Underkeeper

“I hope you actually have something for me.” Iriala said as Bernt entered her office. “My receptionist seems to think you’re just trying to go over his head.”

Bernt shifted uncomfortably. “Uh. no. I mean, It's not just that, I do have something for you.”

The archmage raised an eyebrow at him mildly, but Bernt suddenly felt as though he were in danger and he rushed to continue.

“I was on defense duty with Josie today and I learned something that seemed… relevant, at least. About the Solicitors, I mean... not all of them, but Josie in particular. She can see the mana networks of mages. In detail. She noticed some spiritual damage in my arm – I thought it was mostly healed already, but it might be worse than I thought… anyway, don’t you think that might be the reason the Solicitors placed her in the Underkeepers?”

Iriala’s face grew thoughtful, but eventually she shook it. “They probably just did it because she’d be the most useful – I expect that she can also find invisible creatures and sense demons. It's not unheard of. Being able to see a mage’s mana network wouldn’t be very useful for a warlock, except maybe to see how many investitures they have. Was there anything else?”

“Ah.” Bernt said. He already knew that it wasn't much – Josie had said as much, but he’d needed a reason to talk to Iriala, and this was new information – to him at least. “I also wanted to bring by this spell that I developed – I call it Banefire. It counters hellfire to an extent, and it kills demons. Or, at least, they really don’t like it.”

Iriala sat up straight. “Really? It sounds... relevant to our current situation, though I'm not sure about the name. It's your spell, I guess.” She held out a hand. “Give it here, I'll get it looked at.”

Bernt swallowed. “Uh… your receptionist has it. He said he would send it to Magister Pollock and he didn't give it back when I asked. I was hoping to sell it to the guild and maybe use that to finance my guild membership.”

Iriala snorted. "Let's take a look before we start talking price." Light swirled in one lens of her glasses, flicking from one image to the next too quickly for Bernt to catch what she was looking at. She rose and strode toward the door. “I guess I can spare a few minutes. Come along!”

The archmage walked down the hall so quickly that Bernt had to jog to catch up. Instead of going to the entrance, though, she led him down another hall and up a flight of stairs to a door labeled “Wizard’s Society and Research Division”. Without knocking, she flung the door open and marched through into a corridor lined with doors, practically dragging Bernt in her wake.

“Pollock! Get in here!” She called as she pulled him into one of the rooms on the right. “I need you to take a look at this.”

The room was bigger than it looked on the outside, but still not large. It contained a writing desk, a small, mostly empty shelf where someone had forgotten a haphazard stack of loose papers, and a relatively large bit of clear floorspace, where a circle of runes had been carved directly into the stone.

Bernt recognized it immediately and realized what they were about to do. Without prompting, he began casting, visualizing the spellform in the air in front of him. It was still a new spell to him, so it took him nearly fifteen seconds to get the job done. Once he did, he carefully stripped out the effects of his investiture – he wasn’t trying to sell that – and released the spell into the circle.

When he looked up, he found that they weren’t alone anymore. Iriala and a stooped elderly man were standing just on the other side of the circle, both watching with interest as the gray fire unraveled into the spellform that defined it. The man was ancient, with just a few tufts of fine white hair poking outward from his otherwise bald head, compensated by a long bushy beard that completely hid his mouth.

“It’s...” The old man adjusted a pair of spectacles and moved to the side to view it from another angle. “Well, it’s modeled on a standard fireball, clearly. But it’s using a different basis for the fire itself – very unusual and complex, too. Very fun! I’ve never seen it before. What does it do?”

“He says it burns demons.” Iriala said and looked over at Bernt. “The fire-demons, too, right?”

Bernt nodded. “Yes, it sort of cancels out hellfire, or it weakens it. I’m not entirely sure, but I think it saved my arm from getting burnt off a few weeks ago.”

“I see, I see.” The old man, presumably Magister Pollock, said distractedly and pointed. “And what made you decide to orient the ignition rune like that?”

Bernt shrugged. “I didn’t – it was that way in the original cold fire scroll that I based this on. If I had to guess, though, it’s because a normal fire spell burns mana for fuel and uses the heat that generates to burn things, just like regular fire does. The heat is what does the damage. Cold fire isn’t hot, at least not very. The rune in this spell is oriented to ignite whatever that bit of the spellform is describing there instead of just mana.” Bernt pointed to the cluster of runes in question. “This has some overlap with the spellform for hellfire, though I couldn’t find any part that was an exact match. It’s not the same, but I’m guessing that’s why the spells interact.”

Magister Pollock peered at Bernt curiously. “You tried to work it out on your own? And you have access to the spellform for hellfire?” He turned to Iriala and slapped her on the shoulder lightly, chiding her. “He tried to work it out on his own! And he’s not even very wrong! Why didn’t you send him to me sooner?”

“He’s not a guild member, Pollock.” Iriala said with exaggerated patience. “What do you think it’s worth? He was saying that he wanted to try to trade it for membership.” She looked at Bernt with a raised eyebrow. “You were, weren’t you?”

Bernt cleared his throat. “I was hoping that it was worth enough gold to buy my membership, yes.” He didn’t want to just trade it directly… not if it might be worth more than the price of membership.

Pollock cackled, revealing a gap-toothed grin. “Then I’ll say fifty gold pieces, or a direct trade for membership plus access to the wizard’s society. Simple enough.”

Bernt frowned. Clearly, he shouldn’t have said anything. Guild membership cost exactly fifty gold marks. Now the old man was trying to steer him.

Then again, spell research was something he was very interested in. If Pollock was a wizard as well as a specialized pyromancer, then he would probably prove even more useful than the guild library. In fact…

“Uh. Do you know anything about hellfire? Or about fire that can damage the spirit in general? That fight I mentioned, where I avoided losing an arm? I have some lingering issues from that.”

Magister Pollock squinted at him through his glasses. “Really? Well… I don’t know for certain, but I think you’re in the right place. We can take a look when you’re a proper member and everything. I don’t work with any old riffraff off the street, you know. I’m a guild resource!”

Bernt looked over at Iriala, who was watching the proceedings with a pleased expression. She nodded at him, urging him to accept.

“Oh just take the deal, boy. He’s a little eccentric, but he’ll get you a lot further than a bag of gold. Besides, it’s access to the wizard’s society, not a job. He can’t make you work for him or even show up when you don’t want to.” She emphasized the last bit, staring pointedly at the old man, who snorted at her.

“Silly girl. He’ll be knocking down my door at all hours if he knows what’s good for him!”

–------

Bernt signed the short, one-page contract at the front desk and slid it over to the dour-looking receptionist. Without looking, the man duplicated the thick paper once and handed the copy to his monkey, who went to file it away. Bernt pocketed the original wordlessly and turned back to Magister Pollock, who watched the proceedings with the impatience of a child waiting for dinner.

“Wonderful. Welcome to the Mages’ Guild, boy. Come along, now, I want to see what you’ve done to your arm.” Without waiting for a response, the old man turned and started hiking back up the stairs at a geriatric pace. Bernt hesitated for a second, but then followed and lent his arm to the man.

Somehow, Bernt felt that Pollock was too excited. About his spell, about him, about the damage to his arm. No one had shown this kind of interest in him before, and it made him suspicious.

Then again, he’d paid for it, hadn’t he? He was sure that a lot of mages were about to learn his spell, and not just in Halfbridge. The scryers would disseminate it to every other Mages’ Guild branch in the country. Cold fire was already proving to be very valuable against the duergar – how much better would it be when every pyromancer in the guild, not to mention Arice’s army had it?

“So, then.” Pollock said as they walked. “Tell me exactly what happened. We’ll take a closer look back at my office, but we’re going to be walking a while. I’m not as young as I used to be, you know?”

Trying to remember exactly what he saw, Bernt related what had happened in the fight against the warlock at the Undercity Gates, from the initial burn to Syrah’s healing.

“Hmmm. And that was everything?” Pollock asked, taking a breather on the landing.

“Well. In that fight, yes. But I’m worried that there might be more to it. The same arm was exposed to an alchemical poison about two months ago and I also strained my mana network during the kobold invasion around that time – though it was fine again before that.”

The old man frowned, considering. “We’ll have to take a closer look at it. I doubt the strain did anything permanent in a single day of overuse. Mages who burn themselves out usually do so over months or years – it’s common with soldiers, people who cast a lot of spells under pressure. Better to take a risk than get killed, right? Alchemical poisons can be tricky, though. They’re magical, so sometimes you can get unpredictable spell interactions if the residues aren’t completely eliminated. Tell me about this poison. What happened there?”

By the time Bernt finished relating his experience with the Alchemists’ Guild, they’d finally made it back to Pollock’s office. The room was much larger than the small laboratory that they’d been in earlier, with shelves of ancient-looking books, stacks of notes that covered nearly every available surface, and two large cabinets that stood behind a massive desk that was also nearly buried underneath stacks of loose papers.

The old man bustled over to one of the cabinets and rummaged around in it for a few moments before withdrawing a broken piece of chalk. Then, taking a seat in his large chair, he moved a few of the smaller stacks of papers onto some of the larger stacks and began to draw directly onto the desk.

Bernt watched curiously, realizing a few seconds later that he was creating a rune circle. It wasn’t like any that he’d seen before, though it didn’t look complicated at all. Simpler, even, than the one used for investments or spell analyses that was carved into the floor of the other room.

“Alright,” Pollock said. “Just hold your arm up over the circle there and run a little mana through it. A little lower. Yes, just like that.”

As Bernt channeled mana, a small group of glowing blue lines appeared in the air right above his arm. They didn’t form any definitive pattern, they just ran alongside each other at a slight curve, with one twisting slightly around two others. Over the next few seconds, though, the image grew clearer. The lines weren’t quite straight, wobbling back and forth at very slight angles and they were oddly textured – a little knobby and sort of rough-looking on the outside.

“Hmm,” the old man said, moving from side to side as if to get a better look. “That’s pretty unusual, yes. I’ve never seen an odd texture like this.”

Bernt swallowed. “Do you think it’s going to get in the way of my development? I was hoping to get my second investiture soon – the archmage promised me access to your perpetual flame.”

“Really?” Pollock said, eyebrows going up in surprise. “Pretty daring architecture, that one. Dangerous.” He looked back at the projection thoughtfully. “I don’t really know. If I were you, I would at least try to understand your condition better before proceeding. It shouldn’t really take long, though. We can do a few more tests here, and we might be able to get an alchemist to take a look as well. They don’t know anything useful about mana networks, mind you, but it might help you figure out whether any alchemical interactions are involved.”

Bernt grimaced. “I’ve had some bad experiences with the alchemists. I don’t know that I want to ask them for help.”

The old man laughed. “Alchemists are just people, boy. When you don’t trust an organization, you turn to individuals." He waved dismissively. "I’ll handle that part. Just be here tomorrow, same time.”