Since Lord Lot had returned to his lands, the Lady Zaexyl's room had been slowly conquered by her study. Two weeks ago she forbid even the cleaning staff from entering, lest they too become too curious. Everything was moving too quickly. Killing Heri was supposed to be liberating, but instead it had brought on even more to worry about. Even before the Secondsword Keubroc made his intentions known to her, some of the urban lords, Irolok and Vrok, had begun sending courtship envoys, showing off their wares of second sons. The Lady Zaexyl Archne managed to offend Lady Tokal, left-ear of her house, when she did not attend the wedding of her second born daughter to the firstborn son of the rural Futsei.
Upon her thick oak desk which commanded a good third of her study, her notes were in disarray while ledgers bookmarked by stolen communiques had colonized most of the drawers. What she searched for, though, was in a small jewel box on the far edge of the desk. In it lay the second half of her prototype, another black pill, identical to the one she forced down the throat of the creature. It glowed softly when she picked it up and for a moment she could feel the presence of the creature. He'd not yet left the dungeon. Maybe he didn't realize he could yet.
But she was grateful of the skills she had learned that would track him, wherever he went. Even more grateful that the communiques she had stolen had been right; the device worked! Thank you Laenuc, you opened me to this new world. She mouthed silently to her patron for many years, long before she was ever Lady Zaexyl.
The Sandoran of course had no knowledge that Reiba spent her more lonely nights copying the letters she had pilfered from coat pockets and purses the night before. Reiba was told that her client was a navy sailor and had to leave for weeks at a time, but she knew her nighttime lover to be what the letters called, b'heithel, and worked it the art of the b'hei. The Sandoran word for "compromised" she soon learned meant much more than a settlement between two opposing parties. This was the art of taking the energy and skills of one item and re-purposing them for another. It is what turned a pill of the creature's blood and copper into a homing beacon.
But who are these b'heithel and what else can be done with this art? were questions that burned into her mind since her initial translations of the Sandoran letters into Eirdren. That is what she wanted to know, and she was willing to go down that rabbit hole at any cost, for this was true power.
As a high-end courtesan, Reiba was completely comfortable with the idea of trading a part of herself for something greater and she had plunged into her studies zealously. She stopped when she ran out of money for materials and that was when she got the idea to aim for a higher form of clientele. Laenuc had long since disappeared and it was also a chance to do her first test run of her new found skills. She had traded just the smallest part of a bottle of perfume's flowery scent to give it a lust-inducing quality, which she then used on herself in search of suitors.
Since then as Lady Zaexyl she had created many more new items; earrings that glowed in the pure dark but were brittle and fragile, a bodice that changed depending on the size of the wearer, but that attracted rats. But these were all playthings. She knew more could be done, and the tracking device was the most difficult and complex thing she had compromised to date.
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