Chapter 248 - The Key to an Unknown Lock

Damien

Month 9, Day 12, Sunday 9:00 a.m.

Damien worked with Ana to shove Sebastien’s somewhat larger frame into the stranger’s carriage, and all three of them climbed in after him. “It is Will-strain,” he admitted, his heart aching with every too-fast, panicked beat. “But you’re not in danger unless Sebastien tries to cast something.” 

“‘M not that stupid,” Sebastien slurred. 

“We need a mind healer, then?” the middle-aged woman asked. At Damien’s nod, she screamed, “To Order Headquarters!” to the driver. “Post-haste, as if the denizens of all the greater hells were at your heel!” 

The carriage jerked forward, and from above came the driver’s frantic ringing of a bell as he in turn yelled, “Make way, make way!” to the rest of the street. 

Sebastien flinched from the noise, leaning away from the woman and into Damien’s side. 

Ana was busy checking Sebastien’s eyes and trying to get him to do simple response tests to judge the severity of the Will-strain, but he wasn’t being cooperative. 

Nat, by contrast, was sitting totally still and silent, her hands fisted together around her dress at the knees, and her face pale. 

Damien was the only one who seemed to notice the destination their supposed benefactor had given the driver. “Undreaming Order Headquarters?” he asked, trying not to let his sudden dismay and suspicion show. 

“We can help,” the woman said. “And there is a mind-healer already visiting today.” 

“You’re one of them?” Ana asked, narrowing her eyes. 

“I serve the Raven Queen,” the woman agreed. “But there is no reason to be alarmed. I wish you no harm, and the other awakened will be eager to help. This is what is best for young Mr. Siverling. I assure you, there is nowhere you can take him where he will be as well cared for and protected.” 

Damien shifted uncomfortably, feeling at his coin purse, which certainly did not have the fifty gold he had promised within. “Could I write you a cheque? Who do I make it out to?” He realized that he didn’t have any cheques on him, either. “Or you could send an invoice to Westbay Manor…”

“Oh, it’s fine,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. 

Damien clenched and unclenched his jaw before forcing himself to speak. “No, it’s not fine. I don’t want Sebastien or any of us racking up a debt with the Raven Queen.” 

The woman shook her head. “You misunderstand. The payment for helping this young man has already been made. It is actually I who is lucky to have been passing by at the perfect moment.” She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Or perhaps it was not luck, but fate.” 

Ana leaned forward and clasped Sebastien’s hands, which were smeared with streaks of dried blood, between her own. “What happened?” she asked. “Were you trying to cast a new spell, or…?” 

Sebastien tried to speak but started coughing violently instead. 

Damien fumbled in Sebastien’s satchel for the canteen of water he knew the other young man kept and then helped Sebastien to drink a few sips. 

“I was attacked,” Sebastien mumbled, his eyes seemingly unable to focus. One was particularly bloodshot, perhaps because Sebastien kept rubbing it roughly. “A spell to wipe my memory and then to keep me from finding out that it was done.” He blinked several times and tried to sit up but was obviously too dizzy to manage. “Wait. That’s a secret. I shouldn’t have told you.” He looked at Nat. “Don’t say anything, okay?” he asked earnestly. “I don’t want you to get hurt.” 

Her chin trembling, Nat nodded gravely. “Are you…going to be okay?”

Sebastien lost focus on her and began mumbling something about how he had half-forgotten, half-remembered, and it was tearing his mind apart. “I—I have to stop thinking. I’m going away before it gets worse.” 

“Wait!” Ana leaned forward until she almost fell off the bench seat. “Who did this to you?”

Sebastien chuckled but didn’t answer. 

It was still late summer, but Damien had gone cold, the hair along his arms rising with goosebumps. He knew of one other instance of something like this. Newton’s family. And he knew who had been behind that. 

The middle-aged woman pulled a potion out of her purse. “Would a deathly sleep potion help? It causes coma for a few hours at safe doses.” 

Sebastien’s eyebrows rose. “It might help. A coma is beyond dreams, right?” 

The woman leaned over and groped Sebastien’s arms and chest, looked him up and down, then muttered a few calculations to herself and poured out three drops from her bottle like an absolute expert, as if she dosed people with the deathly sleep potion regularly. “That should last for ninety minutes.” 

Sebastien slumped to unconsciousness almost as fast as the drops hit his tongue, without even a hint of wariness against this strange woman. 

Nat’s face crumpled as Sebastien’s expression went slack, and she forcibly held back a sob so strong it wracked through her body.

Ana seemed to find the woman’s actions dubious, too. “Who are you?” she asked bluntly. 

The woman was entirely undaunted. “Everyone calls me Mrs. Dotts. You may, as well. You’re Mr. Siverling’s friends, then? If I had to guess, Anastasia Gervin and Damien Westbay.” 

“You know us?” Nat asked. 

“Oh, I’ve read about Sebastien Siverling and his friends in the papers, dear. This must be your older sister.” 

Nat nodded. “And Sebastien and I are friends, too. It’s just that the papers haven’t written about me.” 

“Oh, really?” 

“Of course! We watch street shows together, and we’ve even gone out to breakfast, just the two of us. Sebastien said his favorite foods are all the things with butter, salt, and sugar.” 

Mrs. Dotts lifted a hand to her mouth and laughed like someone in a play. “Ho, ho, ho! It seems Mr. Siverling and I share the same taste in food!”

The young girl and middle-aged woman kept up this pointless chatter until the racing carriage finally arrived, and then Mrs. Dotts took charge and started snapping orders and throwing hand-signs like some kind of spy. “I’ve got Sebastien Siverling in critical condition after being attacked by a botched memetic spell. We need maximum secrecy, as the attacker may still be after him. Second floor only, bring him around from the side door. Call the mind healer up right now. Siverling is currently under the effects of the deathly sleep potion, which will wear off in slightly over an hour.” 

To Damien’s surprise, the Undreaming Order people took only a moment to respond, and some even moved in formation like some kind of trained copper squad. Those in charge seemed to be wearing dark clothing, and though it wasn’t a uniform, all had some kind of rank or achievement pins displayed on their left breast, some more than others. 

As several of them were rushing Sebastien off on a stretcher, the same teenage girl they had met during the most recent Aberrant incident rushed out to meet them. “Oh, gods! It’s Sebastien!” she wailed dramatically.

Damien almost tripped. 

She looked around frantically. “We have to save him!” 

Nat let out a single sob before managing to get her breathing back under control. She glared silently at the older girl.

“That’s what we’re about,” Mrs. Dotts snapped back. “Stay quiet and out of the way if you want to help.” 

Damien flinched as a woman with horrible burn scars covering half her head threw open the side door, her other hand wrapped tightly around the wrist of a scholarly looking man. “Up to the second floor!” she urged. “We’ll get him in the warded box.” 

However, when they finally got settled inside a strange metal box-like room and the burned woman thrust the mind healer at Sebastien, the man waved his hands around anxiously. “This is…beyond my expertise. I work with children who have experienced trauma. I’m not some battlefield healer who deals with blood magic mental effects! You need—you need an expert.” 

“Who?” the burned woman demanded. 

“Um, well, probably Tricia Adway, but she’s employed by the Retreat at Willowdale right now. I don’t know if she does emergency care. If not her, then—”

The burned woman turned to the teenage girl and snapped, “Go, Betty!” 

Betty sprinted off like a long-legged racehorse. 

The burned woman turned to Mrs. Dotts. “Get this healer’s address and go to her home as well. We must cover all bases to ensure maximum speed of retrieval.” She turned back to the healer. “The deathly sleep potion may wear off before someone competent arrives. Is it safe for us to dose him again?” 

“W-well, I wouldn’t. Maybe a mind-stabilizing potion? If you have the funds to afford one, I would recommend it.” 

“Gold is not an issue,” Damien said. 

Ana nodded, tapping one foot impatiently. “As long as it’s definitely safe for someone in his condition?” 

“I think Titus took one when I was little,” Damien said. “I only remember Father was livid, but Titus got better quickly.” 

The healer nodded rapidly. “It shouldn’t have any negative side-effects. It does slow down the thoughts, but it also creates a protective jelly that fills the mind and makes it less likely for wounds to accrue or bleed out. That’s a metaphor, of course—I learned about it in school. It’s like how poor commoners will wear a cast over a broken bone if they cannot afford quicker healing.” He shifted uncomfortably. “To be clear, the potion is not meant to be used for brain injuries.”

The man was at least competent enough that, after accidentally bringing up the possibility, he knew how to cast a divination spell to check for said injuries. He was stymied by Sebastien’s boon for a moment, but with some whispered threats from the burned woman, Deidre, the bewildered man managed to overcome, and eventually announced the mind-stabilizing potion safe.

Another few people set out for all the best apothecaries in the city to try to buy one of these rare potions, and Damien only then realized the remaining Undreaming Order members were watching Sebastien like googly-eyed fish. 

Deidre questioned Damien and the Gervin sisters about Sebastien’s situation, then went to a small but beautiful altar area set against the outside room’s wall. She kneeled and said a prayer to the Raven Queen, but this prayer seemed to segue into making a…report? Then, she sat on the edge of one of the nearby empty bunk beds, took a swallow of potion, and told one of the others to wake her in twenty minutes if she did not arise on her own. 

“What’s going on?” Nat asked. 

Deidre smoothed out her clothes and arranged her hair neatly, almost proudly making sure that her scars were fully revealed. “I have just sent a prayer directly to the Raven Queen. The ability to do so is a great privilege for me alone among her awakened followers. I will now sleep and wait for a revelation. Do not worry, young miss. Everything is going to be okay. Why don’t you go play with the other children down below?” 

Nat shook her head and stepped back towards Sebastien, as if she were afraid someone would forcefully drag her away. Her lashes were wet with tears that had slipped past her control, but her expression was firm and determined. “I will stay.” 

Ana, who had been wiping the traces of blood away from Sebastien’s face and hands, scowled through the metal room’s open door at Deidre. “Are you really just going to go to sleep right now?” she scoffed. 

“Sleep connects me with the Raven Queen, a being who is more powerful than either of us will ever be, and whom I serve,” Deidre bit back. “The kind of being who could solve all of this with a single spell and a bit of blood sacrifice if she deigns to.” 

Ana’s mouth fell open. “Blood sacrifice!?” 

Deidre rolled her eyes. “She would use a goat, or something, and then we could all eat it for dinner. Or maybe thirteen young men all around Mr. Siverling’s age would come down with a sudden case of amnesia.” 

“It’s illegal,” Ana muttered, not bother to disguise her look of distaste. “I don’t care if we get to eat the goat afterward if I have to spend a month in Harrow Hill for it.” 

Privately, Damien thought that both he and Ana would probably Sacrifice quite a lot of goats if it would help Sebastien. Ana just didn’t like Deidre, for some reason. 

Deidre ignored her and laid back with her hands resting together over her chest. 

Unfortunately, after twenty painful minutes of waiting around, it seemed that the Raven Queen did not respond. When Deidre woke, she suppressed a troubled expression. “This matter is up to us.” 

Damien cursed the Raven Queen in his mind, uncaring about the rumors that said she could hear when her name was called. Despite his earlier reluctance to be involved with her or the Undreaming Order, he realized now that he would very much appreciate the assistance of someone so powerful in the mental arts. Surely, as a Westbay, he could offer her something worth her time without being forced to owe her a favor?

The mind-stabilizing potion arrived before the actually competent mind healer. When Sebastien woke, he groaned and whimpered and didn’t seem to see Damien standing on the right side of his bed until Sebastien turned his head far enough to see him with the left eye. He reached up to rub at that eye again, and Damien grasped his hand and pressed it back down. 

A drop of water fell on Sebastien’s arm, and Damien only then realized that he was crying. With shaking hands, he brought the potion to Sebastien’s mouth. 

Sebastien resisted, turning his head away. 

“Trust me. This will help,” Damien said. 

Sebastien let slip a few helpless, frustrated tears of his own, but he swallowed the potion down to the last drop. This seemed to ease his pain somewhat, and while they waited, Damien explained the situation, though he wasn’t sure how much Sebastien understood. 

When Healer Adway, an older woman with long, steel grey hair and midnight-dark skin finally arrived a couple of hours later, she had Sebastien’s situation diagnosed within fifteen minutes. Damien didn’t like the way her eyes widened at first, nor the way her lips thinned afterward. But she didn’t waffle about and wring her hands. 

It took her another hour to set up an incredibly complex spell array, which Damien watched carefully, wishing he could help. “He has already started fixing the damage. Honestly, it’s astounding, and if I hadn’t seen it myself, I would have thought it impossible,” she said. “However, without help, there is no way he will make it before the Will-strain kills him. He already has some moderate swelling of the brain. I will stabilize the situation and aid his efforts.” 

“He’s going to live?” Nat asked, speaking for the first time in several hours. 

“He and I will fight for his life together,” the healer said. 

This was not a “Yes,” and Damien knew that everyone in the room understood that. 

Healer Adway spent several hours that day casting until she reached exhaustion. Her wrinkles seemed deeper and her eyes more sunken as she reported with evident embarrassment that, though he seemed to be asleep, Sebastien was still working to heal himself, fighting for his life. “I would force him to stop, but I’m not sure the strain of pushing himself so hard is any worse than the damage caused by the attack. Either way, we will run out of time soon. I will rest for a while and then return to supporting his efforts.”

Nat did end up going down to the first floor when it got dark, but instead of playing with the other children, she pestered the awakened for information about how the Undreaming Order worked, asking surprisingly insightful questions for a child her age. They were trying to set up for a night service, and she was so underfoot that the workers set her to doing basic paperwork in Deidre’s office. Anything to keep her busy. In part, it was a kindness, meant to keep her mind off of the interminable wait. 

When it grew late, Damien went down and found her and Deidre working side by side with almost identical postures. The sound of fountain pens scribbling on paper filled the room. 

Nat frowned over a ledger. “We need better preservation on the potatoes. We lost three whole bags this week to spoilage.” 

Deidre responded without looking up. “Put in a work order to the thaumaturges with a qualified preservation or cleansing spell.” 

Nat stuck out her tongue as she stamped the paper she had just finished. “How much credit for that?” 

Damien interrupted. “It’s time to go home, Nat.” 

She scowled at him, looking quite like her older sister at that moment. “Are you going home?” 

Damien didn’t bother to answer. 

Ana strode past him and moved to stand over Deidre’s other shoulder. 

Deidre slammed the ledger she was working on shut, stood up, and the two women had a short staring contest. Then Deidre smirked, raked her hair to the side with her fingers, and leaned a little closer to Ana. “It’s time to go home, kid.” 

Nat pouted and stood to leave, but Damien felt that maybe the words had been meant for Ana, who whirled around and stalked right back out again, a faint blush of suppressed anger staining her cheeks.

In the morning, Sebastien was still meditating and working to piece his mind back together. The mind-healer uncomfortably explained that Sebastien should be sleeping at times, too, but that he wouldn’t stop even when she warned him to rest. She couldn’t keep up. “I would force a potion down his throat to knock him unconscious, except he does seem somehow able to manage this insane level of effort. He’s getting better. I just worry that when he finally cannot continue any more, there won’t be a second chance.” 

“If anyone can handle it, it’s Sebastien,” Damien said. He believed it, despite the curdled mass of anxiety lodged in his chest. “If you’re worried, give him more of the mind-stabilizing potion.” 

The old woman hesitated. “It’s two thousand gold per vial. I cannot purchase it on credit.” 

“I’ll write a cheque for it right now,” Ana called, coming up from the stairwell on the other side of the room. She walked over to them, wrote the cheque on the spot, and handed it to one of the Undreaming Order’s awakened. Then she nodded to the healer, grabbed Damien by the arm, and pulled him away. 

When they had reached relative solitude on the other side of the room, she spoke. “Do you have any ideas about who did this to Sebastien? I haven’t been able to sleep, and I’ve been thinking about it all night. He was attacked with blood magic bad enough that it could have killed him. And whoever did it is likely still out there. They’re powerful enough and have the right connections to know those spells, but they’re too shit a thaumaturge to cast them right. Still, I’m sure they desperately want to avoid being caught. I think we should bring in a prognos to investigate. Can you report this to the coppers and get your brother to assign a task force to the case?” 

Damien hesitated, remembering Sebastien’s warning not to say anything about what he had told them, and his own speculation about the source of the attack. He looked over his shoulder at his seemingly sleeping friend. 

One of the Undreaming Order people was setting up an artifact to blow cool air on Sebastien. They all seemed to be putting in an unreasonable amount of effort into caring for Sebastien, but Damien wasn’t sure why. Based on Mrs. Dotts’ words, it couldn’t be because they thought Sebastien would be a valuable debtor. Damien remembered that the Raven Queen had saved Sebastien the last time he was attacked. Why couldn’t she have saved him this time, too?

Damien shook away the petulant thought, absently rubbed at a wrinkle on the side of his pants, and admitted, “It might not be safe to call in the coppers.” 

Ana squinted at him but nodded slowly. “I see. It’s true they’re not blood magic experts. The Red Guard, then? Do you think they would look into this as a favor to Professor Lacer, maybe?” 

Damien closed his eyes. “Not them, either.” 

He opened his eyes again to find Ana staring at him as if she could peer into his soul if she tried hard enough. “Do you know who did this, Damien?” 

“I don’t!” he denied quickly. Surely, hopefully, please-let-it-not-be the Red Guard. It could have been some rogue thaumaturge living in the seedy underbelly of the city who wanted to erase a witness to some terrible crime. That was the kind of thing Sebastien seemed likely to get caught up in. Or…maybe the Pendragon Corps? Frederick Pendragon and the High Crown both had a reason to bear a grudge, after all. The only other option Damien could think of was someone within their own, unnamed order of the thirteen-pointed star, no matter how unlikely it seemed. Damien didn’t really know anything about the other members, except that Sebastien trusted them, and that Oliver Dryden had failed to be accepted. 

From Ana’s expression, Damien wasn’t sure that she entirely believed his denial, but she navigated conversations like a duelist navigated footwork, and changed the topic. “What could Sebastien have had in his head that someone was willing to carve out with magic?” 

Their research project on Aberrants, of course. This popped into his mind like the obvious answer, but Damien tried to think of other alternatives. Sebastien had met the Raven Queen several times. Maybe it had something to do with her. However, Damien was sure she wasn’t the perpetrator. Even if she were to do something like this, she wouldn’t botch it. Either she would have murdered Sebastien and made a huge spectacle of his corpse, or the memories would have been erased from both Sebastien’s and Damien’s heads, and no one, including them, would have ever realized it. 

“I won’t force you to tell me,” Ana said. “I don’t know what idiotic schemes you boys have been getting yourselves into, but I do need you to tell me if I need to intervene. Should I station guards outside this building, or beside Sebastien’s sickbed?” Her eyes brightened. “Or…hire some mercenaries? The kind that create permanent solutions and ‘remove’ problems?” She made quotes in the air with her fingers and wiggled her eyebrows meaningfully, but there was no hint of teasing in her eager expression. 

Damien cleared his throat. “I don’t know who we would have murdered, so maybe…not that.” 

“It’s not murder, Damien. It’s removing problems. One of those is a crime. The other has plausible deniability.” 

Damien closed his eyes again and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. He was too tired for this. 

“Even if you don’t like my suggestions, I think we need to make sure that someone is with Sebastien at all times. Just in case.” 

Damien agreed.

When Sebastien developed a high fever that couldn’t be mitigated by the standard potions and salves, he helped apply cloths dipped in ice water to Sebastien’s head to make sure his brain remained cool.

Sebastien still refused to actually sleep, though most of the time he was unresponsive enough to seem unconscious.

Over the next three days, the Undreaming Order headquarters saw a surprising amount of people come and go. Deidre gave a couple of sermons that Damien couldn’t help but overhear while sitting next to Sebastien’s bedside. Damien didn’t really understand the appeal of such a dangerous, vengeful, anarchist like the Raven Queen as a leader. Nevertheless, many of the people below seemed to prefer it over a leader characterized by their kindness and honor. This was indicated by the stomping, laughing, and cheering at each mention of the Raven Queen’s various punishments and acts of revenge. 

Nat came back every day to check on Sebastien and do paperwork. 

Ana was there for a short inspection a couple of times a day, and with each visit, looked increasingly irritable and vengeful. 

Perhaps the strangest part was that everyone in the Undreaming Order was a little too friendly to Damien. They happily sat with him next to Sebastien’s bedside whenever the exhausted mind-healer was forced to rest. They eagerly listened to stories of Damien and Sebastien’s various escapades. Everyone seemed to love hearing about incidents when Sebastien was rude to people without realizing, and there was uproarious laughter as Damien explained that Sebastien had an arch-nemesis that he didn’t even know existed because he was so oblivious to people he found boring. 

Damien was worried at first that they might try to proselytize or brainwash him, but they were surprisingly subtle. And he couldn’t deny the fact that they were doing good. The amount of people they were feeding, healing, and clothing was one thing. But the schooling… Somehow, that hit Damien the hardest. 

It was strange to realize that all these people following the Raven Queen were actually, truthfully, doing a lot of good. It wasn’t just something to read about in The People’s Voice. It was really happening. Of course, they were all strangely vengeful, and at least all the “awakened” were definitely criminals, but they truly believed they were the good guys. 

Maybe because of that, it was difficult to see them differently. 

On the evening of the third day since Sebastien was cursed, Ana came by to check on him, sneer at Deidre, and drop off an artifact shaped like an innocent bunny keychain. It was packed with rending spells, which would literally rip someone limb from limb and spill their entrails over the ground. Which was very illegal. 

Damien took it gingerly. “It has a safety switch, right?” 

Ana smiled innocently and didn’t answer the question. “It’s for Sebastien, but you should keep hold of it until he wakes. Again…just in case.” The smile dropped from her face. “We have to protect Sebastien, Damien. He’s smart, but sometimes I think he’s too smart. It makes him think he can handle everything on his own, even when he really, really can’t.” 

Damien slipped the bunny keychain into his pocket. “Just in case,” he agreed. 

Author Note: 2 things today, the second being a rather long and vulnerable note that I vacillated over sharing or not:

1. Applications to join the latest book's Typo Hunting Team are now closed. Thank you to everyone who applied! It always warms my heart to see how many people are so enthusiastic about making this book the best it can be.

I got a lot of applications this time. I filled up the quota of spots and then even added some more people on top of that, but there were still many people who didn't get to join the team simply because I can only use so much feedback at once. 

If you're one of those people who would have liked to join, don't be discouraged from applying next time, too. While previous Typo Hunters and people with relevant experience generally take precedence, I try to leave a handful of spots for new people every time.

2. Skip this second one if your mood is in a fragile place and/or reading about other people's shit on the internet makes you feel bad.

You may have seen me talk about how I've been dealing with low energy for a while now or need to take things with my publishing business easier because I can't keep up with my prior or planned workload. It's been about 2 years since this started, but in the last 12 months I've gotten worse. I decided to go to the doctor at the start of this year. We did a lot of testing for everything under the sun, and ruled out a ton of different illness and deficiencies.

This week, I was diagnosed with a chronic illness that affects energy production. Now, it could be much worse, but the diagnosis has been a blow to me and I'm still reeling and railing against the idea. I can't quite accept the reality of it, even in my own head. 

But it also explains why I'm no longer able to maintain super-productive levels of work, and even struggle to manage what I'd consider a normal person's "standard workday" of productivity.

I would rather it just be that I've been lazy or even burnt out.

(I have this little voice in my head that says, "I am not sick, I'm just lazy, right? Right??")

I'm not sure how I'm going to handle everything going forward (other than doing absolutely everything possible to manage the illness) but it's likely that I should start adjusting my production timelines to be more realistic for my current abilities.

I don't know what that's going to mean, yet. I really, really don't want to slow the serialized releases to less than a chapter a week. I will do what I can to avoid that.

I do have help with the publishing, and a support system both professionally and personally. I'm going to try to lean more on that support system and assign more work to others, at the very least. 

I'm certainly not going to give up on living a full life and doing everything I want to do. I just have to find different solutions that aren't "work more, try harder." There are also a lot of possibilities for stuff that could lessen the effects of the illness. I foresee studying many medical and research papers in my future! 

I'm not looking for condolences and I hope I haven't made anyone reading this feel bad. I just wanted to let you know what's up.

Latest chapter discussion thread on Azalea's Arcane Alcove: https://alcove.azaleaellis.com/t/chapter-248-discussion/638