The Mól calipers

A pair of measuring calipers, Mól-made, finer than anything Koa had handled in a life of carpentry: they move so smoothly in the hand it comes close to mesmerizing. They were found in Wraithblade Keep, though where in it is told two ways: under a bench in the keep’s later, Peren-style shrine, furniture set down long after the calipers were made, or among the takings of a craft room together with rings and a coin.

Koa put them to work at once, measuring the cracks of a hollowed stone standing in for an altar, and somewhere in the measuring they reached for him. Not a compulsion and not a voice: a tether thin as a single thread, and the sense that he had always owned these and always known their use. He was given the choice to open that thread wider. He put them in his pocket instead, and the feeling dimmed without going out.

They did it for nobody else. Mikhail held them and had no idea what he was holding; Aldo has quick enough hands, but quick hands are not a craftsman’s. Hinta took a wire brush to them early on and turned up the maker’s stamp: Clan Zarkhûn, the same clan whose keep they came out of.

Koa carried them for seasons and never once used them. Sealed into Wraithblade Keep with Hinta for a week, with gnolls prowling the courtyard and a sword to break at the end of it, he handed them over. She turned possessive on the spot. “It’s almost like they know that they belong to me,” she said. “These are of my people.” He answered that they had spoken to him too, and he did not think he was of her people, and then told her they might be cursed and to have Mikhail look at them one day. She did not turn around.

What they actually are, Nancáro explained afterward. Mól magic could be pressed into an object, and a few objects were made as open vessels, near enough beings in their own right. Where a spark exists between a person and one of them, and the person is willing, that person may give a portion of themselves to wake it, and the portion given lives in the thing from then on. It is a symbiote and not a parasite: reciprocal, never more than is freely offered, and not possible at all against the will of the one giving. Koa had the spark and gave the chance away. Hinta took it, and what she spent did not come back to her; by the end of that week she was neither cursed nor possessed but visibly failing, worn hollow, less than she had been. A bond of that kind holds until the death of the one who made it and passes to nobody after.

Awake, they give her measurement and perception past what a person is built for, which Nancáro called sight beyond sight: among other things, the exact flaws in a thing that make it breakable. That is what showed her the flaw in the Wraithblade Khopesh, and the hammer did the rest. Since then she has read the unseen depth of a stone block off the single face of it she can see, and how much electrum runs through the block, and in what shape, and near enough what it weighs. The party say she stole them. She did not; they were put in her hands.