Underkeeper

Pollock peered at the spellform over the top of his glasses, shuffling around the rune circle slowly as he examined it.

“Well. I don’t know that it’ll work quite yet. But it won’t blow up in your face. That’s a fairly good start. I think you have a talent for this sort of thing, one that you should cultivate, given the opportunity. Why don’t you give it a try?”

Bernt frowned. “I haven’t memorized it. I can’t just cast it.”

“Really?” Pollock asked in a tone of surprise. “You’ve been staring at it for days. You built the spellform for it yourself!”

Bernt shook his head. What the man was asking was unheard of. Insane, even. Nobody just tried out a spell they weren’t sure about, and especially not something as dangerous as this.

“No, I don’t think so,” he refused again. “If I try to cast it without making sure that I’ve memorized it right, it really could blow up in my face.”

“Hmph.” Pollock grumped. “You won’t learn your limits if you don’t push them, boy. You seem to have a bit of an intuitive understanding already – learning to cast a spell like this shouldn’t really be that hard for you.”

With a flick of his wrist, the magister summoned fire over his open palm. Or, something that looked almost like fire – this was something a bit different. The flame was a perfectly shaped teardrop of sullen orange light and it hung in the air without even the slightest flicker.

“Ahh.” he sighed. “Very nice.” He extinguished the flame with a thought and dropped the hand. “Dangerous to cast, though, and still not perfect. You should try to weaken the spell a bit, and do whatever you can to improve the stability of the flame even more.”

Bernt gaped at the old man. Unless he’d been coming in here to study Bernt’s work while he was gone, Pollock had just memorized his entire spellform in minutes.

“Alright,” Bernt said numbly, still trying to process what he’d just seen. He was impatient to be done, but he knew he wouldn’t get a second chance if it didn’t work properly. He needed to get this right.

As the master pyromancer turned to leave, Bernt called after him. “Magister, can you get me access to the perpetual flame as well, for my investiture? That way we could do it right away, when I finish, I mean.”

“Sure,” Pollock laughed. “But what happened to taking the time to learn the spell?”

***

Jori inhaled sharply, covertly drawing in the soul residues out of the duergar corpses as she sat on the rim of the cart. Body removal had become one of the many jobs that Underkeepers handled in the new Undercity, which was fair considering the number of corpses they’d been making lately.

Initially, Kustov had simply entombed the dead in the stone wherever they died, but someone decided that a centralized disposal site would be safer, more sanitary and generally more civilized. Probably Fiora.

Jori liked Fiora. The woman was smart, practical, and she’d supplied her with all of these wonderful snacks!

These little tiny bits of souls didn’t really do much for her at this stage– it was more like scraping a bit of sauce out of an empty bowl than having a proper meal – but it was still tasty and a lot better than nothing.

It was almost the perfect job. Of course, she wasn’t strictly assigned to it. She’d volunteered both herself and her interns for the duty, but Palina wouldn’t hear of it, even though Gnugg had experience! But she still managed to help out most days – just as long as she managed to get put on a patrol. Then she could just take her lunch break near the disposal site, usually in time to sneak in or intercept the disposal crew directly as they came in.

It was a large chamber located down a hidden ramp off of the Undercity Market. Every time new bodies were deposited, one of the mages would enclose them in stone, keeping the entire thing relatively clean. Today, though, she’d caught the cart as it rolled past the market square.

“Jori!” Nirlig called, “Come on, I got your favorite!”

Jumping off the cart, Jori scampered back toward the market, where Nirlig held out a small bag that smelled earthy and spicy – spiced mushroom wraps.

She snatched it, grinning up at him. “Thanks!”

They weren’t Cal’s spiced cabbage rolls, but they were pretty good. Digging around in her pockets, she dug out six small copper coins and held them out to the goblin. “Here’s your money.”

Nirlig blinked in surprise. “Don’t worry about it, it’s just a bit of copper.”

“Take it.” Jori insisted. “Your mom says that you spend too much money on other people! ‘How will he ever meet a nice girl and support a family if he spends all his money on random strangers?’ she said. "It’s for your own good!”

Nirlig groaned.

“Please, Jori, not you, too. When did you meet my mother?”

“I wanted to find out where your aunt Striga gets her fire gin,” Jori explained. “So I went and knocked on your door and met your mom. She’s very nice. Anyway, I asked her, and she took me over to your aunt’s house and introduced me. You didn’t tell me Striga makes it herself! I’m paying her to make me some more. What? What’s the matter?”

The goblin had his head in his hands now. “Oh no, that explains everything!”

“What?” Jori asked again.

“Hellfire Gin! Aunt Striga renamed it, and she sent my cousin out to try to find a pound of juniper berries at the market two days ago. She went on about opening a stand at the Undercity Market with the stuff. She’s trying to profit from your notoriety.”

Jori frowned as she dug into the bag. Striga had renamed the gin for her? She perked up. “I’m famous?”

Nirlig snorted. “Are you kidding? There are stories and rumors running wild about you all over the city – well, the pubs, mostly. It started after you fought that duergar warlock up on the surface for everyone to see. I think you made an impression. The rumors aren’t very accurate, though. A lot of them think you’re bigger than a human and that you breathe fire out of your mouth like a dragon.”

That… that sounded amazing. Could she learn to breathe fire out of her mouth? It was a little sad that she couldn’t really live up the hype. But this was good, right? It meant people liked her!

“I’m famous!” Jori cheered past a bite of her mushroom wrap.

***

Bernt listened with some trepidation as Jori bragged about her newfound fame to the other underkeepers. Their shift was over, but they were still sitting in the break room, catching up with the others. Bernt wanted to go. He needed to get up to the Mages’ Guild to try to finish his spellform, he'd been so close last night, but this seemed too important to ignore.

“Sure, yeah. I heard about that,” laughed Dayle. “There was a fellow deep in his cups at the Horse’s Head, he was ready to swear you were a succubus trying to save the city from a rival demon so you could steal the uh… hearts of its men or some such nonsense.”

Jori had started asking the others about all the rumors. She thought they were delightful, though more than a few of them were wildly inaccurate. A few seemed to confuse her for Josie, and some implied that she either worked for the solicitors or had defected from the duergar. Just two made mention of someone that might have been him.

It reminded Bernt of the street preacher he’d heard the other day. The man had almost certainly been railing against Jori, and by extension the Underkeepers and probably the Solicitors as well. Of course, he’d known for some time that Radast was planning to use Jori in some way to try to rehabilitate the image of warlocks, or maybe just the Solicitors in the city. This was the first real evidence he’d heard of Jori’s growing reputation, though.

All in all, he would have hoped that someone like Radast would be able to craft a better narrative, or at least one that was more consistent.

“I don’t think you need to worry your head about it.” Dayle went on, though Jori didn’t seem worried in the least. “All this fighting’ll be over soon, and things will go back to like they usually are, mostly. Rumors die just as quick as they come.”

Jori cocked her head and Bernt felt uncertainly leak through their bond. “What do you mean? Why?”

“I hear the good general’s going to take the fight to the duergar, finally. They’ve had Iriala scrying the enemy for weeks – her and her whole team, I hear. They’re pretty sure now that they can’t take us direct-like at all. That might be why they ain’t attacked us to our faces this whole time, like respectable folks would.”

Bernt looked over and met Kustov’s equally surprised gaze.

“When did you hear about this?” Bernt asked. “Are they going soon?”

“I was bringing my reports by Ed’s office when he got the news a few minutes ago. No idea when it’s happening.” He shrugged. “Ain’t an officer, am I? Probably soon though – couple of days, probably.”

A couple of days…

Bernt got up. Things were about to escalate, one way or another. Sure, if everything went perfectly, he’d be sitting around drinking tea while the army handled everything. But… when had anything ever gone perfectly? No, Josie had been right. There were spies in this city, invisible and immortal spies. And that meant they had to assume that the enemy knew whatever they knew. Anything less was just asking to be outmaneuvered.

The Duergar had already come close to burning down the Paladins’ Hall once. It revealed a little bit of how they thought. If they had good intelligence and knew that the general was making his move, they would want to take out the other major threats in the city – the places where the city’s most dangerous people worked. That meant the palace, the guilds, the Solicitors’ Office and the Paladins’ Hall. The Mages’ Guild was, in his estimation, the most obvious target – they were responsible for maintaining the city’s defensive wards.

Bernt couldn’t do anything about that, and smarter and more powerful people than him were working on it anyway, but he had to at least look after his own interests. If the guild suffered an attack, he might lose access to the perpetual flame and all the work he’d been doing on his hellfire derivative.

The clock was ticking.

He needed to repair his mana network, and quickly. It was time.

–---------

Magister Pollock examined Bernt’s spellform once again, moving around it to look at it from several different angles, nodding every few seconds as he found and checked off whatever he was looking for.

Bernt couldn’t quite tell exactly what the man was looking for, even though he’d built the spell himself. He didn’t really understand the purpose of every rune and symbol in the spellform, never mind every single bend and loop. He just used what he did know to identify the purpose of different segments of the spell and reconfigured the parts he identified as relevant in the ways he thought made the most sense to get the result he wanted.

The problem was that each adjustment he made changed the overall shape of the spellform, which forced him to make a cascade of other adjustments to ensure that everything still worked the way it was supposed to in the first place. It had taken a long time, but he was pretty sure that this time, he’d finally done it.

The elderly Pyromancer nodded one final time and looked up.

“It’s good enough, I think. Can you cast it?”

Bernt shifted awkwardly. “I was hoping you would,” he said.

"You were, were you?” Pollock snorted. “No, no. It’s your spell. Show me!”

Hesitantly, Bernt shaped the spellform. It helped that he had the pattern right there in front of him, but it still took him most of a minute before he felt sure enough to activate the spell.

A red candle flame hovered over his open palm, just a few finger widths tall. It gave off a gentle heat that he could feel on his skin, and it burned so steadily that it looked more like a frozen teardrop of light than actual fire.

“It’s still not perfect, really.” Pollock said, looking at it. “But it’s good! It’s plenty good enough to get the job done. Your last attempt might have even been enough, but it’s better to play it safe. Always remember to aim for perfection, but don’t bother getting all the way there. It’s too much work.”

Bernt tried not to show his excitement, but he couldn’t quite hide his grin.

“Does that mean we can get started? Where’s the perpetual flame? Can we propagate it now?”

Pollock grinned and flicked a finger over toward another of the rune circles in the room. A tiny pinpoint of white fire shot from the tip of his finger, growing to perhaps the size of a grape by the time it hit the rune circle and unraveled into a spellform.

Bernt stared at it uncomprehendingly for a second, then turned back to Pollock, staring dumbly in open-mouthed shock.

“You can conjure it?”