Chương 226: Chapter 247: Provocation

That look was apparently still on my face. Quarl hesitated before he set his coat on top of the desk next to mine.

"You spoke to your brother?" he said carefully.

"Why do you say that?" I asked, acting unreasonably sulky in a way that was going to mortify me later.

"Forgive my saying so, but there's a certain identifiable demeanor," he said. Careful training. Much like myself, he was taught almost from infancy to say particular things so as not to offend people. His training also included crossbows, poisons, stealth movement, and how to wash blood out of anything. My training included a lot of geography and mnemonics.

"You mean to say that I've got a 'Nathan is at it again' face," I sighed.

"Would you believe it is distinct and recognizable from your expression when literally anyone else is bothering you?" he asked me with a quirky half-smile. Of all my love interests, he and I have the most similar sense of humor. He doesn't make me comfortable like Trazom or excited like Thumper, I don't think he understands my perspective the way that Rabert and Kimothy do in their own ways. He's not as eager to back me up in combat as Tiviti, and I can't be as free wth my words as around Nux.

But of them all, he's got the driest humor, the most sardonic laugh. I think it's something you get when you see enough people die. Licard doesn't have it, I think it's something you lose when you see too many people die.

"Well, to answer your question, I did not speak to my brother and that is precisely why I make this face today," I said, tapping my foot. I glared at the door.

"I intended to have some words with him before homeroom but he's been nowhere to be seen. My annoyance with my sibling is sometimes with the things he says when I find him, and sometimes with his convenient absences when I'm trying to find him. I staked out the route from his dorm to the dining hall, and this building, everything. I could not spot him. I checked that he made it back on campus after the weekend, and the dorm master confirmed it."

The bells began to chime, three of them to let us know the class period had begun. Dong. Nathan walked in the door seconds before the teacher shut it. Dong. Dong. He sat down next to Josse in his usual seat. He did not look my way, but somehow he had checked to see that I was present and paying attention. I don't know how but I was sure that he did. Like the air had just a little more smugness than it should. I glared. Quarl nodded.

"That's it, that's the face." I accepted that I have a distinct and identifiable anger that only my sibling can bring out of me. I pulled my gaze away.

"I'm not going to go into too much detail," I said.

"But, you're aware of that unfortunate scene during the last day of Fashion?" The Assassin nodded.

"Someone came at you from behind with magic knives or something?"

"Roughly, yes. And Nathan and I worked together in a rare display of cooperation to not only stop the assailant but to capture him alive for questioning?"

"Roughly, yes," he echoed.

"Well, Nathan had told me he was keeping the assailant somewhere secure and low-profile, which necessarily means that I could not come around to visit." Quarl nodded.

"Ah. Yes, if someone told me that, I'd likely glare at the back of their head too." I shook my head.

"That's not the thing. I'm getting there. Anyway, two days ago I found out that the assailant in question is walking free and visiting old accomplices associated with that attack and others."

"And others?" Quarl repeated.

"Like, other attacks?" I nodded. I know what my face was giving away. If I have a specific expression for Nathan, I definitely have one for The Fire. He faced the ceiling, thinking for a minute, then glanced over at Nathan, before turning back to me.

"If there's some reason you've not killed him, I can help. It won't be as-" I held up a hand to stop him.

"No. I won't kill him and I won't let you kill him either."

"Why?" he said, as flatly and plainly as I've ever heard him. It's a good thing everyone in my circle already knows about my visions or this would be a longer explanation.

"If I'm going to save the future, we need both a hero and a villain."

"Hmm." Quarl glanced back at Nathan, then back to me.

"And Nathan is...?"

"The hero."

"Are you absolutely sure of that?" he pressed.

"Less every day," I admitted.

The next stage is incredibly easy. I take the piece of paper that Coppor Cseyz signed for me, and I took it down to the school archives to have a copy made and filed. The archivist there is an Ambris loyalist, she's got ties to both the Kinghand and Aumerje Houses. So she has grabbed an extra copy of the page and run straight to her distant Aumerje relations, and hands them the paper. It's basically just a full-throated saber-rattling call out. It is a contract, between me and Coppor Cseyz.

It gives him exclusive rights to perform magical assessments of my abilities. Effective immediately. So this contract states that their contract does not exist. The fact that I signed this and filed it is a formal declaration that I have no intention of abiding by their terms. And so now, every day that goes by without a challenge to my Coppor contract is evidence that they are allowing me to ignore their contract. And that is surprisingly huge.

See, a documented contract only matters if one side or both is willing to push the issue and enforce it. If a contract exists and all parties involved just choose to ignore it, then it's effectively dissolved. And so if they do not step up to enforce that contract, I have legal grounds to claim that the magisters have chosen to ignore it, and dissolved it. You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story. They are trying to hold this thing over me.

They want it to be a threat that curtails me for months or years. Their terms gave them the option to come after me at any time, at their leisure. What I've done is forced a new time pressure. If they don't come after me right now, they'll never get the chance. And so the very next day I've got a letter in my mail-call, informing me that I'm being called to the Hearstcliff South-Central-Southeast Deputy Commerce Court to attend and defend myself against prosecution for entering a false contract.

It's an unusual court for them to choose, of all the overlapping jurisdictions this trial could be held in. I'm guessing this was just the most well-bribed one, maybe the judge is Inquisitor Pina's niece or something. I have to assume this choice was made for pragmatic reasons and not at all randomly. I skipped homeroom to flit over to the admin building and let them know to prepare for my absences.

I told them I would forward them all my court dates, and they made arrangements to have my assignments held for me so I could make them up later. I told them that's adorable, and they did not seem to understand what I mean by that. I'm an antagonist, not a protagonist, but I still get player-character privileges. And that includes the correlation between my Intellect score and my grades. I literally cannot fail my classes.

I can only avoid valedictorian if Nathan ever starts taking his attributes in Intellect and takes the top spot from me. And there's no reason.... other than just to piss me off, that he would ever do that. Place your bets now. The whole process was over pretty quickly, really, only took a half-hour. But if you're going to skip a class, you gotta commit. There's just something about someone half-assing an infraction that seems to irk me in a weird, very personal pet-peeve kind of way.

An unplanned half-hour to myself. I've had more than a few irritations lately, and I've got plenty of stress to blow off. I certainly don't want to just hang around, I always wind up brooding and introspective when I do that. Let's go fuck up some monsters. And I did. Through one portal and out another, into a pure unwavering darkness. This place used to freak me out a lot more before I started carrying a blackhart-dyed mask to cover my eyes with.

I conjured forth the aurora, a gentle light that surrounded us and wreathed the area in color and oddly sinuous motion. Curtains of light surrounded me and showed the shimmering oily surface of the cave-lake, and the dry corroded surface of the cavern walls. I hovered above it all, much more comfortable than my first time here. Ice chambers to regulate pressure, building scaffoldings to keep me safe, conjuring voidlight just to see by- things were quite different then.

I hovered over the water and felt the blank spaces within it. The creatures. I started boiling the water, everything within my spell's reach, and the surface beneath me became a thrashing, frantic soup. Creatures that breathe water don't need to be immersed in boiling water long before it finishes them off. I flew out of the alcove and into the larger cavern, leaving a wake of hissing bubbling broth and floating, lifeless monsters. Steam billowed up behind me like I was dragging a vast, vaporous cape.

The far end of the cavern, the lakebed rises shallow and there's a shore, a sloped floor leading down to the water but level enough to walk on. And there's a city dug into that stone, oddly-shaped buildings that housed whatever activities the Blind have. Most of it seems to involve gorging, hoarding, and resting. There's not enough spare energy in their ecosystem to support much else. I was attuned to the stone, I collapsed their buildings in on them as I flew overhead.

Even though I sparkled like a sky full of neon, the creatures had no senses to even detect what it was that moved among them and wreaked this havoc. Well, unless I stumbled across one of their shamans. But if that happened I was going to teleport out anyway. When I go after their lairs, I try to vary my methods up. Explosions one time, stabbings another. Boiling and buildings collapses this time. I don't have a frame of reference for how the Blind think or make decisions, so I'm only making best guesses.

But my best guess is that if I don't make consistent attacks, they won't connect that these attacks are all coming from the same source. And if they don't connect that these are all the same source, they won't be as motivated to launch reprisals. In this way, I hope to be able to cull their numbers without making them even more militant and bloodthirsty.

The goal is a bunch of Blind leaders standing around scratching their heads and wondering why several different grottos in particular seem to keep getting hit with mysterious disasters over and over, never the same kind twice. Worst-case is the leaders all declaring 'this is the work of those surface-world mammals! let's unleash hell upon them!' and attacking early. If that happens, I'll just have to roll with it, but they won't have their ancient reserves so it could be worse.

Arguably, defeating the Blind would be easier if I provoke a war early. But I'm not sure that it would not make things worse, and I prefer planning around known variables rather than best guesses. Rather than provoke a war I don't know how to win, I'm preparing to win the war I do know about. I waved my hand, and below me the air became crackling-cold, and eyeless fish-creatures started pouring out of their homes and fleeing this sudden wave of arctic cold.

They moved sluggishly, their response to deep cold was to slow their metabolism, a maladapted behavior in times that the cold becomes truly deadly and is too rapid to allow proper torpidity. For my purposes, it made them easier to kill in large numbers. They fled into their luge-like streets, stumbling, flailing over each other. They never made moves to help one another or to call for help, they never raised a voice to warn of danger.

They vocalized to threaten each other to stay out of the way or to express triumph when they overcame. It left a lot of their people trampled in the street. They fled to the water. I followed. They died there. The lake was vast and densely-packed so I zoomed off in search of more monsters to slay, boiling as I went. Even though this is largely useless, it feels productive and that's what matters. If you don't feed the serotonin every so often, you burn out.

I know that my victories over the Blind right now are almost entirely symbolic. It's not a big help. My work in the railroad and politics and the arts, that's where I'm really helping. But losing hope, losing perspective, could be deadly too. I actively work to foster my motivations so that when things get rough I'm not on the ragged edge of despair already. It's fun to imagine we could just muster up our gumption and just willpower our way out of depression or fatigue, but that's a romantic fiction.

You can keep that up for a few hours, days, maybe a couple weeks. I've got a years-long marathon ahead of me. And sometimes a little treat is what you need to keep up the will to pursue a years-long marathon. Sometimes, that little treat is to crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentation of things that do not know grief. I don't worry much that I am going to provoke the Blind to attack ahead of their schedule. The conditions they are waiting for have not been met.

And, I have not even delivered them a pinprick of damage. I could boil their warriors every hour for a month and not take a drop from that bucket. I have not really hinted to any of my allies about how vast their numbers are. Tiviti, Thumper, Kimothy, Larianne... I've made sure they've seen the things. Gotten used to the sight of them, gotten practice fighting them. In a couple of years they will all be training others. But never did I even suggest how many they really are. How very badly outnumbered we are.

How important it is that we have better weapons, communication, transport, and strategy. Maybe if I kill enough of them, I can slow them down. Not likely, but more likely than provoking them early. But in this, just like always, the important part is the preparation. Vast power to kill these creatures is all well and good, but ultimately my contribution to this war is not going to be boiling or freezing the cave-fish. It will be taking what I know, and making the right efforts.

But today, destroying the enemy that I can see is just what I need. This was good practice, but only four experience points. I should head back and get ready for my math class.