Interlude Five: Science

Interlude Five: Science

Interlude Five: Science

Sometimes, Josep Scratch hated being an enchanter. Owning an enchanting store was even worse, but that came part and parcel with being an enchanter.

It was a lot of work, which was stressful. His clients were invariably rich, which usually meant noble, and that was stressful too. The work part, though, was the sheer tedium. Sometimes he wasnt even sure if he wanted to be an enchanter.

Josep had grown up in a solidly middle class Wayrest family. He had two loving parents. He performed well at the School he attended. He had mild, forgettable acquaintances, and even a bland girlfriend or two.

He helped his family by taking care of the books for their grain business. They paid him a small, but respectable wage for it. He was fastidious, had a fantastic eye for detail, and found he loved the mechanics of it all, the learning.

He enjoyed figuring out how the grain was grown, and milled, and winnowed. It was satisfying seeing how the merchants operated, when and where and how they travelled, how much they would buy and sell for. He could even appreciate the intricacies of the ledgers, the importance of their precision, both in form and function.

He had another side, though. Secretly, he rebelled against his vanilla life. At nights, he snuck out to listen to poets recite scathing, seditious poetry. Hed go and dance to counterculture musicians, with their racy, fast-paced beats. He even attended a few meetings of a group called The Redeemers, who hoped to make life in Wayrest fairer for all. He never quite understood exactly what they planned to do, but they sounded nice, grand, even, when they spoke.

It was not that he hated his daily life. If anything, it was the opposite. He loved it. But it wasnt fulfilling. He needed more.

Everything had changed when he had manifested an Ideal.

It was on his first Reaping. He had been lying on his back at night, regarding the interlocking, interweaving branches of trees above him: the shapes of them, the curls and snarls, the dots made by leaves. The light of the tiny lamp next to him had cast deeper, flickering shadows, twitching and wavering, and the slightly brighter shards of the night sky behind it all had sent his mind down strange paths. It reminded him of the ledgers, at the family business, the letters that he sent and received there. The beautiful, flowing, fanciful scripts that the Redeemer poets wrote in. He had manifested Calligraphy.

His family were overjoyed. Not only had they an Idealist in the family now, but an Ideal perfectly suited to his work. It was a real coup.

Josep was not quite so enthused. On one hand he liked doing the books, but something about it made him itch. The dry, banal, repetitiveness of it abraded his soul. On the other, he loved art, in all its expressions, and Calligraphy was an art. It soothed him, though he rarely got to practise it as it was meant to be practised. It was stifling.

The family business began gradually doing better. Simply having an Idealist working for them was enough for merchants to offer them slightly better deals on grain, even if it wasnt a mercantile Ideal. It also meant more people went out of their way to buy from them, even if it wasnt an Ideal of much renown.

It slowly wore him down.

He began sneaking out more, spending more time out and about. He began to turn up to work tired, sometimes late as well. His family began to notice.

They pressured him, in their mild, gentle way. He assured them everything was fine.

Nothing changed. The customers began to notice, so tired was he. His family pushed harder.

He had never been a true rebel. He hadnt the hatred, the pure strength of loathing in his heart for it. Life had been good to him, for the most part. He had no cause for a grudge against the world.

And so he told his parents, told them everything. Well, not everything, but he told them he had been going out nights, carousing, getting into mischief. Just not the details.

They were shocked, of course. He had Calligraphy! Whatever could he want with going out nights? It was unseemly, this addiction to music and poetry and painting! Why, where had their inquisitive Josep gone, the Josep who loved learning things?

It was a good question, one Josep found harder to shake than hed like. He was still young, and the temptation was to dismiss his parents concerns, as young people are wont to do. But they were right.

He did love learning. He loved knowing how things worked, loved understanding the systems that life moved by. But he also loved art, loved music, loved poetry. He was at an impasse.

Late one night, after a truculent confession and teary discussion with his parents, he lay in bed. Thinking. Thinking about how he worked. About the mechanics that made him Josep. He thought for a long time.

Eventually, he decided he had figured the most part of himself out, but that the rest was pointless. He was a human. He had too many moving pieces, too many variables acting on him, too many wants and desires. There was a part of him, or a product of him, that was inscrutable, indefinable. It was the part that drove him to go to rebellious meetings, to like art.

He decided he liked that part too. It was beautiful. It was inspired. It was creative. It was necessary.

He had a sudden epiphany, and with it, he had manifested Enchanting.

If he thought things had changed after his first Ideal, now, they were unrecognisable.

His parents were stunned. His mother fainted from shock, then cried with joy. His father smiled wider than hed ever seen, and told him how proud he was.

Word got around. Within a day, he had enchanters showing up at the family business, enquiring after him. There werent many enchanters in Wayrest, but it seemed they all came to call. He and his parents met them all, each and every one, and listened to their offers.

Enchanting was a lucrative business. More lucrative, even, than alchemy, though that was only due to there being less enchanters about. In some places, Josep had heard, it was the other way around.

Every enchanter lived like a king, even the worst of them. They could command whatever prices they wanted, to extremes. There was always someone willing to pay. Always. And therein lay the biggest problem of all enchanters.

They only had so much time.

It made taking an apprentice, even one that would require years and years of training to become halfway competent, an attractive choice. Even increasing their output fractionally could lead to an exponential jump in income for them. And if they eventually became a competitor? Well, they would be one that hopefully remembered their master fondly. If their master hadnt already retired with a mountain of gold.Visit no(v)eLb(i)n.com for the best novel reading experience

Whats all this? he said, frowning over Joseps tattooed hides.

Josep was glad to have someone interested in his pet project. He told them all about it. The Redeemers eyes narrowed.

Could you do it for us? he asked.

Josep didnt know. It didnt seem quite right. He had planned to tattoo a human, eventually, of course. It was the entire point of the project. But he suddenly didnt think they were interested in the science of it, the art.

He opened his mouth to refuse, and the air in the room suddenly grew very menacing. He realised that he was not the only Idealist in the room.

Agreement poured out of his mouth.

Over the next several months, he tattooed people.

At nights, they would come to his house, clandestine, and he would work through til the early hours.

He was ashamed to say, but his first couple of tries didnt work. The Redeemers were unhappy. They threatened him. Luckily, he soon produced a working hardness rune, tattooed right on a mans chest.

From there, his reservations faded. It was working! He had gotten it to work! Now, it was time to refine.

He tried different runes, different iterations, until they worked. The Redeemers no longer cared about his failures, now that they had seen proof it could work. They wanted hardness, durability, and strengthening runes, on all their members. He had his work cut out for him. They had many members, it seemed.

The work soon began to grate on him. He was tattooing the same handful of basic runes over and over. They worked, sure, but this tedium was exactly what he had been trying to avoid in the first place.

And so he began to experiment.

He tried self-repair runes. They didnt seem to work. The Redeemers didnt care, so long as the rune they were attached to still worked, which they did. But it irked Josep. It was a mystery.

Put a self-repair rune on a sword, and if it got nicked, it would slowly repair the blade. Put one on a human arm, and if it got cut, it did nothing.

Suddenly, inspiration struck.

When the Redeemers came that night, he linked a healing rune to the ones he was tattooing. Then he asked the woman to test it. She shrugged, and made a small cut on her arm.

It had healed. But the healing rune had faded immediately, and was useless.

It was a failure, but Josep was excited, because it was the good kind of failure. The kind that made for progress. His mind began to spin through possibilities again.

He tried different healing runes, bigger ones, more intricate ones, separate ones, any kind he could think of. They all produced slightly different effects, but they all shared one common flaw. After use, they failed and broke.

He refused to give up, and the Redeemers had no shortage of willing subjects. He figured he must have tattooed at least fifty of them by now.

One fateful night, it finally worked.

He combined a self-repair rune and a healing rune. It was that simple. Or rather, simple for an enchanter.

The new rune worked exactly how he had imagined. When the man he had tattooed took an injury, he slowly healed. The rune didnt fade. And most importantly, when he made a small cut on the tattoo itself, it slowly repaired itself.

Everything worked slowly, but it worked.

That was when his door exploded inwards.

He found himself pinned to the wall by invisible bonds. The man he had been tattooing, and the other Redeemer that had accompanied him that night, both lay pinned to his floor, bleeding profusely from lacerations all over their bodies. Josep watched through wide, terrified eyes as the tattooed mans wounds slowly began to close, then stopped halfway. He was dead.

Someone approached him. Someone in a cloak so pale green it was just a sliver away from white. They walked right up to where he was pinned against his own wall, stopping a foot away from his face. They were bedecked in silver jewellery, bright chains hanging from their neck, festooned with pale green stones.

Their subordinates, also dressed in that same pale green, rushed through his house. Two of them confirmed the deaths of the Redeemers.

The Inquisition.

Youve been up to no good, Josep Scratch, the inquisitor said, in a voice that could have been echoing from an abandoned polar mine shaft. He shivered.

Take him, the man said, and Joseph was taken away. One of the men smashed him over the head with something hard.

He blacked out.