The Orb (Highmast series, flashback)

Two big green eyes stared at him, half hopeful, half defensive, and Big Gristo did not know what to do about it. It had only been a few weeks since Dryvus had brought his latest acquisition home, but the new kid, Calli, had already made a big impression. The ripples she had sent out through the Rat’s Nest had been far larger than her scrawny little body should have made. He turned his eyes down to the gift she had thrust into his hand instead.

At first he had thought it was a marble, but no marble he had ever seen shone and hummed like that. It glowed the same iridescent blue as a flamewyrm, shot through with streaks of navy and midnight like dark lightning.

“I swiped it off of the technomancer’s cart,” she said. Again, there was that uncertain look in her eyes, half defiant, half desperately seeking approval. A sewer kid’s look if ever there was one.

“Do you want to rephrase that, Calli?” A voice asked behind her wryly and they both looked up to see Dryvus there, raising an eyebrow at her. He always moved surprisingly silently for a man as rotund as he was. That slightly plump roundness burgeoning from underneath his simple, well made clothes gave him a friendly, jovial look, but it would be a mistake to believe it. Dryvus cultivated that harmless aura as he cultivated everything else around him.

The scrawny kid scalded, shoving her hands deep into her pockets and eyeing the Rat’s Nest leader up owlishly. She barely said a word around Dryvus, though he had not been unkind to her. It was as if she had not decided yet how to feel about him.

Join the club, kid, Big Gristo thought darkly. There was not a man-jack of them in the Rat’s Nest who did not owe Dryvus their lives and loyalty, but sometimes Big Gristo found himself wondering if it was worth it. Life would have been a whole lot shorter if he had never saved me, but it certain-sure would have been easier, too. There was something delightfully simple about the hangman’s rope, after all.

“I don’t know what you heard, Dryvus, but I definitely heard her say she found it lying loose and unloved in the gutter,” Big Gristo said loudly, throwing a wink towards Calli. Calli did not allow her expression to change, that same watchful wariness lingering there on her face.

“No unauthorised stealing, Calli,” Dryvus said with mock sternness. “You know the rules. You’ll only get caught and waste all my hard work on the end of a hangman’s noose. I didn’t save you from the sewers just so you could waste your talents picking pockets.”

A flicker of a scowl intensified in her eyes, but she did not let it creep across that hauntingly blank expression. Dryvus sighed.

“Well, remember it better next time. You’re risking all our necks, kid. It’s not just you that could end up taking the fall. You make a foolish choice and we could all face the drop. Don’t make me regret rescuing you.” He held out his hand and Big Gristo obediently dropped the throbbing orb into it. Dryvus rolled it around in the palm of his hand thoughtfully, prodded it with his finger, and then let out a sharp, almost bitter, laugh.

“Where did you say you found this again, Calli?”

She shot a glance over at Big Gristo and muttered, “In the gutter.”

“No, I mean really.”

“A technomancer’s cart.”

His gaze pinned her in place. Big Gristo always thought that Dryvus’ eyes were like shards of crystal, so clear, almost translucent, that it was a wonder you couldn’t see right through them to that ever-whirring brain behind them. The temperature in the stuffy underground home dropped slightly. Calli’s cheeks burned even brighter, but she held his gaze defiantly. Big Gristo held back a laugh. The kid has guts, you have to give her that. He’d not been sure what Dryvus had been thinking when he first turned up with the silent, bony little rat three weeks back, but there was fire in her. As usual, Dryvus’ instincts had proven right.

“We lie to all the rest of the world, Calli,” Dryvus said quietly, and there was no playfulness in his tone now. “But we do not lie to each other down here and you will never lie to me. I will ask you one last time: where did you get this?”

“He already knows, Calli,” Big Gristo rumbled to her. “Dryvus never asks questions he doesn’t already know the answer to. Tell him the truth.”

She shuffled her feet.

“There was this man in a grey robe,” she muttered to the cold stone floor. “I followed him into Seven Stumps Lane when he was drunk.”

Dryvus let out another sharp laugh, admiration mingled with the exasperation on his face.

“You prised this Seersight right out of Mattias McGomery’s eye socket?”

“I don’t know his name,” she said sullenly.

Big Gristo felt a wave of ice water rushing over him. It tasted peculiarly like panic in his mouth. He stared at the glowing blue ball still glimmering with a smug malevolence in the middle of Dryvus’ hand.

“Hell’s Bells, child, you’re going to get us all strung up,” Big Gristo croaked. Now that he knew what it was, it seemed painfully obvious and he wondered why he hadn’t recognised it before. His only defence, he supposed, was that he had only ever seen Seersight orbs shimmering half-hidden behind rich men’s eyelids. He had never expected to see one sitting with a faux-innocence in their happy little home.

“I didn’t let him see my face!” she protested. “And I wasn’t followed home. I just thought you might like it, Big Gristo because, you know…” she gestured at his eye-patch silently.

It’s because I got that pastry from the market for her yesterday, he thought dismally. I should have known better. Sewer kids don’t take gifts without repaying them. They don’t trust debts of kindness, as a rule. I just thought she could do with feeding up a bit, that’s all. I’ve brought this on myself.

“I appreciate the thought,” he said. The words sounded hollow and helpless, coming out weakly, even through the expansive acres of his chest. “But you could have got yourself killed. Besides, you know the rules, kid, no magic in the Rat’s Nest.”         

“It’s not magic,” she said sanctimoniously. “It’s technomancy.”

“There’s a difference?” he snorted.

“No, the whelp is right. Technomancy uses magic in its construction, but it is not made of magic. It’s not as fickle and inconsistent as mage-magics are.”

Gristo grunted darkly. That seemed like a nebulous difference to him.

“Whose side are you on, Dryvus?”

“It’s no different to the wardings on the door,” Calli insisted moodily. “You’re happy enough to use those.”

“Oh, aye? And where did a sewer rat learn so much about magic anyway?”

She stuck out her tongue at him.

“I have two eyes and I keep them both open.”

Dryvus gave the orb another experimental prod with his finger. He glanced up at Gristo and shrugged.

“You might as well try it, seeing as we have it,” he said.

Big Gristo froze in place.

“You’re not serious? I’m not trusting that blessed thing, and I’m certainly not shoving it my head.”

But Dryvus just held it out to him. Big Gristo held his gaze for a moment, but Dryvus had an immovable will. Big Gristo gave in with a bad grace, tentatively accepting the Seersight. The warmth only seemed to increase. He gritted his teeth, reached up, moved his well-worn eye-patch out of the way and slid the orb into the empty socket hiding behind it.

At first there was nothing but a strange warm sensation thrumming inside his head and he thought that the orb, whatever it was supposed to do, hadn’t worked. A migraine-inducing lightning flash soon proved him wrong. He could taste the colours scalding and sprawling through his mind, spasming in a lightning storm inside his head, fizzing and crackling. He tried to pluck the orb back out, but his fingers turned thick and unwieldy. The world swayed abruptly and everything appeared disconcertingly upside down though he was almost positive he hadn’t moved. There was a flash of black which lightened slowly into a fizzing, fuzzy grey and then the world reasserted itself. He blinked slowly.

“Well?” Dryvus demanded. “What does this one do? Seersights all do different jobs, depending on how they’ve been designed,” he added in his best tutorly voice to the scrap.

“I knew that,” Calli retorted defiantly, though Big Gristo doubted she had. He suspected the kid only stole the orb because it was pretty and she’d wanted it. She must have magpie blood in her somewhere.

Big Gristo let out a yelp as he turned to face that Rat’s Nest’s leader. He could see everything about Dryvus in startling detail. Though their underground home was always suffused with a soft, warm light from the large fireplace which dominated the main room, it was usually low enough to hide the sharper details from view. Now, the veins on Dryvus’ nose stood out in thin blue lines amongst his gaping pores. The fine white hairs stood out on the backs of Calli’s stick-thin arms. He could even see the cracks of dried skin ploughing like canyons through the soft plump flesh of her lips. He could read the guild stamp pressed into the stolen silver candlesticks upon the top of the mantelpiece, and see a thin crack splintering the pottery bowls stacked neatly on the shelf by the door.  

He shuddered. He wasn’t sure he liked it. It had taken a while to get used to seeing with one eye, learning to account for his blind-spots and depth perception, but even when he had had both he had not been able to see this clearly.

He looked to Dryvus again, and saw that all too familiar gleam in Dryvus’ eyes, the one which said he already had plans hatching. Big Gristo felt his stomach plummet.

“It doesn’t do anything,” he lied quickly. “Just fizzes and flashes. Perhaps it got broken when Calli pried it free.” He plucked the orb out hastily and dropped the eye patch back into place. The look on Dryvus’ face said he didn’t believe him, but the leader didn’t press the point.

It was Calli who was pouting.

“I didn’t break it,” she insisted fiercely, her hands folding over her chest. “I was careful. That corpse man didn’t even bleed when I wiggled it free.”

Big Gristo swallowed his smile in the face of her indignation, but he couldn’t help but agree with her description. He had often thought the hollow-eyed McGomery looked cadaverous. Still, it rarely matters what one looks like when they are as powerful as Mattias McGomery is. Of course Calli would have chosen one of the most powerful magewitches in Highmast to rob. The brat had all the sense of a brick-wall, it seemed, and knew just as little of fear. This was certain-sure going to end it trouble, one way or another…

He looked at the glowing blue orb in his hand again and then handed it tentatively back to Dryvus.

“You want to have a go, Dryvus, you’re more than welcome to take your own eye out.”

Dryvus just laughed. His fingers closed around the orb.

“I’m sure I’ll find some use for it. I never abandon a gift when it drops itself into my lap.” His mind was already whirring, Gristo could tell, trying to find a way to benefit from their unexpected boon. “Tell Calli how you lost your eye, Gristo,” he added. “There’s a reason Big Gristo doesn’t trust technomancy,” he told the girl.

Big Gristo hesitated. It wasn’t a story he liked to tell, but there was curiosity gleaming behind the scowl on the sewer kid’s face and he thought it might take the sting out of the rejection. She was trying to do a kind thing after all, he thought with a sigh, and kindness is a rare currency in the underworld.

“I lost my eye when I was a mite,” he grunted. “Not much older than you. My father traded it to a magewitch for a Seersight orb, much like that one. My father was a merchant sailor and he wanted a weather orb to predict up coming storms. The magewitch took my eye and the money and promised the orb within a week but when my father went back to retrieve it, the man was gone. Turned out he wasn’t a magewitch at all, just a conman. I never did learn what he wanted my eye for,” Big Gristo added ruminatively.

“He probably sold it to an artificer,” Dryvus interjected. “Lots of the darker magics require live body parts and they can fetch quite a price on the black-market. Seersights themselves require eyes, I believe. Some folks try making them out of dead men’s eyes, but the magic won’t hold to it, for some reason.”

Big Gristo shuddered. He remembered the feeling too well. It wasn’t so much the pain, for there had been large quantities of painsbane involved, nor the fear, though he wasn’t ashamed to admit that he had been terrified at the prospect, it was the coldness of the metal as it slipped against his skin, the greedy gleam in the supposed magewitch’s own eyes, the sudden darkness taking hold. It had been decades ago now, but Big Gristo still had nightmares about it sometimes.

It took a lot to shock the kid, but Calli’s eyes were wide now.

“You mean that thing used to be an actual eye?” she asked, her face curling into such a horrified look of disgust that Big Gristo couldn’t help but laugh. “In someone’s actual head? I thought they were made of glass or something.”

Dryvus did not seem the least bit perturbed by the Seersight’s origins, Big Gristo noted. He was still holding the orb easily, rolling it between his finger and his thumb, holding it up to the flickering firelight. Gristo did not know what magic made the orb so solid when surely something that was once an eyeball ought to be squishier, and he was sure he didn’t want to find out.

He let out a snort of derision. “Magic. Technomancy. It’s all just another way for the rich to get richer on the backs of the poor. It only ever helps those who don’t need it, in my opinion. I don’t hold with none of that magic stuff if I can help it.”

“So what happened next?” Calli asked him. Big Gristo shrugged.

“A few years later my father lost his fortune on a sea storm as he always feared. He sold me into the king’s navy to pay his debts, and died in disgrace in the bottom of an ale bottle a few years after that. I found life on the high sea was not to my taste. When I tried to take my leave, I was caught and sentenced to hang for desertion. That’s when Dryvus stepped in, of course, and the rest is history.”

“But the magewitch,” Calli insisted. “Did you ever hunt him down and get your revenge?”

Big Gristo couldn’t help but laugh. “Bloodthirsty little squirt, aren’t you? Real life isn’t like that, Cal. There’s no justice for folks like us. There’s just us and what we can get.”

The kid’s face grew solemn. She lay a scrawny hand on his large, hairy arm and stared him hard in his one good eye.

“No one will ever steal from you again, Big Gristo. Not whilst I am here to stop them.” She said it with such earnestness that he dared not laugh, and when she added with heartfelt fervour; “We’re going to take care of each other now,” he found he didn’t even want to any longer.