"Well played," the wizard says, when her voice recovers from her surprise. "I should have suspected any elf, here, now, but you eclipsed yourself with Ryssa...well. Does the Ríastrad have complaint of my proceedings?"
Time to cast the die. "Sometimes," the elf says indifferently, "the left and right hand of the Ríastrad meet in the dark and don't know one another. I was simply leaving the scene of my own mission and stumbled into travelling with these people on the road, for safety and for reasons of camouflage; it's become obvious another mission is in action. I would merely have you tell me, for the sake of its success, how many feet are in the dark and where not to tread on them, until I extricate myself."
The wizard groans. "Not that I doubt you," she says, "but the Ríastrad — right and left hands, yes, but somewhere there's a head that knows both, and will go over what I tell you for signs of perfidy, and judge whether I told you too much or not enough or the wrong thing. My concern is here, and the success of my concerns; and I will tell you as much as I see fit, for the sake of it. You tell them that."
The elf shrugs. "I will tell them that," she says.
"Good." The wizard warily crosses the room, and sinks to sprawl herself on a great pile of cushions. "You can sit, if you like, but you look the kind to stand. Do excuse me; I have things I need do while we talk." She open a small wooden chest beside her, withdraws a stone mortar and pestle, and begins to array glass jars and cloth pouches around it on the floor. "It's some time since we last arranged for the paladin to arrive here—"
"The paladin?" She blinks, cocks her head. "Lady wizard, truly, this is not my mission, if you do intend to explain it to me — I thought the point of all this was the res carnelian."
"If it were up to me, we'd keep the thing instead of giving it back to the church every time," the wizard sighs. "But we pick our battles. And of course; but what use would it be to bring it here especial without her?" She uses tweezers to pluck a fluttering insect from a jar, and a small, wickedly slim knife to end its fluttering, opening it up in a sad runnel of clear liquid and shaving out a tiny darker thread from its flesh. In the mortar that goes, followed by dabs and pinches of powders and grainy substances.
The elf watches her, and after a short while, says, "You intend to use it. Is that not against what the Fastness does?"
"Your own people cooperate with us. Is that not against what the Ríastrad does? The church sends it to us. Is that not against what they do?" The wizard begins to grind the mix together. "All institutions reach a threshold where they have design to shape the very world around them. You understand this, being Ríastrad; but the same is true of the Fastness, or paladin Hanssen's church," and the elf nods a litle.
"So she really doesn't die," she murmurs, and the wizard lifts her own head to look at her.
"Ah, you've reached that stage," she says, and smiles. "The hollow orphan animates and thinks; a decade more and they'll cull you or make you an officer. Yes; dear Ryssa has been alive a surprising time."
"But she is but one paladin."
"She first came to the attention of a distant — now extinct — dogmatically distinct branch of the faith of Hanssen's church," the wizard says, and spits some moisture into the mortar to continue working whatever is within. "Organised a series of worker uprisings against theocratic tithing. They tried burning her, that time." Neither her tone nor smile betray any idea on her part that burning people is even worth having an opinion on. "There are few accounts of paladins of Mother Weep-No-More, and furthermore it's possible that they all refer to Ryssa. Really, it's enough to make you lend credence to the mountain atheist-cultists, isn't it? That a god supposedly of victims calls no other paladin, and further treats her only like that. All that miracle living, and not so much as pain relief."
She holds to them, in darkness, a hilt.
"I think," the elf says quietly, "it is a matter of consent. That Ryssa receives only the miracles that Ryssa wants."
The wizard pauses over her pestle, steeples her fingers, looks at the elf. "Do you know," she says brightly, "I think you would be worth cultivating."
"I am loyal to the Ríastrad," the elf says. "And if you proposition me, wizard, that seems unlikely to work well for your health."
"If I ruled out dalliances with those dangerous to me, that would rule out, mm, all wizards, most elves, and definitely Ryssa." Vimbrissaminah looks fond. "You won't appreciate the qualities of a lover, probably, hollow orphan that you are; she is mean, and she has long since annihilated all inhibitions to her wants. I'd miss her, if someone were to kill her." She shakes her head. "Really, please; take a decade to think it over, then take a sabbatical to visit Stormand with me. Lovely city. Wonderful brothels. If it were up to me and not the ascetic types, we'd have built this entire thing there instead."
The elf remains silent.
"No, the thing that makes Ryssa dangerous," the wizard says, quieter, thoughtful, "is the combination of a god that champions the liberation of victims, and time to think about it, and, worst, that she thinks about it. Have you heard her, on Hanssen's church? That his god puts a sword in his hand to champion the weak, in case the wrong strong people take advantage of them? She has nothing but time to see everything in the world, and think about what's wrong with it, and she can't be killed, and those peasant rebellions—"
She shakes her head, and works the stuff for a while, with a thinking face.
"All institutions with designs on the shape of the world run into all the others," she says finally. "Because the world can have only one shape. It can't have both the shape perfect for the church to consume it all and the shape perfect for the Fastness to curate all knowledge and the shape perfect for your Fürsten to rule it. Any institution with a design on the world is a tyranny, and its ultimate expression, necessarily, total tyranny. And so the Ríastrad fight us and we fight you and we both both fight the churches and they fight us and each other. And whenever we give Ryssa time to think about it, she decides that stabbing individual wife-beaters is all very well, but we institutions are all eidolons of abuse, and she decides to burn us all. So every so often, we arrange circumstances to have her wander over here, and either bring or arrive alongside the res potentia carnelian, and I perform all the rituals to balance my own energies for its activation—" she indicates the contents of the mortar— "and we use the thing inside it," she says, still with not the slightest indication of a moral opinion, as if it's no more than a choice of hair ribbon, "to eat her memories."
"Her memories?"
"Such a shame, really, given they're irreplaceable. Confirmation that she's the same paladin in all the written accounts of her god— ah, well." The wizard takes a spoon and scrapes a small amount of crumbly, doughy stuff out of the mortar, squints at it at eye level, eats it and pulls a disgusted grimace. "Foul. Ugh. Anyway, I'll enjoy her company a few days more, then we'll do that, then Hanssen will take it back to his church and she will be—" and the wizard's smile turns up a few notches, "differently, pliably amusing for a while, then she'll go about her business again, as much as she remembers it. The world doesn't need so many wife-beaters, after all. Really, I'm just grateful that the fiasco last time didn't break her— some fool got creative and tried to decapitate her instead of doing as he was told and bringing her here. That was not pretty. Her god may prioritise function, but...a generation of men in a snowy region, much further north than here, grew up knowing that the Night-Beast would hunt those who hurt their family. A decade, before she reliably remembered who she is." Vimbrissaminah blinks a few times. "Thought we might have lost her, that time," she adds. "I was all set to miss her, and then she just upped sticks and came back south making some kind of sense again. Though renouncing her god, that was a shock."
"I imagine so," the elf breathes, mind straining at it all.
"So there you have it."
The elf considers, as best she feels able. "But the temple, along the way here," she says, frowning.
"Oh, your people have someone among the party reporting to them." The wizard flops a dismissive hand. "It couldn't matter if your people took the thing, since they'd simply convey it to us by other means; more important to keep Ryssa with the other paladin, not wandering off in a huff. Apparently it seemed likely."
Some kind of paid human turncoat. Ugh. "I have been close to standing on toes," the elf says calmly. "I thank you for the explanation, lady wizard."
"I thank you for taking your invitation to Stormandy under consideration," the wizard says, winking.
"I imagine, then, this is — a young rescued thing, a girlish crush, and the worldy wizard who has kindly but thoroughly destroyed any romantic proprietary notions over the paladin?"
"Oh, I do so love being the worldy wizard," Vimbrissaminah purrs, and watches the elf simply nod, turn for the doors, and shrug back into the mannerisms of Spider the rogue, now with emotions sorely battered; school her breathing into near-sobs, barely contained, prod herself in the eyes to redden them. "Aaaaah, that never gets less disconcerting!"
"I take m-my leave!" the elf says back, high and trembling, and bangs the door closed behind her as if too distressed for care, scampering away in the direction of the chambers assigned to her.
The wizard, she determines coolly as she goes, is going to fucking die.
