Into the Catacombs
Preface: This is a short story set in Vinlant, a game world I’ve been working on for a while. More details about that setting and the origin of this piece are at the end of the story.
Into the Catacombs
A Vinlant Story
She was called Cheri Naylor. Her real name was Irise, but everyone called her Cheri. It means “beloved” in Fiorentine. And beloved she was.
I shared a lab table with Cheri in Donal Branch's first-year wending class. This was at Givenchy, the magic school at Henri Saint-Denis, in the spring of 298, when I was nineteen years old.
Professor Branch called his students by their last names. To him, she was Miss Naylor. That might be the only reason I know her last name.
Cheri was a wisp of a girl, 90 pounds and just under five feet tall. Her short, straight, dirty-blonde hair was never under control. She was an incorrigible flirt and a terrible speller. I must have spent half our lab time correcting her notes. But she had an endearing rural charm and no patience for rules. She was all the right kinds of trouble.
Perhaps my infatuation with Cheri was a poor choice, or perhaps it was beyond my control. I was young and stupid, but I wasn't alone. Everyone fell for her eventually, even Professor Branch, and he was neither young nor stupid. So maybe we were all just fools for her.
On a restnight early in the fall, I found Miss Naylor holding court with some friends at the Watershed. This was a public house in the south end of Connier, a mile or so west of campus. I happily joined the party, and Cheri and I wound up closing the house.
We talked and joked for hours, about politics, the price of wheat, and the fastest way to chug a pint. When the sun rose at seashore, we were the last two souls in the Watershed, tumbling out into the frosty air on a quiet Seventay morning.
After that night we were inseparable. We forged a bond that would last through the fall, into the following spring, and even for a short while after she killed me.
=-=
Givenchy is a college at the Henri Saint-Denis University in Schoffield, New Ilia. When I studied there, more than half of the students were Ilish, but you could also find students from around the New World: Fiorentine, Sylvan, Duran, Ciroccan. There were even a few students from lands as far-flung as Ouesta and Emba.
Cheri and I were in the school of wending, the scholarly term for magic and conjuring. Wenders from across the Twelve Kingdoms comprised a student body of just over 500.
We still say "Twelve Kingdoms” even though there are at least fourteen countries in Vinlant, depending on how you reckon, and most of them are not actually Kingdoms. On paper, New Ilia is still a colony, ruled by the Monarck in Corint. But in practical terms, we govern ourselves. Geartalkers and the occasional deep-water caravel aren't enough for Corint to exert dominion from the other side of the world.
It's strange how alliances and rivalries from the Old World are still alive in the New. Our nations’ boundaries and geographies are nothing alike. And yet the attitudes based on centuries of give-and-take have not completely faded in this new place.
Of course, there are some differences too. Ilia and Fiorenta were fierce rivals in the Old World, with a four hundred year history of brutal conflicts at sea. But in Vinlant we share a border that runs from the Brakstone to Heaven's Vale, and we simply can't afford to be enemies. Commerce, not conflict, tempers the tone of our association.
Two hundred and ninety-eight years after the voyage of Monten Viran, I was lucky enough to take a World History class seated next to Cheri Naylor. I remember hardly a word of it.
=-=
Cheri took notes in pictures. For the most part, they were caricatures of the instructor in embarrassing situations, but they also sometimes related to the lecture. Her portraits of Monten the Conqueror were especially rude.
In Chemistry class, I sat two rows behind her, just a little to the left, in the perfect spot to to observe her sketches. Cheri drew the most absurd pictures of Doctor Bosso in various predicaments that were wholly unrelated to Chemistry.
Bosso was a plump, dark-skinned man from Ouesta, an arid expanse in the southwest corner of Vinlant. Ouesta is also the western peninsula of the Old World, equally arid and inhospitable, but more exactly "west" by the geographic covenant. Doctor Bosso was friendly and capable, but Ilish was not his first language.
My journal was filled with notations about how he misused and mispronounced words, more than any facts about chemistry. He said "bunding" instead of "bonding," "chango" instead of "triangle," and once said that if your body loses a limb, it will "adopt." He was talking about covalent bonds, and he meant "adapt," but I couldn't forget the image of some poor veteran with an adopted arm. And by extension, poorhouses filled with orphaned limbs.
As I imagined a wounded soldier adopting a lost arm, I looked down two rows and noticed Cheri Naylor drawing a picture of, more or less, exactly what I was thinking.
We had such a laugh after class, walking together for more than an hour. After we had commiserated over every imperfection in Dr. Bosso’s Ilish, our conversation drifted to school in general, where we were from, and what we wanted from our four years at Magic School.
=-=
In the Old World, rumors of mankind’s "second home" were as common as the tales of real magic. Legends spoke of a sister continent, once part of the Old World, which had long ago broken off and drifted away across the Middle Sea. In this New World, magic filled the air, and conjurers worked their craft in every household and on every city street.
But the Middle Sea is nearly impassible. The water is befouled with jagged rocks and monsters, hot nearly to boiling, and crisscrossed with the most deadly currents and winds. Many brave souls had attempted the crossing to the New World, but according to the history books, Monten Viran’s crossing was the first success in more than a thousand years. Through a coarse bastardization, the continent of Vinlant came to be named after him.
Viran was a Grecan pirate of ill repute, who set out for the New World in a 70-foot shrike. He was searching for a mythical treasure: Tasurite, the dark green metal that gives a wender his powers. More valuable than gold, more scarce than glowstone, more dangerous and mysterious than the Middle Sea, “the green” was rumored to lay scattered on the ground in the New World, as common as wildflowers.
In the Old World, the green was all but legend. Carnival hucksters dealt in greened metals like steel, copper and gold, tarnished and painted to resemble the real thing. Once in a while, a magician could find something slightly better, called ketels. These were common metals that had been compelled by some ancient scrap of Tasurite, to take on a fraction of its magical powers. A ketel of steel might help a sorcerer perform a rudimentary divination, or to coax heavy clouds to rain. But Tasurite, the real green, was nowhere to be found.
When Monten Viran crossed the Middle Sea and landed at Gray’s Bay, he learned that the green was not as thick as wildflowers on the ground. But he did discover enough Tasurite near the mouth of the Amuir to make his voyage worthwhile, and in turn to ennoble a thousand imitators to follow in his path.
Viran himself made only three voyages to the New World, retiring to Garis with his spoils and stories of adventure, none of which were anywhere close to the truth.
=-=
Considering our backgrounds, it was ironic that I always worried about money, and Cheri never did. This was not something we discussed often, but while my parents had sent me off to college more or less at my own expense (I had a trust that paid for tuition and books of course, but nothing else), Cheri seemed to have a reserve of wealth that could not be exhausted.
She didn't always pay for everyone's drinks, but she didn't complain when it came her turn. She didn't wear expensive clothes, but she seemed to have the right garb for every occasion. Everyone jokes about money at some point; but Cheri never did. It was either because she knew what it was like to be genuinely poor, or because she had forgotten how to worry about not having enough. Maybe it was both.
Both Cheri and I were Ilish, but we came from very different worlds. I grew up in Whane Farth, in the city of Deker, the capital of New Ilia. It was a huge industrial city as old as the colony itself, located halfway between Schoffield and Gray's Bay along the Amuir River.
The Amuir is slow and muddy by the time it reaches Whane Farth, and Deker is a muggy city with long summers and short winters, far outside the Alday Line. Deker's buildings are white, stuffy things, with tall Ciroccan columns and broad Grecan pediments. Old World Ilia is a cooler place, so our architectural styles are not as summery as our Fiorentine neighbors, with their open piazzas and broad canals. Architecturally, the city of Deker reminds one of a fat man in a white coat, overheating at a summer picnic.
Cheri, on the other hand, was a country girl. Her parents were farmers in the Fattop Mountains, in the high plains southwest of Schoffield. She grew up with two months of midnights, and she was no stranger to belline and pickle jars. Her family's homestead was ten miles outside Hufminz, a small village of Tucken settlers at the edge of New Ilian territory.
Along the foothills of the Fattops and up into Heaven's Vale, it's hard to be sure where Neue Tuk stops and New Ilia begins. Cheri’s face had the bold, heavy strokes of a Tuecken farm hand, but Hufminz was on the Ilian side. So, Ilian she was.
Cheri grew up with a dagger in her hand, defending her homestead from busters and rustlers from the age of five. When she was eight, her father was murdered by folk who tracked him home from Hufminz, late on a worknight, with the singular goal of killing him.
She was awakened by the sounds of the scuffle, but knew the details only because the constable dragged her through the aftermath. It seemed that two killers had set upon her father while he was cooling his horse, stabbing him brutally as if to leave a message, and stealing nothing at all.
The constable ruled the murder to be a random act, but to hear Cheri recount it, you could not imagine it was anything but an assassination. Obviously something in this man's past had come back to haunt him, but if Cheri knew anything about that, she wasn't telling.
After that tragedy, Cheri's family coped as well as they could. She ran the farm with her mother and her three brothers until the age of sixteen, then left for Schoffield to spend two years at the Sant-Denis boarding school. I was never clear on the ways and whys, but somehow at the end of her time at Saint-Denis, Cheri had a scholarship to Givenchy, and a very nice apartment on the canal at 6th.
=-=
My adventure with Cheri, which got me killed, began in the late spring of our first year. We were close friends by this point, and spent many evenings together, either studying, planning to study, or pretending to study.
I had three roommates at High Hall, but Cheri's place was all her own, so that was where we spent most of our time. Her room overlooked the 6th Street Canal, about two miles from campus and only about fifteen minutes by water from any part of the city.
It was about midnight on a restnight, the candles were dead, and we were feeling bored and stupid. Our appointed task was to study for a chemistry trial, but that wasn't happening. The hour had slipped directly from "too early to start" to "too late to finish.”
At midnight, the first-year playbook has basically three choices: let's go find a party, let's go buy some food, or let's make some bad decisions right here in this room. In the same tone as she might have suggested any one of these, Cheri looked up at me with mischievous eyes and asked "Have you ever seen the Catacombs?"
In the Old World, “catacombs" means something different. The ancient cities have countless underground ossuaries: tunnels filled with stacks of bones that are hundreds, perhaps thousands of years old. The Fiorentines and the Ciele are the experts, but Old Ilia has her share as well.
But 200 years ago, Schoffield was a lumber town with thirty people and a dog, so we certainly don't have anything like a proper catacombs. Lacking those, this term had been attached to a collection of mysterious ruins to the south, along the lake shore, the remnants of an ancient and cursed civilization.
So, of course. This sounded like fun.
Fast as we could go, Cheri and I stole down to the canal and commandeered one of the sturdier small craft at Shepherd’s Dock. "They won't miss it," Cheri whispered. "We'll be back before dawn."
Dawn was only two hours away, but sure, I thought. We can row to the Catacombs, explore them, and somehow return before first light. Or we can peter out at the edge of town and grab some late-night beignets at Harow Court before creeping quietly back home, which I assumed was the actual plan.
But half an hour later, we were beaching our stolen boat by the thick pine forest of Carwycj, along the rubble-strewn fields that separate Old Cory and the Catacombs from the shores of the Brakstone See.
"You're an idiot," I whispered to Cheri, playfully. "You're going to get us killed."
Cheri just laughed as if she had done this a hundred times before, and grabbed our rucksacks from the bowkeep. She threw my sack at me, winked, and sprinted up the gravelly berm faster than I could follow.
=-=
Here's what we know about the Old Ones: Nothing.
That doesn't stop us from making some pretty wild guesses. So I could tell you the history of the Old Ones, the ancient people of Vinlant, but like any good story it's not the truth. It's just a collection of my favorite myths.
You can see even from the modest ruins at Old Cory that the ancients were an amazing people. They had talents in architecture, magic, and doubtless many other sciences, that outshine our own. You can tell that magic was fundamental to their success. It may also have been integral to their downfall.
In South New Ilia, these ancient people are called the Hari. Elsewhere they are called the Hera or the Nice. (Nice is a Ciroccan word, pronounced "Neez," that doesn't mean anything else in Ciroccan; but we have trouble calling them “nice" in Ilish.)
All these names are made up, because no one from this ancient race survives. We can call them whatever we want, and for me that's Hera.
Heran ruins have been discovered all over Vinlant. Great promenades with rows of carved stone faces, willowy pillars, towering arches, great underground warrens. The Darkroot has swallowed many of them, and some stand unmolested on the mountaintops, but for the most part they have been destroyed or absorbed by modern settlements.
Old Cory is a rough patch of ground and no one has yet felt like civilizing it, so the ruins of this place, the Catacombs, are more or less untouched. Children from Schoffield often dare each other to adventure here, but it's perhaps a little too scary and a little too far away. And there isn't a parent who hasn't warned their children that monsters from Old Cory will find them if they don’t eat their greens.
=-=
Cheri sprinted across the flagstones in a sunken courtyard, her steel-tipped boots kicking up sparks. The wet grass that poked between the flagstones was blood-black in the moonlight, and ice crystals dressed the edges of every stone and shrub.
This would probably have been more beautiful if I wasn’t struggling to keep up with her.
At the darkest corner of the courtyard was a round pit, covered by a heavy stone. The stone was not original to the place; it was just a dirty boulder, rolled here from the woods and placed over the pit to keep people like us from going inside.
"Hold this," said Cheri, and handed me her pack. She jerked open a pocket on the outside, and produced a tiny hammer, about the size of her hand. With the hammer, she pried loose a small piece of the lichen-covered stone.
I held her pack and stared at her in silence. I was figuring out each step of her plan, just in time to watch it happen. She opened the top flap of her sack and unbuttoned an inner pocket, withdrawing a green metallic sliver about the size of a jackknife.
"Is that..."
"Shhh." She said. Of course it was. A stick of Tasurite, probably stolen from the science lab. Or maybe she actually owned this; I had no way of knowing. A piece this size was called a plink or a tenon. This one was shaped like a handle, so it was a tenon. And it would fetch a price higher than Doctor Bosso’s annual wage.
She pulled out a white rag and wrapped the tenon and the little rock together, then held the bundle tightly in her right hand. Slowly her hand became stiff, as if the bundle were frozen in place. She was linking the smaller stone with the larger one, so that they moved as one. With great effort, she slowly pushed her hand up, and the boulder rose up along with it, rolling back like the lid of a jar. Below it, a spiral stairway led down into darkness.
This magic was not without consequences. I could smell the burning mud beneath the boulder as its base grew fire-hot. Steam rose from the edges of the stone. A hundred creepy crawly things appeared, scalding in the hot mud or tumbling into the hole below.
The stone and tenon in Cheri’s hand, by contrast, had gone ice cold. The fact that she wrapped the whole affair in a rag made it plain that she had done all this before.
"That's dangerous," I said in an unhelpful way. "You are going to lose a hand."
"Pocket magic," she replied, and repacked her toys as if it really were no big deal.
“More like playing with fire," I muttered, but Cheri ignored me, grabbed her pack, and bounded down the stairs.
=-=
"Pocket Magic" is exactly that: magic safe enough to carry in your pocket. Any traveler knows how to work a witch's lamp, for example: it's a tiny metal shell, usually made of Ketel copper, that can spark enough flame to light a candle. There is hardly any magic to it: a small flint makes the spark, and magic keeps the flame.
Some pocket magic isn't magic at all. A candy coil has no real magic inside, but you need something green to fix the sound. Once the coil is made, is is a purely mechanical device, a moment of sound scratched with a tiny needle into the hard candy cylinder.
But Cheri's little demonstration with the boulder was no witch's lamp or candy coil. It was a branch of relation magic called sympatic, or “steering,” in which you control an object with a facsimile. Some people call it house magic or vudu, and it's often caricatured in fiction with a doll that can control a person.
That's not really possible, because the doll and the person are so different in composition. You’d be better off trying to control a person with a pig. But what Cheri accomplished was much simpler than any of that. She simply moved a rock with a small piece of the same rock.
The magic works if as you're extremely talented, or well-trained, or if you are not concerned about opening up a house-sized hole in reality. The temperature shifts in this experiment told me that Cheri was more lucky than well-trained, and that we were not entirely safe from that house-sized hole.
But before I could think much about it, we were racing along dark hallways in the Catacombs of Old Cory. Cheri had lit a small torch (another surprise from her bag of tricks) and she was navigating this maze of ancient stoneways as if she knew exactly where she was going.
We passed a few chambers that would normally have deserved a second look, but since I was foolish enough to forget my torch (something I rarely bring to study chemistry), I was pretty much forced to keep pace with Cheri.
The sound of bubbling water filled the hallway, and I came to stand beside Cheri at the edge of a gash in the earth, an underwater river cutting through the ruin.
"This is as far as I've ever gone," she confessed. The stones of the path had fallen away into the washout. But about twelve feet away, on the other side of the river, we could see that the corridor continued. It seemed possible to climb into the gulley, about fifteen feet down, but we didn't know how deep the water was, or how easy it might be to clamber back out on the other side.
"And it's as far as you're going," I told her. "This is ridiculous."
"No, this is amazing," she said, gazing into the darkness ahead.
"We need to get back. It's almost daylight and we stole a boat. What are you thinking?"
"That is Laren Taylor's boat," she said without even looking at me, ”and he's away until Sixtay. He won't miss it." I had real trouble believing this detail, since she had never mentioned it before this moment.
"You're lying" I said.
And then Cheri shot me a look that explained everything. She didn't say it, but I read it in her eyes, in that dim light bouncing off these slippery stone walls in the depths of the Old Cory in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere. You followed me this far. What makes you think you can turn around now?
I shook my head. "Okay, what's next?”
"I need you to do something," she said.
"What?"
"Take a walk,” she whispered, and I gasped when I figured out what she meant.
=-=
It's not entirely true that first-year students are not allowed to practice any magic. Obviously not, or no one would be able to light a candle or send a message home. But aside from pocket magic, there was only one place to safely stretch your legs and do something real: the wending lab, where you could rely on the protection of a gaggle of looming instructors. Plus several easily accessible buckets of water, ice, and sand.
That very week in the lab, we had done two important experiments. One was psychoinfluence (mind control) using frogs. We told the frogs that they were sleepy, and they fell asleep. As far as I know, frogs don't actually sleep. But they slept for us, and it was equal parts cute and strange.
For a moment in the Catacombs, I was distracted by the idea that Cheri might be using some kind of frog-inspired mind control on me, but I tried to put that out of my thoughts, dismissing it as beyond her. (Or did she dismiss it for me? This doubt lingered at the back of my mind.)
The second experiment was steering, like Cheri had used on the boulder. Using a small sliver of green (called a “tik,” about the size of a fingernail), we coaxed two glass marbles to relate each other. Placing one marble (the “object”) inside a small dish, we could hold the related marble (the “control”) in our hand, move it in a circle, and cause the object to move along with it, as if they were connected by a stick.
It was interesting to learn that the object marble didn't actually roll. It skidded along the surface of the plate, protesting all the way, and this was because the control wasn't rolling either. They really were two objects moving in tandem.
This is a fairly easy bit of magic if you have the gift, because it doesn't require much imagination. Nearly anything is possible if you can imagine it, but the really tough magics (transposition, maneuver, crollux, folding) are harder to visualize. Some kinds of magic require a specific personality, which is why different magicians tend to excel at different kinds of magic. It takes a true wizard to drift between multiple mind-states and master all disciplines.
But imagining that two things are linked, and can move as one, is not that difficult.
After you noticed that the object marble was not rolling, it didn't take long to realize that the plate really wasn't necessary. If you lift the control, the object rises. If you turn the control, the object turns. If you drop the control, the object falls. Right through the plate, if necessary.
And here is the scary part: If the relation is working as it should, the control dictates the behavior of the object, outside the laws of nature. When the control pulls the object through the plate, for example, several things might happen.
The object might make a convenient round hole in the plate. It might shatter the plate. Or it might pass right through as if the plate wasn't there. One student broke a finger as well as a plate. And more than one marble caught fire.
Relating two things of different size was harder, but not impossible, as Cheri had just shown with the boulder and the pebble. But now she wanted to do something altogether weirder.
=-=
"Hold the tenon," she said, and handed her little stick of green to me. She stuck her torch in a cleft in the wall.
"You have got to be kidding."
"What do you think is on the other side of this river?" She asked. "Gold? Green? A million skulls?"
"I don't know and I don't care," I said.
“Oh… I think you care."
She was right. I cared. But I cared even more about not catching fire.
"You're the control," she said. "You'll be safe." This didn't make me feel better. I didn't want her getting hurt. Catching fire, dropping into the river, or whatever.
Here is what Cheri Naylor, my friend, was asking me to do. Holding her shiny Tasurite tenon, I was supposed to go back about twelve feet in the corridor, then establish a link between us, two human people, and then walk myself back to the brink, levitating her across the gap. When she reached the edge, I'd somehow transfer control to her, and she could walk me across by the same method.
It was a perfect plan, except for about ten thousand things that could go wrong.
"We can do this," she said, and she stood with her body pressed against mine, grasping my arm. Her hand was warm. She wasn't afraid. And I guess I wasn't either, although I couldn't stop thinking about that frog.
She grabbed my shoulders and marched me ten steps backwards along the narrow stone corridor. Every cold cobblestone was distinct through the soles of my boots. I was right there, in the moment, in a way that had not been true since we left Cheri's flat. She whispered in my ear again. "We can do this." And like a frog falling asleep (or perhaps not like that at all) I believed her.
And then suddenly she was at the brink, waiting for me to walk her through twelve feet of nothing.
=-=
When you do relation magic, you cause two objects to believe that they are one. Doing this to yourself and another person is a bizarre experience.
I concentrated on the green for a minute or two, going into the blind, and mentally slipping into tandem with Cheri. She watched me for a moment, but then did me the favor of turning away, and adopting my pose, until we were in form.
I moved my hand. Her hand moved, and she giggled. I stepped back a half-step, and so did she. "Wrong way, genius," she laughed.
Shut up, I thought. In front of you is a hole.
I set our feet together again, and I made a couple of useless fists. Cheri did too. I could feel her heart beating, her head racing. Could I really feel that? Or did I imagine it? This relation was only supposed to work one way.
I decided to try a thing. I reached out to the walls beside me in the narrow corridor, and braced my arms, just enough to lift my feet off the ground and hold myself in the air.
Cheri did this too. Except that there were no walls too hold her up. She was flying. This could work.
"Clever." Cheri said. I whispered it in unison with her. "Clever."
And then together we said "Let's go." I'm not sure if that was her or me.
Ten slow, careful steps later, we were across the gap. Or rather, Cheri was. I was back at the edge where we started. I released her gently, and she collapsed. I let out a little scream, but in that echoing corridor, even over the sound of the babbling water, it sounded huge. Cheri said something I couldn't hear.
"What?" I shouted.
She rolled over and smiled at me. "That was great!"
What I didn't know then, but I know now, was that Cheri was a little shaken by that walk. Her feet were hot. She was dizzy. My feet were a bit cold, but I blamed the stone floor and the wetness and the fact that we were in a freezing cave in the middle of the night.
But she didn't show it. She got to her feet, giggled, looked back at me, and pulled a second tenon out of her bag. "Your turn."
=-=
I didn't know exactly where Cheri got her money, and at the time, nothing that I could think of made the slightest bit of sense. I was young and naive, I guess. Looking back it was not that hard to figure.
A few weeks back she had given me all the clues I needed. We got into a discussion about the value of money, something that proper children in Deker were raised to "understand."
My parents and their class, the elite of Ilia's capital, would begin doling out stipends to their children at an absurdly young age. This allowance was meant to teach us the value of a lourde. At age ten, five lourdes per week. At age twelve, twenty lourdes per week. Move a load of books, earn a lourde. And so on, into our teens.
This process pretty much failed to teach us anything about money, just about hating work. In reality, our parents earned thousands of lourdes, and they supported us in ways that were mostly unseen and unexplained. What is the cost of renting a flat? What is the cost of a coach and six? To hire for a day? To own and to keep? To what extent does my family's credit benefit me even when I borrow nothing against it? We truly had no idea.
It was a rite of passage to learn about finances around the age of eighteen, just as one goes away to school and becomes responsible, if not for earning money, at least for spending it. But as to the "value" of a lourde? We really had no idea. We only thought we knew.
Cheri saw things quite differently. Money had no value at all. Rich kids on allowances were being fooled, taught to worry over tiny amounts and ignore huge ones. I defended the practice passionately at the time, but now I feel like she was right.
Growing up in the wilderness, between bandits and cold winters, Cheri had learned the value of a day's work. And while my friends wrapped their minds around the value of a lourde, and how to collect more of them, Cheri figured out the value of an hour, of a day, or a minute, and how never to waste them. You can always get more money, she told me. You can never get more time.
In a way, this explains why there were no dull or wasted moments in Cheri Naylor's life. She was as parsimonious with her time as I was with my money. She would not see it wasted on frivolous things.
She did not spend a single minute slaving for a wage. Quite the opposite. She found the shortest path to wealth, and she took it without a second thought. But that's really a story for another time.
Suffice it to say, for now, that I was surprised that she had two Tasurite tenons, each with a value of about ten thousand lourdes. These she almost certainly, as I think about it today, did not steal from the wending lab.
=-=
I am an idiot. This is pretty much all I was thinking at the time, as I stood, arms upraised like a puppet, teetering on the edge of an underground river, on an adventure with my wild-eyed friend in the middle of a forgotten ancient temple in the middle of the night. Again, and with feeling, I am an idiot.
We should at least have left a note telling people where we had disappeared to. But if I had written that note, it probably would have read "Harow Court / Beignets / Whee!" and that would have been exactly as useful as nothing at all.
And then my foot moved. Or somebody's foot moved. Not my foot. Somebody's foot moved my foot and it was not my foot. There is no good way to explain it.
And that foot set down on nothing. I could feel the hard nothing below that foot. It could not go down any more, because there was a stone under Cheri Naylor's foot, and that foot was mine.
Three steps. And my feet were hot. And while my feet were getting hot, perhaps a little too hot, I realized that this arrangement was not as good as first one. Cheri was looking away from me, while I was walking across the nothing bridge, and she had no idea that my boots were beginning to smoke.
I cried out softly but the gurgling river was too loud. I didn't completely control my own voice, and Cheri didn't hear me. She moved my feet again and the smoke turned to flame. My armpits began to steam. My face turned red. I was cooking.
I screamed out again. "Cheri!" And nothing. She was motionless. Going into the blind, I tore my arm free of Cheri's magic, grabbed the tenon in my pouch, and broke the link. When I hit the water, my hair was on fire.
Or so Cheri tells me. I don't remember, because I was dead.
=-=
When I woke up in the courtyard, it was past noon. Alard Granis stood over me, along with Cheri.
"There she is," Alard bellowed as I blinked ashes from my eyes. She clapped me on the shoulder and said "You girls are quite the pair."
And then as if her meaning had not been crystal clear, she smiled down at me and added "…of idiots."
"Thank you again, Professor Granis," said Cheri. She had obviously thanked her many times already while I was asleep.
"No, thank you," said Alard. "I haven't been down Old Cory since I was a wee lass. Brings back some fond memories." There was a sarcasm here the depth of which that can't be fully explained; you had to be there at that moment.
"Did you know," she continued, turning back to me,"that there is a bridge over the Black River?"
I shook my head. It hurt very much to shake my head.
"The Black River. That's what we called it. When I was nine years old, my friends and I built a bridge over that thing, just about forty feet from where I found you today."
"And around a corner," added Cheri.
"Indeed,” said Alard Granis. “Around a corner."
"I'm sorry,-" I began.
"I'm not finished," said Alard, her finger in the air. "Around that corner, and across that bridge, you come to a place we called the "Thrones Room." Every weekend we'd take the corridor to the Thrones Room-"
"Across the bridge," added Cheri helpfully.
"Across the very sturdy and convenient bridge," continued Alard," and we'd play Kings and Queens until dinner time."
"There's no treasure in that room," Cheri confided in me. "And there's a much better way to get there."
"Called a bridge," added Alard.
I could tell that they had covered this subject in great detail in my absence, and Cheri was now repeating this strictly for my benefit. It wasn't really a bridge, as much as a collection of logs that Alard and her cohort of hooligans had dragged down into the Catacombs thirty-odd years ago. But apparently it was still there and still worked.
"This bridge," I asked. "Does it set you on fire?"
And then those two laughed and laughed, and I realized that pretty much every part of my body had been replaced with a tiny sliver of pain.
=-=
The courtyard above the Catacombs seemed a lot smaller and less mysterious in daylight. Or maybe it was just the commanding presence of Alard Granis, who had carried me up out of the darkness and patched up all the holes that Cheri's magic couldn't fix. She was the god-mother, reminding us by her calm and collected demeanor that Cheri and I were still children.
The boulder was back over the hole, which I assumed was also Alard’s work.
Cheri's tenon of green had shattered when I fell into the river, probably a combination of the heat and the drop. I felt a little bad about that, but she had killed me, so I figured it was a fair trade.
On reflection, I had to thank Cheri deeply for this. I owed her, even though this was all her fault. Getting help in a hurry, after dragging my stupid body to the river bank, was more generosity than I was used to.
But Cheri didn't give it a second thought. I don't think I had ever really trusted her until then, even when I gave her control of my body. That was more like taking a dare. The rescue was different. It felt real. Even though I was unconscious for most of it.
But I have to wonder if that adventure was also the beginning of the end for Cheri and me. We were still friendly after that, but our relationship slowly changed. Matured, grew old. From studying together every night, to socializing with friends on workends, to a congenial wave from the other side of a crowded courtyard. We were like siblings who slowly forgot about each other, or continents that slowly drifted apart.
In case you're wondering, yes I really was dead for a moment, both cooked and drowned, but Cherie knew enough to get me breathing again. And Alard Granis isn't just the wisest wisecracker in Schoffield. She's also one of the best healers at Givenchy. As an added bonus, she knows how to keep a secret.
Despite her jibes in Old Cory, Alard Granis never spoke a word about this back at the University. The only loose end in this whole affair was bookmaker Germon Gru, who was absolutely not Laren Tabyr, and who was absolutely not gone until Sixtay, and who did absolutely wonder what in the Twelve had happened to his boat.
I haven't returned to the Catacombs since than night, but I imagine it's been crisscrossed with many more stories of stupidity in the years since.
And although I did pretty poorly in my chemistry exam, I must say that I had no trouble in my wending trials. Even though, throughout that exam, I could not shake the memory of smoke filling my nose, and thoughts of a frog who might have fallen just a little too easily to sleep.
=-=
More About This Story
Thanks for reading this story. I hope you liked it.
I wrote the first draft of “Into the Catacombs” in 2017, on the train to Eugene Oregon. It was part of a worldbuilding exercise between me and Paul Peterson.
We had the notion to write a tabletop game, possibly a worker-placement or deckbuilding game, set at a wizard’s school. Rather than borrowing an existing world like Harry Potter, we decided to create our own world.
This challenge meant not only worldbuilding, but also determining the basic tone and target audience for our game. I thought it might be good to try this as a piece of sample fiction, and that’s what led to this. That, and some relaxing free time as I rode the train.
This piece doubtless has too much worldbuilding language for a short story, but that’s because worldbuilding was its original purpose. I wanted to establish some history, how magic worked, how people talked about it, and how it impacted life and society.
We chose a colonial-era society and technology (with magic), in a world with two major continents located at its north and south poles. These are temperate continents, separated by blistering heat and impassible equatorial seas. The “geographic covenant” I mention in this piece is an arbitrary placement of north and south within each continent, because polar continents don’t really have a useful north and south. (They just mean “towards” and “away” from center.)
In the Old World, magic is basically legendary. In the New World, it’s commonplace, thanks to a magical metal called Tasurite that is found only in the southern continent. Magicians use this metal, called “the green,” to alter reality to suit their imagination. Different personality types are capable of different kinds of magic. And the metal itself is basically the foundation of the entire New World economy.
The grand pattern of this world is that every few millennia, the people in the southern hemisphere develop magic-based cultures and basically annihilate each other, and a new crop of conquerors sails across the Middle Sea to start the pattern all over again. Without giving away too much, Magic is basically equivalent to death, though it never seems that way until it’s too late.
So in some ways, the author and Cheri are metaphors for those two worlds. This is explicit in the text, but to be more explicit, Cheri stands in for Magic. She represents all of its excitement and danger in a way that the author clearly finds mysterious and appealing.
This story is my first and only piece in the Vinlant universe to date. I drew a very rough map of the continent, and jotted a few extra notes about the world, just enough to write this piece. I noticed that two of my Kingdoms were named “Duras” and “Kaylis” so clearly I was watching too much Star Trek at the time.
But I hope to develop the world more, perhaps post a few summary pages and better maps at World Anvil, write a few more stories, and eventually even return to the task of creating the game with Paul.