Chapter 43: Chapter 43 – Varied Definitions of Obvious

It doesn’t take all that long for us to dicker our way into an equitable arrangement, mostly because I profess a complete disinterest in doing anything complicated. I’m not sure enough how the glyphs and runes for restructuring free-flowing and stored mana into rewards even work; Zidanya knows, but she’s flatly told me that she doesn’t have time to teach me, and we’re going to have to wing it together to a large extent.

We wind up with just an even split. If there’s only one pylon, it goes to the Heharani team, for Pravad’s use; otherwise, like-objects and containers get split without any discussion of what’s in them, we trade off picking unique stuff, and then if we want to swap things, we can. It’s apparently a standard arrangement, called the one by one arrangement; specifically, he writes it as Blind 1/1/Gandrhei, and it takes me a moment to remember that that’s his actual name, with Pravad being the town he’s the Lord Mayor of. Items per turn for the starting party, items per turn for the other, and who starts; it seems obvious enough, and when I put the question to Amber, who knows better than either myself or Zidanya what the usual deal is, she affirms that it’s entirely fair.

I more than half expect that dire presence on my shoulders when we clasp wrists, but it doesn’t show. My relief is probably visible, but so’s Rei’s, as he insists I start calling him, and I very carefully don’t stammer as I tell him that he might as well call me Adam, in that case.

Amber and Zidanya don’t trust Rei. For that matter, none of us trusts Knives or Stella, and Zidanya’s distrust of Sara is mirrored by my and Amber’s distrust of Tim, whose full name I would never have guessed to be Timenko. I don’t trust Rei, either, no matter how dazzling he is; but I do trust my orbs, and somehow the mana flows in the roundhouse, even with all eight of us here, are high enough that I’ve got a full range of Motes and orbs.

Rei moves fast, when he moves, going from stillness to motion like a predator. I’m pretty sure my orbs move faster, and they don’t need my mind in the decision loop.

That still leaves us with where to go. We know where the corridor is supposed to be, in a blatant opening over on the east side of the room; it’s between two weapon racks, just sort of sitting there being obvious. Those of us who have some form of mana perception or other sight enhancements can even see a glimpse of the mechanism and the seams, but it’s dungeonstone, so there’s no way we can force it or break it down.

The keys are the first clue. We’ve still got a spare from up top, so we know that there not only might be more keys, there might be places to insert the keys. We’ve got eight people ransacking the room - and the corpses, but I try not to think about that - and some of us have tricks or Skills to make the ransacking more complete and successful, so that comes up pretty fast. Two keyholes and a spare key on one of the guards; one of the keyholes is on the underside of the table we’re sitting at, and the other is behind one of the ledgers on the west wall, exactly opposite where the eastern seam’s position implies a keyhole should be.

The keyholes eat the keys, and the old keys don’t fit in them, so we’re pretty sure we’re on the right track.

The ledgers, at first glance, are all nonsense. That seems implausible to me, and Sara beats me to the punch when she grabs the ledger that we moved to get at the keyhole and starts flipping through it side-by-side with another one; it’s a cipher, and by the time I’ve figured out by reason how the key-ledger, and I wasn’t the only one to audibly groan at that pun, applies to the other ledgers, I’m late to solving that part. Sara, it turns out, can simply test the cipher decryption that fast, and brute-forces it before I can get there.

The ledgers, put together, are inconsistent, not only with themselves but also with what we’ve observed upstairs and in the corridors surrounding us. The true galleries are symmetric, the true gaps are straight rather than diagonal, the ranks of cages we walked through are stacked two rather than three, and so on; we separate out the inconsistencies into two different groups, and work through it as though an exercise in finding… something, it’s not entirely clear, but it seems like the obvious path. We come up with three maps, and with the inconsistencies and disagreements between the three in one color and the agreements in another, Amber sees a pattern: two different divine glyphs, not magical rune components but representations of the nature and names of two Gods.

Amber doesn’t know them, Zidanya can’t remember where she’s seen them, but Tim is beside himself with joy. They’re perfect, he says, flawless and undamaged representations that can only be the Twins: the Forsaken and her consort, whose name was consumed in its entirety such that he has never had a name, nor ever shall he in the future.

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Twins. I waste a substantial amount of time going through the ledgers looking for twinned information, and a few of us waste a similar amount of time going through the guards’ gear and pockets again looking for the same. Knives fiddles with the furniture and then with the doors for a while, and he for obvious reasons can’t tell us how he does it, but we all turn in surprise when the northern door comes apart and the iron bands previously reinforcing it go rattling across the floor. We’re able to see what he does when he does it to the southern door, or rather, the doorframe; there’s a pattern of tiny nubs on the inside of the head jamb and spilling out over into the side jamps. He presses a sequence of them, and the splinters and shards of wood that are all that’s left from Amber’s particularly effective manner of opening the door earlier dissolve into mana.

There are two keys, one resting on the top of each top jamb, glowing briefly to - presumably - make sure we don’t miss them. When I check the nub patterns that Knives had pressed, they turn out to be the nubs that are twinned between the north and south doors; clear enough, and it gets me off of the ledgers, since the hint’s been used.

The keyholes eat the keys, and continue to decline to eat the original keys from upstairs, so we keep figuring we’re on the right track.

I go over a mental, and then verbal, list of all the stuff we haven’t used yet, since it feels to me like there’s probably a third set of keys around. I miss the chairs, which Rei points out, but nobody finds anything there after looking for a while; I spend some time staring at the armor and weapon racks, and the weapons that are on them, but nothing pops out at me. It’s Stella who, absently running her hands against the dungeonstone of the walls, finds the raised patterns just to the west of one of the doors, which turns out to also be to the west of the other door. Omniglot kicks in, of all things, and after I point that out and tell them what they say, Tim mentions that it’s a written language for the blind, written in raised dots in a grid.

It’s not anything comprehensible, but that’s okay. When I say it out loud, that it’s just a string of letters and numbers with no other context, Sara points out that that’s just another way of saying it’s a key to decrypt a cipher with, and we re-decrypt all of the ledgers and they come out totally differently. That’s fine; the difference between the translations is itself a representation of a question, and the answer is another pair of twinned Gods. I don’t recognize them, but that’s not that big a surprise given that there’s literally a thousand of them; Ebn and Kova, Gods of stone and stars, respectively. That doesn’t seem like an obvious pairing to me until the clamor of everyone simultaneously explaining has passed and I’ve come to understand that it’s money, the two denominations of currency accepted across the continent of Iavshet and the islands surrounding it. They then try to explain the concept of money to me, as though the Fleet doesn’t subsist on trade as much as anything else, and I mostly ignore them and try to figure out what to do with the names of these two Gods.

It takes a couple of leaps of logic, but they’re fair ones: Ebn and Kova have divine glyphs just like the Forsaken and her consort, and those divine glyphs have representations in dotform just like any other thing has. There’s no obvious thing to do with that, but on the east side of the two doors there’s some space where we can press in and get little divots, divots that reset themselves; an input mechanism means you put an answer there, and we’ve got a couple of possible answers.

Ebn and Kova as names don’t work, and their glyphs don’t work. We can’t do anything by comparing their names and the Goddess-pair, because of the consort, but we can compare the glyphs, and the difference between the dotform representation of the glyphic names must mean something, because when we input that into the divots they stay down for a couple seconds, and then all four sets - the two divots we pressed on and the two sets of raised dots - meld into the wall, and from the center of where the divots were, a couple of keys sort of secrete out of the dungeonstone.

The keyholes eat the third set of keys, and there’s a rumbling, grinding sound and a strong flow of mana. I’m happy when it happens, happy with an incandescent and totally unreasonable joy, and it’s contagious, or maybe just shared, because most of us are.

Rei laughs with us, but when we try to explain how we solved it, he just shakes his head. Different definitions of obvious, he says, and that’s that, and we walk down the stairs.

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