Stranger Days, One Wizard's Run-In with Death Options

[Kitchen.Sink]

Stranger Days

Spring in Anvil is cloudy and hot. The houses, all white stone and terracotta, sweat in the evening heat like the trunks of forest trees that drip in mist. A handkerchief, I admit, helps keep the moisture off a damp man’s face. The seagulls, too, as if the air were thick enough to deny them flight, rest upon the rooftops as the sun begins to set and watch the sea shimmer until the world goes dark. Foam flares up round the outlying rocks. Nor should I neglect to mention the out-of-work sailors who congregate in the seaside doorways of the bars along the pier—swarthy men who would rather stand and sulk than sweat out in the heat to earn a day’s wage. The open fruit crates are also an interesting see; much the way the deckhands chant as they toss them to the pier, an occasional apple or tangerine bouncing out for an eager kid to catch. Yes, and the smell of morning brine is perhaps the pleasantest scent from which to wake. How could even my jaded tastes deny it? Anvil was awash with the subtle and mysterious.

It was on such a morning that I first came upon that city’s gates. I remember I had not long before borrowed a thatch fan off one of my novices, and, as my entourage was stabling their mares, I leant upon a splintered beam and dozily fanned my face. The stable-girl smirked from the loft overhead, for I must admit that I looked every bit the image of the Altmer fop unable to bear the heat, as portrayed in the popular novels so prevalent among the low class women of Cyrodiil. I considered making a scene, but really, it was much too hot for it. When my assistant, a blue eyed Breton hardly worth his weight in dirt, conveyed that the rest were ready, I ushered us inward with a laggard wave of the fan.

The guards parted the gates; whereupon, my party and I marched straight for the structure with the hanging blue and gold sign of the Mage’s Guild, so conveniently located near the entrance.

“Now listen to me,” I warned. “If any of them get the silly idea to start slinging spells, do not entertain the even sillier idea of slinging spells back. Just call out and I will put an end to their ambitions quick enough.”

With that warning out the way, my men flung open the copper tarnished doors and set upon the place like wolves out to rip the meat down to the marrow. Bookshelves toppled. Tables overturned. A rather ambitious Khajit hurled a bench out one of the second story windows, much to my amusement.

A lady, a fellow Altmer like myself, who had daintily propped her bare feet upon the welcome desk, tossed her dusty book down and cried out, “Just what is the meaning of this intru…”

Her voice sputtered out of words when she saw my face.

“What in the names of the Nine are YOU doing here?” she asked in our native Altmer, now standing.

“You know full well who puts the pork in my pie.”

“So Traven knows about this?”

“Did you not hear the words I just spoke?” I asked as if sighing, “Or are you so out of practice, Carahil, that you can no longer understand our mother tongue?”

“Why was I not told of this beforehand?”

I waggled a finger. “We could not have you doctoring the books, now could we?”

“Is THAT what this is about?”

“Of course. Your expenditures far exceed the allowance the University has allotted you; at least, that’s what our agents out and about tell us.”

Her face clouded into an uncomprehending blankness. “But we replied several times by stating that an independent and anonymous donor—”

“Yes, I read all that in the reports.” What I dared not finish saying was that in my decades of investigative experience, independent and anonymous donors were often Necromantic cults funneling their funds to spies ‘on the inside’. Though I would loved to have mocked her all the more, I kept quiet about my intentions, so as to leave her and the others supposing that my men and I had come only to settle the books and keep the accounts in line. If a Necromantic spy were indeed numbered among the Anvil chapter, then that sorry soul would be left to a leery pondering over why mere accountants and auditors would scour the site before so much as sneezing on a book of figures.

Carahil surveyed my outfit from Elven head to sued-smothered toe, scowling as she inquired “How’s the weather out there?” (No doubt, she was referring to the faint sea of sweat apparent round the collar of my robe.)

“You’ll have ample time to evaluate the weather,” I said smiling, “on your way to the inn outside town.”

Her brow furrowed up into that high-strung fury common to the facial constitutions of all us Altmers. I decided to ask the obvious, just to blow a bellows over the red coals smoldering in her. “Do you truly think that we could be done in a day?”

“This is ludicrous! What about all our research?” she had started hollering in my ear, now in the common tongue. “What about the alchemical services we provide this city? What about all the correspondence and supplies mailed here? What about all the sensitive instruments that require careful attention and daily maintenance? What about—”

“Those are all very pressing questions,” I conceded as one of my aides handed me a sweetroll from off a table nearby. “And, I assure you that you will have ample time to ponder them further on your stroll to the inn.”

“Stroll to the inn? We are walking there?”

“You are walking there, yes. I figured that since you were so interested in the weather that I would give you plenty of time for inquiry.”

All the men within earshot broke out in howls and jests.

From the open doorway came the distinctive clanking of interlocked chain that any decent thief would know signifies the approach of a no-good lounge-about that others, in willful ignorance, refer to as a city ‘watchman’. My experience has been that these men and women of the ‘watch’, whatever the city in Cyrodiil, do little more than watch their thumbs as they sit twiddling them. He entered and, upon noticing that I was the authority, greeted me with the usual Redguard snarl. “You mind telling me what’s going on here?”

“Owhhh…” Still boorishly chewing on a mouthful of that roll, I waved for my assistant to display our authorization papers while I hastened to swallow. “We are here on behalf of a special department of the Arcane University to investigate the flow of assets—”

“Look, that ain’t none of my concern. What I want to know is why there is a bloody bench out in the street.”

“Oh, you have my humblest apologies. My men will tend to that immediately.” As I spoke, several rushed out to haul it back inside.

“They better get all the glass up, too.”

“Yes, yes. No doubt.”

Carahil, much in a whimsical mood that morning, decided to make mischief. “Guard! Are you not even going to skim their papers? I suspect a forgery! This man and his rabble are acting on—”

“It ain’t none of my concern, lady.” He said as he left without even glancing back at her. My men jeered all the more.

By this time, the three other inhabitants of the Anvil chapter had been herded together and driven out into the street. The little Bosmer, Thaurron I think his name was, kept clutching at an imp and claiming that this fiendish pet of his was unsettled by the sun and would ultimately be unable to sleep at the inn because it preferred felt coverings on its bed. I heard someone yell at him to shut up. The alchemist, a giant Dunmer in a silly purple suit, shaded his face with his hand and stared at the glass scattered along the cobbles. The final denizen, a shirtless Imperial, stood there stupidly with a dazed and uncomprehending wonder in his eyes, as if he had just been shaken from sleep.

With my hands raised I addressed them from the steps. “Quiet now! Quiet. You shall all be relocated to an inn not far outside of this fair city. I must warn you, this is not optional policy to be implemented at your leisure. You will be under armed guard. No one will have access to you, and you shall have access to no one. As for the duration, I am still unsure of this myself. Shall it take weeks? Certainly. Shall it take months? Most probably. If you are upset about this gross mistreatment, then take the issue up at the next Council meeting. Till then, farewell.”

Three battle-mages (the only three among my party) escorted them towards the inn, not without much riotous chatter on the part of the displaced inhabitants. I resumed fanning myself as I watched them wander off into the heat curling up from the distant cobbles; I confess, also, to indulging in a bit of snickering when I noticed Carahil stumble on the lower length of her awkwardly long dress. Were she not such a pompous dilettante I might even have found her attractive. Only a tad, though. Not long afterwards my assistant joined me on the steps to offer up a report.

“It seems,” he said in subtle agony, “that the half-naked Imperial and the idiot Bosmer were researching some bit of obscure, esoteric Arcana and were rather prolific in the matter. They have left us with an entire storehouse of notebooks to sift through.”

I sighed.

“Yes, even more,” he continued “is that Carahil was involved in some scheme with a Bruman member to try and extract the medicinal properties of alchemical plants to be utilized in one-time, instant cast scrolls. She too has left us with voluminous amounts of notes and correspondence.”

I puckered up the pinkness of my lips a little, to express my displeasure in silence. He and I both knew then that Anvil’s heat would have us simmering for months. Through the swaying of my simple, thatch fan I asked “You have visited this city before, Breton. Tell me then, where does a sweltering Elf go to find some relief from this weather?”

“At the docks a breeze rolls in quite often from the sea.”

I informed him that should he need me, I would be idling the day away at the docks, most likely fanning myself in the shade of an overhang and sipping from time to time on some cheap vintage from the Surille Vineyard.

TO BE CONTINUED…

[Kitchen.Sink]

Stranger Days, Pt.4

She bore the marks of a proper beating: a split lip, some crusty blood beneath the nose, a puffy, purple right eye. For all that effort she had only admitted to being Janus’s lover and confidant, his research partner, and ultimately his first contact with the underworld. She had spat her name at us once, which sounded rather like “Maela” to my then half-distracted ears.

She sat slouched in a chair across the table from me. The room was damp and hopelessly dark (actually the Anvil chapter’s basement, which we suggested to her through some patient implications that it was an underground dungeon of some sort). On the table between us shone a lamp, one of the dim paper types that lit little more than our white faces as we spoke. I found it laughably ironic that painted on its side were two doves chirping in a tree.

“Yes, they roughed you up quite nicely,” I commented.

No reply. Her eyes dark, defiant.

“How many days have you been in here now? I seem always to forget. Weeks maybe?”

Through a series of spells and elaborate lamps we had been meticulously toying with her perception of time over the three days since her capture; day and night, in her mind, must have seemed like the spinning of a perilous pinwheel, with the sun and moon passing at unpredictable intervals and the once creamy white line between sleep and sentience now flaking away here and there along her field of consciousness. I admit I pitied her.

She, as if privy to my unexpressed thoughts, began to cry into her hands. “I don’t know how long I’ve been here anymore. I don’t know…I guess…”

My back stiffened; heart in sputters; I leaned a little in my chair. I had never expected her to crack so soon. And what an exquisite cracking, too!

“I’m going to tell you everything—”

At this point I had raised my little brass bell to summon the scribe when suddenly her hand wrapped round mine, stifling the sound.

“No. Just you. If you summon anyone else I swear you will find me chewing my own tongue.”

Glowering a bit in suspicion, I rested the bell on the table knowing that, in the end, I could not risk ruining the moment. I had an Altmer’s memory, after all. With a wave I bade her to continue.

“I am not telling you this because I fear for my life. I do not care one imp’s boat what you do with me.”

I waved once more.

“I am telling you, and you alone, because I think that you might be just what I need. It is the sort of stuff that cannot make the official books, if you get me proper.”

“What do you intend by ‘just what I need’? You ought to know by now that I am well beyond the lures of gold.”

She shook her head. “No, nothing like that. I have thought about it plenty in my head these days, these weeks, and though by telling you everything I will be killing off all my old colleagues, I have to do Janus some justice. However small, I must. He was a softer soul than the rest of us. Justice has to be dealt, even if it means sending Guild dogs to do the gnawing.”

“I see. Now you find pity for the dead. I suppose you are fortunate that we confiscated his corpse. At least you know that your lot shan’t be using him as a festering yard ornament.”

“Yes, that is some small consolation,” she admitted, “though it is not my own that I am after. It is…others. Like I told you before, you have no idea of what you stumbled onto. But you will. You will tremble, too. Let me start from the beginning…”

She revealed that for years the King (of Worms, no doubt) had planted eyes throughout the University, watching silently here and there, just gathering information under the guise of being nondescript novices or a napping guardsmen or two. One of their more ambitious projects involved a slow smuggling of scrolls and legers out of the archives, which would, in turn, be shipped to Cult headquarters for copying and scrutinizing before being smuggled back into the archives before anyone could spot their absence. Much of what they stole proved fruitless; but on occasion one item might peak a few brows and provoke a passing flurry of interest. One such item was a small set of fifty-year-old journals, penned by a magician-gone-mad by the name of Gotamus.

He had been a rising star in the Guild those fifty years previous; a studious researcher with a white smile and azure eyes; the kind of man that could weather any amount of politicking with the ease of a wine cork afloat in bathwater—he might be seen to bob here and there, but never sink. It was only a matter of time before he was made Arch-Mage. One of his projects, just another little something to add to his generous list of credentials, was an archaeological dig at some Ayleid ruins in the old rocky foothills north of Anvil. The ruins had been discovered long before but lay neglected until yet another internal spat broke out in the University which Gotamus decided to survive by retreating into seclusion at the ruins for intensive study. His expedition soon lost touch. A pair of Guild foragers found him a year later wandering barefoot in the Jeralls, nearly naked, an impressive beard on his face, and toting in a small sack those journals and some fruit. The others of his expedition were never found.

The University prompted a cursory investigation, but the internal grumblings, the incessant conflict that had initially prompted Gotamus’s retreat was still in full fervor; thus the journals were filed away in the archives and soon forgotten. Until, that is, a disgruntled alchemist turned spy, some five decades later, blew the dust away and began reading.

At first, the Cult had found his research journals as boring as much the Guild had found them useless. They seemed a mere technical recollection of the etchings and scrolls uncovered, as well as a patchwork of simple sketches involving little oddities in the architecture. Yet, lurking humbly near the last entry of the last book, crafted in a subtle and unassuming script in the lower margin, one entry sent the hairs of the King’s neck standing on end: I am through. Was eternal space ever any less empty? One world shatters and the Silence beyond life and death illumes. It is It.

The King, ever eager to hone his craft, pondered over this so called “Silence beyond life and death”. He dispatched two separate crews to investigate the ruins. Neither reported back. Realizing that perhaps he was playing with a torch still too bright for his eyes, the King decided to focus more on his war with the Guild, rather than on ephemeral oddities of interest. But, the King proved a still curious creature, and so one last crew would be sent; the leadership of this final ‘suicide crew’ fell onto the shoulders of poor, pitiful Janus whose only mistake was owning a home in the area.

Maela, a dutiful lover, volunteered to accompany the then despondent Janus and would eventually even convince three others to join their expedition (keep in mind, please, that this is her recollection of the events). Not long after his appointment Janus contacted Carahil to try and secure one of the precious few interviews conducted by the Guild after the onset of Gotamus’s madness; or, the real pumpkin in the pie, to determine whether or not the mad mystic himself was still alive. Little came of it. Carahil kept delivering improper or illegible scrolls, while Gotamus, if still alive, must have been in hiding or have wandered somewhere distant.

Janus was left with one, agonizing option: to lead his expedition into the depths of the ruins.

TO BE CONTINUED...

This post has been edited by Kitchen.Sink: Jun 28 2008, 12:27 AM