Children of The Underground

Chapter 5: Thaumaturgy

"Sran-YEHTS! Svente Bogi!"

Drazhek woke up to the sound of Misha cursing. He bolted upright, and saw his partner, her back turned to him. holding a crumpled, glinting mass. With growing horror, he realized that Misha was holding the remains of their brass compass, the one that Misha used to find anomalies. The one that stopped them from walking into certain death.
From over Misha's shoulder, Drazhek saw that the orichalc shell of the compass was intact, albeit a little dented. But the glass dial was broken, and what was once an intricate mishmasm of gears and springs now lay in crumpled pieces, mixed together with the glass. The orchalc needle and the vajra crystal were somehow still intact.

Misha turned to Drazhek. A sardonic smile crept across her lips. "We're not completely screwed without this," she said, holding the remains of the compass out to him. "But we might as well be rowing upstream without an oar. We'd be as old as dirt by the time we reach the Vyrai Gate without The Brass Compass. And that's assuming that we won't get blown to bits by an anomaly, or devoured by some monster."
Drazhek stared at Misha hard. For the first time, he considered the possibility of this adventure ending with death. It seemed far away, an abstraction when he was traipsing through the woods, dodging pits of hidden lightning or pillars of flame that could shoot like geysers from the ground. Even when he faced the vulkolaks, the eldritch spawn of mutated wolves, or the simarguls, bats as big as carriages, with the wingspans as wide as houses.

But if he were truthful with himself, it was because the thought of dying by a monster's tooth or an anomaly's magical discharge were both quick and fantastic deaths. They happened to people in ballads or campfire horror stories. But dying from exposure, or starvation...Well, that could happen to anyone, no matter who you were. It was neither impossible nor uncommon for people to wander into the woods and never be seen again, or for drunk peasants or children to fall into pools of shallow water and somehow drown in them. Even a cutpurse's dagger, stabbing in the dark, was a real enough way to bite the dust.
The other thing that distracted him from death was the way he put his trust in Misha. After all, she did say that trust was the thing that most kept vedmaks alive. And she had been trustworthy. She didn't need Drazhek, or at least that's what Drazhek told himself. Yet she did everything she could to make sure Drazhek came out alive. Drazhek was in love with her, and he knew that could cloud his judgement. (After all, he only knew her for a week at most). But while Misha was tough, cunning, and far from ordinary, she was still only human.

"Misha, can I see that?" He asked her, holding his palm out to her.
"Do you think you can fix it?" She asked. Her voice trembled a little and the thought of helping, the thought of her putting her trust into him, made him a little giddy. 
"No, I can't. But I think I can make something to replace it. You were digging through all those dead vedmaks above us to rescue me. Did you see anything they had made of orichalc?"
Misha pondered the question, raising her eyes towards the ceiling, as though questing for the answer there.

"Yeah, most of them were covered with some orichalc knick-knacks. Do you have anything specific in mind?"

"They just need to be orichalc. Though purer orichalc would be better, I'd take anything for now."

Misha studied Drazhek. This tvastrian boy, with tawny, olive skin, and black eyes burning like coal, seemed now like the spitting image of Svarog, their god of fire and metallurgy. His high cheekbones and hill-slope nose strengthened the resemblance.

"Drazhek, are you going to show me some thaumaturgy?" The playfulness came back in Misha's voice.
"I think I will," he replied. He was now smiling. "Trust is your strongest asset. Isn't that right, vedmak? Well, I'm glad to say you can put your trust into me. But first, give me that Brass Compass, if you please."
Misha pressed the broken Brass Compass into his hands. She discovered that her hands, rough and calloused, were nothing like Drazhek's: smooth, soft, almost girlish in their delicacy. But that was good. Hands like that were great for craftsmen. And even better for craftsmen of magic items.

To her suprise, Drazhek picked the brass needle and the vajra crystal out from the Compass's orichalc shell, then poured the remaining metal bits into a rubbish pile on the ground. Before she could say anything, Drazhek reached into his pack and pulled out a mallet, the kind used by mountaineers to hammer pylons into stone. He brought the mallet down on the orichalc shell, flattening it into a thin, metal wafer. Then, he began rolling it into a metal rod about as long and as thick as a grown man's middle finger. Finally, he took his hatchet, gripping it right below the head, and cut the orichalc rod into three pieces. He tapered the front end of each piece into sharpened points.

"Orichalc bullets?" Misha asked. She was impressed by Drazhek's improvisation, but horrified by the need to make such weapons.

"Orichalc bullets." replied Drazhek. "A real forge would have been better, and in the best case scenario, the ballistics would be shit. But I don't like those corpses on top of that hill. Sure, they all probably died from the fall, and we were lucky to somehow tumble onto an air spring. But they were killed in a zone. And like you said, the dead don't always stay dead in the zone."

"Then it's good of you not to take chances." Misha said. But that's not why you made those, is it Drazhek? This thought plunged into her brain like a sliver of ice. You made those just in case one of us dies up there and we end up turning into upyrs—the corpses of vedmaks taken by the zone, and resurrected into murderous ghouls.
Misha shook her head, driving away these thoughts like buzzing flies. This boy improvised a solution to a problem that she thought would end in a mutual suicide.

She had been right to take him.

"Well, I'm ready if you are." Misha replied. She suddenly curtsied, bowing her head low with feigned deference. "My dearest Drazhek," she crooned, her voice dripping with exaggerated formality "Would you care to join me on an excursion for graverobbing?"

Drazhek was startled at first, but regained his composure. He bowed in response to Misha's curtsy,  so quickly and so sharply that she heard his vertebrae pop.

"My dearest Misha," he crooned back. "It'd be my utmost pleasure."

And so, they gathered up their things and climbed out of the ravine, returning to the top of the hill, on a mission to rob the dead to save the living. And if the dead were unquiet, they'd by silenced by an orichalc slug.