The Aquamancer’s Secret - Part 3/3
A flaming pile of ledgers lit the room with flickering shadows.
Ilyan’s Secret
A flaming pile of ledgers lit the room with flickering shadows. Ilyan was backed against the far wall, the tall pyromancer in his face. The shorter pyromancer stood monitoring the burning pile.
Taliana charged.
“We’ve got company!” the shorter pyromancer warned, spinning to face her.
Taliana hefted the bag of powder and threw it. Normally it would be an impossible throw for her, over twenty feet. But with ability and strength coursing through her veins, it soared across the room, missing the shorter pyromancer by a few inches and instead crashing into the burning pile of ledgers.
The pyromancer laughed. “You missed.”
“That was haeber nitrate,” said Taliana.
“What?”
The bag exploded.
The shorter pyromancer shielded his face as the blast knocked him off his feet and sent him crashing into a mixing crucible.
Taliana charged the tall pyromancer, leaping effortlessly from one table to the next.
“Taliava, no!” cried Ilyan.
Taliana leapt at the pyromancer, spar of wood aiming for his heart.
He swatted her out of the air with a backhand.
She tumbled across the floor but came up on her feet. Laughing with bravado, she reached into a bucket of tools next to her and pulled out a long bronze knife, normally used for mincing herbs.
The pyromancer drew a sword four times its length.
“You’re no match!” her master cried.
Taliana circled her opponent, her two weapons outstretched. “My master is right, you know,” she said. “You’re no match for me.”
Ilyan smacked his forehead. “That’s not what I—”
Taliana leapt forward, jabbing with her spar of wood. The pyromancer parried, then brought his sword down in a blow meant to cleave her in two. She blocked with the knife, shunting the blow aside easily. Easily? Of course it would be easy! She had agility and strength on her side!
She pressed into close quarters, where her opponent’s sword would be ineffectual. He aimed a kick at her, but she ducked underneath it, then stabbed forward with her spar of wood, aiming for his knee. He leapt upward in a twist, fire trailing in the wake of his limbs, and aimed another kick at her as he landed. This one she also dodged.
“Hah!” she cried. She was untouchable!
“Behind you!” Ilyan shouted.
Taliana spun to see the shorter pyromancer coming at her with a sack. She ducked under a table, threaded her way between two storage jars, then grabbed the far edge and vaulted up to the topside. The shorter pyromancer was peering under the table, sack still in hand. She scampered forward, weapons ready to strike his face as he straightened—
—when the taller pyromancer’s sword caught her square in the waist.
“No!” Ilyan cried.
Taliana flew sideways from the impact, crashing into a scale and toppling with it to the floor. Her weapons flew out of her grasp. She lay on the floor, stunned, struggling for breath.
The pyromancer’s boot appeared in her vision, pinning her to the wreckage of the scale and forcing from her lungs the air she had just managed to gain.
“That was the flat of the blade,” he said. “Try to be smart again, and you’ll taste the edge.” He looked at the other human. “Seriously, Hal? You almost got your face impaled by a snippen.”
Taliana pounded at the pyromancer’s boot with her fists. “I’ll take you both on, you comma-spliced, poorly parsed, dangling excuses for participles!”
The two pyromancers exchanged quizzical glances. “What did she say?” said the one pinning her.
“I believe those were meant to be insults,” said the other. He was standing by the pile of ledgers, extinguishing the flames with convoluted movements of his hand.
“What is she, a deranged scribal student?”
“She’s the old man’s apprentice. I think she overdosed on a confidence potion.”
An audible click echoed through the room.
The pyromancers looked up—and froze.
“Let the snippen go,” came Ilyan’s voice, hard as steel.
The pressure crushing Taliana’s ribs vanished. She rolled over, wheezing for breath, and looked up.
Ilyan stood next to a set of shelves. His hands held a crossbow: cranked, loaded, and leveled.
“Taliania, come over here,” Ilyan said, keeping his weapon trained on the pyromancers.
Taliana scampered through the wreckage littering the floor, until she crouched at her master’s side, still wheezing for breath.
“Now listen up,” said Ilyan. “You two are going to slowly back out the door, exit my shop, and walk to the end of this street. This night never happened, you’ve never met me, and you will never set foot on this street again. Understand?”
Silence.
“Understand?!”
“Hal, you back out first,” said the tall pyromancer.
“Are you—”
“Do it!”
The shorter pyromancer slowly edged his way to the door of the mixery, then turned the corner and disappeared.
The taller pyromancer smiled. “Should have had me go first.”
He raised his hand, unleashing a blast of fire that shot across the room. Ilyan dodged to the side, the fire barely missing him as it exploded against the wall. Before the pyromancer could launch a second attack, Ilyan recovered his stance, sighted down the barrel of the crossbow, and fired.
The pyromancer knocked the bolt out of the air with his sword.
“Taliada, run!” Ilyan said, throwing the crossbow aside.
Taliana stood rooted to the spot, her confidence now replaced with a wave of bewildering confusion. Where was she supposed to go?”
Just as she scampered into motion, the tall pyromancer snatched her by the scruff of her neck, holding her aloft like a kitten. His sword tip appeared at Ilyan’s chest, backing the man into a corner.
Taliana heard the thump of boots as the other pyromancer returned. “That didn’t take you long,” he said.
“Listen up, old man,” the tall pyromancer hissed. He shook Taliana like a rag. “I can tell you care about your apprentice—even more than you care about your secret, or even your own safety. I know that because you failed to produce the crossbow until she was the one at risk.”
“Please,” said Ilyan, his face pale. “She doesn’t know anything.”
“She doesn’t need to,” said the tall pyromancer. “But you do. And you’re going to tell me what you know—before I count to three—or you’ll be getting a new apprentice very soon. One.”
“Don’t tell them, Master!” Taliana squeaked.
“Two.”
The sword tip began to move toward Taliana.
“Rosewood powder!” Ilyan gasped. “It’s rosewood powder!”
The sword tip froze.
“Explain,” said the tall pyromancer.
“Rosewood powder,” Ilyan said, his voice trembling. “It has to be specifically from Emerald Lake, in Mitria. For a strength potion, two parts per hundred. For a—”
“Write it down,” barked the shorter pyromancer.
Ilyan stumbled over to a table, fumbling for parchment and quill. He began scribbling, his handwriting far removed from his normal careful script. “Rosewood powder from the Emerald Lake region,” Ilyan repeated. “It must be from there, and only there. The volcanic mineral composition of the water, combined with residual essence from the Emerald Leyline, imbues the rosewood with a uniquely high titrophilic coefficient. A precise dilution, finely ground, will suppress most common titrofic and antropic side-effects. I’ll write the dilution ratios here . . .”
For several minutes, Ilyan scribbled line after line on the paper. The short pyromancer paced around the room, putting out any last embers or scraps of burning paper that had been knocked about in the fight. The tall pyromancer eventually put Taliana down on a table, though he kept a firm grip on her neck.
“Make sure it’s legible, old man,” said the taller pyromancer, looking at the messy script. “And accurate. We’d hate to have to return to correct any . . . errors.”
Taliana began to cry.
Finally, Ilyan set down his quill with a shaky breath. “There. That’s everything your client needs to know.”
The shorter pyromancer snatched up the vellum, eyes scanning the page.
“Does it look legit?” the taller pyromancer said.
“I already knew he imports rosewood,” the shorter pyromancer said. “Quite a lot of it, apparently, and always from the same supplier. It’s not a common ingredient in potions. I think we got what we need.”
“Good. Let’s go.” The tall pyromancer finally released his grip on Taliana’s neck as he moved over to glare down at Ilyan. “I wouldn’t bother getting the night guard. We won’t be back. And if you try to report us, cases like this tend to get a little . . . tied up in the Pyromancy Guild’s courts.”
“Your kind are disgrace to the name of mancery,” Ilyan said, the spark of defiance back in his eyes.
“You’re welcome.”
The two pyromancers strode to the door.
The tall one elbowed his companion. “Told you.”
“We’re never doing things ‘your way’ again,” said the shorter one. Then they were gone.
Ilyan rounded on his apprentice.
“That was the most asinine, muttonheaded, and addlepated act of lunacy I have ever seen!” he said. “Did the University teach you nothing? Did four months of apprenticeship go wasted? Aquamancy enhances, but it does not make the impossible possible! A strength potion makes a weak man strong and a strong man stronger. But does it turn a snippen into an unstoppable warrior, capable of taking down two highly trained pyromancers? No!”
“I had to do something, master!”
“You downed a confidence potion and charged into battle like a berserker!” Ilyan said. “Did my training fall on deaf ears? A couple drops of confidence can transform performance. But too much, especially in life-and-death situations, can urge people to take insane risks. You could have gotten us both killed!”
The reality of the evening began to catch up to her, and Taliana began to sob. “But your secret . . . I had to . . . yet in the end you still gave it up . . . all because of me . . .”
“Drat my little secret,” said Ilyan. “Up on your feet and go fetch the night watch. I’ll start cleaning up this mess.”
Aftermath
Fetching the night watch proved to be quite useless.
To their credit, they tried. Ilyan was a well-known and well-respected shopkeeper, and an attack on his shop was an embarrassment to their job. They putted around the store, helping him tidy up and vowing to catch the men responsible. But privately, the watch captain confirmed what Ilyan and Taliana already knew: Any investigation would be in the pyromancy guild’s hands, and the guild protected its own.
After the night watch left, Ilyan and Taliana assessed the damage. The locks to both doors would need replaced. Nearly all of Ilyan’s ledgers had been burned. Luckily, most of his recipes were written on baked clay tablets, which had survived the fire unscathed. Most tragic was his triple-beam balance, smashed to pieces in the fight.
“I was an idiot,” Taliana said, as she hopelessly tried to reassemble the broken and bent pieces of metal. “Replacing this will cost a fortune. I’ll work an extra year for free, to pay it off.”
“Don’t be selfish,” said Ilyan. “Stay on another year? And rob another student of their chance for an apprenticeship?”
“Then I’ll pay it back,” Taliana said. “Soon as I have the money, I’ll—”
“It’s not your fault,” Ilyan said, kneeling next to her. “I mean, it sort of was. But you had good intentions, even if your execution was as ill-conceived as a horseradish-eating contest without milk on hand.” He stood up. “I’ll order a new scale. It will take several months to arrive, so in the meantime we will need to double-weigh everything on two separate balances to approximate its precision.”
Of course we will, Taliana thought with a sigh.
Theories and Realizations
Word quickly spread of the attack on Ilyan’s shop. For a couple days, there was a steady stream of visitors—both tourists, gawking at the melted lock on the front door, and many of Ilyan’s loyal customers coming to give their condolences.
For a week or two, there was a great deal of bluster between the city chancellery and the pyromancy guild. Ilyan’s was a well-loved name, and public pressure demanded justice. The guild paid Ilyan a “handsome” sum (two hundred shekels, a tenth of the price to replace his scale, not to mention the rest of the damage) and promised it would investigate. There were some high-profile arrests of various pyromancers in the city, until within a day each had proven their innocence with an alibi and were released. The guild promised that its investigation was “continuously unfolding.” Taliana took that to mean it was written on a piece of paper that was unfolded by a clerk once a month or so, laughed at, then folded and put back in a drawer.
Things gradually returned to normal—except that with the extra time it took to measure everything twice, Taliana had to come to work a half hour earlier.
She did notice one change: Ilyan’s one-armed supplier started coming by more often.
She brought it up one morning.
“You find it odd?” Ilyan responded.
“I find it coincidental,” Taliana responded, watching him for any clue in his facial expression. “Oddly coincidental.”
“Hmmm,” Ilyan hummed.
When it was apparent no elucidation was forthcoming, Taliana cleared her throat. “I have a theory.”
“Hmm?”
“About your secret.”
Ilyan flipped both lenses of his spectacles up to look at her. “You were there when I was interrogated,” he said. “You know my secret now.”
“That’s just it,” said Taliana. She gestured to the shelf of rosewood bottles. “I’ve been here seven months now. I’ve helped you make every batch we sell. Yes, often you send me out of the room as we reach the end of a recipe. But there’s always been batches where I’m present from start to finish. And normally I’m out of the room for only a few seconds. There’s no way you’ve been sneaking rosewood powder into our recipes for seven months without me noticing. Especially since I know you would never add some without weighing it out to the hundredth of a shekel first.”
“Hmm,” Ilyan said, a hint of a smile appearing on his face.
“There’s more,” Taliana said. “I’ve done the calculations. With how much rosewood you said you add to your recipes, you should be only going through a bottle a week. Yet your ‘supplier’ has replaced twenty-five empty bottles with full ones in the last month. Twenty-five bottles in a month? That’s a lot of rosewood powder.”
Ilyan’s smile grew slightly bigger. “So your theory?”
“It’s a ruse,” Taliana said. “A complete and total lie. Rosewood powder is practically useless. But you did a great job of talking it up. ‘Titrophilic coefficient’? That’s a fringe aquamancy theory that was debunked over seventy years ago. ‘Layline interference’? Another controversial theory, popular only among unified model proponents.
“You invented the rosewood powder story as a cover. And I’m guessing this isn’t the first time you’ve leaked it. Throughout the city, several different aquamancers must be buying bottles of the stuff, all trying to figure out the magic ratios that will make their potions as effective as yours. Your ‘secret’ demands they need rosewood powder specifically from the Emerald Lake, and I’m guessing there’s only one source in the city where they can get it—the one-armed korrik.”
Taliana glanced at the bottles of powder. “You need a cover, to maintain the illusion. So the one-armed supplier uses your store as a depot. When he gets a new shipment, he drops it off here. Then as he distributes individual bottles to your competitors, he drops off the empty bottles here and exchanges them for full ones. Anyone observant enough will see him visiting your shop and assume he’s selling you the powder, and lots of it.”
“Impressive deduction, Tapioka,” said Ilyan.
“There’s just one thing I don’t get,” said Taliana. “Of all the substances out there to claim as your secret, why rosewood?”
Ilyan stared into the crucible he was stirring. “Four reasons. First, rosewood is completely harmless. It is one of the few substances that can be added to pretty much any mixture with near impunity. Deceiving my competitors is one thing, but I would hate for any civilians to suffer for it.
“Second, rosewood is known to occasionally suppress common side effects. But it’s completely random. No one’s been able to find any pattern to it. So my competitors go crazy, tinkering with the dilution amounts, getting just enough random positive result to keep them from giving up. Some have been experimenting for decades now.
“Third, rosewood is an expensive ingredient, but not too expensive. Pricey enough to hurt my competitors’ pocketbooks, but not so pricey as to bankrupt them.
“Fourth and finally . . . the supplier agreed to give me a cut of the profits for every rosewood bottle he sells. It’s become quite the source of extra income.”
Taliana stared at him, in shock at how brilliantly manipulative the old man was. Then she fell off her stool laughing.
Roofs and Pudding Cakes
Taliana had found out one of Ilyan’s secrets. Three weeks later, she discovered another one.
Her cousin poked her awake one night. “I found him!” Twigly hissed.
“Not again,” Taliana moaned, pulling the blanket over her head. “Last time, you ditched me, and I almost got killed.”
“Not the pyromancer, you nit-wit,” said Twigly. “Green-Vest Guy. He’s here. At the shelter.”
Taliana sat bolt upright. “What? Why?”
“Don’t know. He’s meeting with the grand matron.” The grand matron oversaw the shelter’s operations. She was a kind-hearted, well-intentioned woman, though the stress of her position often made her irritable.
Taliana followed Twigly until they reached a hallway bordering the grand matron’s office. Twigly gestured to a small hole in the wall where Taliana could eavesdrop.
“. . . mighty good of him,” the grand matron was saying. “I know I say to tell him that every time, but really, we would have to close our doors without his support.”
“I will make sure he knows,” said a voice Taliana recognized as belonging to Green-Vest Guy. “But that’s not the only reason I came by. The benefactor heard about your roof issues. He wanted to know how much you would need to repair the whole roof.”
“The whole roof?” the grand matron said. “Dearie, dearie. I haven’t even sought out a quote for that, it’s been so out of the question. Probably around a hundred and eighty shekels. But that’s an enormous sum. I couldn’t dream of asking—”
Taliana heard the familiar clink of silver in a large bag.
“Here’s two hundred,” Green-Vest Guy said. “If that’s not enough, the benefactor said he’ll cover the rest. Oh—and he said this particular donation is courtesy of the Pyromancers’ Guild, of all places.”
“Thank the stars! I’m sure we won’t need this much,” the grand matron said in between sniffs. “We’ll return any left over.”
“He said that any extra you can use to buy pudding cakes for your residents,” Green-Vest Guy said. “Specifically pudding cakes, mind you. He insisted on that point.”
Taliana smiled, sneaking back to bed. She had heard enough.
An Accounting
Two weeks later, Taliana showed up to Ilyan’s shop with a box of pudding cakes.
“This is quite the surprise,” Ilyan said, selecting one. “Wherever did these spring from?”
“The funniest thing,” Taliana said. “A mysterious benefactor paid for our shelter to buy cakes for everyone. We had quite the party last night to celebrate our new roof.”
“Hmm,” Ilyan said, turning to walk back to the mixery.
“Master,” Taliana said.
Ilyan stopped and turned. “Hmm?”
“Thank you.”
He shrugged. “There’s work to be done. We need three batches of—”
“I wasn’t finished.”
Now she had his full attention.
“My cousin and I have been following your friend, the man in the green vest. It appears he manages a charity fund, receiving donations from well-to-do shopkeepers and passing them along to institutions for the poor.” She shuffled her feet. “We . . . ah . . . may have snuck into his office yesterday and glanced at his ledgers.”
“Hm-mm. And what did you find?”
“Master,” Taliana said. “You are single-handedly funding half the homeless shelters in the city. Half.”
He winked. “Still want me to cut my prices?”
Two-for-One Special
Taliana only had a month left in her apprenticeship when a large crate arrived from Larrisa.
“At last!” Ilyan said as soon as the courier had left. He eagerly opened the crate, which was packed with grain to protect whatever was inside. Reaching in, he pulled out a new triple-beam balance.
“No more double-weighing!” he announced, seemingly even more excited about that prospect than his apprentice. “No more approximations! No more sub-par results! We’re back in business, Talietta.”
Something caught Taliana’s eye. She reached into the crate, fishing around in the grain until she pulled out a second triple-beam balance. “They sent us two!” she said in surprise. She looked at Ilyan. “Did you order two?”
“Of course,” Ilyan said. “That one is yours.”
“M—mine?” Taliana stuttered.
“You’ll need one when you start your own shop,” Ilyan said. “Typically you can get a loan to cover most of your up-front costs, but few bankers will finance a two-thousand-shekel scale that most ‘experts’ would label overkill.”
“But it costs a fortune!” Taliana said. “Two thousand shekels!”
“They’re getting cheaper over the years,” Ilyan said. “And the manufacturer gave me a two-for-one special. I think this one was only seventeen hundred.”
He didn’t get any farther before Taliana wrapped his legs in a hug.
A Question and a Story
The last day of Taliana’s apprenticeship was a bittersweet moment.
Ilyan announced they were taking the day off from both mixing and selling. Instead, they would deep clean. This involved pulling out the contents of every shelf to clean and scrub the wood. The work was strangely enjoyable, and it left plenty of time to talk.
Ilyna grilled her on everything she had learned that year. How to adjust recipes based on humidity, air pressure, and other factors. How to discern which suppliers to trust and which to avoid. The proper instructions and safeguards for even the most obscure potions.
“You have learned well,” Ilyan said after three hours. “And now it’s your turn. Ask me a question. Any question you like.”
“Any question?” Taliana said.
“Any question.”
“What is your secret?” Taliana said instantly.
“I thought you figured that out already?” said Ilyan. “My ‘secret’ is a false front. The rosewood powder, the obscure objects at the front of my store, the rumors—it’s all an elaborate ruse.”
“But what they say about your potions is true,” Taliana said. “They do work better than anyone else’s. More potency. Fewer side effects. I know there’s a new theory going around the University about a ‘placebo impact,’ but that alone can’t explain how well your potions work. You still have a secret.”
It took Ilyan several minutes to reply, as he scrubbed quietly at the inside of a shelf. Finally, he took a deep breath. “Let me tell you a story. I was much like you early in my career. Bright. Intelligent. Cheeky to a fault.”
“Um . . . thanks?” said Taliana.
“I was ambitious, and I worked hard. By age twenty-three, I had my own shop.” Ilyan gestured around him. “This shop. And I did everything to make it succeed. I burned the midnight candle. I took out loans. I never took a day off. Do you remember our discussion about pricing?”
Taliana nodded.
“I relentlessly cut costs until I could offer the lowest price. And customers flocked to me. Business was booming. I was selling hundreds of potions a day. But I had to make those hundreds of potions each night.
“I began to grow sloppy. I didn’t label things carefully. I lost track of when ingredients expired. I skipped calibrating my scales.
“One morning, a customer came for an aroma of sleep. I was all out of ingredients for the aroma, so I offered to make them a tincture instead.”
Taliana felt her gut twist. There was a reason aromas of sleep—which filled the room with a sleep-inducing mist—were strongly recommended over anything ingested.
“The customer agreed. I had to make it on the spot, and other customers were waiting. My recipe tablets were so unorganized, I couldn’t take the time to find that particular recipe, so I went off of my memory. It had probably been two years since I’d made one. I also didn’t want to create a full batch, seeing this was the only tincture of sleep I’d likely sell that month, so I was doing the math to cut the recipe by a fifth. And since I was in a hurry, I skipped the scales and measured only by sight. I figured the amounts were ‘about’ right.”
“Oh, no,” Taliana said.
Ilyan had stopped cleaning now, his eyes lost in the past. “By my best estimates afterward, I added three or four times as much seraphenin as the recipe required. The patient took the tincture that night to help them sleep. The next morning, they were dead.”
Ilyan began nervously fidgeting with the pockets of his coat. “There was an investigation. By rights, I should have been imprisoned and banned from ever practicing again. As it was, thanks to the intervention of the Aquamancy Guild, I only had to pay a fine to the patient’s family. But I was a complete wreck. I had put profits in front of people. In my haste and greed, I had broken rule after rule meant to keep people safe. And someone was dead because of me.
“Never again, I swore. Never again would I lose sight of why I am an aquamancer: To serve. To ease pain. To give strength. To heal injury.”
Ilyan began cleaning again, a new energy in his movements. “I rose from the lowest point of my life with a new commitment: I would go to the greatest extreme, incur the greatest investments, to make my potions as safe, as potent, and as reliable as they could be. For a year, I interned at the finest aquamanceries of the empire, observing their techniques, comparing their equipment, interviewing their masters. Then I completely overhauled my shop. I invested in the finest tools. I designed and built the extensive sorting system that you see today. And I practiced. I practiced over and over again to redefine the meaning of precision.”
He gestured around his impressive shop. “This is my secret, Taliana. I have the finest potions because I have worked nonstop, for sixty-three years, to make the finest potions. But the motive has always been constant: love. Love for my craft. Love for my customers. Love for the lives my potions change. Love for the impact I’m able to have on the world because of what I do. My potions work because I am precise. But that precision is born out of love.”
The old man knelt and placed a hand on Taliana’s furry shoulder, looking deep into her eyes. “That is my secret, Taliana. And now it is yours.”
Ilyan’s Sign (Again)
Taliana lay awake for hours that night, thinking of Ilyan’s words. (Twigly’s snores didn’t help.)
The next morning was a momentous day. Her family was finally moving into a new burrow! Taliana helped them transport their smattering of possessions, but she herself would not be joining them. She was off to a town in the eastern provinces, where she had arranged to take over the practice of a soon-to-retire aquamancer.
(Twigly was setting off on her own, too. Something about a raptor-hunting expedition in the mountains. She still hadn’t returned Taliana’s charcoal pencil.)
After everyone was settled in, Taliana hugged her siblings, her cousins, her aunts, her uncles, and her parents. (What? You didn’t think she had parents just because I hadn’t mentioned them yet? This is a short story. I have to leave out noncritical details.) Then, hauling a cart with a very pricy item packed carefully in grain, she set off toward the docks, where a riverboat would take her to the next chapter of her life.
She chose a route that took her past a familiar shop on Renner Street. Her eye went straight to the sign above the door. It had been newly painted that morning:
Ilyan’s Aquamancery
Potions, Tinctures, & Elixirs
Taliana shrugged. “At least he left the apostrophe curly.”
THE END
Continue the Adventure:
So the secret all along was doing a whole bunch of small things with extreme precision in all of them. In the aggregate it adds up to amazing results! . . .
Or does it? I wonder if that's the story Ilyan tells all his apprentices to throw them off, and his real secret is yet another layer deep, hidden so well, even the story's narrator doesn't know it!