Broken Lands

“We found it in the storage room where we found the corpsevine.” Sophia gestured at the arm at the far end of the table. “It had rolled under a table, so I don’t really think it’s related to the corpsevines, but it’s weakly magical. I’m not sure what it is, or if it’s exactly what it looks like.” Crystals could naturally absorb and hold magical energy, after all. That was what dungeon cores and world core crystal were, but it didn’t just apply to them.

Sophia had spent enough time around craftsmen to know that the type of crystal or gem mattered but also that just knowing what it was wasn’t enough; good enchanters had to also be able to make sure the right Affinity was present in the stored mana. Unfortunately, Sophia didn’t really know how that worked even at home, much less here, and she certainly couldn’t do it. Her father could determine Affinities by looking at them, but all Sophia could tell was that there was magic there and that it was pretty weak.

“Right. Of course.” Rensyn rubbed his forehead like he had a headache starting to form. “Bring it with you; I’ll show you where to take things like that after we deal with the arm.” Rensyn made his way to the other end of the table and loaded the arm into the burlap sack without touching anything but the sack.

Sophia wouldn’t have wanted to touch it either. She quickly bundled the rock back into the silk bag and tucked them both into her backpack. She had the pack on before Rensyn was done carefully gathering up the bagged arm.

Burning the arm turned out to be a serious effort, but the way Rensyn did it made it feel almost anticlimactic. He talked to Aimiva for a minute or two, then led the group through the building through a door labeled WARNING - DISPOSAL above a symbol that Sophia would have sworn looked like the biohazard symbol, if she ignored the literal flames that seemed to cover it without burning the door. The runes scratched into the oval that surrounded the symbol were probably the enchantment that kept it running, even though they didn’t resemble the one runic system she knew.

She didn’t even have to check the symbol with MageSight to know that it was magical, but she did anyway.

It was less magical than she expected. As far as she could tell, the only thing it did was burn with heatless fire.

She wasn’t sure how she felt about the fact that the room existed. Were there really enough biohazards here that they had to have a way to dispose of them? Did it mean that they disposed of medical waste here too? That was the only kind of biohazard Sophia could think of offhand, even though she was sure there were others.

The symbol being similar enough to recognize immediately was just more evidence that something connected this world and her own, not to mention Dav’s. The fact that all three worlds used variations of English that were if anything closer than American and British English were to each other made the similarity seem insignificant.

“Impressive,” Sophia admitted. “But if that’s all it does, why is it there?”

“It’s a failed enchantment,” Rensyn admitted. “It was supposed to go on the door to the flame room itself and be lit only when it was dangerous to open the door, but it always flames so the Registry Master had it placed on this door instead. Everyone knew what it meant, then. The replacement notification decal wasn’t ever made, since by then we didn’t really need it. I don’t think we’ve used the incineration room for anything other than failed alchemical mixes since then. There are probably some in there waiting for the weekly disposal now.”

“Why are you burning this? Isn’t it already dead?” Dav sounded a little nervous. “It can’t be hiding, can it?”

Rensyn shrugged. “I don’t think so. As far as we can tell, you have to be dead before the corpsevines can affect you, that’s why they’re called corpsevines, and once the corpsevine stopped moving, it was harmless. We burned them anyway; no one wants to find out we’re wrong the hard way by having a corpsevine sprout in the compost pile. We don’t know how they got into the West Conservatory. Coming in with another plant or some soil from outside’s the best guess anyone has.”

Sophia frowned at that. She hated the idea that they just didn’t know and accepted it. “Sounds like we need to look at the compost once we kill all the corpsevines.”

“We don’t know what we’re looking for,” Rensyn admitted. “But no one will stop you from looking. Come on, follow me; you’ll need to know what to do when the fight starts. You’ll probably have at least one shift here, even though none of you are fire mages.”

It really wasn’t that hard. The next room held a collection of metal tables that all had ceramic coverings that almost looked like lids, except that the edges were thicker than the middle. They wouldn’t hold a thick layer of liquid but they were clearly made to hold liquid. Each table was mounted on a set of giant metal wheels that looked ridiculously simple, nothing more than a metal rod that supported the table’s weight inserted through the middle of a pair of disks that could rotate freely.

“Those wheels are terrible.” Dav said it before Sophia could.

Rensyn shrugged. “They don’t burn and they don’t have to go far. If they get stuck, we can just clean them out and they work again. They’re better than the skids we used to have or carrying everything by hand. That’s what we did before the corpsevines; it’s not that hard to move a bunch of potion bottles.”

Now that he mentioned it, there was a collection of about a dozen small glass bottles and one larger glass jug on the table closest to the entrance. The contents were a range of colors from a muddy yellow-brown to a vibrant bright blue, but when Sophia checked with MageSight they all seemed only very weakly magical. She wasn’t sure what to think about the fact that the solution to failed products was to burn them.

Now that she thought about it, she had no idea how alchemists on Earth disposed of failed creations. It had never occurred to her to even think about it.

Rensyn set the arm on the table that already held the collection of weak potions without taking it out of the burlap sack, then nodded at Dav. “Give me a hand with this. It takes two to move one of these tables easily. We need to get it through the double doors at the far end of the room; that’s the flame room.”

As far as Sophia could tell, the tables required some strength to move but the primary problem was that they were awkward because none of the wheels could turn. It seemed like a wheelbarrow-like arrangement might have been better, if the weight were manageable.

On the other hand, this was good enough and would probably be far better if there were entire bodies on the tables. Sophia could imagine that, the body of the woman infested with corpsevine they’d fought.

Wait.

“Did you really bring the bodies back here instead of burning them at the West Conservatory?” That seemed like an awful lot of wasted effort to Sophia. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to burn them on site?”

“Probably,” Rensyn admitted, “at least in terms of distance. I can guess why, but it wasn’t my call to make. Thankfully. All I can say is that I’d much rather guard a transport group for an hour, even several transport groups, than try to guard a flaming beacon surrounded by exhausted fire mages for a day. Corpsevines swarm fire mages. We’re not really sure why, since they’re not the most effective against corpsevines; it’s apparently hard to burn through a body to get at the vines.”

“Don’t tell me we’re going to have to fight corpsevines again.” The words followed the soft snick of the door behind Sophia.

She turned and saw the second redheaded man in less than an hour. This time, he didn’t remind her of her uncle; the pair of fox ears at the top of his head were enough to make the difference clearly obvious at even the first glance. The higher pitch of his voice helped as well.

“It looks that way.” Rensyn’s void was heavy. “At least we know what to do this time. Thanks for coming, Samuel.”

“Of course. Let’s get this taken care of, shall we?” Samuel followed Rensyn and Dav into the fire room.

Sophia snuck a glance in. The doorway was well over a foot thick, probably to contain the heat. The room itself was the first room she’d seen that actually seemed to be lined with brick. There was a clear circle in the middle of the floor where the bricks looked damaged; it took up most of the middle of the room. There was actually a depression closer towards the middle that seemed only a little bigger than a single one of the rolling tables. As her gaze moved up the wall, she saw that it narrowed into a circular chimney. She couldn’t see out the top of the chimney from where she stood, but she guessed that it probably led outside the building. Anything else wouldn’t make sense.

Rensyn and Dav pushed the cart into the middle of the circle, almost entirely covering the central depression and making it obvious that it was actually oval instead of circular. There was plenty of room for more carts in the rest of the damaged area; Sophia suspected that five would fit as long as they were arranged properly.

Rensyn led the way out of the fire room, then cast around for a moment before he grabbed a sign off one of the tables. He muttered something about people not putting things back where they belonged before he hung it on the door.

Sophia had to chuckle when she saw the words. It was clear that the original message was the blocky words FIRE ROOM IN USE, DO NOT OPEN DOOR. At an angle on top of the black letters, someone else had written Beware the irritated Fire Mage! In red.

Sophia turned to Rensyn with a grin. “Samuel edited that sign, didn’t he?”

Rensyn chuckled. “Yeah. It works better now. I’m not sure if that’s from the edit or from the stories about what he did the last time someone interrupted him, though.”

“What did he do?” Dav sounded a bit more reserved than Sophia, but he couldn’t disguise his interest.

Rensyn chuckled again. “He somehow managed to burn everything the man was wearing, leaving him in charred rags and soot, without hurting anything other than his pride. Well, and his hair; he got called baldie for a week or two until it grew back. Samuel says it was an accident, that the fire escaped because the door was opened, but no one really quite believes him. What Samuel doesn’t normally tell people is that it was the third time in three weeks, the third time in a row, that the door was opened while he was burning the power out of the failures. I think that two of them were the same person. He had every reason to be irritated.”

From the other side of the thick door, Sophia heard something. It sounded like a soft fwoomp, but that was enough to tell her that she definitely did not want to open that door, even without the threat of a surprise disrobing by fire.

It was with a set of smiles that everyone followed Rensyn away from the fire room. The room’s purpose was practical, maybe even a little dark, but that meant that even a little humor went a long way.