One-Stringed Harp
Chapter
Three: War Behind Closed Doors
Gatrie and the mercenary general circled each other, their footfalls alternately echoing off the walls at triple their ordinary volume or being muffled completely by the plush carpet. Both knights' armor was freshly dented and scored, but neither one seemed to be injured or slowing in the least. Endurance was a quality valued in armoured soldiers; wearing a half-ton overcoat honed it. They had been circling for some time now, refusing to approach, because all Gatrie wanted to do was hold her back. Her hammers were useful against knights, but lacked reach, and with his lance, it was easy for him to keep the coolly enraged woman away.
"I'm surprised at you," she remarked. "None of the stories about you mention your cowardly–"
"Blah blah blah blah blah blah," Gatrie summarised. "Skip that and bring it on if you're that tough, but I'm just here to keep you from interfering while my friends kick your soldiers around every vase they can find."
The general smiled in a way that would have raised Gatrie's heart rate, if not for her complete lack of guilt and surplus of amusement over Sothe's death. "So you don't fall for taunting. I'm impressed."
"That's right," Gatrie agreed. "I don't fall for taunting, I don't fall for seduction – try, though, it'll be funny – and I don't even fall for it–" he brought his lance up to engage with the general's hammers as she rushed in, and parried both incoming blows "–when you try to get me so busy boasting that I forget we're fighting to the death."
"I'm not interested," she stated, adding the comma with another deflected hammering, "in killing you." One hammer came in from above, and Gatrie's parry put his lance high to the left; she spun and dealt a swift blow from the right that smashed his plate mail into his ribs. "Prisoners are more useful."
"I meant your death, heartless hammerwench," Gatrie bit out, rebounding quickly from the impact and striking back with a sweeping gouge.
"I just can't fit that into the busy mercenary schedule," the general remarked, locking his lance with her hammers and forcing the swing high. Unfortunately, they both had the same thought – 'Hoof to the gut!' – and their feet collided in mid-air, tangling and causing both the unwieldy hulks to fall over. It wasn't even a dignified collapse, but instead painfully slow, and full of the squeaking of metallic friction.
After several more seconds of mighty struggle, they paused and took stock of their immobility.
"I think my gauntlet has caught on your bracer chains," Gatrie stated.
"Really? Well, your lance has wedged my legguards together at the knees," she countered unsympathetically. They wrenched back and forth again, to no effect. The woman sighed.
"This is the most absurd fight I've been in for… seven weeks," said Gatrie.
"…I really do detest you."
Surrounded by a forest of spears, all pointing pointy-end toward her, Nephenee's mind raced. She and Boyd were plainly dead. By any rights, they ought to get skewered horribly now. Not that there weren't tactics she could think of, but on any list of where a professional soldier wanted their enemies to be, 'surrounded by sharp steel' was right at the top. Yet the lances were simply wavering a few uncomfortable inches away, all roughly at the same height. These mercenaries didn't want to kill them.
Why not?
Because bodies get noticed. Because dead heroes attract the attention of living heroes in large numbers. And because no one will care much if a band of mercenaries tries to steal something from the reliquary, fails, and no one gets badly hurt. The less notice Begnion takes of them, the better. And because Nephenee had realised that this was how they were already thinking, even though they were still searching the reliquary, she realised that if the group was any good, they were already planning to seem to fail. The best crimes are the ones that no one knows about.
In the same time that it took for Nephenee to think all this, Boyd had got as far as noting that spears were at a disadvantage against axes, but possibly this was outweighed when there were approximately eleventeen times more spears than axes in the equation. To be fair, he also acted first, murmuring "You've got my back," then diving ahead. A broadside slap of his axe drove the nearest spearheads aside for a moment, and with that narrow space available for only a moment, bent double at the waist.
It wasn't a bizarre bow-before-perforation, nor did he mean for Nephenee to protect him while he did so. This was a path. Nephenee propelled herself over and backwards, spinning and sliding across Boyd's back to hit the soldiers feet-first, followed immediately by a tackle that sent them all sprawling. Nephenee herself was hardly massive enough to hit more than one target, but with her lance held out horizontally, she clothes-lined four at once.
The armoured soldiers had little space to manoeuvre in, all to the good for the heroes' tactics. Even as Nephenee was falling, Boyd was rising again to face the lances on the other side, parrying them all aside with brute force. The poles were tangled like a briar for a few seconds – enough time for him to complete his spin, haul Nephenee up with his free arm, and charge away, doing his best to step on as many of the enemy as possible.
"We goin' the right way?" Nephenee asked, from her place slung over Boyd's shoulder.
"Yep," he confirmed.
"How can ya tell?"
"We're moving away from the million pointy things."
"I got legs, by the way."
"I know," said Boyd, grinning blankly. "…Oh!" He skidded to a halt and put her down. "So you think some other way is the right way?"
"There's thievin' happenin'. Or already happened. Haven' got that far yet. Either way, we need t' stop 'em from gettin' out o' this place."
"Where do letters go when you don't say them?"
Nephenee grabbed Boyd by the shoulders and gave him a shake. "Where does yer head go when ya aren't axin' things? There's gotta be somethin' in this reliq'ary that's worth stealin', and they already got it or they're lookin' fer it or they're gonna lose one thing and make off with another, I dunno–"
Their conferring was quickly broken up by the sound of clattering boots as the mercenaries caught up again. Neither of them bothered reflecting on the irony of fleeing from the people they were determined to not allow to get away, putting that breath to better use as they sprinted down a side corridor.
"This had better not be a dead… end," Boyd groaned as they attempted to turn a corner and instead nearly ran into a shallow alcove. Knowing her lance was better for fending them off in a narrow space, Nephenee turned to face the oncoming soldiers, but rather than back her up, Boyd started running his hands over the walls. "This is an idiotic place to put a dead end, somewhere there's going to be secret passage, something…"
"Ye're welcome t' find it fast, then," Nephenee said. The mercenaries' armor was old, but still strong stuff, and there was a fair chance of herself and Boyd simply being trampled by the lot of them. Rather than wait, the halberdier leapt forward at the last moment, slamming her lance through the chestplate of the leading knight by sheer nerve. He toppled back into his allies with a deep wound that looked much worse than it was. Mangled, bloody metal rarely inspired the troops.
"Okay, okay, the brackets," Boyd selected first, grabbing the two nearest torch brackets and giving them a twist. With a ringing pop, they both came off in his hands. "Mm. Not so much." For good measure, he flung them over Nephenee's head, into the oncoming throng. Next was the wall, or rather every brick in it, one of which was sure to move.
"Anything?" Nephenee asked, losing ground as she parried three lances at a time.
"Not – a – one – ouch!" Boyd bit out, hammering on the stones and finally kicking the wall. He stumbled back, grabbing for his bruised foot, and fell into the alcove, which obligingly spun and dropped him off on the other side of the wall.
"Not bad," Nephenee remarked, planting her lance point-down into the floor. Holding onto the shaft, she lifted herself into a sharp upward kick to the nearest merc's jaw, vaulted fully backwards, and charged straight through the wall after Boyd. She found him still sprawled and dazed on the far side. "Any idea on keepin' 'em on the other side?"
"Well, I know the bucket trick…" the warrior ventured. Nephenee's glare contained all the answer he needed. "Ah, fine." A couple of heavy swings took a chunk out of the floor, which was hopefully not priceless art, and he slammed that stone into the base of the hidden door, jamming its central hinge. "That'll do for a start."
"Can I help you?" Boyd and Nephenee, as required by law, froze in place and slowly turned toward the source of the strange voice. A man, aging but not quite old, and a girl who might have been his eldest daughter were kneeling at an ancient table, in the middle of one of the most stylised rituals of Begnion's long tradition.
"This… would appear to be a tea room," Boyd observed.
"Indeed, the oldest in the palace," the man agreed.
"Are you here to watch?" asked the girl.
"Well, I don't want to be rude, but, uh, I suppose if you…" Boyd stumbled.
"Where d'ya keep the priceless enchanted artefacts?" Nephenee asked.
"Guess that's the fast way of doing it," the warrior remarked, watching the wall tremble under the first impact of mercenaries.
Lucia peered around the edge of the door, making sure no one had seen them sneak into the kitchens, then realised that it didn't really matter, as there were a dozen servants working in the kitchen itself, preparing the nobles' luncheon. Once she managed to drag Calill away from the fresh mango and chilled sashimi, they got back to the matter at hand.
"What did you mea – you are not making a sandwich out of that," Lucia stated, instantly derailed.
"It's lunchtime. Now what's the problem?" the sage asked, selecting a fresh loaf.
"Your sudden transformation from bored-tagalong to vociferous hatred of this Fletcher person. I thought he was about the only decent noble I've met since the end of the war," the swordmaster said.
"He's a troll. Or possibly an ogre. Either way, let's lure him down here and then claim it was a baking accident. That'll explain the scorched outline on the walls," Calill suggested, scowling.
"Are you basing any of this fury on anything?" Lucia asked. "Or is this a random thunderbolt in your eternal brainstorm of madness?"
"I like that. That's poetic. And yes, I always have a reason." Calill locked eyes with Lucia. "He's scum." The swordmaster groaned. "What, you can't tell by looking that he's a selfish opportunist whose moral compass always points due abominable?"
"Not from the outside, no," Lucia said. "He and Astrid looked happy."
"Then look more closely." She sliced the unnatural sandwich into triangles with a handy cleaver, then embedded it in the board and spun on Lucia. "She's happy, yes, but people are happy after they escape from barbarians, and it's not because they like scrambling through frigid mountain crags, it's because they're not surrounded by barbarians any more. Anyone would look good to Astrid right now as long as he wasn't old enough to be her uncle."
"To be fair, Fletcher looks especially good," Lucia remarked.
"Please tell me you're not that shallow."
"You have earrings that you wear only while shopping for more earrings."
"Touché."
The swordmaster sighed. "All right. As I have no dignity left to save and nothing to do until the wedding, I'll follow you on this little crusade. Where do you want to go?"
"To someone who'll have the proof we need and not enough sense to keep it under wraps. A Sagita messenger. Definitely male. Perhaps a touch younger than that Rhys fellow, but much older than whatever-his-name-is, the archer. Rolf," Calill decided.
"How long have you been planning this?" Lucia asked, startled by the sage's burst of scheming.
"Since I realised that mango and sashimi are one thing, but on egg bread they transmute into something quite out of the question. I'll bring it to my next book club meeting."
"Your next…" Lucia trailed off, baffled.
"Oh, I don't actually like any of them. Now, just follow me and look bodyguardly."
Unfazed by the sudden appearance of two professional soldiers and a hammering on the secret door, the tea girl rose to her feet, calmly walked across the room to a stand of fire pokers, and pulled one of them. With a clatter of gears and bars, the alcove-door stopped shuddering with impacts; it had been tightly locked shut. "Much better," the old man said. "Now, we have few mysterious artefacts of any kind at hand, but you are welcome to stay for tea."
"We don't have the time–" the warrior began to say.
"Boyd," Nephenee whispered. "There's no other way out of this room."
"That's insane," he whispered back, and turned to face the amiably curious duo. "Okay, you two are just way too innocent, so you're either hideously evil or you have crazy magical powers."
"Or both," the halberdier added helpfully.
"Right," said Boyd, cringing on the inside like Volke being forced to pay for a meal. "So either tell us what you're hiding or get us out of here so we can find whatever those mercenaries are trying to steal. You may think you've got nice locks, but they're plenty resourceful."
The old man smiled. "I think you'll find we're better prepared than–"
With a catastrophic blast, steam and tiny droplets of molten steel burst out from the nearly-invisible cracks around the hidden door. "Hah!" Boyd bellowed triumphantly. "See? We are all going to die!" The stone crumbled and a mage leapt through, flames whirling between his fingers. Nephenee quickly laid him out on the stone with her lance, but the next one thought ahead and sent a bolt of lightning through to introduce himself.
That mage came through with warriors escorting, and Boyd wasn't sure if this would be a better time to die nobly or try to drag the stunned Nephenee up the chimney with himself. Three to one odds with someone down and needing protection was a nasty prospect. Thankfully, by the time he had opened his mouth to demand that the tea-brewers do something to help, the girl had leapt to her feet and began planting daggers in soft bits with laguz-like speed.
"Nice, very nice," Boyd commented. "Hey, old guy! Want to help out? Crazy magic, maybe?"
The man remained kneeling at his table, hands flat and empty, no weapons or tomes in sight. On the plus side – you had to think like an experienced hero to consider this a plus side – he had also closed his eyes and started controlling his rate of breath. Certain that it would be explained soon enough, Boyd hauled Nephenee to her feet and they did their best to hold off the flow of mercenaries.
"Ya think they get this is a tea room?" Nephenee asked, jabbing the lightning mage quite severely.
"I don't mind stupid enemies. With any luck, they'll waste enough time that – whoa," – here he dodged a heavy broadsword, let the blade clatter and dull itself on the stone floor, and then hacked the thing in two at the hilt – "that Gatrie will finish up with their leader and warn the Begnion guard."
Out of the dark corridor, a thin shadow seemed to flit through the air, but it was nothing so poetic, merely an arrow that quickly pierced Boyd's shoulder, making him drop his axe in agony. Unwilling to relent, he left the heavy weapon on the floor and began swinging a lighter blade with his left arm.
Nephenee cringed at the bloody sight, but only out of disgust. "Hang back," she suggested, then quickly snatched a dagger off the tea girl's belt and waded into the fray. From somewhere in the shadows of the tunnel, several panicked yelps echoed before the halberdier returned, looking a great deal more satisfied. "That's better."
"This hurts like an absolute freaking son-of-a-" Boyd squeaked, cut off at the last moment by a blinding flash that lasted only an instant. The purple spots in their eyes lasted a lot longer, except for the tea girl, who continued incapacitating unarmored mercenaries with industrial efficiency.
Blinking clear her light-lacerated eyes, Nephenee whirled around, looking for anything to have happened, from the flash-petrifaction of all their foes to the summoning of a thousand mighty and virtuous badgers. Instead, everything was precisely as it was before the flash, and the old man finally looked concerned about the chaos invading his tea room.
"'Kay, how 'bout some o' the 'xplosions now?" Nephenee suggested, brightly.
"You must protect it, whatever happens. You cannot allow them–" the man insisted, sadly unaware that speaking in such as way at such a time was as good as guaranteeing that the next arrow fired from the invading mercenary force would slay him on the spot. It struck with even more precision than the one that had temporarily crippled Boyd, and the mysterious man toppled over immediately.
It turned out very quickly that his ninja tea-girl was capable of turning even more savagely deadly, and she started trying for fatal blows rather than merely disabling ones. Nephenee considered the lance in her hand, considered the sniper who had fired the killing shot, and with a mighty throw, neatly placed one through the other.
The mercs' numbers had thinned greatly at this point, particularly since Boyd and the tea-master's blood began to stain the floor and the usual rules of heroic restraint were declared null and void. Nevertheless, one last berserker charged into the room, having much the same effect on Boyd that a battering ram has on a soufflé, and he was followed by a slinking myrmidon. The tea-ninja danced around the berserker, her daggers causing little harm but holding his attention quite effectively. The myrmidon might have finished off Boyd, except that the green-haired warrior was still holding a very sharp axe and looked like he'd probably bite someone to death before any wound could bring him down.
Nephenee was thinking about tea.
This wasn't nearly as insane as it sounded, because she had just noticed that a string was hanging out from under the lid of the teapot. Among the few things Nephenee had managed to pick up from Calill's lessons was the fact that the Begnion people only grew green tea, and that the leaves were always brewed loose. And before the flash, whatever its purpose, there had been no string there.
She rushed for the teapot, and so did the myrmidon, simply because she had. With a sharp twist and kick, Nephenee managed to stun the merc briefly, and used that moment to pour out the teapot's contents. "Boyd!" she shouted, throwing the pot across the room, and the myrmidon dove quickly after it.
Nephenee smiled grimly. She had poured out the tea through her fingers, and they were now closed on a medallion that looked something like a cross between a lotus blossom and a supernova. It gleamed golden with the promise of hidden powers, just as Mist's necklace had done during their journey. The myrmidon skidded to a halt – leaning against the wall, Boyd had caught the teapot with his bad arm and raised his axe in the other, enough to make anyone think twice – and realised he'd probably been tricked.
"Hand it over or he dies," the myrmidon stated, pointing his sword at Boyd.
Sothe was dead. The old man was dead. This was not the time to threaten Nephenee with Boyd's mortality. She came at the myrmidon with only her buckler in one hand and the necklace in the other. A few seconds later, before she could break the other arm, the mercenary was running at full panicked speed down the once-hidden corridor.
Before Nephenee could even begin to feel triumphant, the berserker's tremendous fist hammered her with the spontaneity of a meteor strike. Exhausted as she was, Nephenee fell like a cut tree, and the berserker snatched the pendant from her hand and followed the myrmidon on his way out, pausing only to give Boyd a pre-emptive kick.
The tea-ninja was barely conscious, supporting herself against a bookshelf, but was still more capable of standing than Nephenee, who gave up after the first time she slipped on blood. None of them said anything at first, nor did they dare move much. Boyd, for one, had already been using his arrow-stuck shoulder too much, and there were no healers at hand.
"…Can't believe they got away," Nephenee muttered blankly. "Let everyone down…"
"Nah," Boyd assured her, breathing heavily. His axe lay on the floor, because he had needed his good hand free at the last moment. He raised it now, letting the shine of the medallion show. "If you ever need an enemy who doesn't pay attention, berserkers are the way to go."
Nephenee smiled weakly. "I could kiss ya," she said. Between the green of his hair and the shade of his face, Boyd appeared to be impersonating a radish. "…But I think I might thro' up." For anyone except Nephenee, it was easy to imagine the sudden tumult of disappointment, disgust, and hope roiling inside the warrior's head.
"On your feet, heroes," said the tea-girl, letting go of the shelves and standing unsteadily free. "The only man who knew what that pendant is lies cold before you. We must take audience with the Apostle's court."
The confused boy ducked Calill's slap and sprinted away at high speed, for which Lucia could hardly blame him. Since their one-block-away stakeout of House Sagita's closest manor began, the sage had been downright schizophrenic in her attempts to get information out of the messenger staff. It wasn't hard for the stylish, sophisticated 'urbanite' to get a messenger boy's attention, but once she had done so, something in the whole mechanic seemed to break down.
"I don't know if I can explain this to you, Calill," said Lucia, doing her best to 'look bodyguardly'. "These are pages with fairly simple outlooks on life. You appear to be some kind of cross between a human woman and a rare tropical bird. Trying to finesse information out of someone as subtle as a thrown brick does not work. How can I summarize? They would need to be smarter in order for you to trick them into doing something stupid."
"Hmph."
"Do you see my point?"
"Indeed. What I should be doing is asking them outright. Hey! You there!"
"Oh dear…"
The messenger, who had probably seen the altercations his fellow pages had been getting into with the crazy woman, attempted to simultaneously keep up his brisk I-have-a-delivery-to-make pace while still inconspicuously backing off. The movement was far too confused to work. "Uh… you mean me, ma'am?"
"Is anyone else here you? No? Good. On a matter of some considerable imperial security, I need you to answer a few questions," said Calill, hands on her hips, daring defiance.
"I've got to deliver this…" he said nervously, waving a mail-tube. Calill arched an eyebrow. "But I can pause for a moment, I suppose."
"Good. My first question is 'what in the world is wrong with all of you?' No, don't answer that, it's rhetorical. But your friends either need hobbies or a radical reacquainting with the proper laws of courtship. No, don't answer that either. Where are you deliver that to?"
They waited in silence for a moment.
"You're allowed to start answering now," Lucia explained, brightly. "It can't hurt to say, can it? We're not going to ask to read it."
"House Ceffylau…" he replied, hesitantly.
"You've been making a lot of deliveries there?" Calill prompted him.
"All week."
"Anywhere else getting a lot of mail?"
"Not really…"
"What about incoming messages?"
"No one who wanted to send Lord Sagita a letter would send it to this manor."
"Hmph."
"We've been getting sent out for a lot of books, though. From the palace library," he volunteered.
Calill and Lucia shared a slow look. "…Thank you. Run along," said the swordmaster. The messenger sprinted away at top speed.
"That was strangely refreshing," Calill remarked.
"Probably because you weren't trying to out-subtle each other like you've got to with nobles all the time. You make quite the interrogator. …That or you remind him of his mother."
"Take that back."
"Library books," Lucia mused. "The palace library, too, not the Sagitas' collection. That suggests rare tomes, perhaps unique editions. I'd be quite interested in finding out what a lordling suddenly starts getting scholarly about a week before his wedding." They looked up at the imposing mass of the Sagita manor. "A bit of research? We'll need disguises; being spotted by Astrid last time was mortifying."
"Messengers seem to come and go quite a lot," Calill observed.
"And they're all boys," Lucia countered. "I'm afraid for us, tradition generally says cooks or maids."
"Absolutely not."
"Washerwomen it is, then," Lucia remarked, knowing that Calill would rather immolate herself.
"…Astrid had better appreciate this when we're done."
For Lucia, assembling her disguise was irritatingly involved. With Calill's penchant for shopping, they were able to quickly gather the appropriate clothes, but it took considerable effort to hide the swordmaster's battle-ready physique, not to mention her attention-grabbing waterfall of teal hair. She reluctantly settled for a bulky headscarf that Calill eventually apologised for collapsing in laughter at.
It was rather easier for the sage, who swore her companion to absolute secrecy before removing all her makeup. When she was done, Calill bore as much resemblance to her ordinary self as most laguz did to beast forms of a different tribe.
Then it was a matter of joining the occasional flow of servants in and out of House Sagita, which wasn't hard as long as they were doing more than their share of the work. Everyone was only too happy to be best of friends with the new maid who could carry thirty pounds of smoked gammon with each hand. Calill wasn't quite as popular until she reluctantly enchanted a barrel of apples and hauled it in after Lucia, faking exertion under the pillow-light weight.
Within the manor, the chaotic preparations had passed through full-swing, and were approaching triple-swing at great pace. Calill insisted that they were deep in enemy territory now, and couldn't afford suspicion, which meant that more than once they were forced to join in some cleaning or decorating or similar task, rather than plead business elsewhere. Every time they passed a window, Calill noticed that the sun was irritatingly closer to the horizon, and she was beginning to wonder if it would be better to start a fire or just shout that there was one.
Cursing herself for not coming up with a better plan, and wondering how often one person could survive being mortified in a single day, Lucia eventually faked a fainting spell, and Calill volunteered to hustle her out of the way – finally gaining them freedom from the serving staff and they began the search properly. This turned out easier than they expected, because the whole job of being a maid eventually involved going into every room of the manor. Calill immediately dismissed every unlocked door as a dead end, but the question of how to get past the locked ones without attracting attention remained puzzling. At first, they just passed those by, but the one marked with the House Sagita crest was too good to pass up.
"A sufficiently focused bolt of fire–"
"No."
"I don't suppose you've got a stiletto on you?"
"I left my knives at your house."
"I meant the shoe." Calill sighed and began rummaging in her unfamiliar pockets, eventually producing a ring that jingled with a dozen keys. "I suppose we'll just have to hope the maid I pickpocketed had the right one." Lucia rolled her eyes silently; Calill was the type to consider legitimately unlocking the door to be a last resort.
The ninth one clicked, revealing an ordinary fabulously luxuriant master bedroom. The sage and swordmaster slipped inside, closed the door, and began searching as thoroughly as they dared – if anyone realised they had been snooping around, Sagita was sure to double his security, and probably set mercenary forces on them. It was slow, disappointing work, as they steadily uncovered huge amounts of nothing.
"I suppose it'd be too much to hope he had an actual skeleton in his closet?" Lucia asked. Calill opened the far door and glanced within.
"Oh…" she murmured. A predatory grin spread across Calill's face. "No, we've definitely got something."
"This is nothing," said the Apostle's master jeweller, looking through her valuation glass. "It's probably the least magical thing I've ever seen."
Nephenee, Boyd, and the tea-ninja stared at her blankly. "You're joking."
"I'm not." She held up the frilly golden amulet, letting the light gleam off its myriad curves in a dazzling display. "If it really was 'summoned' as you say, it was either stripped of its power in the process, or it has some other value. Trust me, there isn't so much as a joule of power in this."
"We don' care 'bout jewels; we want t' know why anyone'd be willin' to kill for this thing!" Nephenee snapped.
"It's not listed in any of my books, I can assure you," she stated. "I would recognise something like this immediately. It's quite marvellous, from a goldsmith's perspective. But magic? Not a drop. You said it appeared inside a teapot?"
"Right," said Boyd. "Hanging from the cord, Nephenee said."
"There is no cord on this," the ninja girl observed.
"It snapped off in the berserker's hand when I grabbed it from him, I guess," Boyd said, shrugging.
"There's no loop for it to tie on, though," said the jeweller, holding it up to her eyeglass closely. "It may have once been strung here, but the metal has been cut through, and no ordinary cord could do that. It's alloyed quite formidably. Marvellous craftsmanship."
Boyd and Nephenee shared the latest in a long line of spontaneously-petrified looks. Each was sure their stomach was sinking well through the floor. "The amulet came with the cord," Boyd recalled.
"Th' cord cut right through th' amulet," Nephenee added.
"And there's no magic here," the warrior finished.
"I got a really bad feelin' about this."
Lucia followed Calill into what she had expected to be a closet. It may once have been, considering the ridiculous hoards of clothes some nobles kept, but now it was a workshop. Bows hung from the walls the way a normal person might hang curtains. A long, scarred workbench was covered with shreds of wood and metal dust, and open books lay in nearly every empty space. Endless variations on arrowheads were piled next to the anvil.
"Plainly he really does like bows," Lucia noted. "We have determined that he is honest in that, at least. And the room is well-lit, as opposed to being a sealed haven for dark and seething madness."
"Seems a bit beyond healthy, though," said Calill, forging ahead. "All of these are bowyer's treatises. Books on selecting wood, different carving methods, reflex physics…"
"I don't suppose he's trying to make Astrid some kind of fantastic weapon as a wedding present? She'd appreciate it, probably, but it's not the sort of thing nobles do," Lucia said.
Calill glanced back at her friend. "You are really quite beyond help when it comes to blind faith." She turned back and bent over the workbench, staring intently.
"Found something interesting?" the swordmaster asked, running her finger down the polished length of a recurve composite.
"The only book here without a layer of iron dust on it – logically, the one that's been getting read most recently. It's not about bow-crafting, either. It's a tome of legends," Calill announced, meaningfully.
"Not what I call incriminating," Lucia insisted. "Look, if a bit of woodworking is the worst secret he has…"
The sage read aloud: "Though many attempts have been made through the years to recreate this unmatched weapon, all have failed, no matter how precisely the craftsman mimics the original. Many claim that the Bow of Falling Stars is merely another fable, as let no one say its story is any less deserving than the others recorded here – good grief, they go on for a while about that. Okay… here. Those who remember the terrible tyrants of old must trust in Begnion and House Sagita, its makers, to keep the secret of its location if it still exists. Though only a master archer may wield–"
"Wonderful story, isn't it?" asked a strange voice. It belonged to the mage standing at the door; a formidable figure robed in Sagita colours and emblazoned with the house crest. "But we don't need stories any more." The mage grinned. "You really should remember to lock doors behind you as well."
"This is rather a compromising position to be caught in," Lucia observed coldly. "And you are outnumbered two to one. Do you think we're going to be scared off with something like this in our hands?"
If anything, the mage's grin only widened. "Do you think his Lordship has no such concept as a worst-case scenario?" He snapped his fingers and an Elfire ball ignited in his hand. With a wink at the swordmaster, he cast it carelessly at the far wall, and then most everything available exploded.