The Lavender Tavern

Myer's Helping Hand, Part 1

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Episode notes

Every world in this realm is crisscrossed by ley lines; filaments of earth energy that connect places of worship, monuments, and historical sites. You have passed through innumerable ley lines in your life: think of any desolate place you have been where the hair on the back of your neck stood up for no reason you could fathom...

Meet Myer, an absentminded young mage who works for the Ministry in Frostford. Now meet Myer's helping hand: Stepwise, the daemon he creates so that he can find the things he misplaces. Myer is about to discover that giving humanity the ability to search for anything, at any time, can lead to catastrophe.

Part 1 of 2.

Written by: Jonathan Cohen

Narrated by: Trevor Schechter

A Faustian Nonsense production.

To read the full transcript of this episode, go to https://thelavendertavern.captivate.fm/episode/myers-helping-hand-part-1

Transcript

The more ley lines that intersect in an area, the more magically powerful that area is. Some unfortunate towns only have a single ley line passing through – barely enough to allow a local mystic to dowse for water. Other towns are gifted with an abundance of ley lines.

And of course, once the men and women of this world understood ley lines and how they could work to their advantage, they built towns and villages at the great crossroads of these lines. A mage might wander an unspoiled land, with enchanted spectacles on his nose, until he found a spot that burned with a grid of reddish-gold ley lines arcing across each other. Then he would send back word to those who had sponsored his expedition: here shall be a great city.

There was one place where there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of ley lines that gathered and writhed like snakes. It was destiny that this should be the greatest city ever built. Those of temperaments sensitive to magic had already settled it as a village, but with the ley lines to power their efforts, it grew into a city of spires and minarets, columns and porticos. Frostford: The largest city in the known world.

One cannot simply dip a wand or a staff into a ley line and extract the magic needed for a spell or incantation; it takes training and skill to handle the ley lines. It takes a Minister.

And so, it came to pass, in a section of Frostford that was neither too poor nor too wealthy, that a young junior minister named Myer was late for his work.

Myer was no more than twenty, with a shock of black wavy hair that never quite stayed where it should. He had hazel eyes and the babyish curious face of a child, and at this moment he stood among a pile of his clothes, looking for his staff.

He could summon the staff, of course; this was a trifling cantrip for any minister. But Myer had nearly expended his allotment of magic for the thirty-days, and he did not want the Ministry to sanction him.

Thomas would know where the staff was. But Thomas was not here, Myer thought.

The staff was ebony. Why had he chosen ebony? With his black robes and furniture of dark wood, and black walls, the staff was nearly impossible to find. The only spot of light in his chambers was –

And here he turned to his cat, Bedlam. Bedlam was officially a familiar, as far as the Ministry knew, but the luminous white cat with light green eyes, pink nose and ears spent his time sleeping or looking on with disdain. As Myer now saw, the cat had his paws wrapped around the ebony staff.

“Give that to me!” Myer said, leaping for the cat. In a flash, Bedlam picked up the staff in his mouth and dropped it at Myer’s feet.

“Now,” Myer sighed. “Now you provide me with it after an hour of searching.”

Bedlam looked up with innocent eyes and began to lick his paw. There would be no useful argument with a cat, Myer thought, hurrying from the house with his staff tucked in his belt. Arguments were for his employer.

Myer was late to the Ministry, the largest building in the city, at the center of all traffic and all commerce, with multiple spires that soared into the sky. He ducked his head and rushed past the rows of desks where men and women copied papers and scrolls by hand.

The Ministry was arranged in the manner of the heavens: the higher a room was to the building’s top, the more important it was. Myer’s work room was in the basement, next to a wall that dripped water and the Scrap Heap.

His stomach spoke to him: Thomas had not made him a morning meal to take to work. He pushed the thought aside and entered the work room.

There stood his two collaborators: Raven, a short, stout woman with red hair and green lip tint, gesturing angrily with a sheaf of papers. And Alastair, the subject of her wrath, tall and lean and fidgety, with cropped brown hair, caramel skin and a finicky mustache. They were the least of the Ministry, and it made them angry…even if the anger ended up directed at each other.

“I do not want to make copies of these papers,” Raven said, slamming them onto a table. “I have written them and that should be enough.”

Alastair had the bored look of the magister. Which was only fair, as he had once been a magister before being demoted. “All requests for supplies must be presented with three copies to the Supply Magister.” He saw Myer come in and welcomed him to his cause. “What say you, junior minister?”

Myer sat on his wooden stool and started to lay out his work: leather blotter, rune blocks and ink, staff holder, bottles and papers of his own. The Ministry was said to produce all of the magic and the motive energy that drove Frostford, but it occurred to Myer often that their primary output must surely be papers. “I say that there should be a magical way to duplicate such papers,” Myer said, sliding into the groove of a discussion they had had many times. “Hand copying always leads to the introduction of errors into a work.”

Raven pursed her green lips at Alastair, who simply shook his head. “Not allowed,” Alastair told Myer. “It simply is not allowed.”

Myer did not tell Alastair that taking gold from the Ministry coffers was not allowed; this is what had led Alastair to leave his exalted position as magister and come to work in the basement. “There are some Ministry rules which should be broken,” he said instead. The former magister could not argue with that.

Raven nodded. “I stand with Myer,” she said. “If we were free of these papers, we could spend our time serving the public.”

Alastair wiggled his mustache at her. “How have you served the public today?”

“Once I have copied these papers,” she replied, “I shall send manna along the Ardium sector ley line to power their water wheel.”

“They have been without water for some time,” Myer pointed out.

“Ardium,” Alastair also pointed out, “pays the least taxation of all of the sectors in Frostford. They have the lowest average income in the city. It stands to reason that they may wait some time longer.” He put down his own sheaf of papers on top of Raven’s. “Bix sector is planning a harvest merchant festival for next week.”

“Bix has had three festivals in the last month,” Raven protested, and she and Alastair were off again. Myer bent his head of unruly hair to his own work and paid them no mind. He too would spend much of his day writing papers, copying papers, and ferrying papers upstairs to those who read the papers, stored the papers, and no doubt burned the papers.

The next item he needed was his peridot stone, but where was it? How could he infuse the vitality glyphs for the city gardens without the peridot stone?

Thomas would have told him he was absent-minded, that he could only keep his head by virtue of having a scarf around his neck. But everyone lost things at one time or another, Myer thought. It was not his fault that the things he owned were simply easier to lose.

There had to be a solution.

That night, in his quiet and echoing chambers, Myer put a pot of soup on the hearth for dinner and thought about the ebony staff, and the peridot stone, and all of the other things he had misplaced of late. A spell to retrieve them would not suffice: that type of ritual would draw enough manna from the ley lines to bring attention to him.

He scratched a purring Bedlam behind the ears and thought of the Scrap Heap. The Scrap Heap was a room next to his work room where the bits and scraps of magical materials ended up after the materials themselves had been consumed: fragments of milky opals, strips of fairy cloth, splinters and shards of warm golden amber.

Nobody was supposed to remove anything from the Scrap Heap without signing the correct papers. But six months earlier, Warren, the old man who had overseen the Scrap Heap had found wine more to his liking than papers, and the ministers were told to manage the access to the Scrap Heap themselves – “to economize on behalf of the Ministry,” as the paper announcing the change had read.

It was a temptation. Perhaps not a temptation for the average minister, but Myer was not average. He lay alone in the large bedding that night, thinking and scheming.

He needn’t have schemed. Myer discovered that he could have pulled a barrow into the Scrap Heap room and taken anything he wished. Even then, he was sure to rearrange the piles of materials just so, to cover what he had taken, and to scrawl illegible entries in the Scrap Heap’s ledger book.

If Alastair or Raven noticed that his minister robes bulged a bit more than usual, they said nothing. He had a moment’s panic when he was leaving the Ministry that evening and a marble of polished topaz slipped from his robe, bouncing and clicking across the tiled floor, but at that hour, nobody noticed.

The theft made him giddy, exhilarated. Not theft, he corrected himself – borrowing. His spirits were so high that he stopped at his favorite street vendor.

Ogden, an elderly man who was cheerful despite his hunched back, welcomed one of his best customers: “The usual, my friend?”

Myer held up two fingers. “Special occasion tonight.”

Ogden raised an eyebrow as he packaged up two servings of rabbit-on-a-stick with potatoes. “A…special friend?”

“No, no,” Myer replied, shaking his head. “Just a regular friend.”

He walked home in the waning dusk.

Wait until I tell Thomas what Ogden said, Myer thought, and then he remembered. It was an ongoing process, it seemed: gradual forgetting and sudden remembering.

He knocked on the door of the rooms below him, and Sueanna came to the door after a time. Matronly and solid, her long gray hair was in a braid and curled up under a kerchief. She looked at him with button eyes in a seamed face but smiled when he offered her the second meal he’d bought.

“I remember when I worked at the Ministry,” Sueanna said as they ate the rabbit-on-a-stick in Myer’s rooms. “Long before you. Probably before you were born.”

“Was it very different?” he asked politely, his mind on what he had looted from the Scrap Heap.

“We ran wild like children,” Sueanna said, then smiled at her own memory. “No supervision, few restrictions. We were the ones who made the city move, all on our own.”

Myer wondered if that Ministry had been looser and freer, or simply more negligent. Sueanna misunderstood his silence.

“Do you miss him?” she asked at last.

“Of course not,” Myer said, and glanced involuntarily at the spot on the wall where one of Thomas’ paintings had hung, a watercolor of the city in mists of rain. Now there was only a light rectangle to mark where it had been. “There is nothing to miss.”

When the meal was done and Sueanna had gone, Myer spread his takings from the Scrap Heap on the table in the same way he would lay out his work surface. Then he pondered.

Finding what was lost: a location spell would not use much manna. But a location spell only worked within a couple of feet of the spellcaster. Myer had the tendency to leave things all about his rooms. A location spell to cover the entire property would expend more manna than he was paid in a week.

There would have to be a rudimentary mind at the heart of the spell, an intelligence that could search the areas that Myer instructed, look for the object he requested, and locate it. To bring the object back…he could use apportation – the transmission of an object through the air, but that was also expensive. If something were to carry the object in a manner similar to how Bedlam carried mice, then it might be doable.

It was a complex problem, and Myer spent many evenings with the gems and woods and cloths from the Scrap Heap, alongside his ebony staff and runes and glyphs. Then he discovered an obstacle.

He could speak the usual incantations that he used every day in his work as minister. The more complex ones he would need for this task, however, were beyond his vocal range – both too high and too low. He tried the chants for a week but ended up with a sore throat and needed nettle tea to soothe it.

The path he took to and from the Ministry each day passed a temple framed by columns and greenery. He had heard the singing of vespers many evenings when he had been late coming home. Oh, how Thomas had begged him not to come home late when he was cooking dinner...Those singers had the range he needed. Perhaps they could also teach him to sing.

The fall weather had turned the air cold, and Myer was glad that he’d worn his winter robes into the temple; the marble rooms were even chillier. At that late hour, there was only one acolyte tending to the vestal fires, and Myer went over to warm himself by the flames.

The acolyte had long, copper-brown hair and a bushy beard; the flickering dim light made him look as if his head was on fire. He was banking the coals with a distracted expression but turned to Myer with inquisitive eyes and a wry smile once he’d neatly finished his task.

“Are you looking for something?” he asked.

“No,” Myer said. “Yes. I don’t know. I’m not in need of any prayers.”

The acolyte barked a laugh. “I think we could all use a prayer now and then. My name is Getty.”

“Myer.” They shook hands; Getty’s were dry and warm.

“I’ve heard your choir sing vespers in the evenings,” Myer said.

“They’re quite good, aren’t they?” Getty asked. “When I started teaching them, they sounded like a thunderstorm in a cooking pot.”

Myer explained his problem. He did not, could not say that he wanted to extend his vocal range so that he could create more powerful spells. Getty looked at his Ministry robes and listened to his vague explanation and seemed to make the connection himself. “I can get you up one octave and down two octaves from where you are now,” he proclaimed after listening to Myer sing a verse of a well-known song. “That should help you with your…project.”

“And in return?” Myer asked. “A donation to the temple?” Such arrangements were common in Frostford.

Getty smiled his canny smile. “As you can no doubt tell, we have been having issues with the heating system. One of the vestal girls tells me there’s a partial blockage with the manna in the temple’s ley line.” These arrangements, too, were common in Frostford.

Myer promised to look into it; it was in fact his job to do so. By order of the Ministry, ministers lived in the neighborhoods they supported. The Ministry claimed that this policy brought ministers closer to the people, but Myer and Alastair both felt it more likely that those ministers who were inconvenienced by a district’s manna issues were more motivated to solve them.

As with the spell design, it was slow going. Getty had Myer open his mouth wide while singing, point his chin downward toward the floor, and press his tongue down onto the floor of his mouth. This, Getty explained, would help him to sing higher notes. Myer thought that the expression he wore during this exercise made him look like someone who had been caught doing something wrong, but he said nothing and continued to practice on his own, in the bath, while cooking, and even late at night until Bedlam yowled and Sueanna banged on her ceiling with a broom.

Leaves fell from the trees and the weather turned even colder, but the temple was finally warm with manna heat. When Getty thanked Myer, he protested, saying that he’d had nothing to do with it. Ministers were not supposed to gain recognition for their work; they toiled anonymously on behalf of the Ministry. “But thank you regardless,” Myer said to the acolyte, grinning. Getty’s sly smile was infectious.

Every week, after a surreptitious nip of the temple’s sacramental wine, Myer would practice singing lower and lower notes until his throat ached and his voice scraped along the floor. Getty would not let him rest until he had completed each exercise; then he would send him home with a sprig of mint leaves tied up in a red ribbon to steep as tea, and strict instructions not to talk until the following morning.

Myer sang, and Getty listened.

And one night, Myer was ready. He’d already written out the incantation, and now all he had to do was speak it in the correct tones. Having locked Bedlam in the other room, Myer passed his hands over the mandala he’d sketched onto a scrap of parchment. He sang the high notes, then the low notes, and finally tossed a handful of black salt into the air…And there it appeared.

The daemon was about a hand’s length tall, with folded wings and a beaky head. Its eyes did not blink. Bedlam meowed from the other room; Myer would have to keep an eye on the cat to make sure he didn’t eat it when he was asleep.

But what to call it? The word ‘Daemon’ was too…prosaic. Myer thought of Getty’s instructions, how he had taught him to raise and lower his voice by steps. Stepwise, he thought.

“Stepwise is your name,” he told the daemon. It nodded.

“Stepwise, find my ebony staff,” Myer commanded. The daemon extended its wings, flapped around in increasingly wide circles, and stopped when it saw the staff on the floor next to Myer’s bedding. Then Stepwise grasped the staff in its clawed hands and flew back to Myer, depositing it neatly at his feet.

Excellent, Myer thought. There would be no more misplacing of objects. He experimented with how he could command Stepwise: the daemon responded to “find,” “locate,” and “search,” followed by the name of a tangible object. The manna requirements were minimal, judging by how cool his staff had remained during the process.

The next morning, Myer awoke and bade Stepwise to fetch him a cup of water. The daemon did so. For once, he was up early, and for once, he did not misplace anything. It was almost disappointing. Thomas would have been proud of him, however.

The next morning, though, Myer could not find his staff. He prepared to make the usual search, then remembered and said, “Stepwise, find my ebony staff!”

One of the reasons Myer had settled in this building was the large window facing the street. Now he watched, horrified, as Stepwise passed through the window and kept going. He must have left the staff at work, Myer thought. There would be a trail of manna right from his house to the work room!

He waited until Stepwise returned with the ebony staff, then made his way to the Ministry. Nobody had noticed. Nobody said anything. Perhaps it...