Chapter 503 – Blue Glow

“There was a blue glow,” Dav answered slowly. “I couldn’t make much out but I thought I saw someone … a shoulder and a head and most of an ear.”

“An ear? What sort of ear?” Revanos leaned forward eagerly.

“A wolf ear or maybe a cat ear, on the top of the head?” Dav didn’t sound at all confident. “Similar to Ci’an’s but not quite the same. The side of the head poofed out oddly, too, like one of those big fluffy cats.”

“Or a fox,” Revanos muttered. “Was her fur white?”

Dav shook his head. “I couldn’t see that well; it looked blue. So I guess it could have been?”

It was obvious who Revanos had to be assuming Dav saw: Lady M’Beja. He hadn’t described her to him and a white-furred fox was not the image Sophia would have assumed. Despite that, she was the only person he would be looking for so that had to be who he was guessing. “Was she next to the door?”

“Close enough that most of what I could see was the side of her head,” Dav agreed. 

“Was she facing the door or away from it?” Revanos asked. When Dav shook his head, he clarified, “she wears a glowing blue pendant at her throat, it’s probably the light you saw.”

“Then she was facing the door, that’s where the light was,” Dav answered. “I’m not sure how that helps?”

“I don’t know if it does,” Revanos admitted, “but it’s something. Why did she enter the workshop, though? Maybe she’s trying to get back out?”

“Or maybe she just closed the door,” Sophia countered. “As for why she entered … I’m not sure she knew not to. The Eidolon said she treated the note as a puzzle and one she couldn’t entirely read. When you read it that way, it wasn’t entirely clear.”

Sophia wanted to scold herself. Why did she remember that but not remember that the clarity enchantment was inverted to both affect outside the workshop and to cause confusion?

“It’s been fifty years,” Revanos objected. 

“I don’t know how much time has passed inside the workshop,” Sophia admitted, “It might only have been a few seconds since she closed the door. It’s been two thousand years out here; it’s possible that’s only been hours inside, and that would mean fifty years would be, uh…”

“Minutes,” Dav corrected her, “Not seconds. For it to be less than a minute, two thousand years would have to be less than an hour, closer to half an hour. Assuming that time moves at a constant rate, at least.”

“You would do the math,” Sophia muttered. Her words were bitter, but she couldn’t keep the smile out of her voice. That was Dav, after all. Precision mattered to him. “Minutes, then. Long enough for her to turn back to the door, but not long enough to get it open again? Or maybe she couldn’t open it from the inside?”

That seemed more likely. If opening the door from the inside was possible, surely Mimir would have escaped by now. The fact that both Mimirs were in the building might well mean that it was a deliberate trap, and you wouldn’t want your target able to get out just by opening an unlocked door, after all. “There’s no key in the door, so maybe she took it inside and assumed that would get her out? I don’t really understand why she’d close the door … wait. Maybe she didn‘t. Maybe she went inside because no one came out and it closed behind her?”

“Why don’t we ask her?” Dav proposed. “If she went inside, the door can be opened; if we open it from the outside, surely she can get out.”

It sounded way too simple. Sophia could come up with all sorts of reasons it might not work but none that made it not worth trying. If she’d had any realistic hope of solving the runescript another way, maybe that would be a reason, but she didn’t. However much she wanted to say otherwise, she just plain wasn’t an expert on runescripts and she didn’t understand this one. 

She could probably bypass it if she treated it like a ward, but all she’d be doing then would be faking a key. Now that she thought about it, she really should see what mana signature the key emitted; if she knew that, she probably could make a fake key. That was the best way to get past a ward like this anyway - make it think you were authorized. “I want to spend a little time with the key first but after that … sounds like a good idea.”

Being able to fool the ward into treating her like she had a key didn’t mean she could tell the ward to self-destruct safely. While some wards did have features like that, they were rare and this wasn’t one of them. At least, it wasn’t one of them as far as Sophia could tell.

“You don’t have to sound so depressed about it,” Xin’ri told her with a smile. “Just think … once we open the door, you’ll be able to talk to someone who knows a lot about the key and the enchantment on the building. M’Beja can probably explain it all to you and if she can’t, surely Mimir can.”

“That does sound like fun,” Sophia admitted with a grin.

“I knew you’d like it. Now, let’s head back to camp so you can do whatever you’re going to do with that key; do you think you can finish it up today so we can open the door in the morning?” Xin’ri stood and brushed off the dirt that clung to her robe.

Sophia looked down at the key. “I think so?”

The answer turned out to be no. The pattern the key emitted changed with time and in no obvious pattern. Unlike most of the wards she’d seen in the Broken Lands and even here on Arcatiz, the warding on Mimir’s workshop was not easily bypassed. It would take days at a minimum before she could break it and she might even need some tools she didn’t have. Xin’ri could probably build them, but she might need to.

Sophia expected everyone else, especially Xin’ri, to be impatient, but Xin’ri was actually the most understanding of the time of all of them. As she put it, once Sophia solved the key problem, they’d no longer have a confusion problem; they’d be able to separate more. As far as Xin’ri was concerned, that was worth the time.

If only it worked that way.

The first trial of Sophia’s fake key what two days later, and it was a good thing that Xin’ri insisted on being the one to test it, because the moment she walked outside the range of the original key everything went a little fuzzy for her and she thought she was back home, just outside the city where she grew up.

The next trial wasn’t any better. The one after that might have been, but it could just as easily have been the fact that Xin’ri was talking to Revanos about building a better overhang for their fire when she stepped outside the protected area. 

That one gave Sophia some clues, but it also made something else very obvious: a second example key would make the task far easier. Of course, if they had a second key, success would be far less important. There wasn’t a second key anywhere that they could reach; the only other key they knew of was the one Lady M’Beja had, and as far as they could tell, it was stuck inside the workshop with her. 

They couldn’t exactly enter the workshop to get it. If they could, they wouldn’t need it anyway; they’d just pull the Mage out of there. She was the reason they were here, not Mimir, even if the World Tree and the Guide wanted something done for Mimir.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Waykeeper Issvako made it clear that part of the reason Lady M’Beja was at the workshop was to gain information on Gateways, especially the sort of one-sided Gateway they needed to use to get to Terra, Dav’s homeworld. It was enough of a coincidence that Sophia might have thought it was not one if it didn’t make so much sense that the Patron of magic wanted to learn more about magic and happened to get trapped while searching for the same thing Sophia needed in the only place she knew to look. Sophia would have ended up at Mimir’s workshop even if the Mage weren’t there.

After dinner that evening, Sophia gave in to Dav’s request to play Ekkru again. Her mind was still stuck on the keys, so she completely blanked at one point and drew two tiles before she realized she had one that would play. Sophia sighed and put the correct tile out. “My mind’s just not on the game.”

“I can tell,” Dav said as he played a tile off Sophia’s. “What’s bothering you?”

“The keys,” Sophia admitted, even though she was pretty sure Dav already knew that. “I can’t tell if the problem is that they don’t match well enough and I’m missing something or they match too well and the spell is disregarding the second one. I really need another key to see what it looks like, but the only one we know of is with the Mage. Probably.”

“We could search the area and see if it turns up?” Dav offered.

Sophia shook her head. “We tested what happens if the key isn’t being carried; it works if you’re close enough and it still sends regular signals. There isn’t anything like that near the workshop. I checked.”

“Does that mean it’s time to try opening the workshop to get M’Beja out?” Revanos played a tile as he spoke. 

“I don’t … I mean, I’m not sure we can,” Sophia admitted. “The door will probably open if we clear the dirt out of the way first or she wouldn’t be inside, but I don’t know what will happen when we open it.”

“We can go back to the World Tree for supplies first if you think that will help,” Revanos offered. “I’m not familiar with this sort of magic; I would have guessed that it would stop with the door open but I can’t believe M’Beja would walk in if the door was going to blow shut behind her and restart the stasis. So there must be something I’m not seeing.”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen either,” Sophia admitted. “And that’s why I haven’t opened the door. I wanted to have a second key and I think part of the reason for that is that if we have a second key, we don’t all have to be near the door. Just in case. And if something happens to the key, we’ll have a spare.”

She hadn’t thought of either of those reasons until the moment she said them, but something about them sounded right. They were good reasons and they got at the underlying reason she hadn’t suggested trying to open the workshop yet: fear.

They also pointed out just how unreasonable that fear was. Did she really think that anything that would threaten a Patron would be stopped by being a few feet away or even on the other side of the workshop? Would having a second key really help as long as they didn’t enter? 

“Do you think we should try? I mean, we can probably rig up something to open the door without anyone in front of the door.” Sophia glanced in the direction of the workshop. It wasn’t visible through the tent wall but she knew where it was. “I wonder if I can float it over there with a feather? They can’t handle much, but maybe if I get it close first?”

Realistically, she probably couldn’t. She probably couldn’t even turn it with a feather; they just weren’t that strong. It was nice to think about, though.

Somehow, it was far easier to concentrate on the game after that, even if Xin’ri did have to remind her when it was her turn to play.