Secrets of the Swords, Book 1

Chapter 25: The Waiting and the Worrying

It was late.  Ulsper and the others should have been back by now.

Suthe paced between the long tables, casting frequent glances to the front door and growing more anxious by the minute.

It certainly didn't help that Nem Koel didn't share her anxiety.  Rather, the girl had found something fascinating on the bottom of her boot, and had been trying to scrape it off with a knife for the past half hour.

Suthe had tried to be patient.  Ancestors knew Nem Koel and Ulsper had given her enough lessons in meditation and on calming her anxiety during her time in Fai, but the lessons just hadn't seemed to stick.  Rather, Suthe could only think of her mother, alone in Crestdune waiting anxiously to hear of her daughter's wherabouts.  Or, if she pushed aside worries of her mother, then she was contemplating the fate of Alaera; the unusual, lonely woman had been willing to take in and even defend a complete stranger when Suthe showed up out of the blue.  What had happened after the soldiers had broken into Alaera's apartment, looking for a suspicious druith?

There was nothing she could do about it now.  Suthe shook her head.  She didn't even know if she could go back to the little apartment in Choraport if she wanted to.  Her traits were still so temperamental, and there was no telling if a group of soldiers would be waiting for her when she arrived, ready to ship her off to Isendorn.

Suthe shuddered.  No, that would definitely not do.  Her only option was to wait for Ulsper and Saer Lon to return.  But where were they?  Were they lying dead in a ditch somewhere?  Or perhaps one of the clockwork soldiers had caught them?

Suthe looked up at the fading light outside the windows.

Please, she thought, please let it still be too early for the clockwork soldiers to be out.  It was true that she was still terribly curious about them, but her curiosity had its limits.  Sentient mechanical beings sounded far more fascinating than anything created by the guilds in Forgeborough, but the idea became more frightening than fascinating when Suthe took into account the fact that Ulsper and Saer Lon had been missing for hours now.

"You're going to wear a hole in the floor," Nem Koel remarked, finally looking up from her boot.

"I'd be more concerned about losing one of your fingers with that knife first," Suthe said.  "Or, I don't know, maybe the fact that Ulsper and Saer Lon have been out for far too long?"

"Eh..." Nem Koel made a face and shrugged.  "Errands sometimes don't adhere to the schedules we'd like to make for them."

"So then when," Suthe said, feeling exasperated, "would you say we should start worrying, exactly?"

Rather than answer immediately, Nem Koel frowned at the sole of her boot and gave it one last scrape.  The knife stuck for a moment before something dark and round came unstuck from the heel.  Both Suthe and Nem Koel watched in surprise as the object shot across the room and pinged against a ceramic vase.

"Oops." Nem Koel winced, and for a moment, Suthe thought there was a flicker of embarrassment on her face.

"So?" she pressed, waiting for an answer to her question.

"So," Nem Koel echoed with a sigh, "I think we should worry if we don't hear from them by the time the clockwork soldiers come out.  That's not for another twenty minutes, at least."

Suthe sucked in a breath through her teeth.  "A whole twenty minutes," she said.  "Well, isn't that a relief.  Because if they haven't managed to come back in the last three hours, then surely twenty minutes will make a di—"

Her tirade was interrupted by groaning hinges at the front of the building.  Both she and Nem Koel immediately looked up as one of the heavy doors swung inward, and Suthe's breath caught in her throat.  A second later, she realized who it was.

"I thought you were an assassin!" she blurted in her relief, embarrassed at the admission almost as soon as the words left her mouth.

Saer Lon shoved the door shut and sagged against it, though not without giving a quizzical look at Suthe's statement.  Nem Koel, Suthe realized, was also giving her a critical look.

"An assassin doesn't come in through the front door, Suthe," Nem Koel pointed out, setting her knife down on the bench beside her.  "Besides, you saw what she was wearing before she left, didn't you?"

"I...forgot," Suthe answered in a small voice.

 Nem Koel and Saer Lon exchanged a few words in Shun Dwo, and Suthe looked on, anxiously waiting for the translation.

Saer Lon sighed, then shook her head.

"What is it?" Suthe asked.

"The meeting didn't lead to as many answers as we'd hoped," Nem Koel explained.  "It gave us a name, but not the one we were hoping for.  We have to go to Sang Bur, to meet someone who might know, about the person who might know, about the stones in the Twin Blades."

Suthe frowned as she worked her way through the trainee's convoluted sentence, then let out a groan.  Would she travel the whole hemisphere before she could go home?

Saer Lon made another comment, her gaze now on the door to her room upstairs.  This statement seemed more directed just at Nem Koel, as it was muttered with a tired finality.

"Shah fey Ulsper guwo kayo," Nem Koel said, not looking up.  Rather, she was intently focused on tugging her boot back on her foot, a task that to Suthe would seemingly be easier if she only loosened the laces.

Suthe's ears perked up at the spy's name.  "What about Ulsper?"

"She wanted—" Nem Koel paused to put more force into her tug, "to get a drink, and I told her—
 " again, she paused, "that Ulsper isn't back yet."  Finally, the boot slid on.

Suthe looked over at Saer Lon.  To her relief, the other woman at least seemed concerned by this news.  Immediately, she straightened up from her slouch against the door and spoke in more Shun Dwo.

Nem Koel paused and looked up.

"What?" Suthe demanded.

"Well," Nem Koel said, "she's concerned, but I don't think it's really that much of a problem yet..."

"Of course it is!" Suthe exclaimed.  "The clockwork soldiers are programmed to wake up in fifteen minutes!" She couldn't help the feeling of uselessness that washed over her, as she just stood and fretted while knowing that Ulsper was out there somewhere, about to get caught.

Saer Lon continued to speak, and Nem Koel translated.

"It's not the clockwork soldiers she's worried about," Nem Koel said. "It's just, they ran into one of the Sylterran captains hoping to claim the bounty for Ulsper's arrest.  She managed to lure some of the captain's team away, but—"

"We have to go find him!" Suthe interrupted, making for the door.  Saer Lon stepped in front of her, blocking the way.

"We don't know where he is," Nem Koel said.  "Even if you were in full control of your magic, you wouldn't be able to help him.  We can only wait and hope he returns."

Saer Lon spoke again, and this time, Nem Koel's eyes widened.

"You'd better tell me exactly what she just said," Suthe threatened.  "No sugar-coating."

"She said," Nem Koel began, "that if Ulsper isn't back by tomorrow morning, we leave without him."

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

It's a chapter!  It's a terrible, goes-nowhere-plotwise chapter, but a chapter nonetheless.  Hooray!  I have to break through writer's block somehow.  :P  Also, with the whole computer-erasing-my-files event and switching all of my documents to a new computer, I have somehow misplaced the draft of this story I was working on. T_T  I'm not too fond of writing chapters directly in Wattpad, but I'll have to make an exception for now.  Sorry for the ridiculously late update.  I'd just like to thank everyone who has been voting, commenting, and adding this story to their reading lists though--you all are so motivational and are a big reason for getting me back to writing this!  Sometimes (especially with the holidays) it's just so easy to put off writing, and before I know it, several months have gone by.  So just, THANK YOU!

Who thinks Ulsper got caught?  Or do you think he will make it back in time to head with the rest of the group to the capital?