The Nine Bishops
Chapter 29: Bad Business

Mika followed the stranger closely. He was walking briskly, without looking back to see if she was keeping up. Past the dock lay a tiny village with probably no more than a hundred inhabitants. Pils was a fishing village in a remote part of Southie whose inhabitants, she noticed, appeared to be mostly Filth. Nothing of importance ever happened in a place like this. At least, not until today.

Sully had told her there were a few mages in the village, landlords and tax collectors, who usually came by on a monthly basis to collect their dues. As they walked through, past the little houses, Mika and the shrouded man drew attention. Mika found it hard to judge whether the villagers gawking at them were terrified or curious.

The shrouded figure led Mika on into the forest with the assurance of someone who knew exactly where he was going. A few minutes in, they arrived at a massive stone formation as big as a building, and there the figure stopped, stood still for a moment, then turned around to finally say something to Mika.

“You are to say nothing during this exchange. Once the exchange is started, you will be given a piece of paper to inspect. Take a minute to inspect it and then give it to me. After that, we will turn to Monsoon and you will be paid,” the dark voice said.

Mika wanted to respond, but the figure quickly turned around and brushed the massive stone with the palm of his hand in a pattern. The stone suddenly split in two, revealing a staircase that descended below ground. The shrouded figure began to proceed down the stairs.

Mika’s instincts were screaming, turn around and get out of here. But, aware of what was at stake in abandoning the contract, she ignored her inclinations and followed him down the stairs in dim candlelight. She stepped cautiously, because the shrouded man had surged well ahead of her and she could no longer see him.

She caught up with him at the bottom of the stairs, where there was a door. He knocked on it three times, at a specific interval. After a moment, an eerie voice answered the knock with an odd question: “What is the color purity?”

The shrouded man responded with a single word: “Eburnean.”

Mika was startled to hear the word. She actually knew the meaning of it, which she had read about at some point in her rambles through the library. It was a color: one she might have called white, which it very nearly was, but with a hint of yellow in it. In a way, the answer to the mysterious voice’s question was obvious, but the answer implied a slightly different definition. After all, there is no such thing as purity, she thought. Even a shade as perfect as white is discolored. Mika wasn’t usually given to that kind of thought, but this interaction gave her a clue of what type of business she was dealing with.

At the word eburnean, the door opened slowly with a creak. Before walking in, the shrouded figure pulled something out of his cloak.

“Put this on,” he said, throwing Mika a mask. She caught it: the face of a bear. More and more, her suspicions were being confirmed; whatever she had gotten herself into, it wasn’t legal. But at this point she’d gone too far to turn around. All she could do was continue with whatever was about to transpire and hope to return to Monsoon safely.

Mika donned the bear mask and followed the man through the door and into another dimly lit room, which was perfectly symmetrical and empty. On the opposite side stood another figure, who had just entered through a different door. The scene struck her as a mirror image, except that the other figure was wearing a cat’s mask.

Mika stood patiently, sweating in the dense air of this underground room. The figure she was with was the first to speak.

“Do you have what I came here for?”

“Yes. And do you?” said the other, in precisely the same dark voice.

She suddenly realized the voice was just a front. Not only were these two hiding their faces, they were hiding their identities entirely.

“Of course. Now, shall we prove the authenticity?” Mika’s issuer said.

The other figure slowly walked forward to the center of the room, carrying a bag, out of which he pulled out a small object, small enough to fit within his hand. The figure dropped the bag gently in the middle of the room. Immediately, a piece of parchment appeared on the floor. Mika’s issuer motioned her to pick it up.

So this was what she had come here for.

Mika felt the weight of the room on her as she took slow steps towards the parchment. She picked it up and read it, as she’d been instructed earlier. Its contents would have made no sense to her had she not spent so much time in the library, perusing many types of script.

Though the average person would have found it unreadable, Mika could decipher it. She assumed she wasn’t supposed to understand the text, yet she could read it clearly. It was a series of numbers, written in ancient symbols.

As a book runner, she’d been required to return thousands of books all over the library. To prevent misplaced volumes, the library avoided numbering shelves past the thousands; instead, it employed an ancient numbering system with different characters, so as to keep the numbers to six digits. She’d mastered the system by the end of her month at the library.

After analyzing the parchment for a brief moment, Mika noticed a discrepancy. It had nothing to do with the numbering system, but something completely different. It bothered her so much that she felt compelled to mutter something to herself— something that would change the course of that evening in an instant.

“It’s fake.”

“What did you just say?” Mika’s contract issuer said almost instantly.

Mika could have sworn she hadn’t spoken louder than a whisper. Shocked, she held her tongue. She wanted desperately to retract her words, but it was too late.

“Say what you just said again,” the man on Mika’s side of the room demanded.

“I said, it’s fake.”

Mika was certain of it, but instead of asking her what led to that conclusion, the bunny-faced man hesitated for several long seconds, obviously in a panic.

Then: “We are leaving. Now.”

The shrouded man headed straight for the door, ignoring the small object in the center of the room.

Mika took the parchment with her and followed the stranger out the door. She looked back quickly to see what the other figure in the room was going to do. Will he follow us? she wondered, peering at him through her mask.

The figure stood silently and unmoving as Mika left the room. The door closed automatically behind her, after allowing her one last glimpse of the man in the cat mask.

She looked at the parchment once more and was startled to replace it blank! It seemed that exiting the room had erased its contents.

Mika realized she’d found herself in the middle of a black market deal. She couldn’t believe that any mage using the black market would risk publishing a contract through the SCA. Typically only free agents would take covert contracts like that. Why anyone would issue such a contract publicly was a mystery.

One of the fields in which Doc had been educating Mika over the past two months was the laws of Seemos. She’d found this boring, until she discovered the existence of the black market and underground mage organizations. Guilds were organizations recognized by the Crown as a verified source of well-qualified mages. All members of a guild were vetted by a master, which helped to assure a guild’s reputation. The SCA authenticated the guilds’ members by keeping track of the contracts they completed or failed to complete, creating a record for each mage.

However, as Mika learned, there were also mage associations that featured many of the elements of a guild but were privately funded and did not have the privilege of taking SCA contracts. Often they were tight-knit and secretive. Mages in these associations were typically paid less and weren’t regarded as elite.

Many of these secret associations were prepared to undertake illegal activity and contracts that might include theft or even murder. Some were notorious for assassinations, and their members, understandably, remained incognito. There were Hunters divisions whose sole purpose was arresting these mages.

One way they were able to effectively communicate in secret, Mika learned from her law books, was through the black market, an untraceable system of trade, communication, and movement. There wasn’t a lot of detail in Mika’s books about the black market, but she was sure she had found herself in it. One thing she did know was that both parties were able to keep their location a secret once they were out of the black market. Therefore the cat-masked man that Mika and the issuer of her contract left behind had no way of tracing their location, since he was not actually across from them physically but rather as a projection. He was possibly in a completely different part of Seemos.

The immediate issue for Mika was that she didn’t know why what she had said led to such an abrupt halt to the deal. The chance of any ordinary person, even with library experience, knowing the item being traded was fake was next to zero. Mika was sure she was the only one who could have known, yet the bunny-masked man readily took her word for it. And she knew now that the item in question was far too valuable to just walk out on without dispute.

The shrouded man stood in silence at the bottom of the stairs, his back to Mika. She stood there quietly because it seemed the safest thing to do.

After a long moment, he turned around to face her, and, to Mika’s surprise, took off his mask.

Except that it wasn’t a “he” after all. It was a woman. And she finally asked the question Mika had been waiting for.

“How did you know that the Bishop’s medallion was fake?”