The Threadbinders
Chapter Eleven
Letting go of Sophia and Vinton had actually been much easier than Arkady and Yasha had thought it would be, simply because the two humans looked so damned happy together, it almost felt like they were doing them a disservice keeping them on Quiesh a moment longer.
They’d not lingered long in Daggerport—word that they had a patient with the dying remnants of Shesterlilly hive in her had gotten out, and they’d been politely told not to stay overnight—and before they knew it, they’d found themselves approaching Feralreach, the coastal overlook city where the Council resided.
Feralreach was truly a marvel of magical engineering, a city perched on an overlook above the water, hundreds of yards above the coastline, various suspension beams keeping the city aloft above the raging Terrorheart Ocean, which continually thrashed and churned beneath it. There was a dock along the underside of the city, one which raised and lowered ships into the waters beneath it through a variety of cranes, hooks, pullies and winches, but there was also an air dock on the city’s topside and Yasha brought the griffin in to land there, some place they hoped would be much less heavily crowded, but instead turned out to be almost as much as a frenzy, with many airships and flighted creatures coming and going.
Upon arrival, Arkady knew things were definitely amiss in Feralreach.
The city itself usually had a sort of sleepy, academic feel to it, but things were extremely hustle and bustle, and their arrival was screened much more heavily than what they were used to. The last time they’d shown up, the harbormaster had given them little more than a cursory glance before asg them a dock and sending them on their way. This time, they’d been asked about their business, their length of stay and all additional engers travelling with them. Even though Velshia was still unconscious, because of her condition, she wouldn’t be allowed to leave Quiesh’s compartments during this visit, and Moonweave had graciously agreed to stay with her, while Yasha and Arkady dealt with Council business.
It had been near on a decade since their last visit to Feralreach, when Arkady had come to tithe into the Council’s coffers, as part of his contributions to their orphanage outreach programs, one of which had been responsible for discovering him in his youth. Since then, he’d done all that he could to help keep those programs afloat and running. Too many potential mages went undiscovered, simply because they went untested in their youth, and the worlds needed as many mages as they could get.
Feralreach still had that oceanic smell to it, but now it was undercut with dozens of exotic spices and herbs wafting through the air. He imagined there must be some sort of automated defense spell to keep the migratory birds away, as avian pests had always been rampant around the city, and now he couldn’t see signs of a single one. Perhaps the plague of airborne assaults had been enough of a tax on the street merchants that they’d banded together to commission some high-end deflection spell. Or maybe they’d just brought in predators to hunt the birds. Hard to say.
“I’ve always liked this city,” Yasha said, stepping up to stand next to her husband. “There’s something constantly a’flux in its streets.”
“Mmmm. I mostly liked it because I could get good mizzard sausage any time, day or night,” the dwarf mage laughed, stroking his beard slightly. “That had better still be true, or I shall find Nivrex’s next of kin and demand to know why his business failed.”
“Leave it to my husband to think with his belly,” the elvish Threatbinder giggled, rubbing the back of his neck with her hand as she towered over him. “Do you think they’ve realized the problem?”
“Based on all the coming and going, I think they have an idea,” he told her, grumbling just a touch. For years, he’d argued they needed some type of centralized communications system, some way that would enable to them to check in for updates that didn’t require them to journey out to Feralreach, and each time he’d been told the same thing—if he could come up with one, they’d gladly use it. But until he did, they had to use the tools they had at hand. Which weren’t all that much.
While Feralreach had started as a home for the Binders, it had originally been much more of a magical college than an actual city, but as the number of mages grew, so, too, did the structures needed to feed, house and entertain them. Eventually, the city of Feralreach expanded until it had become the large metropolis it was today, a coastal hub trading point that also doubled as the mages’ headquarters and home.
Before heading in to see the council, the two of them had stopped to get a room at a local inn, just to be sure they would have some place to sleep tonight that wasn’t Quiesh’s chambers. They loved their companion, but it was nice to sometimes be able to sleep in a solid and stable bed chamber that didn’t sway on the winds or rise and fall with the breathing of the creature bearing it upon her back.
One thing that definitely struck both of them as a disappointment was how that, as of yet, they had yet to come across a familiar figure, someone they’d known last time they’d been through the city, but it had been nothing but a sea of unknown faces, which had made them feel much more like strangers than they felt they should’ve been. The buildings were at least mostly the same, and the layout hadn’t really changed, although Arkady was disappointed to see his favorite brewery in town seemed to have changed owners.
Yet another reminder that nothing lasted forever.
After checking in at the inn, the pair headed towards the largest, most imposing structure in town—the University.
When the school had been founded, Threatbinders had been in far higher demand than Threadbinders, but both lines of research were given equal time. Over the centuries, both sides had seen time where they were in much higher demand than the other. The last few decades had seen an uptick in international skirmishes and wars, so Threatbinder services had been on the uptick. But there would always be those in search of love.
When they reached the front gate, they found themselves greeted by a pair of massive ogres standing guard outside of the building itself, neither looking especially bright, but both of which were of such size and stature that it gave the two mages slight pause as they both peered up at the towering walls of muscle blocking their path.
“Pardon us,” Arkady said, raising his voice to ensure the giant guardians could hear him. “We’re here to talk to the Council.”
“Yeah, well, that and a shiny gold piece’ll get you a cup of hot veelish down at the corner,” one of the two ogres said to him. “They ain’t seeing anyone. Not now, not soon.”
Arkady frowned a little bit. “I’m a Threadbinder and my wife here is a Threatbinder, which guarantees us an audience any time we should wish one. And we wish one.”
The talkative ogre glanced over at his pal. The two hulks each stood two and a half times the size of Yasha, making them even taller over Arkady. “Little dwarf here thinks he’s being funny, doesn’t he? Only ever been one dwarf Threadbinder and ol’ Arkady’s centuries old, not someone young and spry as you, dwarven pup. Now scamper off, before I’s squish ya.”
The dwarf could see his wife starting to tense up, but he simply placed his hand on her hip to calm her. And then he simply relaxed his eyes, found the ogre’s golden life thread, wrapped his hand around it and gave a sharp twist, as the ogre’s eyes widened, and he clutched at his chest, unable to see his life thread being manipulated by the dwarf. Still, the ogre wasn’t entirely stupid and glanced down to look at Arkady, suddenly realizing that Arkady was exactly what he said he was.
The ogre reached behind him and started pushing open the gate, glancing at the dwarf with pleading eyes, using his other hand to wave feverishly at his partner, who frowned and helped him open the door. “Sorry, Master Arkady,” the other one said. “We wasn’t told you might be coming by, an’ things ain’t been good at the Academy the last month or so. Please let Gebben go?”
Most people weren’t aware that Threadbinding magic could be used offensively, but Arkady had lived long enough to learn most of the various unorthodox ways he could apply his magical skills in a pinch, and he wasn’t going to be pushed around by some lunk on guard detail who hadn’t had the common sense to recognize a Threadbinder Master’s uniform when he saw it. But he certainly wasn’t going to make it a fatal mistake on the guard’s part either. The dwarf uncurled his fingers and let the cord slip out of them, as the bigger ogre whom he assumed was called Gebben, clutched at his chest and started wheezing for breath. “My… apologies… Master… you look… much younger than we would have expected…” the ogre gasped and sputtered as he and his partner moved out of the way to allow the two mages to .
“I will try and take it as a compliment, Guard Gebben, but it would befit you to perhaps brush up on your Threadbinder and Threatbinder attire, so that this sort of incident does not happen again,” he said. “No hard feelings, however.”
The two mages strolled into the Academy as the two massive doors were pulled closed behind them without the ogres saying another word.
“Did you need hurt his pride so, husband of mine?” Yasha scolded lightly.
“I needed our entrance expedited,” he grumbled, “and that seemed the best way to do so.”
“You could’ve given them our names, dear husband.”
“You heard them, beloved,” he said, shaking his head with a wry laugh. “I am too young to be the great Threadbinder Master Arkady Gormansson, Rank Eight.”
“To be fair, love, we have done very well for ourselves in the tithing over the last decade, and you probably do appear ten, twenty, mayhap even thirty years younger than you did when last we were at Feralreach,” she said, stroking the top of his head. “While you and I are accustomed to that, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Council didn’t recognize you, so much more handsome than the last time they saw us.”
“Flattery, dear wife, will only get you so far with me.”
“It’s gotten me thus far, dear husband, and I imagine it will take me further still.”
The halls weren’t as filled with students falling out of every nook and cranny, as they often were, because according to the calendar, they were in the summer break, a two-month period where the Academy held no classes, instead letting students practice independently, and the instructors allowed to experiment and research as they saw fit.
However, there were plenty of ways to call all the faculty of the Academy together. Outside of the main gathering hall, there was a small set of three gears, each with a slide lock holding them in place. One at a time, he removed the slide locks and turned to put the gears into position. Once all three were in position, there was a soft, wet thunk sound that came from behind the wall, as a mechanism moved to load a round into the chamber, and then a sudden whooshing sound, as the firework barreled up the long tube and illuminated the sky over the Academy with a swirling green and purple light, signaling that the Council was being called to an emergency session. Any Threadbinder or Threatbinder of rank five or above could call one, which was in part how the Academy remained such an open hierarchy—no one singular person was in charge.
The two of them walked into the empty chamber, but left the doors open behind them as mages of both stripes began pouring into the room quickly, many familiar faces seeing Yasha and Arkady, giving them both waves of approval and, in several cases, relief, as if they were desperate for someone to come and tell them what the hell was going on. This continued for several minutes, as Arkady and Yasha sat at the front of the room, as those who’d called for the meeting, and they waited as even more mages continued to flood the room, all the seats taken and many, many more mages in standing room.
Arkady watched as Old Man Druthers, the oldest Threatbinder alive, wandered towards the front of the room, his eyes settling on the dwarf. “Good to see you, Master Gormansson,” he said, offering one of his ancient and withered hands for the dwarf to shake, which he did. “I’m hoping you’re here to shed some clarity on the problems that several of our Threadbinders have been reporting on for the last few weeks.”
“I can provide some information, Master Druthers, but clarity? That might be asking a bit much from an old sage dwarf like myself,” he laughed, the older man laughing with him. “I can give you all the details that I’ve gathered, but if you’re asking for meaning or purpose, well, that’s a bit outside of my personal scope and abilities, I think.”
“Even just some understanding of what’s happened will be a great improvement,” the older man said, not letting go of Arkady’s hand for a long moment. “This has been of great consternation to all of us here, and even I feel like I’m treading water, and my legs grow tired from all the effort.”
“I’ll do what I can to offer some solace, great Master, but even still, I’m afraid none of will be standing on solid ground any time soon.”
“M’lady Yasha!” The boisterous voice approaching belonged to the Threatbinder affectionately known as Burr by many of the more senior of the trade, although his actual name was several dozen syllables long. He was generally referred to as Threatbinder Sap in formal company. At barely a quarter of Arkady’s height, the pixie Threatbinder Master was easily the most dangerously tiny package walking or flying around the campus. In fact, in of actual weight, he might have been the most lethal substance to have ever lived, considering his propensity for large and powerful Threatbindings. “I see you’re still kicking about with this troublesome dwarf by your side. You could be doing so much better than him, you know.”
“And be, what, the eighteenth ex-Mrs. Sap?” Yasha laughed respectfully, shaking her head. “Even with all the complications and problems, I still place my faith in the art of Threadbinding, and most especially in my husband.”
“Are you hitting on my wife again, Burr?” Arkady cackled in a bellowing roll of thunder. “Don’t make me stuff you inside of a breadbasket and fling you into the cold waters. Again.”
“How dare you, sir!” the pixie said, placing his tiny hands on his hips in mock offense. “I am simply looking after the health and well-being of one of our upstanding of the Threatbinder community, and making sure she’s cared for and loved.”
“And I’m telling you, Burr, that I’m doing all of those things without complaint, and you keep harassing her every time we’re in town, and I shan’t have it, sir, no, not one bit longer,” he chuckled before the pixie stood on the table before him, and the two squats exchanged a hug like the eternally long-term friends they’d always been, even with the incident involving the breadbasket. (Burr, it had been mutually agreed, had that one coming.) “How’ve you been, you daft coot?”
“Watching the student body go to hell and back,” the pixie grimaced. “Back in our day, the students were eager to put in the hard work needed to master some of the finer concepts. Now, everyone wants short cuts and work done for them. They’re unwilling to get down into the nitty gritty of how our magic works. It’s appalling.”
“You envy them how easy they have it, don’t you?”
“Damn straight,” Burr grumbled, scratching his proud, twirled mustache. “Never let them know I said that, though. I take it you’re here about the chaos that’s been affecting our Threadbinders?”
“We are,” Arkady said. “I discovered it a few months back and have been doing a bit of research into it before I wanted to present it to the Council. At first, I thought it might have just been an isolated incident, something connected to moon tides or the like. But I’ve had enough time to set out that it isn’t an isolated case, and that the system itself has some greater problems that we need to address.”
“Looks like just about everyone’s here, lad, so you’d better get to it,” Burr said as he moved to sit down on the table in front of the two mages.
Arkady looked up and the room was filled from wall to wall with so many different type, sizes, shapes and races of mages that he felt a little self-conscious. He’d never called one of these meetings before, although he’d been in them when they had been, and each time, he’d wondered how much pressure must be on those who called it. As much as his wife was here to him, this was Threadbinder business, and the Threatbinders were simply being brought in so they would stay in the loop of what was happening.
“Good morning,” Arkady said, trying to summon whatever teaching instincts he might have ever possessed. “For those of you who don’t know me, I am Master Threadbinder Arkady Gormansson, Rank Eight. I am here to inform not only the Council, but the entire College that the art of Threadbinding is in danger of disruption. The old ways, those we have known for centuries, no longer hold as they once have.”
“We have seen it!” said one younger mage, panic in her eyes and voice.
“It’s true!” another groaned. “I don’t know what I’m doing any more!”
“Love is no longer pure or true!”
“We are doomed! Our art is dead!”
“It’s the end of a tradition of thousands of years old!”
“The public is going to demand our head on spikes!”
“They’re going to sentence us to a dozen years of hanging!”
“HEY!” Arkady’s voice cut through the crowd’s bickering like a deafening thunderclap, shoving down the voices of all the others in the area and leaving the room in a massive silence once more. “Stop panicking! No one is going to be demanding anything from us, and none of the services you’ve provided before now are invalid or null. This isn’t the end of the world or even the end of our ability to perform our duties. What it does represent is a change in the way we do business, and some of the fundamentals upon which we have come to rely upon.”
“What does that mean?” a particularly sassy elvish woman off to one side said, perhaps a distant cousin or relative of Yasha, Arkady couldn’t be sure.
“What it means that the peoples of our worlds have, it seems, crossed a threshold, one I suspect affected by the constant population growth we have seen over the last few centuries,” Arkady said, placing both of his strong hands on the table in front of him. He needed to convey strength, and he needed to make sure the entire room saw him being completely unafraid. Here, in this moment, fear would incite a feeding frenzy, with most mages driven into a panicked stampede in seconds, and the remaining few trampled underfoot, casualties of the carnage. Instead, he needed to quell the fear before it could take root, before it could even get a toehold among the crowd. “The old ways work, just not as they once did. The threads are still there; there are simply more of them now. You will have to work a bit more, do some study and not simply have the answer provided to you on a plate.”
There was a large amount of people rabble rousing, and so Arkaday smashed his fist down on the table to bring the room back to silence again.
“You are entirely capable of doing the things you have always been doing!” the dwarf said. “You simply now have options and more complexity. The fact of the matter is, no person in the worlds has simply one lone soulmate anymore. Each of us now has several options to pursue—some closer, some further away, some stronger, some weaker. These are things you need to discuss with your client—you give them the options. Don’t just make up your mind for yourself.”
“Wait, so each of these threads really binds two people?” a younger looking human mage asked from somewhere in the back.
“That’s right. I’ve been investigating some, and I think thickness is attached to strength of that bond, but I’m still not entirely certain of that,” Arkady said. “There’s much to learn, and threads can fade in time. When we picked up our first multiple threaded person, she had four threads coming from her, one of which led to Yasha and I, another of which led to a man in Gom Weydan, someone she had a much stronger connection with, and whom she eventually left with. Since then, the cords connected her to us has grown thinner and thinner, but it still hasn’t broken. So, Threadbinders will need to adapt and adjust, to learn how to judge which threads are better options than others, and how to talk about those options with your clients. And we’re all going to need to learn more about the cords themselves, how they operate, what each individual detail can tell you about the link it’s formed between two people. We’re not completely in uncharted waters, friends, but the currents have changed, the wind is unpredictable and we have much work to be done.”
“Can we even say to be connecting people with their true loves?” one of the older Threadbinders said, as Arkady pointed a finger at the man.
“The term ‘true love’ probably needs to go away, but ‘soulmate’ is still a thing we can be saying,” Arkady told the gathered mages. “And people may be excited about the idea of more options, or the idea of having multiple partners.” Many of the people grumbled and groused as Arkady waved his hand in the air again. “Look, you can sell it however you want, but this is the world you’re in now. All of us have to adapt—we’ve all been on autopilot for so long, we’ve forgotten how to adapt to a changing world, a society that’s evolved into something new. You have to learn again. We’re all back in school once more.”
The room devolved into a long series of discussions that ran rampant for hours, while many of the mages wanted to probe Arkady’s knowledge about what he’s learned in the ways of multiple threads, width of threads, types of threads, when threads could appear and how to judge the quality of each thread.
As much as he and Yasha wanted to get out of the conversation as quickly as he could, but unfortunately the talks got complicated and intricate, and nobody else had the experience that he did in dealing with the new system. Everyone was suddenly a student, and Arkady was the only one who had been doing any real research into the matter. Many of the Threadbinders had just stopped accepting work until they had a better understanding of what was going on. In fact, the most common thing that he heard for the next several hours was, “Are you sure this won’t just… go away?”
Old mages stuck in old ways.
It was infuriating.
But by the time the moon was high, Arkady had done all he could to help answer questions, to get people prepared, and, most importantly, to get them prepared to do their own research, to understand how things were going to function under the new system. He was teaching them how to forget rules and structure, and how to improvise based on what they saw and what they felt.
For him, this sort of adaptation had been second nature so long, simply because of his nomadic lifestyle, that he was surprised to see how horribly entrenched in their ways many of the mages were, and how much of a struggle it was to get them outside of their patterns and habits.
They had planned to leave Feralreach the day after their arrival, but it looked as though they were going to be needed at the Academy for a bit longer than that, which meant the next day they would need to head back to Quiesh and get Moonweave and Velshia, especially as the latter could wake up as soon as the next day, and she would be ready for her final treatment. The Shesterlillies were nearly completely run out of her bloodstream, and within a few more days, the true Velshia would wake up for the first time in decades, only to find out that not only had she left home, but that she wouldn’t be able to return to it for several more decades, if even that.
Neither Yasha nor Arkady were looking forward to that, but they would do the best they could to help the woman find a good place for her to live the rest of her life. Some days, the small comforts were the only comforts the mages could find.
When they got back to the inn, Yasha was practically carrying her small, stout husband, the dwarf utterly exhausted from his hours being interrogated by his fellow mages, who expected him to have all of the answers, rather than the few pieces of stray knowledge that he had picked up while trying to figure out what was going on as much as the next mage.
Both were so tired, they almost missed the tall elf trying to stab the dwarf as they climbed the stairs, but thankfully, Yasha had spent most of the meeting being bored and so she was on her game, and as soon as the silver dagger gleamed in the low light of the tavern, she whipped her free hand out to pin the elf’s arm against the wall, her thumb digging in right in the center of the tall elf’s wrist.
She barely had time to see the elf look at her, as if aghast that she had tried to stop him, only to bite down on a small capsule of some kind, and to be destroyed in a flash of smoke and flame that appeared and disappeared so quickly, it could’ve been mistaken for a teleport spell, and not the suicide enchantment that it was.
The entire thing had happened during one long blink of Arkady’s eyes, and he turned to look at his wife, who had a single tear rolling down her cheek. “What did I miss, love?” he asked her, almost asleep in his steps.
“Nothing that can’t wait until you’ve slept, dear husband,” she said, although the tremble in her voice told him that it would be the first thing they would discuss in the morning.
Until then, however, both elf and dwarf needed to rest, and neither had the wherewithal to strip any of their clothes off before crawling into the bed of their room at the inn and falling immediately asleep.
Yasha had spent centuries fighting off elves trying to assassinate her husband. They just hadn’t taken any shots at him recently, which meant either old habits were back, or something new was afoot. Regardless, sleep trumped all.
They slept.