VIRAN

  Auntie's offering bowl filled one raindrop at a time, while Viran made himself small in his chair and studied the gift he had been given.

  The beading water had just started to run down the smooth wooden sides of the bowl to pool at the bottom when the humans walked in wearing their sandals wrong. Different kinds of wrong, too. Like no one had taught them the proper way, and they hadn't worked out the same solution.

  Viran kept silent, because bothering them wouldn't fix anything.

  The silver amulet was almost the size of the nail on his thumb, but only the middle was smooth enough to use as a mirror, if it weren't so crisscrossed with scratches. The edges had neat little grooves in them.

  Something about the way the lines were arranged made Viran's brain itch, but Auntie said his name right then, so he looked up and waved.

  Nice and slow, so the humans would know he wasn't being scary.

  He had lost track of whatever it was by the time he looked back down, but Auntie hadn't given him any instructions on how to use the amulet, so it must be something he could learn on his own.

  So while Auntie explained all the ways she could help, and rain started to pool and rise in her offering bowl on the window, Viran focused on his job.

  Which was figuring out how this little piece of metal was going to help him learn to control his mana. The amulet was so small, it had to be something simple. So simple he was overlooking it.

  Then Calen said 'gun', and Mirri's tail slapped Viran's ankle by accident. Or maybe on purpose.

  He looked up and sniffed anyway, but nothing smelled like sulfur, and neither of the Arrivals was reaching for a weapon. Mirri was hiding that she was angry by curling her tail around the furniture, so she wasn't getting ready to fight.

  Auntie wouldn't need his help with two humans. She was a mage too, but she had so much more mana than Mirri that having the proper ratio of power investment still meant she was at least as durable as Viran. Maybe even more durable than Dovin, who wasn't a mage.

  The kind of durable that was made to live forever for real, not just stop aging.

  Nothing the little humans could have smuggled in would even scratch her scales. Especially not something—

  "Manaless." Calen confirmed, and everyone got to go back to being relaxed.

  Calen had also given Viran an idea.

  Just because he was supposed to be learning to use magic to be dangerous, didn't mean Auntie had given him something dangerous to learn with. Viran was supposed to be not very scary, and not very distracting right now, while he figured it out.

  So nothing the amulet did would be scary or distracting. He could put mana into it without worrying.

  The thick-bordered frame of the not-mirror drank the first excited trickle of mana Viran tested it with so greedily that he almost thought he hadn't fed the bauble at all.

  Sure, it was a *silver* caster's bauble, but silver was used for complexity. Gold and copper took mana *faster*, when you wanted to get something done. And the amulet would be showing some of the power he put into it, if it had been gold. The only thing that transferred mana fast like copper, let you shroud the stored power like silver, and held lots of mana at the same time like gold was—

  Auntie tapped Emma's shield with a claw. She was standing up and talking, moving to pace around the desk with her platinum staff in hand, but she didn't sound like she needed his help.

  She sounded like she was offering the Arrivals as much help as she was offering Viran.

  Well, almost as much. Mirri had never talked about what her caster's baubles had been made of, and this one was for water mana. She wouldn't have used it before.

  The offering-bowl at the window was almost full of rain, but Viran was too busy excitedly re-examining the *platinum* caster's bauble between his claws to care if it overflowed a little. The water would just spill outside.

  He flooded the channels in the metal, trying to feel them out, and immediately felt his mana twist. Viran withdrew hastily, losing the chunk of mana he had thrown out blindly, and tried again slower.

  The energy was flowing back on itself in one direction around the rim of the amulet, and running away around the opposite edge at the same time. Pushing more power the 'wrong' way just jammed up the energy, and the platinum was drinking a lot of mana to fill in the way that did want to take the power.

  Viran decided to see how far around the amulet the mana would go in just one direction, pushing through slowly while he checked that he wasn't missing anything important.

  Auntie had one of her itineraries out on the table, the one that showed the eastern valley below Eastwatch, and she was stretching out the measuring ribbon with all the different definitions of a 'Length' marked on it. Emma was shaking her head while Calen leaned back and rubbed at the sides of his forehead. Mirri was being strangely attentive, listening to the Arrival talk about shadows and 'parallels' and something called a 'meter' that mana wouldn't translate.

  They seemed to be talking about... how big the planet was?

  "Em, it's close enough based on what we know," Calen interrupted. "A meter is kind of like a length, depending on which one they're using."

  "A False Verinian length." Mirri agreed uselessly.

  "We'll have to estimate the closest settlement anyway," Auntie seemed to agree with the smaller Arrival. "A few scaleswidths either way won't change the math overmuch, unless we're talking about millions of units."

  "We are," Calen winced before finishing his reply, while Emma was busy taking deep breaths very slowly. "They were a few hundred miles away. Closer to a thousand, they weren't even at Kansas yet."

  Which told Viran nothing about how far away the village of Kansas had been from Calen and Emma's home. Only that their parents had been on a long trip.

  "How many meters make a mile?" Mirri asked for him. "Twelve? Seventy-two? One hundred fourty-four?"

  Viran swallowed a snort. Expecting the Arrivals to use the same systems of measures Avarea did was silly. Auntie said it was practically tradition for new cultures to bring their own measures with them. Even dwarves had used tens instead of twelves, before the Empire and the monsters from the Depths had finished making them extinct, and they had been native.

  "One thousand, six hundred and nine," Emma's quiet voice was still the loudest thing in the room. "and thirty-four hundredths."

  Auntie silently stowed the itinerary on her desk, and went fishing through her trunk for a different map while Mirri tried to interrogate Emma about how people on Earth ever measured anything like that, and Calen got in the way about it, offering a series of half-explanations that were more confusing than helpful.

  Viran kept silent as he went back to his task, because bothering the humans right now wasn't going to fix anything.

  Even if Mirri was actually right this time, and their system of measures seemed madder than a tomb king.

  The 'scratches' on the thinner inner surface of the bauble started to glow lightly, thrumming with mana a few at a time when Viran completed the circle around the frame. Once he did, the amount of power the amulet took dropped drastically, and he got to cycle the mana he had already used through the metal. It still wouldn't spin the other way, the mana just churned in place when he tried.

  Speeding up the flow of power, going the 'right' direction this time, also didn't do what Viran was hoping for.

  If anything, the obviously patterned lines crisscrossing the surface seemed to blink faster instead of steadying.

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  Slowing down was where he made his first real bit of progress, and the answer was so simple that it made him feel silly.

  The lines were forming runes, three of them lighting up one after the other and going dark in the same sequence. The next problem was that he didn't recognize one of them, which meant the amulet wasn't just elvish.

  It was a relic, trying to talk to him in High Elvish.

  Mirri would be able to tell him what the rune meant. She could read High Elvish 'well enough,' which meant really good, because that was how Mirri measured things. She would know a three letter word.

  "What?" Mirri hissed quietly when he tapped her.

  She was paying *rapt* attention to Emma for some reason, now that they had moved past agreeing on which measures to use. Maybe she understood the math. It all just looked like tracing wider and wider circles to Viran.

  "What is this word?" Viran asked, holding out the amulet where she could see, and cycling the power as slow as the amulet would let him.

  Mirri's eyes darted to the bowl on the windowsill before she turned back to the lesson. Viran almost missed her answer, because she was already facing away by the time it reached his ears.

  "Wet."

  That made him feel even sillier. Of course the caster's bauble needed water to teach him about water magic.

  Auntie didn't seem to mind, or notice, when Viran dumped some of the rain out of her offering-bowl. Mercy didn't smite him for it either, but Viran promised her he would put some water back after he was done anyway. Quietly, because praying loud hadn't really worked the first time.

  Maybe gods got annoyed if you were too loud, just like people.

  Either way, the amulet slid to the bottom of the bowl and neatly came to rest, giving Viran another simple problem to solve. He couldn't feed it mana without touching it, and he couldn't read the runes while his fingers were on top of it.

  Snaking a thread of mana through the water from the edges of the bowl allowed him to reconnect with the mana he had stored in the metal, and resume cycling it as Mirri stood up to cross the room.

  That was fine, Viran knew what it—

  The runes were different, now that the amulet was wet. Instead, they used all letters he knew, and even a word he knew in High Elvish.

  'Dry.'

  Viran tried not to sigh too loudly when he took the amulet out of the bowl, flicking rainwater off the surface.

  The word went back to 'wet', then 'dry' again when he dunked it back in, then again, and again, looking closely for a pattern.

  The pattern was simple too, and came with simple instructions.

  The edges of the bauble weren't part of the runes that said 'dry', they were glowing differently, with smaller hatches that made different runes, running around the edge of the amulet.

  Mirri said they were another one of the High Elvish words for 'wet', the one that meant 'flowing water', like in a stream or a river, while the center of the amulet still said 'dry', and the whole thing was wet.

  So he needed a way to get the edges wet, and keep the center dry.

  Viran looked up for help, but everyone except Calen was busy with their own circles. Mirri had retrieved a tiny abacus with painted beads to help Emma keep track of what she was doing, Auntie had some records open while she noted some city names and placed pebbles at Emma's instruction, and a map of the top of the world spread across her desk. So far most of the northern continent was inside the circles.

  Essentially everywhere except Tenashki and the Highlands, actually. And a big, big stretch of ocean below the Wastes, between Kethridaaz and the Sinking City.

  Auntie was explaining that writing a letter to Kethridaaz was a bad idea, because if the new Lord of the Wastes learned that Emma was looking for her parents, and found them first, bad things would happen to everyone involved. Things worse than dying.

  Like Emma having to finish her duel from earlier, alone, if she wanted them back.

  Calen was only busy pretending not to watch what Viran was doing, so Viran moved the bowl of water from his lap to Mirri's chair, where they could both see it comfortably. He needed a flat surface to keep the water still anyway.

  Hunched over his new worktable, Viran worked at the puzzle, studiously avoiding scaring the human by doing anything like looking up, or talking, or using too much mana.

  Trying to get water away from the middle of the amulet failed in a few different ways, but all of them were useful.

  Weaving the threads normally, the weight of the rest of the water collapsed the tiny open space Viran managed to create at the bottom of the bowl. The mana simply broke, the amulet stopped cycling, and Viran had to stick his finger back down to make sure the power didn't drain out of the metal.

  Weaving the threads the way Mirri described took a lot more power, but Calen seemed to be leaning even closer when Viran checked, so it wasn't enough to be scary. This time, his mana properly held back the weight of the rainwater, but the amulet just... followed his claw up, lifting off the bottom of the bowl and sticking to Viran's finger.

  He couldn't keep a space with nothing inside stable for long enough to read the flickering glow from the bauble.

  So Viran let the amulet drift back down, and tried from the top, pulling the water apart to let air down. That almost worked, but it pushed the rain further and further up the sides of the bowl, until Viran got stuck.

  He really didn't want to make a mess of Auntie's floor, and it was taking more and more power to weave solid threads the deeper he got into the bowl, like the water lower down was trying to crush its way through and flatten out again.

  The surface of the water fluttered as Viran let it go and sighed, maybe a bit too loud.

  "What are you trying to get it to do?" Calen whispered.

  Luckily nobody was close enough to get jabbed when Viran looked up. Mirri was all the way over at Auntie's desk still, talking about how she planned to send 'correspondence' to the Sinking City soon anyway, so *of course* they could send an inquiry once there were refugee lists. Auntie was pretending not to frown while she agreed.

  Viran didn't think very many Arrivals would have survived landing in the ocean around the Aequitian capitol either, but he kept that idea quiet, because bothering the humans while they were trying to be hopeful wouldn't help anyone.

  "I have no idea," Viran did his best to match the Arrival's volume while he looked back down. "I've never done this puzzle before, but it's trying to teach me something."

  While Emma was busy comparing knowledge about treating Seraph Sickness with Auntie, Viran spent a minute or two quietly describing what he had done so far, and demonstrating again. Just the important parts.

  Calen listened patiently, and only surged his eyes to watch what Viran was doing with his mana, not his whole brain or head.

  "Is there a reason would they use the word for flow instead of just saying wet again?" The Arrival asked when he was done. "Are you supposed to put it in a stream?"

  "I don't think Auntie would have given me a bowl if I needed a stream," Viran shrugged "And I don't know about any streams that go in little circles. I might need to make one in the bowl."

  Which meant dumping out more water.

  Calen's fingers made a loud clicky sound, and his mouth opened a little.

  "Like a whirlpool." The human suggested.

  Viran avoided shuddering at the idea of making a maelstrom in Auntie's office. Some of the worst sea monsters lived near those, the ones that weren't afraid enough to hide deep down in the dark.

  But there were no sea monsters in Auntie's offering bowl. Just water that would evaporate for Mercy later.

  So he tried, and it almost worked.

  The water eddied slowly at first, so Viran 'stirred' it a little harder with his mana. Sure enough, it climbed the sides of the bowl, and started to bend inwards at the center. He shoved more power through, building up speed and increasing the depth of the vortex.

  The amulet spun and jumped on the bottom of the bowl as the air approached, dragged a little by the swirling water, so he spent just a little power pinning it down, and gave the bowl one last surge, hoping to drag the whirlpool to the bottom and unlock the next step of the puzzle.

  The last burst of power sprayed water everywhere as the whirlpool climbed over the edges of the bowl.

  Some of it had hit his vest, some had gotten the front of Calen's skirts wet, some had gotten the back of Mirri's skirts wet, there was water all over the floor away from Auntie's desk, but the rest halted, detached spray and all, in front of Auntie's outstretched hand.

  Her maps were perfectly dry.

  "Sorry Auntie." Viran apologized anyway.

  Calen was laughing about being wet, and Emma didn't look too upset at the disturbance. At least, as far as Viran could tell. Flat faces with tiny mouths were hard to read.

  "Perhaps this is a good time for a break." Auntie didn't look mad, she was just pretending not to smile with her teeth. Her eyes were still crinkling while she threw the water she had caught out the window with a gesture. "I think we've made excellent progress today, and Dovin is almost back with some reports. Would you clean the rest up for me?"

  Viran nodded, and put the caster's bauble very safely into one of his belt pouches before he went to clean the floor. He threw the dirty water out the window, promising Mercy a clean offering soon before he did so.

  Dovin knocked while Viran was setting the bowl back on the windowsill to catch rain, and keep his promise, and Mirri was already halfway out the door, leading the Arrivals to the big guest room across from Auntie's office.

  They had wanted to stay together, and—

  "Good," Dovin grunted, watching the humans disappear after Mirri. "Those two should stay away from the barracks for a day or two, the whole garrison is up in arms about the watch being captured by Saah's men. I don't trust putting human strangers down there right now, Young Immortals or not."

  "It is poor timing, given we want to earn their trust," Auntie sighed. "Viran, would you see what the mess hall has in the pot, and bring up as much as you—"

  Her face did something funny.

  "—and bring up a reasonable amount of food for our guests, along with whatever you'd like?" She finished.

  "Sure. Meat or no meat or half meat?" Viran asked. "Emma didn't eat any of the trail food."

  The crumblies she had been slowly trickling out of her pocket had been part of what Viran had thrown out the window.

  "Good eye," Dovin praised him. "No meat for now, they'll settle in better if they aren't worried about their food."

  "Good work on getting to the whirlpool, too," Auntie added. "How was it?"

  Viran thought for a second, pausing in the doorway again.

  "All the pieces were simple so far, but they keep piling on top of each other." He told her.

  A few more steps, or a little less help, and the complexity might outpace what Viran could keep track of, or even do with his mana.

  "Just keep doing what you're doing, and you should have it solved by the end of spring. And maybe you'll have made a friend or two as well," This time Auntie didn't hide her smile. A light tailwind ushered Viran the rest of the way through the door. "Don't worry if your work slows, it's natural for some things to get harder as you make progress towards understanding them."

  Viran forgot to nod before he closed the door to the Warden's Perch. It took him until he was almost two flights of stairs down the Spire before he puzzled out what she had meant.

  The Arrivals were Young Immortals. Just like Mirri. Auntie was making them into allies, if she could, but if Viran could make them friends, too, one of them was already durable like a real Immortal.

  They were the kind of friends who might actually live forever.

  All Viran had to do was figure out a simple way to stop being scary before they left, and they might even come back to visit sometimes.

  Tesla valve is an arrangement of baffles and recesses lining a pipe that specifically allow the flow of liquid in one direction, but when liquid is passed through in the wrong direction, turn back the energy of the flow on itself.