The key?!
She was only baffled for a moment though. Everything the killer had done was deliberately orchestrated to make this murder look like an accident, or perhaps a suicide. Sliding the key back inside the room would only add to this illusion, making it look as though the door had been locked from the inside.
If I can grab the key before the oil catches...
But no. Even if she managed to unlock the door and escape the room before the conflagration enveloped it, there was a good chance the killer would still be waiting somewhere outside. Out of the fire and into a knife-point. She shook her head. That would be unacceptable.
No, her best option was the mysterious passageway, aka the only way out that didn't have a murderer on the other side of it. Probably.
But some unexplainable instinct had her dashing back into the room—against every modicum of her better judgment, of which Tiri usually had plenty—to snatch up the key from the folds of a black rug and tuck it into her pocket.
The beaker hissed and spat behind her like an angry cat as she sprinted back to the nook and wriggled through the gap in the wall. When she was through to the other side, she reached back in and wedged her fingers into the groove that had been dug into the back of the loose stone, presumably for this very purpose. She pulled the block back into its place in the wall.
Not a second too soon. The stone had barely ground to a halt when the first flames ignited with a whoomph. Within seconds, the room beyond was an inferno. A blast of heat through the gaps in the stone sent Tiri stumbling away, twisting her ankle on stairs she couldn't see until she finally regained enough presence of mind to pull out a chemsphere.
Down the steps and along an empty corridor, then down more steps—there was only one way she could go, and she followed the featureless passage until she could no longer hear or feel the flames above. There she rested for a while, until the shocked numbness that had enveloped her after her narrow escape finally faded. She stared at the narrow passageway, lit by the pink glow of her alchemical globe.
Then she took out Lila's list from her pocket and scratched out the name "Harald Knox."
Lila had clearly been on to something. Whatever Varnell was up to—and Tiri was certain the Guildmaster had had a hand in these deaths—Tiri had to continue Lila's work and bring him to justice.
If the suspicion that the Guildmaster was covertly murdering his own mages hadn’t motivated her to keep her going, there was something else that would have.
The final name on Lila's list.
"Benin Fitz."
Twenty
Just One
Corey
The ark was starting to take shape. Unsurprisingly, it didn't look nearly as grand as the one in Bekkit's blueprint.
When I complained that it looked more like an old traveling chest than a holy reliquary, Ket regurgitated her speech about letting the gnomes express themselves. "Every people has its own style," she told me.
And gnomes have less style than kobolds. What’s the world coming to?
I'd thought Bekkit's estimate of a few hours was overly generous. After all, my builders could construct an entire gnomehome in a matter of days. How long could a measly box take?
But it seemed that the smaller the item, the trickier the process. Each component seemed to require a lot of carving, sanding, tweaking and polishing, followed by close examination to determine whether it was of appropriate quality to be included in the final product.
It was undeniably superior to anything they’d built before. Their craftsmanship was definitely improving. Still, I couldn’t help but grumble when I thought wistfully of the magnificent receptacle from the blueprint, though not loudly enough so that Ket could hear.
My sprite had done a fair bit of grumbling herself. It seemed she hadn't previously been aware of her ability to share construction blueprints with me. Since she hadn't advanced beyond the lower tiers during her time as a God Core, she no longer possessed any blueprints I didn't already have myself, and I deduced that this was making her feel inadequate.
My suspicions were confirmed later that day, when I was mooning over the emberfox’s blueprint again.
“It’s gorgeous.”
“It really is a stunning specimen,” Ket agreed.
“I don’t understand, though. It’s a god-born hybrid. How can it exist outside of the Sphere of the one who created it? Are all mage’s familiars like it? How do they get hold of them?”
“Something to ask Benin later, perhaps. Or Bekkit.” There it was again; that hint of testiness that she didn’t have the answers.
“Maybe they come from the former Spheres of Cores that are destroyed,” I mused. “If they survive their Core’s destruction—”
“They can’t,” said Ket. “When a Core is destroyed, so are its god-born. Including its avatar.”
“Actually, that’s not strictly true.”
I could almost hear Ket grinding her teeth as Bekkit inserted himself into our conversation.
“Of course all god-born creatures are subject to their creator’s limitations—for a time. At first they are purely mana-based constructs, fragments of life essence given form and purpose. If they fall during this time, they will simply dissipate and return to the aether.”
I thought back to the many, many creatures who’d fallen to the kobolds during the first weeks of my godhood. Though they’d bled—or ichored, in the case of the non-vertebrates—like any other creature when injured, upon death they’d sunk into the stone to rejoin the ambient mana that permeated my SOI.
“What do you mean, ‘for a time’?” I asked. Ket huffed, but I could tell she was listening carefully.
“Well, as I’m sure you know already, the more time a creature spends in existence, the more solidly its mana coalesces. This happens in stages, until eventually it becomes a creature fully of the physical plane, like your fiery friend the emberfox.”
Bekkit pulled up the Augmentary
