Breaking Step (Dungeon Runner 3)

Tibs stood at the window, looking out and annoyed at the clear sky. Of course, today would be when the bad weather cleared.

Over the last week of incessant bad weather, Tibs had returned to the Brokerage. On the first night, he'd found that his hooks had barely deteriorated, and the two strands were still in place on them. So, he'd set about, each following night, enduring the mind numbing pelting rain as he carefully moved more and more strands to different hooks. He'd considered putting them all on the same one, but he didn't know how much 'interaction' they could endure before triggering. Two nights before, he'd found he'd moved aside the last of the strands he could Identify.

Which left far too many he couldn't. How would those respond to being pulled apart? He could sense the Arcanus, but not all of them acted the same way depending on the essence they were used with. And while he'd managed to deal with the Arcanus he hadn't known on the strands he could identify, by simply copying them when he needed to extend how they stretched. The combination of an Arcanus he didn't know on a strand he couldn't identify the element of seemed too risky to attempt.

So he'd called it a night, then had returned to the Library the next day, spending coins on another set of good clothing, and including gloves like the one Oshara had worn. He couldn't copy the weave through them, but counted on being able to keep away from anyone with an element. There, he'd struck up a conversation with another scholar closer to his age, claiming to be new, and through him, was able to speak with enough of them his questions were spread and didn't raise suspicion.

What he'd left with was some confidence that a weave could be 'deformed' to a point, without it 'breaking'. That would trigger some effect, it could be the intended one or not. But if they could be deformed, they could be moved. All he'd needed was a way to do that. He'd had to come up with that on his own, as he suspected that question would get him noticed as not a scholar in training.

He had water, and he knew the correct filigree of Fey hardened it. He spent the hours before the early night the heavy rain brought experimenting until he had strands hard enough other strands didn't 'move through' it, but still flexible enough to wrap around strands and 'tie' them into loose bundles.

Then he'd carefully done that with the strands left, parting them like a curtain. Even with making it as wide as he was comfortable, the opening was still tight. He rested on the roof for an hour to confirm the alterations hadn't been detected, and then he sensed the light increasing ever so slightly, letting him know that even if he couldn't see it, dawn was approaching. Since this wasn't something he wanted to do at anything but his peak, he headed to Archer's room to sleep, then, as soon as it was sufficiently dark, he'd get in, finish the job and go home to his friend, and clear the air with Don.

"So, it's tonight?" Archer asked, not sounding particularly eager to have his coins.

"No." So, of course, today had to be the one the rain stopped. If he believed in luck, he'd be cursing it. From what he remembered Carina explaining, a long time ago, it felt to him, the weather was caused by all the elements far above them interacting. When they were distributed evenly, they had clear sky. A little too much water and there were clouds; air brought winds. Too much, and the weather turned bad until the excess was spent. The balance was never perfect, she'd told him, but usually only off enough to add the pleasantness of a breeze to the day, or the shade of passing clouds.

The skies of Shellbridge seemed to never be in balance, except when he needed them to be so.

Torus was to his left, its horns seeming thicker than they did in Kragle Rock. That seemed to be the case in a lot of the cities he'd visited. The one time it wasn't was when he stayed within the same kingdom. Otherwise, they might be thinner or thicker. He didn't understand how that could be, but that was one question he wasn't in a hurry to get the answer to.