Jonathon Worthington: Strangelight Investigator

Case #18: The Mystery of the Purloined Past (Chapter 8)

The blue-black smoke bulged outwards from the copper ring, disrupting the rest of the scene we were spying on as it all swirled together into an obscure mess. The cloud gathered together into a foot of solid sword blade that pushed its way out like a shark against a flimsy fishing net. Despite the disruption of the scrying ritual I didn't think we were in any real danger; it was nothing more than smoke after all, no matter how it was shaped.

Lil did not share my comforting ignorance. The smoldress desperately called out several crude phrases in her native language before throwing the stub of the cigar she was smoking to the ground and grinding it out with her bare foot's heel. She spun the controls around the copper circle's circumference before fanning the smoke mirror with her stubby little arms, screaming incoherently at it the whole time, apparently trying to get the cigar vapors she'd been controlling to disperse.

The cloud held on stubbornly to its sword-shape for a moment longer as the mechanika portion of the smoke mirror cycled down with a whine. But without Lil maintaining it there was no way for the sorcery to remain focused. I couldn't imagine the reason for her panic; it was just smoke after all!

A very real and very deadly section of sword coalesced from the cloud and fell to the floor at my feet with a thud.

Unlike when Aria had held it before, I had no trouble seeing the sword now; no distortion of sight or sense hid its presence from me. It was a finely-wrought blade, elegant, that had savage runes etched down its length, with a razor-sharp tip and a wicked line of sawteeth sweeping back opposite the slightly curved cutting edge. There was at least a foot of steel lying on the floor of the shop, severed at its mid-point from the rest of the sword with a cut so clean and perfect as to defy belief.

"She ... she could have come through the smoke mirror?" I managed to ask.

Lil was panting with exertion, nose bleeding at a steady pace. It was second nature for me to pull out my handkerchief and offer it to her, which she gratefully took and used to staunch the crimson dribble. "Well, what did you expect? If someone thumps your noggin through a window you'd smack back too, wouldn't you?"

I'd never encountered a valid form of scrying before, as all who I'd met who claimed to possess such abilities had been charlatans of one variety or another, so I didn't have any valid basis to judge Lil's utterance on. But if what she was saying was true then the bogrin's device had not simply allowed us to spy on the actions of other people.

It had opened a portal through the fabric of reality.

"Do you have any idea how insanely dangerous that was?" I breathed with terrible wonderment. I toed the steel sword section away from me and carefully rose to my feet, my eyes locked on the bodged-together apparatus that shaped Lil's smoke magic into a form of sorcery that threatened our very souls. "What you've created here is essentially a teleportation portal. No one who uses such magic survives for long."

Lil waved an unconcerned hand

"Works fine," she mumbled, exhaustion clearly beginning to take its toll on her. "Once I had an Infernal start chatting me up through it, but we came to a nodding arrangement."

"Which was?" I asked, my heart beating a little more rapidly. Infernals were creatures more alien than the Orgoth, hungry entities that lived in the mists between worlds, beyond even the afterlife of Urcaen. They had a great and terrible fascination with the souls of mortals. Only the most depraved and desperate of sorcerers ever dealt with them, and not a single one of them escaped the clutches of the ethereal beings in the end. Any attempts to traverse the world by transporting matter or man through teleportation brought the creatures swarming like dragonfish to bleeding prey; only the dragonfish were much more likely to at least leave bones behind when they were done.