§115 The Other Place

Taylor's group rode toward the mountain in a carriage, along a road he had laid down rather hastily. Ahead of them, the smooth ground switched back and forth a few times, uphill, before entering a large lava tube. His portal to the Other Place was deep inside the mountain, so they didn't need to climb the entire volcano.

"Why was the priest laughing?" Kasper's question was innocent enough, but it made Taylor groan. "What's the big deal about a test? I take tests all the time."

Taylor ruffled the fur on Kasper's head. "It isn't just any test. It covers a lot of topics: history, law, economics, city planning, and some other things. For some people, that test is the most important moment of their professional lives. You can't be a legate if you don't pass the test. You can't hold an imperial post of any rank at all, without passing some version of that test."

"Weren't you a legate for like a year?"

"I was a proxy for my father, and, under the circumstances, the governor waived some requirements. Anyway, I'm not worried about the test. Curator Jane tutored me on the whole course years ago. The problem is, you can't just walk into an office and demand to take the test. You have to go to a school that teaches the right courses, and they only give the tests twice a year. And, they only give the test to their students."

"They're making you go to school?" The wolfkin boy grinned. "Like, sit still in a classroom at a desk for hours at a time and raise your hand to talk?" Kasper was naming all the things he disliked the most about school.

"Yes," Taylor groaned. "Exactly like that."

Kasper pretended to think. "The dark lord goes to school. I predict complete chaos."

Taylor grabbed the younger boy in a headlock. "I'll go dark lord on you, you little monster. You're enjoying my agony way too much!"

Once they were sufficiently deep inside the mountain, past the sight of any imperials who might be watching, Taylor's party disembarked. He stored the carriage in his satchel and spoke a few words to the green dragonid that pulled it. It looked like an animal, but it was a magical construct built around a trapped soul. At his command, the dragonid became a flat, round stone that Taylor could put into his pocket.

The dragonid was one of many trapped souls he possessed, relics captured from a fourth-tier magician. Most of the trapped souls turned into monsters so fearful that he didn't dare wake them up. But the dragonid was docile and helpful. If left to its own devices, it would lie on its belly and be very still, preferably somewhere with lots of flowers. Because of this odd quirk, Taylor named it Daisy and made use of it.

One day, Taylor would learn how to unbind the trapped souls and send them all into Death's embrace. 

Taylor, Blake, Cook, Chambers, Kasper, and Ophelia proceeded on foot, winding through the round tunnel, joining with other passages, until they reached a dead end. The gray rock before them was a magic barrier, sustained by the open rift in the mountain's heart. With Taylor leading the way, they passed through the surface into a chamber beyond, where a stela of carved stone waited for them: a portal to the Other Place.

Kasper shrank from it. "How long are we staying this time?"

"We're only passing through," assured Taylor. "We're going directly to Portal Park. I promise."

The wolfkin closed his eyes and let Taylor pull him into the pocket dimension.

The portal connected to an underground cavern. They had to climb up a spiral staircase to emerge on the side of a different mountain, one overlooking a soft meadow, a stand of mushrooms as tall as trees, and, beyond them, a small wood of golden-leaved trees with white bark. Autumn had arrived early, and clouds blustered against the top of Taylor's mountain. Above the mountain floated its mirror twin, their tops nearly touching. His entire dimension amounted to a scant several square miles, too small for the wolfkin. The few weeks they lived in hiding hadn't been good for the pup.

In fact, it hadn't been very good for anyone. It was safe, but that was its only advantage. He had so far failed to invent a way for others to pass in and out of the Other Place without him. There were no stores, no schools, and no society. His servants put on a brave face, but they were unhappy. The cabin Taylor willed into existence did not want to be changed by others' hands, so Blake had nothing to do. The accommodations were so spartan that there was very little for Chambers to clean or organize, other than their clothes. Cook was slightly better off than the other two, for they still needed to eat, but she missed her daily trips to the market, and the meals became repetitive. The three of them were accustomed to managing a proper house.

As they crossed the meadow and entered the wood, signs of Kasper's distress became too frequent to ignore. Trees with shredded bark showed where he had tried to claw his way out of the pocket dimension, desperate to leave.

Taylor should have known it would happen. He had read What to Know About Your Wolfkin Pup soon after he agreed to take in the younger boy, and the book was clear that captivity was bad for his kind. A few hours as a kidnap victim could be endured. A few weeks confined to a pocket dimension was torture. It wasn't only about the size of the cage, but the fact that it had a locked door. If Kasper couldn't leave on his own, then Taylor might as well have shut him in a kennel and thrown away the key.

The situation came to a head when Kasper bit Blake, his adoptive father. The wound was deep and would have left a scar if it weren't for Taylor's skill. Neither could recall what set Kasper off, or they refused to tell him, but when Blake went to Taylor for healing, he begged his master not to punish the boy. Afterwards, the pup couldn't look anyone in the eye and cried in secret in the deepest cave under the Other Place. Taylor had to use his power as the realm's creator to locate him, and it took time to explain he was still wanted.

Taylor found the correct tree and pulled everyone through to a similar tree beyond Wokehaad Farms, where his household temporarily resided in Maestro Nelis's guest house. In terms of security, it was a compromise between being unreachable and living openly in a city. Nelis was an elder arc and an orchardist, and had significant defenses around his property, the kind most people wouldn't notice until it was too late. There was space for Kasper to roam, and people who would look out for him. Taylor sighed as he sent most of the household on their way. What was the point of leaving Midway, only to end up in similar circumstances somewhere else?

What Taylor needed was a house that he owned properly, where he could lay down significant defenses. There were other kinds of protection he should deploy, too. Taylor had lived half in hiding for a long while, which offered some advantages, but doing so had forfeited certain protections. If his neighbors in Midway had known he was someone important, then they probably would have mentioned the strange people peeping at him from a nearby house and asking questions about him in the market. If he couldn't live in hiding, then raising his profile and his status could offer a layer of defense.

"Will you return tonight, Young Master?" asked Cook. 

"I doubt it. Save a plate, but don't wait up."

Cook, Blake, Kasper, and Chambers departed for the Wokehaad Farms guest house. When they were out of sight, Taylor took Ophelia's hand and pulled her into the Other Place, back to Portal Park.

She followed him in silence while he brooded. She had been his tutor once, had taught him to read and write in Orlut and Arcaic, and a great deal besides. Now, just a few years later, she worked for him. Her loyalty was transactional, premised on his ability to get her nearer to her heart's true desire: return to her race's ancestral home. For Taylor, retaking Arc-Home was one facet in the larger goal of making the arcaic races strong enough to re-establish themselves on the northern continent. Humanity was losing ground, and the gods wanted them to be strong again.

He also had a crush on the pretty arc woman, which further complicated matters. 

"I'm officially impressed," he told his former tutor, remembering at last to drop her hand. "How did you arrange that meeting?"

"I told them it was what Wen-Uroda wanted. Beastkin revere the great spirits." She waved her hand lazily, "I also suggested this was a way to keep the mountain from becoming a problem in the future. Again. Humans wouldn't have cared, but beastkin live long enough for something like that to matter."

They walked in silence toward a pair of buildings. One was single-storey with a wide footprint. The other was tall and round. "Have I earned your trust yet?"

"You definitely proved your ability. As for trust, we have our contract with Chowgami. I should caution you again about breaching the terms. The gods take my contracts very seriously."

"So you've said. I found out for myself what happened to the church. Consider me convinced."

"Well, come in, then." He led her into his workshop, where mana-driven machines produced a variety of materials he needed. Some would be fashioned into magic devices, while others could be sold for coin. He went straight to a pair of squat rectangular kilns. He opened the one that was barely warm and removed a tray, revealing a dozen red cabochons. "I can grow high-capacity mana stones. They're basically just red emeralds, with a few amendments to enhance their capacity. It makes them useless as jewels, but you won't find a better power source without turning to pure mana crystals."

"The gem you gave me for the jeweler wasn't dug out of a mountain, was it?"

"I grew it right here."

"Ulla was very impressed."

"Why wouldn't she be? The gems I make are literally perfect. Which brings me to these." He plopped a small wooden box full of rough gemstones onto the table in front of her.

She gasped and pulled one stone after the other from the box, lining them up. There were several kinds of stones, but they all had something in common: they were twinned crystals.

"You have a fortune sitting in this box. Why haven't you sold them?"

"Because I don't want anyone knowing that I can make twinned gemstones. Take a closer look." He handed her an appraiser's loupe, which she fitted to her eye with a practiced motion. She quickly put down the stone she was holding and picked up another, and then another.

"The same flaws, every time. You could still sell a few and make a lot of money. People wouldn't have to know where they come from."

"I could, but this isn't about the money. What do you know about Knexenk? I'm not asking about the class system, but Knexenk herself."

Ophelia's expression eased into diplomatic blankness. Taylor wouldn't have noticed the change if he hadn't stared so longingly at her face for several hours a week back when she was his tutor. "The Church of the Giving Goddess claims she is the highest of all the gods, and is dedicated to human advancement. Older scripture and other writings, pre-Evangel, say she is a subordinate god."

"Full marks for scholarship. But, they're both wrong. Knexenk isn't a god at all. She's a magical construct, created by the gods. She's a system of magic, just like Spellscript, magic circles, Permutations, or Alchemy."

If he said that to nearly anyone else, they would have been surprised, but Ophelia didn't even blink. It was one more point of confirmation that the arc woman knew as many secrets as he did.

"The heart of that system is one of these." He picked out one of the discarded gems, a star-shaped chrysoberyl, the color of new grass. "The gods never intended for humans to hog the system to themselves. My primary quest is to create a copy of Knexenk and let it grant classes. But there's a problem."

"The gems are flawed," she finished for him.

"Not for much longer. I cracked it. Come and see." He led her to the building next door, the tall, narrow one.  "You can't go in because I'm keeping it isolated from vibration. But you can look. He opened the narrow door and let her see what was inside.

The crystallarium was similar to the bloomery, but larger. It looked like a round-bottomed beaker the size of a small house, suspended three feet off the ground with gravity magic. A floating hopper held raw materials that were gasified and fed into the low-pressure interior through a thin tube. More layers of magic outside the vessel sequestered it from sound. A stack of high-capacity mana stones the size and shape of dinner plates powered the assembly, with a redundant supply nearby in case the first failed or ran out of mana.

Taylor couldn't look at the end product until he thought it was done, which made him nervous. His usual crystallariums ran unattended, at the longest, for only two weeks. If a run failed, he could start it again with little real loss. This project would run for months, and if it weren't perfect, then he'd have to start again. So, he had taken every precautionary measure he could think of, including setting up a Zone of Forbiddance to keep everyone else out. 

Not that there was anyone to worry about in his personal pocket dimension. The miniature world had a sun, a river that ran in circles, a forest, a mushroom forest, a bit of grassland, a mountain with an inverted twin floating above it, and some fascinating underground spaces that grew delicate, mana-rich plants. For all that space, it had housed a handful of people, and only temporarily. 

Ophelia whispered, "How do you know it works?"

He handed her a green gem slightly smaller than the other test stones. She glanced at it long enough to verify that the imperfections were missing.

"You've done it."

"Not yet, but I'm close. The big one will take months to grow. But, what do you think happens when the empire finds out thousands of arcaics are getting classes?"

She blanched and shut her eyes. "We'd be a threat to the church and the empire; a threat to the very idea of human superiority. The emperor will kill us. He won't have a choice."

"Ophelia," he took her by the shoulders, "you want to recover Arc-Home because it's the homeland of your people. But I want a place for everyone, far from the empire, somewhere the IEF can't reach without breaking itself. A place where all the races can have classes and live the way the gods intended, bolstered by the system's strength and guidance but without the foolery of worshiping it as a goddess. That's how we get strong enough to succeed where the empire failed."

He released her. "So there are two ways this can go. We can retake Arc-Home early and open it to everyone. Or, we build the first northern settlement somewhere else, and the arcs take Arc-Home for themselves sometime later."

"Can't we start with Arc-Home for everyone, and then move the other races after…," she looked away from him. She was too intelligent and too well-read not to see the contradiction.

"You taught me Aarden's history. Remember Kulatavili? How did that go?"

King Kula had allied multiple tribes to clear new territory, with a promise to share it equally. But as soon as the territory was secure from monsters, he tried to eject two of the three tribes. "You know what happens when people spend their blood on a place, build it up, put down roots. Anyone born there will think of it as their home. They won't leave without a fight. Everything you do to encourage them to move away will create resentment that leads to bloodshed. Forcing them leave will end in bloodshed sooner.

"I don't mind being the springboard for Arc ambition, but I won't chart a path to pointless bloodshed. I won't raise up a people just to watch them slaughter each other."

"Arcs will never give up on Arc-Home," she said. "You can't ask that of me."

"I'm not asking you to give it up. I'm asking you to win, even if that means waiting a while longer, or sharing power in your homeland with other races. Arcs can't do this on their own, even with classes. And not every arc will feel the way you do. Some will even see you as the enemy for causing trouble. This project could split the arc people into opposing factions. Have you thought of that?"

She looked at him in a way she never had before: annoyed. "You think I haven't?" She turned her gaze to the floating crystallarium. "I'm prepared for that. The only thing that scares me is dying without seeing my homeland."

"Oh, I don't think you'll have to worry about that," he smiled at her from behind his mask. "We're going to scout Arc-Home no matter what. You'll be able to kiss the ground if you want to."

She scanned him up and down with hopeful eyes. "When?" she asked.

"We'll be ready to scout the northern continent in eighteen months. The Muse, Arc-Home, parts of Shik-Karan and Han-Karan. But remember what I said. If you want Arc-Home for the arcs, then your people will have to take it on their own."