Pepper / INK /

what Robert found

Finding the rooms had taken quite a bit of work, and every spell of revelation he knew. It wasn’t that his spells were anywhere near strong enough to actually find it, but the spells reacted with the magic in a certain way if there was a heavy spell on it. And so he looked for that interaction. But he could only use one or two spells before he had to rest from the rebound and gather more magic to try again.

When he finally found it he had to curse Javved as a sneaky bastard. The room wasn’t actually in the house. There was a portal spell that linked the house and wherever he had his back room. For one thing, it faced the wrong way to belong to the house he was in, for another thing it was twice the length of the front room it was concealed in.

The portal set him down in a room that made his head swim. Not only because the sheer amount of magic in it, but also because of the darkness of the spells. There was a lot of blood alchemy here. And he knew there was, it made him feel ill and weak. It made the tattoo the Inkwalker had given him ache, and it made his magic feel rough and wrong. He didn’t know how else to explain the feeling.

But it was at the far end of the room that he found something interesting. A family portrait. Someone he knew. One of the few townspeople he hated. He couldn’t really tell you why he hated Daniel Emmett, but he did, and the feeling was mutual. He’d been banned from he shop for life. Or at least he thought he had. It was hard to think with the dark magic coursing around him, and half-remembered lies and truths swirled through his head like discarded leaves on a blustery day.

He remembered, or thought he remembered, a fight with the owner of that particular shop long ago. He and Inkaru had argued, but he wasn’t banned, he had told Inkaru what he was doing, that he was undercover to catch the murderer of the former police chief, and then they had staged the fight so that the necromancer wouldn’t look too closely, but his memory was as twisted as his magic.

Robert, like many in the city, had found his magic failing, spells he knew like the back of his hand, suddenly rebounded on him for no reason, and his magic failed to work, or was painful to cast. If people had paid attention to history they would have figured it out, but as it was, the hallmarks of Shadow Plague were largely forgotten, relegated to an old wive’s tale.

Robert drew his attention back to the picture. Javved and the other practitioner in the same picture. And another picture, taken, no doubt with some form of magic camera, because the emulsion had started turning silver. There was also one of a man and woman and seven kids, another picture with a woman tattooed up from her chin line down. A bow on her right arm, a quiver on her left, and with a clap she could call them into action. The fact that it was a magic camera was obvious in the Inkwalker photos because depending on the angle it was the woman, and then a darker-skinned woman, with higher cheekbones and long braids.

The Emmett ink came from the south and from the Isles. And so it was that the guardians of both were different. Hers had a lot more sigils and tribals. There was another picture on the other side that was of another Inkwalker. There was a strong family resemblance, but the same magic double-exposure showed a very different picture. His skin was bronze, his ink had a lot of animals, not as many sigils. And his hair was kept back in a copper cuff. Kept long but wrapped up on top of his head, either in a bun or sometimes a turban. The eyes of the man’s picture were much much older. And a slight sneer had developed on the normal picture. The script at the bottom said "Zebulon Emmett." On the girl’s picture it read "Zoe Emmett"

There was a picture with Javved, the two lines down his face when the ink was visible. Of all the Inkwalkers pictured, his was the crudest of the tattoos. As if they were unfinished. And there were the two lines on his face. Something that rarely happened. But he was surprised, there was no double-exposure, and there was a name, nearly scratched out on the frame. But if he squinted he could just read it. "Damien Emmett."

He was investigating one of the small alcoves when he found it, a door marked with the sign for do not enter. The door wasn’t protected, but when he opened it, he found the last thing he ever expected. Ink.

#

Three sides of the walk-in closet were lined with shelves. There was a counter that ran along there too. Moon quartz lined the counters and threw off a blue-white light for the entire room. And the lights, run by small moon sigils added to the effect.

There had to be a couple dozen bottles of ink Each one labeled with the name in the language of its native tongue and dated with the date of capture. A few had ’human’ names attached to it, one of them bearing the name ’emmett." In front of the far wall was a basin of moon quartz, proper enough for the rituals of binding and unbinding ink. It worked better if the entire body could be immersed, but hands would work. There were smudges on the floor and some of the shelves that might be ink and might be blood, might be a little of both.

The inks were almost always in their bottle when they were not being worn, and those bottles were supposed to glow blue-white. But these, they glowed sort of grey. The inks in most of the bottles were not doing well. The room was set up to channel moonlight, but it wasn’t hard to tell that many of the inks were very bad off, they had almost no glow left. No magic. Whatever this sickness was, it affected the inks too. There were one or two inks that were out on a shelf in the other room, and it hit him that those must be the even more rare, solar inks. It wasn’t known if there were as many solar inks as there were lunar, but if so, they tended to stay in their own areas.

Solar inks tended to burn hot, their bottles a bright golden yellow under the light of the sun. These seemed untainted and still glowed brightly. Robert didn’t know what that meant. He didn’t know that the plague only attacked lunar magic. It couldn’t digest blood magic at all, and solar magic could kill it.

In fact, no one in the local area knew much about Shadow plague at all. They knew it formed the thick grey mist everyone called the malaise, and that when it settled heavily in an area even the weather could be affected, but they were just now starting to learn anything about what it did or why.

The far east was much better with the plague than they were. And in most parts of the far east it was said to have been eradicated. Of course, they were also said to use more-- strident measures to make sure it did not spread. There were whispered stories about quarantine and destruction of entire towns to wipe out the plague. A route they were unwilling to take in the western states.

The far west didn’t have plague either, but that was because it was said to be almost entirely devoid of magic. Or at least of people who understood how to use it. They’d never heard of a place that didn’t have magic, but a place where it wasn’t ever used because no one understood it, that they could wrap their minds around. And that was what they were trying to prevent here.

Robert didn’t know how long he had stayed in the secret room but finally he thought he should leave, so he walked back to the portal and went through, remembering to straighten both pictures before he left the house. He had to get home, he had to tell his son.

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Next Chapter: What the Steward said