Ascendant

They briefly got caught up while they ate, with Nym giving her the abridged version of how he’d killed the hive queen and Analia giving him a dubious look. “How did you manage to hold three separate spell effects at the same time? Most mages can’t even hold two,” she asked.

“I… don’t know? I just do. It’s not easy or anything. I don’t think I could do four, if for no other reason than I can’t get a wide enough conduit to sustain that much magic at once.”

“This is your stupid telekinesis spell all over again.”

Analia pouted briefly before being distracted by a little cake the waiter brought to the table. Nym had a bite at her request, but it was so sickly sweet that he could barely swallow it. Analia didn’t seem to have that trouble, and tore it apart in short order. “I always wanted to do that,” she said, smiling. “It takes forever to eat anything when decorum insists you always put the smallest sliver of your meal in your mouth for each bite.”

“Yes… right.” Nym couldn’t say that he related. When he took small bites, it was usually because that was all the food there was. He did not miss those days at all. “So I should find out today if the mages I’ve been spending time with will be staying in Thrakus. One of them told me if they can’t stay, they’re going to go west to build fortifications for the army since some undead problem there is getting way out of hand. I’m sure we could go with them.”

“That’s where my father is,” Analia said. “Though the army is big and I doubt we’d run into him. There’s always the chance though, and I’m not sure I’m ready to talk to him.”

“Oh. The other option was leaving the country, but I think we got away clean enough that no one’s looking for us at least.”

“Eeeeehhh… I might not have snuck out as easily as I made it seem.”

Nym wanted to be surprised. Really, he did. But he knew there was more to her story than she’d told him, and he very much doubted it had been as easy as she’d claimed. With a sigh, he asked, “What happened?”

“Well you know, after our first attempt ended in me needing a healer to patch me up, my brother got really, really involved in every minute of my life. If he couldn’t be there personally to watch me, he had Malk and Dansin both staring at me. It was a fight just to be allowed to use the facilities without one or both of them trying to escort me into the room.”

“Who’s Dansin?” Nym asked, trying to remember if he’d met anybody by that name but coming up blank.

“My father’s shadowguard. He’s been shadowing Bardin since Dad left a few months ago.”

“I don’t know what a shadowguard is.”

“Oh, right. It’s a noble thing. They’re bodyguards you never see. Thus the name. They guard from the shadows. If you see a shadowguard, it’s because something has gone very, very, very wrong. When Dad had to leave on assignment, he tasked his shadowguard with watching over Bardin until he got back. And then Bardin told him to start keeping an eye on me.

“Of course I didn’t realize this right away because Dansin is a shadowguard. So the first time I try to sneak out, I’m about to float my trunk through a window only to see him sitting on it and oh so politely asking me to return to my room. Apparently, my brother gave him orders to reveal himself and interfere if I tried to leave the house on my own.”

“You were basically a prisoner in your own home,” Nym pointed out. “So how did you get away?”

“Ah… that. Well, I’d like to say that I am incredibly skilled in the stealth arts, but the truth is that I wasn’t a prisoner in my own home. I just wasn’t allowed to go anywhere without an escort. So I went shopping, took a big purse with me, and then paid off the worker to let me slip out the back while I was trying on a new outfit. I just walked out in clothes my guards had never seen and headed over to the mages guildhall, then paid for a teleport to Thrakus.”

Nym started laughing. After all the planning and scenarios they’d come up with, after failing to actually get away, she’d done it just by walking off in the middle of the day while her bodyguard waited in the next room for her to change her outfit.

“Hey, it worked!” she said.

“I know. I’m sorry. It’s just… we put a lot of effort into our plans, and you could have done that at any time.”

“I will stab you with this fork if you don’t stop laughing at me,” she threatened, waving around the fork, which still had flecks of cake on the tines.

“I’m not laughing at you, I promise. It’s just kind of funny how easy it was when we went and made it so complicated.”

There was a brief flash of arcana around Analia, followed by a black square of something launching itself through the air to bounce off Nym’s face. He snatched it up before it could hit the table and took a bite out of it, only to make a face before he reluctantly swallowed it. “What… what is this?”

“It’s chocolate, you Godless heathen! Don’t you dare try to tell me it’s not good!”

“It’s… very bitter.” Nym set the rest of it back on the plate.

“You have no taste.”

“I’ve eaten charred rat that tasted better,” he told her, only somewhat untruthfully.

“That’s gross. You have not.”

Nym just stared at her. She stared back. “No, you’re lying,” she insisted.

“Only about it tasting better than your chocolate. And it’s close.”

Staring him in the eye, Analia picked up the piece of chocolate and put it in her mouth. She chewed and swallowed, still staring him down. Then she reached down to grab another piece and repeated herself. Nym rolled his eyes. “Whatever. You can have all the chocolate.”

They finished their meal and parted ways, with Nym promising to come back to the Silk Box that evening to meet her after he found out what his new friends’ plans for the future were. Analia wasn’t entirely set against going west, but she wanted time to think about it first. Considering how complicated her feelings towards her father were after their discovery of his experiments, Nym couldn’t hold it against her.

He caught up with the Earth Shapers just as they were exiting the Boot and Strap. “Hey, sorry I’m late, I was with a friend,” he said as he ran up to them.

“A girl friend,” Monick said.

“Oooooooohhh,” Nomick added.

Nym ignored them, and instead asked Bildar, “How did the meeting go?”

“Not good. Even though we’re just making foundations, apparently we are still infringing on the contractors guild’s rights, according to the city council. We would need to be licensed with the guild and have approval for jobs, else they have the right to censure us and take action to stop us. So basically they can keep harassing us as much as they want, and at most they’ll get a slap on the wrist if they do something illegal, probably because the guild paid off the people who are supposed to be in charge of enforcing these laws.”

That was not how Nym had expected that meeting to go. The guilds had a lot more control over the local government than he’d expected, based on what Bildar was saying. It seemed to Nym that the contractors guild was clearly in the wrong, attacking the earth mages unprovoked and attempting to abduct Nym so they could ransom him back. The fact that the city council had sided with the guild despite all that made Nym a lot less eager to stay in the city.

That was too bad, because he was starting to like Thrakus, other than the smell. And he’d gotten used to that. It was open and airy, which he always appreciated, and considerably warmer than Abilanth. There were rich districts and poor districts, but they weren’t segregated by walls with posted guards whose only job was to keep the have-nots out of sight of the wealthy.

Thrakus was a trading city with a ton of traffic going through it all year round, for all sorts of reasons. He supposed it only made sense that in a city so heavily focused on money, that those with bags full of crests would have the ability to influence the laws and politics in their favor. It wasn’t fair, but that was life.

“If you can’t do more foundations now, where are we going?” Nym asked.

“Oh, we can,” Bildar said. “As many as we want. It’s just that no one is going to stop the contractors guild from trying to punish us any way they see fit.”

“That constable yesterday did not make it seem like this would be what happened.”

“I’m sure he didn’t. He’ll do what he’s told by the people who pay his wages, so from now on, any… disagreements… between us and the contractors would best be handled without the constabulary getting involved. No punishments are going to stick to them and we’ll be fined or jailed as much as they can get away with.”

“They were really that blatant about it?” Nym asked. “Why didn’t they just run you out of town on the spot then?”

“Too much effort on their part, I guess. Easier to let the guild shoulder the cost of getting rid of us, since it doesn’t cost them anything to not arrest guild members plus they probably figure they can squeeze us for more money at the same time, on top of whatever bribes the contractors guild paid them to rule in their favor.”

“This kind of crap is why we don’t do town jobs,” Ophelia muttered darkly.

The mood was a lot less festive as they walked to the construction site. There was already a crowd gathered, and Nym recognized more than a few faces in it. The three men who’d been arrested yesterday were out and smirking at him, but before they could do anything, Constable Berndart walked up to them in full uniform and put a hand on one of their shoulders. He drew them away from the crowd and started talking to them, but it was too noisy for Nym to make out what was said.

One of them started arguing with him, his tone and posture belligerent. Nym could only assume the man, his head freshly swelled from getting out of trouble consequence-free, was telling the constable to get lost. Whatever it was he said, Berndart didn’t care for it. He reached out and grabbed the man, then pulled him forward and drove his knee into the man’s gut. The man collapsed and the constable squatted down to say something else to him. Then he patted the man’s head, stood up, and walked away.

The man’s companions helped him up, and all three cast hateful glares at the constable’s retreating form, but none of them looked quite so smug anymore. “Hah,” Nomick said softly next to Nym. “Looks like the good constable isn’t happy about the decision either. Weren’t those the three that took a swing at you yesterday?”

“Yes. I wonder what he said to them.”

“That there were an awful lot of bad things that could happen to a man in a cell, even in the span of an hour or two, and it would be best for him to avoid the kind of trouble that would get him put there in the first place.”

“What?” Nym shot Nomick a surprised look. “How do you know that?”

“I’m not just an earth mage, young man. I can do other things besides move dirt.”

“You know sensory enhancement spells?” he asked, suddenly interested.

“First and second circle,” Nomick bragged.

“And he definitely learned all of them to aid with peeping on the girls when we were teenagers,” Monick added.

“You’ll never prove it!”

Nym wished he’d been paying more attention. He hadn’t even noticed Nomick casting the spell. Oh well, he’d just have to get the mischievous earth mage to do it again so he could copy it.