Sapphire Crystalline's Arc

Chapter 12 of 12

Sapphire spread her father's page on the table at The Hag's Wig. The inn was loud with ale and low talk. She smoothed the old paper flat and studied the diagram. Gears, a chair, a coil of lines she could not name. One part sat half-drawn, its edges torn. She could copy the whole machine and still miss this single piece. Build it wrong, and she would waste her one true trail. She had spent a fresh flower, a night as a beast, a crossing of three valleys to get this far. She would not spend it on a guess. A voice cut through the noise. "You are reading a corpse." She looked up. A necromancer without a body stood beside her chair. Green light burned where his eyes should be. She knew him. Vexeron had held a debt over her once and sent her into a cursed keep. She had paid it. His hold on her was gone. But he was here again, and that was never nothing. "The page is torn," Sapphire said. "I cannot read the last part." "Then find someone who built one." Vexeron tilted his skull toward the door. An old man was pushing through the crowd, cranky, gray beard down his chest, robes marked with faded runes. "Him. He moves things through walls for a living." The old man dropped onto the bench across from her. He did not ask to sit. He looked at the page and his face soured. "Mordecai Grimsoar," Vexeron said. "He knows conjuring machines. He is chasing a door he broke. Ask him before he leaves." Sapphire turned the page to face the old man. "Can you read this?" Mordecai leaned in. His finger stopped on the torn part. "That is a return coil. Missing its ground. Build it like this and it reaches back and pulls you with it." He tapped the chair. "You sit here, it does not send a spell to the past. It sends you. No return." Sapphire's stomach dropped. "My father drew it to unmake the curse at its source." "He drew half of it." Mordecai did not soften it. "The ground wire completes the loop. Without it, the coil eats the rider. Your father knew. That is why he tore it off. So no one built it whole." "Then it is useless," she said. "No." He pulled a stub of charcoal from his belt and drew a plain line off the coil, down to a base. "That is the ground. Simple. He hid the safe part, not the hard part." He stood. "The wizard Whitestone owns the rest. Go take it back." Sapphire stared at the finished coil. She could read the machine now. Every gear, every wire. She knew what to build and how to survive the chair. She folded the page. The last piece she needed sat in Aldric Whitestone's locked tower. And he would kill her for it.