Chương 18: A Scholar Who Doesn't Like Fairytales

Scillo had rehearsed the fabricated story countless times before he reached the door of the safehouse. He'd started on the walk back from the Brass Lantern a few hours after the horrifying person had left, going over the details in his head to make sure he didn't get anything wrong. He stood outside the door now and breathed out a sigh to try and calm himself.

There was a burning hatred in his heart for being forced to betray his organization, but the fear of being killed by that mysterious being was much, much greater. The building was in an area called Merchant's Row located in the second Ring, wedged between a cartographer's shop and a very reputable cloth importer. It had a sign above the door that read 'Bonfire Trading Company' in fancy gold lettering, giving a sense of elegance and refinement. Scillo quickly pushed the door open and went inside.

The ground floor was an actual trading office. That was a part that still unsettled him a bit even now, the sheer commitment of the organization to the facade. There were actual clerks behind desks working through legit trade documentation. Bolts of fabric were stacked along one wall and shipping manifests covered a notice board near the window. There was absolutely nothing suspicious about this place. A young woman looked up from her desk as Scillo entered and gave him a polite and pleasant smile.

"Hello. Please go to the second floor," she said.

"They're expecting you." Scillo nodded in reply and headed for the stairs. The second floor consisted of a narrow corridor with four doors, each one closed tightly shut. The walls were a sharp white, and the floors a sparkling marble. A small window at the end was the only source of natural light. Up here, the atmosphere was different, the clerks not looking up when he entered. They instead kept their eyes on their work, a deafening and strange silence in the air.

The only sign of proper life was at the waiting area outside the third door, sitting in one of the two chairs against the wall. There, a young man Scillo had never seen before was seated. He was maybe twenty, with close-cropped dark hair, forest green eyes, and a placid, composed expression. His hands were folded in his lap, and his posture was relaxed. One hand was bare, while his left was covered in a fine white glove.

It was clearly very expensive, the fine-stitched leather unlike anything Scillo had seen before. The man glanced at Scillo when he sat down in the adjacent chair. As they made brief eye contact, the young man gave a small, easy nod along with a small smile. Scillo nodded back, and they sat in silence. After about four minutes, the third door opened. A clerk appeared, looked at Scillo, and said "He'll see you now." Then she stepped aside and Scillo followed her in. Inside, the room was small and plainly furnished.

There was a desk, two chairs, and a single lamp. On the desk sat an inkwell, a pen, a wooden spool of rough paper, and multiple compact brass cylinders that Scillo recognized as a compression cylinder for messenger birds. Behind the desk sat a man. He was perhaps fifty, with thinning grey hair and a rather unremarkable face, with a knobby nose and watery grey eyes. He wore a plain dark coat, with a belt of gold splitting it in the middle. He looked at Scillo with an expression of mild attention, tilting his head.

"Sit down, young man," he said. His voice was pleasant and quiet, like warm honey. Scillo obeyed, sitting on the chair.

"Tell me what happened at the Brass Lantern," the man said. And then he picked up his pen, fed the long line of paper through the brass frame of the spool until a fresh section was positioned beneath the nib, and began to write. After a few moments of silence, Scillo began talking. He told and explained the story he'd rehearsed. Basically, he'd waited at the Brass Lantern as planned. Liatra and Pavett had also been there. Then something happened, something like an aura or a feeling attacking them.

In only a split-second, it had hit all three of them simultaneously. He'd gone down fast, lost consciousness, and when he'd come around, Liatra and Pavett were dead and whatever had done it was gone. He'd explained how he'd played dead until he was sure it was safe, then he'd come here. Throughout the story, the man continued to write without any interruption, not even any minute change in his expression.

The pen moved steadily across the paper in small precise sentences that Scillo unfortunately couldn't read from his angle. When Scillo finished, the man continued writing for another fifteen seconds. Then he stopped, but didn't look up immediately. He read back over what he'd written with the same mild attention he'd given Scillo. Then he looked up.

"The aura you described," he said.

"Have you encountered anything similar before?"

"No," Scillo answered truthfully.

"And you lost consciousness immediately?"

"Yes. Almost immediately. Well, within a few seconds."

"And when you regained consciousness, you were in the same position you'd gone down in."

"Yes."

"Nobody had moved you?"

"No." The man looked at him for a long moment. Then gave a gentle smile.

"Very interesting," he said. The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. He then picked up his pen again and wrote a few words down before setting it down again.

"So, three agents," he said.

"Berland, who had seventeen accumulated bodies worth of strength. Liatra, whose [Chrysalis] rune made her arguably the most versatile combatant in your team. And Pavett, whose [Off-Set] rune made him almost impossible to incapacitate through direct force." He folded his hands.

"All three were easily neutralized, with only one survivor." He looked at Scillo with that mild expression.

"You." Scillo's mouth had gone completely dry. Was… was the man suspecting him?

"I was lucky," he explained hastily.

"The aura hit me faster than the others, I think. So I went down before—""Before whatever killed them decided to kill you as well," the man finished for him pleasantly.

"Yes, yes. You mentioned that."

"Yes."

"Very lucky," the man repeated under his breath. He picked up his pen again and wrote something else down. Scillo felt a crushing sense of helplessness as he watched the pen move. Would he be discarded now that the organization thought that he was compromised? What would happen to him now?

"The girl," the man said, still continuing to write.

"You never made visual contact with her?"

"No."

"And in the time between Berland's departure and the incident at the Brass Lantern, you observed nothing unusual, correct?"

"No," Scillo said. After a long silence, he also hastily added, "It was a quiet night." The man looked up for a second at that. Then back down to his paper.

"A quiet night," the man echoed softly, as if tasting the phrase. He subsequently wrote it down. Then he set his pen down entirely, the first time he'd done so since Scillo had entered the room. He folded his hands on the desk and looked at Scillo with that same mild, lazy attention.

"Are you perhaps familiar," he said, "with the tale of the Three Dancing Sisters?" Scillo faltered.

"No." Why was the man talking to him about fairytales all of a sudden?

"It's an old children's story from the far eastern settlements." The man's voice remained warm and pleasant.

"Once upon a time, there were three sisters who lived near a great dark forest. Every night they would dance at the forest's edge, laughing and singing, because they said that as long as they kept dancing, the monster inside couldn't catch them." He paused for a second.

"The story ends with the youngest sister finally lying down to rest, because her feet hurt. It makes you wonder what happened to her. Was the monster a lie? Or was she truly caught?" He picked up his pen, and straightened out the paper.

"Children love that story," he said, resuming his writing.

"Though the love is mainly for the tale's catchy song." Scillo sat very still. Was… the story supposed to mean something?

"The girl," the man continued, his tone not changing at all.

"Our current intelligence suggests she has entered Ghenna."

"I didn't see her," Scillo said carefully.

"No, you mentioned that." The pen kept moving on the paper, undeterred.

"But she's down there. We're quite confident about that." He tilted his head as he stared at the paper.

"Which brings me to something I've been considering since you walked through that door." He finished writing, read it back for a second, and then looked up at Scillo.

"You're familiar with the story of Aurthur's Candle?" he asked.

"You must, this one is quite famous."

"No." The man looked disappointed. Then he sighed, and smiled.

"Well, it's a lovely little tale. It's about a man who loses his way in a vast cave system." The man smiled gently.

"But he has a single candle. And he knows that somewhere deep in the cave, there are others who are also lost, who also are searching for the exit." His eyes glinted warmly.

"The clever part is that he doesn't try to find the exit himself. He simply lights his candle and waits. Because lost people, you see, always move toward light." He let that sit for a moment in Scillo's head, his smile remaining cordial and charming. Then he picked his pen back up and looked back down at his paper.

"Are you familiar with a Delver named Wormwood Moss?" he asked, his tone changing to something more businesslike, as if the recounting of the strange fairytales had simply been a small detour. Scillo shook his head.

"No."

"Well, no reason you would be." The man fed a fresh section of paper beneath the nib.

"He was nobody particularly remarkable. A simple Delver who was registered with the Union for about six years." He opened his desk drawer and removed a small photograph, sliding it across the desk without looking up. Scillo leaned over, looking down at a man in his thirties, lean and covered with scars, with deep-set eyes and a long white beard.

"About eighteen months ago," the man continued, "Wormwood Moss descended alone and reached Floor 14. Which was considerably deeper than his previous record of Floor 9. I wonder why?" Scillo looked at the photograph and said nothing, studying the strange man's facial features.

"He came back up three weeks later." The man's tone remained agreeable.

"And he had definitely changed. He stopped contacting his known associates. Liquidated his apartment, his equipment, and even his Union registration. He then converted everything he owned into travelling money and started moving north through the settlements."

"He was running?" Scillo asked.

"He was running," the man agreed warmly.

"Though from what, we weren't certain at the time." He picked up the photograph and returned it back to the drawer.

"He later died in a settlement called Millhaven around three weeks after leaving Crater City."

"I don't understand," Scillo said, confused.

"Delvers go mad and run away from here all the time. That's not unusual."

"No," the man agreed.

"It isn't." He set his pen down and folded his hands on the desk, his calm look turning more serious.

"The reason we took an interest in Wormwood Moss is confidential," the man said simply.

"And it's above your current clearance level, I'm afraid." His smile remained welcoming, and his tone sounded genuinely apologetic.

"What I can tell you is that when we became aware of him, we immediately sent multiple teams to Millhaven. But the girl had already left by then." He picked his pen back up.

"She'd been moving south ever since. Toward Crater City." He looked up at Scillo.

"You're quite familiar with the rest, correct?"

"Yes," Scillo said quietly. The man nodded pleasantly.

"Very good. Your new assignment is Wormwood Moss. Find out what happened in the eighteen months between his descent and his death." Finishing writing, he tore the completed paper from the frame and fed it into one of the brass compression cylinders. The cylinder sealed with a soft click and joined the others on the farthest side of his desk.

"Oh, and one more thing," the man said.

"You should know that Wormwood Moss had a particularly useful rune. [Bird's Eye], it was called. It gave him the ability to create perfect maps of any space he'd physically entered. Down to the millimeter, apparently." He set down his pen gently.

"We recovered several of his maps from his apartment before he liquidated it. Floors 1 through 9, all perfectly rendered." The man tilted his head with a thoughtful look on his face.

"And yet, we found nothing from Floor 9 to 14." He looked up at Scillo.

"A man whose entire rune was built around the compulsion to document everything he saw," he said. His watery grey eyes held Scillo's with a strange intensity.

"And he documented nothing. Strange, isn't it?" He flashed a gentle smile.

"Now, before I send you off, are you familiar with the tale of the Blind Painter?" he asked.

"No," Scillo said.

"Well, once upon a time, a painter of great renown lost his sight in an accident. But he kept painting anyway, every single day, canvas after canvas." The man's smile remained warm.

"When his students ask him why he even bothered, he tells them something strange." He gave a dramatic pause.

"He says that he isn't painting anymore. Instead, he's hiding something now. And yet, what was he hiding?" Chuckling softly, he looked back down at his spool of paper.

"I personally think he was hiding his own grief." His thumb reached over and smoothed the edge of the paper slowly.

"The man had lost the one thing that defined him. The grief has to go somewhere." Following a short silence, he tilted his head at the paper, the warm, patient, and unreadable smile still on his face.

"So I ask you the same question I asked about our painter." He did not look up.

"Find out what Wormwood Moss was hiding. And find out why, of everyone he could have told, he chose that particular girl."