Sticky Situations

Synopsis

The Elder pushed himself off the map-room wall with strength he had not had before. It’s been some time, he said to Koa, and then, troubled, that he could still feel Aldo in the room but no longer see or hear him. Aldo raised his voice and got almost nothing through. The barrier that thinned when the thing inside him was removed has closed again from the other side.

What followed was the longest and most generous council he had ever given. Mikhail’s crown, he explained, is the Muharib chief’s: it attunes whoever wears it to whatever realm he means to walk, so that a sky of fire or a sea of magma singes the brow and then lets him breathe. The Muharib guarded the gateways against what came through them, and when a gate opens the essence of the other place bleeds into this one. That is also what the crystals are: crystallized essence of another world, grown where that world touches this one, which is why the gates form there and why the stones can be infused further. He offered to infuse one. The Ring of Säv he took for a chief’s ring of that clan, and said the Säv were loyal enough to the Emperor that their secrets died with them; the Emperor himself kept house with Clan Saytar, who are remembered for their laboratories.

Then the harder part. Mikhail recounted Aldo’s vision of two figures fighting before the Mól took them, and the party’s conclusion that Vëné was Nancáro’s sister; he said only that it rang familiar, and then the memory of her death took hold of him and turned to rage. The room filled with pressure, the stone table lit between its cracks, and Koa told him to stop, and he stopped, and apologized, and observed that Koa is much stronger than he was. Koa then told him about the grave at Vigil and the Iophanite that spoke there, and Nancáro said an Iophanite had come to him too, not long after she fell, and that in all these centuries he had never understood it was her. Her message, as Koa carried it: the two of them are wrapped inside the curse, and when it breaks she returns. For a moment. It’s time we stop playing games.

The rest was cosmology and arithmetic. Each keep’s paired trees reach into opposite worlds, one rooted in order and inevitability, the other branching into life; both are lethal, and only the crown will let a man stand at either. Nancáro is strongest at the Twisted Grove and can pull them there from any map room, though not back again. The curses must be broken at once (seconds, he said, minutes at the very outside) or they knit themselves whole inside a moon. The undead at the Valley of Doom gave up their souls and are reborn by a death crystal buried beneath them, soluble but slow. And he remembered an old Eldamar tale of soul-eating fae, the hags of the night, that come to live inside their victims’ dreams, which fits both the thing that grew inside Aldo and whatever is unbinding the Chantry’s dream-catchers. Mikhail worked the longitudes off the map diorama: sunrise, the one clock every keep shares, reaches Haudh-Gwenn first, Wraithblade a minute and a half later, the Grove five minutes after that, the Valley twelve. So they chose three (Wraithblade, Haudh-Gwenn, the Grove) and left the Valley alone: furthest out along the clock, and the slowest of the four to break.

Then they cleared the keep, which took the rest of the day. Koa had Aldo teach him a line of the goblins’ own tongue and insisted on frightening them out rather than killing them bound, though the fight in the map-room doorway went lethal anyway before Mikhail got the door shut. A Mól nook gave up the three bottles of Peren blood again, and a satchel of labeled potions. In the workshop a black widow the size of a dog dropped on Koa and was killed for it, and under the workshop lay a cellar of webbing and cocooned husks with a Hafuwë still alive in one of them (one of the two off Dwayne’s crew, lost at this keep), who will not wake for a week. On a chain at the survivor’s neck hung a plain gold ring that showed writing in a primordial hand when held over the fire. The forge itself is the prize: it burns without smoke and never goes out, and its quench buckets never empty, crystals set into their stone bases. Hinta should see it.