Chapter 26.2: Mixed Emotions

As quickly as he could, Minkus made his way back across town to the Shining Inn.

When he arrived, the glimmer of twilight had vanished, replaced by the first dim stars, pulsing from the night sky far above the city walls. If only for a second, he paused, feeling relief at just how big the world around him really was.

He stepped through the doorway, though, and that awe vanished. There was Master Gill, reclining in his chair behind the front desk. Minkus gulped, and the man looked up from his papers.

“Why, Mr. Large. Welcome back.” Despite his usual politeness, there was discomfort in his voice.

Words nearly ran together as they flowed from Minkus’ mouth. “Yes, Master Gill, hello. I— I’m very sorry I had to leave in such a hurry. I— you’ve been patient with me— and—”

The innkeeper set his work down on the desk and leaned forward. The reservation in his voice faded, though he still didn’t smile. “You’re perfectly fine, Mr. Large. It seemed unlike you, but we all have our difficult days.” He scowled a little. “Your friends more than most.”

Minkus winced. “Did they— Have they caused more complaints?”

“Not yet,” the man said. He stiffened. “But like I said earlier, you’d best keep it that way. I can’t allow this pattern to continue, if you get my meaning.”

“Yes, I do. And— and we will— keep it that way, I mean.” Minkus nodded, more to himself than the innkeeper. He would keep it that way, somehow. He didn’t really have a choice. The two of them—no, the three of them—had nowhere else to go, so Minkus had to remain in Gill’s graces. Not that the man didn’t deserve their respect; he more than deserved it. By morning, though, Minkus and Penny had to have everything possible copied out of Zinn’s tome, and they needed this place to do that. Of course, getting everything copied would require pen, ink, and paper, three things Minkus only now realized he didn’t have.

Minkus rested his face in his hands. How had things become so very complicated?

“Is there something more you need, Mr. Large?” Gill asked.

At the question, the asura came to himself. “Actually,” Minkus stammered, “yes.” He didn’t know how he could ask this man for anything right now, but he had no alternative. “Could I borrow a quill and some paper? Lots of paper, actually. Any quality. It doesn’t matter. I— I can pay you for it.”

“Nonsense,” the man chided. “All part of your stay, Mr. Large. You know how we do things here.” He bent over and rummaged around in the shelves below the other side of the desk, pulling out a stack of papers an inch thick, along with a quill and an ink jar. He slid them across the tabletop. “Will this do?”

Minkus thumbed at the stack of sheets, “Yes. Oh, yes, very much so.” He beamed and took hold of the items. It was a relief to see there was still some friendliness between them. “Thank you, Master Gill. Thank you, and— and good night.”

“And a good night to you, Mr. Large,” the man replied, settling back in his seat and returning to his reading. “Remember, though,” he called over the top of his loose sheets. “I can’t let it happen again. I won’t.”

“Yes.” Minkus nodded emphatically. “I understand. Thank you.”

Balancing the ink pot atop his stack of paper, Minkus made his way to their room, up the main stairs and three doors to the right. It was a short walk but long enough to shift his focus back to the tome, to the jade, to Ventyr and Yissa, and to Jinkke. He reached the door and knocked. “Penny, it’s me,” he whispered, knocking gently again. “It’s Minkus.”

He heard steps cross the creaky floor inside, and the door cracked open. In the gap, a dark eye appeared, half covered by a lock of sleek, black hair. Minkus patted his pack, feeling the edge of the tome inside. “I got it,” he said.

Penny opened the door a touch wider and moved aside to let him in. Then she clicked the door shut behind them. “What exactly did you get, now?” she asked, standing uncomfortably beside the door with her arms crossed tightly. “You took off without an explanation.”

Turning to her, Minkus noticed Wepp still tied to a chair in the middle of the room. Now, though, he was also gagged. Minkus’ spirits fell. He didn’t know what he’d hoped for, but this wasn’t it. They still had a captive in their room. And Penny? He glanced at her, standing against the door in that distant, calculating way. She was still the friend who'd betrayed and lied to him. In his rush across Divinty’s Reach, he’d actually left all this behind him, thinking so intently of his other friends, his sister. Perhaps somewhere in his heart he’d really just hoped this, all of this, had just gone away, but it hadn’t.

Minkus sighed, laying aside the paper and ink and letting his pack down to the floor. He opened the flap and removed the thick, hardcover tome. “This,” he said, showing the woman.

“And that is?” She stopped. “Wait. That's that golem-brain book, isn’t it? You ran all the way across town for that? Why?”

“I just— I thought I remembered— well, look at it.” He felt his cheeks rise into a grin as he dropped his bag and spread open the tome on one of the beds. He had the answer; he just knew it, and that was one thing he could actually be happy about.

Penny took a step toward him, and Minkus flipped through the pages he’d just reviewed in the Durmand Hall. Glyphs and diagrams flashed past once more, until he reached what he was looking for, and he threw a finger down on a block of notes that floated right above a sketch of a jade construct. The first line of the text was emboldened.

“Great,” Penny groaned, rolling her eyes. She looked at him, unamused. “You know I still can’t read that asura stuff, right?”

“Oh, yes, of course.” Minkus said, clearing his throat. “I’m sorry. It— well, it says something like constructs of jade and their spectral agony.”

“Wait, what?” Penny leaned closer to the page, inspecting its diagrams. Her eyes widening a fraction, her attention settled on the illustration of the construct. “Is that one of those things the bookworm was on about?”

Minkus nodded excitedly. “See? We have information on them!”

“I don’t remember this at all,” Penny said, flipping a page. “What in Grenth’s green ass is it doing in this old-dead-asura handbook for golems?” She stood up from the pages, crossing her arms and leaning away as though distrustful of the tome.

“Zinn wasn’t just a golemancer,” Minkus started, “he also—”

Wepp suddenly mumbled excitedly behind his gag, distracting Minkus from his statement. The captive asura struggled against his bonds to better see the materials spread across the blanketed bed. He rocked and tipped, threatening to topple the chair.

Penny lifted Wepp’s chair firmly from the ground and faced him the other way. “This doesn’t concern you.”

Wepp huffed, struggling to turn himself back around for a moment, but soon quieted down. Shaking her head, Penny looked once more at the opened pages, and Minkus waited patiently for her reply.

For a moment, the three held silent, but Minkus was all too aware of the work that needed to be done and the people he needed to do it for. It couldn’t wait. He snatched up the tome, grabbed the stack of sheets and ink from the floor, and bounded to the desk against the wall. “We need to copy this as fast as we can,” he explained. “I swore I’d get it back first thing in the morning. I shouldn’t even have it, but Levanche had to leave, and when I offered to trade my...”

Minkus trailed off, coming to a stop. The room was uncomfortably still. Not peaceful, and not attentive. It was coldly still. Tense. Resistant. He looked at Penny and found all those things on her face.

“Penny?” Minkus asked. “Did you hear me? We only have tonight to copy as much of this as we can. We— we need to copy as much as we can. We can use this to—”

“To what, Minkus? What exactly are we going to do with this?” She snapped, tightening her crossed arms even further into her chest.

His shoulders fell, and before he could stop them, his eyes moved to the floor. That old discomfort from his youth, that shame, it washed through him. His hand itched to drop the tome and rise to tug uncomfortably at his ear, but he held the thing tight.

“Penny,” he stammered, “you heard what Wepp said. This employer person, she’s— bad. She’s dangerous. And the jade, it’s— it’s dangerous too. It says so here.” He raised the tome, careful to balance the writing tools he’d stacked atop it. “Everything Yissa and Ventyr said, it— it says the same. It says the constructs used magic to make people mad. But Zinn, he worked out ways to fight it. That’s what the old stories say. That’s what the tome says— I think, anyway.”

“Gods, you have no idea what you’re doing, do you?” She rubbed her forehead.

“Penny, I—”

“Biggie, just stop,” she demanded. “We don’t know anything about any of this. We don’t even know if there’s a this to know anything about. All we have to go on is the word of this idiot.” She gestured at Wepp, who huffed his offense.

“But Ventyr,” Minkus said, his voice growing quiet. “Jinkke.”

“Biggie,” Penny snapped again, “you don't know if your sister is with them!”

She stopped, seeming to catch herself, and leaned down to put a hand on his shoulder. Minkus slid free of her touch. He wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t like it. “What I mean,” Penny tried again, “is that she probably isn't: she’s probably not with the others at all. If they’re in any kind of danger, she’s safe in that floating cube-city of yours, or wherever she went.”

Minkus blinked, then blinked again. He could hear reason in that argument. “Yes, I suppose that’s— well, that’s probably right. She isn’t much for adventuring. And she was very concerned with her research.” He pursed his lips, his load still keeping his hand from shooting up to play with his ear.

They’d discussed this briefly before, and despite his anxiety, he couldn’t argue any of Penny’s plain logic. That didn’t mean there was no alternate logic to argue; he just didn’t have any. He never did. Amid that, though, something nagged at Minkus. Standing there for what seemed far too long, only periodically meeting Penny’s gaze, Minkus couldn’t shake the feeling that for all the reasonableness of Penny’s outburst, there was something else behind it. Despite her words of comfort, Penny was anything but comforting, anything but compassionate, anything but concerned for their friends: for Jinkke, Ventyr, and Yissa. His mind stopped spinning.

“She’s probably not with the others at all?” Minkus asked slowly, repeating Penny’s words.

“No,” she agreed, “you said it yourself. She has her research.”

Feeling suddenly more balanced, Minkus asked the next question, the one he’d not been able to express before. “What about the others?”

Penny’s hand started twisting at the bolt at the end of her holstered pistol. “Minkus” she said with a scowl, “you really think Vent needs us? If anyone can take care of himself, it’s that guy. Him and the bookworm, they do this kind of thing for a living. It’s, like, their job to save the world or something.”

That was a lie. Well, sort of. Ventyr was a quite capable soldier and a strong elementalist, but Penny’s words— were they a lie? No, not technically. They were, however, a distraction. That was suddenly clear to him. Truth seemed to well up inside Minkus’ chest, and Penny’s words, though full of factuality, had little to do with truth.

On truth’s heels came compassion, flushing through Minkus from within and without. The two, compassion and truth, spiraled together inside him, pushing his uncertainty aside, and in a snap decision, he gave them voice. “Penny. Are they able to protect themselves, or do you just not want to help?”

She reeled away, rising upright and stepping back. Her eyes remained fixed on his, her teeth clenched, and when he didn’t look away, she squirmed.

“No,” she finally said, “I— of course I want to— but it just doesn’t—”

“No you don’t,” Minkus interrupted, shaking his head as the truth became painfully clear. His confidence remained, but his calm melted away. He was sad. He was hurt. He was angry. They all swirled together, spurred by the virtues that seemed to press themselves both into and out of him.

“You don’t,” he said again, still holding the tome, papers, and ink pot in trembling hands. Rising tears burned in his throat, and his volume rose with them. “They’re our friends—Ventyr is your friend—and you don’t want to help. You don’t want to do anything to keep him safe.”

After a quiet second, she barked back, finally breaking before the accusation: “No, I don’t!” Her hands shot out at her sides as the woman leaned into the conflict. “I don’t. Not when the threat is unknown, the plan for helping isn’t a plan, and our necks are on the line! Gods, Minkus. We’re not soldiers, we’re not heroes, we’re not saviors, and I don’t want to be any of those things. You know what happens to soldiers and heroes, Minkus? Huh? Do you know what happens to people who stick their necks out to save other people’s sorry asses? How many times do I have to tell you this?”

Minkus still felt the heat in his face, but he let her answer her own question.

“They wind up in a jungle, Minkus, attacked by ancient monsters.” Her voice had now risen to nearly a yell. “They wind up in a cave, murdered by bandits. They wind up in some gods-forsaken village, run through by centaurs. They wind up dead or maimed or alone in a world that doesn’t give two coppers if they life or die, eat or starve.” She paused, her jaw quivering for just a moment before she steadied it and forced herself into picking up that bit of lost steam. “So, no, Minkus, I don’t want to help, and I’m not going to!”

Minkus stepped back. He knew he’d been right in his assessment; he knew that. But he hadn’t been prepared for this. What in the Alchemy was Penny talking about? The compassion buffeting against his chest both reached out to his human friend’s evident pain and railed indignantly against her selfishness. He worked to find something, anything to respond with, but words failed him. This was all very confusing.

For what seemed like minutes, the two stood there in silence, periodically glancing at each other but neither able to say anything.

Minkus finally opened his mouth, hoping he’d find the words he knew they needed, but he was interrupted by a sudden pounding at the door. He froze, his attention snapping across the room to the locked door.

Gill’s warning! he thought. In only minutes Minkus had completely forgotten Gill’s last warning, his very last warning. He snapped a finger up in front of his mouth, shushing Penny.

“I think it’s a little late for that,” she retorted. Somehow this interruption had broken some of the tension for her too. “Whoever it is, just go talk to—”

“No, Penny,” he said, waving his arms downward, as if to suppress her volume. “Master Gill— he said— he said we got another complaint. He said if we got one more— I mean, another one more— he’d have to kick us out.”

The human looked on the verge of retorting, when the pounding knock came again. She looked at Minkus, then at Wepp, and a sudden understanding seemed to strike her. Her hands shot to her mouth, and with muffled moans, Wepp began to bounce excitedly in his seat.