The Lavender Tavern

Myer's Helping Hand, Part 2

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Episode notes

There was one place where there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of magical ley lines that gathered and writhed like snakes. It was destiny that this should be the greatest city ever built: Frostford.

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 2 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-2

Transcript

According to Myer’s tracking spell, there were now nine Stepwises – eight of them outside of his control. Now it was time to panic.

Myer tried to slow his breathing and thought of his lesson on Runaway Magic. How could he not think of it? It was the highlight of every Ministry student’s first year of study. The magister who taught the course showed them how a magic spell that simply doubled objects would lead to disaster. He started with a copper coin and kept doubling it with a simple incantation. The single coin became two coins, then four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and by the tenth doubling the magister showered the podium in copper and told the students that there were now over a thousand coins…before he made all but one of them disappear with a flourish.

Any magic that was not properly cast could lead to runaway magic. There were rumours that this was one of the reasons the Ministry had been formed in the first place, but the magister would neither confirm nor deny this. He had scraped the chalk across the large slate at the front of the class, then tapped each syllable, emphasizing the word: “Cat-tas-stro-phe!”

Myer re-read the spell he’d written to conjure the first daemon. There were no flaws that he could see. No, Stepwise had been copied by human means, at least at first.

He bit his lip. “Stepwise, double yourself,” he said with some dread.

Stepwise stretched and split down the middle. Now there were two Stepwises in front of him. Eleven red spots on the line symbol. Cat-tas-stro-phe.

He could duplicate enough Stepwises to catch the other Stepwises now, but since at least one other person knew how to duplicate the rogue daemons, there was no stopping them.

And each daemon used a tiny bit of manna…unnoticeable at first, but once it became a case of Runaway Magic, the manna would start adding up.

Myer was a clever young man. He often had many clever ideas and brought these clever ideas to Alastair or the lower magisters. This time, he felt that the cleverest thing he could do was to…say nothing.

It would have been simple to deconstruct the Stepwises. All Myer needed to do to make them disappear was to reverse the spell inscribed on the sheet of parchment he now kept locked in the bottom drawer of his chest of drawers. He could even tear the parchment into pieces, if he did not mind the thought of every Stepwise suddenly deconstructing violently.

But the moment Myer broke the spell, all of the accumulated manna that animated the daemons would instantly flow back into the manna reservoir at the end of the street, and from there into the neighborhood’s ley line. The Ministry would not fail to notice an *increase* in the supply of manna…especially when a young, clever minister resided only a short walk away.

The next morning Myer noted with a dull resignation that there were fourteen red dots on the symbol. On his walk to the Ministry, he spotted at least two Stepwises flitting about the buildings above him: one had a hammer in its mouth, and the other carried an apple.

If Alastair suspected anything, he remained mute. Sueanna claimed to be busy with solstice preparations. Even Getty was busy with what he called “temple business.”

Raven, Myer noticed, had started to make elementary mistakes in the work room: using agate instead of tourmaline, trying to undo a spell by drawing a sigil in a clockwise rather than counter clockwise direction, even cracking her jade wand on the edge of her table as she attempted a particularly difficult incantation. She seemed newly preoccupied. Or, Myer thought, a bit ashamed, she had been preoccupied for a while and he had only now started to notice.

Raven usually stole away every midday on their break, leaving Alastair and Myer to eat hand meals and commiserate. On one break, Myer followed Raven at a distance, and saw her enter the narrow winding staircases that flanked the tower. When he stepped into the staircase, he saw her some flights above, huffing and puffing her way up. Then she suddenly reversed direction and came towards him.

She must have seen him, and Myer was trying to determine an appropriate excuse when Raven came upon him and expressed surprised. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“The…same as you,” Myer said, tentatively.

“I take exercise in these stairs every midday,” Raven said. “You are free to join me.” Then she turned from him and started back up the stairs.

Myer was not much for exercise aside from the flight of stairs he had to climb to his lodging every night, so he struggled to keep pace with Raven. They climbed stairs in silence broken only by his wheezing. When they neared the top of the Ministry building, Myer asked her: “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Raven said, turning again down the stairs. “Completely fine.” She said this in the tone of one who is not at all fine.

A minute later, Myer tried to bring the conversation back to life by saying, “I’m looking forward to the winter solstice. Are you?”

Raven did not reply directly. Instead, she asked, “Will you spend it with your parents?” Myer had never discussed his parents with her, but he still wore the family emblem around his neck. Despite his distance from them, he was proud of the family history of spell work and service.

“We no longer speak,” Myer breathed. The stairs were now causing his legs and lungs some distress. “I left them a long time ago.”

“I never knew my parents,” she said, picking up her pace and marching ahead of him. “I am sure you had your reasons, but I would gladly spend solstice with mine every year.”

Myer knew little of Raven, although they had worked side by side for two years. She was from a village in the east; she ate spicy food that smelled of cumin; and she sketched funny, distorted faces of himself and Alastair when she thought they were not looking. Had he known she missed her parents, he never would have spoken in so cavalier a fashion –

But of course she missed them, he thought as they came to a final stop at the bottom of the stairs. And as he heaved and gasped for breath, Myer compared her to Getty, the foundling.

Getty was happy to be apart from his parents: the temple elders were his parents now. But Raven – he had seen her looking unhappily at the higher-up magisters during Ministry celebrations. She had no surrogate parents among them. He had never heard her speak of friends, or other family. If anyone lived in shadows, it was her.

Everyone, it seemed, was in search of something they did not – or could not – possess.

The following morning, Myer could not find his ebony staff again, and as he was running late, he asked one of his Stepwises to locate it.

He felt no guilt. The miniscule amount of manna this would use would go unnoticed among the total amount used by all Stepwises. And the daemon was so helpful!

A Stepwise fetched him some freshwater from a nearby pond to aid in the Ministry work he brought home. A Stepwise quenched the light after Myer had gone to bed. A Stepwise even lit his way to the chamber pot in the middle of the night.

What else could a Stepwise do? Myer spent a tipsy evening testing his daemons with queries. A Stepwise could predict the weather, with some degree of success – about the same success as any lay prognosticator. A Stepwise could determine the best path to take to reach the archives and warn if a horse-drawn barrow had upended and blocked the way. What else?

The next night, Sueanna came up with some solstice pie of her own, claiming that Myer must be hungry. How had she known his pantry was bare? Could a Stepwise have…told her?

Myer cringed and asked: “Stepwise, how much food is there in Sueanna’s pantry?” And Stepwise told him.

Myer had always slept well, but now he stayed awake most nights. Not from the worry that consumed him – he had resigned himself to that – but to the fighting and shouts that started as a murmur and rose to a din each night as the days until the winter solstice ticked down.

“I know you were with that woman!” a man yelled to his partner from across the way. “You didn’t go to work today; you went to the tavern!” a woman scolded her partner. “You have been taking a potion, so you need not conceive!” a husband sobbed to his wife.

Every question had an answer, and every Stepwise could find out any reasonably-accessible information, even if it would normally remain a secret. The red dots multiplied along the line on the tracking parchment.

The saga of Stepwise took some unusual turns. On a day when he felt little like cooking, Myer went by Ogden the street vendor’s stall to pick up some rabbit-on-a-stick, but the old man was under a cloud.

Literally: Several Stepwises floated in the air above his stall, each holding a banner reading: “Terrible food,” “Bad service,” “Don’t eat here,” and so on. They were just high enough to be out of reach, but low enough that anyone in the street could see them.

Ogden batted at the sky in futility. “Do you see them?” he demanded. “I have tried to move my stall, but no matter where in Frostford I go, they follow me with their infernal banners.”

Myer did not know what to say, being the source of Ogden’s problems, in some way. “Do you know why they are here?” he asked finally.

Ogden shrugged. “Well…perhaps the rabbit was not as fresh as it could have been…ONE NIGHT. One night. But does such a lapse merit this kind of retribution?”

Myer promised he would dispatch a Stepwise with a positive message once he reached his lodgings and took the rabbit-on-a-stick with him.

In times past, had he bought take-away food from a street vendor, Myer would have had little recourse if it had been spoiled or lacked flavour. But now, anyone could challenge the vendors…and at least one person had had the idea to do so.

In his lodgings, Myer took one of his Stepwises out of the cage and wrote a message on a long strip of cloth: “Reliable, tasty food.”

It occurred to him that the negative banners he’d seen did not have to be truthful. They could be from someone who bore a grudge against Ogden, or even a competing street vendor who wished to destroy the man’s business.

He tied the banner to the Stepwise’s left foot and commanded it to fly to Ogden’s stall. There was no way, Myer thought, that anyone who saw those banners could know if they were true at all. Anyone could say anything. Myer himself could start a campaign of whispers against someone, without anyone being able to track it back to him.

By the time he had released this last Stepwise, the tracker parchment was a solid red line.

The tracker had given Myer another idea: he took a smaller strip of cloth and imbued it with a distance spell, then wrapped it around his left wrist like a bracelet.

Now he could summon and command his Stepwise when he was away from his lodgings, even when he was in the work room. All he needed to do was to speak his command into the wristband, and a Stepwise would obey.

Raven had been even more withdrawn than usual as the solstice finally approached. Myer went to the staircase at lunch to look for her, but it was empty and silent. He commanded his Stepwise to search for her, and when the daemon flew to him, Myer followed it to one of the side doorways of the Ministry, where he saw Raven from a distance, eating lunch alone.

Myer could imagine some of the pain she felt; he knew what it was like to miss someone with all of your heart.

He contemplated his Stepwise, now safe and hidden within his robes. A daemon could not search for something connected that distantly to the present, though…could it?

“Stepwise,” Myer whispered to the daemon, “can you find Raven’s parents?”

The daemon did not reply. Was this a problem too difficult for his creation?

Then he pulled back his robe and observed the glyph inscribed on the back of Stepwise’s head. The symbol was rotating, as if the daemon were thinking. Daemons could not think of course – but something was happening.

Myer imagined the skies of Frostford darkened with Stepwises flitting to and fro on their errands. Seeking information, delivering packages, pilfering valuables, and spying on neighbours, friends, lovers.

Not only Frostford. From his figures, Myer knew there were more Stepwises than humans in the city. The daemons must be spreading to neighboring towns.

His suspicions were confirmed when, the day before the winter solstice, a Stepwise flew in through his window and dropped a note onto his table. Myer knew it was not one of ‘his’ Stepwises; he’d daubed a bit of red paint on their backs so he could tell them apart from the others.

The note was from his parents, wishing him a happy winter solstice. They had not written it themselves; it was a ready-made greeting that could be bought at any stall in any small town. He was angry at the impersonal nature of it but touched at the same time. They were a hundred leagues away, and yet they could wish him a merry solstice as if they lived next door.

He dropped off a fat suckling pig at Sueanna’s lodgings that afternoon. She had the same seamed face and button eyes, but she was lighter, happier. “I’ve been writing back and forth with old friends,” Sueanna told him. “We had lost touch so many years ago.” Her Stepwise sat proudly on the table by the hearth; clearly, she saw no need to conceal it.

Everyone, it seemed, was having their wishes granted in some way. Except for Raven...and his own half-whispered wish that night so many weeks ago. He was ashamed to think of what he had wished for, and ashamed that he still wanted it to come true. In his Ministerial training, Myer had often heard the metaphor of the mage who was impotent to grant his own wishes. Perhaps in the shadows of his mind, he did not truly want Stepwise to fulfil his heart’s desire.

Candles hung from the trees that lined Frostford, and a gentle snow fell on the day of the solstice. Peace and calm, Myer thought – although the fighting and the wishing and the spying continued.

He locked his red-daubed Stepwises in the tiny cage, hung it far from Bedlam’s reach, and went for a walk by the light of the candles. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine the previous year’s solstice. Laughter and company and –

It was then that a hand clamped down on each of Myer’s shoulders. He knew the insignia on the black gloves at once. There was no point in struggling.

The Ministry was quiet on this solstice day. He had never been this high up in the building; the room was vast, cavernous. The woman who spoke to him was mild and ordinary; this frightened him more than anything else.

He did not remember the words. He did not have to. Myer was to stop all of the daemons, immediately. There were to be no more requests, or wishes, or messages. He was the only one who could reverse the spell. Of course, they knew he had created them. The contours of the spell he had used marked him as clearly as if he had stamped each Stepwise with his own sigil.

If he did not stop the daemons that evening, he would be dismissed from the Ministry. Blacklisted. Banned from the city. And the Ministry would use every Stepwise it could muster to hound Myer for the rest of his days.

“You are a clever young man,” the woman concluded. “Surely you can see that there is no other way.”

The gloved hands marched him downstairs. Stepwise had fulfilled many requests. And now there was only Raven’s wish, and the wish he had made…but there was barely any time left for them to be fulfilled.

He saw once more Raven’s downcast face in his mind’s eye, and Myer started to walk more and more slowly, dragging his feet through the slush of the Frostford street and sending mental wishes for the Stepwises to grant Raven’s wish.

Why was he so intent on helping her? Perhaps, he thought, it was so he could prove that he could undo what had happened…reunite people who had once loved each other. Love, though, was a task beyond Stepwise.

“Enough dawdling,” one of the guards said, and pushed him along roughly. “Make haste.”

When they arrived at his lodgings, the men in the black hoods and black gloves stood impassively, while Bedlam hissed and spat at them. Myer reluctantly unlocked the drawer and drew out the original spell sheet. Then he began tracing the lines backwards with his stylus, unmarking the parchment as ink flowed out of the paper. He saw the two Stepwises in the cage suddenly wink out of existence.

It was over.

The day after winter solstice was known as the Day of Commerce, but this year it became known as the Day of Complaint. Those who had become accustomed to using the daemons for their everyday tasks did not like having those daemons taken away from them – particularly on a solstice.

Myer went to the Ministry the following day as usual, but the door to the work room was shut. He inserted his ebony staff into the lock, but the door would not open.

He started to wiggle the staff back and forth in the lock, but from behind him, Alastair said, “You need not bother.”

The disgraced former magister was wearing street robes, and he held out a square of parchment with Myer’s sigil on it. When Myer took it, it unfolded into a letter that explained that his employment was severed and listed the items he was to return to the Ministry.

“They did not tell me they would get rid of me!” Myer complained.

Alastair smiled. “You know too much.”

“Can you at least let me in so I can retrieve my summer robes?” Myer asked.

The other man held up his own letter. “It would seem that I know too much as well.” But Alastair was too easygoing to stay despondent. “No doubt they have been planning this for me since my demotion.” He tore up the letter. “Let us go fetch a drink.”

“Where is Raven?” Myer asked.

Alastair shrugged. “I wonder if she arrived early and received her own letter at that time.”

Stripped of his Ministry possessions, Myer accompanied Alastair through the Ministry, where people deliberately avoided looking at them as they passed…then no doubt watched them with fascination from behind their backs.

Myer felt guilt over Raven; she should not have been caught up in this. She was completely innocent.

Then he saw her in the Ministry rotunda. Her hair was well-trimmed, and she wore gray robes: the mark of an archivist.

Their eyes met, and Raven pointed to an alcove at one side. Myer left Alastair and went to meet her. “I have been promoted,” Raven said.

“You know what happened, then?”

Raven smiled. “Everyone knows what has happened. They have all kept silent about it.”

So, Raven had pulled success from his ashes. Myer was happy for her. “I wish you well,” he said.

She seemed much happier than before. “I have you to...