“This is an absurdity, and I want an answer, Kelly, not your charge’s ravings. “Magus, Cleric, I think you misunderstand what-” The Greatmother is not to be invoked so trivially.” “Using a divine intercession, no less.” The androgynous figure had an equally androgynous voice, colorless and without affect. “Kelly, what rank idiocy drove you to sever this large of an area from the Kingdom’s wards? Not that any size area would have been acceptable!” “This is no time for japes and nonsense!” The Magus-and it was definitely the Magus, if Kelly had identified him correctly his robe made Kartom’s look like a ratty bathrobe-was intensely unamused at my antics, and it showed. I put a hand on her shoulder, smiling at James and being a little surprised at how genuine and broad the smile was. “We made each other a pledge,” I said, cutting off whatever Kelly was going to say. “Miss Nadash, thank you despite the oddity of your request, it had a salutary effect.
That got a moment of baffled silence, and disappointingly-there was absolutely no way that his mellifluous baritone was the lowest in the group, I’d heard someone lower-James was the one to break it. “One of you at a time,” I said at a more normal volume, “starting with whoever’s the bass and going up from there.” It didn’t quite echo off the walls of the buildings around us, since there simply weren’t enough of them, but I fancied that it might have. “Gentlefolk, please!” I put a tremendous amount of carry into my voice, as much as I could manage.
I was already doing my best to acknowledge the pressure of the System without letting it take over my sensorium, and the cacophony was going to give me a headache in short order. And with it, so did the sounds of our… interlocutors.Ībsolutely not, I thought to myself almost idly. The silence shattered the moment the road was fixed, and the sounds of the village-animals and insects, wind in its own right and wind in the trees, children at play in the distance and more-resumed. Finally, as the Magus’s hands came together in what was no doubt a thunderclap of palms, the road evened out until the deep scars and burns in it were no more. The ash and ice went first, wafting away into the air the vines went afterwards, crumbling into a dust that was reabsorbed by the road. I wrenched my eyes away, staring at the residue from the divine activity in our area as it started to vanish. It wasn’t my head, though, not per se-it was some sort of inner ear disturbance, though obviously here it could be magic, or- no. It was actively difficult to look at the person who was… who was not one of the three people I knew nor the Magus, and trying to do so was making my head spin. The thought flared through my head, and I opened eyes that I hadn’t remembered closing. It had a far nicer aesthetic, and wasn’t as easily confused with the term for a sublime moment, and. As they exhaled, one’s face lined in concentration and the other’s smoothing into something far less worried, the circle started to… sublime, I supposed, though I’d always preferred sublimate as the verb form.
The two agitated people won the argument, and they took a simultaneous deep breath. The two people I didn’t know were in one case pacing and waving his hands in agitation and in the other case practically vibrating with tension, standing across the circle from each other. Kartom and Rafa were on one, the former bending down to inspect the circle and the latter seeming vaguely dismissive of the whole situation, while James had a poker face and perfectly neutral body language.
We waited while the people outside had some sort of argument, body language suggesting there were three sides. Judging by the way her expression was growing more nervous, Kelly, it seemed, could do so. I could infer this from the silent mouth-movements of the five people arrayed around us, but sadly, I couldn’t read their lips. It turned out that the four-element circle around us was pretty thoroughly muting sound from outside.
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