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It is a mild night in Nicodranas, and Veth is considering slamming the door in Essek’s face.
He’s wearing a Disguise that she hasn’t seen before and an expression that warns of future vomit. He says, shivering, “Um. Hello. Please help me?”
Veth, who is beginning to wish that she hadn’t answered the door in her skimpiest robe, attempts to surreptitiously cross her arms over her cleavage. She says, remarkably pleasantly, “Are you fucking insane?” Essek shudders violently. His fake eyes beg, please.
“Do you have any idea what time it is? I have a child in here, Essek. I have my husband in here.” On second thought, she’s more worried about Yeza’s ability to defend himself in an invasion scenario than Luc’s. Her eyes move, involuntarily, to the dark shape of her crossbow propped up next to the coat rack in the foyer. She says, “I’ll have you know that I’m armed.”
“Veth,” begins Essek, “I am begging you. Please, help me.” She stares at the veneer over his face. She hasn’t seen him in, what, half a year? None of the Nein have, to her knowledge, not even Caleb.
Five months ago, Veth had gone to stay the night at Caleb’s, because Luc was sleeping over with the snotty Tiefling kid down the street named Whimsy or Merriment or something else equally stupid, and Yeza had said that he loved her but also would like to get curry from the place on the corner and pass out in his underwear, and didn’t she miss her friends?
She had brought hard liquor, which she was expecting to have to funnel down Caleb’s throat, but instead found herself rapidly outdrunk. He had a class in the morning, and seemed to be valiantly drowning any fucks he might have once been persuaded to give. She had told him, you’ve been acting weird. She said, spill. He had spilled.
Apparently, the last time that Essek had deigned to drop by, around a month ago, he refused to drop his Disguise, even within Caleb’s paranoia of home wards. He had stayed for fifteen minutes and thirty-eight seconds, Caleb told her, and then Teleported away like he was running from a fire or a very large dog. He had said, I’ll Send to you later. He had not Sent to Caleb later.
And now Veth’s thinking about Caleb, and Essek, and Caleb-and-Essek. She looks at where his hand is trembling against her doorframe, and remembers the shade of pale lilac that had blushed on his violet knuckles, when Caleb had died, when he had held him against his body, against the sucking hunger of the city. They had had to bodily pry him off, to do the resurrection. The sound that he had made.
“Okay,” says Veth. “That’ll get you in the door. But I want an explanation. And!” She raises one finger in an intimidating point, “It had better be adequate.”
Some kind of iron rod seems to extract itself from Essek’s spine; he collapses in on himself in overwhelming relief. “Yes,” he breathes frantically, “yes, yes, of course, whatever you require.” Veth grimaces. “Just get your floaty ass in here.” She backs off, so that he can stumble falteringly into the foyer, and through there into the kitchen.
She goes to close the door behind him, which he did not bother with. Typical. As she softly eases it shut, a smudge on the whitewashed wood catches her eye.
In the silver moonlight, the bloody handprint on her door looks old, and brown. She reaches out to touch it, feeling half-drunk. Her fingers come away glistening.
Veth slams the door and backs away, stomach sinking. She calls over her shoulder, “Essek? Buddy?” There is no response. There is a thump, like a body falling. She turns around.
Everything’s been turned down for the evening, the only light in the night-blue room the singular orange glow of one half-melted candle, the kitchen smelling of lemon and cinnamon and herbs. And blood.
Essek had sat himself down on one of the benches at the table, but has toppled over on his side, all of his body—except for one outflung leg which remains straddling the bench—sprawled on the floor. The pose would be funny, if he wasn’t about to fucking croak.
Blood is coming from somewhere under his Disguise, and it pools around him in a midnight sea. Veth can track with her eyes where it follows the geometric lines of grout connecting the tile, so that it seems to be reaching out thin and seeking sanguine tendrils. His chest is moving in uneven, shuddering gasps.
She flies across the kitchen, and skids to a stop before she busts her ass in the ocean of blood. She falls to her knees beside him; feels warmth and moisture soaking into the hem of her silk nightgown. She says, three octaves higher than normal, “Essek, what the fuck?”
“Sorry,” he gasps. “Sorry, sorry.”
Veth tries to put pressure on his wound, and then realizes that there is no wound, because he’s hidden everything neatly behind his Disguise, like a tool. She shrieks, “Drop it! Drop the Disguise!” Essek wheezes, says, “Can’t. They’ll find me.” Veth would hit him, if he wouldn’t expire instantly. “They’ll find your fucking corpse if you don’t let me see you, asshole!”
Essek lifts up one hand, like he might Dispel after all, but it flops back into the pool of what is rapidly beginning to look like all of his blood and accomplishes a whole lot of nothing. “Idiot,” Veth informs him, and sucks it up, and casts Dispel herself.
She wishes that she hadn’t.
Essek’s face is fucked, one eye attractively ringed in what must have once been a killer shiner, with the remnants now inking his purple skin in greens and blues. There is a thin line of red cutting from his top lip to his hairline, which shows a small notch where its growth has been interrupted. One of his ears is, to be tactful about it, about halfway gone.
There is a gushing spurtspurtpsurt of blood pulsing from a hole in his abdomen. Veth classifies it as a hole because it is not a stab or a wound or a tear. There is literally a neat, halfling-fist sized hole punched through his gut, like someone needed a teeny window to the other side of his torso. Essek’s face is steadily draining to the faintest periwinkle color, like a piece of fruit with all of the juice leached out. His voice is very faint when he says, “I think that I’m dying,” and does.
Well, Veth convinces herself that he does for a good thirty seconds—it’s hard to find a pulse when his wrist has gone for a dive in the deep end of his own blood-pool. No, no, it’s there, just thready and declining.
Veth says, eloquently, “Shit!” and books it upstairs, stumbling over the first step and then climbing the rest of them on her hands and knees.
She practically kicks the bedroom door open, scaring the shit out of Yeza. He, evidently having heard the commotion downstairs, is clutching the candelabra from his bedside table and brandishing it at her menacingly. When he sees that it’s just Veth, his shoulders relax minutely, but only just. She is, after all, covered head to toe in blood.
Veth scrambles up and over the bed to root around in her nightstand, chasing spare crossbow bolts and some scrap of lace that might be the missing half to her favorite set of lingerie around the inside of the drawer, until her slippery fingers close on the smooth glass bulb of a healing potion. Yeza behind her, still clutching his candlestick, ventures tentatively, “Honey?”
“There’s a disgraced drow politician bleeding to death in our kitchen,” she tells him. And then, as an afterthought: “Keep Luc upstairs.”
Yeza sighs and says, morosely and resigned, “Right.”
Veth flies back down the stairs. Seeing the scene again with marginally fresher eyes is horrible, like a gaudy painted massacre, but she doesn’t let herself pause. She throws herself down on the ground beside Essek, uncorks the potion with her teeth, and starts trying to force it down his throat.
There’s blood coming from his mouth now, too, which makes everything more difficult. Veth ends up having to prop his head on her lap, holding it up so that the liquid she manages to baby-bird into his slack mouth goes anywhere other than his chin. He’s making little spluttering noises that she takes, optimistically, as signs of life.
Veth says, “Don’t die in my kitchen, you fucking asshole.” Essek chokes wetly.
It takes maybe two minutes before he seems to stabilize, the hole tentatively closing, like it’s shy. Veth worries vaguely that it’s just skinning over the damage, and he still has some gnarly internal bleeding, but calms herself down by reminding herself that there’s nothing she can do about it and it’s his internal bleeding anyways.
Essek’s eyes flutter slowly, like he’s waking up from a nap or coming down from a high. Veth remembers, for some absurd reason, that time for Fjord’s birthday a year ago when they all got high off of some mutant plant Caduceus found growing on somebody who was probably pretty rad in life’s grave, and everyone sat around watching Essek do math on the floor with one of Jester’s oil pastels for two hours.
Veth had watch the elegant swoop of his wrist, the neat flick of his fingers, smudged with carmine. She told Caleb later, both of them red-eyed and bleary, “Okay, I get it now,” and she did.
Essek coughs once, and then opens his eyes all the way. Veth hopes that the first thing he really sees is her pissed-off face above him, petulantly. “Alright,” she says, “what the hell, man?”
His head is still in her lap. Essek rises up like a vampire out of a coffin, all stiff-backed, and staggers to the bench that he fell off of in the first place. When he sits, he turns to face her, and sees the truly abhorrent amount of blood spreading across the tile. It turns out that his purple face can go remarkably green, if adequately incentivized. He’s still clutching the newly-scabbed over hole in his abdomen, but he raises the other shaking hand in a half-hearted Prestidigitation that gets about half of it.
He says, “I apologize.”
Veth stands, wiping her hands against her nightgown. “Look, I don’t know what led you to believe that we have the kind of relationship which would make me the one you want to run to when you’re on death’s door, but I’m worried someone punched a hole through your brain along with your guts.”
Essek grimaces. “You saved my life.”
“Begrudgingly! If Caleb knew I just let you bleed out in my house he’d be mad at me! I’m not an altruist, Thelyss.” Essek’s mouth twitches, so very slightly. “Yes,” he says, “I have learned.”
“I want an reimbursement for the potion you’re half-wearing, and I want an explanation. Now.” Essek slumps back against her kitchen table and runs one trembling, blood-streaked hand through his white hair, giving the impression of highlights done by a particularly impassioned hairdresser. It doesn’t suit him.
“Does now mean something different in Undercommon?”
Essek’s mouth draws into a flat line. He says, “I need your help.”
Veth wishes that she hadn’t wasted that potion, because she’s just going to end up killing him anyways. “Let me get this straight. You come to my house at ass and balls o’clock, dying of a mysterious gut wound, you almost bleed to death on my floor after going totally quiet for half a year, and then you ask for my help?”
Essek sighs, and says, “Yes.”
“I’m calling Caleb.”
“No!” Essek stands, abruptly, and then apparently thinks better of it and sways to sit back down. He says, through gritted teeth, “No, you cannot contact Caleb.” Veth raises an eyebrow. “Jester, then.”
“No.”
“Okay, exactly what is going on here? I was serious about those answers, asshole. Why can’t I call Caleb or Jester, who I’m sure would be more than happy to kiss you better. Why did you run to me?”
Essek grimaces, like he’s steeling himself. He begins, “I want you to know that what I’m about to say is not intended as an insult towards you.” Great sign. “I need someone that I know will, ah. Hm. I need someone who can be counted on to put themselves first, above me or my safety.”
Veth stares at him, for a long minute. She says, “So, you need a selfish asshole. Why not Beau?”
“Beauregard cannot Teleport herself out of danger. Caleb tells me that you are advancing very rapidly in your study of the arcane.” Veth narrows her eyes at him. “Yeah, I’m not half-assing the wizard thing. You’re telling me that you chose me for whatever this is because I can get out of dodge?” Essek raises his hands up in a half-hearted shrug.
“Okay,” says Veth. “That’s actually fair. What, exactly, do you want me to do with you?”
“I need you to come back with me to Rosohna, to my tower.”
Veth can’t help it, she starts laughing. The look on Essek’s face just makes her laugh harder, until she’s actually wiping tears out of her eyes. “Of fucking course you do. Of course! Has anyone ever told you that you’re a chronic problem? Maybe a glutton for punishment?” His face is impassible.
“There is something I need that I left there. I have reason to believe that my tower will soon be cleared out, and that cannot happen before I retrieve this thing.”
“Fine. Sure. And who was it that punched a chunk out of your stomach?”
Essek’s face does not move, and his voice is very flat when he says, “A Dynasty assassin.”
Veth falls into another round of hysterics. “Of course! You dumb bitch, you absolute asshole! Seriously? Seriously?”
Essek admits, begrudgingly, “It is not ideal, I am aware.”
“Oh, are you? Are you fucking aware, Essek? And you want me to waltz in there with you, into what is most definitely a trap, so you can retrieve some—some arcane trinket?” Essek shrugs again, helplessly. He says, “Yes.” And then, “You can say no.”
“Obviously I can say no, dick. I’m just—I guess I’m not going to. Yes. Okay. Fuck it. I’ll go with you. Okay. Yes.”
Essek’s face turns up to her, as shocked as she has ever seen him. He says, “What?” Veth tells him, impatiently, “You wanted an asshole, you have one. I’ll go with you. If anything goes wrong, I’ll bamph myself out of there and tell everyone what happened to you. That’s why you need another body in there with you, right? A witness?”
The silence in the room is enough of an answer. “And you’re sure that you’re up for this? I feel like most of your blood is currently outside of your body.” Essek is still pale, but he flexes his fingers and says, “Yes.”
“Okay. Give me five minutes to tell Yeza what’s going on. I wouldn’t recommend coming with me, on account of the whole warden-prisoner thing you guys have going on. God, you’re such an asshole. I can’t believe I’m doing this. Alright, stay here.”
Veth, very carefully, does not look back at him when she begins to ascend the stairs. She has no desire to see what his face must be doing, while her back is turned. She suspects that it will be terrible.
Essek’s tower is trashed.
No longer the impersonal lair of a genius with some obsessive-compulsive tendencies, his sitting room looks like he let Luc have the run of the place for a week.
Jewelry stands and boxes spill their guts like silver intestines set with huge gems, tangled in shining heaps on the ruined floor. There is an important-looking orb cracked completely in half, revealing a hollow center rimmed with gold—little shattered bits of it dust the ground and make it dangerous to walk upon. Fine items of clothing have been dragged out of wardrobes and now drape on overturned furniture, looking for all the world like expired bodies. Books have been torn, thrown about, and dog-eared.
“What,” says Veth, “the fuck?”
The owner of this mess stands with one hand on his mouth, and the other on his abdomen where there was very recently a cookie-cutter hole. Essek says, “None of this should be here.”
“Well,” says Veth evenly, “obviously it is. Any chance you have a pet hurricane that could’ve done this? A house tornado?” Essek ignores her, drifting to the center of the room. He bends down and picks up one half of the orb, from which a gentle stream of gold dust trickles steadily. “This was in my laboratory. And this,” he gingerly lifts up a sadly discarded book, laying page-down and crumpled, “this was in my library.”
He shakes the book out gently, and then smooths over the cover with his hand. “My first thesis. A Treatise on the Adaptability of Dunamis. Total arrogant drivel. I was very proud.” Veth gently overturns one of the jewelry boxes with the toe of her shoe. “And I’m guessing that you didn’t keep your opals in your living room.” Essek frowns and shakes his head, to say, no, I did not.
There is a moment, before he states, flatly: “Someone has gone through my tower, and systematically destroyed anything valuable or important enough to me that there was a chance I had an arcane protection on it. This was why I was alerted about something happening in my tower. They triggered my alarms on purpose.”
“Wait a second. You’re telling me that you have traps on everything above a couple of gold pieces?”
Essek makes a vaguely offended face at the word traps. “My wards don’t do anything to the meddler, unless they have stumbled upon something very sensitive. I am simply alerted to the meddling. Then I am at liberty to dispense my own retribution.”
Veth puts her hands on her hips. “And if, when you had us over for magic and breakfast, everyone downstairs had stumbled upon something very sensitive?”
“Impossible. My laboratory was locked six ways to Whelsen.”
“Your underestimation is insulting. What would have happened?”
“Some light densification of your circulatory system.”
Veth kicks him in the shin. He hops a little, but it seems like he’s doing it more to appease her than because he’s in any significant pain. Veth wants to kick him again, but says instead, “So, basically, someone wanted you to come back. Someone knows that you’re alive, and wanted to lure you back. And now you’re, well. Back. Shouldn’t we leave?”
Essek’s eyes narrow. “Not before I get what I came for. You are, of course, free to leave whenever you’d like.”
“Ugh, you suck. Obviously I’m staying, dick.” Essek’s face cracks open a little bit, which Veth has to look away from before it upsets her. “You go find whatever, and I’ll chill out here. Do some light reconnaissance. Then we can get outtie.”
“Thank you, Veth.” Essek’s voice is so perfectly sincere that it pisses her off. Oh, she will be kicking him again, with a swiftness.
“You know, I have no idea how Caleb stands you. Sex in that house must be a fucking science experiment.”
She can almost hear Essek smiling, the asshole, as she storms off to where she remembers the kitchen being. It’s much neater than the main sitting room, sterile in the way that only a kitchen hardly ever used can be sterile. There is a fine frosting of dust coating everything.
Something bright catches Veth’s eye, and she crosses to it warily. Under the same blanket of dust as everything else in the room, a consequence surely of Essek’s yearslong absence, there is a pink paper box, with a dark smudge on the side that could be writing. Veth reaches up and wipes the dust away from that smudge, revealing a few gaudy words in curlicue cursive font.
The Softer Stoneforge Bakery.
“No,” breathes Veth. “Oh, you piece of shit, tell me you didn’t.”
She tears the box open, and is greeted by a wafting cinnamon-sugar smell. There are rows of sweetbreads, cookies, muffins, cinnamon rolls dripping frosting, a truly disproportionate amount of black moss cupcakes marching in neat lines. Veth reaches out to touch the frosting on one of the cupcakes, and a soft peak of it comes away on her finger.
Essek has not been to his tower in years, since before he left for Eiselcross the first time. This box has been on his counter for all of those years, long enough to accrue the same inch of dust as everything else here. And yet, the goods are fresh. Veth gently breaks apart a cinnamon roll, and finds the inside still warm. She, against her better judgement, nibbles on a piece.
It is soft, and warm, and completely fresh. It tastes like sugar, and cinnamon, and the faintest, bitterest edge, like ozone. Dunamis.
“Oh,” says Veth, aloud, to no one, “you asshole. When did you buy these? Was it because Jester complained about your cookies, or was it when we found you out? Did you really think we would drop in for breakfast again? You kept them fresh, you fucking dick, just in case? You beautiful fucking idiot, why do you make it so hard to hate you?”
Veth drops the roll and kicks the box away, to skid mournfully across the dust-covered tiled floor. She digs around furiously in her pocket for a small piece of wire, raising it to her mouth and spitting, “Thelyss, get your ass down here. We are having a discussion about your perpetual fucking cookies. You better reply to this message.”
On the other end, there is a weird breath, and Essek’s voice saying something in Undercommon. He pauses, as if listening to someone reply, and then answers. His voice is shaking, tense, but focused. He sounds scared shitless.
Veth raises the wire again in the vague direction of upstairs, already backing out of the kitchen, and says, “I’m coming. If you’re in your lab, cough once. If you’re in the library, cough twice. If you’re in your room, clear your throat. Stay calm. Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it. Reply to this message.”
The spell cuts in on Essek still speaking in Undercommon, but he catches his breath and coughs, discreetly, twice. He pauses, as if unsure, and then coughs twice again. Veth drops the wire and sprints for the stairs, taking them two at a time, loading a particularly nasty bolt into her crossbow. When she reaches the landing, she sees that the door to the library is cracked, a thin sliver of light cutting across the gloom of the hallway.
Veth ducks to the side, hearing voices float out from the crack in the door. There is one that is identifiable as Essek, and then another, a woman. They are both speaking in Undercommon, of course. Veth curses silently and digs around in her bag for her little baggie of soot and salt, and smears some over the lobe of her right ear.
There is a weird ringing sound, and then the Comprehend Languages snaps into effect, which is vaguely nauseating. Veth crouches next to the door, hand on the trigger, and listens.
Essek’s voice: “—beg of you.”
The woman: “Thelyss does not beg. Who are you now then, I wonder.”
Essek: “A fool, as I have ever been. If Thelyss does not beg, then do not call me Thelyss.”
The woman: “No, Essek, that is the problem. You are Thelyss, still. And this is why you are yet my responsibility.”
Essek: “Your responsibility to do what with? To deal with me?”
The woman, who Veth is beginning to think of as a real pill: “You are a fool, but you are no idiot. You know what must happen next. Do not shame me. Do not shame your brother. Do not shame your father.”
Essek: “I gave up on not shaming you a very long time ago.”
The woman: “Evidently.”
There is silence for a long, long moment. Then, Essek says, very quietly, “If I come with you now, will you do your best to, ah. To expedite the process?”
The woman sighs, and says: “For all of the pain you have given me, I will still do this for you. My heart is yet weak. Perhaps I am not yet truly worthy of the title of Umavi, and still I will do this for you. There will be pain, but not as much as there could have been. I swear to you, son of my body, it will be swift.”
There is a metallic click as Veth cocks her crossbow and nudges the door open a smidge wider with the tip of the bolt, saying a quick prayer to the god of greased hinges that Essek doesn’t have a rust problem in his tower.
Through the widening crack, the woman is finally revealed to be a tall, graceful drow with deep violet skin, five million layers of white clothing, heavy braids that ring around the crown of her head and fall to the floor in ropes woven with ribbons and fillets, and a deeply disdainful expression.
She has one hand out, reaching for Essek, who stands with his hands held halfway up, hovering impotently around his waist, like he can’t decide whether or not to assume a full casting position. One of his fists is clenched very tightly around something that she cannot see. His eyes glance briefly, so briefly, over to the door, and he sees Veth. Veth knows that he sees her because his eyes widen fractionally, and his mouth draws into a little o shape, and his hands raise the slightest degree, tendons flexing. There is an indrawn breath from someone.
The woman whirls around, Essek lifts his hands, and Veth’s finger twitches. She sends a barbed bolt directly into the white-swathed chest of Essek’s probably-evil mother, on accident, which will not go down as one of her finest moments.
Except she doesn’t, really, because the bolt is now hovering in midair, like it’s sunk into an invisible wall between Veth and the horrible terrible no good very bad Thelyss family reunion. Essek has his hands flung fully out now, fingers curled into a somatic that Veth doesn’t think she could replicate if she tried, something deeply dunamantic and complicated.
The woman says, softly, “You told me that you had come alone.”
“I did,” says Essek, quaking, “I do not know this halfling.”
Veth realizes with a start that, even if Essek’s mother had seen the Nein in court at any time, she would only ever have seen Veth as a goblin. Essek drops whatever he’s done to the bolt with a harsh breath, and it clatters pathetically to the floor. He lies, through his pointy little teeth, “an unfortunate looter. I am sure that she will be running now. Let us not become distracted from our business.”
Veth remembers inviting Essek over to dinner, remembers crowding around him at the loaded table. Do you get lonely, Essek? What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done, Essek? What’s your mother’s name, Essek? He had said, Deirta Thelyss. She is the Umavi of my Den.
Essek makes frantic eye contact with Veth, a burst of exhausted panic when he sees that she is not running. He incinerated one of those fucked-up screaming things in Aeor, when they were paired up. Veth had told the rest of the group, Essek saved me. Why had she said that?
Deirta Thelyss looks remarkably uninterested in her. She probably could run, even if Deirta had the ability to Counterspell. Veth thinks that Essek would probably Counterspell the Counterspell, in the interest of saving her, which wouldn’t earn him any favors before his execution. But, still, she could run.
It had been Veth, in the end, that had said, welcome to the Mighty Nein.
Veth stands her ground and tells Essek’s asshole mother, “You’re not going fucking anywhere with him.”
The Umavi raises one perfect eyebrow in time with a perfect hand, and a bead of something dark flickers between her pointer finger and her thumb. Veth cocks the crossbow again and points it dead at her head. She says, “Bring it, bitch.”
That little bead of energy pulses and jitters, swelling in little whumph-whumph-whumph patterns of energy. Veth has the briefest moment to consider that the way she’s going to die is spaghettification at the hands of Essek Thelyss’s evil mother, before a black bolt of lightning strikes Deirta in the fine-boned wrist.
She hisses and the bead dissipates along with much of her arm-skin. The Umavi seems to forget Veth entirely, turning on her son, who still has his hand outstretched.
Essek says, “Veth, go,” and Veth says, “Fuck you, I’m not going,” and he says, “Then get out of the way,” which Veth does hastily as a ripple of artificial gravity hurtles towards them both. She scoots her happy ass behind a sofa and just watches.
Veth has seen wizards fight. She is a wizard that fights, on occasion. She’s seen Caleb liquify people and densify people and blow people sky-high.
Veth, however, has never seen two expert dunamancers go at it.
Immediately, the tower library is fucked beyond repair. Essek and his mother duke it out in a storm of swirling paper, splintered wood, and spattered ink, hurling Gravity Sinkholes at one another.
At one point, Deirta seems to flicker in and out of existence, and reappears within range of Essek’s next attack, which Veth suspects means that Essek is pulling out the Temporal Shunt stops. Caleb gave her that one, a hand-me-down of a hand-me-down.
Essek is vicious, teeth bared, snarling. Veth hasn’t seen him this out of it since Aeor. If he has any compunctions about turning his mother into a sanctimonious pretzel, it doesn’t show on his face. Of course, this might be helped by the fact that she’s doing her level best to murder him in turn.
The thing that he’s been holding in his left fist the entire time flies across the room on his next spell, accidentally flown from somatic-happy fingers. Essek takes a precious second to whip his eyes around the room for it desperately, before getting caught in the gut by a concentrated beam of light. Veth remembers how, just an hour ago, there had been a hole in that gut. If he keeps this up, he is going to lose.
Veth shouts above the crackle of gravity, “Essek, we need to go! I can get us out, if you can get to me!”
Essek screams, then, hoarse, and rakes his hands down and throws them out, and his mother judders for a minute before, abruptly, blinking off of this plane of existence. There is a sudden quietness as Veth and Essek are buffeted by gently fluttering sheets of paper, until Veth regains her senses and shrieks, “Did you just Banish your mom?”
Essek has already fallen to his hands and knees, scrabbling around with searching fingers along the floor. He says, desperate, “We only have a minute, help me look.”
Veth’s voice is growing steadily higher. She exclaims, “Look for what?”
Essek is muttering to himself furiously, crawling around on his hands and knees, peering under ruined furniture. Veth doesn’t have Caleb’s sense of time, but she knows that they’re pushing up against that minute, and Essek is still not done looking for whatever it was that he came here for.
“Essek,” says Veth, sharply, “I am not telling Caleb that I left you to die here. Come on.”
Essek looks up at her, and the expression on his ragged and bloodied face is horrible. “Whatever it is,” Veth tried again, more gently, “it’s not worth more than your life. Come on, asshole, let’s go.”
He makes a terrible caved-in kind of sound, then, and regains his feet. Essek stumbles over to Veth, who fumbles around in her pockets until she comes out with a token to one of her safe Teleportation spots. She doesn’t even care where it takes them, just as long as they’re decidedly not here.
There is a pop and Deirta Thelyss emerges from wherever Essek had Banished her to, looking bedraggled and angry as hell. She advances, one hand held out menacingly. She hisses, “You are no son of—” and then she is gone, and so are they.
Veth and Essek are spit out in Caleb Widogast’s living room.
Caleb Widogast, who is for some arcane reason fully dressed at the ungodly hour, jumps about a foot in the air and almost fireballs them to death, from what Veth can decipher of his half-completed somatics.
He breathes, “Verdamnt,” and then takes two unsteady strides toward them and pulls them together in a bone-crushing hug. He says, hoarse, “Yeza was so worried, he walked to the Cobalt Soul to beg a message off of them, to Beauregard. Beauregard got the message to me about five minutes ago. I was just getting my things ready to come after you.”
Caleb releases them, as harshly as he had embraced them. “Why did you do this? Under what— I cannot even—”
“It was a waste.”
Essek’s voice is so miserable that for a moment Veth is transported back bodily to a ship’s hold in Nicodranas, a drawn-out confession. “I put Veth in danger, and I did not even get what I had gone for. It was a waste.”
Neither Caleb nor Veth seem to really know what to say to that.
Veth says eventually, for lack of something better to say, “Your mom sucks dick and balls, man.” Caleb exclaims, “Your mother?” And Veth says, “Yes, his mother. Laid out a trap for him and everything. Sneaky bitch!”
Essek takes a heavy seat on a moonlit sofa and puts his head in his hands. Caleb crouches down on the floor in front of him and takes his wrists, but does not try to pry them away from his face. Veth feels awkward, all of a sudden, like she’s intruding. Caleb asks Essek very softly, “What did you go back for?”
“My brother,” begins Essek, hitching. “When he was consecuted, he cut a lock of his hair and braided it into a bracelet, in the old style. He gave it to me. I considered it so gauche, so juvenile. I never once wore it. And now I will never see him again, so I thought that it might be nice—” his wavering voice finally breaks, “—it might be nice to have even a piece of him.” He trails off into real sobs, like she hasn’t heard him cry since Aeor.
“Essek,” says Veth, surprising everyone including herself.
“I have brothers. Well, I did. I don’t really know where they are now. They were never kind to me, when we were children. It was horrible. I don’t know. I know that I would never try to Gravity Fissure my son (“Was,” demands Caleb, burgeoning on hysteria) but I don’t know that if one of my brothers turned up on my doorstep tomorrow and told me that he was sorry for how he tortured me when we were kids, I would slam the door or let him in. I let you in, didn’t I?”
Essek is staring at her through his fingers. Veth continues, “I found the bakery box in your kitchen.” His haunted expression morphs gratifyingly into mortification. “Jester would never have left you alone, if she knew that you had done that. You are one tough bastard to hate. I think that you’re going to be alright. I really do.”
“Thank you,” he says, still sniffly, “for helping me.”
“No biggie,” says Veth, who does actually feel like it was verging on biggie-territory. “Just, next time, if you’re coming in hot with a new speed-hole, drop a Sending in advance. I opened the door to your medical situation in my skimpiest nightie.”
Caleb holds up his hands in a time-out gesture. “Hold on, what is this about a speed-hole?”
Essek melts, just a little, into the circle of Caleb’s arms. He says, a little pathetically, “Can we just talk about it in the morning?” Caleb meets Veth’s eyes over the crown of Essek’s head, mouths, thank you, Veth the Brave. She flashes him a thumbs-up and one of the little hearts with her fingers that Jester showed her how to do.
Caleb turns into Essek, murmuring something so low in his ear that Veth cannot make it out. She turns her back on the scene, thumbing the correct token out from her pocket this time. Veth’s going to go home, and look in on Luc in his bed, and sleep for ten hours next to Yeza, and spend all day tomorrow scrubbing her floors. Then, she thinks, she’ll extort Essek for the price of a greater healing potion, with fifteen percent interest.
Digging around in her pocket, she comes across something crumbly. She draws it out to reveal a piece of cinnamon roll, one she must have accidentally nabbed in the rush upstairs.
Veth licks her fingers, and is still tasting cinnamon when she steps through the spell that will take her home.