AotN: Chapter Three (Patreon)

In Which There Is A Cabinet of Curios

The interior of the wagon was luxurious in a way Florian had seen, but rarely ever experienced. The ground was covered in thick silk and wool carpeting, in a style that had to have been imported from the south. Maybe Tajart or Sokht or somewhere else, Florian didn’t know. The room seemed slightly larger on the inside than it had been on the outside. The wagon shouldn’t have been more than forty square feet, but it looked closer to a hundred, large enough to be an apartment in the Narrows.

The interior of the wagon was brightly lit, despite the fact that the outside shutters had been closed over the window. For a moment, Florian envisioned a burning oil lamp spilling, but as he looked up at the surprisingly tall ceiling, he could see the smooth gray spheres of gray-green grym light suspended from the ceiling in loose netting. He’d seen those before, on the few occasions he’d had reason to leave the Narrows and head into Llanporth proper, but the city refused to place them throughout the Narrows – too much risk of them being stolen. 

There was a small bed in one corner of the room, across from the windows set into the side wall. The bed was heaped with thick wool and cotton blankets, as well as a down-stuffed pillow. And on the far wall, opposite to the door, had to be where the wand he had been recruited to steal was. Two bookshelves stood on either side of a heavy oaken desk, and all of them were covered with assorted materials. The desk had a special inset area, filled with small jars of ink, pens, and even brushes, and there were sheets of paper spread out across its surface. 

The leftmost bookshelf was covered in thick, leather bound tomes of all sorts. Florian wasn’t an especially fast reader, not by the standards of someone who’d gotten a proper education, but he could make out mentions of geography, history, mathematics, grammar, politics, and above all, the grym. Florian was struck by an impulse to simply sit and read, or to steal the books and hide away from Madam Corbin to understand everything within them. But he couldn’t. He was working on a tight schedule, and his eyes flicked over to the rightmost bookshelf, where the wand most likely was. 

That shelf was less of a bookshelf and more of… Florian wasn’t sure of the word. Perhaps a cabinet, though he was all but certain that rich folks had their own, fancy name for it. There were neatly fitted glass panels over different levels of the shelving, to keep things from falling out, and the cabinet was stuffed with different curiosities. There was the skull of a monster covered in strange scripted runes, metal bands too large to be rings and too small to be bracelets, and what looked to be a round sphere of the grym lights, disassembled to reveal delicate runes carved on the inside of the glass. 

The cabinet even had a strange smell, in part due to the bundles of a dozen different herbs. Some of them were recognizable – summer savory, lavender, and thyme. Others were from faraway places, like curled strips of bark in a glass jar, little dark things that looked like dried flower buds, and a nut that didn’t match any that Florian knew of. He dropped into a crouch, even as the wagon hit a bump in the road, and started scanning the case from the bottom up, slowly rising to examine new shelves after dismissing them. 

There! On the fourth shelf from the bottom, there was an ornately carved wooden rack, with space for four wands. The first of them was made from metal, and set with small, polished orange crystals swirling up its length, until the tip had a gemstone nearly the size of a kernel of corn. The second was carved from what appeared to be bone, and was covered in strange shapes and sigils. Just looking at them set Florian’s teeth on edge, and he somehow knew, just knew, that they didn’t mean anything good. The third was seemingly a single, long piece of crystal, though Florian didn’t know the type. The wand itself was a triangular prism, and had been painted with delicate art of monsters locked in combat. The fourth and final wand was the one that Madam Corbin had sent him here for. Black and lacquered until it was the color of midnight, with a glass sphere at the bottom. The sphere glowed ever so softly, not like the grym lights, but with a purplish light too faint to even read by. 

Florian knelt and slid open the glass paneling, snagging a smooth gray stone that looked markedly like an ordinary river-rock as it nearly fell to the ground. He placed it back onto the wood, then removed the wand from the rack, shut the cabinet door, and tucked it into the inner lining of his raggedy jacket. He strode across the room, took a deep breath to steady himself – confidence was key in both life, and to empowering the Face in the Crowd skill – and stepped outside. He latched the door behind him, then walked out, weaving through the caravaneers around him, and strode past one of the mercenaries. 

Judging by the well-used, but equally well-maintained sword on one hip, the fine duelist’s pistol on the other, the battered and dented steel helmet, and the man’s thick leather jacket, the mercenary was probably a Warrior, or one of its many split-paths. Florian's heart was hammering in his chest as he walked past the mercenary, moving alongside a woman in a chef’s smock who brandished a rolling pin at one of the men from the Narrows who was pushing in, trying to get a good look at the fight in the market square. Even Florian snuck a look to see that two more Thugs had joined in against a pair of Constables defending the merchant. 

Florian used the opportunity to slip out of the mixture of caravaneers and among the crowd of ordinary people of the Narrows, and walked by a factory worker who was shouting loudly, complaining to anyone who could hear that his lunch break was over, and he was going to be fined for being late. The man served as a beacon of attention, letting Florian slip deeper into the crowd. 

Maybe it was luck, maybe instinct, maybe a blessing from one of the Five Divines, maybe some motion in the Grym that Florian could not see but understood at a primal level. Whatever it was, something made Florian look back, take a final glance at the caravan as they pushed through the open market. 

He saw the grym caster staring back at him. Their eyes locked, there was the sensation of Florian’s soul being laid bare. Her bronze pupils burned into him with a ferocity and intensity that shook Florian to his very core. She raised a hand, and for an instant, Florian was sure that she was going to shape the grym into some magyk, flay his skin from his bones, or cut his head off from dozens of feet away.

She grabbed one of her companion mercenaries, a gruff man with long legs, and tugged on his arm. The moment was broken, and Florian knew he’d been found out. He didn’t know how, or why. The workings of grym casters were entirely beyond him. But he had been. He bolted, rushing through the crowd, spinning and launching himself down an alleyway. His Face in the Crowd complained, not meant to hide such obvious motions, but it was of limited use now anyways. He needed to make it to the Ragged Rat before the grym caster and her companion could catch up with him. Behind him, he heard boots thudding against the alleyway, along with the smaller, shorter pitter-patter of the Fercewri grym caster. 

“Get back here ya’ little–” the Classman mercenary started to shout, but Florian reached up and snagged a laundry line. His knife was in his hand in an instant, and he cut through the line, causing the shirts and towels to hit the mercenary and the grym caster. The mouthful of fabric cut the mercenary off, and Florian booked down another alleyway, grabbing onto a low stone wall that he knew was there. He threw himself atop it, then grabbed onto a window ledge and brought a leg onto the ledge. If he could just get to the roof… 

“Vot thaumus etukya bul!” 

The grym caster thrust her staff forward, a grayish light building at the tip. A beam of mystical force thundered through the air. Florian tried to lean into the window and dodge, but the force struck him and threw him off the sill. He drew his head and arms in, protecting them as he hit the ground on the far side of the wall. Wind rushed from his lungs, and he couldn’t breathe for a moment. As Florian choked on the lack of air, the mercenary leapt over the wall with seemingly little effort. He was definitely some sort of Warrior, not that knowing that would do Florian any good now. The man leaned forward and grabbed onto Florian’s shoulder, even as Florian scrambled to his feet, wheezing, barely able to breathe. 

He slipped out of the man’s grasp, shaking, his body working off pure panic at the moment. He took off down the alleyway again, but the man dashed after him, closing the distance entirely too quickly. How was the man so fast?! It had to be something to do with the physical enhancements that the Warrior class received. Florian sucked in a deep breath as air finally returned to his limbs, and took a quarter of a second to study the Warrior. The stance the man was using was almost certainly one designed for fighting large and powerful monsters, because Florian knew it was far too broad and open for a street fight. He dove between the man’s spread legs, and the Warrior let out a yelp, hand moving to protect his manhood. 

Florian bounced up and took off again. He was two alleys away from the Ragged Rat. He could make it!

“Thaumus etukya gi-mur!” 

Gray light coalesced in front of Florian, filling the alleyway, and he slammed into it. The impact rattled his teeth and dazed him for a moment, long enough for the Warrior to turn and grab his arm. This grip was firmer than it had been before, stronger even than Gunnar’s had been, and as he tried to use his Slippery skill to slide out of the man’s grasp, he failed. He struggled and pulled, but the Warrior’s grip was powerful. The grym caster approached from the end of the alley, where her short legs and lack of any empowerment to speed had left her behind. The wall of mystic force in the air behind Florian vanished, and the woman held out her hand expectantly. 

“You took something from my mother. Give it to me,” she demanded. Her accent was posh, and had faint hints of Tisconal in it, which was odd, because that was west, and Madam Corbin had said the caravan was coming from the south. Perhaps she’d been educated there? Or perhaps she’d just lied to him? 

That was a pointless thought, he needed to focus. Florian’s mind worked overtime as he tried to find a way to get the grym caster and mercenary to leave him be, but nothing made sense. The band of shadow that had been twisted around his finger by Madam Corbin grew colder, and the Fercewri grym caster’s eyes snapped to it. 

“Oh, blood and carrion,” she swore. “You’ve been forced into this, haven’t you?” 

“What?” the Warrior asked, turning to look at his companion. 

“There’s magyk around his finger, it looks like an Umbramancer’s work,” she said grimly, and raised her staff. She began to chant, the words tumbling out so rapidly that Florian couldn’t catch many of them, though he caught ‘Thaumus’ once again. It seemed to be a core component in all of her spells. 

Gray-green light washed over Florian’s hand, and the band of frozen darkness peeled off slowly, making a terrible noise all the while, like the sound of a knife rasping against fish scales. The powers clashed and fought for a moment, before the shadows faded away into nothing.

As if they had been waiting for the grym caster's work to be done, a group of four Constables armed with muskets and swords came marching down the side alley.