Chapter 7: Desertification

Tarvi and Mathal knocked the last of the brunch to the floor to clear a makeshift operating table. Mathal tossed her borrowed layers off onto the bed only for them to land beside layers already shed by Tarvi. Mathal shrugged. She wasn't about to fight Tarvi to be the first to undergo amateur experimental surgery.

"Any last words?"

"Don't let these be my last words," Tarvi giggled nervously.

She set her belt between her teeth and laid flat on her back, fully exposing the hand-length scar just below her sternum. Mathal held her blackthorn wand between her own teeth and straddled the patient. She placed the tip of her middle finger and nail at the base of the scar.

"Show me the money," she muttered around the wand.

Her magic flowed out in an arc and down the line of her arm to wash over Tarvi. The magic coin glowed pale yellow through her chest in the darkness of the room.

"Three, two, one-"

Mathal drove her nail down through the tissue to the thin edge of the coin in a single stab. Tarvi grunted and snorted through the belt, breaking into a cold sweat, but she kept as still as could be expected.

Unfortunately, Mathal's nail was not a cutting implement but a gouging one. She had to make two more precision stabs before the incision was large enough to fish out the coin. Tarvi screamed and sweat beads as large as marbles.

Mathal yanked the wand out of her mouth with her free hand and gave the patient two charges. Tarvi gurgled and spat out the belt. The gash stitched closed, adding an extra ugly layer over the original scar.

"There, done, it's all over now."

"Well," she panted, "except that now it's your turn."

Mathal grimaced and spun the wand handle to Tarvi.

Tarvi held the blade of a magicked dagger an inch above the skin and braced her free hand against the table. On the count of three, the blade came down. Mathal spat out her belt, roaring in Aklo.

"It's [redacted] cold!"

"Sorry," she mouthed around the wand.

Tarvi slapped the coin into Mathal's waiting palm. Her hand closed with enough force to have crushed gold, but the silver kept its shape and only bit a dent into the skin.

Tarvi touched the wand to Mathal's temple, then jerked her hand back in a stream of Infernal curses. The wand went flying.

"It [redacted] zapped me!"

"Is this the first time you've cast a healing spell?"

"It's stored."

"Doesn't matter. If you don't know how to direct the magic, it'll go any which way."

She sat up, causing Tarvi to slide back, free and knife-arm flailing. A fresh spurt of blood trickled out from the fine cut.

No waste, Chelon approved.

"Just lemme see the wand. Please."

Tarvi hopped off to look for it. It came flying up from under the table less than a minute later.

Mathal caught the wand with a witchlock. She gave herself two charges, half for the cut and one-and-a-half for the previously sustained wounds. It didn't completely heal her, but it was good enough for now.

-/-

They looted the bodies for a little over three hundred gold each and left the undercroft, clothes reworn and coins in hand. They pitched the coins as hard as they could back down into the crypt. The silver bounced, rolled, and finally echoed to a stop. Mathal tapped her foot on the topmost step of the stairs.

"See ya."

The magic rose inside her, but instead of surging out into the ground and unleashing a thirty-foot line of sheer seismic force, it splashed out of her in aimless sputters. The earth tremoring spell vanished from her aura as though cast.

Chelon, what just happened?

You took out your focus. It will take time. Do not depend on all spells to cast all the time.

Best guess, what's my chance of spell failure right now?

One in three.

She cursed in Aklo.

"What? What's going on?" asked Tarvi.

She thanked Chelon and broke the news to Tarvi, who had likely been similarly affected as a spellcaster herself. Tarvi repeated Mathal's curse in Infernal, unwittingly.

"Ok, well, maybe seismic activity in such a concentrated spot would've given us away anyway," said Tarvi.

"Whatever. We'll just have to burn the top and the bottom floor."

"The good news is they've got a kitchen."

The better news was that they had bags and bags of sugar and flour. They spent a full hour dragging the lot to corner of the sanctum wall and crypt door. The powdered heap stood a foot over the mantle, sugar at the base and flour on top.

They armed themselves with two ten-pound bags each. Tarvi took the sanctuary and the rooms they hadn't seen but which she'd memorized off the map. Mathal took the undercroft.

Back in Palaveen's room, she dragged a nail across the coarse, knit fibers and ripped a tiny hole into the bag. She started pouring beside the body further from the door. She followed the line of the table to the corpse of Palaveen then curved by the desk to swipe the lamp and its flint. She tossed the empty bags into the room and went for more.

As she poured her lines of sugar, then flour, she made little connecting tributaries to the many tails left by Tarvi. By the time they met back up at the door of the church, they both smelled like the back of a candy shop pantry.

Mathal dropped one empty sack at the end of the line just below a grimy window. She wrapped the other around her arm and punched the glass. It shattered into the empty street. She left the second with the first.

Tarvi and Mathal closed the heavy carved door behind them and crossed over to the ruins on the other side of the street. They crouched down behind the base of the ruins, which had survived its inferno by virtue of being a three-foot wall of mortared stone.

Tarvi twisted a strip cut from one of her bags into a thin wick and set it in the last slick of oil in the lamp. Mathal wrapped a witchlock around the lamp. Tarvi struck the flint and steel. The wick sparked with a tiny flame. Mathal's witchlock stretched the lamp nine feet across the street and tossed it the rest of the way through the broken window. Tarvi and Mathal stayed low and protected their heads, waiting.

The flour caught first. The church roared to life. And exploded in multiple deafening waves of heat, wood, and glass shrapnel. The blasts even snapped the blackened spires of the ruins on their side of the street. The earth shook not from seismic activity but the collapse of the heavy wooden beams that bore up the roof. Thousands of clay shingles shattered against the cobblestone. Razor sharp shards flew inches overhead and sank into the ruined wood with the beat of a torrential rain.

Only when the crashes of collapse grew less frequent did Tarvi and Mathal peek over the stone wall. The Temple of Bats and every building on the block had been engulfed by the flour and sugar inferno.

Tarvi's sooty hand met Mathal's. She tugged her away from the blaze. They ran south through the ruins without a second look back.

-/-

Tarvi and Mathal travelled as far south through the city of Westcrown as they could before dusk. With the threat of shadowbeasts in the darkness, they stopped at the nearest tavern, the Bruised Eel, a well-stained, reeking pile of planks whose many bed-rattling engagements could be heard from the street. The bar on the first floor was sullenly silent in comparison.

They slumped over a damp, sticky table in the corner. Mathal set Chelon, who'd un-merged from her aura during the walk, onto the driest spot she could find. Her entire body throbbed with a dull, bone-deep ache. Her muscles burned even with the effort of resting her chin in her hands. Tarvi appeared to be in a similar condition, massaging her eyeballs through the lids.

A three-foot tall gnome with teak wood skin and bright pink hair in two waxed, foot-long horns slapped a waxed rag onto the tabletop. A limited menu had been sketched out in charcoal.

"What can I getcha?"

"Coffee," said Mathal. "Can I get that in a gallon?"

"One massive jug, got it. Anything else?"

"Yeah, the set of the day, thanks."

"Do you wanna know what's in that?"

"I'm guessing it'll be more palatable if I don't."

"Good call. And for you?"

"I'll have the-that's a beehive, right?"

"Ha, yeah."

"Great, thanks, then I'll have the mead, just a mug. Is that little brick supposed to be chocolate?"

"Yep. We ran out of real bricks."

"Right," laughed Tarvi. "I'll get a chocolate bar and the daily set as well."

They sat in silence until the gnome returned with their food and all through the meal. Neither could look at the other until they'd emptied the last dish. Tarvi only focused her gaze long enough to give Mathal a nod before staring back into the distance. Mathal raised a hand toward the gnome bobbing up and down behind the bar. Chelon's little head gently butted her free hand. She rubbed his shell first absently, then gratefully.

"That'll be eight gold, unless you want this separately?"

Mathal and Tarvi put down four gold each, Palaveen's treat. Before the barkeep left, Mathal asked them about rent. According to Yakopulio, she/her, a night's stay and three much plainer but equally square meals a day cost two-and-a-half gold per person. It was an honest rate, and one at which they would run out of coin in two months.

"Find an honest job in two months-that sounds doable," said Tarvi.

Yakopulio, passing their table with a tray of drinks as tall as her hair, laughed.

"Ha, sure, sex work or begging-take your pick."

The prospects were daunting.

"Yeah, no, I'm not gonna think about it until tomorrow," said Mathal.

Instead, she tromped up the stairs with Chelon on her shoulder. Her room consisted of a narrow bed, a faded quilt, and a squat set of drawers. But there was a door and even a window overlooking the outdoor bathroom behind the tavern.

It was a far cry from the nest of lice and bed bugs called the poorhouse. That was truly the end of the line, the inescapable sinkhole where the prospectless poor went to starve and die. Mathal had promised herself she'd never go back, but now she'd also promised Tarvi that she wouldn't turn to crime.

She set Chelon on the drawers and flung herself face-first onto the quilt, making a sooty angel.

"I'm not that honest, Chelon. Don't tell Tarvi."

She drifted to sleep in minutes to the rocking of the bed in the next room.