone structure at a crossing in that park. It was still up there in the vision.

And behind Congress, the Ancient’s version of the Union Senate was the… Library of Congress. Which was said to have held millions of books before the Fall.

She spent a lot of time contemplating the description. A million Ancient books, awaiting their arrival. A million books waiting to be converted into… parchments of power.

If they were still there.

The perspective boggled her mind. She had to swallow, alone in the reading area of the library.