1????????Soul Bound

  1.3??????Making a Splash

  1.3.2????An Allotropic Realignment

  1.3.2.33 His mother's arms

  They moved a little way away from the spectators, and sat down facing each other on a blanket she’d used for laying out the lunch ingredients. There were a few crumbs, but a quick Clean spell removed them, and also all traces of sweat and stains from their clothes. While at it, she joined them together as a gestalt, casting a skill increase and learning buff, followed by a calming. After that, it only seemed logical to teach Nicolo the same silent meditation she’d taught the monks, and she offered up a prayer to Rac that he might guard her secrets and grant her insight into the mystery of Nicolo’s past.

  Ten minutes later, as she sat watching a cross-legged Nicolo meditating with a natural ease that even the abbot of a Tibetan lamasery would envy, still racking her brains for further preparations to make, she finally realised she was just putting it off. She turned her Truesight on, focused upon the blessing surrounding him, and tried to bring herself in tune with it, just as Isabella had taught her to synchronise with a patient when healing.

  She closed her eyes, matching her breathing to Nicolo’s, her heart beats, her mana flows…

  There. She could feel something. Not part of him, but not entirely alien like a disease either, not an invader. A linkage. A bond that had been there for much of his life, one whose presence his sense of self-identity had adapted to, had accepted. But what exactly was it linked to? She probed further.

  It didn’t seem to be like an anchored ward, linked to his body or something physical inside it such as an implanted gem or swallowed potion. Nor was it like a spell, dependent upon his mana, and upon the thoughts and intentions of his mind. There was a feeling of the linkage stretching in an unusual direction. She’d seen something similar when she and Wellington had experienced Camillo’s perception of reality magic. Time. The blessing was linked to an aspect of Nicolo that stretched back into history, beyond even his birth. His spirit? His ancestral heritage? No, that wasn’t quite right.

  She drew on her experience of sharing senses with the other Wombles, remembering how Tomsk assessed potential threats and opportunities, and saw combat as a single flowing process. Nope, that didn’t help. Alderney’s awareness of spatial relationships, lines of sight and aesthetic balance? Still no resonance from blessing. Wellington’s mathematical abstractions and optimised dependency trees, Bungo’s opportunistic probabilities that matched his alchemical and prophetic symbolism? Still no help.

  She tried seeing as she imagined Bulgaria would, putting on his personality as another might try on a new mask for size. Human relationships, layers of motivations and patterns created by information being presented in different ways, filtered by people and their preconceptions, moving and changing as it flowed from mind to tongue to ear to mind.

  She pushed herself beyond conscious acting, almost becoming him, and it was like a barrier broke. No, not broke, something gentler than that, like she’d stopped holding a barrier up, a barrier of preconceptions that had prevented her from making sense of things. The blessing had two linkages. The linkage anchoring the blessing to Nicolo had the feel of a direct personal relationship, one associated with an enfolding warmth and protection. His mother? Yes, that felt right. It had been cast by Nicolo’s mother as she died, powered by a total unconditional sacrifice of all she was and had, not traded with deities as a bargain but offered up as a plea.

  She turned her attention to the other linkage, the one she hadn’t even noticed until she’d tried seeing it as Bulgaria would. What was that linked to, if not Nicolo’s body, mind or spirit?

  She needed more information. Could she bring Bulgaria into the gestalt? Something pulled at her, as that concept filled her mind. Information! The blessing didn’t protect Nicolo’s body - it protected his information. She felt around the concept, trying to narrow it down. Not all information he had, nor all information about him. Information you could link to, information a mage could use to go from knowing a person’s name and past, to knowing their current location or activities. She drew on memories of using her own Homing skill, that had started off as Locate, and struggled to focus in upon just that part of the blessing. It felt like straining to read the bottom line of an optician’s sight test chart. If only her skill were higher.

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  Eventually she had to give up, her stamina exhausted. She knew there was more to discover, but she’d only been able to touch the edge, gaining hints and impressions. The protection felt like a bubble in a fog, limited in what it did, but providing absolute isolation inside that scope - almost a pocket dimension, like a stash or one of the Zoo’s ecospheres. It wouldn’t survive even a pin prick, if the pin was the wrong sort, and once the balloon popped that protection would be permanently broken. But against the right sort, the blessing felt like a stone castle wall attacked by ping-pong balls. Against the right sort of intrusion, no matter how cunningly planned, no matter if the enemy tried to get information via dreams or rumours or blood rituals, Nicolo was safe, still hidden, still enfolded within the protection of his mother’s arms.

  It was just a feeling, hard to put into words, and there was nothing more she could gain. Not the identity of the enemy, not the definition of what would or wouldn’t pierce the veil, and not the reason why his mother had felt the critical danger to Nicolo, the tipping point, wasn’t some actual attack but just the event of his location being revealed.

  She opened her eyes and shut her skills down, then lay flat on her back with exhaustion. The feel of the sun on her skin, the dusty breeze and the roar of the crowd rolled over her. Pleasure washed through her, as System sent her notifications.

  [Skill “Calm” has reached level 6.]

  [Skill “Blessing” has reached level 6.]

  [Skill “Truesight” has reached level 21.]

  [Skill “Meditation” has reached level 20.]

  Kafana: {Guys, just a quick update, tune me out if you’re busy.}

  Alderney: {Go ahead.}

  Kafana: {Nicolo let me study his blessing, and I’ve learned a bit more about them in general. In specific, I’ve confirmed his blessing was cast by his mother, and that it protects him against enemies tracking him down via some kind of magic affecting information flows.}

  Wellington: {Have you been using learning buffs again?}

  Alderney: {Sounds like it.}

  What? Did the buff affect her speech so much it was obvious to them?

  Kafana: {Hey! Should I be insulted here? What are you saying I normally sound like?}

  She could hear a grin in Alderney’s reply.

  Alderney: {Oh it isn’t bad. You’re just normally a bit less precise and a bit wordier. We can only pick up on it because we know you so well. I like both versions of you.}

  Kafana gave up. She noticed Wellington hadn’t expressed a preference, but sometimes it was better to leave things be than to keep digging.

  Kafana: {Yes I did use a learning buff, and it still wasn’t enough to fully understand the blessing on Nicolo. I really hope we can find a way to help Flavio soon, but I think it would help our chances if I could raise my Blessing skill to at least level 10.}

  Wellington: {Camillo lent me a copy of Lord Xeno’s monograph “Insights into categorical structures for a conceptual realm, afforded by a systematic exploration of the combinatorial lattice created by intersectional use of Bibliomantic search criteria.” Would you like to read it?}

  Kafana: {Um, thank you for the offer, but I think I’ll pass on that for now.}

  Bungo: {You’re using resonance, right? I was talking with Columbina about Carnivale, and the timetable for the events we got from Tori Landi. She mentioned an event happening tomorrow, The Flight of Luna, and said it draws massive crowds. It’s when the partying really starts, and everyone who’s anyone will be there, which should include all the KeyNPCs. It would be the ideal time to do that genetic relationship ritual you’ve been planning with the samples we’ve collected, to find out who is related to whom. If Nicolo is there, could you do the same sort of thing to see who Nicolo’s mother was trying to protect him from?}

  She thought it through for problems, and then remembered the trick with butter that she and Tomsk had used to track a wary assassin back to his lair.

  Kafana: {Worth a try. Ideally we’d find a high spot to scatter enchanted glitter from, that only sticks to people recognised by the blessing. That way, even if they’re disguised and there’s more than one of them, I could use my Homing skill to track their movements after the event.}

  A whistle blew, and wild cheering erupted from the Phantoms side.

  Wellington: {Got to go. See if you can find out more about the mother.}