The Queen’s Drawing Room

The King, Queen, General Bobbo, and Lisaykos were seated in the drawing room waiting for Usruldes who walked in without his usual fast and concise movements, wearing clothes the King lent him. The clothes were baggy on him since he lacked Imstay's muscular bulk.

Before he even had a chance to do reverence, Imstay spoke up: "If you even think of doing obeisance, I will feed you to the jawfish in the river."

Usruldes stopped, blinked, and then nodded. "I would give the fish indigestion; however, for once, I will not argue with you. I haven't felt this worn down in a long time."

"Then we will not keep you for long," Imstay promised. "Can I get you some tea?" That got a raised eyebrow out of Bobbo. It made him realize just how close these two men were.

"Please," Usruldes lowered himself slowing into an armchair. "How is the Blessed Emily?"

"She's sleeping right now," Aylem replied. "She was questioned by the high priestesses earlier but as soon as it was over, she had a bad attack of nerves so we put her bed to sleep it off. The last two days have been rough on her."

"She showed no signs of that while we were traveling together. She was easy to be with: cooperative, compliant but decisive in action when she needed to be. I did want to talk to her sometime soon. I would not be sitting here if not for Emily." Imstay delivered a beaker of hot tea to Usruldes. "Thank you." The king clapped him on the shoulder and sat back down.

"What name should I be using for you?" Lisaykos asked.

"Whatever name you use will be fine, mother. Usruldes is just an alias I hide behind."

Bobbo, who the king had invited, sat up in his chair and looked from Lisaykos to Usruldes and back, eyes wide. "Wait. You. You're..."

"Yes, General. He is my son."

"Usruldes, you're her missing son?" Now that Bobba knew, he could see the resemblance: they shared the same chin, the same nose, and the same gray eyes.

"And you will forget his face and his identity as soon as you leave here," Imstay said.

"Of course I will, Mighty One," Bobbo nodded, "but first, I really would like to hear what happened with Usruldes, or should I say Irhessa, or maybe Hessakos?"

"Oh crap," Imstay grimaced.

"So you do know my real face," Usruldes remarked. "That's part of the reason the King asked you here."

"It's a good cover story," Bobbo conceded. "I never had any reason to doubt it. If you look at things sideways, it's even close to the truth."

"Cover story?" Lisaykos prodded.

"King's courier," Usruldes replied, referring to a small corps of magic users who carried sensitive messages and diplomatic correspondence. They often had to defend those messages in transit or destroy them. They had erratic schedules and were gone for long periods, which served as a good cover story for a spy with a family.

"His family lives four doors down Brewers' Row from me," Bobbo said to Lisaykos. "His children are fond of stealing the apples and pears off my trees to the consternation of my gardeners." He turned back to Usruldes, "does your wife know?"

"Yes and no. She knows I work for the king directly and that I do tasks other than courier work. She does not know I am specifically Usruldes." He stopped and held his head for a moment, "Blarg, I'm worse off than I thought." He closed his eyes and sat back in his chair, gripping the arms, "I'm sorry, the room was spinning there for a moment."

"We'll keep this as short as possible," Imstay said. "We should limit ourselves to just essential questions. Who wants to start?"

"I will," Lisaykos jumped in. "Do you know what happened to the bandages on Emily's head?

"Those came off in the river. I tried to protect her head as much as possible but did not detect any problems from the healing skull. The last time I checked was just before the Queen arrived."

Satisfied with that answer, Lisaykos moved on to the next thing she wanted to know. "Irhessa, were you the person who mindcast the shrine and garrison at Aybhas?"

"Yes, mother. That was me. I saw that young healer get stabbed but couldn't stop my pursuit of Emily. I'm sorry, but I had to make a choice and that choice had to be Emily. I hoped to wake enough people who could help your healer, assuming she wasn't already dead."

"Well, it worked," Lisaykos acknowledged. "You woke half the town but Healer-in-training Kayseo is alive due to that mindcast."

"I'm glad it worked out. I hardly ever get any feedback on the things I do, so it's nice to know she survived. She seems to be a good egg and Emily trusts her."

Lisaykos' eyes narrowed, "so just how long were you spying on my shrine?"

"I had orders to keep an eye out for Emily, not the shrine, mother. You can't say it was for nothing since I was already positioned to protect Emily. I regret only that my observation post was too far away to stop the kidnapping, but I was worried you might detect me if I was any closer."

"No, I knew someone was out there but I couldn't pin you down from the few bursts of activity I detected," she deflated his bubble. "You are very good at hiding, but then, you always were."

Bobbo interjected when it looked like Lisaykos was done: "Your eagle, Cadrees, said there were three attackers on eagles. When we got to the Island Swamp, we found only two. What happened to the third?"

"Emily and I took down the third," Usruldes replied as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do.

"Not you?" Aylem wanted more detail. "You and Emily both?"

Usruldes exhaled, "When we floating the river as debris, an archer on an eagle found us. She put three arrows into my back without my knowing she was there, which meant she had a more powerful charm of concealment cast on her than my powers of clairvoyance. Frankly, I thought it was the end of me."

He paused and consciously relaxed his shoulders. "I remember losing my hold on Emily and going under. I felt the water filling my lungs and the panic and the fear." He shuddered and closed his eyes again. "And I thought, so this is what it's like to die, and that my family would never know what happened to me, and how much it would hurt them, and how much I loved them."

The room was silent as he covered his face with his hands. He then shook his head and continued: "My apologies. It was a difficult moment. Everything went black and the next thing I knew, Emily had gotten my head and shoulders pulled up on a riverbank. She somehow got me to expel the water in my lungs and stomach. I was quite helpless just then, and that's when the archer's eagle landed next to us. The archer told Emily to get out of the way so she could kill me off. Emily deliberately put herself between me and the archer. I had no idea what she was doing because she ripped a strip off her nightgown and picked up some rocks and ignored the archer.

"So the archer cast the charm of discipline on Emily to get her to move. Mind you, at this point, I was just beginning to get my first unobstructed breaths and regaining my wits. The most amazing thing is that Emily got back up despite enduring a charm of discipline, and stood again between me and the archer. She took a rock, used the strip from her nightgown as a sling, and hit the archer in the head. The archer fell off her eagle and onto the riverbank, out cold. The eagle tried to attack and Emily made it back off by a barrage of rocks from her makeshift sling. By then, I was able to get up and dispatch the archer, pushing her body into the river. Now freed from the force of its control gem, the eagle departed. So that is how Emily saved me, not once, but twice. As I said, she was decisive when she needed to be."

"I've never seen anyone resist a charm of discipline," Imstay said in wonder.

Usruldes shook his head, "I didn't think it was possible before I saw it happen in front of me." His head started to droop and he forced it back up, "I am fading, folks, and I would prefer to be horizontal in a bed rather than on the floor."

"Is there anything else you know that we don't?" Imstay asked.

"Yes, there's a deserted farmhouse with a barn on the west side of the river just south of Two Ferry Island. You should find two or more dead bodies in it. The people behind the kidnapping hired other people to do the dirty work of removing Emily from the temple. Then they killed their hirelings at that farmhouse. Cadrees can show you where it is. He is susceptible to freshly killed rabbits or fresh fish, in case you need to entice him. I'm going back to bed now." He struggled to his feet and swayed a little.

"I'll walk him back," Aylem got up and took his arm, and guided him back to his guest room. The rest of the drawing room occupants sat in silence for several moments until the Queen returned.

"He was asleep before his head hit the pillow," Aylem remarked as she sat back down. "Who is staying for dinner?"

---

Emily, dreaming in the Queen’s bedroom

I dreamed of a silver-colored mineral with a splintery-to-fibrous habit, radiating needles like stibnite. At first, I thought it was stibnite but Basil Valentine in his Benedictine habit protested, remarking that he would never give his noble antimony to Tiki for indigestion.

"Give that to me, love," said Granny Mueb. She was wearing a rubber zucchini suit. I asked her why.

"It's going to be harvest soon. I'm trying out for the cheerleading squad as a mascot." She took the mineral from me and threw it into the cauldron where she was making willow bark tea. "We'll need a lot of tummy medicine for harvest."

"Is this supposed to be one of those dreams like the one with the bat poop for making saltpetre? I had that dream after I made my saltpetre so your timing was off. Why can't you folks just mail me a good chemistry text or a subscription to PubChem?"

"It's so boring when you're a god, you know? We have to get our fun somehow, and you're very entertaining. Did you miss the iridescence?" She handed me back the mineral she just threw in the pot. I looked at it and noticed a yellow tarnish that graded into iridescence. What was this? I was missing something crucial. I wanted my copy of Dana's mineral handbook in the worst way.

"You haven't looked on the backside of your pegmatite veins, have you? You'll flunk mineralogy if you don't remember the mineral associations with tourmaline and skarns."

"Mineralogy was 60 years ago and I didn't flunk! Dammit, I taught it as a professor in Perth! This dream is unfair!"

Granny Mueb just laughed. "You can get your over-tall friend Jane to concentrate acetic acid from vinegar by freezing, you know," the talking zucchini suddenly loomed over me, as tall as Susan from Monsters vs. Aliens. Granny Mueb Zucchini picked me up by the collar and tossed me into the cauldron filled with pink tummy medicine. "Don't forget to invent glass first, dear," she said as I fell into the brew.

Bismuth! It was bismuth subsalicylate in the cauldron! I opened my eyes to find myself sitting up in bed, except it was a Cosm-sized bed in a room I didn't recognize. It was a huge room. Then I remembered. It was the Queen's bedroom. I remembered the panic attack after being interrogated by the magic monster priestesses of doom. I really could have lived my life without that particular experience. Right then, I was more than ready to walk out of this place, head for the woods, and be done with Cosm for the rest of my days.

Regardless, I needed to remember this dream which dredged up my long-forgotten organic chemistry from college. Someone thoughtfully left a wax tablet and stylus on the side table next to the bed. I grabbed them and started to write, half in Fosk and half in English because Fosk doesn't have words to describe chemical things. I first wrote:

Mueb? Is this a god?

Was Mueb the Giant Zucchini a god or just a dream entity? Because of Mueb, I woke up with salicylate compounds stuck in my head. Since being attacked by the god Tiki, I was becoming apprehensive that all this science in my head was the fault of powers outside of myself. That made the confirmation of Mueb as a god a top priority. There were eleven gods but I couldn't remember all their names. It had been almost an entire season since Foyuna had lent me that book on the gods.

So, who was Mueb and why did she want me to make the salicylate-based compounds of aspirin and bismuth subsalicylate, commonly sold over-the-counter as Pepto-Bismol? I started with the basic materials to get both drugs and wrote:

Bismuthinite Bi2S3, looks like stibnite, Sb2S3 - yellow tarnish to iridescent effect

Calcine and then smelt, reducing furnace? Fluxes?

Bi+3(aq) + 3(NaOH) --> Bi(OH)3 + Na(aq)

Bi(OH)3 + salicylic acid ---> Bismuth subsalicylate.

The pink tummy medicine was easy if I had lye and salicylic acid. The problem was the salicylic acid, especially since organic chemistry wasn't my favorite subject.

willow bark ---> salicin --- how to get from salicin to salicylic acid?

derive from methyl salicylate? sodium salicylate?

No doubt, more would come to me. Once these problems popped up in my brain, they would not leave me alone and often worked themselves out while I was doing more mundane tasks like fishing, chiseling quartz out of a pegmatite, or being trapped inside a Cosm palace.

I put the problem of getting salicylic acid aside and moved on to acetic anhydride. If I had acetic anhydride, I could make aspirin. We did it in organic chemistry as an exercise in esterification. You treat salicylic acid with acetic anhydride. The end products are aspirin and acetic acid. If I remembered correctly, it worked best with sulfuric acid as the catalyst

Did I need to concentrate acetic acid from vinegar, as Granny Mueb said? I could make acetic anhydride from acetic acid but Mueb was not as lazy a chemist as I was. I could probably skip making concentrated acetic acid if I went the lead acetate route.

Lead acetate was easy to make. All you need to do is expose lead to the fumes of a good strong vinegar, the source of acetic acid. Yep, lead acetate is easy to make and easy to poison yourself with too. Lead acetate was once known as sugar of lead. It tastes sweet like sugar. I don't recommend eating it.

Lead acetate is white. It was used in cheaper formulations of white paint to bulk out the more expensive lead white, which was a carbonate. That's why all those little kids got lead poisoning. They ate the sweet-tasting paint chips from flaking cheap lead-white paint. Terrible stuff. Tastes great and fries your brain forever.

This should work for acetic anhydride:

lead acetate -> dry distillation -> acetone

acetone -> pyrolysis -> acetic anhydride

salicylic acid + acetic anhydride w/ sulfuric acid (catalyst) --> acetic acid + aspirin

I had to wonder if these eleven gods were messing with my brains. I shouldn't be able to remember all this stuff that was decades old from another life. Some of it I was sure I didn't even know in that previous life.

It would be so much easier just to ship me a CRC handbook and some chemistry texts. Are you paying attention, you meddlesome eleven gods?

Was there really bismuthinite on the west ridge of the Valley of the Vanishing River? I needed to go exploring soon before the snow started to fall on the mountain tops. Otherwise, the thought of gods meddling with my head would drive me nuts until the snow melted next year.

I jumped off the bed, thinking to go out to the drawing room. It had to be getting close to dinner time. I reached the door and realized I couldn't reach the latch. And the bed was too tall to climb back on. I managed to snag a cushion off a chair and used it to cushion my back as I sat down on the sill of the ceiling-to-floor window. The view of the city below was interesting to look at and the descending sun was painting the sky with pretty dusk colors.

As I sat there, looking at this center of this Cosm-run polity, I got to thinking. Why did the Cosm still scare the crap out of me when I wasn't scared of a giant creature like Asgotl? Was it because Cosm had magic? The ability to wave a hand and inflict agonizing pain was something to fear. But one didn't need to have magic to be cruel or to inflict horrific pain. Just ask Hitler and Pol Pot. They perfected entire governments to do that for them.

I could not deny that my childhood experiences in a breeding farm left a deep mark on me. I still flinched when anyone touched me without my knowledge. Seeing Cosm-sized hands in front of my eyes did horrid things to my stomach. The night of fire and death of my bunkmates still stalked my nightmares and sometimes appeared as waking flashbacks---something I didn't want to face or admit.

Before the glass accident, I thought that I never wanted to be a part of this society run by Cosm on the backs of Coyn and flying mounts; however, the actions of the high priestesses today made that desire irrelevant. The greatest social power in Foskos, the shrines, had now included me as part of their Cosm society regardless of how I felt about it. Was it now too late to escape?

Going back to the wilderness certainly was one solution. Being alone solved the problem of Cosm who scared me; however, being surrounded by people at the shrine brought another problem to my attention: I was lonely and I didn't realize it before the Queen rescued me.

I found it pleasant just to sit in Lisaykos' study and read while she did her paperwork. I liked listening to Thuorfosi playing her zither-thing and it was nice to have Wolkayrs top off my beaker of sweet tea without even having to ask. The folks at the shrine were kind to me and they were genuinely good people. I liked them and I liked being with them. They became less frightening with time.

It occurred to me that the Convocation of funny priestess hats was concerned about the explosion at my cave. Lisaykos and Aylem had been worried about that too. It was an obvious conclusion that magic users did not have chemical explosives. What if magic users didn't advance in the material sciences because they didn't need to? Did that make my knowledge of explosives something they feared?

I realized that I didn't need to solve this conundrum this evening. I had all of the harvest and cold seasons to figure it out as I worked on relearning how to talk. I wondered if Lisaykos had somewhere I could build a glass furnace.

The sunset was lovely. I sat watching it until Thuorfosi came to fetch me for dinner. I showed her the tablet, pointing to the first line about Mueb.

"Of course Mueb is a god," Thuorfosi looked confused. "You didn't remember that from the Lay of the Eleven Gods? Mueb is the god of the harvest and nature."

Well, I always was bad with names. I remember the gods' roles better than their names. About half the names didn't stick in my memory. Giltak, Gertzpul, Tiki, Mugash, Surd, Landa, Galt - that's seven of them but the names on the other four keep escaping me; though I think I'll remember Mueb from here on out.

So if Mueb was the harvest god, I guess that explained the zucchini suit. Having Mueb in my dreams also explained one other thing: these gods really were mucking about in my brain.

---