Chapter 133: Funnel and Horn (Patreon)

Lira woke early the next morning with an idea already waiting inside her mind.

She had a spell that connected two sheets of paper. The next logical step was to put something useful on them. She slipped into the library, closed herself inside the alcove, and wrote two incantations on a fresh page.

Kisar. Hishar. Velar. Kaldris. Hano.Symbol. Wave. Clarity. Retrieval. Connection.

Kisar. Hishar. Velar. Velkor. Hano.Symbol. Wave. Clarity. Launch. Connection.

One runic spell would gather sound out of the air around it, and the other would send that same sound back out. Cast through a linked pair of runes, one half became a receiver and the other a speaker, so she could keep the speaker beside her and leave the receiver wherever she liked to spy on. It was an ear and a mouth, with a paired sheet of paper acting like a tunnel between them.

One could consider such a spell a more complicated version of her Focused Hearing. But there was an advantage to this configuration that Focused Hearing could never achieve. She didn't need to know where the receiver part of the combo was to be able to activate it. Provided she managed to sneak a rune inside Kavard's luggage, she should be able to spy on him even when he was on the road and she couldn't visualize his location. Distance shouldn't be a problem either, but she hadn't tested the linked paper more than the width of the library, so she wasn't sure.

The first design problem she worked to preemptively mitigate was the directional aspect between sender and receiver. If both runes could gather and send the sound, it would easily make her get discovered. So the two runes needed to look different. The receiver would be a ring of wave runes with Kaldris arrows pointing inward, like a funnel, and the speaker would be a ring of wave runes with Velkor arrows pointing outward, like a horn. She had used a similar trick when she turned Prince Aric's sound-blocking spell into a one-way runic design, and she was confident the shapes would work well.

"Pika. Selan. Tureth."

She did not need a long meditation. Most of the work had been done over the past weeks, through the sound spells and the linked paper spell. Velar would filter the voices, and the Hano would link the runes together.

Kisar. Hishar. Velar. Kaldris. Hano.

The click for the receiver came while she pictured the Amphitheatre of Arkon, with its curved stone catching a whisper on the stage and delivering it to the highest seats.

Kisar. Hishar. Velar. Velkor. Hano.

The click for the speaker came a few minutes later, when she thought of the bronze bell swinging in the well and the way a single swing had filled the whole shaft with noise.

She opened her eyes and went straight to the testing.

She drew a fresh strip with a Hano rune at each end.

"Kisar. Asatan. Hano."

Then she cut it in half, drew the funnel on one piece and the horn on the other, and set the horn on the small table in the alcove. She carried the funnel through the library to the front desk by the doors, where the noise of the castle was loudest, and left it face up beside the inkwell.

"Kisar. Hishar. Velar. Kaldris. Hano."

Back in the alcove, she cast the other half.

"Kisar. Hishar. Velar. Velkor. Hano."

She realized afterward that she could have cast both from either spot since the sheets were twins and the link would have carried the spell to the farther one. Still, she wanted a clean first test, and she was already there to place the sheet near the door to begin with.

For a long moment, she heard nothing at all.

She was starting to think the spell had failed when a thin but clear sound came out of the horn rune, slightly faint, though the voices came out clear. Two maids were talking near the front door, discussing their linen duty and how it had become easier since Hesta was no longer there to micromanage them. Then they walked on past the library, and the alcove went silent again.

Lira frowned.

She had failed to hear their footsteps and failed to hear other sounds coming from outside the tower, like moving carts and bird songs. It took her a moment to work out why, only to remember that she had added Velar in the incantation to filter the sound, and she had pictured human voices only when she powered the rune. The funnel had listened to exactly that and nothing else.

It was a useful limit in some cases, but she should also be able to be alerted when the door got opened, so she could always know when someone came to her library while she was distracted with magic.

Luckily, it was an easy fix, and all she needed to do was collapse the runes with her ink spell, then redo them, this time visualizing the appropriate filter.

"Asatan. Tir. Kisar."

"Kisar. Hishar. Velar. Kaldris. Hano."

"Kisar. Hishar. Velar. Velkor. Hano."

The spell worked better this time. She could hear the patter of steps coming from outside the library, though most of them were faint, and would only get louder if someone was heading to the library proper rather than passing through near the tower entrance.

She picked up the horn rune and decided to test out the range, starting to climb to the highest and furthest point away from the library door. The spell kept working like normal, with footsteps and random conversations cutting in intermittently.

By midmorning, when the garden was at its busiest, Lira decided to put this new spell to a field test.

She first folded the paper with the receiver rune into an origami of a rat, using her paper manipulation spell.

"Pika. Asatan. Frushum."

The funnel rune was hidden inside the folds, intact, then she painted the rest of the body gray with ink so that it would pass for a real rat if spotted.

On the other sheet with the horn speaker runes, she added a sound-dampening rune so that only she and anyone standing in her personal space would be able to hear what the rat was catching. Then she set out to the outer gardens and sat on the same bench beneath the same tree where she had first tested her Focused Hearing spell. Finally she sent the rat on its way, controlling it through the magical link with her paper manipulation spell.

It scurried across the grass in short movements, moving unnaturally, though it didn't disturb the grass enough for it to be obvious.

As soon as she reached a spot where maids were walking, she started hearing voices coming from the speaker rune.

"...smiling to herself, I swear, even in her mourning black."

"Maybe she's relieved," said another voice. "I, too, was glad to see him gone."

"Don't say that where anyone can hear you."

"I'm only saying what everyone's thinking. Lady Rosalind is now married, and her sisters would have better luck finding a husband with Harwin negotiating on their behalf."

She moved the rat once more, this time near a group of footmen following Steward Dalwin.

"His fashion sense is dreadful. Every time I meet with him, he wears black, never a hint of color. I really hope that, now he is going to serve as Master of Coin, he will listen to my advice and add a red handkerchief in his pocket."

Is he talking about Kenth Kelroth?

Lira kept her hands very still on the paper, just a woman reading a history book on a bench.

She followed Dalwin for a while, hoping to know about when Kelroth would show up, but the man was only talking about prior encounters and nothing as recent as last year.

She was distracted by another conversation and left Dalwin to follow it as she heard Sir Liam talking about the Aric’s expedition.

"We are still getting ready. Though we will probably leave in two weeks."

"Is Deren going too?"

"Yeah."

"Could you get me a spot with you? I would love to leave the castle for a bit."

"I will see what I can do. Though you know how Aric is, it would be a by-the-book expedition, and you would be expected to march as if we are going to war."

"Yeah… Maybe on second thought, guard duty here in the palace isn't so bad."

Lira kept testing, hearing a few tidbits of conversation here and there, and testing that the magical link extended to most of the palace grounds. She could technically move the rat origami without any visual using just the link, but that ran through the trouble of not knowing herself where the paper was, and risking exposure. So every now and then she would follow the line of disturbance to locate the rat, making sure it was still under the cover of grass, and making sure it was kept away from both the main hall and the gate houses, just in case.

A lot of people were talking about both princes' imminent departure, one to a country estate with Estophon and the other to the Holtary mountains.

And Lira needed to decide what to do with either of them.