“We have no choice but to destroy the pre-Loss artifact,” Parchment declared as soon as the molasses was smoking. “I will contact Press and request a large enough explosive to sunder it and bury the remains in rubble.” Noue looked shocked and dismayed, and while Quill understood her viewpoint from their discussions, he disagreed with her. One of the things he liked about her was that they could hold opposing viewpoints and still get on companionably. He was, however, uncertain how such a large explosive could be transported into Coldpass subtly.
Much to his surprise and delight, Noue spoke up, suggesting the spaces between the runes be cut like puzzle pieces and transported individually, and then reassembled once they had made their way into town. Rune magic was not anything like as complicated as Glue’s sorcery usage, didn’t Glue think it would work? Glue shook their head, expressing a lack of familiarity with branding runes and how that worked.
Parchment spoke up again. “It should. Even the runes on my arm only enable a specific and simple effect. I’m surprised, though, Noue. What do you know about rune magic?” Noue put a splayed hand to her chest dramatically and protested that she was a thief after all, and if she knew two things it was stealing things and then successfully making off with them. Quill dryly suggested she knew more than two things, and she playfully gnashed her teeth at him.
The knowing glance shared by Glue and Parchment made him flush. Their cell, for now having four members, had paired off neatly. It occurred to Quill that with his method of communicating with Spine, it would take a long time to communicate to Press what they needed, and felt a stab of envy when Parchment dismissed it as a nonissue. He supposed there were dead drops he could use to contact Spine, but for it to be of no moment…
Speaking of things that were of no moment, reminding him of things that very much were, Quill drew the offer of employment from his jacket and presented it to Glue. He related that first she had interrogated him using what was ostensibly air sorcery, and had shown him a formal warrant for his magical interrogation, and then had told him this was her counter-offer. Noue immediately left his side and peered over Glue’s shoulder, asking if this was what had him in such a mood the day before. He nodded and waited for their assessment.
Glue made a hissing intake of breath as they read the offer. “She’s figured out substantially more than Burner ever did. Oh, look, she makes provision for your sweetheart,” Glue elbowed Noue gently in the ribs, but she didn’t dignify Glue with a response. “She’s evaded my releases from the Sanatorium. At least thus far.” Quill commented that she seemed to have a way of vanishing from his awareness the moment she was done with him. He winced as soon as the provocative words were out of his mouth, feeling like they were overly suggestive, but Noue evinced no insecurity or offense.
Glue made a gesture and Quill found himself trying to recall Decontextualized’s face, and realized all he could bring to mind was brown bangs, a long braid, and leather armor. He found some humor in Glue cursing magical veils when they were trying to use magic to overcome them. Quill also mentioned that she’d done some air sorcery—but no, they had discussed that, it was some other theory of magic—and he would like Glue to take a look with their own sorcery. “What, you have something more shocking than this letter? The confidence, the awareness… I’m wondering if she gave you this just to hand over and make us sweat. I can’t bury the nervousness, she might cue in on it.” Quill apologized and confirmed that he did, in fact, have something even more worrisome to share. Decontextualized, “What happened to Deco?” He was getting to that. Decontextualized had applied a great deal of psychic pressure to his mind, and in the process left behind a construct rather like the blank wall Glue had emplaced.
Glue took a long pull from the hookah and exhaled the smoke slowly, making it coalesce into a swirling sphere. Drawing on the focus provided by the flavored smoke, Glue peered into Quill’s mind, a sensation far less uncomfortable and invasive even than Decontextualized, and certainly more tender than Burner. “I see bruising, certainly, but… ah, hello. That is a neat trick. Bury it in the morass of bruised psyche… Quill, would you like me to unravel this for you? It can’t be comfortable.” Quill confirmed that he would very much like it removed, after Glue had learned all they could from it. Any advantage against Decontextualized they could muster—and surely Glue saw why he wouldn’t use a more comfortable shorthand for her name, now—was one they would apparently need. Glue nodded and told Quill to let them know if it was too painful.
He felt a kind of psychic tug as Glue unseated the lock Decontextualized had emplaced in his mind. Glue “hmmm”ed to themself as they fiddled about. “Ah, now there’s a nasty little piece of work. She seated it on a kind of mental fuse. If I weren’t so good, as soon as I removed or unraveled the safe you would have gone insane. Unfortunately for her, I am that good. I know how insanity works.” Quill thought uncomfortably of the prophet driven mad by Burner and wondered how much of Glue’s expertise was—
“Quill, for the life of you stop thinking such things while I’m trying to dismantle this. Ah… there we go. As for the safe itself, I see you left the key as an open engram. But the safe… Quill, you locked this.” Quill froze. He’d assumed that Glue would be able to learn about the kind of mental architecture Decontextualized employed, but hadn’t considered what else they might learn. “You always were the most traitorous leader. You want Noue that badly?” Quill’s mind strayed to Decontextualized’s offer of not only Noue but his ex before her, before he made a disciplined attempt to focus on what he had done. He had brought the letter to the cell and laid bare his secrets. “And a good thing you did, she would have unlocked all your rumination the next time she saw you and known all the things you locked up with it. Then she would have had no use for you and could have pulled the plug on your sanity herself. Honestly, Noue, thank you for being a more loyal apprentice Historian than he is Master Historian; the man thinks with his heart. If you’d been less principled I think I’d be in manacles right now.”
Noue laughed and said she was flattered to have inspired such loyalty in Quill, but that it spoke badly of him that he’d even considered turning in the rest of his cell. He protested that he hadn’t considered saying yes, he’d just—“Quill, I am looking at what this lock buried. I can’t touch the emotional stuff, I can’t even unravel the entire lock, but I can see your thoughts quite clearly. You were considering taking Noue and Epi and leaving us in the lurch. I caught you trying not to think about him before and I think Noue should know about old flames.” Noue cocked her head at Quill, but rather than looking bothered she looked merely exasperated. She said she could tell he was holding a candle for someone else, and what bothered her was more that he wasn’t as devoted to his principles as she’d thought. Principle had been what he’d used to draw her in to the Historians to begin with!
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Quill apologized, but he had been off-balance and it wasn’t as though, with all her mucking about in his brain, Decontextualized couldn’t have put in place a feeling of desire. As far as he was concerned he hadn’t been holding a candle for Epilogue anymore, had put the matter behind himself.
Noue looked to Glue, who shrugged and replied, “I’ll need more smoke if I’m to keep looking around, but I think we’ve found most of the fun stuff. The lock is unraveled and the key is a mess of engram parts, I don’t think she’ll get anything useful from it except that she tempted Quill and failed. Noue, you might want to stay on guard, she seems to have identified you as Quill’s break point, and Quill as the most vulnerable part of our cell.” Quill asked if he might not be the most vulnerable because he had the least status. Glue was the lead doctor at the local Sanitarium, Parchment was a guildmistress… he was a mere librarian. For that matter why didn’t they ship him off to another cell when Noue completed her apprenticeship, and keep her on in his place to check Tome?
“What do you mean, ship you off? Quill?” Quill apologized and clarified that cells were generally kept to three for security purposes, aside from apprentices. “So you invited me to join an organization you knew would take you away from me.” Quill protested. The alternative was to lock away all she had learned of the Historians behind one of Glue’s walls and send her on her way. This, at least, bought him time. “Time to figure out which of your associates to betray?” Quill shook his head vehemently. “Well, no, obviously. If that were the course you found palatable you would have kept… Epi.” Quill protested yet again. As he did so, Tome Junior, who had grown progressively more agitated as the conversation went on, began chasing his own tail and clawing at Parchment’s side. Quill went on that he’d had a mind-witch mucking about in his head, it wasn’t as though he would trade Noue for Epilogue. That ship had sailed, that fork had turned, that thread was cut. Noue sighed. “I’m sorry, Quill. I’m not normally given to suspicion and doubt, but that you were considering turning in your entire cell just to… what, have me as a consort? It’s really rather disturbing.” Quill turned to Glue and demanded a fire sorcerer. He wanted this settled. He had doubted, which was something even the Faithful of the One God were entitled to now and again, and he was not convinced that it wasn’t the workings of Decontextualized that he had even considered it. Hadn’t Glue noted that it was possible she had put “curiosity” in his mind to make it ripe to reap later?
“That is a fair point, I apologize. There’s no need for a fire sorcerer. I can see the bruising, I can see it around the memory of Epilogue, even if I can’t exactly touch it.” Quill turned to Noue, hurt written on his face, and asked if she really believed he were a man of such casual conviction. He worked as a librarian, she had read the letter offering him employment, she knew his passion for lore and yet he had elected to remain at his current post. He had laid bare all the secrets imparted to him by Decontextualized, and if that wasn’t a sure enough show of loyalty to his cause he didn’t know what was. Glue and Parchment were both nodding, and this seemed to decide things for Noue. She apologized for doubting him. The cell sat in uncomfortable silence for several moments, perhaps even a sandglass, before Glue passed Quill the hookah hose. Everyone let out a big sigh, and Tome Junior slumped to the floor and curled up nose to tail. Noue chuckled, Parchment did the same.
Glue let out a cackle. “Boy, we’re all on edge! It’s almost like having your mind meddled with makes you paranoid! Keeping secrets, not knowing who to trust, knowing the wrong choice could make you dragon food! But I will attest that I trust Quill. He and I are old friends, I was the one to induct him, in fact.” Physician, heal thy self. Wasn’t it possible that there had been more than one landmine in Decontextualized’s little lock? Glue wasn’t normally prone to hysteria, though the needling about Epi had been entirely in character. “I’ll admit, it’s possible. I can’t actually look at my own mind with air sorcery, and having a fellow at Sanitarium do so would be… inadvisable. Too many secrets.” Noue inquired as to how Glue kept their secrets, then. “Oh, that’s simple enough, I keep up a wall. I can’t look, so I can’t do fine work, but putting up a wall of air is easy to do. It’s necessary, even, for one’s equilibrium given access to mind magic and surrounded by the mad.” Noue asked if that wasn’t a little obvious?
Parchment shook her head and said the obviousness was precisely what made it the perfect defense. She’d asked Glue similar questions previously, and it was standard procedure at the Sanitarium for even the apprentice sorcerers to erect mental walls to avoid more than minor frenzies from exposure to madness. Noue replied by asking if Glue’s hysteria over Quill’s momentary uncertainty wouldn’t qualify as a frenzy. “It absolutely would. Except it was an emotional frenzy, not a logical one. I can’t work the fire sphere, emotions are out of my reach.” Shouldn’t they perhaps branch into fire sorcery, then? Perhaps the problem with the criminally insane Glue couldn’t cure was that their disorder was emotional, rather than purely logical. After all, wasn’t insanity a departure from logical thought? Glue looked rather like they had swallowed a frog. Not a large frog, indeed one small enough to squirm on the way down. “Quill? You’re the lore expert. Why didn’t you suggest this years ago?”
Quill laughed and shook his head. His axiom was limited by what people knew, and he was limited by the vast swathes of his mind covered by Glue’s fog. It had been one of the first tricks Glue had learned and employed as a journeyman at the Sanitarium. If insanity were not a disordered jumble of the engrams that made up logical thought, it was not something known to post-Loss medical science. Parchment waved a hand dismissively. “Science” was pseudosorcerific nonsense, a good earth sorcerer was the solution to physical ills and air to the mental ones. “I wouldn’t dismiss it that readily. I have documented cases where there are emotional disorders, but my attempts to treat the thought processes have generally eroded too quickly to be useful. I can lay down a rational track of thought and it winds up in a mental trench in short order. Well demon droppings, Quill, your new lady friend is wise! Maybe we should keep her and ship you out. To Spirithome, if you like.”
Quill raised an eyebrow, took Noue’s hand to kiss it, and otherwise refused to acknowledge Glue’s good-natured barb. Parchment spoke up that hadn’t Glue intentionally neglected that avenue of research to avoid discovering the secret of true mind control? Glue froze mid-draw on the hookah, coughed, and wiped tears on their sleeve while nodding. “A fair point. But if it might help some of the tortured souls in Power of Engel’s… I’ll reach out to my extracellular contact. Maybe it is time we did something about Tome, like Noue has been saying.”
