Both Sides Of The Coin [Aurin]

[Erratum]

"No, no, no." Louis said, and there was undisguised and obvious frustration in his voice, "The Imperial pet has been kept in luxury for decades, and that includes... ah, a harem."

"Turtle harem." spat Hodgekins, like a curse, "Ludicrous. A ridiculous thing."

The big man shrugged, clearly not interested in arguing the point. "Nevertheless. And so it produces eggs. Dozens of them a year. And twenty years ago, it was a symbol of incredible wealth and status to acquire one."

"But the damn beasts live forever. Ten years after the first wave, everyone who could have wanted one had one, and the sort of people who follow trends from ten years ago could finally afford them. Every upjumped cobbler with enough money and a big enough house bought an egg, and suddenly the country was riddled with turtles. They don't do anything interesting, they make the most ungrateful pets, they eat their weight in vegetables every week. You can't kill them, you can't abandon them, and they'll still be around burdening your grandchildren when you've kicked the bucket."

From the color in the two servants' tones, Aurin could tell that this was a genuine complaint, of the kind which had simmered for years. Presumably someone in the Allstead house had been one of those idiots ten years too late to fashion, and their purchase had cursed the household with an immortal reptilian burden.

Unfortunately, it looked like they were now trying to turn that into Aurin's burden.

"Well." said Louis, awkwardly, after the echoes of Hodgekins' angry rant had faded in the trainyard, "The fact of the matter is that we cannot send off the company's money and keep the tortoise here. The OIR is bad enough; I trust none of us wants the Inquisition to come knocking at our doors, yes?."

That had been Valentin Valentin's nightmare, too, although probably not for tortoise-related reasons. The revenue service might imprison or even kill those who tried to shield money from the grasping hand of Empire, certainly. The Inquisition was only too happy to use runes and torture both to draw the names of conspirators from its victims. Their involvement was the only realistic way that things really went south for Darus of Haqs.

"Mmm. Anyway, thirty-five. It's not as though we're asking you to keep the tortoise, Darus. And let's not exaggerate here, the Imperium hasn't exactly got the time and resources to spend harassing Haqs over some railway owner's tax disputes. As for Zaichaer... to be frank I don't know what is going on over there. I heard rumors that they started flying the buildings around, is that true, do you suppose? Either way, you've got all of Atinaw between you and the OIR, and I assure you that Mr. Valentin isn't going to risk his sorry hide with that pack of savages."

[Aurin]

"Deal," he said unhappily, although it was fair enough, he supposed.

A gentleman, he put out his hand to shake. Perhaps he could give the tortoise to Farza to be re-homed in the Grove of the Kindred. He would only call it a tortoise because that was what it was. A certain well-educated brat named Timon had made a certain Aurin feel like an ignorant idiot over the turtle/tortoise difference, and so even Darus would not make that mistake. But he would judge Hodgekins for his lapse.

"Yes, well, I plan to avoid Dratori and the savages of Atinaw if I can help it."

Darus notwithstanding, Aurin didn't have a problem with the Dratori. He was a bit leery of Atinaw because he had grown up in Cathena, but he had become much more cosmopolitan over the years.

"In any case, time is of the essence, yes? Lay out your little plan for me and let's keep things moving right along."

They would expect him to tweak the plan for his own benefit, and he would. They ought also to expect him to adapt the plan to changing circumstances. The best laid plans of mice and men, wasn't it?

The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

A pocket watch came out of his vest pocket and he angled it to catch the light of Gerhard's lantern. They weren't friends. They were all plotting how to take advantage of each other and the situation. He didn't actually care what happened to them. If Valentin got what he wanted out of the situation and Aurin got paid, all would be well.

If Valentin was ecstatic and Aurin got away with all of it, well, even better.

[Erratum]

The two men looked at each other- Louis serene, Hodgekins plainly apprehensive. Then they nodded, and Louis reached forward to grasp Darus' hand. It was a surprisingly gentle handshake for so huge a man; he didn't try to crush or overpower Aurin at all. However...

As Louis leaned forward to shake, his shirt separated just a hair from his skin- and beneath it, Aurin could see, very clearly, an amulet. It was imbued with magic, and powerful magic, of a type with which he was well familiar- Semblance. And although Aurin was not a gifted Scrivener, this type of amulet was one he'd seen before in various forms. It concealed auras, actively working to hide magic from Semblers and auraglass alike. Magical items, dragonshards, even personal runes could be kept completely off the books with such a device.

But more than that, Aurin's keen eyes discerned just the barest segment of a pattern on Louis' chest. It could have been any kind of tattoo, of course... but with that amulet kept upon it?

"The plan is simple, painless. If all goes well, risk-free for you." Louis said. The man obviously had not noticed Aurin's notice, and why should he? It was an instantaneous glimpse that virtually nobody in the world would have had the context to make sense of. "Tomorrow, that thug Valentin will come to inspect our books, where he will find that we have invested--months ago, you understand--most of the Allstead company fortune into foreign securities. He will demand the details, which I have painstakingly invented. The end of his chase will show that young Master Frederick unwisely took that money and lost it, and the money is unrecoverable."

"Not far from truth." muttered Hodgekins.

"But in truth, we will have invested it with you. Tomorrow morning, early, all the money we could liquidate will be on an armored car on the ride to Zaichaer, and you will be on the train also. There, you will meet our minder, who will travel with you to make the final investment and assure access for Frau Allstead. Simple, and, even if you are caught, legal as far as every state east of Gelerand is concerned."

[Aurin]

Aurin might recognize something that Darus noticed, but Darus couldn't know. Darus' own aura was carefully inverted, masking him, making his aura seem that of the persona rather than the man underneath. While he was likely powerful enough to either shatter the enchantment or force his senses through it, he was certain nobody would have created such a thing without alarums against intrusion by brute force.

It was a good thing he was always on alert—some might say, rather, paranoid—and so he half-expected surprises even his masterful arcane senses missed. He smiled, though it was slightly sour, as if he hadn't gotten quite the deal he had hoped for.

"Very well," he said. "I have dropped hints that I was tiring of Valensier, so leaving first thing on the morrow won't seem suspicious. I hope your minder knows the care and feeding of tortoises better than I." He laughed, an obnoxious little laugh at his own sally. For a moment, he considered making a joke about turtle soup, but thought better of it. He didn't want to upset the natives, though Gerhard and Hodgekins might not be Gelerian at all.

Aurin knew he wasn't the only person capable of this sort of shenanigan. He had been training Rivin to do just the same.

If there was a minder, then there would be someone to tell him more of the minutiae, which he would ignore as soon as he found a way to abscond with the funds.

"In any case, it's already dark and I have to be here bright and early, so I will take my leave and pack my things. Gentlemen, if I don't see you then, may Valentin be stymied and our fortunes increased. Good night."

He would, of course, remain if there was more they wished to say, but otherwise, he knew they didn't enjoy his company and so he saw no reason to belabor their last good nerves with his presence.

[Erratum]

That strange meeting was the last time that either Darus or Aurin Kavafis would see the two men for some time, and the circumstances of that fact were... unusual.

The next morning, Darus made his way to the train station as they had agreed, and swiftly identified the train in question. There, the conductor readily assured him that he had been identified as the owner of the present shipment, and he was shown, as promised, a train car filled with a significant quantity of avens. It was not quite the kind of fortune which would have accounted for all the assets of a large regional concern like Allstead Shipping, but it was undoubtedly quite a haul which Louis had managed to liquidate on short notice. A giant, a mage and a competent accountant? Truly, a man like that was worth his own considerable bodyweight in gold.

However, no minder met up with Darus. He waited as the morning ticked over until afternoon, and soon found that the train was leaving with both him and the money on it- but without any apparent agent of Louis and Hodgekins. His tricks revealed absolutely no sign of either of them, nor indeed of the young woman who had been pretending to Frau Allstead's position and spying upon them the night before.

Throughout the day as they traveled, no investigation of the train revealed anything amiss; but it could not possibly be the fact that the other men had decided to simply abandon this fortune to the merchant whom they'd so distrusted. Where was their agent? Where was his minder?

It was only when evening came upon the horizon, as the train continued tirelessly west towards the distant city of Zaichaer, that Aurin caught a glimpse of whatever machination was at play. When he retired to his car--Louis had been thoughtful enough to book him a full-room sleeper car--he discovered that among the many amenities the Allstead Shipping Elite Sleeper offered was a full-length body mirror (affixed to the wall, naturally, so the rattling of the car did not cause it to fall). And there, in the mirror, he glimpsed the spirit which had begun trailing him.

As Aurin looked upon his own reflection, he watched it blink; and when the eyes opened, for just a second, there were no whites or irises or pupils, but only two strange fields of white-on-black, like static.

[Aurin]

Darus was as good as his word, arriving punctually and looking over the gold punctiliously. Perturbed at the deviation from plan, however, he did occasionally check his pocket watch and frown until it was time to go. Go he did; there was nothing to be done for it.

Paranoid as he was, he did not drop his glamour nor his persona. Artur Darus socialized with a couple of fellow travelers in the cafe car, but otherwise kept to himself. When he finally noticed the ghost in the mirror, his eyes widened.

"Well, fuck," he said, not mad, but certainly glad he had finally identified the wrinkle. He had sembled the gold, but ghosts were elusive things. As he didn't have any ghostwine on his person, he said to the mirror, slowly as if to someone who didn't speak Common fluently, "I will find someone who can speak to you."

When he arrived in Zaichaer, he was once again as good as his word. The shipment was transferred to a secure warehouse; he wanted this resolved before he made it disappear. Whereas previously, he would have used his traveling trick to move the gold off the train and left his minder high and dry, that wasn't as sure a bet with a spirit. It might be attached to the gold and able to follow it, able to lead Gerhard and Hodgekins to it.

He left the steel container box briefly, and returned with a young physician he knew. Bruno Storlock looked around, not asking to look inside the box. When he found the spirit, he smiled and waved. Then he handed the cool, gently glowing vial to Darus.

"Aren't you going to...?" Darus made a vague gesture.

"Master Darus, I have surgeries to perform after this. I'm merely here to ensure you have no negative reactions to the ghostwine."

With a dramatic sigh, Darus took the vial, muttering to himself, then downed it with a shiver and a shudder. When he started blinking, young Storlock took his wrist and counted his pulse, staring hard at Darus' eyes to ensure the pupils were dilating and contracting properly.

When the ghost resolved for his altered vision, Darus turned toward it.

"Ghastly stuff. Well. Hello. I'm Darus of Haqs. How may I assist you, spirit?"

[Erratum]

Darus' vision fogged and blurred around the edges, shadows swirling and extending little tendrils inward. The ghostwine's taste was bad enough, certainly, but it went much deeper than that- a sense of profound nausea reached down through his gut and sank into his very soul. Perhaps that was unavoidable, a necessary side-effect of heightening the mortal connection to the realms of death, but it was easy to see why people tried to avoid it.

The bad news for the merchant: the ghostwine did not quite render the spirit visible. The heady brew was supposed to clarify ghosts, make the spiritual as palpable as flesh to the eye and ear, but Darus found that this did not occur. The air remained stubbornly opaque (or, rather, translucent... but the effect was, somehow, the same) and no figures resolved therein.

Happily, however, he was not without clues for this dilemma. Though the ghostwine's effect on eyes and ears was most famous, it infected every one of his senses- including his supernatural ones. The Traverser's sixth sense also seemed to grow distant and strange, the very character of the Veil of slipspace seeming to sour within and around him. And with that distorted perception, Darus realized that he could feel the spirit pressing against the other side of slipspace. He felt the thing practically touching him, its hot breath against his neck, separated only by Malgar's infinitely thin dimensional interdiction.

This he recalled the witches of Zaichaer explaining to him, in different ways. The Railrunners had warned him, of course, that Slipspace was inhabited, infested by the detritus of some ancient calamity too profound to be fully understood in the modern day. Gerhard had told him that those creatures could be harnessed, bound by the art of Summoning and pacts to act as spies.

Unfortunately, neither the Railrunners nor the Sunsinger had been particularly forthcoming in detailing the capabilities of these creatures. If this was really a spirit trapped in Slipspace, it made it all the more likely that simple Traversion would not suffice to lose it. It also signaled for sure that someone--perhaps one of the three he'd met in Dardouen, but who could say for sure--had set the thing on him, either to keep track of the avens or to try to catch him out of character and discern his true identity.

[Aurin]

"Useless," he finally muttered, sitting down on a folding chair he found. Then he burped and moaned, trying not to vomit. He fucking hated ghostwine and when he felt better, he was probably going to beat the necromancer for making him drink it when a necromancer would be more facile with spirits.

"Ugh, gross."

Unperturbed, the young surgeon crouched beside him to take his vitals, utterly disregarding Darus attempting to slap his hands away.

"The nausea will pass, Master Darus. You will be fine." He turned his dark eyes upon the spirit, his own senses keen when it came to the numinous. He had grown up a Grymalka. With a sigh, he looked away, found a pail to set beside the suffering insufferable man. "I have to go now. When your body tells you it's hungry, eat. That will banish the last of the nausea. Good day."

Darus followed his instructions. While he was suffering, it wasn't terrible. He was inured to such things, really, when he put his mind on it. He lived large now when he wanted to, but much of his life had been spent poor, grasping, suffering. He considered options: demon stone; spirit binder—he rather wished he could call upon Siv, but the elf was likely in Silfanore faffing about with the holier-than-thou Hytori, and anyway, he didn't want to get him mixed up in this shit—; Sunsinger or Kindred.

He left and eventually returned with Ansel Gerhard. The old Sunsinger owed him more favors than Farza of the Kindred, even if Farza's coven was that more traditionally expert with summoning and the like. He had explained that he was Darus of Haqs and needed help either binding or banishing a spirit, temporarily even, if he could then find a quick way to transfer the funds into a document of credit, which would be even more liquid than gold, and then he could dispense with his disguise where the spirit wouldn't recognize Darus of Haqs as Aurin Kavafis.

"It's in here, Master Gerhard. With the barest help from a Grymalka, I determined it is not a ghost but something a summoner might truck with. I require your expertise, please."

[Erratum]

Ansel had been somewhat surprised to see Aurin, but he was utterly unfazed by the man's use of different names. Well, that was hardly surprising, was it? For all their affectations and strict hierarchy, the Sunsingers were smugglers and mercenaries first and foremost. Doubtless Gerhard had been required to do underhanded work often in his tenure with the coven.

Once the other man had described the situation, however, Ansel's surprise gave way to curiosity.

"Yes, Darus, he used the other man's false name as easily as the 'real' one, "I'm familiar with the sort of spirit you speak of- and they're quite unusual. Most witches and magi prefer to truck with more corporeal and vital spirits. I'll have a look."

Upon reaching the room, Master Gerhard took his time with a variety of odd preparations. First he closed the door, then hung a small charm from the knob- a golden horseshoe. He checked each of the walls for cracks, and upon finding one affixed a small paper talisman to it. He dimmed the little gas lamp lighting the room and instead lit a set of candles, which quickly filled the room with a pleasant lavender smell.

These minor tasks completed, Ansel produced a large hand-mirror and laid it in the center of the room. This was followed by a small tube of glistening sand, which he tapped against the floor to produce thin, concentric circles around the mirror. He finished this up with a set of four glyphs, intoning sternly: "To the north I place the tower, where none need go. To the west I place Ailos, and the dawn upon the mountain. To the east I place the flaw, and the ending of things. To the south is Aedrin's tree, where all that exists is all that must be." With each invocation, the old witch touched a finger lightly to one of the sand glyphic on the floor, flooding them with a bit of aether. One after another, they lit. "In the name of our great father, Aileor, I light the circle without, to protect us from that which lurks beyond." Gerhard lit the outer circle of sand in the same manner, sickly white light running down the length of the sand from his finger, then tapped the innermost circuit. "In the name of the Lord of Suffering I light the innermost circle, to guard us from the beasts within."

The entire circle shone now. The hand mirror lying in the center trembled, then rose slowly, climbing to the height of the Sunsinger's eyes. The image within slowly distorted, transforming into snowy static before resolving rapidly into a reflection of the room once again. And there, in that small mirror, Darus saw a truly bizarre image.

It was himself, kneeling upon the floor, struggling against the firm grip of two other reflections of Aurin, who restrained him as though they were guards in Arvælyn's court, holding their own clone down to await some royal judgment. The restrained reflection glared balefully at the real Aurin and Ansel, jerking and gritting his teeth as he tried to pull free from the grip of the other spirits holding him.

"Hoo..." Ansel Gerhard let out a long breath, and even in the dim candlelight Aurin could see the sweat running down the nape of his neck. For all Ansel put on a show of strength, age was getting to the man. "Yes- it's as I thought. That spirit is much akin to the ones I employ, beings trapped between worlds by the Lord of Suffering long, long ago. They hold a grudge against Malgar for their treatment, and so a summoner can bargain for their services by offering the eradication of pain. They are an unpopular sort of familiar, for the interdict which binds them is divine in origin, and even powerful mortal magic will not suffice to let them manifest."

"But- they make excellent spies." Ansel observed the mirror doubtfully, "I can hold this one for a time. Perhaps a few days. But eventually it will slip away and the summoner will know what has happened. Is that enough time to accomplish your ends?"

[Aurin]

For the first time, Aurin felt as though he were in the presence of a witch and not any old runic mage. A Rune that opened a gateway for a certain sort of trick—that, he understood. The mystical, the esoteric—those reminded him of demons and their ilk, things that were other and, for lack of a better word, unnatural. Things that went against what his soul felt was correct for this world it inhabited. He was mindful of the strain he put Ansel under. He wouldn't do so without need. A part of him wanted to care for the old man; certainly his own father had neither desired nor required such from him. He did want to learn what he knew.

Darus didn't know if the creature saw through his glamours or if what he saw in the mirror was a reflection specific to him and to his soul. Ansel hadn't explained.

Frowning, the foppish merchant considered.

"I can do what needs doing whether it watches or it doesn't," he said. "If it weren't watching..." Well, it would benefit the covens. His mind continued to race through options. Poor Darus could invest the money into the theater as he had said he would, and leave it to the Railrunners to give Gerhard and Hodgekins the runaround. They could be upset with Darus, but it wouldn't get their money back to kill him. Aurin just didn't want anyone outside a select few to know the face behind his faces. It was sloppy work for a Myshalarai, or even for the confidence man he had been before joining the Myshalarai.

No matter what he did, Valentin would not be implicated. He was playing the role of OIC villain and playing it well. And the lawyer likely wouldn't care about the extra-Imperial details so long as the true villains got well and truly fucked, which they would be.

"Poor fucking thing," he muttered. Leave it to a contract killer to empathize more with some creature stuck between worlds than with another human.

"Is it possible to subvert its contract with their summoner? I mean, do you need another spy? Can we offer it a better deal or is it stuck...?"

He didn't want it ratting him out, either as Darus or as Aurin. He thought Ansel would treat it better than anyone those chucklefucks would hire, or it might have been one of them who bound the spirit.