Legwork
Winstead said farewell and exited Natanal Vig’s‽ house in the Undersling. As she walked out of this shadier and more unkempt area of Satyrine, she reflected on what she’d learned.
In the last few days, she’d been to Kryven’s Books, Tollisberry Park, Grynn’s Gramarye, the Castle of the Lie, and now Mr. Vig’s house, all in the hope that something about this new world would make sense. Her brain still glazed over and left her staring into the middle distance when she tried to hold it all in her head at once, but at least a few things were becoming clearer.
Satyrine, for instance. The . . . Deathless Triumvirate, three immortal and possibly godlike beings, ruled it. They hadn’t always, but they did now from their floating citadel over the Marquis Quarter. They were people, but they were also noncorporeal—not confined to their physical presence. They ran the city, but they were also the soul of the city. They might even be indistinguishable from the city, except that not everyone agreed that they were literally the soul of Satyrine.
Some narratives spoke of their predecessor, an entity known as the Angular Serpentine. It had . . . possessed the soul of the city until cleansed by the Deathless Triumvirate, or else it had been the previous ruler who had diminished and maybe even left before the Triumvirate arrived and established the current order. It had come from a place called Narvago, but no one knew where exactly or why it had been brought here.
The transition between the two might have been a struggle for supremacy, or the Angular Serpentine might still exist in Satyrine under the fabric of everyday life, hidden in a corner unbeknownst to the populace. This last interpretation was held by those who believed that its diminishment was connected to the disappearance of the arabasts. Who were . . . an older and previous sentient race who lived here?
It was all very, very confusing. Certainly, the Deathless Triumvirate ruled now, she told herself as she returned to the chained tomes of Grynn’s Gramarye. And I’m not in Shadow anymore.
Not that it hadn’t been pleasant in its own way to learn about this city. Those who wished to describe its history were not content with one medium. Tollisberry Park had some marvelous and evocative, though likely overdramatized, sculptures of significant past events. Art galleries displayed beautiful images of life in Satyrine past and present. Pairing the images with the words she’d found in the libraries showed how people felt now about what happened then. It bothered her, however, that for as central a conflict as the one between the Angular Serpentine and the Deathless Triumvirate had been, she was hard pressed to find anything more than vague congratulatory references to the Triumvirate’s victories.
Determined to dig into the matter, she settled at a study table but froze as the woman next to her got up to leave. She was strikingly familiar, with a studded jacket and long red hair with a shaved side. The woman swept out with proud steps and posture, giving Winstead a nod as she passed.
Winstead nodded back, and just like that the woman was gone. Far too late to call out a greeting, Winstead's memory finally supplied her with a name: Lucerin. It conjured up far more than she cared to think about right now. Winstead opened the tome to where she had left off and continued reading.*
The cathedral had hardly changed since Rhea had last entered. The diagrams still decorated the walls, the furniture still cluttered the center of the floor in an untidy heap, and the room was, once again, empty.
After briefly puzzling over the diagrams again, Rhea wandered up the bell tower. She’d waited until closer to the hour to do this; indeed, it had prevented her from taking in as much of the diagrams as she would have liked. But it seemed appropriate to wait for the toll of the bell to find out whether this building was only a cathedral. Perhaps she would sense a pulse in its tone, or a voice.
She’d heard of so many sentient things recently that she wanted to find out whether this place was another one. Images of Rus and Vici fighting the siege worm kept entering her head, as well as the mention of Zennan Street. If this is a living being, she thought, what could it possibly tell me?
Climbing the stairs was not very difficult, but Rhea’s breath grew heavy with exertion as her mind organized a weaving to read the emotions of the room. Her excitement grew as the weaving took shape.††‡
At the tenth hour, the tolling began. Each peal started quietly and grew louder until it cut off with a sudden silence. She looked up at the tower ceiling. The mesmerizing movement of the bells—back and forth, back and forth—reflected the sounds precisely as the rhythms picked up in complexity and tone. She wove her whispered words and gestures to the pace of the silvery tones playing out above her, all of them escalating in harmony. They grew louder; her hair stood on end, and her skin prickled with an anticipation that grew more and more agitated until, with a suddenness that bordered on violence, the sound ended and she loosed her weave.
The tension abruptly released. She waited, her senses extended all throughout the belltower. At any moment she expected a voice to speak to her. But the building remained silent.
For a moment, a great disappointment threatened to ruin her day. Then, slowly, a sense grew further down inside the building of not one but two conflicting and emotionally charged centers. She threaded her way quietly down and toward the main room, where the warring intensities seemed focused.
They were not beings, she sensed. They were signatures, imprints, possibly remnants of the beings whose emotions argued here. The first was anger: palpable, consuming, murderous fury, uncontrolled and undirected. The other was cool, calm, almost inert. As Rhea entered the main room, the first beat on the second like the tide on a stone before completely receding. The stoic and nonresponsive one stood clear in her senses for a moment longer, placid and immovable, before fading away.
As the now-empty cathedral returned to Rhea’s focus, she noticed that the front door, which she had locked upon entry, hung half open. Discomforted, she went to close it but stopped as something new emerged in her periphery.
A small scroll, neatly and elegantly tied, sat on an upturned chair in the heaped furniture. As she picked it up, she saw the words Fellow Pathwalker on the outside. She untied it, and her eyes fell on the words Walk with me.
She had barely intuited the phrase before her mind opened to the Noösphere. The room was modest, and she was in a protective circle of some kind. A small pedestal sat expectantly. Rhea disconnected, nervous, only to realize belatedly that the pedestal bore the inscription, in the language of vislae, of his name: Aberinkula.
The discovery of the new cardinal directions of toward and along (or rather stam and renn, as a trip to the Hall of Records had illuminated) itched at the back of Marweg’s mind as he walked home. Camden, he thought to himself, might just be around an unobserved corner. It gnawed at him, intruding on his plans for the next day strongly enough that he decided he would try to find where it had been.
Some time spent with maps and records in a Fartown zoning office told him where to look, and he walked to where Cheston met Tesseract Park.
Compass in hand, he looked rennward and stamward the boundary between them. He’d seen the other people in the tower when he’d walked renn, even if they couldn’t see him. It stood to reason that while in the normal dimensions he could look into these ones. If he saw something dangerous, he wouldn’t explore. If he didn’t, he might. He walked down the street, seeking a glimpse of anything out of step with the rest of reality, taking great care not to accidentally travel those directions himself.
It was fruitless. There were barely any people to be seen, much less an entire neighborhood trapped somewhere else. And it was getting late. Exploration could wait until another day. Marweg wasn’t willing to let curiosity supersede preparation for an officialgathering in the Marquis District. He slept well that night, worn out from the labors and conversations of the previous day.
The next day, after he’d breakfasted, he laid out his favorite fancy outfit with the cape, took his time shaving and grooming, and paused to consider whether he wanted company.
He decided that yes, he would, and he knew who he would call. After he finished dressing, he gathered some exotic threads he’d collected in a half-forgotten storage box and set them aside on a table, drew up the appropriate summoning paraphernalia and symbols, and called out a true name.
A shimmer in the air, like a thousand strands of vibrantly colored string moving in the wind, formed in the space before him. The coils spread and contracted, reached and withdrew, turning in and around themselves as they solidified into tangible form. It curled out and away from itself in a broad motion resembling the horn of a trumpet and then circled back in on itself again, finally settling into a near-Marweg-sized mass of almost opaque threadlike interwoven filaments.
Marweg smiled. “Good to see you again, Spindlerieve,” he said. “I’m going to the Marquis District party today, and I’d like you to accompany me.”
A coil of threads poured out of the main mass into a complicated maneuver.
Marweg nodded as though it had spoken. “Yes, I have some payment for you right over there.” He pointed to the threads. “I do hope they are satisfactory. The shopkeepers said they’ve come from quite a ways off, and honestly some of them are unique enough that I can’t remember what they’re made of. Please, go right ahead.”
The tendril swirled around and into the threads on the table, gathering them up like a greedy gust of wind to be lost in its vortex, woven into the billow and twist of the other thousands of strands. After a moment it settled and relaxed, its constant motion focused on him once again in a pleasing, steady flow like a smooth stream.
Marweg smiled. “I’m glad they are to your liking. You can mingle with my cape when you’re not needed, but I’ll likely need you to help me find people in the crowds from time to time. Remember, eye-catching but gentle; we don’t want to cause offense.”
The threads spun clockwise three times.
He nodded. “Wonderful. Let’s go and enjoy ourselves.”
‽ The Path, 118. Natanal Vig is the current leader of the Order of Honed Thought.
* GM Note: This interaction became the seed for what became the Shrikes in the flashback in act II.
†† Detect Emotions
Blue
Level 4
Depletion: 0-1 (check each round)
Range: Near
You get impressions of the emotional state of all nearby sentient entities. This spell does not match the emotion to the entity.
Qualities: Sight (Freedom), Invisibility (Wind)
‡ Rat duplicates Messiah, gives Rhea a passive +4 to every action.