One by one, the chemspheres on the wall glowed to life as the Guildmaster descended the steps. Tiri watched him through a gap between the books.
“Evening, Gardos,” he sighed as he settled into his usual chair. He pulled a silver bowl across the table toward him and murmured an incantation. Purple-black smoke swirled up from the base of the bowl, lighting up Varnell’s face with a faint sickly glow.
The Guildmaster bowed his head over it, peering into the bowl, then suddenly frowned. He pulled his head back and glanced at the statue on the plinth, presumably just realizing his greeting had gone unremarked. “Gardos?” he called.
He waited, then shrugged and returned to his scrying bowl. “Come on, Mornier, get on with it.” He shifted impatiently in his chair.
Tiri’s ears rang like she’d just set off an alarm glyph. Gardos had told her the truth.
Lila is alive.
She swallowed bile. The numb shock that had overwhelmed her quickly gave way to a rush of relief and joy. But that was already being pierced by darts of confusion and horrific realization.
Her injuries must have been terrible. And she knows we left her there to die. She must hate us all so much.
Unable to deal with the possibilities of Lila’s current mental state, Tiri’s mind retreated, focusing instead on small details of her immediate surroundings. Like the smoke in Varnell’s scrying mirror. Something had been niggling at her since she first saw it. Something about the color...
Then she recalled one of the books she’d come across during her early research. A useless tome, it had mostly been focused on horoscope scrying. A ridiculous school of thought, obviously, but one interesting nugget she’d gleaned from it was that starsigns—or Aspects—had changed after the Shattering. Worlds across the cosmos had been destroyed, stars extinguished, and though their light still traveled the unfathomable distances across the night sky, astral mages had confirmed their sources to be gone from existence.
The book had listed the colors associated with each current starsign, asserting that even were a mage to be disguised with glamor, the smoke of their scrying would reveal the celestial alignment under which their magic first appeared in the world. The purple-black light that currently painted Varnell’s tired-looking face had not appeared on the list. That meant it belonged to a mage from before the Shattering, which meant the color shouldn’t exist anymore. Clearly Varnell was not that old. Which meant—
Something chittered near Tiri’s feet. She looked down to see the strange creature that had accompanied Varnell on his previous visit. It was staring back up at her with bulbous black eyes, half-hidden behind a fringe of blue-gray fur. It clicked its mandibles urgently.
Her first thought was that she wished she had Benin’s Arcane Sight ability so she could identify the creature properly. Scales and fur? Mandibles and teeth? What sort of bizarre hybrid was this, and who had made it?
Her second thought, which should probably have been her first, was, Oh damn. He knows I’m here.
“Greetings, Tiriani Moon,” said Varnell. His head was still bowed over the scrying bowl, but his familiar stared up at her intently.
She had a thousand questions for the despicable Guildmaster, but one was at the forefront when she stepped out into the open study area.
“Lila is alive?”
She’d meant it as a challenge, but it came out more as a plea.
“Mornier? Yes. Still alive, and still as ever my loyal agent.”
What? Why? How?! she wanted to scream.
“If she’s so loyal, why did you send her on a death mission?” she asked instead.
Varnell raised an eyebrow as though he had no idea what she was talking about. “Excuse me?”
“You wanted us gone. All of us.” She pulled out a piece of paper—the original requisition for their expedition underground, taken from among the pile of papers she’d found in Lila’s room.
Recognition flitted across his face. “Ah. That was a difficult decision. I lamented making it.” His face was grave, his voice sincere. She might have believed him, if not for the tendrils of intent she’d already gotten from the ink of his signature on the paper itself.
“That’s a lie.” She was even hardly surprised to hear the confidence in her voice as she declared the Guildmaster a liar to his face. So much had changed lately; just a few months ago most people would have agreed that Tiri was the kind of person who wouldn’t say boo to a goose (a phrase she’d always found rather odd; in her experience, getting close enough to a goose and then deliberately startle it was not something a timid person would do).
“You lamented only the inconvenience. You were confident this would solve more than one of your problems, and you congratulated yourself on orchestrating such a neat solution.”
Thank you, Detect Intent.
He narrowed his eyes. He was properly looking at her now, and his mask of concern had dropped, as though he was finally considering the possibility that there was more to her than he’d first thought.
How flattering.
“Would it make you feel better if I told you I regret it?”
“No, because the only reason for that is the hassle we’ve caused you by not dying obediently like you wanted.” She needed no ability to tell her that. “What about the pyromancers?” she asked, before he could try and talk himself out of things again—or decide to simply turn her into dust with a click of his fingers. “Why kill them?”
Unconcealed hatred flashed across his face, and she had to force herself to stand her ground and not take a step back. His eyes darkened.
“The world will not miss them,” he said coldly.
Varnell’s familiar scuttled underneath the table and curled up by its master’s feet. He reached down unconsciously and brushed its head with his fingers.
“To answer your first question,” he said, “I had reason to believe Mornier had developed… misconceptions. About our work. About me. Misconceptions that would have me hounded from the Guild like a beast.”
Misconceptions. Right.
She nodded toward the
