Chapter 58: 58. Real-Fake Sound

Excerpt from Vyulle Earsplitter’s “Vyulle’s Guide to Auditory Illusions, Vol 1.”

“There’s a little war that goes on in your head when you listen to a real-fake sound. If your illusonoise isn’t just right, there’s a spiky edge to it that gets on everyone’s nerves—and not in a fun way! That’s the real-fake sound, the not-quite-right that makes everyone stand up and shout, ‘Oi, that’s not a real orchestra! It’s just some cheeky kesh waving her hands around!’ Better to make it faker if you can’t make it realer, so you won’t have to get to the part where you say, ‘Of course, you daft ninny—I told you in the first place it wasn’t real!’”

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The following morning, Yenna had to prepare herself for an entirely new kind of battle. In their efforts to make sure the skull didn’t somehow break free of its bindings and attack everyone, Yenna had been asked to wake up briefly before dawn to take over the vigil from Suee. The mage had some rather choice words to say on the very concept of waking up quite so early, and despite having retired early the previous night Yenna felt like she could have easily slept till midday if she went back to bed now.

Yenna performed her morning routine on auto-pilot as her mind blearily shook off the fog of sleep. Her hands gestured to various corners of her tent, calling forth a brush to straighten out her long red hair, a warm, damp cloth to wipe her face, a spare set of clean clothes. For kesh, getting dressed was usually a rather awkward affair—the main reason why their culture didn’t care quite as much about nudity—with lots of stretching of the mid-joint and specialised tools for straightening out things right at the back of the lower half. For a kesh mage, reaching was no longer a problem.

The brush trailed along as her hair tied itself neatly into her signature braid, a dark green ribbon on the end for today. Yenna had picked out a matching caparison robe, this one with a more muted pattern of light green thread tracing out the image of long, delicate leaves. Running her fingers across the brim of her wide hat, Yenna changed its colour to match—it simply wouldn’t do to be running around with clashing garments. With a yawn and a stretch, Yenna pulled herself to her hooves and stepped out of her tent.

It was still dark out—darker for the absence of the supernatural moonlight that had kept them safe overnight. Barely anyone was awake, the forest still and calm. Yenna’s breath fogged in front of her, barely visible in the light of dim torches that those keeping watch had kept lit. Chime had straightened themself out a bit to act as a much larger wall between the dark of the forest and the gathering of tents—Yenna wondered if the silupker had slept, if they even needed to sleep overnight like fleshy creatures did. Still shaking off the dream-like state of waking up, Yenna thought she might ask. Later, though—she had work to do.

Suee was sitting right where Yenna had left her the previous night, hands clasped in still prayer. Her starlit robes were once again obscuring her form, but Yenna knew where to look this time—if the mage didn’t know any better, she might suspect the priestess had fallen asleep. The skull was hidden from view, wrapped up in a plain leather sack. When Yenna approached, sat down beside the skull, Suee simply nodded silently and walked away. They had already discussed what to do the previous night—couldn’t risk slipping even the slightest hint of a plot where the still-animated skull might be listening.

The previous night, after Yenna’s experimentation with the metal shard and the black book, the captain had called both mage and priestess over to ensure the plan was settled. It also proved a perfect time for Mayi to finally remove the binding bandages from Yenna’s wrist—it felt good to have motion in both hands again, though the doctor had given her a rather stern talking-to about the more permanent side-effects of repeated breaks.

“The plan itself is fairly straightforward, I’d think.” Eone had squatted down alongside the skull, ready to talk as soon as it was confirmed the skull couldn’t hear her. “You two keep an eye on it, blast it or smash it or what-have-you if it starts doing anything suspicious, then me an’ Muut or whoever have ourselves an innocent conversation for our grim li’l eavesdropper, eh?”

The captain had entirely co-opted Sergeant Myuu’s plan, taking the reins on the idea—Eone was certain that the sergeant’s presence would be better as an unconfirmed possibility rather than a certainty, while her own presence was definitely already known.

“So, you’re going to… make sure everyone knows, then? So we don’t have any slip-ups?” Yenna wasn’t going to have to ‘act’ in this performance, but she was still nervous about it all.

“Ah, yeah yeah. Got the message passed along already. I’m carrying the bleedin’ thing with me, so I’ll be able to remind anyone who forgets. Good bit of an idea here, though it’s gonna be a bit of a pain to keep up the farce all the way to Milachur.”

Milachur was one of Milur’s capital city’s mostly-official names—most Milurans simply called it ‘the capital’, because it had a different name depending on who you asked, and where exactly within the city you wanted to go. On paper, Milur’s capital city was called Milur, but the ancient name was too confusing—better to use the names of those districts, Yenna had learned. Milachur was nearer the city’s centre and mostly dominated by Highshine, the Deepstar ancestral estate. It was still a few days' travel away—Yenna didn’t look forward to waking up so early each morning to ensure the safety of this blasted skull.

Standing guard over the skull was the worst part of the plan, but at least Yenna’s other role in all this tickled the part of her brain that wanted to engineer an elegant solution to a puzzle. The entire ruse hinged on convincing the people listening in that their party was far better equipped than they actually were—not worth the effort attacking on the road with a beefy escort, much easier to just continue as normal now that it was clear House Deepstar was convinced House Stormsea was their enemy. 

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There on that cold morning, Yenna conjured up a glowing light and pulled out a couple of old spellbooks. Illusions weren’t exactly her expertise, but they were fun, in a way most other parts of magic didn’t get to be. They were there to be sensed, played around with, toyed with. A bit of straight-laced arcane magecraft, directly from the books, with some tweaks for flavour. A test of her skills as a mage, without the distractions of stumbling blindly through some new and exciting discipline of magic.

The initial obstacle was creating a medium on which the spell itself could be inscribed—it was a poor mage who decided she would just sit there and concentrate on a spell like this all day and every day. Yenna pulled out a wide sheet of thick paper, folded it over into something like a booklet and punctured its very top with a string to create an oversized paper talisman. On the inside, Yenna could create paired spell-circles, the spells within activating on contact with one another when the paper was closed. It was a fascinating technique, though its most common usage always amused Yenna—they were a mainstay of novelty greeting cards, playing a song or displaying an image once opened.

Yenna filled the inside with the basics of magecraft—pathways to draw in and regulate the consumption of ambient magic, designed especially to prevent any interference with the skull’s signal. Runes of power and directive script gave motion and life to unformed spells, awaiting a single flick of ink to connect them up as they breathed with the tides of magic.

Next came the sounds. Illusory sound was an interesting field, slightly more abstract than illusory images—it was simple to transfer what one had seen into an image, magically painting with colours defined by complex interactions of magical fields, while sounds had an extra layer of care involved. Sounds came forth through the vibration of the air, by vibrating faster or slower, in different intensities and with all manner of variables that the spellbook in Yenna’s hands described in jargon-rich terms. Illusory sound could make auditory experiences beyond what nature could produce¹, but ironically struggled to recreate those natural experiences in ways the fleshy brain couldn’t tell apart from the real thing.

On top of that, Yenna couldn’t simply have it play the sound of jingling chainmail over and over—even the simplest of minds would understand something was wrong. Her spells needed to interact with a sort of logic—alter the sounds to reflect the environment, to project the illusion over reality like a grand cloak instead of attempting to block it. Yenna considered that maybe this was approaching overkill, but if she was to have any fun with this task then she would not hold back.

Most of the sounds Yenna wanted to produce were simple enough for her to recall. Background chatter of many people, dredged up from her memories of crowded study halls and busy city streets during her years of training in Sumadre. Chainmail and the sounds of arms, sourced from the constant jingle that Sergeant Myuu made whenever she moved, with some added effects to sound sometimes far, sometimes near, but always in numbers. Yenna even mixed in some distantly shouted orders—troops had leaders reporting to leaders reporting to leaders, and those layers of command needed to speak. What else could be more convincing for this deceit than the sounds of military bureaucracy?

The one thing that tripped Yenna up was the sound of marching. The more she thought about it, the more the mage realised it wouldn’t entirely be necessary—whenever the group would move, they would surely be in carriages or mounted up, or piled up on Chime. The sounds of hooves were familiar, and the sound of booted feet was not. Yenna made the easy decision to make the sounds of their travel be the clatter of hooves and wagon wheels.

The final touch was the logic, which turned out to be more of an exercise in allowing the spell to sense the surrounding world than in actually deciding when and how sounds should play. The spell featured a component that could detect how fast they were moving, whether people were near or far, the kind of terrain they moved over judged solely by the sound of everything nearby, modifying or activating certain illusions as needed. When they were travelling, the illusions would travel with them—when they stopped, moved out, made camp, so would the sound. By the time Yenna was done the sun had started to peek out over the top of the nearby mountains, bringing with it a measure of warmth and the comfort of natural light. Sunlight poured down like a warm blanket, illuminating the mad scrawl of miniaturised spell circles carefully arranged across the inside of an oversized traveller’s prayer².

With a smile, Yenna tied the string on the charm to the bag housing the skull and pressed the folded paper closed. One last flourish of magic saw the thing sealed and weatherproofed, and with a click-clack of her rings Yenna kick-started the spell. The sound slowly amped to life, like the whole camp had just woken up to find that they had quadrupled in size overnight. The sounds of distant orders almost caught Yenna off-guard—she had made them surprisingly convincing, and it genuinely sounded like the noise had come from elsewhere.

When Eone came by to check on her progress, Yenna couldn’t help but beam with delight at a job well done. She handed the captain a slip of paper explaining what she had done—couldn’t risk speaking it all aloud—and Eone matched Yenna’s grin. The captain snatched up the bag in a massive hand, tying it to her belt like some warlord keeping her new trophy close by, and walked off with a mouthed ‘thank you.’

Despite her nerves, Yenna couldn’t help but picture the faces of those cultists on the other side listening in. Shock, surprise, panic—just where have they found so many troops? The mage allowed herself a quiet giggle, though it quickly transformed into a yawn and the rumbling of an empty belly. The mage laughed again—heady nostalgia, performing magic and forgetting the mundane body, just like peaceful days of study and teaching.

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¹ - Around the time Arcane magecraft became popular enough that anyone could break into the very basics, musicians and performers became enamoured with the idea of ‘one-person acts’. Early mage illusionists came up with all manner of methods for replicating the experience of a full band with only one living performer, wowing audiences for years to come. An enterprising sub-culture of audio-illusionists hit upon the idea of tweaking the sounds they were producing, moving beyond replication to all-out fabrication. The experimental sounds they made metamorphosed from simple ‘clean-up’ of audio to all-out aural anarchy as the range of sounds that could be produced was discovered to be greater than what most sentient beings could even hear.

² - It’s not uncommon for even Aulprean travellers to inscribe a prayer or magical ward into a small piece of paper, fold it up and wear it around one’s neck to keep themselves safe from inclement weather, bandits or beasts. Some mages make a living producing these en-masse, selling them at gates and docks—though just as many con artists do the same, promising twice the effectiveness for half the price.