Chương 136: 126. Skévos

I watched a potter in the lower town fire a grain jar from river clay. The jar held three measures where one should have fitted, and bore the weight of all three. He had dug the clay from the silted bank below the shrine. He could not repeat it. — Codex of the Long Watch, Field Observation, 6th Century BCE, Ionia Arthur got up from the floor with his right hand doing most of the work. His left arm hung at his side. It was functional but not much more than that.

His knee sent a sharp pain up his leg when he put weight on it. Across the cella, Breakwater lay face-down on the dressed limestone where he had dropped it. He crossed the room with a limp and bent to pick up the shield. The shield had taken two direct hits from quarter-tonne limestone columns and there was hardly a mark on it, which was the entire point of a Deflection Emphasis and still managed to surprise him. Sarah came across with her right hand out and the warm glow gathered under her palm.

"Partial tear in the lateral collateral," she said, putting her hand on his knee.

"You shouldn't be walking on this."

"It's holding."

"It's holding because you are thirty-five Strength and too stubborn to fall over." The glow seeped into the joint and the pain changed to a dull ache and then to nothing.

"Good enough," she said. Sarah retrieved her coat from the floor near the wall, shook the dust off it and put it on over the ruined shirt. Donna was at the plinth, crouching, with one hand resting on Ravener's head where the axe stood upright on the floor.

"You lot should come and look at this," she said. • • The plant was growing in a crack at the base of the plinth where the dressed limestone met the floor. It should not have been growing at all. There was no sunlight down here and no soil worth the name, just a fracture in the stone where dust and moisture had collected. Out of that fracture a single stem had pushed through with feathery grey-green leaves and a flat cluster of small white flowers at its head. Steve hauled himself up and came over.

He crouched beside Donna and looked at the plant without touching it.

"That is growing in solid rock," he said.

"In a sealed underground chamber with no light source, hardly any soil and no water. This should be a dead brown stick." The flower is saturated. The Ether concentration in the plant tissue is significantly higher than in the surrounding stone. Steve leaned closer to the crack in the stone. The flat flower head was perhaps the width of his palm, the tiny florets packed tight. He turned to look at Sarah. Sarah had come up behind them and was looking at the plant with her head tilted slightly to one side.

She knelt down and put her face close to the flowers.

"That is yarrow," she said.

"That's what I thought."

"Achillea. It grows on every dry hillside in Greece and my grandmother has been putting it in poultices since before I was born. It is yarrow." She sat back on her heels.

"Yiayia uses it for fevers and for clotting. She would crush the leaves and bind them onto cuts. She has been boiling the heads into tea for stomach pains since before my mother was born." Sarah looked at the plant again.

"If anyone would know what to do with an Ether-saturated yarrow, it would be her."

"Do we pick it?" Arthur asked.

"Right, here's the thing." Steve's exhaustion lost to his enthusiasm.

"A plant, dense with Ether, sitting at the bottom of a dungeon. A glowing herb in a dungeon is loot."

"A reagent. You are right." Now Arthur was hunched over the flower as well.

"So we take it," Donna offered.

"We cannot just take it." Steve pointed at it without touching.

"We do not have the gathering skill or the herbalism profession. If we tear the roots or crush the leaves or bruise the flower, you have got a fistful of green rubbish worth nothing to anyone."

"Think a Nature check would do it?" Arthur said.

"Nature check, DC depending on the rarity. This would be at least twelve."

"Except we don't have Nature." Arthur sighed.

"There might be a check I am failing right now by breathing on it."

"We don't have Nature. We don't have Herbalism. We don't have Survival, and I don't think Acuity forty-four is a substitute for knowing which end of a flower the roots are on." The two of them put their heads together over a weed while the dead half-wolf, half-man thing cooled behind them.

"If it works like the old rulesets," Arthur said, "the flower is the volatile part. You would want the leaves whole and the head undamaged. Cut, do not pull."

"Cut where, though? Just above the roots? The middle of the stem? If there is—""Are the two of you quite finished?" Donna said. It was not really a question. She crossed to the plinth, went down on her heels beside them and unclipped the flanged mace from her belt.

"Donna," Steve said.

"If you smash it—" She did not smash the plant. She did smash the head into the limestone floor beside the base of the plant. The stone cracked. She hit it again, widening the fracture, then drew Ravener and slid the flat of the axe blade under the root mass. She levered upwards. A chunk of limestone the size of a dinner plate came up with the plant sitting in a plug of rock dust, earth and root, the whole thing balanced on the blade of her axe. She turned and held it out to Steve.

"There you go," she said.

"Dirt and all. Try not to ruin the reagent. Yiayia can lift it out of the dirt herself when we get it to her, with whatever profession she has been running for sixty years without the System's permission." Steve took it from the axe blade with both hands and stood holding a plant in a lump of broken rock and earth, looking like a man who had just been handed someone else's baby.

"How am I supposed to carry this?" Arthur looked at the dirt-and-stone plug in Steve's hands, then at the backpacks on the floor, then at the bronze sheathing along the plinth that they had not yet talked about taking but would most definitely take.

"This is where a bag of holding would've come in handy," he said.

"Say that again," Steve said.

"I said a bag of holding would've come in handy." Arthur motioned at the cella.

"There is a lot of saturated bronze down here, and now a slab of floor as well."

"No," Steve said slowly.

"But Petros's barrel." Donna groaned and sat down beside Sarah.

"We are not going anywhere anytime soon." Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

"The barrel that holds ten times the water it should." Steve ignored her and continued.

"A farmer past the silos made it. He wanted a barrel that held more, so he put a core into a barrel with that intent, and he got a barrel that held more. There is nothing special about a barrel. There is nothing special about a bag either." He was already shrugging out of his own pack and tipping it empty onto the flagstones. He fished a core out of the pouch, one of the six from the hunters in the rooms above, and turned it once in the low blue light of the walls.

"A backpack is already shaped to hold things. The intent would be a larger internal volume and maybe lower weight. The vessel already matches the function, so there is no reshaping needed. A non-transmuted vessel should take a simple binding."

"Should," Donna said.

"Should." Steve put the core inside the pack, pressed both hands flat against the canvas and held his intent. The binding happened faster than any Arthur had watched. The core dissolved into the fabric without resistance, because the canvas was already the right shape for the right purpose. The seams of the pack brightened once, a brief pulse of warmth that ran through the stitching and the buckles and then settled into the weave.

ARTIFACT CREATION DETECTED BINDING LAW ENGAGED Vessel: Heavy Backpack (Standard) Core: Lykanthrope Hunter (Sanctum-Grade) Intent: Greater Volume FIELD PACK — PRIMITIVE Internal Volume: Increased Signature: None Steve read it off the air and some of the delight leaked out of him.

"Primitive," he said, making a face.

"No proper name, no signature. The binding took but the vessel capped out." He pulled the mouth of it open and looked inside, and his eyebrows climbed anyway.

"Although. There is definitely more room in here." Arthur picked up the pack, and when he reached inside, his hand kept going past where the bottom should have been.

"That is more room," he said, drawing his arm back out.

"That is a great deal more room. The core was far too good for the vessel, so most of it went to waste, but there is still easily ten times the space in there."

"Which is Petros's barrel to the letter." Steve nodded.

"Rubbish vessel, good result regardless. A proper one would have given us something obscene." Donna dropped two of the bronze plaques from the nearest niche into the pack. Arthur felt the weight. It was exactly as heavy as two bronze plaques ought to be. When he looked inside there was room for twenty more.

"No change in weight, though," Arthur said, feeling the weight.

"Too much to ask for from a twenty-pound backpack, I suppose." So they filled the bag. Arthur worked the bronze sheathing off the lower edge of the plinth with the crowbar end of the mace. The long bright strips were heavier in the hand than their thinness suggested. Donna prised the plaques out of the wall niches one by one. The strips and the plaques went into the mouth of the pack and dropped away into wherever the pack now kept things. The canvas swallowed the lot and did not so much as bulge at the seams.

"Archie, where is all of this going?" Steve asked, bringing over a small plaque. You have seen spatial distortion before. The space you are standing in right now is bigger than its physical footprint would suggest. All dungeons and nodes have spatial distortion to some extent. The bag uses the same principle.

"Yes, but what is that principle?" Arthur asked.

"Pocket dimensions, wherever the odd socks end up? What?" A pocket dimension is something your recreation media gave you. What is happening is simpler and less comfortable. The bag is folded. The inside and the outside have stopped agreeing on how much room lies behind the seams, and the bound core is what keeps them from agreeing. You are carrying a very small and very badly made dungeon. It holds for the same reason the room around you holds, and it will last exactly as long as its core does.

When the core fails, the inside and the outside will reconcile, and you would not want your hand in the bag when they do.

"And I'm to carry that on my back?" Arthur said, alarmed.

"How long are we talking?" Based on the quality of the core, years. Unless you come across a Demiurge, in which case, minutes. Arthur looked at Archie and decided not to pursue the crumb trail. He picked up the pack. The pack that had just eaten a plinth's worth of bronze and dozens of plaques weighed precisely what a plinth's worth of bronze and dozens of plaques weighed. Whatever the fold had done to the room inside the bag, it had done squat to the mass of what was in it.

"Ah," said Steve.

"The space folds. The weight does not." He took the pack off Arthur, tried to heft it, grunted and handed it right back.

"Afraid it's all on you."

"This is far too much weight," Arthur complained, standing the pack against the wall.

"Nonsense," Steve said, looking at the bag.

"Carry capacity was what, Strength times six point eight kilos? Which puts you at two hundred and thirty-eight kilos before you are so much as encumbered. That bag is nowhere near it. Don't be a baby."

"Except all D&D rules do not translate," Arthur protested.

"We will know, won't we, when you haul that pack up the stairs," Steve responded. Donna laughed and Sarah joined her.

"Fine," Arthur said.

"Load the rest of it up." • • The glow in the walls was lower now than when they had entered the cella. Arthur looked around to make certain and turned to Archie.

"The Printworks dungeon normalised, once we killed the core. That is not happening here." The Ether density is falling. When it drops below the distortion threshold, the interior will contract to match the building's true geometry. The architecture will continue to collect Ether, and it will be a few weeks before a new core begins to form. This was a cull, not a cure. The same thing would have happened at the Printworks as well.

"How long do we have?" Arthur asked. About two hours.

"Let's allocate while we still have the space," Donna said. The allocation was straightforward since none of them were close to the fifty mark that Steve suspected would be another threshold. Arthur put one into Strength, one into Constitution and one into Dexterity.

"I was going to bring Acuity up to fifteen, but I still feel too slow sometimes," he said as an explanation. Donna put one into Strength, one into Constitution and one into Dexterity. Steve debated whether he should put three into Acuity for this level and the next to hit fifty, got a glare from Donna and put one into Acuity, one into Resonance and one into Constitution. Sarah mirrored his allocation, putting one into Acuity, one into Resonance and one into Constitution.

ARTHUR ASHWORTH - LVL 23 - STR 36 DEX 17 CON 34 ACU 11 RES 10 DONNA CALLAS - LVL 23 - STR 23 DEX 38 CON 27 ACU 10 RES 10 STEVEN PARR - LVL 23 - STR 10 DEX 10 CON 16 ACU 45 RES 27 SARAH VASSILOU - LVL 22 - STR 10 DEX 10 CON 16 ACU 28 RES 28 The yarrow was the last thing they put in the bag, wrapped in Steve's spare shirt with the dirt plug intact, settled upright in the centre of the bag where nothing could crush it. Steve positioned it with the care of a man handling an artefact and then stepped back.

Arthur shifted the pack higher on his shoulders and got his left hand through the shield grip. The arm held. Donna looked at the shimmer hanging across the far stairway and then at the three of them.

"Time to see what this barrier is," Donna said.

"Up." THE ETHER ATLAS: FIELD NOTES OF Steven Parr Kastella, Athens The Recorded Dose I have spent the better part of fifteen years in departments that prided themselves on separating evidence from tradition. We drew a hard line. On one side of it was - peer-reviewed, reproducible, falsifiable. The other was - everything your grandmother told you about willow bark and garlic and the flower you put on a wound to stop the bleeding. The second category was not taken seriously and I took it less seriously than most.

I could recite the names: Achillea millefolium, soldier's woundwort, staunchweed, nosebleed, herba militaris. I could trace the etymology from Achilles to Chiron to every campaign apothecary who packed it into a field dressing from the Peloponnese to the Somme. I knew the botanical history better than the herbalists did, and I still filed the whole tradition under interesting names, with very little actual mechanism. The mechanism was never missing. The concentration was.

Yarrow growing in an Ether-saturated environment is not the same plant as yarrow growing in an English hedgerow. Archie confirmed that the tissue held Ether at a density far exceeding the surrounding stone. The documented property (haemostasis, wound closure, tissue repair) is not a superstition that needs explaining away. It is a real pharmacological effect which was not taken seriously because it requires a minimum Ether concentration to produce. Why mess with plants when you have access to modern medicines.

Ether might have changed that. This means the materia medica is not folklore. It is a pharmacopoeia written for conditions that are now becoming common. Dioscorides prescribed yarrow in the first century. Chiron taught Achilles to pack it into wounds before that, if the myth is to be taken at face value, and after today I am less inclined than I was yesterday to dismiss the myth.

A plant that grows in solid rock in a sealed chamber with no light and more Ether in its tissue than in the stone around it is not folklore. It is evidence. The hypothesis that follows is uncomfortable but structurally sound. If Ether saturation restores the documented property, then the property requires preparation: a dose prepared from the plant, not raw leaves chewed in the field. The herbals do not say eat the flower. They say crush, boil, bind, steep. They describe a process.

The process implies a practitioner. The practitioner we have is a woman who has been preparing plant medicines in her kitchen for fifty years and has never once needed a peer-reviewed journal to tell her she was right. I owe my grandmother's generation an apology. Several, in fact.