The Past
Imbibing ghostwine allows the drinker to detach their own soul from their body and walk the physical realm in ethereal form, for a time. This is a dangerous endeavor as, without protection, their body is left vulnerable to things that might wish to possess it. The wise necromancer only partakes of ghostwine only when their physical body has been afforded adequate protection. The duration of their ghostly state depends on the skill of the necromancer who prepared the concoction. If the drinker possesses runes of magic, they are still able to utilize their runes of magic as the Cardinal Runes are imprinted upon the soul, not just the physical body. However, users are warned that while in this state, they are just as vulnerable to the powers of a necromancer as would be any other ghostly or spiritual entity, perhaps even more so.
"What's that?" Ava asked as he flipped the page.
"Homework." He set the book aside, having read as much as his mind could properly handle for the moment.
"You want to try now, Oren?"
Cuvindas. Eight days from waking with a hole in his spine and Ava watching over him. "You want me to go out, Oren? Maybe easier for you alone..." He shook his head.
"No. Stay, doesn't matter." He settled back in his seat, pulling a knit cap down over his ears. One of the books said the body got cold as death. He stared at the bottle glowing faintly in his lap, another gift from Galeas. He wasn't really seeing it; the light reminded him of the reflections off that star dagger from the shop back home. He blinked, then looked up to where he had pinned Ava's gift through the hole in its center.
He closed his eyes.
He drank the thing down like a shot of hard liquor. It burned ice down his throat and into the pit of his stomach and he instantly shivered. In the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past him. Symbols, faces, a blurred mandala of visions—he didn't know what was his wonky runes trying to reorder his mind and what was the ghostwine.
Please, he prayed, Grimlord...
Then everything went gray.
Now.
The gray expanded from within him and flowed, flowering for him, an origami trick. He was here, he was home, he was somewhere else entirely or perhaps distance just didn't matter for ghosts the same as for ordinary folks. And somewhere he was laughing in a white-painted loft, distant fingers clutching the empty bottle, tears of release streaking his face.
He had always wanted to be dead. This was the closest he had ever come.
*~*~*
Ava was gone when he came back into his body, and the loft was dark. He checked the clock and saw that five hours had passed. From what he had read, that meant some potent ghostwine. He got up, set the bottle aside, and collapsed on the bed, pulling something of Ava's over his head. He was cold, but not shivering. That might be a problem, though hypothermia was rarely a problem down in Cathena City. He was no longer in Cathena City, didn't even know where exactly he was. Distance mattered less when one was only a spirit.
There was a knock at the door. He ignored it.
There was another knock at the door. Then the sound of someone fiddling with the lock. Or picking it. Though his survival instincts thrilled with alarm, he couldn't force himself up. But he pulled the black silk off from over his face, expecting Galeas or Ava or someone come to kill him good and proper.
"Myshala's teats," said a hoarse voice, "I know that bitch can see in the dark..." A squat figure stepped in and closed the door. "Turn the lights on, all right?" Oren flopped his hand toward the nightstand and turned on the bedside lamp.
"I'm the Phergus," said the Phergus, and made a warning face at him.
"Oren."
"Pleased to meet you, I'm sure. I'm doing some inventory for your boss, it looks like." He fished a pack of cigars from his pocket and lit one. The smell of tobacco filled the room. He crossed to the table and glanced at the empty bottle of ghostwine. "Will get you more of that, but here's your problem, kid." He took a filthy envelope from inside his jacket, flicked ash on the floor, and extracted a strange iron ring on a leather thong. Mists-damned artifacts," he said, tossing the thing down on the table. "We'll get in, but there's no rest for the wicked, eh?" He folded the envelope with great care and tucked it away in an inside pocket.
"Ahh... cold wright iron runeforged ghost sort of thing... Lets you do some things you normally couldn't while under the influence."
"What for?"
"I haven't got a clue. Know I'm outfitting Ava with something else, though, so it's probably going to allow you to connect to her." The Phergus scratched his chin. "So now you get to find out just how tight those pants of hers really are, huh?"
The Present
Aurin sang a song of melancholic joy. At least, he sang the chorus. He ought to have roped Arry into this, being as he was the musician of the family, but the little starlet was acting strange and Aurin was going to have to figure out what was up with him as well. Sometimes he had to keep people and situations separate in his mind in order to focus on any one thing long enough to tackle it.
The ginger wasn't a trained singer by any means, nor did he speak the Lysanrin language if that was what it was, but he had a good enough ear to have picked up the melody and memorize the sounds of the words, at least. He made a self-deprecating flourish with his hands when he was done and the woman smiled.
"So, as I said, heard it from a Lysanrin orphan." He pulled a face. "Call me a pessimist, but my money is on them being dead. All the same, trying to help him out with a direction to look, at least."
Her handsome face was thoughtful, but she was quiet. Sometimes quiet made him nervous; this was one of those times.
"I can... sing it again, if..."
The woman smiled and shook her head.
"No, I've got it." She winked. "Wouldn't be good at my job if I couldn't memorize music and quickly." That said, she took out a leaf of blank tablature and quickly scored out the melody, humming it softly as she did so. Aurin watched, bemused, as she then wrote down the lyrics, singing them softly, too. Her first performance of it was infinitely better than Aurin's, but he shrugged that off. He wasn't the one treading the boards at the Golden Peacock Theater; he just kept the money moving where it needed to go to keep things running.
She made a few more notations, explaining a few things as she did. "Based on the musical structure, these are probably where the lyrics separate into words. Hm, now I can find a translating dictionary... Only a few scholars speak their language with any degree of fluency, though I can imagine Lysanrin learning songs by rote and not knowing what the words mean. Inandoth, some call it. Akiroth, others. After the fall of the Clockwork Empire, there was a continent-wide attempt to destroy it entirely. Kill the language, kill the culture; at least, I believe that was their intent."
"Salt the earth," Aurin said.
"Indeed."
"Well, this ought to keep me busy for a few days, Master Kavafis. I'll send word to your office at the theater when I have anything of value to share. I must say, I'm pleasantly surprised the new impresario of the theater likes musical puzzles."
"Thank you, Mistress Krajewska," he said, standing. She did too. They made all polite noises and gestures until he was on his way.
He hoped she brought him something useful. His investigation on Yshvold's behalf was at a dead-end otherwise. He could go sing it at any Lysanrin who would allow him close, but that didn't actually seem productive. In any case, he put a pin in that as it was on her plate so he could focus on other things—like ogling the fresh-faced young scholars of the Academy rushing from class to class. He smirked like a fox in the henhouse.
