Chapter 20: Misalign

“Can’t you just do whatever you did at the door?” Phaine was, very obviously, incredibly annoyed about the situation.

“I could,” Mira allowed.

Her eyes were tight, just shy of glaring at Phaine.

“Well?” Phaine gestured toward the chest. “Any time.”

“It’s just that that much power would definitely kill me, and honestly probably everyone in this room, too.”

“That’s fine, we can step outside,” Phaine muttered with a scowl.

Mira rolled her eyes and went back to staring at the chest, arms crossed. The runes were too complicated for her to understand, with her minimal knowledge. They might be an alarm to deter theft, some kind of lock, or a deadly trap for a would-be thief.

Hender’s other possessions did not nearly account for the amount of wealth she had stolen, so the only reasonable conclusion was that the gold she had taken was inside the chest.

“Can I take a look?” Ness asked.

She had been standing at Mira’s elbow for a few minutes, staring at the chest, watching flecks of weird light flicker through the elaborate markings at regular intervals.

“What?” Ness turned to look at Mira, surprised. “Why?”

“It… reminds me of something from my world, actually.. something I studied in school.”

“You studied?”

Ness had a flash of annoyance before processing that Mira’s inquiry was genuine surprise, not some kind of veiled insult.

“Yeah. Computers, circuitry. It’s not really that uncommon.”

“Some special kind of jewelry?” Mira shrugged. “Look all you want, but for goddess’ sake, don’t touch it.”

“It’s not—” Ness started to throw back, and then noticed the hint of mischievous smile on Mira’s face.

She found it endearing, and responded with an overly dramatic scowl, before moving closer to the chest and sitting on the floor in front of it.

The silver traces really did resemble some kind of cross between physical circuit traces and the more symbolic circuit diagrams used to analyze them. There was nothing she could recognize as a discrete component, but in the places she might expect them were inscrutable swirls and squiggles.

Still, all of the symbols were connected together, and some had only one silvery line leading to them, while most of the others had two or three.

“Do you know what any of these mean?” she asked Mira, gesturing toward the rune work; she was far enough away, out of an abundance of caution, that she could not indicate very precisely.

“The only way the runemaster would permit me continue my other studies was if I promised to never try to create a rune again.”

“O…kay. But, like, anything? Any hint?”

Mira sighed, and crouched next to Ness. She studied the chest for a few moments, and then pointed to one near the lower corner, with three lines radiating from it.

“That one there? Shaped kind of like a star drawn by a blind person holding the pen with their mouth? That one is Mek.”

“And that is…?”

Mira grumbled something like I knew you would ask that, but even with her enhanced hearing and their magical link, Ness could not be sure.

“Mek… bends its transverse plane toroidally under fluxion. Uhm, when charged with fluxion, it opens a temporary path through itself.”

“Uhm. Okay. Definitely understood that. Do you have a pen? Some paper?”

Mira looked pointedly at the bed sheet that she was wearing in lieu of clothing, and then started flatly back at Ness without answering.

“Okay,” Ness replied, with a good-natured grimace. “Fair. Remind me to show you how to tie a sarong.” She glanced up toward Phaine. “Do you have any paper?”

Phaine stared back at Ness, equally non-responsive, with even less hint about what was going on behind their expression.

“Uhhh. Right,” Ness glanced away, with a mildly frustrated sigh. “Mira, can you…”

“Phaine, do you have paper and something to write on it?”

“Yes, of course,” they replied, their voice dripping with sarcasm. “Did I forget to mention that I quit the guild and started over as a bookkeeper?”

“As helpful as you are beautiful. What about her?” Mira gestured toward Hender.

Phaine sighed in annoyance.

“Her pack is stuffed with forged waybills and toll receipts, perhaps some of them have usable space.”

She walked around the side of the bed, glaring at Hender as she did so, and fetched up a leather satchel that had been dropped against a wall.

“Hey! You can’t—” Hender spoke up in protest.

Phaine emitted a low growl and, admirably, did not kick the seated woman as she walked past the other direction.

“As duly appointed guild executor of this writ of branding I hereby declare these items as legitimate takings and/or evidentiary holdings. Happy now? Unless you have something useful to say, why don’t you shut the fuck up?”

Ness half-expected Phaine to throw the satchel at her, but the woman walked it over, crouched down, and started carefully sorting through the contents. Eventually, she produced a sheaf of heavy papers, most of which were blank on one side. She also found a stone ink well and a dip pen.

Phaine stacked everything neatly and re-packed the satchel, then walked to the bed and threw herself down on it with an exasperated sigh.

“Not bad,” she commented, settling into the mattress.

“Yes,” Mira replied drily. “I am more than aware.”

Ness pulled the first sheet of paper off the stack, and carefully started writing. She had used fountain pens before, once or twice, but never a dip pen. It did not take long to get the hang of it, but she could immediately see why the ball point pen had conquered her world.

Mek, she wrote, and repeated the words that Mira had told her.

“Great. And what’s fluxion?”

“Am I back in the academy, then?” Mira sighed, and then after a moment, recited from memory, “Fluxion is the ripples in the world created when a working is empowered, such as the visible or audible effects of more powerful spells.”

“Oh, what I… feel when you…”

Ness touched her own bare shoulder to demonstrate, and Mira nodded.

Hours passed and the sky beyond the windows began to lighten in promise of the coming day. The guard awoke, took one look at the brand on Hender’s forehead, and excused himself; there was no brand out for him, and he had no interest in earning one in continued service to his former employer.

Hender left as well; the brand and the forfeiture of her assets was all the punishment for her crime, and Phaine had no real power to coerce her to help them otherwise. She left with the clothes on her back and only enough of her gold to live on for a week or two.

Just before dawn, Ness and Mira took a quick field trip so that they could examine the runework used to heat the baths. These examples were simple, and well within the bounds of what Mira was able to understand and explain.

To Ness, they seemed like simple analog circuits, barely more than a set of symbols connected with silver wire hammered into a wooden backing. Mira explained that one set, a sort of jagged, intricate spiral, was a fluxion reservoir. It was connected to a dozen copies of a small symbol called anex. The reservoir released little pulses of power, fluxion, that the array of anex converted into heat, warming up the water.

“This doesn’t seem all that complicated,” Ness offered. She was sketching the symbols found on the bath tubs into her notes.

“The silver has to be very, very pure. And the symbols have to be exactly right; rune workers use templates and very intricate construction diagrams. And the pathways have to be the correct length, to avoid fluxion bleeding off of them or misalignment. Even a basic rune like these,” Mira gestured to the heaters, “is at least several days’ work by a master. Plus, a sorceress still needs to charge them.”

They returned to Hender’s room as dawn broke in earnest outside. Phaine snoozed, snoring lightly on what had previously been Hender’s bed. Rist sat against a corner of the room with his back to the wall; he had originally been watching the two women talk and work, fascinated despite that he could only understand Mira’s half of the conversation. Ness suspected his interest was more about Mira’s attractiveness than any genuine interest in the intricate details of runic magic.

He had fallen asleep an hour or two before their excursion.

Ness, herself, sat cross-legged in front of the chest, surrounded by a few dozens pieces of parchment, covered with notes and symbols. Six of them had been carefully laid out, and she had drawn a large diagram across them.

“It’s a combination lock,” she concluded. “With a try counter. Get it wrong too many times, or force it open, and all of the power is sent to these symbols,” and here she indicated a cluster of six identical runes, each several times larger than any of the others and formed from heavy gauge silver wire.

“I still don’t remember what those do,” Mira muttered, stifling a yawn. “What’s the combination, then?”

“I don’t know. Some of the traces- sorry, pathways- disappear inside the chest, and that must be where the comparison happens.”

Ness stared at the chest, bent with her chin held in her hands and her elbows propped up on her thighs.

“If we cut the pathway to those six runes,” Ness asked, “What happens to all of the fluxion? If it has nowhere to go?”

“Usually an explosion.”

“Big?”

Mira rubbed the back of her neck.

“Big enough.”

“Okay,” Ness muttered in reply. “Okay. I’ve got an idea. But we’re going to need a saw, and we’re probably going to need to find a new inn.”