Jihûn got up before the Sun and jogged across the top of Mons Imperii Flavi. He imagined dramatic music to motivate himself. Running past facades carved by ancient giants, elves, and the artisans of Autumn Blossoming Dynasty made imagining dramatic music easy. After jogging, the Eighth Prince lifted weights. After that, he practiced horse stances. Then punches. Finally, he took a cold bath, dressed pragmatically, and took a rickshaw to one of the clockwork lifts.
At the bottom of the lift, he waited for the right barge. Then he waited for the barge to depart. Then he tried to think about other things. What he avoided thinking about was the Feng River.
The surface sparkled in the morning light. Very pretty.
The depths were terrifying.
Originating on the slopes of fabled mountains in the West, the Feng flowed across rocky plateaus for a thousand or two miles before it reached the caldera containing the Imperial Mound. All that rock kept the current from picking up silt. It was possible to look down, down, down through clear water. In most places that was cool. A rift surrounded the Mound itself, however. When the barge got over that rift's middle, Jihûn fixed his eyes forward.
Always forward, never down.
People who looked into the depths went stark raving mad.
The barge neared the Six Pagodas riverfront. Jihûn watched foot traffic buzz past lofts and shops. As the barge neared its dock, his inner arcana felt something it hadn't felt the previous afternoon, evening, or night. It was a tickle. Maybe a tease. But it was there. Faint pressure came at him from all directions, but mostly it came up from below.
Just what he did not need.
Reflexively, Jihûn glanced down. Tianming Town sat on rock beds twenty to thirty feet higher than the river. That allowed the city's engineers to design sophisticated sewer systems. They isolated runoff and waste, pushing it east and south into dispersion flats. Even near the city's edge, river water remained clear — and fortunately, the bottom was back. Jihûn saw nothing down there but boulders, sand, and the mangled timber frames of old wrecks which had been claimed by crawdads of unusual size. He looked forward again.
Were crawdads venomous?
Where was the arcane tickle coming from?
The barge docked. Jihûn climbed wooden ramps up to solid rock. He bought chocolate treats and made his way toward Madame Wu's Mansion. As he walked, he tried to figure out the shape and direction of the tickle. It did not take long to conclude it was strongest in the direction he wanted to go. That was also something he did not need.
Madame Wu's Mansion sat on a huge plot spread over different rock terraces. The whole thing was enclosed by walls twice the height of those around most city manors. Every fifteen feet or so, blocks engraved with geometric designs protruded from the wall face. Climbing rose vines made details difficult to resolve.
The mansion looked beautifully ruined — and more than a little haunted.
Jihûn considered it strange that a noble family was permitted to build such a large fortification so near the center of government. The Autumn Blossoming Dynasty ruled an era of extreme artistic accomplishment and relatively little common sense.
When Abi d'Ilga's grandfather abdicated in favor of the general who founded Great Yao, Marquis Yue probably fell out with the more cautious new governing order. There were a lot of "greats" in front of Jihûn's forebearer, while Abi's grandfather was still alive.
Half-elves were different.
Madame Wu's Mansion looked like a fortress, but ran like a boarding house for starving students. Dragon Turtle Society's heavies were nowhere to be seen. There was certainly nothing heavy about the mansion's frail tenants. Jihûn felt bad about eating all the chocolate while he was trying to figure out the shape of the arcane tickle.
He made his way through the Mansion's courtyards, halls, and corridors. Even if they were underweight, the tenants looked healthy. There was something to be said for subsistence dieting, but Jihûn couldn't imagine saying those things himself. Everyone he encountered in the mansion was in high spirits that morning, as if a great weight had been lifted from their fine collarbones.
Jihûn had a thing for fine collarbones.
Maurice Lupin's collarbones were hidden under lumps of stringy muscle, which was too bad, but also pretty good. Jihûn knocked on the door to his gangster concubine's corner suite. Randal answered. Talk about fine collarbones!
"Maurice hasn't gotten out of bed," Randal informed the Eighth Prince.
Ridiculous!
Jihûn had finished a morning jog, weight training, stance training, descended the Mound, crossed the Feng, and wandered around Six Pagodas measuring arcane energy. Meanwhile, Lupin wasn't out of bed?
Randal also appeared to be in curiously high spirits.
"Has the hot bath spell gotten bigger?" asked Jihûn.
Randal shook his sleepy-potato head. He hadn't been to the bath that morning and couldn't say for sure, but believed it was the same size. How could it get bigger? A tenant passing by in an undersized towel confirmed the spa was the same size it had always been.
Jihûn marched to the side of Lupin's enormous bed. Lying on his back, Lupin had all his limbs stretched out to take up as much of the surface area as possible.
"Is he always like this?" Jihûn asked.
"He always tries to take as much of the bed as possible," said Randal. "I think he would prefer it if the bed were smaller."
"Why?"
"Less of it would be out of reach," said Randal. "He is a bit short."
"Does he always stay in bed this long?"
"Yes."
Jihûn shook the bed. Once Lupin was awake, Jihûn grabbed him by one leg, yanked him out of bed, and pulled him across the floor to his wardrobe. Though initially bitter over such treatment, Jian Peak Abbey's top disciple brightened up when Jihûn revealed they would go out for breakfast. After settling into a private room at a swank establishment near the Crimson Quill bookstore, Jihûn raised the most obvious question.
"What happened after I left last night?"
Randal couldn't think of anything unusual happening after they left the spa. He couldn't speak to what might have happened while he was asleep.
"There were no unexplained screams?" asked Jihûn.
Randal shook his head.
"No cracks of ominous thunder?" pressed Jihûn.
"Nothing like that," insisted Randal. "Why do you think something strange happened?"
"Concubine," said Jihûn. "What happened?"
Lupin's body language made it obvious that he knew something.
"Nothing happened," he insisted. "Why are you even asking?"
Jihûn leaned forward.
"I'm asking," he said, "because I know you can feel the arcane tickle in the air."
Lupin deflected. Jihûn returned his attention to Randal.
"What about your ghosts?" he asked.
"I haven't seen them since the baths."
"I saw…," said Lupin, stopping himself.
"Out with it!" commanded Jihûn.
Lupin acknowledged he had experienced an unusual dream. In that dream, he saw a little girl who answered to the name Randal had used in the baths. Nin. Jihûn tried to extract details. Lupin tried to maintain that it was all just a dream. Eventually, Jihûn established that Nin Yue was the only daughter of Marquis Yue. Lupin's description was consistent with Randal's.
"Have you ever drawn a picture of Nin Yue?" asked Jihûn.
Randal had not.
That reinforced the probability that Lupin had seen something real. Jihûn dug into the dream. When Lupin mentioned Richan and Edrus, however, he got irritated.
"Do not joke," said Jihûn.
Lupin slapped his own palm against the table.
"Hubris!" he said.
Jihûn leaned back in shock. Then he leaned forward, and slapped the table more lightly.
"Hubris?" he asked.
"Not like that," said Lupin. "Like this: hubris!"
Then they both slammed the table and repeated the word. Lupin came clean about both of his encounters with Abi d'Ilga. In his initial framing of his first encounter, he suggested she invited him down from the roof to join the card game as an equal.
Jihûn dismissed that as pure nonsense.
"She caught you by surprise and crushed you against the floor," he said.
"Excuse me," replied Lupin. "You weren't there."
"She crushed you," repeated Jihûn. "Then what happened?"
Lupin conceded that he had been crushed, and provided a more accurate summary.
"She gave you gold and told you to invite Randal to live with you?" pressed Jihûn.
"Correct."
"Did she mention me?" asked Jihûn.
"No."
Jihûn leaned forward.
"Not once?" he asked.
"Not once."
Lupin then related his dream. Jihûn again dismissed the possibility that Abi would treat the jewel thief so respectfully. Lupin stuck to his story. The little kids required his expertise to break into a tomb, he insisted, and admired his skills.
"It's nice to be appreciated," he said. "There were no weird dream quirks where everything shifts around, but I'm sure I never left my bed."
Jihûn confirmed with Randal that nothing disturbed him during the night. He then asked Lupin to repeat the ending of the "dream," emphasizing the importance of describing what happened exactly as it happened. Lupin used his thespian skills to act out the argument between Abi d'Ilga and the mouse — complete with entertaining voices.
"No embellishments!" insisted Jihûn.
"I'm not embellishing!"
"The Grand Preceptor does not talk like that!"
"That's exactly what my Second Master said!"
He repeated Abi's declaration that if the Grand Preceptor had always been a mouse, she would have liked him more. Jihûn was forced to admit Lupin's interpretation of Abi was accurate.
Even more convincing was his interpretation of Edrus.
"So if I understand," summarized Jihûn, "Abi d'Ilga asked Hermes Charleslouis to break a spell cast by the First Elven Emperor to imprison a vampiric fox demon."
It sounded absurd even for that girl and her friends, but the arcane tickle was real.
"My understanding is that the demon was destroyed in the process," said Lupin.
"And with the demon's destruction," said Jihûn, "Elven chains binding an ancient titan beneath the Imperial Mound would also break?"
"One of the chains," Lupin nodded. "Is that the source of arcane energy?"
"What did you see Hermes actually do?" asked Jihûn.
"He glowed," said Lupin. "Then there was a flash, and I woke up. I'm sure I wasn't there. I had gotten scratches in the dream. Nin saved me from a bolt trap."
"How did she do that?" asked Randal.
"Caught them in a silver web," said Lupin. "When I woke up, there were no cuts."
"Nhao is a powerful shape changer," said Jihûn.
Lupin leaned across the table and lowered his voice.
"Is this a terrible secret we must not disclose?" he asked.
"Of course," agreed Jihûn.
"But…," said Lupin apprehensively. "Abi and the mouse know that I know."
Jihûn leaned back and considered.
"I see what you mean," he said.
"What does he mean?" asked Randal.
"One or the other might kill him to keep the secret safe," said Jihûn.
"But you made him tell us!" said Randal. "So we know too! Is that bad?"
Both Randal and Lupin looked at Jihûn anxiously.
"No," the Eighth Prince concluded. "Abi knew he would tell us. If she cared, she would have already killed him."
"What about the mouse?" asked Randal.
"The Grand Preceptor insists on solving problems in the hardest way possible," said Jihûn. "Killing is too easy."
"What should we do?" asked Lupin.
"Nin told us to buy painting supplies," said Jihûn. "So we'll do that."
"And ignore the end of the world?"
"Yes," said Jihûn.