“So the first entity was a flock of brightly colored birds,” Ashtoreth explained.

  “O-kay,” Frost said. “The whole flock?”

  “Yeah, pretty much,” said Ashtoreth. “I don’t really know how it worked, because whenever there was a vibe shift then they’d switch out whichever bird was talking to us. And whenever they had to think for a second, all their constituent birds would just start squawking.”

  “And they didn’t know anything?”

  “They’d heard of humans before, but they couldn’t tell us anything. Where things got really interesting was when they called up their dragon friend on a smoke phone.”

  “O-kay.”

  “Smoke phone?” Sadie asked. “What’s that?”

  Ashtoreth shrugged. “Kakisha contacted a dragon—I’m guessing with telepathy—and then a moment later they’d appeared in the room, all made out of smoke. And they did not like me.”

  “Why not?” Frost asked.

  “He said it was perverse that I’d taken the purity of humanity,” she said.

  “So they could see through the illusion,” Frost said.

  “Yep. Both of them, actually. Kakisha probably told the dragon about me. Normally, you don’t project your truesight with long-distance communication. Anyway, we got kicked out of the birdhouse shortly after.”

  “Right,” said Frost. “Look, I know at this point I must sound like a broken record… but are you sure this plan is safe, Ashtoreth? If these heavy hitters have some weird, unknown preconceptions about humanity…”

  “You’re absolutely right,” she said. “We should let it go. This time, at least.”

  Frost sighed. “Okay. Good.”

  “I thought this would be a trivially easy thing to ask around about,” she said. “But that was when I thought that human history wouldn’t matter to any millenia-old powerhouses. After that little debacle, I’m thinking that asking around after humans might not be such a good idea. We’ll leave it to someone less essential than me.”

  “Shouldn’t we just ask the elves, though?” Sadie said uncertainly. “They’re immortal. And they probably know a lot of immortals, too.”

  “Call that plan B,” said Ashtoreth. “But I still want someone to investigate independent of them because they’re the elves.”

  “We’re almost there,” Dazel said. “It’s just up ahead, past that empty part.”

  They had landed and rejoined everyone else after their episode in the birdhouse. Then Dazel had guided them into a sort of cavern-within-a-cavern, a smaller cave that held all manner of businesses but where flight was illegal.

  “There,” he said. “That’s it.”

  The building had no neighbours: it was surrounded on all sides by empty lots, as if the rest of Arc Enival had shrunk away from it. Pale green lights had been set all around it, and as they approached, these washed most of the color out of the world.

  She’d expected that a soulweaver would be like a surgeon, enchanter, or alchemist: that the building would be a cosy little shop accommodating one specialist and their assistants. This was several times larger than that, though, multiple stories tall with a round tower rising from its center like a lighthouse. Ashtoreth could see dark stains streaking the grey stone of the structure’s exterior, as if it had been weeping rust.

  “Wow,” she said. “You sure picked, uh, a legit-looking establishment to get some soul work done there, Dazel.”

  “Hunter spotted them, actually. I think his chuuni-vision just let him cut right through the city and find the shadiest place available. But trust me, this was the best one out of the three we found.”

  “This was the best?” Kylie said. “How? Were the other places both suspended over pits of bubbling goo by rusty chains, or something?”

  “No, but they were inauspiciously cheap and their soulweavers didn’t answer my questions to my satisfaction,” said Dazel.

  “Hey,” Kylie said, eying the building dubiously. “Your soul, your choice.”

  “Glad you see things correctly,” said Dazel. “But look, boss: you’re the only one whose instincts I trust. Do you think this won’t go how I want it to?”

  She shrugged. She was conscious of the fact that he was using their contract to check and see if she’d arranged for any kind of treachery, but without alerting the others. She didn’t mind, of course: he’d helped hide the fact that she’d tried to sell her sisters from Frost, after all.

  “You’ll be fine,” she said. “I can’t say for sure, but I’ve got no reason to doubt your expectations.”

  “Great,” Dazel said. “Let’s go.”

  The front doors were locked, and Ashtoreth knocked to be greeted a moment later by a blue-skinned devil who glanced down at Dazel, then admitted them without a word.

  “These are yours, by the way,” Ashtoreth said, sending Dazel a large quantity of cores as they were led down the entrance hall. “Should get you past 300. And let me pay for the soulweaver, too. It’s my obligation.”

  “Right you are, boss. Can’t wait to choose my aspects.”

  “Do you know what they’ll be?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  Ashtoreth frowned. “You’re not going to say?”

  “No.”

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  “But you’ll show me, right? Once you start casting spells?”

  “Obviously.”

  “Yes,” she said in a low whisper. Ashtoreth was more than a little bit stoked for an overpowered party wizard.

  They emerged in a large main chamber, one situated directly under the tower she’d seen outside. The tower itself was fully hollow, serving as an open area where all sorts of magical apparati had been stuffed into the space above a sophisticated magical circle. Everything was still lit only in green.

  A feminine figure stood near this circle. Her entire body was covered in black cloth, save for the featureless white mask that covered her face. She glanced over at them as they entered.

  “The demonic familiar,” she said, glancing over at Ashtoreth. “Knowledge spirit. Assigned recently, during an initialization… though the age of the bond itself has picked up an extra year somewhere. You are the bondkeeper?”

  “Mhmm!” Ashtoreth said.

  “I am not severing your familiar’s bond,” said the soulweaver. “He will still be your familiar. I am instead giving him a detailed map of the manner in which you two are connected, which I assume he intends to give to another weaver so that they can sever the bond. You understand this?”

  Ashtoreth was fairly certain that Dazel, being Dazel, was planning on doing the second part himself. Still, she nodded. “Yup.”

  The soulweaver moved toward a desk on the far side of the room, almost seeming to glide in her long robes.

  “The process is expensive in and of itself, but the map alone is not your only expense. You want the process kept secret; this costs. You want the process expedited; this costs. The price is written… as are the contracts. Come.”

  Ashtoreth joined the soulweaver at her desk, and the rest of her companions all sat themselves in some armchairs arranged along one wall while she began the arduous process of examining the contracts.

  They were straightforward, but she and Dazel were nonetheless both extremely meticulous in reading them over. All of them were agreeing not to use the ritual for anything other than what was being bought and paid for, the soulmap. All of them were agreeing to anonymity: Ashtoreth and Dazel wouldn’t even be able to tell someone where they’d found her.

  The soulweaver was a professional, and she made no objection to the half hour or more that she and Dazel each spent with their copies, drilling the simple lines into their minds and recruiting every ounce of intelligence and creativity they had to try and spot just how they were being taken advantage of.

  But the contracts were legitimate. The three of them signed, and Ashtoreth paid without much complaint. Dazel had earned the big spending, especially when they’d mostly traded plastic wrap and synthetic fibers for the money in the first place.

  Still. Even without selling her sisters, they could have made a killing. Who knew how many levels she could have returned to Earth with if they’d simply stayed long enough to trade everything they’d brought for cores? It wasn’t a happy thought.

  Soon Ashtoreth was sitting in one of the armchairs along with the rest of the crew. Dazel was led into the center of the room, where he sat in a circle and scrutinized the runes around him as the masked woman placed a large crystal in a sconce that was linked to the circle by a long chain of runes.

  The crystal would contain the vast quantity of data that constituted the soulmap itself. As they watched, the soulweaver began the ritual with a quiet chant and the circle began to glow.

  It took a while. Ashtoreth could determine enough from reading the runes that led toward the crystal to see that the speed of the spell was limited by how much energy the soulweaver could push into the crystal in a given moment, and it wasn’t hard from there to get a feel for how long they had left.

  Dazel sat in the circle as the soulweaver chanted, looking around at the runes and no doubt keeping close eye on the mana that she was manipulating. Clearly he wouldn’t believe it wasn't a setup until the whole process was done.

  Dazel was right about one thing: Ashtoreth couldn’t possibly understand what he’d been through. What was it like to be a slave for thousands of years, then finally be free?

  After what felt like another half-hour, the glow of the circle began to fade as the last of the soulmap was transferred into the crystal.

  Then Ashtoreth heard a voice inside her mind.

  Remain composed. Don’t answer me.

  She blinked. It took her a moment to realize that the voice in her mind was Hunter. Something sounded, or felt, off about him.

  It’s Hunter, he said. I’m not using our telepathy rings because they might not be trustworthy. I’ve got a different way. It’s only one-way, so you can’t answer me.

  She suppressed the urge to shoot him a suspicious look. Was this actually Hunter—or someone faking it to get her to trust him? What was going on?

  I can prove it’s me. Hold out your hand behind your back, palm-up, and I’ll warp something into it. It’s a jewel. It stores thoughts. Memories.

  She blinked again. Normally, teleporting anything close to someone involved pushing against their magical threshold: it was possible, but required extra strain. It was the things that kept Hunter from killing enemies by warping their brains out of their skulls.

  But Ashtoreth and Hunter had trained and fought together enough that it was second nature for her to simply allow him through her threshold.

  Slowly, calmly, she held out her hand behind her back.

  She felt the light touch of Hunter’s magic a moment later, and a gemstone fell into her palm.

  Memories, he’d said. Ashtoreth had to focus as hard as she could to maintain a blandly interested expression in the ritual going on ahead of her. Whose memories were these?

  This is important, and you need to be fast, Hunter said. Use the gem.

  She paused, unsure. The ritual was almost finished. Everything was going just as it was supposed to.

  Wasn’t it?

  You told me to tell you that you can’t afford to take chances, not with Earth, said Hunter. You said that this was called a lacuna maneuver.

  She drew in a little hiss of air. It was involuntary, but also not too loud: she’d been girding herself against any kind of reaction, after all.

  Use the gem, Hunter said again.

  The ritual was almost complete. The light from the runes that ran toward the socketed crystal was already fading. The map was close to finished.

  Except it wouldn’t just be a map, she realized. Hunter had found this place for a reason. They were here for something else.

  She thought of the Eldunar. She’d let them into her mind, after all. They must have controlled her, made her give Hunter orders that she didn’t even remember, played around with her mind so that they could get around Dazel’s contract…

  Except that made no sense. Ashtoreth could believe in treacherous elves, of course, but so could Hunter. He’d have told her right away that she’d been compromised if she’d come to him with some secret scheme anytime after meeting the elves. The elves would have known as much, too.

  No, she realized. It was the humans. She’d taken pleasure in showing them the futility of trying to break into her mind, showing them how easy it was for her to trick them. They couldn’t read her mind or verify the truth of anything she said… but with the right upgrades, a human psychic could easily have helped her put some plan into motion and then forget about it.

  High Command would have known. When she’d been examined by the elves, they could have verified every part of the plan that their psychic and Hunter had been privy to. They’d probably rushed the elvish psychics to examine her precisely because they needed the real talent to confirm everything before they left for Arc Enival.

  Her hand closed around the gemstone. Ahead of her, Dazel was just… sitting there. Totally unaware.

  But Frost had been right to have a bad feeling about their trip. He’d sensed that something was wrong, and it was. The whole thing was a setup.

  Only it wasn’t Hell, Apollo, the Eldunar, or the Humans who had ultimately planned to blindside them.

  The traitor was Ashtoreth.