4.19 A Little Help From Our Friends

Jori had received an enchanted timepiece from Iriala to help her track their scheduled summoning times. It was a simple metal rod that cast a shadow according to the position of the sun. The archmage hadn’t been sure it would work in the hells, but Jori didn’t see why not. She needed to know what the time back in Halfbridge was, after all, not here. 

When she’d planted it in her new cave complex’s central hall, she’d been proven right. The rod cast a singular dark shadow, even though little hellfire lights hung all around it. So far, it had made her regular summonings much more comfortable.

It also meant that, when she felt herself pulled out of the hells, she knew it was too early. Nearly two hours early, in fact. Ed would still be handing out assignments down at the Underkeepers’ headquarters. So she wasn’t surprised to find herself standing on the stone floor of an unfamiliar hall full of unfamiliar people. For the most part, anyway. Josie was the one performing the summoning but, instead of greeting Jori, she flashed her a quick smile and moved to sit down behind a low desk to the side of the room, where several other solicitors sat. So… It was like that, then.

Immediately in front of her sat a fancy man who smelled of some kind of flowery perfume and an embroidered coat and a woman in an unfamiliar red uniform. Jori knew she was an officer – she had an insignia on her shoulders and several other patches and pins sewn on the front. That meant she was probably important. She had to be, if Josie wasn’t allowed to talk in front of her.

“Dzhorianath, class three demon, no confirmed pact, no confirmed allegiances. Is that right?”  The fancy man rattled off, staring down at a piece of paper.

Jori sniffed and shook her head. “I’m an employee of the Halfbridge Underkeepers in good standin – I work for the Beseri government! That’s an allegiance.”

The man made a note on his paper with a little grumble and then held up another piece of paper.

Jori couldn’t read it, of course, but it had a lot of scribbles on it. If she could get closer, maybe she’d be able to interpret its intent – provided that it was a contract, of course.

“We have received a formal petition from the head of the Halfbridge Underkeepers and Archmage Iriala of the local Mages’ guild claiming that you have agreed to assist the kingdom in its battle against the Duergar Empire and the demons in its employ. Are you aware of this petition, and did you agree to provide these services?”

Jori scratched her head “Yes? I mean, I agreed to help the Great Mages move people to and from the third hell in order to kill out enemies permanently. I didn’t say I would do it all by myself. That would be suicide! It’s supposed to be cooperative between my people and the task force you form on this side. We would need people like Great One Ed to help us kill the great ones.”

“Who?” The red-uniformed soldier asked, confused by the name. She looked over her shoulder at a stiff-looking man who stood behind her, his head slightly bent down in obvious deference. “Who is that?”

“Archmagus Colonel Thurdred, former third legion,” he replied in a voice that was even stiffer than his posture. “He was responsible for arcane artillery, discharged and permanently reassigned while on leave during the third year of Renias’ reign.”

The man delicately overenunciated the words “permanently reassigned”, as though they held some special meaning.

“Ah…” she said, her voice heavy with distaste. “One of those.”

“Yes,” Jori confirmed, not bothering to keep her annoyance at their disrespect of the great mage out of her voice. “The great mage and I killed Zijeregh, a class four whisperer, and two of her servants! They will not be returning to the fight. Can you say the same of the ones you fought here in Teres?”

The woman grimaced, but the fancy man went on before she could respond. 

“The text here states that you are not willing to work under a standard solicitor’s pact. Could you explain that, please?”

Jori snorted derisively. “If I want to live as a slave, I can just go and serve a demon king. I’ve gotten that offer before and turned it down. Why would I take yours? I just want to work for fair compensation, like anybody else! We should be paid and shouldn’t be treated like a criminal when we haven’t even done anything! And I want to be able to come and spend my money!”

She knew that Josie had already brought her specific demands to these people in writing, but they still looked shocked for some reason. She hadn’t even demanded to be allowed back here permanently, though her eventual return was still part of the plan.

“Demons are not like anybody else,” the fancy man said. “They do not benefit from the same rights and protections as people do in Besermark.”

Jori stood up straight and hissed softly. “What did you just say?”

Josie shook her head at the imp urgently and stood up, her chair scraping against the floor with a loud noise. Jori wasn’t sure what that was about, but she shut her mouth, glaring over at the rude fancy man.

“Magistrate Sarros, with respect,” the solicitor said, “the personhood of demons is legally ambiguous. This may be another matter that needs to be clarified before we can move forward.”

Another solicitor, one who’d been standing near Josie, stood up, scowling angrily. “There’s nothing ambiguous about it! The legal status of demons has been legally defined for over a century!”

“Quiet, quiet!” The fancy man, apparently the magistrate of Teres, shouted, growing red in the face. “Everybody calm down. I do not appreciate these interruptions. Solicitor Josie, you start. What’s ambiguous about it? Demons are classified as monsters and can be bound to service by force. There is over a century of legal precedent for it.”

“Yes,” Josie replied calmly, “but they can also be bound to legal contracts, which makes them legal persons by default. The law isn’t clear.”

The magistrate squinted and made a thoughtful noise, and the other solicitor threw up his hands with a scoff, earning himself a glare.

Jori sat down in the summoning circle and tried to get comfortable. It was going to be a long morning.

***

Bernt left the Norhold Central Administrative Command Building with a spring in his step, despite feeling mentally exhausted after hours of work on Archmage Dalbrand’s burnouts. He’d managed to do eight procedures today, and he was carrying nearly as much gold in his pocket as he made in an ordinary year as an Underkeeper. It also just felt good. He didn’t think he’d ever get tired of the look on their faces when they cast their first spells afterward. Sure, most of them weren’t so injured that they couldn’t cast at all, but they could clearly feel the difference. They, more than anyone, could appreciate the value of his work.

Despite that, he guessed that most of them wouldn’t bother to develop even their limited potential as sorcerers. They saw this more as a way to restore their capabilities as mages – but that was fine for now. Whatever they accomplished after this would reflect positively on him and on sorcery in general. That, and it would prove his value to Duke Renhild, Archmage Dalbrand and the Beseri military in general. Even if the Mages’ Guild here never quite accepted him, he would always have allies here.

As he entered the guild on his way to visit Minister Jesra, Bernt noticed that the Scryers’ Office appeared unusually empty. Taking advantage of the opportunity, he dropped in to grab his mail before climbing the stairs to the diplomat’s office. He’d specifically made time to see the minister, assuming that she would want to talk about what had happened up at the Peaks over the past few days. As it turned out, though, she wasn’t in her office.

Unsure what to do next, Bernt left the guild again and made his way toward the inn where his friends were staying. On the way, pulled out his mail – a letter from Josie, and an especially long one from Pollock.

Josie, as it turned out, had not been drawn into the conflict with the Duergar below Teres due to some bureaucratic quirk of her status. Solicitors weren’t bound to the kingdom’s defense, and as a Halfbridge Underkeeper on assignment, she was additionally protected from engaging in local conflicts in other cities. Still, it appeared that she was fighting a separate battle of her own. She was attempting to codify Jori’s legal personhood in two separate ways, with two separate legal processes. Bernt wasn’t entirely sure how that was supposed to help his familiar, but he had to trust that she knew what she was doing.

Pollock, for his part, had apparently been doing some reading. He hadn’t discovered anything specific about absorbing magical potential into the body, but he did have another insight to share.

“It’s hard to say anything definitive about what’s possible for you right now without at least a rough diagram of your newest investiture, but your description has given me some food for thought. You should consider that, unlike a mage’s spirit, sorcerers don’t suffer from excessive complexity in their spirit. Mages rely on augmentations and postwork on their spellforms to cast effectively, but sorcerers can cast spells instantly and manipulate their mana network manually to cut out or include whatever they like. Added complexity only expands the repertoire of spell effects that a sorcerer can produce, and there is little incentive to limit how complex and convoluted it gets.

In light of this, I would suggest that you consult the archwizard’s journal you discovered in the kobold warren. While the author’s approach to transmutation appears inelegant, his mastery of pyromancy is highly advanced. The first, disintegrative portion of his spell diagrams are masterworks in their own right – spells that can destroy very nearly anything, breaking things down into a more fundamental state of matter than can then be reconstituted into something else. You have no need to be so efficient, of course, but you should still be able to benefit from studying his work.”

He went on, drawing out a few bits and pieces of the journal’s spellforms and pointing out how they modified the spell to burn up various kinds of matter more efficiently. Bernt could see the potential. The spell mechanisms weren’t totally unfamiliar, either, now that he considered them. The larger design echoed his cold fire spell, though it was much more complicated. The perpetual flame investiture was similar as well. Unlike most fire spells, these spells specifically defined what was to be burned and how. The cold fire incorporated elements of some manner of soul magic to target demons, while the perpetual flame had modifications to its relationship with ambient mana.

Bernt didn’t fully understand how these modifications produced the effects that they did – namely that the one could burn otherwise fireproof demons while the other could burn mana that other spells couldn’t interact with in any way – but he wasn’t so green that he couldn’t see which portions of the spellforms were responsible. With Pollock’s samples and explanations of their functions, as well as the notes he’d taken from his own studies of the journal, he might be able to do more. Maybe, if he could learn to precisely control the growth of his spirit, he could incorporate these or similar elements into his own sorcery.

He hadn’t actually brought the mysterious archwizard’s journal with him, but it shouldn’t matter much. Not yet, anyway. First, he needed to learn how to grow his spirit naturally, to get an idea of what it felt like and how he might control the process. He’d consumed all of the coal grass florets he’d gathered from the Phoenix Reaches, and he’d tried to consume the bark of the cinder trees. Unfortunately, the bark hadn’t exactly gone down easily. He’d only eaten a pinch of the stuff ground down to a powder and immediately gagged on the bitter flavor. If he was going to do this, he needed access to better, more palatable materials.

Conscious of the heavy purse of gold in his pocket, Bernt changed course, turning down a broad street decorated by hundreds of colorful signs. It was busy, with people and carts swarming back and forth along the road, but he didn’t need to push far through the press of people to get where he wanted to go. The alchemists’ supplier didn’t look like much from the outside – more like a warehouse than a shop. But Bernt supposed that made sense. They didn’t usually sell to individuals here, but rather supplied guild and military alchemists. As he stepped through the front door, he worried for a moment that they didn’t even have a storefront. Fortunately, though, he found a weary-looking woman sitting behind a bare counter, writing something into a thick ledger. She looked him up and down with raised eyebrows.

“Can I help you… err, underkeeper?”

“Legitimator Bernard,” Bernt said quickly, remembering his last encounter with the Alchemists’ guild. The odds that these people had heard of the underkeeper who had embarrassed their guild back in Halfbridge were slim, but a little caution couldn’t hurt. “I was hoping to get my hands on a vial of burning rain.”