Well, that was twice now that Zeter had needed to run for his life. It was not an experience he ever wanted and really hoped this wasn’t going to become a regular occurrence for him. He’d need to make more disks of absolution since there was no doubt Jelvaic would want them to go back into Yomichi and find Nyla. Rescue Nyla, more like, since she was evidently being held in the Tower of Light’s chapel on the north end of Autay Wa. That was almost a half day’s journey on foot unless they cut through the fields and even then it would take them hours.

“What’s that?” Damarys asked, drawing Zeter out of his own thoughts.

She was pointing off towards the main road where a new encampment was being erected. There were a dozen or so large tents already up and someone was summoning a palisade around a wide perimeter.

“Oh, that’s the other Sages,” Ketty Pordis replied in casual tones. “We were going to try and get to the tower within the city but since we’re barred from entering, we’ll be camping out there for the time being.”

“Why not join our camp?” Kasyn asked.

“We didn’t want to barge in,” Ketty said with a dismissive wave of the hand, though Zeter suspected that she was lying.

He’d worked enough with the Sages of the Mercurial Robe to knew better than to ask Ketty his questions in this fairly public setting, but he made a mental note to get her by herself so they could talk. For one thing, palisades were not a normal thing to see in Yume, even now. Who did the Sages think they would need to defend themselves against, and what might they be attempting to do that would incur such an assault?

The rest of the hike back to camp was spent with Damarys and Ketty discussing the current state of affairs. Zeter only half listened to them as he cast his mind to his tent where a pair of empty gloves were clumsily forming lumps of clay into small disks. It was a simple task yet it was almost too much for Zeter’s limited magical abilities. The animated gloves couldn’t inscribe the runes, but it was a good deal of work just to make the disks. With his limited senses at this distance, Zeter approximated that there were a dozen usable disks in his tent ready to receive runes. It took him an hour or two to inscribe each disk, so if he took a day or two he could have them all inscribed and ready to go. A dozen disks would do a fair amount for them as far as just getting them to the chapel of the Tower of Light. If it came to fighting the soldiers there, he wasn’t sure which way the city defenses would interpret their actions. He hoped the city wouldn’t view that as law breaking, since the soldiers were intruders, but he wouldn’t count on it.

As soon as they arrived at the camp, Zeter broke off from the others and headed to his tent to get to work on the disks. He’d leave the reporting and such to Damarys and the others. Inside his tent, he checked on the disks and, as he suspected, only a dozen of them were suitable for accepting runes. The others he would mash back into lumps of clay and have the animated gloves try again with them. Then, he pulled over a small board he used as a work surface and placed the first clay disk onto it. Using a fine tipped needle, he began scratching away at the surface. As he did so, he focused magic through himself and into the rune. It was a slow and tedious task but he was getting better and faster at it with each new attempt. The first few times he tried to make a disk of absolution had been failures. Drawing a rune wrong, pouring too much or too little magic into it, or just using a poorly shaped disk were all reasons it might fail.

If only he’d been able to use the original one he’d been given to study, rather than having to remake them from memory. Unfortunately that first one had broken before he’d had the chance. Still, the ones he’d made had clearly worked to a certain degree. The worth of the gate must have been incredible to overwhelm his disks so quickly. He wondered if anyone had ever sat down to calculate the economy of these sorts of work arounds. How much, exactly, could someone steal with a prayer? With a disk of absolution? That got him wondering about what other ways there might be to avoid Akumu’s detection.

He was halfway through the first disk when a voice called to him from outside his tent.

“Excuse me, Zeter, are you in there?”

It was Ketty Pordis. Rune scribing was not something you could just put down part way through and he didn’t want to lose even one of these so he didn’t pause in his work even as he spoke.

“Come in,” he said.

Ketty parted the tent flaps and walked in. It would be pointless to hide what he was doing from her so he didn’t try. Instead, he nodded to the other stool he had in his tent and Ketty sat herself down. He glanced up at her and she was staring at his work, a knowing expression on her face.

“How can I help the Sages of the Mercurial Robe?” he asked as he worked.

“You and I have a common friend,” she said and an illusion of his contact from within the Sages tower appeared briefly.

“He teleported me out of the city when the attack began,” Zeter told her. “I haven’t heard from him since.”

“No one has,” Ketty replied. “We haven’t been able to contact anyone inside the tower and every attempt at teleportation into it has been blocked.”

“Well, the tower’s in Chikara Wa,” he said, “and we’re still barely able to survive Autay Wa.”

“Yes, and I understand you’re working on fixing the issues with Autay Wa?”

“Hopefully, yeah.”

“Then I’d like to help.”

“Fine with me,” Zeter shrugged and almost messed up the disk of absolution. “Why’d Jelvaic turn you down? Do I need to keep it a secret that you’re helping?”

Ketty didn’t seem to like what he’d said about being turned down by Jelvaic, but what other reason would she have for seeking him out like this after being introduced to Jelvaic. If he had to guess, Zeter would assume it was because she’d already approached him and was rebuffed. The only question was why. What did Jelvaic have against the Sages?

“Discretion would be appreciated but not required,” she huffed. “I doubt Jelvaic would demand you refuse my aid, though it may further complicate things for us. Either way, I have a few items you may find to be of use.”

She withdrew a rug from her bag of holding and unrolled it. The designs were foreign to him but he could sense the magic in it.

“This is a flying carpet,” she explained, “not the best, mind you, but these are incredibly rare on a good day and impossible to find otherwise. This one can only reach two to three meters above the ground but that should keep you out of reach of most things in Autay Wa. Watch out for fire elementals, though, since carpets burn rather easily and it doesn’t take much damage before flying carpets lose their ability to fly.”

This time, Zeter did lose his concentration on the disk of absolution and the unconstrained magic cracked the disk.

“Sorry,” Ketty said without sounding like she really meant it.

Zeter waved it off. This carpet was worth quite a few disks of absolution as far as improving their chances of survival within the city was concerned.

“Anything else I can do for the sages while we’re in the city?” he asked, running his hands across the woven strands of the flying carpet.

“Yes, actually. You’ll be going by both the Kokyo and Shinko Toshokans on your way to freeing Nyla. The Sages would like to know what condition the Toshokans are in. If there’s any damage to them, if they still require Akumu’s permission to enter, that sort of thing.”

“Kokyo Toshokan is open to everyone,” Zeter reminded her.

“It was in the past but is that still the case?”

He nodded, acceding the point.

“Very well,” she got up from the stool and strode back to the tent flap. “I’ll be in the Sages camp if you need me. Ask for Armand at the entrance and he’ll bring you to me.”

With that, she left.

Zeter waited a few minutes before turning his attention back to the failed disk of absolution. It had a large crack running from the last rune he’d been working on all the way to the edge. There was no way to repair that so he crumpled it back up and tossed it into the pile for his animated gloves to redo. He was about to start in on another disk when someone else came to his tent.

“Zeter, I’m coming in,” Jelvaic stated and cast back the tent flap.

He was always a large man but in the enclosed space of the tent he was almost too large to fit. He hunched down and then squatted awkwardly onto the spare stool that Ketty Pordis had recently occupied. Jelvaic met Zeter’s eyes with his solitary one and held his gaze. Without being told to, Zeter put the clay disk down and didn’t bother trying to inscribe it while talking.

“She give you that?” Jelvaic gestured to the flying carpet.

There was no point in asking who Jelvaic was talking about.

“It’s a flying carpet,” Zeter replied. “We’ll be able to stay above most threats with it.”

Jelvaic grunted and rubbed at his chin where stubble was threatening to turn into a real beard.

“I don’t trust them,” Jelvaic said at last. “They’re not interested in helping the people, just themselves. If she’s having you do work for her, well, I won’t stop you. All I ask is you keep your focus on what’s really important. Our survival. If you’d rather just do what she and those Sages want, then tell me now and I’ll leave you alone and find someone else for Nyla’s rescue team. I won’t even take the carpet from you, but I can’t have people with conflicted interests going in for Nyla. It’s too important.”

“I understand,” Zeter replied carefully without committing himself one way or the other. In all honesty, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. Sure, saving Nyla was important but did he really want to risk his life for that? Then again, did he think the others would survive without him and, more importantly, the flying carpet and disks of absolution?

“Right, well, take a day and think on it. You and the others are to come and meet me tomorrow afternoon to talk about getting Nyla back. If you’re willing, I’d love to have you on the team.”

He got up and walked out without another word.

“Fun,” Zeter grunted to himself.

Being caught between Ketty and Jelvaic was less deadly than running for his life but almost as emotionally uncomfortable. In the grand scheme of things, Jelvaic was right. The survival of the people was paramount, but Zeter was a thief, an errand boy, with aspirations to learn greater magics. Was that really someone who risked their life over and over again? That sounded an awful lot like a hero and he didn’t necessarily want that appellation attributed to him since it brought unwanted attention and made certain activities that much harder.

“Hey, Zeter, are you in there?”

This time it was Damarys’ who spoke. Zeter let out a sigh, looking at the stacks of clay disks he needed to be inscribing and just set down his etching tools.

“Come in,” he said, resigning himself to having to wait to get to work on the disks.

To his surprise, Damarys, Kasyn, and Emilie all crowded into his tent. They sat down wherever they could fit and Zeter had to push his work even further out of the way out of concern the clay disks would get crushed.

“What are you working on?” Damarys asked.

Zeter knew this question was coming so he’d already figured out how he’d handle it. Rather than try and hide the truth, he told them exactly what they were and how they worked, as far as he understood it.

“Each one takes me a couple hours to complete,” he concluded, “so it’s hard to really stock pile them unless I have a few days to work on it.”

“That’s amazing!” Emilie exclaimed. “How did no one think of doing this before?”

“I don’t think this is a new invention,” Damarys pointed out.

Kasyn was just frowning with obvious disapproval on his face.

“Regardless,” Damarys went on, “these saved our lives before and I expect they’ll be crucial going forward. Is there anything we can do to help?”

“Not unless any of you know how to inscribe runes.”

Damarys and Emilie both shook their heads.

“It’s blasphemy,” Zeter heard Kasyn murmur but knew better than to poke at him over it.

“I also got this flying carpet,” Zeter went on to hopefully avoid any confrontation with Kasyn. “It should help us avoid most things in Autay Wa.”

“You had this the whole time and you made us go in there on foot?” Kasyn blurted out.

“Of course not! I just got it from that Pordis lady.”

Kasyn seemed eager to find any reason to be upset with Zeter right now but Emilie and Damarys were excited and relieved by this new acquisition.

“If you give me a day or two to work on the disks, I think we’ll be in a good state to go after Nyla.”

Zeter wasn’t sure why he was saying all this. He hadn’t decided yet whether or not he was going back in. Right? Or maybe this was him making up his mind. A part of him regretted it, but another part of him appreciated the relieved looks on Damarys and Emilie’s faces. Even Kasyn seemed to calm down a bit at Zeter’s words.

“I guess we should leave you to it,” Damarys motioned for the others to get up and the three of them left his tent.

Zeter thought he was done with guests for the time being until he heard another voice outside.

“Damarys, I have something to show you after I speak with Zeter.”

There was no polite waiting for him to call her in. Arjana pushed through the tent flaps and did not sit down but remained standing, looming over Zeter. Her right hand rested on the hilt of her sword and Zeter was reminded that, of all the people he knew, she was the only one who’d seen real battle, having traveled outside of Yume and working as a mercenary in several wars.

“You’re still friendly with the Sages.” It was not a question. “They want to plunder the Toshokans, steal every tome they can get their greedy hands on.” She was smiling at him with all of her sharp, pointed teeth and he was reminded of the fiend he’d met less than a week ago. The similarities were obvious and it was no secret about Arjana’s ancestry. Just an unpleasant reminder for Zeter. “The Toshokans are one of our greatest resources now that Akumu is gone so if you betray us to the Sages, I will eat your heart.”

She poked a clawed finger into the air between them and it began to glow. She scratched a rune there, leaving it to burn in the air for a moment before it faded. It was a promise rune and Zeter felt it latch onto his heart, leaving him with a painful, burning sensation until it faded fully from view.

He waited until she was gone before he began scribing a canceling rune into the air and removing Arjana’s promise rune. It was one of the first parts about rune craft he’d learned, how to remove unwanted runes. It was a good safety precaution in case he inscribed something incorrectly, or if he warded something and then wanted to remove the ward. Either way, he breathed more easily once her mark was gone. It didn’t mean she wouldn’t still try and eat his heart if he helped the Sages gain access to the Toshokans. He didn’t doubt the Sages were after the knowledge held within there, but he did doubt they’d steal it. They’d been making copies of Akumu’s tomes for decades, if not centuries, so why stop now? If they got caught stealing, that would be the end of it, but if they were making copies quietly on the side, who was to know?

Well, that all depended on getting Nyla back safe and sound first, so for now he would focus on that. With all of his visitors come and gone, he could finally get to work again on the disks of absolution. Something told him that even with the flying carpet, he was going to need quite a few of them.