Chapter 19: Misjudge

Phaine led the group into the antechamber, carrying one of the flickering candles that they had used to light Mira’s bedroom. The thief moved quietly enough that Ness wondered if cat claws were the only enhancements the woman had. The dim candlelight was barely enough to see by, but not enough to rouse the sleeping guard.

Once Ness stepped through, Rist gently closed the door behind them, vigilant with his flask of oil in case the door hinges chose that moment to announce themselves. Door closed, Phaine fished a small ceramic vial out of her bag, uncapped it, and let a few drops of its contents fall onto the lips of the sleeping guard.

Then, with silent gestures, she bade everyone to wait.

Ness wished her phone worked, so she could at least track the passage of time, if not find something to distract her as the seconds sluggishly trickled by.

She shifted nervously from foot to foot, glad that she was barefoot and that the floor seemed sturdy enough to not squeak.

After thinking it over for a few minutes, she supposed that the screen light would probably be a problem, much less the risk of an errant pinging notification.

Ness tried very hard not to cough or sneeze.

She looked over at Mira, who was mid-grimace as she pulled her injured arm tighter against her torso, jaw muscles flexing against the instinct to vocalize her pain.

Ness padded carefully over to the door back into the hallway, and crouched what she judged was a safe distance away from it, examining the now dull-grey runes pressed into the wood of the floor.

The patterns reminded her not just of circuit traces, but of circuit diagrams; inscrutable symbols all connected to each other with faint lines. If the arrangement had been a circuit, it would have been quite a simple one; but she had no idea what the individual runes symbolized.

After several minutes, the guard’s slumber deepened and his breathing slowed.

Ness looked back toward Phaine, who was still watching the guard slowly.

Another few minutes passed, and the guard’s breathing slowed even further, to the point where Ness started to worry if Phaine had given him too much of whatever she had given him; but at this latest sign, Phaine only nodded, and turned away, unconcerned.

The platinum-haired woman gestured toward the inner door, which had no lock. It stood slightly ajar, open an inch or two. It seemed that Hender had trusted the magical trap and her resting guard to be protection enough.

Phaine examined the threshold carefully, nonetheless, moving the candle around gently to catch any possible flicker of rune-work. Once she judged it safe enough, she gestured to Rist, who crept up— more noisily than Phaine, Ness noticed, but still much more softly than most people would have managed.

Rist oiled the hinges of the inner door like he had the outer, and ever so carefully nudged it open, feeling for the potential resistance of furniture that might have been moved to block it.

Watching them work, Ness felt a nauseating wave of retroactive anxiety. If she had not burst through the door, disrupting their first attempt, they would have branded Mira before any of them figured out what happened. She was still unclear exactly what that meant, but it definitely sounded bad, and Ness had certainly noticed the fear that Mira had felt when she realized what Phaine had almost done.

Phaine and Rist were clearly professionals, and only a lucky (or unlucky, depending on your perspective) squeak of a window hinge had changed the course of that night.

Mira and Ness stayed in the antechamber, as far from the sleeping guard as possible, eyeing him warily.

Ness itched to lean in close to Mira and whisper to her; she wanted to know if the woman was okay, and if the angry red lightning bolt marks traced along her skin would heal. She kept her distance, though, a foot or two apart. Close enough that Mira could reach out, if needed, but not close enough to risk the moans Ness would almost certainly emit if her lips accidentally brushed Mira’s ear during a whispered conversation.

Ness was distractedly wondering if the sorceress liked her ears being nibbled when a flash of eerie purple black-light and a crack like miniature thunder issued out of the bedroom; followed shortly by a new voice, a woman’s, that Ness didn’t recognize, shouting in confusion and anger.

Mira sighed in exasperation while Ness looked frantically from her to the guard, who was still sound asleep. Or, Ness supposed, having watched Phaine administer something, drugged into unconsciousness.

“Might as well go see the show,” Mira said, normal-voiced, gesturing toward the door.

“Are you okay? What happened? What was that? Are you okay?”

Finally free to speak, the questions poured out of Ness before she could think better of them. Mira paused mid-step and turned to look back at her, head tilted.

“Rune magic, intended to… I’m not sure what. I was never very good at runes. I absorbed the energy from it but it was a lot more than I expected. Usually it just hurts, like fire in your veins. How did you know it was there?”

“I could her a high pitched whine, like an old camera flash charging? It got louder when… what’s his name?”

Ness gestured toward the door, from which she could hear what sounded like an argument, voices lower now but occasionally approaching something in the neighborhood of a stage yell.

“Rist.”

“It got louder when Rist opened the door, and as… what’s her name?”

“Phaine.”

“Phaine. Who is she? The whine got louder as she was gonna step over it so, I don’t know, it seemed like the right thing to do.”

“You might’ve saved her life, or at the very least her mission.”

“I… what?” Ness’s brain ground to a halt, she was so used to Mira dismissing her, at best.

“You did really well, Ness.”

Ness’s brain rebooted at the praise. She stared, blinking and speechless.

“What? Don’t look at me like that.”

A little bit of the customary scorn came through in Mira’s tone, and Ness found that somehow comforting.

“No, sorry, I’d just been…”

Feeling so useless, Ness wanted to say, but she could not quite bring herself to that level of vulnerability.

“I’m glad I could help,” she finished, awkwardly, instead. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, it just hurts,” Mira responded, stretching and relaxing her hand.

The skin cracked as Mira flexed it; she winced, and emitted a soft grunt of pain. Ness caught a faint iron whiff of blood, and suppressed another surge of protective sympathy.

“Is there anything I can do?”

“No.”

Mira resumed crossing the room toward the bedroom, and Ness followed a step behind.

“So, who’s Phaine, anyway? She’s…”

“She’s the friend I was telling you about yesterday.”

“The friend- wait, your ex? What the fuck? Why is your ex breaking into our hotel room?”

“Mistaken identity,” Mira responded, cryptically.

She stepped into the doorway leading the bedroom, paused, and then turned once again to look at Ness, with the same indecipherable look that might have been some kind of grudging affection, or at least something slightly better than tolerance.

“Hey, Ness?”

“Mira?”

“Earlier, if you hadn’t rushed in…”

“Yeah,” Ness replied softly.

“No, what I mean is.. Thank you.”

Ness’s throat suddenly felt tight.

“Of course.” Her voice was a little strangled, and she coughed softly to clear it. “I mean, you’re welcome. Mira. I… you’re welcome.”

Mira nodded quietly, and stepped through the door.

Ness spared a glance for the guard, still asleep on the divan. She had a moment of envy for him; whether asleep or unconscious, it seemed restful. The fact that she had managed only a few hours of fitful sleep, herself, was starting to catch up with her.

She followed Mira into the bedroom.

Ness stepped through the door after Mira, and took in the scene.

A woman, not dissimilar in stature from Mira, albeit with longer hair a few shades lighter, was sitting against the far wall. She had a blank, shell-shocked expression and she stared through Phaine, who seemed irate, and moments away from launching herself at the seated woman.

The room was dimly illuminated by the glowing red rune floating about a quarter inch in front of the seated woman’s forehead.

Rist was awkwardly standing off to the side, watching Phaine closely. He seemed on the verge of intervening, to pull Phaine away from the listless seated figure.

“Get the right person this time?” Mira asked, standing just inside the bedroom.

Phaine stopped mid-sentence and spun to face Mira.

“I can’t hit her but there’s no rule that says I can’t hit you,” she growled.

Mira raised an eyebrow and said nothing.

“Shut up,” Phaine muttered at Mira, turning back toward Hender with a scowl.

“So where’s my fifty percent?”

Phaine pointed, without looking, at a small wooden chest pushed up against a wall.

“It’s in there, and this one,” she punctuated the words with emphatic pointing at Hender, “knows how to open it, but is refusing to talk.”

Every inch of the small chest was covered in silvery runes, similar to those that had been laid across the threshold into the antechamber, but both denser and more numerous. To Ness’s ear, the chest sounded like a particularly angry hive of bees, and it was emitting a constant silver glow that somehow managed not to shed any light on the neighboring wall or floor.