H - 96: A Point Needs to be Made (Patreon)

It had gotten harder and harder to sleep, and that was making everything worse.

Cora paced in a dim alley behind the mercantile district, glaring at the shadows and struggling to concentrate. This was where she’d been told to come, and naturally they were keeping her waiting. It was a basic power play, so common it was almost mandatory, but right at this moment it was the absolute last thing she wanted to deal with.

She had tried, belatedly, to take Clarent’s advice, but could not get her mind to stop racing. Worse, the attempt had left her terrifyingly open to…the influences. The vague whispers which usually peeked through only when she used her conjuration to travel had begun to appear at other times—any time her defenses lapsed for any reason. Even, faintly, at any time when she wasn’t able to fully occupy her mind.

Such as when she’d been left to stew by herself in a dark alley with nothing to do but pace. Cora fished a vial out of her vest pocket with fingers that were less dexterous than they should be, tossed back its contents, and carelessly dropped the glass to the already-littered ground. The small dose of stamina potion pushed back the weight of fatigue a bit, restored some of her fraying mental clarity.

“Why’d you do it, Cora?”

“Shut up!” she snarled, making a slashing motion with her hand and not pausing her vicious gait.

There was silence, only the sounds of her feet and the distant voices of the business district a street over. No voices, no whispers, at least for the moment.

“That is…not the response I usually get.”

Cora nearly stumbled as the realization hit her. That voice had not been in her head. Someone was talking to her, here in the real world. Someone hidden. And she’d just reacted as if… Shit.

“I don’t deal with time wasters,” she snapped in the same tone, covering as best she could, “and I have zero patience for drama. Come out and talk like a normal person or fuck off.”

“Or what?” The woman’s voice now was amused—malicious, but amused, a combination of aspects at which Valefolk excelled. “You’ll walk out on me? The problem, my good Lady Cora, is that I require a discussion with you at this time. If you insist upon making it difficult, it will be difficult for us all.”

Hells and dells and silver bells, she was in no fit state for this. Trying to think was like groping around an unfamiliar house in the dark. Cora tried to ram her mind into a semblance of shape through sheer force of will, which didn’t work. What was happening? Was this her contact? What the hells were they on about? The worst part was that she knew she could handle this—she was Vale nobility, conversational duels like this were an art in which she’d trained before she was old enough to leave home. If only she could think!

“Before you threaten me,” she retorted, “keep in mind that the stakes for me are not my safety, but that I’ll lose my job if I flatten this entire neighborhood.”

Immediately she knew that was the wrong move. This was a time to ingratiate and de-escalate—never strong suits of hers even at her best.

“Well enough, then,” the voice replied, still amused. “I’ll consider those ample enough stakes to moderate your behavior. What did you do to my men?”

“Who?”

“We can play games as long as you like, Cora. One of us has nowhere else to be this evening.”

“Then play like you mean it,” Cora snapped. “Do you think I was born this morning? I know you didn’t really expect me to discuss my business with a formless voice in an alley. Are you going to give me something worth engaging, or is the conversation over?”

“You have been doing business with the Crows,” the voice replied calmly, “my guild. It was an easy job, your money was good, and the discretion of both parties was reasonably assured. So far, so utterly standard for business in Boisverd. And then, Cora, the last I heard from two of my top lads was that they went to meet you to collect payment and discuss next steps, and failed to report back. We found them both dead near your rendezvous point.”

The surge of ice-cold terror straight down Cora’s back actually helped clear her head. “What? No. How? Who did—ah.”

“Ah, indeed.”

She drew in a breath, feeling it shudder unsteadily and hating it. “I didn’t kill them. Not that saying that is worth anything, I suppose.”

Only silence answered her. Cora tried as best she could to remain outwardly composed, keeping her body stiff while her eyes darted helplessly about, uselessly taking in the shadows. She had been focusing on her wards this whole time; they told her no one was nearby. Obviously, there were ways around wards. Not just anyone could do that, but now she understood why this group had thought they had cause to take extra precautions for handling a mage.

That also meant she might actually be in danger here. Disappearing out from under the eyes of the Crows would be a catastrophe. These weren’t like those idiot bandits out in Dragonvale; if they didn’t know exactly what it signified when a conjurer seemingly teleported, they could find out quickly. And they had means of getting information into important ears in Boisverd.

“What other leads do you have?” she demanded after the pause had lingered a breath too long. “How were they killed? Damn your eyes, who is after me?”

“Indeed,” the voice drawled, “I am…not unwilling to believe you didn’t do the deed yourself, Cora. The means used were…not your style. Not to mention that this damages our relationship and gains you nothing, and the fact that you came to this appointment afterward suggests ignorance on your part. This does not make us friends, you understand. There are many who might take the opportunity to knife a pair of Crows in an alley, but it is not a thing which happens every evening. Then again, it is as you say. If our brazen foe is not after my people, but after you, and they were only caught in the tail of your trailing web… Well. That has implications.”

Cora ran fingers through her short hair in frustration, struggling for control, and for clarity of thought. “Shit. No one should be able to… Wait. The Herons?”

“There are some ruthless bastards among the Herons, true, but this was even less their style than yours. And they’d have taken it up with you if they knew of our deal. No, I’m afraid that leaves…whoever you are truly after at the back of this.”

“That is not for you to know,” Cora snapped. “These are state secrets with the potential to upend thousands of lives.”

“Indeed, indeed,” the voice mused. “I would strongly prefer not to be drawn into such business. Alas…sometimes I don’t get what I want.”

Shadows moved.

Cora jerked, immediately castigated herself for the tell, and shifted to look at the dim, barely perceptible figures forming around the edges of her vision. Were they… Was that real? Phantom movements in the dark were…things she sometimes saw. It had been getting worse and worse, the longer she was unable to sleep.

“I’m sure you know the feeling,” the voice continued. “If not…you will.”

“This is your last chance to keep this matter civil,” Cora snarled.

“Then it is also yours. Let us cooperate, my dear Court Mage. It is too late for us both to profit from this, but it seems we have an opponent in common. If it should prove that you dragged the Crows into nonsense above our pay grade…well, we can discuss that at a later date. Perhaps some reconciliation will still be possible. For now, we must deal with the present. Take heart—you are of no use to me dead, or too mangled to function.”

“I cannot say the same,” Cora grated, and once again, instantly regretted it. Wrong approach, wrong thing to say.

The shadows moved more directly, forming into vaguely humanoid silhouettes in the darkness. Still too vague for certainty—she knew that rogues operating in a city were capable of a maneuver like that and likely to use one…but also that she’d been seeing such things when nothing was there. If she overreacted…

“Quite. Hence my standoffishness. It seems the difference between us, Cora, is I came here prepared for this. One way or another, in the end, we all yield to inevitability; all that remains at stake is the grace with which we do so.

Oh, of all the pompous…

“So you like to play with shadows?” Cora growled. “I prefer the opposite.”

It was a simple spell, one of her standbys, and quite easy to modify into multiple simultaneous evocations. If she was dealing with a rival mage capable of defeating her wards, engaging them in a duel of skill was unwise; a conjurer in such a situation was best served by falling back upon the basics. Highly sophisticated mages were often unprepared to contend with primitive physical interactions.

And so rather than the traditional orb of light, she conjured eight points of carefully formulated magnesium, in the careful and precise configuration she’d learned years ago during her apprenticeship—magical only in the invocation, after which it would take the form of intense flares of pure light that would be very hard to douse. Eight should be enough to banish every shadow in this little cul de sac.

The world turned entirely white and a solid wall of force struck her. It took Cora’s focus several seconds to swim back into coherence. She could hear nothing but a shrill ringing. A nearby wall was collapsed, pieces of brick everywhere—including atop her body—and there were two cloaked figures unmoving on the ground. The ones still moving were hazy with some magic they were…oh, no, that wasn’t magic. Her new double vision began to slowly recede.

At least it was brightly lit, now. Three piercing white flares illuminated the space—wait, only three?

Oh.

She was too exhausted and unfocused; her conjuration had been slightly off.

When conjuring pure magnesium into the atmosphere, you could not be off.

Forcing her body to move introduced clarifying spikes of pain. Cora managed to lift herself just enough to reach into her vest pocket and find her potions, shaky fingers groping past the hexagonal vials to the round ones…there. They had survived unscathed; anybody who expected to be going into action would spring for the good potion vials, the ones cast of adventurer-grade glass that wouldn’t shatter. Drops spilled as her trembling fingers flicked off the cap and brought it to her lips, but she got most of the healing potion into her mouth.

The tinnitus receded and real sound rushed back in; the hissing of her flares interspersed with shouts and groans. Numbness turned into pain, which then receded, and Cora scrabbled to her feet.

Well, shit. Had she succeeded in driving back the shadows this discussion could have continued on more favorable terms, but as far as the Crows had seen, she’d just tried to blow them up. There was no more discussion to be had here.

Brick fragments fell from her coat as she lurched to her feet, and lunged for the most accessible alleyway—the only one which didn’t have a magnesium flare or an upright Crow in it. One moved to intercept her even so, and she threw out a hand, conjuring a blast of elemental wind to drive them back.

Mindful of her recent screw-up, she overcompensated and under-cast; the breeze she produced barely ruffled the figure’s cloak. It stopped, though, dodging to the side and throwing both arms before its head in a defensive posture, probably expecting her to be casting much worse.

Well, that worked.

Cora lost her footing and nearly fell as she tried to break into a full run, barely catching herself in a stagger. Ironically, that saved her. Already slowed by the misstep, she was able to stop as three cloaked shapes appeared seemingly from the very walls in her path. Light from her own flare gleamed along the rapier suddenly aimed at her from the one on the right. The shape to her left brandished a staff with a luminous crystal at the tip, and a line of glowing sigils appeared across the ground between them, accompanied by a sudden spike in air pressure that made her ears pop.

Great, a barrier specialist. That was going to put a dent in her offensive options here. Even so, she was more concerned about the third Crow behind them, the one pointing a crossbow between their companions’ shoulders, right at her face.

“I took you for a wiser woman than this, Lady Cora,” said the voice from before—again echoing from all around in an effect which served to obscure the speaker’s location. Probably not one of the three facing her down, then. “Granted, you do look rather the worse for wear. Whatever the extenuating circumstances behind this lapse in judgment, you do understand you’ve forced me to be…reactive.”

The mage raised his staff higher; the sigils glowed brighter. She was absolutely certain that would be a one-way barrier, enabling his companions to attack through it.

“Lasses and lads,” said the Crows’ apparent leader from the surrounding darkness, “a point needs to be made here—but carefully. Don’t make it so hard that our guest is unable to talk afterward. There is much talk that still needs to be done.”

Her head, ironically, was clearer; adrenaline would do that. Her vision still wavered, but she had enough mental clarity to take note that the line of sigils across the ground was only in that one location, not climbing the walls to either side. A single wall, not a bubble.

Rookie mistake.

Cora conjured a huge pile of bricks directly above the three; they were buried right as the crossbowman fired.

All three rogues staggered and lost their footing, but the bolt flew true before they did. It hit her right in the chest like a punch, sending her staggering backward with a grunt, and only landed that way because by some divine or infernal miracle the tip had impaled itself mid-flight on one of her falling—

That was a pear. She’d been shot with a crossbow bolt tipped by a big, juicy pear.

All three of them were cursing in confused annoyance, stumbling back upright completely unharmed because instead of the bricks she had tried to drop, Cora had buried them in pears.

Adrenaline was only a partial substitute for weeks of sleep. She hadn’t messed up two casts in a row this badly since she was an apprentice. If even her magic wasn’t reliable…

This was actually a problem. Cora had to acknowledge the unaccustomed fact that she might not outgun the opposition, here.

“You just had to be funny, didn’t you,” snarled a muffled female voice from the rogue with the sword, who now angrily kicked a bunch of fruit at her and stepped forward, blade upraised. “You know what? I’d be less mad if you’d blown us up again. This little prank is costing you a finger, you overbred brat.”

“NOT SO FAST!”

They came bursting out of a side alley behind Cora, who was so rattled she spun to face the new arrivals, heedless that this was putting her back to her enemies. The figures were cast in silhouette by the white magnesium still burning in the cul de sac behind them—a fact which they now put to deliberate use.

They posed. They stopped and struck a pose. Not even a good pose; Cora had never seen anybody brandishing weapons in those positions, for the simple reason that they would have to switch to a much less insane position before they could be used. And somehow, that wasn’t even the worst part.

While posing, they were announced with a fanfare. An actual, literal blare of what sounded like a trumpet and…was that a string quartet? How?

“Ready yourselves to greet fate, villains!” proclaimed the slim figure in the center, currently holding up two short swords in a reversed grip with arms crossed right in front of their own throat, from which they couldn’t possibly swing them properly. “Your would-be skulduggery is at an end, for now you face the Lone Wolves of Destiny!”