"Elf? Elf!" a voice hisses, and a hand more clumsy than competently cautious tries the door to her moonlit chambers.
A few days more, the wizard had said, and it's been two. The elf has no better plan, still, than "stab the wizard," and wizards tend to be regrettably prepared for that sort of thing. It's perhaps just as well that she is meant to be playing the part of crushed and sulking maiden, because she is seething.
Hanssen opens the door and cautiously sidles in.
"I do not have designs on your person!" he hisses loudly ahead of him.
"Of course you don't," she says — from her seat on the windowsill, not the direction of the inner bedchamber, startling a curse out of him. "Paladin, this is bizarre behaviour; what dire circumstance has you sneaking about like — me?"
He wrings his hands. "I must tell you," he says, "that I have misgivings about the wizard."
It is like the sun coming out. Finally, a usable asset.
"Tell me everything," she says, and he stumbles through a version of the same facts: that his church keeps the res carnelian, that they don't trust the Fastness with it, but that there is a reason, according to his superiors, why it must be lent to the wizards every so often; a ritual that must be done.
"I have never questioned my superiors so much as since this quest," he says, and she sees moonlight glinting on the wet tracks on hs cheeks. "But the Mother's paladin, she is — she is a provocation to thought."
"And you have a new doubt about this?"
He pauses for a few breaths. "I ask myself: what does the res carnelian do?" he says. "And if it's so vital, so good...why hold it back from the wizards at all? If this is a good work, why is it a secret?"
The elf drums her fingers on the sill. "Why do you tell me?" she says; and then, "who else have you spoken to?"
"I wish I could speak to the paladin," he says. "She would — but she seems bewitched. I come to you, hoping you know how to reach her."
"Mm. Well, that's good, at least. You can't speak to the others; I don't know yet which of them is in the pay of the Ríastrad."
He gapes. "The—"
"They knew exact how to find us, when they tried to take it and blew up your temple. Someone among us has a means of passing them messages." She slithers to the floor. "It's not Ryssa, it's not me, I trust it's not you."
(She doesn't trust any such thing, but either way he can be manipulated by saying so.)
"The Ríastrad," he says hoarsely. "They want the relic?"
She shrugs. "They want something. And as you ask — what does it do? It seems the wizard keeps the Mother's paladin in a state of distraction, so that she cannot interrupt; which seems to assume she would."
"Are you sure you cannot reach her?"
"Paladin, I have tried."
He slowly clenches his fists. "The apex monster — called paladin — to cull the rest," he whispers.
After breakfast and the wizard's usual appointment with Hanssen, the elf shadows Vimbrissaminah and Ryssa as they take in the sea air atop the Fastness; keeping out of sight, walking soundlessly at the foot of walls they stroll above.
"I have a ritual to perform, in keeping with the nature of the res potentia carnelian," the wizard drops in casually, in between rubbing herself on the paladin like a cat. "Could I rely on you to watch over? If there's any danger, you can't come to serious harm, and you can protect me."
"Of course," Ryssa says easily, a smile in her voice, and the elf silently bristles.
"Then come with me," the wizard says, and the elf looks sharply round as a great trapdoor, set into the courtyard she stands in, begins to lift itself. She slides into a shadowed archway, flattens herself against stone, and waits for footsteps and the wizard's chatter to recede in the direction of steps down from the rampart; then return, at her own level, and finally begin to echo as the two descend.
She races to find Hanssen.
"Paladin — now," she spits, interrupting him in talk with Ulsmyn and the sellsword, and dashes away again, his footfalls heavy and immediate behind, chased by exclamations.
Beneath the trapdoor is a spiral staircase, which plunges through and out of the Fastness — into an inverted tower of water, held back by nothing but insubstantial force. She slows them to a silent creep downward, staying to the centre of the stairs' wide curve, not risking a glance over the edge to reveal their prying heads.
Conversation drifts up, the words hard to make out, but still light enough in tone; and finally they reach a turn of the stair that brings them to the cusp of mutual visibility, if the wizard or Ryssa were to look up. There is a floor, here; a stone, much like those of the causeway, suspended midway from waves to bed, perfectly dry within the confines of the air-tower's outline. Within that confine, there is a thick, ritual ring of salt; in the centre, a pedestal of a different stone, dark and deeply carved in some obscure runic style. On it, the wizard has unpacked the res carnelian from its churchly box: a fist-sized crystal of a dull red, in a tarnished silver setting.
There is one chair, in which Ryssa is reclining, watching the wizard's movements and seemingly at complete ease.
Vimbrissaminah retrives a small shuttered lantern from near her feet, and tweaks its light down to a narrow line, setting it carefully to shine into the crytal's depths. She painstakingly rotates the crystal in place on the pedestal's top, with the slightest pressure of fingertips, until it begins to re-emit the line of light, stained pure red, in a single particular direction; keeps it moving until that line points to and paints the seated paladin, who raises her brows.
"You don't remember, Ryssa," the wizard says easily, "but we have done this before. You'll come to no significant harm."
Drops of bright metal abruptly condense on the paladin's skin, as if from the very air, and snap together like lodestone to form fine silvery chains already wrapped around her and the chair.
"It will hurt somewhat," the wizard adds carelessly, smiling, "but you won't remember—"
Which is of course when Hanssen flings himself down the stairs, sword ringing out of its scabbard, bellowing something about treachery and evil, and it's all the elf can do to drop to the steps and slither over the outer edge, away from everything, and drop further than she'd like into the shadow behind and below their last turn. The impact leaves one ankle weak and ringing, but the ache is ignorable for now; not broken. She sets her teeth into a snarl, shakes the arma insidiosa from her sleeve.
The wizard can dodge a sword, it seems, with a spider's abrupt, startling, scuttling speed. Hanssen yells at her and swings and swings, until she finds herself with her back to the watery wall, the creases of her clothes just kissing wetness, ripples spreading at her back.
"Hold, paladin of the church!" she snarls, eyes wide white slashes within their black paint. "We are allies!"
And there; his weakness. The wizard's jaw works as he draws a breath to begin a speech. "If my church allies itself with monsters—!" he starts.
She spits a gleaming arc of silk at his feet. By the time he has recovered his wits to renew the menace of his blade, she has simply slithered away from in front of it, the twining, clutching pearlescent strands crackling as they stick and harden, binding his legs into a hard shell rooted to the floor.
"As for you," the wizard says, and turns to where the elf is hovering midway to her, knife in hand. "...I can work with whatever foolishness you think is clever." She smiles. "If they knew, you'd be Made An Example Of; so I think you'll be my creature now, after all. It's not so bad; and if you think it is, I can simply give you the smallest taste of what the lovely paladin is about to receive. We'll have that trip to Stormand after all, all together, and get to know you all the way through. Ryssa is delightful, when suggestible."
The elf gives her a long, long look.
"Or you could try with your little knife, dear." The wizard's smile widens, admits a slithering tip of tongue.
"Really, being Made An Example Of is not a compelling prospect," the elf concedes slowly.
"You see? Working together is simply a matter of what everyone is willing to tolerate." Vimbrissaminah relaxes, steps to the pedestal.
"Elf," Hanssen says, and she looks at him impassively, raises a shoulder in a shrug.
"I did what I could," she says, and the wizard laughs.
"I have such a weakness for pragmatists," she says, and puts her hands to the crystal.
An intense pulse of red light jumps along a single line, for just a moment painting a vivid bisection of its target's face.
