Broken Lands

Lady Essia’s frown morphed into a smile at the question. “Oh! I almost forgot to tell you! I think I figured out the twisting thing you use to anchor the spell in place so it doesn’t move when the person does!”

“Show me.” Samuel held his arm out to Lady Essia, clearly intending it to be the target of her spell. He watched intently as the girl pulled a wand out of a pocket. A series of soft words spilled from Lady Essia’s mouth as she cast the spell.

Sophia listened for long enough to recognize that, like everyone else she’d seen cast spells, Lady Essia spoke in Bridge and used words related to the spell she was casting. Even without knowing it was a Purify spell, the chant of “Separate poison and disease, draw them out, expel dangers from the body” would have told her what the spell was supposed to do. She triggered her MageSight and saw a complex spellform hovering over Samuel’s arm. It was indeed finding things in his blood and removing them from his body, but surely he wasn’t actively poisoned?

“You’re gripping it too hard,” Samuel told Lady Essia. “The body can manage minor toxins on its own; there are cases where you need to cleanse that deeply but they are rare and usually mean the person is dying already. Untwist it just a little … yes, there. Well done. Now you get to hold it for several minutes. Try to keep it at that level while we talk.”

Sophia saw the spellform shift slightly. She wouldn’t have described it as “gripping too hard” or untwisting anything; to her, it looked like Lady Essia allowed the spellform to spread slightly so that it would take far fewer minor things. Indeed, it didn’t seem to actually do much right now, which made sense since she was testing it on someone who didn’t need the spell.

Well, whatever worked for you was what worked for you. The way her father explained things didn’t always make sense to Sophia either, and he was one of the people who taught her from the time she was little.

“We need as many healers as we can get,” Samuel started. “Especially people who can purify wounds; physical healing is easier than purification. I think we can get you a choice; you can either stay here at the Registry and heal people who are sent back to get them back on their feet to continue the fight, or you can do the same at the advance base we’re going to set up in the western end of Casterville, outside the city nexus’s reach. Either one will be a good place to earn Wisps.”

Sophia frowned at that. “Why outside? Wouldn’t it be safer inside?”

“Placing an advance base inside a Nexus makes the entire Nexus withdraw,” Samuel answered immediately. “Bases that are well outside the contested area can be inside a Nexus, but not ones that are close enough to potentially be attacked. It’s one of the reasons Vocational Registries are outside the closest Nexus where it’s possible; sure, it’s convenient for people coming back from missions and it means we can have practice facilities that are just outside, but those are conveniences. Being able to use any Vocational Registry as a base when something comes up is more important. If this were smaller, that’s what we’d do; going around the city takes time but would make sense if we were only moving a dozen people. As it is, a location closer to the fighting makes sense.”

Sophia blinked. That made exactly no sense. “Why would the Guide make it harder when it also rewards doing stuff that protects people?”

Samuel shrugged. “No one really understands the Guide. My guess is that it thinks of that as hiding behind Professionals, but Rensyn thinks it’s because it doesn’t want to make things too easy. Whatever the reason is, that’s how it works. So, Essia, where do you want to be?”

“Father will come here,” Lady Essia answered immediately. “He’d make me go home. Closer to where I’m needed is good too.”

Sophia tried not to laugh at Lady Essia’s priorities. “You’re going to have to stand up for yourself eventually or your father will always treat you as a child.”

“I’ve tried,” Lady Essia answered with a wrinkled nose. “He doesn’t want to see it. Says I’ll grow out of it and take a Profession once I’m old enough. Bah.”

Samuel shook his head slightly but didn’t directly comment. “In that case, you’ll need an escort. Sophia, has Rensyn yet told you what you’ll be doing?”

Sophia shook her head and considered Lady Essia for a moment. She could already tell where Samuel was going. “I’ll have to check with the others, but I don’t think we want to stay in a base the entire time.”

She knew she didn’t want to. She also didn’t think that was Rensyn’s plan. If they were going to stay safe behind guards, they wouldn’t need to Level, even if they were backup for the guards in case something sneaky slipped by. They could already handle a single corpsevine and more Shield would only help that so much.

Samuel shook his head. “There’s little point in keeping a healer-purifier at an advance base if we don’t send her out where she’s needed. There are potions that can help against the corpsevines’ poisons; Halven is making a bunch of them. The problem is that the potion and the poison both attack the body; it takes a lot of healing to recover from using the potion to delay the poison. Anyone you can get to fast enough will recover far, far faster than someone who had to use the potion, even if it’s only enough potion to reach the advance base.”

That sounded like a very fast acting poison indeed. It was certainly far worse than the ones Sophia was used to.

On second thought, that might be because every dungeon she knew of that had creatures with poison was already mapped. Unless you were the initial explorers, you knew if there was poison and what protective gear and antidotes you needed to carry. It seemed like that wasn’t the case here; instead, they had healers try to handle things and a shortage of healers.

“How will we know where we’re needed?” There wasn’t any sort of long-range communication here; if there were phones, at least half of the messages Sophia had carried in the last week wouldn’t have been necessary.

Probably a lot more than half.

Samuel grinned. “The easy way. We make them come to us. It’s up to the Commander, but I bet you’ll be with the Fire mages. Essia doesn’t have any means to get to patients faster, so it’s the best place for her. I guarantee there will be plenty of fighting.”

Getting everyone to agree was easy. The Quinn twins were happy to help, while Amy was even more stir-crazy than Sophia was and was thrilled to hear there was a plan. Dav insisted on meeting Lady Essia, but once he did he said she was like the little sister he never had. Rensyn was actually the last person let in on the plan, but once he heard about it he was almost as thrilled as Lady Essia was.

From there, things moved quickly. Sophia’s group was one of the last few to be given a task, but once everything was arranged, they were sent out to the advance base. It was in an old run-down mansion overgrown with greenery and surrounded by trees that were clearly old when the original issue with the corpsevines happened a decade before. There were signs of recent repair; the windows were all intact and the doors had clearly been replaced, but other than that the only sign there were people there was the path that had been cleared to the entrance.

If Sophia had her directions right, the building was very close to the West Conservatory. She was fairly certain they were a bit more north and farther from Casterville, but the route they took to get to the no longer abandoned building that would be their advance base didn’t take them near the West Conservatory.

Once they were inside, the first thing Sophia noticed was that all of the windows were reinforced with metal behind the glass and the room had an inch-wide line of old dust that surrounded it everywhere except the doorways. It was far too even and there was much dust to be just a poor cleaning job, which told Sophia that it probably wasn’t just dust. It didn’t seem to have a magical component to it, so it wasn’t part of a ward spell.

Sophia wished she understood wards better than she did. She could deal with simple wards; that was, after all, how she used to sneak into the cookie jar when she was a teenager. She never got into trouble for it, even though it ticked her nanny off when she “spoiled her dinner.” She was pretty sure her father considered bypassing wards to be good training.

For this, though, the important thing was that it wasn’t a ward. It wasn’t magical. It had to be a completely mundane method to discourage corpsevines. Sophia doubted it would do much against corpsevines hidden in a body, but it might well discourage the vines themselves. She knew it would make her sleep more easily, even without knowing exactly what it did.

“Ah, you made it. Welcome to our new home away from home,” a familiar voice greeted Sophia. She looked up and found herself staring up at a familiar red-headed and fox-eared visage. “Come on up, while we’re here you five will be on the top floor. Some of us elderly folks don’t do stairs as quickly as you youngsters,” Samuel joked.

Sophia probably shouldn’t have been surprised that the Fire Mage leading the contingent they were grouped with was Samuel. Looking back at how everything happened, she should have expected it.

“You wanted a healer for your team, didn’t you?” Dav put Sophia’s thoughts into words before she could, but his tone said something different. She felt a little resentful about being pushed around, but Dav sounded almost admiring.

“Eh,” Samuel lifted one shoulder in a sort of casual half-shrug as he replied. “We were going to have a healer sent to travel with us no matter what we did. Essia’s one of three healers at this particular advance base and I’m one of the two distraction team leads. I didn’t have to push for a healer; I just had to make sure Essia was the one I got. It wasn’t hard; we know each other and can work together. That’s not true of all of the healers here.”

Samuel showed them to the suite that would be their rooms for however long the fight against the corpsevines lasted, then disappeared downstairs to meet with the Commander. Sophia took the chance to ask Lady Essia a question that had been bugging her off and on since she met the healer. “Samuel never uses your title. Why is that? Do you want us to use it or not?”

“Oh.” Lady Essia sounded surprised. “You don’t know? It’s the old saying about the Registry, Samuel follows it.”

Sophia gave Lady Essia a blank look.

“You know! Rank stops at the door, that old phrase,” Lady Essia explained. “Wait, you didn’t know? How?”

Amy chuckled. “I wondered when you’d notice. Those two came from a long way away. Wherever they’re from, it’s an odd place. They don’t have Vocational Registries, they call them something else. Also, Rae? Pay up.”

She extended a hand towards Rae, who sighed heavily and pulled a few coins out of the pouch at her waist and set them in Amy’s hand.

Sophia shook her head in amusement. She’d clearly missed when that bet was placed. “So do you want us to call you Essia or Lady Essia?”

Lady Essia shrugged. “Rank stops at the door, I suppose. Essia is fine.”