I put the backpack in first, bidding it a fond farewell. I was less sure about giving it up than I was about giving up the Anyblade, but we’d had seven months to pull out everything we could want from it. Amaryllis had argued about it, but we hadn’t had a proper fight. The thing that clinched it was that we might be able to get larger things from Earth; there had been quite a few times when I’d thought to myself, “oh, I’ll just grab that from the backpack”, only to realize that the thing I’d wanted couldn’t possibly be pulled from the backpack, given its size. We were fortunate that most of the furniture we needed had been stolen from one place or another by Fenn (or in the case of things taken from Weik Handum or Caer Laga, rescued rather than stolen).The closet wasn’t terribly big, and it was about as unassuming as it had been described. The only thing that marked it as special was the fact that it wasn’t very close to any other doors or rooms, which gave it a place of prominence i

“And you’re okay with staying behind?” asked Mary.“I am, you don’t need to ask me again,” said Valencia. They were in the hotel room together, alone. Grak was putting up wards in the other room where the tuung were staying, and Joon had taken Fenn to go find out if there was another way down the Pit. Valencia was more comfortable when she was with just one other person, because sometimes there were too many people talking at once and it was hard to figure out what they were all saying without a devil’s help -- and Valencia didn’t particularly like having a devil’s insights into her friends.“I know I decided for you,” said Mary. “I don’t want you to think that I was pushing you out, you’re a valuable member of this team, but --”“If a warder looks at me, he’ll know that I’m non-anima,” said Valencia. “And then he’ll tell people, and they’ll try to kill me.”“It’s partly that,” said Mary. “There are a lot of reasons.” She paused. “I thought that you might like some independence. You’v

Negotiations took hours, and I was thankful that my role in them was very minor. There were hundreds of things that needed to be hammered out, but Amaryllis and Valencia (with the most cunning devil she could find) were both up to it. No one ever said out loud that if we wanted to, we could just kill everyone and leave, but there were a few hints in that direction, especially with casual uses of magic, most of them by Bethel. She peeled the skin from an apple with her telekinesis while she held it in two fingers, which made the point rather clear.The big sticking point was Anglecynn. Finch had been called into Cranberry Bay because of that first altercation with Larkspur, and he’d started connecting the dots right from the start, at least to hear him tell it. A mysterious man goes to a library asking about a disease from the Risen Lands, and just a short time later gets attacked by Anglecynn’s Foreign Security Director, who also happens to be the guy who benefits

The Isle of Poran sat in the middle of a slate gray sea, under unnaturally roiling clouds. The soil was poor, leaving little but lichen and moss to grow, and it was almost perpetually wet and drizzly, with an average of two sunny days out of the year. It had been the redoubt of a vampire prince, long ago, with a small village of muck farmers surrounding his castle and paying blood tribute to him and his cohort.I’d had a lot of problems with vampires, back on Earth. There were scientific issues you had to work out, if you didn’t just want to say “it’s magic, fuck off”, like the fact that blood had 900 calories per liter, which put some serious limits on vampire diets. There were also worldbuilding issues, like why, if vampirism could spread and vampires had lots of abilities, they hadn’t just taken over the world a few centuries ago. But the thorniest issues with vampires had been the cultural ones: vampires hadn’t just been done to d

When looking at the athenaeum system as a whole, I was very much reminded about what Figaro Finch and I had talked about regarding specialized hammers. If all you had were thirteen special hammers, then eventually you would start designating some of them for ‘close-enough’ purposes. Each of the athenaeums had carved out their own little slice of the higher-education pie, and usually centered around one or two complementary or linked types of magic, but there was a strong tendency for them to expand beyond that. The Athenaeum of Bone and Flesh wasn’t just a place where people learned bone magic, it was where they learned healing magic in general, and beyond that, they were the renowned experts in non-magical healing as well, save for the niche that the Athenaeum of Quills and Blood had carved out for itself. There were things you could learn without going to one of the athenaeums, since Aerb also had independent colleges, and not all of the minor magics were tightly