NOVEL NEXT Book Seven Chapter Thirty-Eight
Book Seven Chapter Thirty-Eight
That evening, once we've crafted enough flowers to plant a large garden that gleams with every color of the spectrum, we all reconvene at [Lady] Evershed's palace for dinner and a strategy session. Instead of a garden picnic, we're dining in the formal ballroom, waited on by a crack serving staff decked in the House Evershed livery. Their timing is absolutely impeccable, always filling up plates and glasses without being intrusive, and my mouth salivates each time they bring out a new course. My favorite is savory flat noodles in a curried sauce topped with chunks of braised duck, but it's all exceptional.
A bite of an apple flat bread makes me perk up. Semi-sweet, but bursting with a sense of autumn leaves and the hint of a tang in the air. I might have to change my answer about my favorite dish.
Time seems immaterial when there's this much good food. I don't know if I've eaten for twenty minutes or two hours, but I don't care. This is the best dinner I've ever had, and I'm not about to let a single bite escape. Eventually, we're too stuffed to continue, and I flop back in my seat with a satisfied groan.
Our gracious host calls for her assistants to wheel in a special contraption. Suspended from a mana-steel frame embellished to look like vines with tiny bell blossoms all over them is a spectacularly clear pane of glass the size of the banquet table. With a single wave of [Lady] Evershed's hand, the glass lights up with white and gold lines: a perfect replica of Grand Ile's walls and districts, complete with the intricate canal system and hundreds of bridges.
"Gorgeous map," Avelina breathes out.
"Thank you! Though, to be quite blunt, I'd rather hoped for more impressed reactions from my esteemed guests. That tells me that you've seen this combination of scrying magic and glass work before, or something like it. Nuri steals my thunder once more," she chuckles dryly.
"Only because you opened my eyes to the possibilities of what glass can do," I say.
"Smooth," Baryl mumbles from beside me. He's sprawled back in his massive, navy-blue upholstered chair, clutching a very round stomach. "Ugh. All this amazing food, and I can't eat another bite."
Tinkling bells interrupted his complaint, announcing the arrival of yet another food cart. Pushed along by a bespeckled man, whose food-stained robes and intense eyes tell a story of an absolute madman in the kitchen, the cart carries only a single tray in the middle. Despite the disproportionately small size of the dish, the dessert on top of the tray draws my eye like the abyss sucking mana into an endless vortex.
'Delicious' seems too inadequate a descriptor for the pudding pie topped with luxurious waves of ivory cream frothed into perfection. Rich and dense, a deep brown bordering on the black of newly-turned, loamy earth, the pie demands my attention with an urgency that I've only ever seen in one place before: imbued items.
My mouth waters, and my fingers twitch toward the dessert involuntarily before I master myself and force my hand back down onto the table.
Baryl sits bolt upright, his gaze locked onto the pudding pie. When the [Chef] slices the first piece, he waves his hand and leans forward, his eyes aflame with greed.
"Give Baryl's portion to me, since he can't eat another bite," I say, snatching the serving away just as his fingertips brush the edge of the gleaming ceramic plate.
"Noo! I found extra space!" he wails.
I smirk pitilessly. "Too late."
His eyes widen as I carve away a bite with my fork, lifting it to my lips with exaggerated slowness. I only indulge in a tiny nibble, dragging out my reaction. "Mmm. Incredible!"
With a cry of despair, Baryl collapses back in his chair. All the while, [Lady] Evershed sits in regal silence, observing with detached amusement.
Avelina slides a plate over to the woebegotten boy, patting his shoulder as he snatches up the pudding pie and shovels the entire slice into his mouth with a sigh of contentment.
I wipe my mouth with an embroidered napkin, but it's out of habit rather than necessity. The dessert is too good to allow a single crumb to go to waste. Already, a sense of inspiration is bubbling up within me, though it falls short of a full-fledged concept. The [Chef] is talented. With the right instruction, he might learn to imbue his food. I should start a consultation business and charge a fee to help people unlock axiomatic magic.
I nod toward the glass pane. "As amazing as this meal has been, something tells me that you didn't call us here to experience culinary wonders. What's the map for, Master Evershed?"
My venerable teacher rises from her seat. Every movement is fluid, almost hypnotic, thanks to her recent breakthrough, since she's still adjusting to her improved body and mind.
Flourishing her wrist, she redraws the map on the massive suspended window. The tangled web of spectral lines mist away into nothingness, giving way to a grid of blazing gold and icy white as the perspective shifts. The view moves from the familiar canals and walkways to reveal a schematic of the underground tunnels we used to travel to the studio.
Zooming in, the map moves and reconfigures until it's a sketch from inside the tunnels. We're moving at breakneck speed, as though we're watching through the eyes of a bird flitting through the tunnels, offering a dizzying look at the extensive maze beneath the surface. Stone flies by, leading us down stairs and ramps, ever deeper into the earth beneath Grand Ile.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Abruptly, the walls fall away, revealing a wide, unadorned chamber with vaulted ceilings that soar a hundred feet overhead. And in the center of the massive space, writhing like a living thing, is the telltale tear in space that can only be one thing: an entrance to a Rift.
I tilt my head toward the pulsing portal, enjoying the theatrics of the reveal. "Within that Rift lies Nazarovas' Path, I presume?"
"Want to find out?" she asks.
"Every major city in Densmore is built over a Rift. I'm confident I already know." Then I pause, frowning as I consider the name and pageantry behind it all. "There's a labyrinth down there?"
Evershed's eyes glitter, and her lips quirk up into a smile. "Only one way to be certain."
"All right, I'm hooked. But you already knew that. I'm too easy to read," I reply with a self-deprecating laugh. "When do we start our delve?"
"Two days from now. I have meetings tomorrow, and I'm sure you'll want some time to see your brother and sister-in-law settled in their home. Take some time to prepare. My goal is to use only glass Skills, not any power granted me as a [Lady] of Grand Ile, but I'm not much of a combatant. Bluntly, I'm not sure how much stopping power my traps will have. I'll rely on your expertise to see us through."
I salute. "You can count on me!"
[Lady] Evershed manages to make inclining her head look elegant. "I believe I can. You have become quite reliable, Nuri. The least I can do is light our way through the dark."
"No wonder you made a few lamps at the end of our studio time," Avelina says, leaning forward on her elbows and studying the glittering map of light.
My mind leaps back to our afternoon crafting session, and now the shape of the lamps immediately makes more sense. Back in the studio earlier, I swung the blowpipe in slow circles, elongating the glass at the end, and then dropped the molten bulb into wire frames about two handspans tall. I blew into the mouthpiece to inflate the bubble within the glass until it filled out the entire lantern frame, and [Lady] Evershed took over from there, infusing the lanterns with her magic—not imbuing, but lending a fragment of an unfamiliar Skill to the creation.
"Lanterns make sense. What are the stars for?"
"Preparation prevents poor performance," [Lady] Evershed quotes at us primly. "We'll need light, and we'll need directions. This compass will guide us." She reaches into her pocket and withdraws a circular piece of etched glass she made earlier.
The memory surfaces just as vividly as our work on the lanterns: [Lady] Evershed pulling a gather of molten glass from the furnace and shaping it in midair. She'd pressed a small pair of jacks into the glass as she turned it, creating tiny marks almost like the ridges on the rim of a pie crust. Little by little, it took shape, until a compass emerged.
Annealed now thanks to the acceleration of her Skills, it sits in the center of her palm like a puddle of liquid gold. Light blooms, like a flower opening to the sun, illuminating the face of the glass in impossibly delicate lines. The light writhes as though it's alive, twitching and shifting to align on the edge in an arrow.
"That leads to the Rift?" I guess.
"For now. Unless I command it to seek out a different destination. Just like life, there's almost always another path if your first way is shut."
I nod. "Sage advice. Weapons?"
"That's your department," [Lady] Evershed replies wryly. She turns to the others. "Mikko, Avelina, enjoy the respite I've prepared for you at your vacation home. Baryl, you've got school, so you can't come with us. Don't try to wiggle out of it!"
=+=
Baryl doesn't try to wiggle out of school, nor does he beg to join us in the Greater Rift. He's far too interested in taking advantage of [Lady] Evershed's absence to make some extra coin. I've turned into a corrupting influence, since we spend most of the next evening scheming ways for him to sell off a few imbued items without flooding the market.
It's a vicious round of negotiations, but we finally agree to split the profits fifty-fifty, even though I did all the hard work and Baryl's just my sales minion. I swallow a smirk when I see how he's strutting about, his chest puffed out, and decide I won't tell him that I would have let him talk me far lower if he'd been confident in swindling me. After all, I can make imbued glass anytime I want.
"Sure you won't need to keep a weapon for the delve?" Baryl asks after I've handed him a circlet, an animated glass hedgehog, and a lesser version of the spear I made for Nicanor.
"Nah, I'll make a better spear for the Rift," I reply, waving my hand dismissively.
His jaw slackens as he processes the fact I can make masterwork weapons on demand. Then a hard light enters his eyes. "You tricked me!"
"Yep. But you'll still make enough to buy a year's worth of candy," I point out.
Baryl chuckles. "You've gotten sneaky. That's good. You might just survive. Show me the spear you make? I wanna see it up close! Oh! Or give me a spear of my own when you leave!"
"At this rate I won't make one at all," I tease, which incites a moment of panic that Baryl snuffs out almost immediately—though not fast enough to evade detection from my enhanced senses thanks to [Arcane Domain]. Still, he does a credible job of appearing nonchalant.
"You know," I continue, grinning at his growing discomfort, "this simple spear isn't all that draining to make. Maybe I'll create dozens of them to fire at the monsters in the Rift. Quantity is its own quality, after all."
"You're a bad person," Baryl pouts.
I cackle in my best approximation of an evil overlord. Baryl just rolls his eyes. He knows I'm a big softy and I'll give him a spear anyway. Our banter continues into the late evening, until I finally kick him out so I can get some sleep before my delve. I tousle his hair when he leaves my chambers, and he doesn't even pretend to scowl. Instead, he hugs me tight and makes me promise not to die. He's a sweet boy.
As I drift off, I tell myself to create a link to Evershed's scrying mirror so that my golems can transmit our progress above ground. He'll probably have fun watching us explore and fight. It's a quick bit of work in the morning once I'm up, and he's practically shaking with excitement at the prospect of following our adventure from the safety of the dining room.
Or maybe it's the promise of dessert while he enjoys the show that has him so excited.
"Ready to see what glass can really do?" [Lady] Evershed says when I join her at the top of the staircase that leads down to Grand Ile's subterranean tunnels. A gleam of joyful challenge sparks in her lively eyes. If not for her white hair and deep laugh-lines, she'd look younger than I do right now. All that mana is good for a person's vitality.
If I break through soon, will I look young for my entire life? I find myself wondering. That could be useful in another fifty years, I suppose.
"Try to keep up," I tease, leaping down the stairs.
The great [Lady] Evershed follows in a more dignified manner. Behind us, the massive door creaks shut. Rather than a sense of doom or finality, all I feel is the war drum of adventure pounding inside my chest once more. Adventure awaits, and I'm thrilled to answer the call.