Underkeeper

“I just don’t know what to do.” Torvald complained. “We’re fighting a powerful enemy here, but I’m still just a guy with a sword. I don’t understand why I haven’t gotten a calling!”

Bernt shrugged noncommittally. “I don’t really know anything about the gods, Torvald. Can’t you just ask the priests? They can talk to them directly, right?”

They’d been assigned to haul supplies down from the surface and the two of them were hauling a heavily laden cart through the tunnels toward a designated guarded storage chamber. Someone, probably the magistrate, had decided that the Undercity was a safer place to stockpile food and various flammable goods than the warehouses at the docks up on the surface. It made sense – if anything, Bernt was surprised they hadn’t done it sooner.

The timing was probably down to the general’s planned assault on the duergar. They would want the city as well equipped to handle itself as possible before they sortied. With the army outside their fortifications, they would be left relatively vulnerable. That shouldn’t matter, considering that the enemy should be busy with the army, but only an idiot went to war expecting things to go to plan. Or that’s what Ed had said, anyway. The old war mage would know, Bernt supposed.

“No! I mean, yes, they can, but they wouldn’t do it over something so petty. Priests who abuse their access to their god’s ear can suffer terrible consequences. Sometimes they get demoted, but in more extreme cases they can get excommunicated entirely. It’s not worth it.”

“Alright.” Bernt said, nodding. “Fair enough. But you said you wanted to become a paladin of Ruzinia, right? I mean, maybe you’re just not qualified yet. She’s the goddess of hopeless situations. How many of those have you been in?”

Torvald grunted thoughtfully. "I guess it’s possible. There aren’t any paladins of Ruzinia in Halfbridge, that I know of. The only ones serving right now are in the military, in the garrison at Fort Alborough on the border. But there isn’t supposed to be a formula. It’s not a simple ritual that you can do to gain access to a god’s favor. You have to develop a relationship and gain their favor as you would from a king. It’s a personal process, not a ritual.”

Bernt shrugged. “Sure. I mean, just keep trying, I guess. I’m sure there will be plenty of opportunities to prove yourself, no matter what happens with the Duergar.”

Whatever happened, Halfbridge now sat directly on top of a massive warren of tunnels that they knew for certain connected to the greater Depths below. A place that teemed with monsters, including at least one elder dragon and his horde of kobolds – wherever they had disappeared to. Somewhere down there was the Duergar Empire proper, where their attackers had come from as well as other mysterious peoples. Dark elves, lizardfolk, and if the rumors were to be believed, even stranger creatures who never ventured anywhere near the surface.

***

Josie patrolled down the tunnel in the Goblin Quarter with Jori on her shoulder, the little imp snapping her fingers as she summoned small sparks of hellfire that were extinguished almost as quickly as they formed.

The fire flared every two or three seconds next to Josie’s head, a tiny, smelly candle flame of destruction. After perhaps the fifth time, she cleared her throat.

“Jori, stop that! You’re going to set my hair on fire.”

The imp lowered her hand with a sigh. “I’m trying to turn the flames green. Bernt can cast green fire when he wants, but mine is always red!”

“Alright, do you have to do it right next to my head?” she asked irritably. “Come down and walk on your own two feet if you want to play with fire!”

With a little chirp, Jori complied. Leaping from her shoulders, she spread her wings to glide forward a few steps and landed smoothly on her feet.

“Are you even sure that you can modify your fire like that?” Josie asked as the demon began conjuring tiny flashes of fire again. “I know Bernt said sorcerers could modify their spells, but is that what you are? Warlocks can’t do it, and we’re using your abilities, right?”

“Sure – I already did!” Jori exclaimed proudly and snipped her fingers in demonstration in a small burst of fire. “Can’t you see how tiny my fire is? I can squeeze down on the channel right at the top and it makes the fire go smaller! I’m going to be a real demon sorceress. Just wait and see!”

Josie frowned, concentrating on the looping formation in her hands. She could sort of “squeeze” down on it, sure, but that just activated the ability. She hummed consideringly. “I can’t do it. Do you think it might be part of the pact? It describes what power I should get from the midnight hag exhaustively. It’s for my protection, but it might also limit what I can do with it.”

“No idea.” Jori said, trying again. This time, the tiny burst of hellfire shot straight up into the tunnel ceiling, cutting through one of the glowing vines to send a few softly glowing leaves tumbling down. Jori caught one and jumped up and down in excitement. “Wow! That was different. See? Who knows what I can do!”

“I guess it makes sense,” Josie mused. “Minor and lesser demons are pretty well understood, you all have the same basic abilities. Once they reach class 6 or 7, though, they start developing unique power profiles. I mean, that’s why greater demons get their own classification. Maybe that’s all they’re really doing – learning to manipulate a sorcerous mana network.”

Jori shook her head. “No. New, different abilities need growth – new channels. I don’t know how to do that, exactly. I would have to grow to try, and your master would send me back to the hells. He said he would do it.” She cast another quick burst of hellfire into the air. “Squeezing a channel is easy. Anyone can learn it with a little time. I’m going to start with that!”

“So why don’t all demons do it?” Josie asked, voicing the obvious question.

“Maybe they don’t know they should try,” Jori said, sounding a little sad. “Nobody teaches us. We have to learn everything by ourselves.”

Josie saw the little demon grimace and smiled at her. “Hey, maybe most demons, but you don't. You have friends!”

More than any demon she'd ever heard of, in fact. It was really a unique situation. Jori looked up at her and nodded seriously.

“I do. Yes.”

–-------

“Damn it, Iri.” Ed grumbled, “Old Pollock? Really? Your timing could have been better. He was just starting to make himself useful. I had to take him off the interception team and start sending Fiora out. Says he thinks he can get proper control of his fire spells again ‘soon’, but who knows how long he’s going to be laid up.”

Iriala kept her eyes fixed on General Arice, who was describing the tactics he intended to use to break through the duergar defenses to the assembled stakeholders for the city’s defense. Much of these plans were based directly on Iri’s own scrying, so he supposed maybe she actually found it interesting. Ed thought a windbag like Arice shouldn’t be explaining this sort of thing in the first place – he should have just let the tactician that made the damned plan give this talk.

After a moment, Iri nodded to herself and turned to fix him with a neutral stare. “He was dabbling in creating his own fire spells, Ed. He was going to meet him sooner or later. Bernt needed some proper guidance and Magister Pollock is an enthusiastic and competent teacher, if a bit reckless. If you’d sponsored his guild membership, you might have delayed the inevitable a bit, but not by much. He did it to himself, you know, and it was his own idea. Without Pollock he would have probably killed himself with that experiment.”

Ed hummed irritably. “I told him to wait until he was a magister himself before he started playing around with his mana network. A little experience can go a long way.”

Iriala sighed and rolled her eyes at him. “Yes Ed, you always listened to the wisdom of your elders when you were young. At least we got that banefire spell from him. You should have seen the face on Arice’s Pyromancer Colonel when I gave it to him. They’ve been stuck on heat shielding duty this whole time, just trying to keep the demons from cooking their troops down in those kobold tunnels."

Ed pulled the unlit pipe from his mouth and scowled down at it for a moment. Then he knocked the dead ash out of it onto the ground next to him and reached for the bag of tobacco he always kept in his left sleeve. “Good for them, I guess.” It was embarrassing that they needed it, really. The military should already have effective doctrines and tools for dealing with an enemy like this in the Depths. In fact, he wouldn’t be surprised if they did, and Arice just didn’t know what he was doing.

That asshole rubbed him the wrong way, prancing around over there, trying to look smart in front of the count instead of doing his job. Everyone could see the damned tactical map on the table. What did they need him talking for?

“How is that dwarf’s project going?" Iriala said, changing the subject. "He showed up in my office with Janus yesterday, asking for one of my engineers – a hydromancer. They were awfully hush-hush about it.”

“Ah.” Ed nodded, relaxing a little. “Yeah. That’s a contingency I set him on. I’d rather not talk about it too much, if you don’t mind. You never really know who or what’s listening, and we’re sitting a little too close to all the most interesting people in this city, as far as those damned dwarves out there are concerned.”

–-------

“How did you do it?” Bernt asked, opening the window shutters to let the stink out of their living room. Jori had just cast a broad, diffuse cloud of hellfire into their living room. It evaporated almost immediately, leaving the room hot and reeking of sulfur.

Jori shrugged. “It’s not really that hard. I just think about what I want it to do and then try it out. It’s like learning how to fly!”

“Thanks, that’s very helpful.” Bernt said sarcastically. Jori had described the way she modified her casting as squeezing or pushing on the channels. To Bernt, that sounded like she was essentially restricting mana flow in some areas or cutting them off from the rest of the network, maybe even changing the shape of the mana network slightly. The problem was he had no idea how she was doing that. It didn’t feel like much through the bond.

He could feel the investiture there, sure. He could even sense the mana coursing through it, something that proper sorcerers couldn’t do as far as he'd read. But squeezing it physically with his muscles didn’t do anything at all as far as he could tell.

That made sense. It was his spirit, after all. Even if it was physically manifested, why would pushing on it physically do anything?

But then, how was he supposed to manipulate it? Bernt growled in frustration. If only he could cast his spells normally through his right hand – maybe figure out a way to sort of disconnect parts of the structure as he cast mana through in a mostly straight line, then maybe he could at least cast his spells almost normally. Then he could work bits of the new investiture into them as needed and take his time.

He held his hand up to cast another torch spell next to the three already hanging in the air in front of him. Unlike his normal version, these spells would stay lit indefinitely – drawing mana from the environment to sustain them. He supposed if he cast enough of them, they should eventually drain the power from their surroundings and create a sort of mana desert in the house, choking out the perpetual torch spells. Not an ideal environment for a mage, either.

With a thought, he extinguished two of the lights before continuing, dispersing the mana that it burned back into the environment while absorbing the mana that defined its structure back into himself. It was slightly more complicated than canceling a “normal” spell, which was done simply by withdrawing his mana from it, but it didn’t take more than a moment either way.

He just wanted one channel, the shortest path through the investiture, skipping as much of its complex structure as possible. Concentrating on his goal, he cast the spell. As he did, he felt an odd prodding sensation in his arm. Then the channels warmed as the spell manifested, and fire poured from his palm, rolling into a ball.

He stared at it. “Did it work?”

Jori shrugged.

Frustrated, he cursed himself for not chalking a rune circle down on the ground before he started. Except for the way it manifested, his new torch spell looked almost exactly like the old one to the naked eye. He had no way to tell if he’d managed to change anything.

Bernt focused on the air around the spell, trying to sense if it was absorbing mana from the air around it. It didn’t feel like it. Not like the older spell hanging next to it.

“Hey, I think I did it!” he said, sounding surprised, even to himself. He’d done something.

Jori looked up at the light, squinting skeptically. She reached up and lobbed an uneven glob of liquid flame up into the air, where it hung awkwardly, rotating crazily around its own axis and giving off an unpleasant smell to go with its reddish light. It didn’t form into a ball.

Jori nodded at it proudly. “Mine’s better,” she opined.