Chương 5: The Butterfly Report

The walk from the Shadefall Training Grounds to the old Aphid Barn took twenty minutes. The hero made it in thirty-five. He did not walk so much as stumble with a purpose; the system would highlight the ground with dancing emojis in the direction he needed to step, and the hero would shamble that way. Each step arriving slightly after the last one had finished its business, his bare foot and his booted foot finding the path in their uneven rhythm.

Fenwick sat in the harness, held the guide strap, and did not rush him. They still made it back in half the time it took to get to the hunting ground. The barn sat at the edge of the Order's grounds, set apart from the main buildings by fifty feet of cleared grass and a low stone wall the previous-previous Order leader had built when the Honey Aphid operation was going to be a serious commercial enterprise. It had not become a serious commercial enterprise.

It had, as rumor had it, because most of the official records had been sealed, a wine operation that had succeeded in inebriating half the Order and seriously hampering the enchantment and study that were the main exports of the Order. The barn had been cleaned thoroughly. The old stalls had been cleared, the floor relaid with fresh boards, the high windows left deliberately unshuttered on the north side so the air moved through. For the first two days, it stank of death.

Then Nibbles had found the spell, and the spell had held, and the barn had begun to clear; a dead, rotting corpse still had a way of sticking to a building, though it was getting better. He unbuckled the harness, dropped down from the hero's shoulder, and landed on his feet in the barn's entrance. The zombie stood staring at the wall where his screen was. Words in that strange language began to fill the screen, and the hero's posture relaxed as it stared at the wall. Fenwick straightened his robes.

He rolled the harness and set it on its hook by the door. He looked at his charge for a moment, at the pale yellowed grey skin catching the last of the evening light, at the arm hanging at the wrong angle, at the glowing sockets tracking nothing in particular. The butterfly had been real. The XP had been real. Point zero zero one, against one hundred, but real. He left before he could start arguing out loud.

"Movement," he said, to no one. The path between the barn and the main building was forty yards of flagstone, and he used all of it.

"He responds to movement. That is the finding. That is the data point. Four days ago, he arrived and uncontrolled, and today we have demonstrable evidence of stimulus response, and that is—" He stopped.

"That is a finding." He walked another ten feet.

"Calibration. The word is calibration." There was a pine needle behind his left ear from the fall. He removed it. Fenwick straightened his robe and took a breath. He raised a paw to knock on Nibbles's door and realized he was still rehearsing, so he knocked before he could begin again.

"Come." Nibbles's office smelled of old paper, cedar, and forty years of careful thought. Reports in one stack, correspondence in another, a map weighted at its corners with small carved stones. One candle. Nibbles behind it, quill down, watching Fenwick come in with the expression he kept for conversations he had already made peace with having. Fenwick had not made peace with anything. He sat. Eyes watching the candle, desperately avoiding contact with Nibbles.

He folded his white paw under his other paw in his lap.

"Report," said Nibbles.

"It was a calibration day," said Fenwick. Nibbles waited.

"One kill. A butterfly. The XP was—" A pause.

"Fractional. But that is not the finding. The finding is behavioral. He tracks moving objects. Small ones. Fast ones get his attention, and he will pursue them. With focus. Whatever the state of the cognitive apparatus, the tracking mechanism is functional, and that—""How much XP?"

"Point zero zero one." Nibbles looked at him.

"Against one hundred," Fenwick said.

"Yes. I know." The candle moved slightly. Somewhere in the church, a door closed.

"The point," Fenwick continued, because the silence was not going to fill itself, "is that we know something we didn't know yesterday. Yesterday, we had a target and no methodology. Today, we have a methodology. Movement-based stimulus. Acorns. A lure, potentially. The toadstool people respond to noise, and if he can be directed toward noise—" If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"Brother Fenwick."

"—then we have a system. A trainable system. It needs refinement, but the bones of it are there and—""Fenwick." Fenwick stopped. Nibbles's paws were folded on the desk. He was not unkind. He had never been unkind. What he was was thorough, and thorough covered a great deal of ground.

"Is he better than yesterday?" Fenwick opened his mouth. Closed it.

"Yes," he said.

"Then it was a good day."

"It was one butterfly."

"Four days ago," said Nibbles, quietly, "he held you at mouth level." The room was very still. Fenwick had made this argument to himself fourteen times on the walk over, Nibbles's side of it included, and had won it every time. Winning it had not made him feel better. He was beginning to suspect it never would, and that was a different kind of problem than the one he had brought to the office.

"Twelve thousand gold pieces," Fenwick said. He had not planned to say it.

"Yes."

"The Crown expects—""I am aware of what the Crown expects."

"Then you are aware that one butterfly—""It's better than yesterday." Said without force.

"And tomorrow will be better than today."

"You don't know that."

"No," said Nibbles.

"I don't." The candle moved again. Fenwick looked at his paws. The white one had worked its way out from under the other.

"It responds to me," Fenwick said.

"When I speak. It doesn't do what I say. But it registers. There's something in there that registers." Nibbles looked at him for a long moment.

"Yes," he said.

"I believe there is."

"I don't know if that's better or worse."

"No," said Nibbles.

"Neither do I." Fenwick looked up, his eyes a bit more moist than when he had started. He stood, blinked twice, and straightened his robes.

"Tomorrow," he said.

"Movement-based engagement. Controlled stimulus. I have a theory about the toadstool people, and I want to test it."

"All right."

"It may not work."

"All right." Fenwick nodded. He crossed to the door and stopped with his paw on the frame.

"He caught it," he said.

"Whatever else. He saw something moving, and he caught it." Nibbles said nothing. Fenwick had not needed him to. He took the long way back. The lake sat in a shallow bowl half a mile east of the main road, fed by a spring the town had been using for three hundred years. A low wooden dock extended eight feet over the still water, maintained by the Guild for the fire brigade's use. In the wet season, the hook at the end was empty, and the dock was quiet, and the water was very dark at the edges.

Fenwick sat at the end, looking at the water. He had been a scholar. That was the thing he kept returning to. Every posting he had held in the Order had been inside, at a desk, with a text in front of him. His silver sprig had been earned in the library, at the altar, in the careful administration of ceremonies that had not, until four days ago, ever produced anything unexpected. He was good at it. Genuinely good.

He could read the old scripts, understood the binding theory behind seven of the twelve major summoning classes, had written a paper, a real paper, cited twice, on the structural evolution of the Eternal Flame's ceremonial rites across the third and fourth centuries. He had eaten lunch at his desk for three years. He thought about his mother. She would be at the kitchen table at this hour. The books open, the lamp near, the careful columns of figures she kept in her small, neat hand.

The farm ran on those figures the way it ran on rain and good seed. Three generations of sod farming: the stock was good because she knew when to reinvest and when to hold; his brothers and sister were out in the fields doing the physical work while she kept the numbers that made the physical work matter. His siblings trusted her completely with it. He had not done the work since he was twelve.

Thirteen, when he'd gone to the Order's recruitment presentation in the village hall and sat in the front row, and asked four questions that made the visiting priest pause before answering. His mother had not discouraged him. In his family, that was the equivalent of a formal blessing. The first in three generations to join the Order. His brothers had thought it was funny at first, then impressive, then something they didn't have a word for. His sister had written to say she'd told all her friends.

He wrote to them. Not as often as he should. The weeks moved fast inside the Order, and a letter was an hour, and there was always something pressing. Three days of travel to the farm was a week-round trip that no one could manage casually, and the gap between the letters he sent and the letters they deserved had been growing quietly for three years. His mother had come for his first sprig.

Had traveled three days to stand in the church in her good dress with his brothers and his sister beside her, and had watched him receive it with an expression he had only been able to glance at before looking away. If he had looked directly at it, he would not have finished the ceremony standing up. He had not seen her since. His life had been changing slowly for three years. It was about to change faster. He was going to be an adventurer. Not a scholar.

Outside, in the field, on the shoulder of something that no longer smelled but still moved the way an undead thing moved and tracked butterflies with the focus of something that had forgotten everything except wanting. A fish broke the surface near the center of the lake. The water settled back. Fenwick stood. He straightened his robes, tucked his white paw behind his back, and looked at the water one more moment.

"I need to write her," he said. Then he turned back toward the barn. ⟨ [SYSTEM PRIVATE LOG] ⟩ ──────────────────────────── [Entry 4, Addendum] He left muttering to himself. He came back silent. I don't know if this is better or worse.