56. The Society of Night (I) (Patreon)

Shadows

I am dark, but darker still
is she whose bed I share;
my lady of the midnight will
gift me her hidden prayer.
-Alscius Calvioli, from Twelve Liaisons

Aldo became a Sneak a week after Mailyn and I did - eight days, to be exact, which meant that it was a Turnsday… an even day, on which we had our Basic Seamanship class, and so Rose Argent made good on her promise to bring Aldo to class. He arrived to fight, flail, and tie knots with his fellow Sneaks a mere two hours after being informed that he was no longer a Scamp. And, would you believe it, the little bastard placed first in the mastmaster competition. Mailyn and I had a whole week's worth of practice over him, but he scampered up the pine tree like a monkey and grabbed pennant #1 like he was born to do it.

"That kid's a natural," Driane whispered.

It was the first time I'd seriously considered that, while I'd been learning a dozen (and counting) languages and earning decent money as a translator, there were perhaps some skills I could have been practicing to better prepare myself for life as a Sneak. Aldo's apprenticeship under the semi-legal arm of the Slartic mob had given him invaluable skills, and suddenly being in all tier five classes as a Scamp didn't seem to impressive.

"Relax, it's just Aldo," Mailyn whispered.

Yes, it was Aldo, good old Aldo, whom nobody could seem to knock off a log or get a decent poke on with their bamboo pusher. If he hadn't gotten confused with his knots, he probably would have gotten first in the sailmaster competition, too. On his very first day! Never mind that Mailyn and I got first in the rowmaster competition again because nobody else could figure out our trick for unswamping a canoe in fifteen seconds flat.

Aldo made Sneak at the same time as three other former-Scamps, which landed him on crew #64, on the same floor of the same residence hall as us, albeit across the stairway from Mailyn and myself. That suited me well enough - we could socialize plenty without sleeping in the same room. I treated Aldo the same as I always had, even though I was just a bit jealous that he appeared to be a better natural sailor than me… a sailor like Rose Argent, the Rose of Floria. I treated Aldo the same, and I even partnered with him during Basic Combat class to make sure he saw all of the strikes, rolls, and grapples he'd missed during the week that he'd been a Scamp and we hadn't.

"Hey… ah! What gives, Vix? Ow! Do you have to throw so damn hard?"

I nodded curtly. "If we slack in practice, we won't be ready when it really counts. It's for your own good."

"That's… ow… that's a load of…"

"She has the right of it, Sneak," Corporal Soto boomed at us. He would have been a good drill sergeant if he'd, in fact, been a sergeant (actually, his teaching our class was probably one of the conditions for him making sergeant in the Shadowguard). He stopped to watch a few rounds of our back-and-forth takedown drills. "Practice hard, fight hard. Unless you're expecting your enemies to lay you down softly like a dandy on a first date, you're doing your partner and yourself a disservice if you don't go full energy!"

"Yes… ow… damn… yes, corporal!" Aldo shouted back.

We settled into a new routine, bringing Aldo into the fold and adding several of our crewmates into our satellite social circle - Driane from Mailyn's bunk, Philo from my own bunk (he was a bit of a thaumaturgy buff and didn't mind if I talked his ear off about artificery), and a full half of the Sneaks in Aldo's bunk. As always, he was a bit of a social dilettante, forging social bonds with impressive promiscuity but never much depth. The main exception to this rule was Mailyn and myself, whom he thought of (apparently) as younger sisters - technically accurate since he was a few months older and members of the Collegium often refer to one another as 'brother' or 'sister'.

In any case, this became our new normal - crew duty and breakfast in the mornings, Basics of Thaumaturgy and Basic combat on odd days, Mathematics and Basic Seamanship on even days, and baths and recuperation in the afternoons. Only, after a few weeks of intense physical hardship every afternoon, I started to get used to it and no longer needed hours to recuperate. After a quick bath and a change of clothes, I was good to go (albeit not very quickly). On a few afternoons a week, I even made it down to the Foreign Canton to visit my old haunt at The Learned Scholar, where I picked up some of Mossy Lakes's backlog for fifty percent over my old fee (that is, a tollo per four pages rather than six) as well as a little linguistic tutoring for Mossy, since I hadn't had as much time to train her as I thought I would and I was a Sneak of her word.

While starting Sneaks don't have as much free time as Scamps, they still have plenty - perhaps six hours of Collegium classes and assorted duties on an average day plus another two hours of studying or reading for classes leaves seven or so hours of free time… subtract bathing, travel, and meals and you've still got five hours, assuming you sleep for nine hours (as the typical Sneak does). As for myself, I've only ever slept for four hours, five at most, ever since I was very young, giving me even more time than that, which I spent either reading, drawing, keeping my journal, or a half-dozen other mini-hobbies that I cultivated late at night or early in the morning.

This proclivity is what drew Philo's attention to me. He was a fellow night-owl (albeit not an early riser like me) who noticed me reading by glow-globe beneath my covers and gave me a fright when he peeked in. I managed to suppress a yelp, but I certainly glowered at him for the surprise.

I set down my book and hissed, "I'm reading!"

Undeterred, Philo nodded amiably, his pale moon of a face taking in the little fiefdom under my sheets - two school books, a novel, a journal, a sketch pad, and me, all illuminated by a studded pewter glowglobe crafted by my own hand. I don't think he saw Pranto II, my little stuffed pony. If he did, he certainly never brought it up - kudos to him.

"Want to see the garden?" he whispered.

"What?" I glowered even more at the non sequitur.

"I noticed you liked to stay up. Well… the garden's different at night. Lots of herbs and flowers that aren't out during the day come out at night, or in moonslight, or only during certain seasons. I've got an herbarium book…"

"Spurspar's Compleat Herbarium?" I asked excitedly.

"You've heard of it?"

"I love it!" I hopped out of bed so quickly, I nearly bowled poor Philo over. "Show me!"

He shuffled over to his footlocker and quietly opened it, producing a sadly pristine and recently-printed copy of Altice Spurspar's compendium. After all, herbariums are best often-used and well-annotated. With that, he gestured for me to follow him and we went out into the night.

Like all of the residence halls, Purspine Hall had its own garden, perhaps thirty meters wide and twenty meters deep, with a little artificial cave where we grew mushrooms and separate plots for vegetables an herbs. Fruit trees had been planted wherever space would permit. Every night, one of the half-dozen or members of the Greenfingers Society in our hall (the Collegium Society dedicated to herbalism and botany) would venture out to work the subtle magic of verdemancy over the garden, ensuring that the plants grew in all seasons (not that Floria has much in the way of seasons) and produced many-fold what a garden its size would normally produce. Philo had garden duties two nights a week.

We crept through the sepia-dark hallways of the residence hall. What we were doing was completely allowed, but my years of Scamp indoctrination had conditioned me to feel a certain wrongness about creeping about at night… a sense of wrongness that I would overcome very quickly. Soon, we were out in the cool night air, the moss growing between the stones slick with incipient dew, the pale moon low in the sky and barely peeking out from scudding clouds. The air smelled of damp earth and subtle flowers, the night still around us. And, I realized with a little gasp, the garden was glowing.

It wasn't a brilliant glow, not even enough to see by, but for our glowglobes. But ten thousand tiny points of light illuminated the backyard plot. Little starburst flowers, meandering vines, luminescent insects, and even a few faintly-pulsating roots, the garden was aglow with a galaxy of little light sources. It was beautiful, a special moment etched in the silent midnight hour. I was brought out of my reverie by Philo nudging my shoulder.

"That one's my favorite - midnight forsythia," he whispered.

It was a simple enough bush speckled with delicate flowers. Only every third or fourth flower glowed with a faint light like paper lanterns festooned on a festival banner, a faintly-pulsating blue or indigo that waxed and waned as if invigorated by a slow botanical heartbeat. I touched one of the flowers, only on the tip of the petal, and gasped as the light almost immediately winked out.

"The flowers exude a liquid at night to attract red-isle moths, but they're very greedy. If you snip off the flower at the base very quickly, you can take it before the plant retract the juice into… well… I'm not sure where it goes. You can't get it by tapping the stem."

"What's it good for?" I asked. I touched another petal, that flower winking out as well as the plant reclaimed its precious fluids.

"Medical use… it's useful for, um…" he flipped to the page in the Compleat Herbarium and squinted to read the florid text in the dim light. "Healing, especially scabs and infection. Effective topically or orally, best mixed with bartroot."

"That means it's an emetic, too," I said absently - I'd read through most of Mrs. Delina's copy of the book and knew that bartroot was one of the most common remedies to help people keep things down that didn't want to stay down.

"I'll have to remember that," he mumbled. Before he could close the book, I snatched the book from his hands and removed the little graphite pencil from my pocket, quickly jotting in the margin: may cause vomiting. "You can't write in a book!" Philo gasped.

"Why not?" I asked.

He pondered over that for a moment. "It seems wrong…"

"It's not wrong," I stated. "If the author didn't include something that ought to be there, then why shouldn't you add it yourself?"

"That makes a certain kind of sense," he admitted. "But please don't write in my books."

"Sorry," I whispered.

"So… would you like to collect a few flowers?"

I nodded and then watched as Philo showed me how, taking a small set of clippers, carefully lining them up at the base of a small, glowing flower, and then quickly snipping it off and letting the bloom tumble into a little glass jar. Immediately, the nearby flowers retracted their light, darkening the entire branch of the bush before, slowly and over the course of a minute or so, the lights gradually pulsed back into existence.

"The plant will only let you take three or four before it goes dark for the rest of the night," Philo explained. "And if you're not quick about it, you won't get any extract at all."

I was too slow with my first flower and the plant withdrew about half of the glowing extract, but my subsequent attempts were almost as good as Philo's own. He gently shook the jar of flowers, the glowing extract pulsing a bit with each shake. "I'll purify the extract when we go back inside - I've got… well the Greenfingers have got… an alchemical filter that can extract just about anything."

We continued through the garden, Philo showing me the various blooms and insects that only emerged at night. We flipped through the pages of the Compleat Herbarium as we did so, and I couldn't help but be a bit disappointed that Philo didn't write in any comments or annotations. I could only conclude that have been must be more of an alchemist than an herbalist, since any herbalist worth his green would at least add notes about where you'd found your samples and how you'd collected them. Philo insisted that he had a good memory and would start a separate journal when he got the chance.

Afterward, we returned inside, the residence hall warm and a bit claustrophobic after spending the better part of an hour observing and taking clippings from the garden. Philo had also cast a number of spells and added alchemical supplements to some of the plants, but I could quickly tell that it would be a while before I was ready to practice magic of that complexity.

Back inside, Philo showed me to a little corner with an ad hoc alchemy setup - just a handful of common-use glassware and purification and fractionation tools. The crown jewel of the collection was an extraction filter, essentially identical to the rock filters used to purify water but far subtler and more efficient. After invigorating the thing, he ground up the midnight forsythia flowers in the filter's intake bowl using a pestle. Almost immediately, the flowers desiccated and allowed themselves to be ground into a sickly gray dust. After a minute, Philo purged the tiny tap on the side of the filter, expelling about half a milliliter of faintly-glowing indigo fluid - purified extract of the midnight forsythia.

"I've got garden duty two nights a week," Philo explained as we returned to our beds. "You can be my assistant if you like."

I nodded emphatically - that suited my needs perfectly, at least for a while. I would gladly take free lessons from anybody willing to disseminate them. After all, who knew what would become useful later on?

I returned to my bunk and, after recounting the night's occurrences in my little journal, I put my books away and curled up with Pranto II until dawn's first light, at which point I was awoken by Aldo. This in of itself was highly unusual for two reasons: Aldo was not an early riser, and nor was he a member of crew #61. Nonetheless, there he was, indistinct and indigo in the feeble light.

In a pained voice, he whispered to me: "Rose left!"