Chapter 7: Aoife (part 2 of 3)

  It wasn't fight night, but Aoife nevertheless found herself sneaking out of the house after the rest of her family had turned in. Whatever vague uneasiness she had started the day with had been muddled further by her conversation with Marlowe. Even Clodagh—or perhaps especially Clodagh—couldn't help her on this occasion.

  One person other than Lucy stood a chance of helping to clear her mind. Her feet raced past the alleyways onto a larger street that would take her to Main Street. A light drizzle had started in the evening and hadn't abated. Combined with the late hour, it left the streets completely deserted save for her. Once she managed to turn onto Main Street, she slowed down to examine each storefront as she passed, not entirely sure what her destination would look like in the near-total darkness.

  She finally stopped in front of a weighty-looking iron door with a metal placard next to it. She couldn't make out the letters engraved on the placard, but as far as she could recall, this was the only shop on the block with an iron door. Faint light leaked through the windows, but not enough to allow a view into the building.

  Aoife hesitated for another second before making up her mind and lifting the doorknocker. The piercing sound it produced was much louder than expected, causing her to look around nervously. For some time, there was no sign that anyone would come to the door. A part of her had already started to regret making the trip and wouldn't have minded if the knock stayed unanswered.

  Just as she began to turn away, she heard a latch slide free and saw the door swing open languidly. Inside stood the solid figure of John Rockford, filling the entire door frame and dwarfing Aoife. The bespectacled blacksmith held a lantern that looked comically small in his hand, and was already in his nightclothes. He looked at her in shocked bewilderment, not dissimilar to the face he showed when she had suddenly materialized on his roof a week ago. She averted her eyes, suddenly feeling awkward.

  "Child, what are you—" Mr Rockford started to remark, but upon seeing her damp hair and clothes, he stood aside. "You'd better come in first."

  The inside of the shop, strikingly spacious due to the high ceilings, was dimly lit by a small furnace in the back. The main furnace, connected to a substantial chimney on the side of the building, sat covered and long cooled. Around it were a multitude of devices and mechanisms Aoife wouldn't know the first things about. To her, they looked to be in wild disarray, but she supposed there must be a rhyme and reason to how they had been arranged. The walls on both sides of the shop were clad in metal chains, tools, and weapons of sundry sizes and shapes. Whenever Aoife had walked in here with Clodagh in the daytime, she felt a sense of inhospitality from the metallic edges and corners that seemingly covered every surface of this room. In the shadows of night, they felt even more ominous, and she couldn't help but pause in her tracks as she followed the blacksmith inside, wondering what had possessed her to think this had been a good idea.

  Mr Rockford turned a curious look at her, and she bit her lips and kept walking. The iron door shut behind them with a heavy thud. No matter, she thought to herself, I'll stay a little while, make polite conversation, then leave. On hindsight, it had been foolish to place her hopes on a much older man she barely knew. She had already begun the unwieldy task of thinking up a fresh excuse for why she had visited, when Mr Rockford gestured toward a seat next to the furnace in the back of the room. "Come, sit. I'd just put on some tea."

  Only when she got closer to the fire did Aoife notice how wet and cold she had been from the walk. As she settled into the well-worn chair she had been offered, she found herself relaxing considerably, and allowed herself to dry off in unthinking silence. After a short while, Mr Rockford joined her on the opposite chair, two teacups in hand. As he poured, he asked without looking up. "Something on your mind, child?"

  Something on my mind? Let me count the ways. The Huaxian visitor claiming to be an estranged relative before disappearing again. Her mother's declining health and the possible role her blood tricks could play in reversing the course. Her sparring partner's ambitions for becoming an EIC recruit, not to mention her sister's fascination with the same occupation. Her underground employer's alleged plans for a marquee event and the potential dangers they portended. She didn't know where to start.

  "Why did you become an adventurer?" she found herself asking, to her own puzzlement. Of all the pressing issues that weight on her, how had she landed on this? Having gotten past the initial shock of seeing her at his door, Mr Rockford appeared unfazed by the question. He took a sip from his cup before answering.

  "It was the fashionable thing to do, at least among my crowd. Some people are born knowing exactly how they'll spend their working lives. A merchant's firstborn, children born on farms, anyone with half a brain who had a doctor in their family... Most of those folks weren't foolish enough to actively seek out Maladies for a living. They used to leave that to the rest of us—the labourers' kids, the street urchins. For us, it was a way out, a way to make something of ourselves. Of course, you also needed to have a knack for Magic to get anywhere, and I... was one of the lucky ones."

  He said this with a subtle grimace, and Aoife suspected that the word 'lucky' was thick with irony. She was reminded of the grimness that had visited the blacksmith on the day of the Testimony when he spoke about Valor Company and the Khiimori Apparatus. She didn't know any retired adventurers beside Mr Rockford, so she didn't have a frame of reference for whether this apparent bitterness toward his chosen career was a common trait. It was a curious thing. By all accounts, adventuring was one of the most highly respected and amply remunerated professions. She would have expected more pride or fondness from someone recounting his experience in the discipline, or at least less negativity.

  "Um, do you mind telling me why you quit, then?" she asked somewhat timidly, worried that she might offend or dredge up unpleasant memories. Her companion took another sip of his tea and let out something between a sigh and a snort.

  "The short of it is I couldn't magick anymore so I had to quit," he fixed her with tired eyes, the lines at their corners prominent. "But I suppose you'd want a longer answer. Magic... it's something that can be learned, but it can also be lost. Not forgotten—more like, locked away. The knowledge, the resources... all of that is still there but there are some of us who lose the ability to access our attuned Quintessence. The Consumpted—that's what we call these Magickers who can't magick anymore. As far as I know, no one's quite figured out why that happens, but I believe there's a branch of medical folk whose sole focus is to try and figure that out, working with the Consumpted to try and fix them. It's expensive to train one of us up, you know; the companies would want to recoup their losses somehow if the adventurer should have had many good years left... and was still kicking."

  "Did you work with one of these doctors? To help you get back?" Aoife asked, though she thought she already knew the answer. Sure enough, Mr Rockford shook his head.

  "Believe me, they tried to send me to one. Damn near took me to court over it. But I refused. I said if it was money they wanted, they can have it. Everything I'd saved up working for them, I gave it right back and left for good. If I'm being honest, child, I was relieved when I woke up one day and couldn't magick anymore. Gave me the push I needed to walk away, something I should have done long before then."

  "Did you... not like it? Being an adventurer?"

  "Oh, there's plenty to like about adventuring. The pay is unbeatable; that much was as true in my time as it is now. The prestige and the attention you receive in the city... I suppose some of us found that gratifying as well. And it might be the only job in this world that actually lets you see it. The world, I mean. Hills and mountains, caves and lakes, wild animals... the people who spend their entire lives couped up inside the city gates can't begin to imagine.

  "But I suppose for me, the best part of the job was the Magic itself. There's a unique pleasure in it. A heightened sense of being one with nature, being one with yourself. It was... the unmistakable feeling that I was in my truest form only when I was attuned to the Quintessence. I won't deny that there's a real beauty in it."

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  For a moment, the lines on the old blacksmith's face seemed to deepen again as he greeted his ghosts. But unlike the dark wrath that radiated from him at the Testimony, this effect was more peaceful, more welcoming. Aoife saw that, within this retired adventurer, a kind of wistfulness coexisted with the bitterness. She thought she could understand. The rousing thrill she had experienced as she burned her heat and jumped over the rooftops of Thameside had been a joy like no other. Then that very night, the same powers used to scare off a drunkard and win a prizefight had left her cold and exhausted.

  "Then why... why were you thinking about quitting, even before you couldn't magick anymore?" Aoife thought of Marlowe, and of Clodagh, and found that she was afraid of the answer. But she needed to hear it.

  "Because my job entailed that I knowingly drive young men and women—fellow adventurers—to early graves," Mr Rockford did not avert his eyes, nor did he change his tone, but a familiar shadow fell over his face. The ghosts had shifted again, and he said this to make himself hear the words, as much as for Aoife's benefit. "I knew it was wrong... an abomination. But I was a fool then, and let myself believe the sweet lie that it was a necessary evil. I suppose one day, my own body decided that enough was enough."

  Aoife fell silent, a shiver climbing up her spine despite her proximity to the furnace. She recalled the Dragoon from Valor Company at the tail of their victorious procession. While he hadn't died, he also didn't look alive, at least in the truest sense. Was this what it meant to become an adventurer? The sacrifice that had to be made? Yet both Marlowe and Clodagh were two of the most vivacious and hopeful people she knew. What awaited them at the end of their dreams?

  "Tea not to your taste, child?"

  She looked up, startled into realizing that her tea sat in her hands, untouched the whole time. It had likely grown cold by now.

  "I'd offer you something stronger," Mr Rockford continued, his features softening somewhat into a slight smile, "but I'm sorry to say I don't keep that stuff around. Doesn't agree with me."

  This gave Aoife a thought. "What happens when you drink liquor?"

  "I get worn out," he replied, now rubbing his beard absent-mindedly. "Like I'd just been striking metal for a day and a half without stopping. Doesn't take much; one drink could do it. The lads I ran with back in the day wouldn't believe me until they saw me in my sorry state. I don't know if it still does that to me; it's been decades since I've had a drink. I don't particularly care to find out, though."

  He studied Aoife as he spoke, and she wondered if he saw the flicker of recognition in her eyes. She understood then that she could trust this man, and this moment felt ripe for getting to the heart of why she had come here tonight. "Mr Rockford, do you know anything about Blood Magic?"

  The blacksmith put down his teacup and leaned back into his seat, causing the chair to creak precariously under his weight. He also seemed to sense that they had finally arrived at the crux of their conversation. "You'd have to be more specific, child. Magic takes many forms, and more than a few deal with or have an effect on blood."

  "I'm thinking of the one practiced by the... Susu... erm, do you know of the DaKhureen tribe that got raided forty years ago? Maybe something to do with a supply of the Khiimori Apparatus?"

  Mr Rockford nodded gravely, "The Tsusuzekhs. I wouldn't say I'm well-versed, but I have my own assumptions about them. You want to know about their Bloodkeeping, do you?"

  She nodded in turn, filling with the same excitement she had felt during Lucy's account. She was desperate for any morsel of knowledge that could tide her over until she met her great-aunt again, or perhaps anything that might inform her efforts to coax Ma back to the land of the living.

  "It's a highly specialized technique that defies categorization. For one thing, it has no attunement," Mr Rockford paused, possibly expecting to see a reaction. When he got none, he continued with a cough, "meaning it doesn't access a specific Quintessence and can, in theory, be practiced by any Magicker, irrespective of how they're attuned. I don't profess to know how it works, but I'd wager it has everything do with the Khiimori."

  "What are the Khiimori?" Aoife blurted out, voicing a query she had become curious about only recently. "I mean, I've heard and said it myself so many times now without knowing what they actually are."

  "The Khiimori were a Malady endemic to the Tsusuzekh Valley near DaKhuree. They were special in that they didn't seem to have a single or even double attunement, but rather could access all five Quintessences. Someone much smarter than me managed to find the actual object that lets them do this—some kind of... internal organ, I suppose, that seems to filter surrounding Quintessences and transmute them into usable energy. It's called the Apparatus, and every Malady has one that's unique to their kind.

  "Whatever it is, the Tsusuzekh people found a way to incorporate a similar Magic into their culture. As mad as this might sound, the Tsusuzekhs didn't hunt the Khiimori, and in turn the Khiimori appeared content to leave them alone. These people seemed to have formed a kind of bond with the Maladies, which let them emulate Maladous Magic; Bloodkeeping was one of the forms it took."

  "They're not around anymore, are they? The Khiimori?"

  "Aye, child. They've since been hunted to extinction. Given to the great cause of supplying adventurers with their precious Apparatus."

  Aoife thought she should feel strange about the sombre tone with which a fellow human spoke of the extermination of a Malady species, as if he were lamenting the demise of mankind's sworn enemies. Instead, she herself felt a pang of anguish, a tightening of her chest, as if a part of her was mourning the Khiimori. It was the part of her that she didn't know about until a few days ago, which had descended from the Tsusuzekhs and carried the memories of their land.

  "Um, this Bloodkeeping," she went on, voice suddenly soft and hoarse, "does it do anything like... cure someone who's bloodless?"

  "I'm not familiar with that term, child."

  "Oh... my Ma, she has this illness. She gets really pale, like all the blood's gone out of her, and she can't find any energy, lies in bed all day. Our aunt called it bloodlessness, but I'm not sure if that's the right word for it. Do you think... the Tsusuzekhs would have known a way to make her better?"

  Mr Rockford studied her again, and his expression had now taken on a gentle quality, one of understanding and compassion. He spoke softly to match her tone. "As far as I know, Bloodkeeping isn't used for treating diseases, though I wouldn't be the right man to ask about this. I'd wager, child, that what you describe is more in the realm of Medicine. Remember, doctors are Magickers too, even though most of them are not as strongly attuned as adventurers. I suggest you ask one of them if you want to know more about your mother's condition."

  Aoife nodded, though her heart sank and all of her earlier excitement had left. There was a finality to what Mr Rockford said that seemed to brook no further probing on this visit. As if to concur with her thoughts, the blacksmith stood up, surprisingly limber for his age and size. "Come, child, I mustn't keep you any later than this. Let me walk you home."

  "Oh, that won't be necessary, Mr Rockford," Aoife put down her teacup, which was still full, and stood up as well. "It's me that kept you up late. I can manage on my own, really."

  He looked at her with that slight smile, and this was now the second time that Aoife felt as though he knew more about her than she had volunteered. In any case, he seemed to agree with her assessment that she would be safe walking home alone.

  As she made her way halfway across the shop and toward the front door, the older man called to her. "Aoife."

  She stopped in her tracks and turned. He almost never called her or her sister by name. They were both 'child' to him. Half lit by the flickering fire and half covered in darkness, Mr Rockford cut a formidable figure, and she was once again reminded of the grimness that had coloured his talk about the Dragoon and the 'cost of doing business'. Here stood a man who was frail despite his towering proportions, weighed down and worn out by the ghosts of his past.

  "Aoife," he called her again, cracks seeping into his deep and sonorous voice. "Your sister Clodagh. She is a good child. A good soul. But she harbours ambitions that I fear may lead her to ruin. I know it is not my place to say, but please. Stay with her, wherever her path takes her. Be her shield. Keep her out of harm's way, as much as you can."

  Aoife nodded earnestly, though she wasn't sure if he could see her. It would be just as well if he couldn't; she didn't want him to see the large drops of tears that now flowed on her cheeks. She didn't know where they had come from, didn't know if they had always been hiding just beneath the surface. For once in her life, she felt as though the vow she had sworn to herself—to Da—had been reaffirmed by someone else who also recognized its sanctity, and endorsed her for the duty. She must always have the courage to do what was right for her family.

  Mr Rockford didn't need to see to know that Aoife would keep her vow. He also nodded, as if to himself. "And child, if ever you're in strife... if I could be of any help, do not hesitate to come back here."