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Dawn starts to go through the materials he brought back from Dead Fred's Pile as soon as he and the ladies return from Stoneyvale, and he returns to his work quickly again after he and Angel return from Arabel, pausing only to add Flip's things to the stack. A few things have already become clear from Dead Fred's notes and journals: Fred was quite the sick and devious bastard, but he was a brilliant, devoted researcher and tinkerer with a fascination for the natural world. His earlier journals are filled with neat, detailed notes on vivisections of all manner of creatures (and he appeared to regard humans and demi-humans as just another sort of "creature") as well as artful and accurate anatomical renderings. Unlike many of his peers in the magical profession, he did not place magical devices in a class above purely mechanical ones, but often blended both disciplines in the construction of his traps and artifacts to produce little marvels... little marvels that caused nothing but death and pain, but marvels nonetheless. He applied many insights gleaned from his natural studies to his work; the design for a lightweight spring-trap powerful enough to break fingers was inspired by the defensive mechanism of a tiny, harmless ground fly. Dawn pauses to study the spring-trap, and copies the page out for further future study. His studies of anatomy also bore fruit in a more disturbing direction: Dawn finds several "imperfect" revisions of a poison-delivery system for a trap, as Fred sought to maximize the level and duration of agony inflicted before the release of death. Nor was he alone in his goals, as several designs bear comments in the margins pertaining to commissions and clients. Fred's work was much sought-after in certain circles, and made him an incredibly wealthy man. Dawn sneers at these; in his line of work it is best to deliver poisons that do their jobs quickly and efficiently. Drawing out the agony is, after all, only prolonging the possibility that the victim can summon aid. Dawn eyes the drawings only long enough to familiarize himself with their mechanisms in case he runs into similar concepts in the Box, and then skims onward. Fred's later studies seemed to focus almost fanatically on the ineffable spark within creatures that gave them life, and the idea that the life-spark itself might be harnessed as a source of power and magic. Fred's notes increasingly refer to his artifacts as his "little children." In the last of the journals Dawn found, Fred writes at length about his plans for a series of masterworks, the children that will be the heirs of his body and mind, his most precious gift to the sort of future *he* wishes to see. His true progeny will bestow their service, their treasures and secrets, only upon the most deserving. "My true sons and daughters," Frederach writes in the last entry, "shall carry my fame into the new age. They will fat themselves on the lesser creatures, the foolish and the weak of spirit. All shall desire them and the secrets they hold, but they will scorn and devour the undeserving. Should a man be known for his cunning, his brilliance, his skill? Let him first outthink my children, let him match wits with Frederach himself, and live! Or crawl back away, dull worm that he is, fit only to feed his betters. And so will the name of Frederach live coeternal with Genius!" These are the last words in the book; although Fred documented all of his other work with copious notes, spell-bits, and ornamentation details, there are only the roughest of initial sketches before this entry for the masterwork he was planning, enough to suggest a series of artifacts, perhaps four or five in number. There are several references in one section to "my library," and a sketch labelled "dower-box" looks tantalizingly like the Key retrieved from Flip. The remaining pages-- about a third of the book-- are completely and stubbornly blank, no matter what methods Dawn attempts to turn up invisible or hidden script. Perhaps a dozen pages appear to be torn out of the very back of the book, and it looks like a pocket that might have held additional papers was torn off the back inside cover. Dawn scowls at the blank pages and wills them to fill with marks, but they stubbornly resist him. He sighs and considers the rough sketches, comparing them mentally to the Box -- and the unfinished box he left in Fred's workroom. He wonders what kept Fred from completing these pieces, but as Fred did not conveniently scrawl, "Alas, I have accidentally injected myself with a venom for which there is no antidote, and will undoubtedly die a hideously painful death within mere heartbeats-- urk!" in his journal, he has no choice but to move on. Dawn finishes going through Fred's journals and personal papers, and turns next to the magical items. The scrolls appear to be fairly standard-- though high-level-- offensive and defensive spells. Fred appeared to be particularly fond of fire, poison, and draining spells-- life-draining, strength-draining, etc. There are also a few matter-transmutation spells with disturbing connotations... air-to-goo seems particularly nasty. Dawn merely catalogs the more standard scrolls and tucks them into the appropriate hidey-hole. The ones he doesn't recognize he puts in a different spot, for eventual reverse-engineering. The little perfume bottle from the abattoir is permanently enchanted with some subtle variation on the necromantic spell that's such a hit with dracolich cults, "Magic Jar." Although at first glance it appeared to be made of cloudy glass, closer inspection reveals it to be made of an incredibly fine and thinly-carved white alabaster. As he turns it in his hand, Dawn can make out an occasional swirling shadow of something inside, although nothing sloshes if he shakes it. He rolls the bottle slowly, watching its contents swirl, thinking. Finally, he sets it carefully aside. "Maybe Jewel or Andrial can figure out who it is, before I let them out." As he turns his attention to the magic-laden silver book-box, Dawn gets the uncomfortable itch between his shoulder blades that suggests he's being watched. His workroom appears unoccupied, except for him. Dawn looks around, opens the secret doors and checks to be sure there's no one in the connecting rooms, and then goes back to the workroom. He cancels his wards and re-builds them, then hunkers down at the bench to examine the book-box again. The silver book-box is something of a conundrum. Now that he has a moment to look at it and another artifact of Fred's-- the Key-- to compare it to, Dawn can see that it is, indeed, one of the finest pieces of silverwork he's ever seen. Its patterns and overall decorative theme-- Late Gothic Dread-- bear much in common with the Key. Still, it looks crude and shabby next to the smaller piece. The Key's exquisite workmanship draws the eye, its silver gleams richly in the light of the lamp. Its minute detail fascinates, and indeed, Dawn realizes with a start that he's been staring at the same minute silver-worked insect for at least a quarter-hour, from the slight kink in his back when he pulls away. The book-box simply... lacks a certain Something that sets the Key far above it in quality. And, as Dawn peers closer, he realizes the book-box is slightly flawed, as well. The back cover bears a carefully-nuanced pattern of ivory, moonstone, and alabaster that, when viewed from farther away, forms the shape of a gape-jawed, fanged skull from one direction, and a voluptuous woman from another. But one of the little bits of alabaster to the left of the skull's eye socket is flawed, and the crack reveals a hollow inside the stone. Dawn spends several hours dismantling and analyzing the traps. A permanent "Sleep" spell he had thought a trap on the box-catch appears to already active, and directed *inward*, rather than outward towards whoever might try to open the box. When he finally gets it open... there is nothing inside. Dawn's detection spells show a short, weak fizzle of power as he opens the "cover" and he blinks as the space within momentarily shimmers, but then the spells-- there seem to be quite a few of them-- fail quietly. The space within is tiny-- barely enough for a chapbook-- and the back is honeycombed with holes that let light in through the stones on the back cover, when held up to the lamp. Whatever the book-case was supposed to be, it appears to be a failure. Dawn frowns as the spells fizzle and fade, but they flicker too quickly for him to identify their signatures. He closes the box and re-opens it, but the spells don't seem to have re-set. He picks Fred's journals back up and leafs through them quickly, but doesn't find anything that resembles this to explain its purpose. He sighs and holds it at arm's length, tipping it back and forth to admire the shimmer between skull and lady, and then sets it aside. "Ah, well. Bring a nice price, even flat mundane." Dawn sets all of Frederach's artifacts aside, and digs out the things Angel has recovered from Flip. The unfinished puzzle ring, which proves to be made of nickel-silver, doesn't appear to match up with any of the raw materials Flip had in his possession (unless he used up his supply of the alloy). The materials themselves are mundane-- a book of thin-hammered gold and silver leaf, some copper wire, some silver wire, solder, some hand-sized squares of marquetry board and other fine woods, a small bag of semi-precious gemstones of fine quality, various polishes and stains in small jars. Once he's verified that all of Flip's possessions are non-magical in nature (except the Box, of course), Dawn sets the raw materials aside to give to Jewel. The tools are a little more interesting: besides the standard jeweller's and cabinet-maker's tools, he also has a set of lightly-used lockpicks, and a lock of medium difficulty that perhaps he was using to practice on. Dawn sneers good-naturedly at the picks (their excellent condition the mark of a novice, like an unscratched sword blade or a shield without dents might present to a warrior) and turns the lock over in his hands. He picks it without difficulty, locks it, and picks it again. Almost like a worry-stone, he continues to open and close the lock while he goes through Flip's papers and notes, mostly without even looking at it. The sheaf of loose papers prove to be jewelry designs, much like Dawn has seen Jewel doodle in the margins of things she's not supposed to be writing on. Dawn puts these aside with the raw materials to be given to Jewel once he's certain there's nothing related to the Box or the puzzle ring in the set. Scraps from Flip's pockets turn up a hefty amount of pocket change-- about 3 plat, total, quite a roll for a journeyman, jeweller or no. One crumpled note turns out to be a shopping list written in Flip's hand. Dawn counts up the change, raises his eyebrows, and stuffs it into his own pocket absently. He eyes the note, suspiciously subjects it to a couple of the more common methods for bringing up hidden inks (heat in one area, a darkening solution on another) and then tosses it in the trash. A folded note, only slightly creased, is written on finer paper and sealed with wax that has been carefully lifted rather than broken open. The message reads, in an elegant, feminine hand, "Dearest Cat, Ellie has gone missing. I beg you, return home by fastest post as soon as you receive this. With your skills, I know you can find her. Please, you are her best hope." The message is signed Wynne Suchart, although the signature is marred by a round water-stain. The outside of the note is addressed to Lady Catreenia Hooke at her cottage just outside Marsember. There is no posting-mark on the outside of the missive; apparently, it was never sent. Dawn makes a face. He hesitates between Jewel's pile and the trash, then finally opts to toss it in the trash, as Jewel already knows her sister is missing. To Dawn's mild surprise, about half of Flip's journal *is* in code... a code that takes Dawn all of a minute to decipher. Dawn rolls his eyes. "Amateur. He doesn't even change ciphers between pages." Still, enough to stop the average snooper, one supposes. And it appears that Flip would know a thing or two about snoopers... from his journal, it looks like he's an old hand at it, himself. His earliest journal entries are written in plain text, and read like a mage apprentice's notebook... observations on the nature of magic, mnemonics for simple spells (though of course not the spells themselves). Dawn flips through these fairly quickly, though he grins nostalgically at one particularly silly and pervasive mnemonic device, and makes a note to remember to pass it on to Calis. Flip is obviously a hungry young mind, and eager for more knowledge, but from his notes he does not advance very far in his studies. He admires and respects Bonesteel, who has begun to teach him simple magics, and has disdain for his blood father, who is constantly outwitted by Bonesteel. Bonesteel, through his manner and actions and sly jokes, appears to have taught him to have scorn for the less intelligent. And then, the spying starts. He spies on his father as he searches covertly for the rumored treasure. He spies on Bonesteel's office. At first, he suspects Bonesteel of practicing a spell he's hiding from his informal apprentice; he writes of seeing a thread of bright light that shines from under the office door late at night, and strange lights from the office windows. The keyhole and the draft beneath the door are covered, he discovers, but imperfectly, so that light escapes. He begins to notice rich and rare objets d'art appearing and disappearing in the office and around the manor, coinciding to the appearance of the spell-light. Some are magical items that later figure in impromptu lessons. Still, there is no way for him to spy directly into the office. Flip is not thwarted; he steals a drill bit from his father's thieving tools and hollows out a small peep-hole in the office wall. From the date of the next entry, the process seems to have taken him months, and he discovers when he has finished that his angle of view reveals little as to what Bonesteel is actually *doing.* He sees odd shapes moving, like snakes writhing in mid-air, he sees a dark fog and strange flashes of light. He gets a glimpse of what he describes as a glowing cavern, but apparently his vantage point is not good enough to see inside of it. He speculates that Bonesteel is consorting with the demon realms, or perhaps the ghost of Frederach himself. Dawn snorts at Flip for not researching the angle of his spy-hole more closely before setting bit to stone, but reads onward. A long entry written in quick, jerky script catches Dawn's attention. It is dated a little over a year before Bonesteel's death. Flip writes of his father's frustration with his treasure-search, particularly the impregnability of the office. Flip is convinced there is no treasure there and has never seen a box such as his father describes-- he's been in the office several times on Bonesteel's invitation-- and yet, when his father asks for his help in spiking the lock on his next visit, he agrees for his own purposes. Flip is uneasy about his master's midnight "trips to hell," as he calls them, and while he is doubly wary of walking in on such a spell in mid-casting, he burns to know what might be found through the glowing portal. At the end of his next magic lesson in Bonesteel's office, he follows his father's instructions for jamming the lock on his way out so that the bolt will not catch properly. He watches for several fruitless nights before he sees Bonesteel beginning his spell again, and waits until the man is fully absorbed in what he's doing before trying the door. In his journal, Flip describes the scene before his eyes as he pushed open the door. He writes of seeing a dark fog that filled the office, and wondrous, serpentine bands of ivory and worked silver that hover in mid-air, twining around a central space that contained Bonesteel and a pair of identical, human-sized, arched doorways constructed of the same materials. The floating bands take up nearly the entire space of the office, forming a maze-- almost a prison-- of metal and vertical rows of ivory like huge teeth hedging in the mage as he concentrates on something at its center. Before Flip's amazed eyes, Bonesteel extends his hand towards the left-hand arch, reaching for one of a group of eight metal sigils adorning the doorway. As soon as he grasps it, the portal pours forth a stream of light-- the light Flip first spied beneath the office door-- and begins to open. At this point, something must have alerted Bonesteel to his visitor, because before the portal can open all the way, he shoves the sigil back in place and begins to turn around. Flip is out the door and down the hall before Bonesteel can see clearly who intruded on his spellcasting, but he knows he has lost his chance. Indeed, the jammed lock is already fixed when Flip gently tries the door the following day, and Bonesteel begins to act even more secretively than ever. Dawn grumbles and re-reads this section, growling at the boy's lack of precision. "'Nearly filled the room' doesn't really help me set up, and 'maze of metal and ivory' does NOT-" He sighs, and looks around his workshop. "Guess I'll have to do it in the warehouse, to be sure." He mutters unflattering things about Flip's mental and physical prowess, and goes back to reading. The next few pages are filled with Flip's speculations on what the portal might actually contain, and whether it is indeed a door to another realm. He dreams at length on ways he might glean the spell to open the portal. But Flip cannot erase from his mind his brief glimpse of the grey, frightened look on Bonesteel's usually austere face when he turned around. Flip doesn't seem to work up the courage to spy on Bonesteel again. The next entries are brief, until a last, longish entry dated about a week after Bonesteel's death. Flip relates seeing the light flash beneath the office door in the middle of the day, and being curious enough to go to his peephole and watch. This time, he observes Bonesteel carrying the Dancing Hours out of the portal and polishing each carefully at his desk. He watches as the portal opens again, and Bonesteel seems to hesitate, and stagger, and fall. Flip writes of grabbing a statue from the hall ("it was ugly, anyway") and using it to smash enough of a hole in a panel of the door to reach the lock. Through the hole he made, he could see straight into the Treasure Room, and realized instantly that *this* is what his father had been searching for all this time. A glimpse was all he had; as the fallen Bonesteel's hand relaxed, the sigil-- a twisted snake, he saw, in the moment before it hit the ground-- fell from his fingers. The portal, the black fog, and all the swirling bands of metal and ivory, twisted in on themselves and snapped back around the sigil until only a small, metal box-- Frederach's snuff box, the Key the townspeople spoke of-- lay on the floor in the sigil's place. Flip got the door open, but it was too late by that time to help Bonesteel; the man was dead. In a few short lines, Flip writes something like an epitaph for his master-- he writes of the man's care for him, his teaching, his dry love, the times when he would speak wistfully of the heirs he'd never borne. The remainder of the entry is, in contrast, very detached, almost in the tone of a disinterested observer. Flip describes his father entering, seeing the door broken, the Dancing Ladies on the desk, Bonesteel dead on the floor with his son leaning over him. The box, beside them. His father looked shocked. He entered the room, moving along the wall, giving his son a wide berth before bending to pick up the fallen box. Dawn snorts. "Nothing like paternal compassion." Flip notes that his father looked contemplative as he studied the box, and that he could not recall the man ever having looked that way before. He watched as his father attempted to manipulate the box, his fingers closing around it and attempting to turn some hidden mechanism. One turn, two... some of the tendrils that Flip had seen encompassing Bonesteel drifted outward from the box, swirling around his father. A third turn, and it must have been a wrong turning-- the box flared open suddenly and snapped shut just as quickly, the coils of silver following the bright light back into the heart of the box and drawing his father's form in with it. In barely the space of a breath, the box dropped to the carpet again, and his father was gone as if he had never existed. Dawn notes that Flip has no wistful epitaph for *him.* This is the last regular diary entry in the book. Immediately after, the coded entries begin. Each bears a name-- a victim, one might say-- a date, and a description of exactly how the person manipulated the box. The first entry bears his father's name; the last in this section is given to Elowys Suchart. Her entry is quite lengthy, and Flip seems to have developed a shorthand for describing the turnings and pathways of the box. Several blank pages follow, and the very last page of the journal, in code, is labelled with Bonesteel's name, and describes the final manipulations that opened the portal. Dawn finally sets aside Flip's practice lock, smirking again as he sets it next to the barely-used picks. "Just couldn't fucking PICK one, could you? If you'd stuck to one thing or another, you'd be a fucking master by now. How can someone so bright be so fucking DUMB?" Shaking his head, Dawn gets down to work. He breaks the code on Jammer's name, and flips to the last to verify that it's the same code used for Ellie's. Then he goes back and decodes the entire section painstakingly, checking and re-checking to ensure he doesn't miscopy anything. He checks to make sure that each path is the same as the one before it (excepting the last, fatal step, of course) and works on learning Flip's shorthand for the assorted steps. Finally, he's left with what must be most of the path, and a last step which he circles carefully in red ink as incorrect. He leaves some space on his note page, and writes in Bonesteel's final manipulations. He pulls out the puzzle ring and spends some time comparing its loops and whorls to the path described by Flip's experimentation, hoping it will offer some insight. The unfinished puzzle ring is lovely and quite complicated for its kind. Indeed, some of its loops bear similarity to the tricksy, eye-twisting turnings on the surface of the Box, but there the parallels end; the turnings don't appear to mirror those of the box's opening for more than a handful of turns in a row. The best that might be said of the ring is that it appears its creator must have nearly as devious and inventive a mind as Frederach's, and shows some great promise as a jeweller for being able to reproduce such complexity in metal. When this is done, he stops working for the day. He carefully locks everything up and goes inside to eat a good meal. He spends a few hours with Bienca, takes a bath, and then takes a long nap. When he wakes up, he kisses Bienca and their son, then collects the mundane stuff he'd set aside for Jewel, the Box/Key, and the 'Magic Jar' bottle, and heads for Jewel's shop. |
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