Broken Lands

Chapter 373 – After Dinner

Arak Shade moved from one shadow to the next as he made his way across Mazehold. It wasn’t his best form of concealed movement, but it had an advantage the others didn’t: he wasn’t the only person who could move through the shadows in Mazehold. That made it far simpler to avoid attention; anyone who caught a glimpse of his shadowy self was likely to think of someone else, rather than Arak Shade.

Even a little bit of deniability helped when you had to deal with the Blade. She needed him, but that only meant she wanted to control him. That was also the reason he always traveled in the shadows when he was outside the Arena in Mazehold. You couldn’t know when he was hiding for a reason and when he was simply traveling if he always acted the same.

The fact that it originally started as a way to hide from monsters helped. He’d preferred to travel in shadows the entire time he was in Mazehold. It wasn’t necessary because of the monsters anymore, but they were still a convenient reason. 

Not that he needed to be cautious about this trip. It was nothing more than a dinner invitation from the Flying Stars, something they’d sent a few times over the past year and a half and something he always enjoyed. They went on about half of the expeditions he led, an unusually high number but probably a good part of the reason for their quick advancement. 

The fact that they capitalized on that and managed to turn quick advancement to the top of the second upgrade into reaching the third upgrade in well under a year showed that their progress wasn’t luck. They were determined and had good advice from somewhere. Arak could easily guess where; while the Registry was willing to help anyone, old Arryn was their landlord. People he sponsored tended to do well, which meant he was both choosing well and giving them the support they needed. The Flying Stars were a step above his usual trainees, which had to make things easier.

Arak half wished he could do the same thing. He was certain he wouldn’t do as well as Arak did, even before the Blade came into the picture. It would still be nice to try. 

It wasn’t worth it. All it would be doing would be setting the children up to become more tools of the Blade, the same way Arak himself was. Maybe he should be wishing he could escape, instead. 

If everything worked out the way he wanted, he’d be able to flip things around. He wasn’t sure what he’d do after that. It hadn’t really seemed like a realistic goal until a few weeks earlier when Sophia made it to the third upgrade. She was still a bit weak for the deep Maze, but the door he was interested in was usually shallow enough for him to find. He usually wanted his team to be roughly midway through the third upgrade when he went that deep, and Sophia and her team weren’t. 

He didn’t want to wait the years it would probably take for them to get there. Maybe they’d be ready in a year? They’d still be twelfth level then, but they’d have had the time to settle into their new Spheres and they were able to take on third upgrade parts of the Maze’s shallows while still well within the second upgrade. There was hope.

Arak solidified in front of the door to old Arryn’s house, where the Flying Stars stayed. There was no sign of the old man’s wagon, so it should be an ordinary dinner. That was just what he needed; the Blade seemed unusually tense lately, which made everything more difficult than it should be.

It seemed ordinary enough at first. The flying stars were their usual cheerful, slightly strange selves. Jaycen was a little more formal than usual, but Sophia seemed almost excited. It was apparently Dav’s turn to cook, which meant it would be a little exotic; of the Flying Stars, he was the most likely to decide to try something fancy. He failed fairly often, but even his failures were usually tasty, if not pretty.

The Flying Stars were good company over dinner, as well. They asked for a few pointers and advice on how to deal with Threads, just like any other new third upgrade team. Arak helped as much as he could, but without the knowledge of what the fourth upgrade needed, all he could really tell them was that there were two major ways to use Thread: you could have the Guide manage everything or you could guide it yourself. 

Like gathering Thread, guiding it where you wanted it to go meant that it went a little farther. It also meant you had the chance to influence the Abilities you guided it towards. Most people didn’t use the method until late in the third upgrade, when Thread gain slowed to a halt, because being able to affect your Abilities meant you could damage them. That was all too common, especially among those who struggled to reach the third upgrade at all. With a group like the Flying Stars, it was a lower risk as long as they always kept in mind what they wanted each Ability to do as they reinforced it by winding Thread around it. The Guide would warn you if you Threaded something in a way that didn’t match your mental image, but it wouldn’t warn you if all you concentrated on was winding the thread efficiently.

There was a nervous sort of energy about Xin’ri when she suggested moving to the party room after dinner. Arak started to wish them a good night, but Xin’ri shook her head quickly. “No, no, you should come too. We said dinner, but we meant dinner and snacks! Uh, we made sure to get sweet ice with caramel drizzle; that was your favorite last time, wasn’t it?”

Arak hesitated. Sweet ice was best when it was hot, so that it helped you to cool off. It wasn’t that warm in Arryn’s house. Despite that, the combination of tiny crushed ice pellets with a sweet syrup drizzled on top was delicious and he did like the thicker caramel sauce; it still flavored the ice, but it also formed a slight crust on the outside where it cooled, so some bites were stronger than others. “Sure, why not?”

He was about halfway through his sweet ice when Dav asked the question that had to be the reason they were nervous. “Do you know Bai?”

Arak nodded. “Bai’s been in Mazehold for as long as I can remember.”

Arak smiled at the reminder of his younger, more innocent days, back when he first developed a plan to turn his disaster of an initial Sphere choice into something he could deal with. It was too bad the man was so badly Warped; he must have been very good before that, but he was one of all too many who gave up his Calling after things went bad and retreated to live in a safer place, even if that place was Mazehold itself.

The man was practically a fixture of the Registry’s tavern. He always wanted to know about the people around himself and was happy to share whatever a Called wanted to know. His partial maps of the Maze were hugely helpful for small teams who were hunting enough aurichalc to repair their gear and his tips about advancement had probably saved dozens, even hundreds of people from months of failed effort. “He gave me some ideas, back in the day. He might even be the reason I ended up shifting into healing; it’s hard to say.”

Dav nodded slowly. “Then you’ll understand it if I say he’s been tracking as much as he can about what happens in the Maze and has found some patterns in the deaths.”

Arak frowned. There were patterns in the deaths; there always had been. There was no reason to talk about them, though, because they were what you’d expect. People got careless or pushed too deep or were caught in a mazestorm. “You mean something other than the usual.”

 “I don’t know about that,” Dav answered. “I think this has been going on for years. It’s the kind of thing that’s easy to hide in a dangerous place. People are being killed in the shallows, during normal trips that should be fairly simple and safe.”

“Carelessness is the usual reason for that,” Arak protested. “I’ve seen it happen on expeditions; people think they’re safe and fall asleep on watch or stop looking for danger. The first few times, nothing happens, so they relax and it happens more often. Eventually it catches up to them. It’s one of the things I watch out for. The best way to deal with it for most people is to give them a scare, let something almost happen. Embarrassment is a better option for other people. It has to be something they’ll remember even after the expedition ends and remember deep enough to change, without being so severe that they freeze or give up.”

“It likely is some of it,” Dav admitted, “But it’s not enough to explain a death rate that is eight times higher per trip into the Maze’s shallows for teams in debt as compared to teams who aren’t in debt, and almost no deaths from the top fifty Arena teams.”

“High-ranking Arena teams don’t go into the Maze that often outside expeditions, other than you,” Arak noted grumpily. He didn’t really disagree about carelessness not being enough of an explanation for that level of discrepancy, but surely there was something else. Surely.

It took several hours and a long talk with Bai after Amy fetched him from the Registry, but they did eventually prove their case. Something was happening in the Maze, something that wasn’t right, and the Arena seemed to be involved somehow. Worse, there was another connection Bai hadn’t caught until Arak asked about it: the teams always had people who weren’t really advancing despite spending a lot of time in the Maze. That wasn’t unusual for third upgrade teams working the Shallows, but it was a pattern Arak had seen before.

The more Arak heard, the more he began to believe he knew who it was, too, and possibly even why. How wasn’t even a question; it was easy to figure out. He used the things regularly.

“Debt isn’t the connection,” Arak declared. “A visit to the Arena as a spectator is. The people who bet enough to end up in debt spend more time in the Arena, that’s all. Someone picks out the targets and plants a lodestone on one of them. Lodestones are … well, I use them all the time in the Maze. They’re how I find places I’ve been before. It’s not perfect, but if you have the paired compass, you can move more or less towards a lodestone. It can’t be followed while you’re in a zone, but all you have to do is take link-gates in that direction and you’ll get there eventually. That has to be how they’re picking out people and how they’re not killing the wrong people.”

He felt at least twenty years older than he had that morning. This was exactly what he feared and a large part of the reason he shifted his Grand Talent into healing instead of the shadow-walking he started with. He saw what happened to stealth specialists that stayed too close to the Arena; the fact that he was better than they were, good enough to find at least some secrets before he was powerful enough to be co-opted, didn’t mean he would be able to escape except by making himself too useful to use that way. 

Not then, at least. There was a chance now, if he could get the Flying Stars, especially Sophia, to help. “As for why, there’s a way to steal Wisps and even Thread without having the Anchors you mentioned.”

“The Broken Blades,” Sophia interrupted. “Does that mean they can take more if they’re used to kill, or maybe on a recently dead body?”

Arak tried to cover his shock. Sophia was flashy. People noticed her. How did she know that? “Ah, yes, I believe so. The Broken Blade … well, let’s just say that I never intend to be her assistant. They all die, mostly mysteriously.”

Sophia, Xin’ri, and Amy all glanced at Jaycen. That was odd enough that Arak noticed it, but he didn’t comment.

Arak smiled and laid out the bait. “I think I know a way to stop it.”