.
My excitement slowly turned into anxiety as the Wind spirit remained silent. We continued drifting along with the wind, slowly ascending the northern face of the Giant’s Fortress. We were level with the northernmost peak, barely a half-mile ahead, when he finally spoke once again.
He said, “Give.”
Due to my befuddlement, my very intelligent reply was, “Umm…”
It wants something in return, My Lady, Durandal noted, sounding a little amused. I’m surprised it has answered this many questions already without asking for anything in return. Probably, you have been receiving goodwill as an acquaintance of Lord Moram until now.
Remembering my initial trouble with Lucy, I asked Durandal, “Old Man, can you… negotiate for me?”
It would be my pleasure, My Lady, he replied.
We reverted to silence. I suppose it was easier for Durandal to speak to the spirit without needing to simultaneously translate to Ostish for me. Maybe I could have asked Lucy to translate for me, but I don’t know if Lucy could necessarily hear the conversation either. It might have been one-on-one.
While passing over the snowy top of the peak, I glanced over at the tiny illusion of Lucy, curious if she was actually seeing the world from her apparent vantage point. My fairy sense said she was still resident in the spirit stone, but also present in the little butterfly-winged, barely SFW creature on my shoulder. I honestly could not tell which was the real her, or if she was simply somehow present in both locations.
We descended down the other side and were roughly over the lowest point of the saddleback leading to the next peak before Durandal spoke to me again.
My Lady, the spirit has agreed. He will take us to the place where he senses her. In exchange, he wishes a dose of Healing mana.
“Healing mana?” I retorted. “Why in heaven would he want healing mana?”
It is the most precious type, to spirits. Nothing like a ‘Healing spirit’ exists, so they rarely have the opportunity to acquire it.
“Can he even use it?” I asked, still baffled.
A spirit can use any kind of mana, My Lady. They must acquire the patterns from others– what you call ‘inscriptions’ or ‘magic circles’– but they can perform any level one magic. The problem is, they can only draw one kind of mana themselves.
Come to think of it, the more complex tools made from spirit stones that I had seen in the Palace sometimes performed more than one element of magic.
“But I’ve never seen a spirit carrying mana other than its own element?”
How spirits store the mana is unknown to me. I don’t even know how I store mana, My Lady. This is a thing known only to the gods.
As he said it, I had that same vague feeling in the back of my mind that I often get now, that Senhion probably knew the explanation. That happens when there is something that is common knowledge to her but hasn’t made it into the little fragment of her consciousness that is the Mortal Realm me.
“Then why do spirits like magic stones? I thought they used the stone to store their mana?”
That is not the case, My Lady. The stone gives them a comfortable place to rest. They make it more comfortable by packing it with more of their element. That is the ‘storage’ you are sensing.
I nodded, then considered the request the spirit was making.
“I’m like a blow torch when I cast Healing though,” I worried. “I can’t hit him with it directly.”
Just pour some Healing mana into me. I will separate some of it and hand it to him.
I nodded and circulated Healing, pouring a dose into Durandal’s blade. The svartalfar steel absorbed it and held it easily when I let go of it.
In my sense, I could see a thin stream of it then depart the blade and flow toward the spirit, disappearing once it arrived. After twenty seconds or so, it stopped.
That’s as much as he can accept, My Lady. There’s still some left.
“Give!” Lucy suddenly demanded.
My Lady?
I chuckled and said, “I’m fine with it. We should keep her happy.”
The thin stream traveled from Durandal to the pouch inside my blouse containing Lucy’s spirit stone. I suppose that settled the question of where the real Lucy was, although it still begged the question of why she seemed to also be part of the illusion of a tiny pixie on my shoulder.
“Spirit, can you take me to her now?” I asked the Wind spirit.
Instead of a verbal reply, it abruptly turned west and began flying across the grain, cutting sideways through the wind rather than blowing along with it. We flew down along the breadth of the mountain for miles, encountering a lower ridge and then a stream channel winding back and forth down the descending western face of the Giant’s Fortress. South of here, the mountain would widen into a mass twenty five miles wide, but here it was only perhaps a dozen miles.
We passed over a waterfall that tumbled downward almost two hundred paces and descended into a wide plateau on the western shoulder of the mountain. This was still high altitude, about seventeen hundred paces above sea level, but it was a place of dense forests broken by open patches which were clusters of human settlement.
We settled to the ground on the banks of the little stream near where it joined another in the middle of one of these patches. This appeared to be either pasture land, or a fallow field, probably belonging to the cluster of steep-roofed houses a short way uphill.
“Here.”
I looked around, thinking carefully, trying to understand why he had brought us to this spot. The only princess visible here was standing in my boots.
“Old Man, can you get him to clarify?”
To kill time, or satisfy her curiosity, or for some other reason known only to a spirit, Lucy’s illusory body had taken off and begun flying around. Then, she settled on top of some flora that had just begun emerging from an eddy nearby, which I was guessing to be cattails. It was early in the growing season here, and hard to tell. I wondered what she was looking at when she stared from there into the water.
After a short pause, Durandal relayed, He means that this is the closest spot that you can approach to where he feels her aura.
“The closest spot that I can approach?” I echoed. “What does that mean?”
After another consultation with the spirit, Durandal stated, Apparently, this is roughly the center of the region that the spirits can sense her, and the strongest point, but they are sensing her from below.
From ‘below’…
To verify what I was hearing, I asked, “From exactly how far below?”
Wheels were turning in my mind, and images of a mental map from Senhion’s memory.
Spirits do not perceive distances the way you do, and they don’t measure things in paces and miles, My Lady. But I will try to get some clarification from him.
Another agonizing wait.
He says he can go further down, but he stopped here because you could not follow him further. He will follow further down to see how far he must go.
The Wind spirit disappeared into the soil. Quickly, I expanded my fairy sense and followed him downward. I can sense out to about a hundred paces, but he quickly disappeared beyond that range. I tried to use vampire sense, sending the thin wave of Darkness chasing after the spirit, but that had been a faint hope, since I frankly have never detected anything but Dark spirits using vampire sense. Sure enough, I couldn’t sense him.
The distance he had already taken us, and the distance I had seen him go from there, really begged a huge question.
“Exactly how far can these creatures sense auras, Old Man? We’re miles from where we started following him.”
It isn’t like that, My Lady. When he first answered you, he wasn’t sensing your princess himself. He was using his connections to all the other Wind spirits in the region. Most spirits do not have a strong sense of self. When you asked if he could sense her aura, it was the same to him as asking if the community of Wind spirits of the region could sense it.
Now, I understood what Durandal had meant by benefiting from the good will of Lord Moram. This Wind spirit might not belong to the vodyanoy, but others in the region did. They had volunteered the initial information because of his orders, but actually asking this one to lead me here had required payment.
The spirit emerged from the ground and hovered in the air near me.
“Did you go to her?” I asked.
“Go. Go not.”
There is no try, a silly part of my brain added, which I promptly ignored.
“Old Man?”
I will ask for clarification, My Lady.
But really, I already knew, in broad strokes, the answer to the question of Amelia’s location.
Because there was only one place below my feet where she could possibly be. I couldn’t imagine how in the world she arrived there, but somehow, my foster sister had found her way into Ilim Below.
I returned to the camp about an hour before sunrise. Or, more specifically, I returned to within about a hundred paces of it. Wanting to recharge my body mana as much as I could, I cloaked, slipped out of my clothing, and knelt in the little river upstream of the camp. The river was glacier-melt cold, but I circulated as much Light mana as I could without causing myself to glow, and gritted my teeth.
The ‘clarification’ that Durandal had sought didn’t clear anything up at all. Neither of us could make any sense whatsoever out of what the spirit described.
Spirits tend to stay within the physical medium they are associated with, ninety percent of the time. That’s why you find Water, Wind and Earth spirits mostly in those respective zones, why Aether spirits love thunder clouds and Fire spirits flock to active volcanos. But they can be found anywhere. Frankly, there are plenty of them underground, since that’s where mana streams flow, but they can be passing through the rock beneath your feet, anywhere on the planet.
So there was absolutely nothing stopping the Wind spirit from passing through solid rock to reach Amelia. And yet, the spirit insisted it could not actually reach her. It described being in an open space– sure enough, the vast section of Ilim Below beneath my feet per Senhion’s map– and going into a side gallery, only to reach a spot on the wall. She seemed to be just beyond it, but after he passed into the wall, she suddenly seemed to be behind him.
The description reminded me of my experiences while traveling through Relador without a guide.
But Durandal couldn’t accept that he was actually understanding the spirit correctly, as it made no sense to him, and went back and forth with him several times, trying to clarify further. I had to put a stop to it by reminding Durandal about what happened after we fled Royses, and our navigation difficulties while trying to escape the dryad Möemnen. If I hadn’t interrupted, the two would have kept arguing until dawn. The mystery was still stumping us when we parted ways with the spirit.
I had the sense that the situation as we understood it wasn’t impossible, but I couldn’t tell whether that was because of my experiences in Relador, or some not-quite-remembered fact from Senhion. It simply felt like something was on the tip of my tongue.
When I noticed the sky beginning to lighten, I climbed out of the river, used [Fairy Breeze] and dressed, all the while trying to figure out how I was going to explain Ilim Below to ten people who had almost certainly never heard of it. Seven of them had been inside one small part of it, which would help. My real problem was, how would I explain why I knew about it?
