As it happened, they made plans to meet at the Manners Lounge after lunch, once again meeting in a private, fourth-floor room with Parchment’s pet toy drake. Glue commented dryly that they had a great deal to discuss. Parchment cocked her head and turned to Quill, who simply nodded and handed over the scrap of parchment, hah, that had been behind the loose brick at the library. It had a single word scrawled on it in the same cramped, spidery handwriting as ever, “collapse.” Parchment looked up at Quill and asked him if it was a joke. He shook his head regretfully. The odds of a forgery were low, the handwriting of Spine distinctive but very difficult to duplicate, despite the itch at the back of Quill’s neck when he had checked the brick that morning.
Parchment stared at the word for a while, obviously conflicted. While the fog allowed ambivalence, it mostly prevented it by forgetfulness of their highest loyalties. The wall of thought that Glue had erected blanketed thoughts that it contained. It was still like a missing tooth once he unlocked his fog glyph. He found his thoughts ever returning to the blunt blankness which contained… well, he didn’t know what it contained. Unlike his mental fog which obfuscated the reasons for some of his habits and kept his trains of thought benign, there was no hint of what was within the stony redoubt.
Perhaps most troubling was the lack of a glyph, or even the suggestion of one. Decontextualized or Burner would have to break down the walls themselves to plunder his secrets, and Quill shivered at the thought of the woman in Power of Engel’s forevermore. He looked over at Noue, who was attending as a guest of Parchment’s in the official books of the Lounge. The toy drake seemed to delight her as much as it did Glue, and Quill found himself pondering the possibility of a small dog or cat to distract from the blank wall in his mind. Noue evidently had no taste for hookah, but was sipping from a small mug of chocolate, tickling Tome Junior’s tail with her free hand. The hot drink was another indulgence he attributed to the Fireplains, though he thought Peaceshield was the actual producer of cocoa the Fireplains were known for enjoying hot beverages. Which, as a man born and raised on a glacier, he found incomprehensible, but if that was his biggest issue with Noue…
He smiled. He could relish calling her Noue now. Her work was complete, and she had been inducted into their secrets to a limited extent. Or a not-so-limited extent, given the extent of Glue’s sorcery. It had its limitations, they’d discussed at length the impossibility of a single-sphere form of mind control, but the ability to lock away secrets allowed them to work much more openly with operatives. It would be a great boon going forward. A bleak thought, to him, that there would be a “going forward,” but one to which he was resolved. He believed in the greater good, and if he couldn’t bring Noue into his cell, and he admitted the reality that he was not ready to single-handedly overthrow dragonkind entirely, then he would say farewell.
But that was a problem for the future, and he was nearly ready to lock the fog back into place, file away what was said absent-mindedly, and enjoy the time with Noue. She caught him watching her, and hid a smile behind a sip of her chocolate. He hadn’t imagined the smile, however, because she laid a hand on his thigh after she set down the small mug. Parchment was holding forth on her duties as guildmistress, and when Quill realized he wasn’t listening he went ahead and restored the fog. He would remember another time, when he wasn’t trying to savor his quite probably limited time with Noue.
As guildmistress of the Earth Guild, Parchment had to oversee a commercial empire which spread throughout most of the northern Sevens. They exported granite to other nations, gabbro to the Barbery Mountain Bone Pickers, and almost as an afterthought to their quarrying refined or cut the precious metals and gemstones that came out of the Barbery Range. However, in the last dozen years Tome had gone from a general advisor to nearly a dictator. They were on the verge of discovering, as Parchment had leaked to the Coldpass Chronicle, some kind of pre-Loss artifact. Even she didn’t know what they were going to find, Tome was demanding utter secrecy. She oversaw countless crews of miners, using a variety of techniques, ranging from ice fracturing of the stone to simply magically reforming the stone with teams of sorcerers. Curiously, and much to her financial relief, Tome had demanded that no magic users be involved in the excavation of the artifact, so she would be losing only semi-skilled labor. She sneered at that, as though their skill in any way affected their value as human beings.
Quill sighed as Noue echoed Parchment’s sentiments and asked if they were paid less. The fog had to go or he’d look like an imbecile. Parchment acknowledged that, yes, she paid her “common” miners less, because she couldn’t afford the proportionally greater rates the sorcerers would demand for their abilities. She might be able to, were she not affecting patronage by Tome—Noue interrupted to say that they would still be being paid less. Parchment asked what Noue suggested, and she replied flatly that communism was the only ethical form of economy. The Savior, she went on, created communities which operated on a communal basis, even if this fact had been largely depressed or erased by the Age of Loss. Which she now knew was a product of dragons, creating inequality to keep humans at each others’ throats rather than turning to the true oppressors and hoarders of wealth.
Quill nodded. Noue was a particular kind of thief, and they had been lucky to find her. Skilled, discreet, ostensibly independently wealthy, she stole only from dragons. She couldn’t conscience such great wealth in the hands of even the semi-divine figures of dragons, when people starved or froze or otherwise perished of want. Now that she knew a few of the Historians’ secrets, most notably the litmus fact that dragons had intentionally wrought the Age of Loss to wipe out knowledge of their Dragon Wars, her fervor had only increased. Quill just hadn’t seen that when they had met, because it hid behind the helpful wall of intellectual fog Glue was so skilled at installing in the mind. In any event, Noue advocated for equality for all.
Parchment asked what the motivation for more difficult or distasteful trades would be, in such an economy. Noue shot back asking whether Parchment would abandon her duties as guildmistress to be a scribe or smith if her pay were reduced to a stipend and an indulgence budget. Whether Glue would abandon their studies and research if it didn’t pay—Glue interrupted to point out that it didn’t pay particularly well, and much as they were loathe to undermine Parchment in anything, the nursing staff of Power of Engel’s were paid even less and engaged in the unpleasant business of managing the criminally insane out of genuine Wholist or Witness charity. Noue pressed her advantage, asking why the Earth Guild didn’t accord heating to a single warehouse building to end the veritable epidemic of frozen homeless. This time, however, Glue jumped to Parchment’s defense, pointing out that she was walking a wire-thin line between indulging Tome and undermining his causes. It was Tome’s will, and his expensive tithe, that kept geothermal power from heating the entire city.
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Noue nodded, sighing. Quill took the opportunity to lay his hand over hers, and told her that the injustices she railed against were the entire cause for the existence of the Historians. Noue looked at him sharply and gestured to Parchment, asking if her market economy ideas would evaporate in the absence of dragons. Which, then, was the true face of the Historians? Quill’s alleged idealism, or Parchment’s principled but anemic resistance? Parchment took umbrage at that, asking where her dedication was anemic when she had allowed her office to be bombed, and would be engineering the deaths of an entire shift of miners just to buy time for the cause. Noue retorted that she hardly put herself at risk doing it. Parchment raised an eyebrow and asked where she wasn’t risking anything, smuggling in a bomb to the mine shaft. That she would be going to a dead drop to pick up the mining tool the Earth Guild was denied, by order of Tome. Noue considered this, and nodded after a long pause and a sip of her chocolate.
Glue brought them back to center and said that they had another cause for wanting to meet more privately than a cafe or go table. Noue cocked her head. Ah, Quill remembered now. He took out his penknife and slit his thumb, hissing at the pain before the magic of the channeling sealed the injury as if it had never been there. His mind, already more expansive from the relief of fog, felt as though a great lattice of facts and knowledge had been laid atop it. He couldn’t hold it all in his head, but he could search and access it like a library of thoughts. Not to mention, this time he knew exactly what he was looking for.
He asked Noue if she knew what manifestation was. She shook her head and asked him to explain as he was clearly eager to do. Unable to resist, he asked if she knew what channeling was, which of course she did. Channeling allowed communing with the spirits of the world, granting knowledge and mystical ability. He had channeled just then, she’d seen the blue motes of light sealing the cut on his thumb. He grinned. As ever, she was perceptive. Manifestation, he elaborated, was the physical coalescing of a spirit into a physical form. As agreed, they would pay her for her thievery, and while he couldn’t say it yet the ability would serve her well should she become a Historian, but they were so pleased with her work that they would let her in on another secret. Among other things, it would make her harder to hold, and it wasn’t a Historian secret so much as knowledge which had yet to be widely disseminated. There was such a thing as an axiom of lockpicking, a spirit of ordered human thought devoted to the art of opening the sealed.
Noue nodded, stating that she’d considered such a thing before learning that the skill of such a spirit was rudimentary compared to her own expertise. But by all means he was to go on, she liked where it sounded like he was going. He grinned. She kept him on his toes; he was used to his theater surprising his audience. He elaborated that if one were to manifest the axiom of lockpicking, one would have a set of tools usable for most any burglarizing endeavor, but also they would possess the ability to open a lock specifically without regard for the scale of the tools to the scale of the lock, with only an exercise of will. Noue’s eyes shone, and she nodded eagerly. He was, then, proposing to give her this spirit? Quill nodded. He knew the ritual, or his spirit of lore did, though she would have to convince the axiom to work with her all on her own. They had brought a puzzle lock, ostensibly a rich merchant’s toy, with which she could entice the spirit. She examined the puzzle lock and said that, given the proper tools, she could open it in less than a minute. Quill nodded, and everyone cleared space to allow Noue to commune with the spirit of lockpicking. From then on she would be almost impossible to hold, able to summon forth lockpicks from nothing provided she could draw blood as an offering.
The spirit appeared as a folded leather wallet of tools, folding itself to be a mouth and two long, antennae-like eyes made from the tools it contained. Without a word, Noue raised the puzzle lock for the axiom’s inspection, and it examined the toy eagerly. She set it between them and unlocked it, borrowing Quill’s penknife to smear the opened toy with her blood. “I propose a compact, axiom of lockpicking. My blood, my talent, my devotion to humanity, in exchange for your manifestation as a set of tools.” The spirit pursed its leather lips and pondered, and Quill felt sweat break out on his brow. The axiom would like the appeal to humanity, being the counterpart to the natural world as modern magic understood spirits. After a pause, it nodded its strange puppet head and spiraled into nothing but blue light, which poured into the wound on Noue’s hand and sealed it.
With a blood offering, Noue summoned the axiom spirit, squealing with delight at the apparition of a pick on her right hand and a wallet of tools in her left. She let them melt away into light once more, and then clambered over to Quill and kissed his cheek. He raised his hand to her cheek and tilted her face towards his, murmuring that their business was concluded. She smiled and agreed, and then she pressed her lips to his. He relished the moment, from the warmth of her cheek to finding that she tasted like the chocolate she had been delicately sipping.
Rather than tease him, on what would be a sore subject of his romances, Quill saw Glue take Parchment’s hands and kiss her knuckles, then her wrist, until they had trailed their way up to Parchment’s lips and they too were caught in a passionate embrace. They had a war to wage against a potent adversary, were beset by foes with abilities they didn’t understand, and the stain on their souls left by bombing the mine shaft would be called to account on Judgment Day, but for this moment Glue and Quill had the women that captivated them, and nothing more urgent than a gently smoking hookah and a bored toy drake to ignore.
Quill wondered what Glue saw in Parchment, but it was at least a sandglass before Noue allowed him to break off the kiss and inquire. Glue laughed and replied that they were both employed in their passions, and that they found common ground in their passionate natures. Parchment flushed, as Glue said this. Noue asked Quill what his passion was, and he replied that it was lore, and study, and that he would often disperse his volunteers to their duties and read books destined to pass through the bookstore out of the library to give them one last fond farewell. She kissed his cheek again, commenting that it was a cute little quirk when he asked what it was for. “And,” she added, “I like kissing you. I’ll do it again, in fact, I think.” To Quill’s delight, she did.
