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The sun is setting on the city of Zadash.
Fjord frowns. It’s much darker than he’d expected—maybe all the days on the road have thrown his sense of time. It’s no matter, of course, except that he’d promised Jester that they’d go searching for someplace that sold real, Nicodranas-style bear claws earlier today, and she’s been nowhere to be found since.
He props his forearms on the windowsill and stares out, taking in the bustling scenery that surrounds the Leaky Tap. The setting sun gilds the entire skyline in gold, casting an unreal glow on the silhouettes of metal-plated roofs. A handful of the people passing by outside his window are tieflings, but none are blue-skinned.
Fjord sighs, mentally preparing himself to break it to Jester that if she wants her pastries, she’s going to have to get an earlier start than this. Most shops close around eight, he’s pretty sure, and it’s already… close to then, probably. Bakeries especially won’t keep long hours. He squints one more time at the sun, trying to gauge by its distance from the horizon how much time they might have left. But the spires of the city are high, and there’s no real way to tell where the horizon is from here. Fjord misses the ocean.
He makes his way down to the pub below, where he finds not Jester but Caleb at a table in a corner. It is otherwise unoccupied save for Frumpkin, who is curled up within easy petting reach, and a book so large it might technically count as a dining companion. Caleb strokes Frumpkin’s fur absently, then flips a page. In the time it takes Fjord to approach, he’s turned another and makes no sign that he’s noticed Fjord at all.
Fjord clears his throat softly. “Evening,” he says, and Caleb jumps, eyes widening into a perturbed stare. Frumpkin makes an unhappy sound and blinks up at Fjord long enough to eerily mirror his owner’s expression.
“Um,” Fjord says, breaking eye contact with some difficulty. “Apologies, I… didn’t mean to interrupt. Just wanted to ask—you haven’t seen Jester anywhere, have you?”
“Jester,” Caleb echoes, frowning. “No, I don’t think so. Has she gone missing?”
“Missing is a strong word. More likely she was out wandering the city and lost track of time.”
“Right.” Caleb nods and starts to turn tentatively back toward his book, watching Fjord out of the corner of his eye as if daring him to say something else. Peculiar man.
“You wouldn’t happen to know what time it is, would you?” Fjord says.
Caleb heaves an extremely put-upon sigh. “Of course,” he says. Rather than turning back around to face Fjord, he looks back at the table before him, then reaches decisively out for Frumpkin. Frumpkin, who had resettled in a more upright position after Fjord’s interruption, does not take kindly to Caleb’s efforts to work his hands under his body and turns another magnificent stink-eye on Fjord as if to say you did this. With some difficulty, Caleb lifts Frumpkin fully off the table and holds him in front of his face with a look of stern consideration. Frumpkin stares back at him, beleaguered as only a spoiled cat can be.
“Quarter past seven,” Caleb announces, and sets the cat down. Frumpkin makes an affronted noise and settles back down, and Caleb scratches the scruff of his neck affectionately.
“Uh,” Fjord says.
Caleb levels a weary look at him. “May I return to my reading now?”
Fjord gives himself a slight shake. “Yes. Yeah, of course. Enjoy the book.”
“Certainly,” Caleb mutters, eyes already distant as they race over lines of text. Fjord’s presence by the table is clearly forgotten within seconds.
For a second, Fjord thinks of saying something, but a slitted-eye look from Frumpkin quickly dissuades him. Fjord nods to himself, then turns on his heel and beats a strategic retreat.
Not quite too late for the bakery, then, if Caleb is to be believed. Though Fjord doesn’t think he’s ever seen the man look at a pocket watch, so he’s not entirely sure he is.
He’s more at home on the Mistake than in the city. It’s been too long since he felt the sting of salt on his skin and the rolling of the deck beneath his feet; since the minute he set foot on the ship, he’s felt that the ground he stands on is steadier than ever. This, finally, is Fjord’s element. He knows what he’s doing here, if nowhere else. And that makes one of them—the Mighty Nein are many things, but they are decidedly not seaworthy. Their ship is, without a doubt, deserving of its name.
Inexplicably, this has made Fjord feel better about the situation at hand, not worse. He’s spent the past days giving the hired crew cheerful, competent orders and the rest of his time wandering the ship, dispensing bits of advice to whichever of his friends cross his path. In the past twelve hours alone, he’s taught Caduceus to tie a passable knot, Beau to wind the ropes in a way that’ll make the sails better catch the wind, and Nott to peek over the railing of the ship without hyperventilating. He’s strangely proud of the progress he’s made here. He'll have them all turned into decent sailors yet.
He spots his next quarry sitting with his back pressed to a wooden crate on deck, hands absentmindedly combing through his cat’s fur as he stares off into the distance.
“Caleb!” Fjord says, striding over with purpose.
“Hmm?”
“You’re always looking out for new things to learn, aren’t you? How’d you like to add one to the list?”
Caleb raises an eyebrow. “Sure,” he says. “What is it?”
Fjord makes a bit of a show of squinting up at the sky, gauging the distance between the sun and the horizon. It doesn’t take him long to do anymore, not after all his years of practice. “Right now, it’s one in the afternoon,” he says. “Sun’s due to set in seven hours. Want to know how I knew that?”
A very odd expression passes over Caleb’s face. It is not one of excitement to acquire a new nautical skill.
“It’d come in handy off the boat too,” Fjord adds in an attempt to sweeten the pot. “We’re always out in the wilderness adventuring, no timepieces to be had. Can’t hurt to know how to orient yourself out there.”
“Ah. No, I’m sure it can’t. That’s very kind of you, Fjord, but I’m afraid that particular skill will be of little use to me.”
Fjord laughs. “What, you never need to know the time?”
“Not as such.” Caleb gets to his feet, readjusting Frumpkin in his arms as he does so and looking down at him fondly. The affection fades from his expression as he looks back at Fjord, however, melting into vague discomfort. “I always know what time it is.”
“Always,” Fjord says with poorly concealed disbelief. He’s met more than one crewmate in his time who ‘always’ knew about one thing or another, and has seen more than one of them steer a vessel directly into a storm.
Caleb sighs. “Currently,” he says, and cranes his neck to look not up at the sun, but down at the cat quietly purring in his arms. “Currently, it is sixteen minutes past noon.”
Fjord experiences a rapid-fire burst of emotions, indignation followed closely by a sharp twinge of annoyance, both of which he shoves down under familiar, affected calm and bewilderment. “Now, how would you know that?”
Caleb fixes him with a perplexed look. “I always know what time it is,” he repeats, as though Fjord missed it the first time.
“To the minute?” Fjord challenges.
“Yes.”
Fjord sighs. “Right,” he says. “And what’s the deal with the cat?”
One of Caleb’s eyebrows arches. “The deal with my cat,” he says, enunciating slowly and hefting Frumpkin in his arms as he does so. Frumpkin appears entirely unaffected. “He is my cat, my familiar. That’s all.”
“Well, yeah,” Fjord says. He feels a bit like he’s lost his footing. He’s witnessed Caleb look at his familiar like a watch twice now, and he’s always been a believer in the old adage that once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and so forth, but this is a bit much. “I just thought you-” He gestures between Caleb and the cat. “You know.”
Caleb gives him a sincerely troubled look. “My cat does not talk to me, Fjord.”
“Uh. Of course not.”
Caleb just keeps looking at him.
“O-kay!” Fjord says. “Anyway. High noon. Good to know.” He raises two fingers to his forehead in a clumsy salute, turning on his heel in search of his bunk.
He could swear he hears Caleb say something else, something amused, from behind him, but when he turns around Caleb is cradling Frumpkin in his arms, attention entirely devoted to him. Doesn’t talk to his cat, indeed.
Down below decks he finds Nott. Nearly runs her over, in fact; she’s crouched right in the middle of the hallway, and she squawks indignantly at the interruption. When she stands to face him, her hands are stained black. Looking down, Fjord finds a small heap of gunpowder and a pair of round goblin eyes looking up at him beseechingly.
“Not gonna ask,” Fjord decides. “Just don’t blow up the ship, please.”
“You got it, captain.” Nott gives him a gleaming grin. She smells of acrid smoke.
“I was talking to Caleb up there,” Fjord ventures. If anyone would know what that man’s deal is, he thinks it would be Nott. “You know that he can always tell the time?”
“Oh, yes. Caleb knows everything,” Nott informs him solemnly. There’s a glint in her eye that seems to appear every time she talks about Caleb, one Fjord recognizes from watching other people talk about their gods. “He’s very smart,” she says. “Knows all sorts of tips and tricks like that.” She flashes another smile at him, sharp and quick.
“Well, yes,” Fjord says. There’s something unnerving in the intensity of Nott’s stare, something that makes it a bit hard to focus. He summons his resolve. “But what does it have to do with the cat?”
Nott blinks at him. “With Frumpkin? Nothing. He’s a cat.”
“Well. Not always.”
In the deeply uncomfortable silence that follows, Fjord entertains a visceral and intensely realistic fantasy in which he collapses to his knees, cradles his head in his hands, and allows himself to plead to whatever gods are listening to tell him why.
“Anyway,” Fjord says. Valiantly, he resists the urge to at least squeeze his eyes shut. “That’s not the point. I just thought that sometimes when he knows things like that… it seems like the cat gets involved.”
“Caleb’s very smart.” Nott looks at him doubtfully. “I don’t think he needs a cat to help him tell the time.”
Fjord touches a hand to his forehead. “Of course,” he says. “I didn’t mean to insinuate—uh.”
“I think he does it by the sun?” Nott goes on thoughtfully. “That’s how it’s usually done, isn’t it? Only, Caleb’s studied so hard that he’s very precise at it.”
“That’s the thing, Nott. I’m a sailor. I’ve been telling the time by the sun for years, and there’s absolutely no way to tell the exact minute that way. The half hour, maybe, but frankly that’s more like lucky guess territory than anything. Now, I suppose it’s possible he’s lying-”
Nott’s face, which had been curling into a smug grin, abruptly sours. Fjord switches gears.
“-but I can’t think of any reason why he’d do a thing like that.” Except to be a sanctimonious bastard. “There’s something he’s doing differently; I just don’t know what it is.”
The smug grin is back on Nott’s face. Fjord’s been with this group long enough now to read her expression quite clearly: My wizard is better than you, warlock.
“He’s very studious,” she repeats. “I’m sure he’s got some clever trick he could teach you up his sleeve.”
“I’m sure he does,” Fjord says with some relief. “Well. Don’t let me keep you from your…” he waves his hand vaguely downward. “Explosions.”
Nott visibly twitches with excitement, which Fjord takes as his cue. “See you,” he says, and then, on second thought, pivots before he reaches the ladder that leads belowdecks. He points a stern finger in her direction. “Don’t blow up the ship.”
She’s already crouched on the floor again. Fjord sees a spark flicker between her cupped hands. “No promises!” Nott calls cheerfully.
Whatever a captain’s salary is, Fjord thinks, he is not getting paid enough for this. But he’s pretty sure she’s kidding, and that’s good enough for him.
“Forty-four bottles of beer on the wall, forty-four bottles of beer,” Jester warbles. Her voice is rough and drained compared to when she started, approximately six hundred thousand bottles of beer on the wall ago, but she shows no signs of stopping even though Fjord’s almost completely sure the metaphorical wall has been getting bigger and bigger each time the song starts over. Fjord is not a man who tends toward anger and frustration, but as a seasoned sailor, he is intimately familiar with cabin fever. Or tunnel fever, in this case. His brain feels like it’s been vigorously stirred.
“Take one down, pass it around, forty-three bottles of beer on the wall. Forty-two bottles of beer on the wall-”
“You missed one,” says Beau from her position beside Fjord, then immediately cringes at herself.
“What?” Jester says. The singing, blessed mercy, stops. “No, I said forty-seven, then forty-six, then Fjord tripped over that rock at forty-five, then forty-four, then forty-three-”
“You didn’t finish forty-three.”
“I didn’t?”
“You said forty-three bottles of beer on the wall and then went straight to forty-two.”
“But that’s what I’m supposed to do!” Jester pouts.
“I’ve never been very good at counting backward,” Caduceus muses from where he’s taking point a few steps ahead, seemingly to himself.
Jester resumes singing. “Forty-three bottles of beer on the wall, forty-three bottles of beer…”
“It’s two o’clock,” Caleb announces loudly from somewhere behind Fjord. Instantly, there is an even louder clamoring from all around him as the entire group—except Caduceus, probably—tells Caleb to shut up. The singing starts up again immediately afterward.
Fjord turns a critical eye on Caleb. It takes some maneuvering, and he nearly does trip on another rock in the process of walking backwards for a few steps, but he catches sight of him: trailing toward the back of the pack as always, with his cat draped over his shoulders as always. And just as Fjord expected, his attention is on Frumpkin, craning his neck to look right at him and scratching him affectionately under the chin. Fjord frowns suspiciously at him, apparently long enough to draw attention. Caleb’s eyes flick up, absentmindedly at first, and then return to him with more focus when Fjord is not fast enough to avert his gaze. Or to hide the fact that he’s still walking backwards.
Attempting to play it off, Fjord quits the backwards walk and makes his way over to Caleb, toward the back of the pack. Caleb watches him approach and, when Fjord makes it close enough to hear, he says conspiratorially, “We have gone through enough bottles of beer by now for us all to drown in.”
Fjord chokes on a laugh. “And then some.”
They walk side by side for a moment, listening to Jester pluck down one imaginary bottle after another. It doesn’t take long for Caleb to sigh deeply and pinch the bridge of his nose, clearly afflicted by a similar headache to the one pulsing through Fjord’s skull.
“Yeah,” Fjord says. “No kidding.” Then, bolstered by whatever camaraderie this creates between them, he says, “Listen. I know you’ve said before that you just always know, but I can’t help but wonder how you can tell the time down here. I mean—you’re certainly not doing it by the sun.” He makes an expansive gesture at the stone ceiling and the flickering torchlight. “Call it academic curiosity.”
Caleb looks taken aback, then visibly considers. “I suppose I never did lay it out explicitly,” he says. “Of course, for the sake of academic curiosity.”
Of course, Fjord thinks a bit pettily.
Sidestepping a knee-high stalagmite, Caleb says, “It is not inaccurate to say that I just always know the time. It is not an uncommon ability among practitioners of magic—at least, practitioners of the academic type. I don’t believe Jester, for example, shares this ability.”
They both look ahead for a moment. Jester, farther down the tunnel, has reached thirty-six and is dragging her feet dramatically in time with each bottle of beer.
“It’s just something that comes to you as a wizard, then? You start studying the arcane and… what, a clock appears in your head? And stays there forever?”
Caleb makes a complicated, indecisive gesture—not casting, just reaching out as though he can pluck the right words out of the air—and Frumpkin’s eyes follow the movement. “In a sense, I suppose? But, uh, more specifically, you have not been wrong when you’ve asked if it has to do with Frumpkin.”
Vindication is not a strong enough word for what Fjord feels.
“I knew it!” he shouts, punching the air as Caleb jumps at his sudden volume, looking alarmed. Frumpkin shrinks back too, drawing in toward Caleb’s collar and raising his hackles.
He doesn’t even realize the singing has stopped until Jester’s voice echoes down the tunnel, calling, “Fjord, why are you yelling?”
Fjord clears his throat, irrationally chastened. At a more moderate volume, he calls back, “Uh, nothing! Nothing to worry about. Just- I, uh-”
“Did you trip on a rock again?” Jester says, dripping earnestness and sympathy.
He presses a thumb to his temple briefly. “Yes,” he lies, unsure why even as it leaves his mouth. “Found out that Veth has been tripping me,” he adds for good measure, whipping around to point accusingly at where he last remembers seeing a goblinoid shape, but finds nothing. He narrows his eyes.
From somewhere in the shadows clinging to the walls comes an indignant squawk. “What! Never!”
“You know what you did,” he says menacingly in the vague direction of Veth’s voice, then turns back to Caleb. “How in the world does the cat help you tell time?”
Caleb smiles absently at the rising squabble echoing off the tunnel walls, and laughs lightly when Jester begins singing again amidst Veth’s recriminations. “There’s something rather special about the eyes of a cat,” he says. Fjord throws a suspicious glance at the cat in question, half expecting to find clock faces in his pupils. Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise him at this point. Frumpkin’s eyes look entirely normal, though, golden and slitted in the low light. Caleb continues, “Their night vision is quite good, and they filter out excess light during the daytime by changing the width of their pupils. Much the same process occurs for you and me, of course—though I believe tieflings and elves and such have a stronger response which lends them dark vision.” He gestures illustratively at Fjord. “Half-orcs.”
There is a pause, as if Caleb is leaving him time to puzzle it out himself. Fjord can’t decide if he finds it considerate or a bit condescending. “So the shape of his eyes changes in the daytime, and you read the eyes instead of, I don’t know, looking at the position of the sun?”
“Precisely.”
Fjord frowns. “Huh.” He takes another look at Frumpkin’s eyes, which are slitted but not needle-thin despite the near-darkness of the tunnel. “Could I do the same, by Frumpkin’s eyes?”
Caleb laughs, not unkindly. “Ah, no. You could perhaps make an estimate, but my ability to determine the exact time comes from my particular bond with him.”
“Hm. Figures,” Fjord says. “Guess none of us would bother with timepieces if we could make do with cats. That actually makes sense. Thank you.”
Amusement twists at Caleb’s mouth. “Well. That, and most cats are not so portable or cooperative as Frumpkin.”
“’Course.”
Their eyes meet again for a moment, and Fjord is abruptly struck with the disconcerting image of Caleb reading the width of his pupils like a timepiece. He blinks, acutely and uncomfortably aware of his own ability to see all the way to the front of the group without significant issue.
Humans aren’t on the list of races with dark vision, he reminds himself. Caleb probably couldn’t read his eyes if he wanted to; otherwise, what would he need Frumpkin for?
From far up ahead, Jester’s voice rises above all other sounds of conversation, loud and undeterred still. “Take one down, pass it around, twenty-six bottles of beer on the wall…”
That should be the end of it, but of course it isn’t. If Fjord has learned one thing about the Nein’s resident wizard in their time together, it is that Caleb is a slippery and inscrutable bastard. And it’s not that Fjord thinks he enjoys lying, or playing games of evasion when people ask him questions; in fact, the more he gets to know Caleb, the clearer it becomes that he is almost painfully earnest whenever it does not physically threaten him to be.
So Fjord doesn’t think Caleb was lying to him, necessarily, about Frumpkin’s eyes. He has no reason to, as near as Fjord can tell, and it doesn’t seem like the sort of lie he would tell anyway. But the fact remains that it is day when they step into the teleportation circle and night when they arrive in Rosohna, and Frumpkin has been dispatched to wherever he goes when he’s incorporeal, and one of the first things Caleb mutters to himself once they are no longer under the watchful eye of the Shadowhand is still, “Midday, and it is like the dead of night. It’s all true.”
Fjord is entirely prepared to write this off as a fluke. They’ve got bigger things to worry about, frankly—they’re going to get Yasha back and deal with whatever political crisis they’ve just instigated by handing over the dodecahedron, and Frumpkin isn’t even here, so Fjord’s got other things on his mind. Hell, let the wizard lie about the time if he wants. It’s no skin off Fjord’s back.
But he keeps paying attention. And Caleb keeps doing it: he drags himself off the sofa in the Xhorhaus, grumbling about it being nearly midnight, and Frumpkin—reincarnated—is asleep and curled on Jester’s lap across the room. He warns them that they will surely be late for their scheduled meeting with the Bright Queen if they don’t leave now because it’s three fifteen and it takes another fifteen minutes to walk to the Lucid Bastion, and Frumpkin is nowhere in sight. He snaps his fingers to dispel Frumpkin minutes before informing Veth that she only has an hour left until most shops close for the night, so if she wants to make something explode that evening she had better get going.
None of it is quite enough for Fjord to call him on it, but it is more than enough to make him suspicious. Not that it takes much, these days.
He finally gets his chance late in the night after they fail to get Yasha back. They’re all beaten, bruised, exhausted, and more than a little shaken up, and in this group that’s as good as a mandatory order to take to the hot tub. Nobody particularly wants to lie in bed thinking about what went wrong—or Fjord doesn’t, at any rate. So Caleb heats the water, the seven—six—of them strip, and they do their best to let the water scald away the memories of the day, heedless of the fact that their voices carry and the rest of the city went quiet hours ago.
Jester carries the conversation, for which Fjord is immensely thankful. She chatters on aimlessly about whatever seems to come into her head; the Traveler, a card trick she’s trying to learn, her latest painting, the Traveler, Beau’s recent attempts to throw punches so fast they literally can’t be seen, the Traveler. She gets Caduceus to promise to wake up early with her to see if there’s any hint of sunrise in the eternal dark of Rosohna. Fjord fondly needles her about how her weasel looks more on the brink of death than usual today. (It’s a nice distraction, but he truly does mean it. If any plant- and insect-eating creature could develop a taste for humanoid blood purely out of spite, it would be this wild-eyed and severely neglected weasel. He’s half convinced the only thing keeping it above water, so to speak, is the literal power of Jester’s love.) There’s a solemn weight hanging over the conversation throughout, the pall of the awareness that their number is incomplete, but it’s nice. They need this.
Eventually, Jester perks up, and a small spark ignites in Fjord’s chest, because this smile is more genuine than anything he’s seen all night. “Hey!” she says. “I forgot I saved a spell tonight! We should totally call Essek and tell him we’re, you know, alive and stuff! And that he should come hang out in the hot tub, maybe! We’ve got a lot to tell him about.”
Fjord raises his eyebrows and his hands, fingers curled in counting position. Jester takes a breath, evidently ready to launch right into it, but before she can speak, Caleb reaches out a hand to stop her with a pained look.
“Ah,” he says. “Jester. Maybe not right this moment, ja? It is two fifty-two in the morning. I’m sure our friend is resting and would not much like being woken up at such an hour.”
Jester’s eyes go wide. “Oh. You’re totally right, Caleb. That’s okay, I’ll tell him tomorrow instead.” She perks up even further, a feat which would be nigh on impossible for anyone else. “Maybe I can call my mama instead! Do you think it’s also late in Nicodranas right now? It’s so far away it could be day there, right?”
Caleb winces slightly. “Ah, I’m not sure, but maybe best not to chance it.”
She heaves a dramatic sigh. “I guess I’ll have enough spells to call both of them tomorrow any-” Jester breaks off abruptly, a faraway look coming over her eye. A handful of seconds pass, and then, lowly, she says, “Oops.”
From across the tub, Beau asks flatly, “What does oops mean.”
Fjord does his best to catch her eye. “Jester?”
She hides a sheepish smile behind her hand. “I guess I already started casting it before you said stop, Caleb. Essek says hi and it’s totally fine I Sent to him in the middle of the night, aaaand he says he’ll talk to us tomorrow!”[1]
Fjord is fairly sure that message has been doctored a bit, considering the history of Sending spells he’s borne witness to. “Oh boy,” he says. “Can you message him again? Just to apologize for waking him?”
Caleb’s grimace is only growing more pained, but Jester says, “Nope. All out. Sorry, hot boy, gotta sleep first.”
In the quiet that follows, Caleb twists his hands in a way that makes a fresh wave of steam rise off the surface of the water, which heats back to a near-scalding temperature.
Half as a distraction to ease him back into the extreme heat, Fjord turns to him and says, “Where’s that cat of yours? Not a fan of water, is he?”
One side of Caleb’s mouth lifts. “His cat form may be temporary, but he behaves much like most other cats in that regard. The feline sensibilities carry through.”
“Can’t fault him for that.” Fjord drapes an arm over the side of the tub, affecting nonchalance but watching Caleb closely. “Was that just your best guess at the time, then?”
Caleb gives him a very peculiar look, half affront and half genuine bewilderment. “No, of course not.”
“Just-” Fjord waves a hand in the general vicinity of Caleb’s shoulders, to highlight the distinct absence of a cat. “Without Frumpkin’s help?”
“Oh,” Caleb says, and then something even stranger comes over his face: an unmistakable blush. To anyone sitting more than a few feet away, it probably looks to be the product of too much steam in the tub, but Fjord is too intimately familiar with both the heat of the water and the burn of embarrassment to be fooled. Caleb rubs at the back of his neck. “Ah. Well. I know what I told you, yes, and generally that is the way I tell the time, but truthfully, I don’t strictly need to.”
“Huh,” Fjord says blankly. “Wait, so- wait.” He shakes his head, hoping to clear out some of the steam, and narrows his eyes at Caleb. “You use the cat to tell the time, but you don’t need to? Or is this some, like, he’s-not-here-here-but-he’s-here-in-spirit-so-he-tells-me-the-time-from-the-great-beyond thing? Just- what is the level of involvement of the cat. Please.”
The flush remains on Caleb’s cheeks, but a growing air of bemusement radiates off him. Fjord, for his part, stoically refuses to allow the sopping wet, scrawny wizard make him feel any embarrassment. He’s not the one being needlessly evasive about his weird bond with his pet right now.
“The… level of involvement,” Caleb says slowly, grinning just enough that Fjord knows he’s being made fun of, a bit, “is whatever I want it to be in the moment, I suppose. When I want to know the time, I can simply know it, or I can look at Frumpkin for reference. As I often do, as you have seen. I was truthful with you, of course—my ability to know the time is a product of my studies, and my, ah, unusually keen mind.” Here, at least, he has the good grace to look sheepish. “But, thanks to some tinkering I did during the long time Veth and I spent on the road, I was also able to link that ability to my little companion, there.”
All Fjord can think to say is, “Why?”
Caleb lifts one shoulder in a shrug, smiling faintly. “No practical reason, really. Would you believe that just being able to tell the time unaided makes you miss having something to look at while you do it? It’s just… well, it’s more fun this way.”
Fjord, whose personal fondness for cats is thoroughly tempered by the fact that his body rebels every time he comes within an arm’s length of one, has trouble appreciating the sentiment. That, and he’s seen Caleb laugh maybe four or five times total since they set out traveling together, at least in a way that didn’t sound like it was being torn out of him. He chuckles softly, trying to summon a visual of the Nein’s prize-winningly solemn wizard having fun, but stifles the sound before it can cause offense.
“I’d say there’s a good amount of fun to just pulling the knowledge out of the air, too,” he says. “But what do I know. It’s a handy trick, either way.”
Caleb smiles wryly. “Only if I am given enough warning to perform it before, say, valuable allies of ours are pulled from their rests at ungodly hours.”
“Lucky for us,” Fjord says, “none of us would ever do such a thing.”
“The Mighty Nein, disturb the peace? Never.”
They turn as one to look at Jester, who senses their gaze and immediately shrieks in amusement at the looks on both their faces, and soon they are met with several neighbors who, funnily enough, all seem to share Caleb’s keen awareness of the time.
Frumpkin’s pupils are just short of perfectly round in the low, ice-blue light.
“Six forty-five,” Fjord says.
“Seven thirty-one.”
“Damn.”
There isn’t much point to telling the time in Aeor, not as deep underground as they are and considering that they are already moving as fast as they dare through the ruined city, but it’s that or dwell on the blood-red eyes carved into Caleb and Beau’s skin and the fact that every foot they descend is a foot closer to their almost certain demise. Fjord’s guessing game aside, Caleb evidently doesn’t see the need to keep a running tally when they’re not in an endless worm-hole, especially not as distracted as he is with his various wizardly research pursuits. Every other step they take, he’s darting off to translate some ancient text or lay reverent hands on a crumbling scroll, many of which Fjord has already seen disappear into various pockets and compartments. Frumpkin stays draped over his neck, providing heat that Fjord is bitterly jealous of, watering eyes or no. His guesses have been getting closer as he’s taken fresh stabs at it throughout the day’s travel, but he has a sneaking suspicion he’s just getting better at gauging roughly how long it’s been since he last asked rather than at reading Frumpkin’s eyes.
“All things considered, that is pretty good,” Caleb says. “We’ll make a wizard of you yet.”
“Alright, alright, no need to patronize me just because we’re all about to die.” Fjord gives Caleb’s shoulder a good-natured bump. “Besides, if that’s the trade-off… No offense, but I think I’d rather keep my hitpoints than be able to do a party trick with your pet.”
Teasingly, Caleb says, “Ah, but as you know, Frumpkin is not a vital part of my trick. Are my noodle arms perhaps worth the prize of being able to know, unaided, that it is now seven thirty-two?”
“Not on your life. I’ll just keep traveling with you: same outcome, and I don’t get knocked over by stiff breezes. Win-win.”
“Ah,” a soft voice says from close behind Fjord. He tries and mostly fails not to jump; the lack of footsteps makes Essek downright freaky sometimes. Essek goes on, “Forgive me, but I couldn’t help but overhear. You have mentioned this… trick before, of being able to tell the time at any moment.”
“Yes,” Caleb says. A different kind of alertness seems, now, to glint in his eyes. “Seven thirty-two, currently.”
“Fascinating.” Essek drifts closer so he is keeping pace on Caleb’s other side. “I have wondered, before, what lies behind this ability. Not a combat-based practice, but quite a useful one nonetheless—perhaps, when things are less dire, I can persuade you to teach it to me.”
“As a favor?” One of Caleb’s eyebrows is arched. His expression is unreadable.
Essek’s smooth, perpetually diplomatic expression fractures for half a second. “If you like.”
For lack of anything else to contribute, Fjord looks to Frumpkin, who gives him a yellow-eyed stare back. Fjord shrugs, as if to say, yeah, I don’t know what they’re on about either. To the cat.
“Somewhat cheap, as favors go,” Caleb is saying. “I don’t even have this in my spellbook. It is mostly a matter of practice, as I was just telling Fjord. Practice and some innate skill.”
“Interesting,” Essek says, without sparing Fjord a glance. “I assume, in your case, that this is primarily a matter of skill.”
“Ja, maybe a bit more than for most.”
Fjord is just considering falling back to walk with Jester instead and letting the wizards make out or whatever this is in peace when Essek says, “Is it a low-level spell? If it consumes any material components, that is a high price to pay for relatively easily accessible information. Or does it take place entirely within your own mind?”
Fjord can’t help himself; the opportunity to explain something to Essek rather than the other way around is nothing short of irresistible. “Actually,” he interrupts, “it’s all to do with the cat. Isn’t that right, Caleb.”
Caleb’s eyes flick over to Fjord to raise an eyebrow, and on his other side, Essek’s brow furrows.
“With the cat?” he says. “Your familiar? He’s- I have no familiar myself, but it was my understanding that they are comprised of magical energy, not that they have any capabilities outside of-” He breaks off, pressing a hand to his mouth in consideration. Caleb looks about to speak, but for reasons unknown to Fjord, visibly decides against it. “Unless,” Essek says. “Caleb. Are you using your familiar as an auxiliary focus?”
“I don’t carry an arcane focus,” Caleb says blankly. “This ability is not one which consumes material components—it would not be necessary.”
“But you are channeling magical functionality through him,” Essek says, right on the heels of Caleb’s sentence. He sounds almost breathless. Fjord throws him another covert, extremely baffled look. “Like a mirror of your own arcane ability; rather than performing the ability in your own head, you are allowing it to happen externally and then to return to you through your connection with this creature. Caleb, this is fascinating.”
“I… see what you mean,” Caleb says. “I never thought of it that way, truthfully. It was simply a bit of a trick to achieving something already within my skill set.”
“Your trick has marvelous implications,” Essek replies. “How do you determine the information once you have channeled it through your familiar?”
“Through his eyes. The width of his-”
“His pupils! Their reactivity to the light is perfect for such a transmission. It is the same in Xhorhassian cats. That is very clever indeed.”
“And you believe this sort of channeling could have other uses, as well?”
“Oh, almost certainly. It would take some experimentation, of course, but if this ability can be distributed in this manner, who is to say that other processes cannot be performed externally as well? You could conduct arcane rituals entirely separately from yourself, in theory. Not unlike the functions of a Resonant Echo, but without the… fragility that causes them to dissipate after a single casting.”
Caleb’s eyes are wide and bright. “The same keen sense that allows me knowledge of the time also gives me a sense of cardinal direction; I always know in which direction I am traveling, without the use of the sun or any familiar landmarks. This is not knowledge which could be so easily imparted through the eyes of my familiar. Perhaps we could start with the transmission of that knowledge, and work our way up?”
Fjord’s own keen sense tells him his role in this conversation has been summarily forgotten. Just as well. He’s not even remotely prepared to confront the fact that Caleb’s apparently got a built-in compass as well as a clock.
“I give up,” he says to Frumpkin. Frumpkin blinks at him, eyes golden like the sunset far above them.