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lazyscience · 1 month ago

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book club fic - this only has about 500 words of original content tonight, but I did a rewrite on it to pull something back that I went back and forth about. So here the whole thing is, all together to date, beyond the readmore.

Bonus content: an inspiration for the silk, 10th century Byzantium.

“A second-story man.” She made a scoffing sound, stirring the pile of goods he’d placed on the counter with a finger. “ What have you got on the job, a week?”

The thief puffed up, glaring murderously at the old woman running the counter. Word on the street claimed the Copper Crow gave a better rate than the skinflint old bastard at the bazaar. But to his way of thinking, fences were all cut from the same cloth; a bunch of juiceless old has-beens who liked to claim in their day they’d gotten away with the Holy Mirror of Nyon-kyo, the Crown of Blessed Stepan, the wand of Dagobert and the ruby choker of al-Said’s favorite consort, expressly to knock down rates for the honest working thief.

She went on mercilessly, laying out each chain, ring and brooch as if he’d picked it out of a midden. “Silver-gilt. Gilt bronze. Cut glass. Cut glass AND a coloring agent–see the wear on the edges? Gilt lead - that’s quite clever, actually, closer to weight for a fake but see here? Too soft to hold the purity stamp well. That bottle’s not crystal nor even cut glass, that’s mold-poured, although you might fetch something for the dreamflower syrup in it from a grey apothecary - couldn’t say for sure, I don’t move unsealed perishables. And that?” A callused index fingertip tapped the final object, a silver-set garnet. “That’s cursed.”

“I beg your finest pardon?” The thief glared at the fence. “Cursed? You haven’t even tested it with a relic! Didn’t know I was in a cathedral!”

The fence awarded him an unimpressed look over steel-rimmed spectacles, gray-green eyes as faded and colorless as the rest of her. “The silver-gilt’s a decent piece. Fifteen.The rest of it’d probably buy you more goodwill at the Broken Lily than it’s worth in cash, but out of the goodness of my heart if you have starving mouths to feed or you prefer the boys at the Prince’s Ransom, I’ll take it all off your hands for twenty-five.”

“Or I’ll take it all somewhere that isn’t trying to fuck a hardworking cracksman,” he blustered, gritting his teeth as the woman shrugged.

“As you like.” She pushed it back across the counter, all except the garnet, the dark glistening red of new wine or old blood.

A knife leapt into his hand. “You can give me back my take-all of it, or I’ll have that ring and a finger to go with it.”

The old woman tilted her head and let out a faint sigh, almost …pleased. “Tell me something, boy. In your vast experience of curses, and relics, and sorcery. Most sorcerers need at least one ring, yes, to manipulate an item in the physical realm?” She spread bare hands wide across the counter, even as two stilettos, a spiked flail, a gently curved dagger and even more concerning, three crystal balls of varying sizes rose from their shelves, gently fanning into circles around him. The crystals lit from inside as they spun, one shot with golden strands, another an oil-slick iridescence that teased at the corners of his vision and another with trapped flame. “I told you, that ring is cursed. You should be grateful I’m choosing to believe you’re too stupid to know what it really is. Because if I thought you did, and you were selling it to me as an object of value, I’d cut you up for catmeat.”

A harsh meow made him jump; out of the corner of his eye, he saw a small tortoiseshell cat as shadowy and unassuming as its mistress, the same faintly amused expression in its green eyes. He realized there were more reflective-glittering eyes in the shadows, and a heartbeat later that he REALLY should have thought more about the lack of visible guards for one middle-aged woman tending a secondhand shop in a run-down neighborhood.

“He does look stringy, doesn’t he, Majali?” She sighed, tucking back a few graying strands that had escaped from her dark braid. “The deal is still open. Fifteen for just the chain or twenty-five for all the rubbish together, and if you don’t try anything excessively stupid, I won’t have your brain out through your nostrils. I’ll even throw in dealing with this unfortunate trapped soul you’ve brought me gratis, instead of either tipping off the one you stole it from OR throwing you to the nearest divine in service to the city for crimes against life.” She made an impatient noise as he tried to speak and only a croak came out. “Tell you what, I’ll sweeten the deal to fifty if you’d be good enough to tell me where you, ah,found this - I mean, I will find out with or without you, but it’s been a long day and I’d take it as a favor, truly, getting a start on getting this all sorted out.”

The weapons parted to either side of the door like cavalry wheeling in salute, as she took out a handful of coins. “Mm, my change is low. But I’ve given you two solidi parisi and 13 denarii troyes, so it should be right by weight.” He flinched as she reached out and pressed the coins into his hand, spun as if to bolt and she lifted a hand, the ball of trapped bolts wheeling around at eye-level. “Ah, ah. You haven’t told me where yet. Can you write?”

The thief looked back at her wide-eyed. “Lady, I’m a thief.”

She sniffed. “Not a very good one, then. Knowing your letters is a good start on valuation. A note to or from the right person can be worth much, much more than trinkets. Books are valuable to a collector who knows you can get the right ones. Information, boy, is a greater treasure than gold.” She shook her head. “Anyway. Were you seen? Can you tell me where it was, or better yet show me?”

“The kind of information you’re talking about gets people like me dead. South and west of the market, off the Street of Owls, the alley they call Owlet, the tall narrow house.”

“If you’re worried about staying alive, you’re in the wrong line of work, young man. Good enough, off with you.” She waved him on, and the thief bolted as if there were a couple of hellhounds on his heels. Majali jumped up onto the counter, ears flat and hissing as she looked at the ring. “Yes, quite,” the mage agreed, and went to throw the bar on the door.

Reynaud and Ludo slipped out from between shelves, weaved in and out of her legs as she went back and forth. “Yes, yes, I’m not daft. I’m not going to take on a sorcerous murderer before dinner. Or without more information than a description of a house.” She stared at the ring, muttered curses under her breath. It wasn’t an easy thing to touch, but she couldn’t very well leave it lying with the trinkets in the shop, either. She finally took a silk scrap from a shelf purporting to be a lady’s favor, knotted it around the ring and tied the whole business around her neck. At least that way it wasn’t visible, touching her skin, throwing its distinctive aura in every direction or in a pocket for a cutpurse. The last thing anyone needed was another idiot thief wandering around with a woman’s soul in his pocket to sell to gods only knew who, for devils only knew what.

“Reynaud, you and your brother watch the shop,” she said to the fluffy orange cat and his brown shadow. “I’ll bring back supper, we’ll plan then. When Mistress Yveline comes back from her hunt, please ask her to stay. Maja?”

The tortoiseshell cat padded over to the hook where her hood and mantle hung and waited to jump up onto her shoulder, arranging herself comfortably in the folds. A serviceably faded russet, you could overlook the glimpses of fur peeking through it, especially if Majali was encouraging people to look away. A small chirp, and the mage left her shop by the rear door, locking it with a key and a whispered warning to the lock that anybody stupid enough to brave her guard would be the worse for it.

***

“Auda!” Smiling, the proprietress of the Broken Lily greeted her with an embrace, blinking and laughing at the little chirp as Majali’s head emerged from the mantle. “And Mistress Majali. Have I finally persuaded you you need tadliik?”

“I need what?” She blinked. “Oh, is that the new bath service you’ve started?” Minna was what people liked to call a handsome woman, with sharp dark eyes and a strong face owing more to the Albans than the Treveri, still tall, trim and graceful at an age many married women were welcoming grandchildren. But then, Auda rather thought Minna was owed at least that by the gods. There were much worse places a woman could sell her favors than the Broken Lily. Minna’s gracious salon was the equal of many lordlings’ homes, and her girls set their own prices and worked together to determine their schedules and …offerings. And a goodly handful of poor women not interested in whoring earned a fair wage there too as laundresses, maids, servers and even musicians, provided none of the ladies felt like demonstrating their own skills.

“No - well, related. I was telling you last month, it’s a sort of medicinal anointing? Which I realize does not sound delightful, but it truly is, a rubdown with scented oils to relieve aches and pains. Not like a Alban strigil, it’s for after you’re clean. We have finally - at ruinous expense, I might add - acquired a good enough copy of Ibn Sina to satisfy Anjum that she understands it well enough to teach, and it’s simply miraculous. She’s been showing all the girls.”

“I’m afraid this isn’t that kind of visit, Minna - although I would like to speak to Anjum, if she’s free.”

“For you, Auda, I am sure she is, or will be shortly. Something tells me this is a conversation that requires discretion. Which means you COULD just as well get the tadliik–”

“I’m willing to compensate her - and you - for the time, but I’m afraid we should all be clear-headed for this.”

Minna sighed. “Fine, you exhausting woman. Will you at least take some mulled cyser or sahlab with me?”

Majali emerged fully from the folds of Auda’s mantle at that, chirruping happily. “She didn’t ask you,” Auda said, wrinkling her nose.

“Are you suggesting I would let a guest go without?” Minna said, mock-scandalized. “I just know that Mistress Majali does not care for spiced apples so much as for milk warmed with flowers. I believe rosewater rather than orange flower, for my lady?”

Majali nipped Auda’s ear, then purred, paw resting on the silk around her neck with its terrifying contents, suggesting that while clearheadedness was called for, something calming and restorative would also not go amiss. “Sahlab for me as well. Although perhaps after we talk I will want the cyser.”

Minna’s brows shot up as she gestured her guests up the stairs. “You know where my private parlor is, I’ll arrange for drinks and have a girl fetch Anjum.”

Minna’s parlor had its own cheerful fireplace as well as a share of the greater kitchen’s chimney against another wall, making it undoubtedly quite the warmest room in the place, other than the bath with its hypocaust. Auda shed not just her hood and mantle but outer cotte before taking off the bit of gaudy damask at her neck hiding the ring. It shone almost as deep as the ring in the lamplight, not a scarf as as it looked to a casual gaze but a belled silk sleeve unlaced from a bliaut. Blue perilously close to purple from a sumptuary’s point of view, woven in fine Iscan silk with griffins in sun-golden medallion-frames. A younger Auda - well, it was a lot of pattern to wear easily, it wouldn’t stand up well to the demands of a mage’s life, and most of the silk she had was for utilitarian purposes.

Looking up as Minna returned with Anjum, she thought wistfully for just a heartbeat or two about silk, Anjum’s gown as green as her eyes, as green as Majali’s eyes, the color of new leaves and vibrant youth patterned with darker branches and vines, her riotously curling hair confined in a finely knitted net of golden silk with green glass beads. “Learned. My apologies.” Anjum’s eyes darted curiously to the fabric in front of Auda as the servant girl who had followed her in set out cups of sweetly fragrant sahlab.

“The one without the crushed almonds for Mistress Majali,” Minna said, gesturing, and the girl’s eyes widened as she realized the one of the cups was for the cat, who nodded at her like a great lady and opened her mouth in a silent mew of thanks.

“Anjum, I hardly expect a busy woman looking after her livelihood to be waiting around at an old woman’s pleasure,” Auda replied as Minna shooed the fascinated child out before returning to sit down.

“Old woman,” Minna snorted. “You’ve the advantage of me by two years, and if the girls here start calling me old woman, I’ll stop having you renew the hypocaust and see how they like stoking it all winter.”

“Pah. Where would you keep the wood?” Auda took a sip of her own sahlab. Ordinarily, it was richer than she cared for, but the velvety smoothness of it reminded her she hadn’t eaten since snatching an apple and some bread and butter out of the pantry between the man who’d sold her the scarf and the one who’d dithered between a string of pearls and an enameled golden brooch for entirely too long to make her think he could afford either.

Anjum let out a soft breath. “You enchanted the hypocaust, Learned?”

“Auda, Anjam. Just Auda. And enchantment is a discipline of illusion and emotion. Conjury is summoning elements or spirits to appear by your will. Invocation is commanding objects to bend to your will. And then there is what was done that I need to speak to you both about. What do you know about a mage’s rings?”

“Very little, L-Auda, save that most of them can do little without at least one. It is a tool or item of power, I suppose much like a divine’s holy icon or a text.”

Auda nodded. “Correct, so far as that goes, although it need not always be a ring. That is…traditional. It may be a circlet, or a bangle, but it must be an unbroken circle, that can neither open nor close, that the user may wear. It may be plain, or engraved with some particular meaning to the wearer. And it may have a gem or crystal stone in it to hold…energy.”

“Energy?” Minna asked, frowning.

“Energy. What I am about to tell you is not…forbidden, as such. But I would ask you both to keep it close.”

Anjum and Minna nodded, and she went on.. “It may be the user’s own, distilled from their intent over many sessions to be a reserve of strength for a great work they would otherwise not be able to do all at once, or if they anticipate going into a dangerous situation where they might need to perform many acts of magic without time in between to rest and recover. It can be from a bound elemental force or spirit; this can be a neutral thing, imbued by exposure to a powerful thing like a great storm, a rushing waterfall, a great fire or what Romans called a god-forge, where rock melts and flows like metal. A spirit is a more difficult thing. It can be an act negotiated for and agreed to, or an evil one can be confined so by force of great will and purity of intent. Or it can be an act of slavery.” She looked up. “Perhaps once in a century, a great mage reaching the end of their life has agreed to bind their remaining power and knowledge thus, to continue teaching and protecting beyond what they could otherwise do, until all that remains of their gift is consumed - and if someone with a gift wears it, beyond even that, they can continue to speak through them, to teach and guide.”

Minna and Anjum both took quick breaths, Anjum’s green eyes wide with wonder, Minna’s narrowed with thought as Auda went on. “Such rings are great treasures. But more frequently -although mercifully for all of us, still rare - someone whose blood has magecraft is sacrificed into such a ring. And this is the greatest crime a mage can commit. Because anyone may shed blood, and many men have taken slaves and forced them to work. But someone bound in such a fashion, even if not voluntarily, is bound from their gods, and the life beyond life. Even once their gift has been extinguished, and they become a trinket of no worth to the criminal who made them so.” She pointed to the ring, its silver setting pallid and cold amidst the flickering coal-colors of the silk damask, the brightness of the gem. “As I believe this to be, such a stolen soul.”

Both women reacted with horror, Minna making a holy sign and Anjum exclaiming in the tongue of al-Khatlan. “Calm yourselves,” Auda said. “While this is a terrible thing, it will not corrupt by touch. It is, however, if you have mageblood…uncomfortable to touch it, knowing what it is. And the one sacrificed I believe is untaught and untrained, she doesn’t have the disciplined mind of a mage to make herself heard. To speak with her I think will require a learned servant of the gods.”

“So why have you brought her here to the Lily?” Minna said, cocking her head as Majali came to sit on Anjum’s lap and purr her most comforting purr.

“Two reasons. One, my wise friend, is that you collect rumors like an intelligence officer about women’s business afoot in Treviere. If this was a local girl, there could be talk, and a girl disappearing is the kind of thing I know you listen for particularly.”

Minna nodded, generous mouth hardening. “Yes. If there’s someone or something out there preying on women, whores are easier prey than women with husbands and fathers looking out.”

“Indeed. The maker of this will be very angry to have lost it, and someone who could make this sees people as things, to be used and discarded. Dangerous to anyone, particularly those he - it COULD be a woman, but I doubt it, the size is too large for most womens’ hands, and it’s–”

“Ugly,” said Anjum flatly, looking at it more closely again. “It looks like something a man who fancies himself a dangerous man would wear. The stone is beautiful, but the setting looks like…teeth. Like fangs or talons clutching it. The kind that if a client was wearing I’d ask Othmar or Gautwin to stay in hearing.”

“Just so,” Auda nodded. “And the other reason is, I will need someone with a good hand with silk.” She nodded at the intricate work of the snood containing the masses of Anjum’s hair. “There’s a reason I didn’t simply pop this trinket in a coin pouch,” she said, wrapping the ring in the sleeve again. “And not just to keep it from thieves. Different types of magical traditions, and different types of magic within them, require different types of tools and preparations, much as any other artisan’s trade or scholar’s work. Sometimes rituals require a drawing with certain colored pigments, or an effigy made of materials with significance to the caster. Many rituals of binding or loosing require some sort of cord. And silk, more than any other type of thread or cloth, interacts with magic. Can be imbued with purpose. Wrapping such a token as this in silk and my will will help keep its owner from finding where it’s gone by scrying or divination when it’s outside the defenses of my home. And when we’ve found what we can of the girl, there are rituals that would require a finer hand than mine to construct, spells knit into silk, by which maybe she can be freed.”

Anjum stared at her. “And you think this magic, this is a thing I can do? I have no gift.”

“No. And I have gift, but not nimble fingers, not for something like what would be needed for this. I set things on fire, girl. I don’t paint with a needle and fabric. But perhaps it can be that together we can do what needs doing.”

“Does the silk have anything to do with her - the one in the ring?” Minna was frowning at it.

Auda paused a moment, looked at Majali, who chirped, then got up onto the table to study it herself, mouth half-open, whiskers spread as far as they’d go. “You know, I didn’t think so. I was just trying to think what I had that might suit, and I was sold it earlier in the day. Just the sleeve, mind you, not the pair or the whole bliaut. I was told it was a favor, and well, frankly courtly love stories gone sour are a dozen to a silver penny - which I wouldn’t usually give for a single sleeve lacking the rest of the dress or even its lacings. But a clever seamstress could make a hat or trimmings worth having out of a piece so fine, or perhaps a purse.”

“It might be worth taking to a seamstress to try to find who it belonged to. The finishing and lacing-holes are very, very fine work indeed, that would require the most delicate of needles. Very few households close by would have serving maids capable of this kind of work, and the seamstresses in town would certainly have took note of such a striking piece as a possible buyer for their wares, or a fashion to imitate as best they could for more likely clients.”

“You think it related?”

“Maybe not. But it seems quite bright and new for something a knight would have carried with him, possibly worn as you are now to display his allegiance.”

Auda swore softly, and again as Majali mewed quietly. “She isn’t certain, but there could have been blood on the edge. Which means nothing, as you say, if it were worn by the knight in tourney. But…”

“But. It seems too convenient, perhaps, that someone would sell such a thing when possibly a woman has gone missing.”

“It does,” Auda said grimly.

#book club fic #installment 4 of?#edits

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