Completed (Flashback) Gut Instinct

[Kuvarakh]

OOC - Begins a series.

20th day of Summer, 420

"Get back to work!" the master snapped. "I told you, Kuvarakh, you only get your first body from my stock. You're on your own now. You should have been looking before now. We have contracts to fill! I can't have you distracted, worrying about having your body rot out from under you. It's nowhere near that bad, anyway. I can hardly smell you at all!"

"But I can't schedule something like this, Master. It's not like I can go down to the "cadaver store" and buy one. I need to spend some time checking alleys and infirmaries. Maybe a bar fight will break out, or I can find a new murder victim."

The master rolled his eyes. "Idiot! If they find you with a new murder victim, they will assume you DID it! Especially since you are a Nuit.I would think you, more than anyone, would be aware of the prejudice we face as immortal occupants of discarded soul shells." he smirked at his metaphor.

"Would you quit calling them that? You mock my daughter's death with jokes like that! You know damn well that's the only reason I became a Nuit! To stop the cycle! To have the time to learn how! Then her death won't be in vain! And I'm not going grave robbing either!"

This argument was getting old. The Master had given Kuvarakh a hand-shake promise to see to it that he always had a new body when he needed one. That was one of the points that had finally convinced Kuvarakh to accept the transformation. Now it seemed like he not only expected him to wait until the last gray stinking clump of rot sloughed off his bones, he actually denied making any such promise in the first place.

The Master shrugged, "Suit yourself." He sighed angrily and set down the item from the project they were working on. He looked at Kuvarakh with a last effort at patience. "Look, wait until it rains and breaks up a funeral. That should be a fresh enough body. Or wait until the next ship comes in and then keep on eye on the Sailor's Guild graveyard. They'll have burials of people who die on trips at sea. They might not be as fresh, but they are less likely to be recognized by the locals. Those are sources that DO have schedules."

Kuvarakh clenched his fists and spoke through gritted teeth, "Is that where you got your bodies, Master?" The anger in his voice was plain, "It's so hard to tell what sort of deaths they died all encased in ice like that. You obviously have some source. You made me a promise and I expect you to keep it! If you must, take it out of my pay, such as it IS!"

"I'll take it out of your hide, you ungrateful little wretch! I already spent too much time making that embalming gel crap for you. And you still didn't get two years out of your current body before you started complaining because it shows a little decay." The Master sneered back, tired of having this lie coming back to haunt him.

"A LITTLE DECAY? I had to tighten my left eyelids to keep the eyeball from falling out! This is my face we're talking about. Not some purple blotches on my butt, hidden by clothes! My body IS in better shape than most, but I can't do the same treatment on my face. You know damn well the body you gave me had been beaten to death! His face was the worst part of him."

"ENOUGH!" The Master shouted, "Get to work, or GET OUT!"

Kuvarakh barely managed to avoid slamming the door as he left. Well, he had all night now. This body had been tentatively recognized months before. Certain aspects of the encounter had led him to believe it was a murder, not an accident.

[Kuvarakh]

Kuvarakh walked the streets, uncertain of his goal. He needed a body to switch to, but his few opportunities to look around for victims had been unproductive. He felt contempt for his situation. He was nothing short of a vulture. Hoping for someone to die, preferably someone young. It sickened him. Falling back on his "greater good" rationale didn't always do the trick. He always hoped he would stumble across the body of a criminal, stricken down by his intended victim in self-defense. He would have no problem living with that.

He decided to head into the East Street area. He was glad it was only early Spring, and, as a result, still cold out. It made it normal for him to have his faced wrapped in a scarf. He listened to the sounds of the rundown section of the city. Tavern music, laughter, drunken singing, arguments, screams, loud impacts, breaking glass, slamming doors. But there was one nearby direction with no sound whatsoever. A dark alley. Not a candle in a window, not a cat scratching in garbage, not a word spoken. But there was movement, he was sure of it.

A robbery, he guessed. The victim told not to make a sound. The poverty-stricken residents, unwilling to take note for fear of being involved. Turning their lights off to keep the event from being noticed so it would be over more quickly. Even the rats avoided this alley, this minute.

He started to sing, loudly, off-key. He staggered into the alley, ignoring the sudden warnings and threats coming from the shadows. A knife glinted slightly, catching a light from the far side of the street. Kuvarakh pulled his scarf and stretched it tightly between his hands. He knew the knife would hurt more if it was dull, and he knew the assailant would expect a protective reaction from this "drunken fool", not a fist to his throat.

The knee to his groin was equally unexpected. As the man staggered back, Kuvarakh pulled the knife from his ribs and took a quick glance at the two other men. One was the original victim, the other the second assailant, who was now suddenly under attack himself. Kuvarakh tossed the knife aside, prepped his scarf again and rushed his attacker, pushing him hard on the left shoulder and wrapping his scarf around his neck as he spun.

There was a bluish flash from the direction of the other men and he turned to see the attacker lying as if paralyzed in the alley, the "victim" squatting over him. After a few seconds the man got back to his feet and calmly walked over to Kuvarakh. He grabbed the man's arms and helped hold him. The former assailant eyes grew wide and he began to mouth words.

"Don't forget to keep the scarf tight for at least three minutes after he stops struggling, or you'll just end up with a brain damaged idiot and you'll have to start over. It's not as easy to feel justified in killing a simpleton as it is killing an armed robber." The 'victim' stated matter-of-factly.

Kuvarakh and the struggling assailant both turned as one with the same shocked expression. The man almost broke free, but Kuvarakh redoubled his efforts and the other man wrapped his arms around him in a bear-hug. Soon he dropped and Kuvarakh kept the strangling scarf around his neck, giving the former victim a sour look.

The man struck a cavalier pose and remarked with a casual tone, "Don't be all sick at heart, my friend, this is obviously what you wanted, is it not?"

"How do you know what I want? Maybe I just wanted to stop a robbery, not commit murder!"

"Oh, come now, self-defense is not murder." the man said with a dismissive wave, "But if you felt so strongly, why didn't you let him go? And to answer your question, you may want to consider that when you use your scarf to kill this man who stuck a knife in you for no reason beyond your terrible singing, it is no longer available to cover your face. Though the smell of this alley IS covering your AROMA, it's pretty clear that you are a Nuit in need of a new body. I, on the other hand, am a maledictor in need of body PARTS."

[Kuvarakh]

"Well, how convenient!" Kuvarakh snapped, loathing the depths to which he was stooping.

"Yes it is, and if it's bothering you this much, I can safely assume you have not been a Nuit for very long. If it makes you feel better, these two men killed a woman last week." the maledictor said brightly.

"Why in the world would that make me feel better?" Kuvarakh rose, his voice a hiss of recrimination.

"Because if this pair kills someone every week, that's fifty two lives a year we will have just saved." the man declared smugly, "Not bad for a few chimes work. And now, our rewards." he went through their pockets and held out a handful a copper mizas with an occasional silver. Kuvarakh glared at it as if it was poison.

"And what about the woman?" Kuvarakh blurted, then wincing and lowering his voice, "what about her life?"

"What about it?" the maledictor answered with a shrug, "I was too late to save her, but not too late to mark her killers. So in a sense, her sacrifice enabled this force of justice - " he indicated himself, "to take note of two worthy men to deliver that justice upon."

"Is that why you do it? So you can call yourself a 'force of justice'? You go around poor areas hoping some desperate man will attack you so you can murder him?" Kuvarakh saw the man's look and cringed at what he knew was coming.

The man's smile faded as his eyes narrowed. He leaned in close, and though his voice was a whisper, it rang through Kuvarakh's mind like a bell. "Isn't that why you do it?"

Kuvarakh stepped back in denial, but the man did not relent. "Isn't it a fact that you need a new body? Preferable a nice fresh one? Well there it is! All yours!" he gestured at the body with a scathing flourish. "And isn't it true that you chose to become what you are? To serve a master just like you?

"Oh, no doubt you have a mission, a quest, a cause that justifies it." He grabbed Kuvarakh's collar and pulled him close, not in the least put off by his corpse-like visage. His expression changed, the accusation gone, but the intensity remaining. "Let me ask you a question, a question for a proper 'force of justice', and see if you can answer it: 'What's the value of an innocent life?"

Kuvarakh was taken aback by what seemed a sudden departure from the direction the debate had been taking. "What?..the value?...That can't be answered. It's impossible. There's no answer to that question."

"Sure there is, and its clear, qualitative, quantitative, precise AND morally defensible." he said and waited for Kuvarakh to take the next step.

Kuvarakh scowled, but he took the bait, his voice jaded, his gestures sarcastic, "Fine! What is the value of an innocent life?"

"Half the value of two." the man stated simply. Kuvarakh started to protest, but he cut him off, "One third the value of three. Ten percent the value of ten! But here's the real question. What if the innocent life belongs to your own child? THEN what is it worth?"

Kuvarakh's face was stone. His fury boiling in his gut as his jaw clenched almost to the point of pain. "How do you know to ask me that? How do you DARE to ask me that? You know what that means to me, don't you? How do you know about this? WHO ARE YOU?"

The man leaned close, unflinching in the face of Kuvarakh's anger, "The father of one of the bodies your master has stashed away, Kuvarakh!"

[Kuvarakh]

Kuvarakh reeled back, coming up against the wall. "How do you know my name?"

"You assumed I knew about your daughter, didn't you? I would think it should follow that I know your name as well." The man's scowl took on a bitter but satisfied look. "You don't even begin to protest my accusation that your master is a murderer, then?"

Kuvarakh looked away, his eyes dropping to the muddy shadows, "I have suspected for some time now. I saw several entries in a book of his. He was stalking someone's movements. Then the entries stopped and I checked, a man that had remarkable similarities to one the bodies he 'has stashed away' up and disappeared within a day of his last entry. I checked further and found several more such instances. Always people with no ties to anyone, no family on record."

Suddenly, he DID protest, "If he IS a murderer, why would he break that pattern and take your son, with you living right here in town? And how did you know I would be here? I mean, you obviously set this up!"

The man gave him an appraising look, "Yes...I did....I wanted...needed to meet you. To answer your second question first, Where else would you come? For a body, I mean. I didn't know for certain it would be THIS night, but I knew you had to come. You're not an evil man. Same as me, you occasionally need to be on the spot when people die. And it feels disgusting to follow people around, hoping for their death, doesn't it? So you go where evil men already ARE, and let them choose to victimize you. Then it's not so vile a thing to kill them for your own gain. You're only defending yourself. AND removing a future threat to whoever would be their NEXT victim."

Kuvarakh nodded slowly. He had used this same rationale to come here. He expected he would use it many times in his indefinite future. It was not his fate to determine whether a threat presented itself to a stranger on some distant day. Maybe that stranger had it coming. Maybe this dead mugger was not a really evil man either, just desperate. Kuvarakh leaned his head into his folded arms against the wall, his eyes closed. He had never wondered before if a Nuit was capable of tears. It seemed so.

The other man studied him with sympathetic eyes. 'This is his first time. It MUST be. He will learn to live with it in time. He will HAVE to.' He took a deep breath and continued, "And as for your first question, I cannot say, I can only guess. Perhaps he figures I will die before he needs to use that body. Perhaps he will take it and then purport to BE my son and decry ME as having tried to kill HIM. Maybe he thinks he will inherit my estate. I only know that I have certainty, I have suspicions, but I do NOT have PROOF!"

"But simply having your son disappear doesn't even give you cause for suspicions!" Kuvarakh cried, trying to get his emotions in check, "Why have you selected HIM as the likely villain, maybe your son ran away with some girl!" his voice choked as he thought how he wished it had been his daughter.

The man's gaze was penetrating, "Do you think you are the only one who applied for your master's apprenticeship? You were what, fifty? My son was nineteen. Which body would YOU want? For all I know, ALL your master's stored bodies were prospective apprentices. This is hardly the first time he's solicited applicants for an apprenticeship."

Realization dawned on Kuvarakh then, "That's why you approached me! You want PROOF! You want me to check the bodies in his ice cellar against a...list or something!"

The other man nodded and handed several sheets of paper to him. "Yes." the two men stared at each other for a long moment. Eventually Kuvarakh nodded and took the papers from him. The other man took a deep breath and expelled it as a look of satisfied justice warmed his face. Then he grimaced slightly, "But for now, lets tend to these bodies. is there any way I can assist you in...what you need to do?"

[Kuvarakh]

The man had a cart and they loaded the two bodies onto it and covered them with sawdust and a tarp. He told Kuvarakh his name, Aldren Trask. They agreed to stop at Kuvarakh's home on the way to the maledictor's workshop, so he could run in and grab a jar of some sort of gel.

They got to Trask's home, the workshop in a cellar behind a false wall in the basement. They carried the bodies in and began to prepare one for embalming. The other body they carried to a different chamber where Trask began his own preparations, advising Kuvarakh not to concern himself with them.

Kuvarakh hooked a large iron pot of water by its handle over a fire and applied a thin spread of watered alcohol to disinfect the facial features. Then he made a large cut to remove the internal organs. Even though a Nuit does not use them, they serve to keep body mass and muscle pressure in proper proportions so they needed to be kept aside. He cut each organ open and drained them.

The maledictor's tools were uniquely suited for this work. saws, clamps and odd devices for spreading body parts, odd glass tube-like devices with thinner inserted parts for forcing air in or out of the tube. Kuvarakh realized how very fortunate he was to have the Trask's aid in this. His last body switch had only encompassed the working of the muscles to break rigor-mortis and the incisions to drain the blood. It had been his own idea to alchemically treat alcohol into a gel form for lining the body cavity. He had saved it for this.

The glass tube device greatly increased the speed of draining the fluids, both with application of suction at the draining incision and pumping at the inflow incision. After 'greasing' the body cavity with the gel and draining and working the blood out, they flushed the body with a diluted alcohol/water mix using the same suction and pumping method. All this extra effort added a few hours to their efforts, but it could add a year or two to the body's duration by prolonging its resistance to the beginnings of infection and decay. Kuvarakh wondered if some powerful additional alchemy upon the fluids and gels could accomplish the greatly increased body duration that was his mission in un-life.

Now he dipped each organ in the boiling pot of water, drained it again and replaced it in the cavity as best he could. He wasn't sure if he got everything exactly right, but they weren't truly going to need to function, so all he needed was equalization of internal pressure, and with a bit of maneuvering, he achieved that.

Once again, he realized how unprepared he had been when he came to the point of suturing the large cavity incision, as well as the lesser artery and vein incisions. And again, Trask came through with a heavy thread and a stout needle. The maledictor grimaced at the sloppy stitching Kuvarakh made, but felt it was important for him to get some experience. Several times he had Kuvarakh restitch a spot or two, but eventually was satisfied that it was going to hold securely.

They now washed the face to remove the last traces of disinfecting alcohol and Kuvarakh started scribing the glyphs of body transferal on the head, chest, abdomen, hands and feet. It was morning by the time the transfer was done and Kuvarakh found that he hurt all over, more than the first time, but it was mostly the body absorbing the disinfecting alcohol and passed in a while.

He managed to gasp out his sincere thanks to the maledictor. Trask just nodded and replied that it was the least he could do in exchange for what Kuvarakh would be doing for him.

[Kuvarakh]

Kuvarakh returned to his master the next day, moving slowly and with a marked lack of coordination. Surprisingly, his master was all smiles and apologies, praising him for his initiative in acquiring a new body for himself and making remarks about how his behavior had been to motivate him to this end.

Kuvarakh swallowed his fury silently. Not only was his master side-stepping the issue of the promise he had made to provide this need from his "stock", it also ate at his conscience that he had been driven to seek someone out, criminal or not, with the intent of forcing a 'self-defense' scenario for what was just a hair short of murder. And now, even the issue of the master's promised "stock" was tainted by his own sense of being an accessory to murder. His daughter might as well have been one of the bodies among them.

For the next few weeks, things went smoothly, but unproductively, for Kuvarakh. It had nothing to do with the alchemy, or his lack of progress in anything but increased speed and quantity. This brought him no real satisfaction anyway, as it truly only served the master by allowing additional mundane contracts to be filled faster. No, the sense that really stymied him was that the master had put a new lock on the ice cellar door, and Kuvarakh had no excuse, legitimate or otherwise, to enter and investigate his suspicions of foul play.

He had promised Trask, the maledictor, to do that very thing. 'Does the master suspect my intent?' he wondered as he spent what spare time he had charting time references for disappearances among the populace from what sources there were. Some were reports to bolster public safety warnings issued in The Zeltivan Chronicle, others documented by the University's Board of Regents where property and tuition issues came to advocacy due to disappearances of both students and/or parents.

Of the forty-odd possible unexplained disappearances in Zeltiva since his master's arrival, he had no doubt that the eleven bodies in the ice cellar could be confirmed to be among them. He could feel it in his gut.

[Kuvarakh]

He found Trask a few days after cross-referencing his last lead and explained the new obstacle to his investigation. "He has nothing except the bodies in there. There's no other reason for anyone to go in there! But with that new lock, I can't just take a quick look when he's busy, and I don't know where he keeps the key."

"All the more reason for his reluctance to keep his promise to you. Now he knows he's got another two years or so before you'll have cause to bring it up again." He stared at the wall, unfocused, for a moment. Suddenly, he slammed his fist on the table. "DAMN! And there's nothing to stop him from pulling this same crap two years from now!"

"Can't the authorities make him open it?"

"Tried that already. That's why he knows I'm after him. There's already a jurisdiction issue regarding whose authority extends to that part of town. Plus, if some of the bodies are the results of sea-related deaths, then it's a Sailor's Guild matter, otherwise, it's the Lord of Council's purview, and he carries no weight that can't be lightened with a bribe. On top of that, it seems there's some law requiring unanimous approval from all relevant jurisdictional authority to allow it. Like it is some kind of criminal imposition on the sanctity of his home to look at SOME of the bodies for fear that some of the other UNapproved bodies might be seen."

"That's crazy!"

"And there's more! He apparently has official commissions from Sahova for those bodies, adding an additional legal issue. No one wants to get them involved in it."

"Oh come ON! How does the Lord of Council even know what an 'official commission' for a cadaver from Sahova looks like? I doubt there even IS such a thing."

"I completely agree, but I just wanted you to know all this, so you know why I've given up trying to get to him that way. No, there's no way to get to him like that...No way to get to him at all!...No legal way..." his words hung in the air.

[Kuvarakh]

Three days later, Kuvarakh was finishing an activation for a monthly contract. It was getting to be late morning and his master had not yet made an appearance. His mind began to wander to the locked door on the ice cellar.

It wandered next to his lock pick tools. He didn't like to call them "thieves' tools" like so many people did. He wasn't naive. He understood that they were probably used more for break-ins than the honest work of opening locks where the keys had been lost. But, though what he was doing was, technically, illegal, he was given no choice by the very same law he was bypassing. he should not have had to do it this way.

He kept this rational fresh in his mind as he twisted and pushed the pins in the lock, trying to find the right combinations of lift and shift to clear the bolt. After several minutes, he began to grow frustrated. The inner workings of this lock were not responding as normal. This lock was some new type and he couldn't figure out how to approach it.

He sat back and studied the keyhole. He brought a candle and tried to get a better look at the nature of the slides and pins inside. The flickering light hindered more than it helped, however. The ridges lining the inside of the keyhole danced and flashed at the same time that the flame dazzled his eyes. The opening itself was odd. Instead of a simple tapering, vertical slot with a rounded top, it had more of a "Y" shape to it.

The significance of that suddenly dawned on him. In an old style lock, the rounded end was the pivot point and all significant adjustment was only up and down. This would pivot in the middle so it must work with rotary slides and alignments, not vertical. He hoped his old lock pick set would be up to that task. Even given that he could find the necessary slips and flushes to do it, he wasn't sure that he had enough pins and wedges to cover all three possible adjustment points.

He was just kneeling down to try again, when he heard the door slam upstairs. He pulled and rolled up his tools and slipped back to the activation ring, preparing to act surprised, when his master staggered into the lab. His surprise was not feigned when he saw him. His master had been horribly beaten.

[Kuvarakh]

"Good Gods, sir! What happened?" Kuvarakh gasped.

"What does it LOOK like?" the old Nuit snapped back, grimacing as he hobbled to the steps, white ichor oozing from a dozen lacerations and wounds. "I was robbed and beaten! Damned greedy bums. They should all be shipped out and sunk in the sea!"

"Did you see what they looked like?"

"OF COURSE I saw what they looked like! How could I NOT see what they look like when they are right in front of me, hitting and kicking me? They looked like every other criminal scumbag lurking in corners instead of working, like they should be!"

"Did you report it?" Kuvarakh asked, suddenly relishing the irony of his master being on the other end of the legal ambiguity he had been hiding his own crimes behind.

"There wasn't time! And besides, who would I report it to? The Board of Regents? The Sailor's Guild? The Army?" He flung his arms about in frustration.

"Wasn't TIME?" Kuvarakh blurted, "What do you mean by that? I'M finishing the contract for the shipyard's lines. I've only got one more activation to go. I was just going to break after the last one."

"Look at me, for gods' sake! I'm losing ichor in a dozen places! I need to jump ahead of schedule here. You go ahead and do that last activation for the shipyards. I was going to, but I need to transfer bodies." The old Nuit paced impatiently.

"Very well, sir. I'll get a body out for you and you ca-..." Kuvarakh began.

"I'LL get my own body." His master interrupted, "You just go and perform that last activation."

"It's too soon. I need to rest after the last one." Kuvarakh explained.

"Then REST! Go...take a walk or something." The old Nuit spat back, his annoyance growing.

"This is ridiculous! There's no reason for me not to assist you with this. I'm not busy. You're in no condition to -..." Kuvarakh started counting points of logic off on his fingers. His master whirled angrily to face him.

"I'm in good enough condition to get my own body out of the cellar! You know as well as I do that we Nuit have to be ready for emergency transfers like this, I don't need your help."

"But there's no REASON for me not to! This isn't a situation where you're on your own and HAVE to do it yourself. Just give me the key and I -..." He began, trying to counter the old master's stubborn refusal.

"MIND YOUR OWN GOD CURSED BUSINESS! YOU STAY OUT OF THERE! Now if you need to rest, go upstairs and lay down, if not, go for a walk or something while I take care of MYSELF!" His master's face shook with fury.

The air sizzled between their eyes as they glared at each other. After a few moments, Kuvarakh sighed heavily and looked away with a shrug. "Fine! do it the hard way. I'll be back later." he slammed the lab door on his way out.

Kuvarakh made his way slowly up the stairs. His heart was heavy with foreboding of what was to come. He reached for the doorknob, already certain who had arranged the beating. He opened the door, and there, as if in answer, was Trask, the maledictor, with a bag of tools.

He gave a direct look to Kuvarakh, a look of both sympathy and vindication. "Satisfied?" was all he said.

Kuvarakh sagged in resignation. All he could do was nod his head, his eyes closed.

[Kuvarakh]

Kuvarakh did his best to estimate how long it would take for his master to get fully immersed in the transferal ritual. Given time to drag the body out and thaw it, time to scribe the many glyphs involved and time to get under way with the draining of the ichor, he estimated 5 or 6 hours. This was assuming that he had some mechanism at hand to thaw the body fairly quickly. It may be nothing more than a big vat of hot water, replaced every 10 or 15 minutes, Or maybe he'd even make it the focus of some alchemically accelerated process.

But even then, it was not as though they needed to catch him in the middle of the ritual. He'd be so weak after the ritual, he would hardly be able to stop them taking his keys and opening the ice cellar.

Kuvarakh was at war with himself. On the one hand, if the old Nuit had incriminating bodies stored in the cellar, he was going to pay, especially if one of the bodies was Trask's son. On the other hand, if they were unable to connect any of the bodies with any of the criminal disappearances. There would be a scandal. He sat and brooded, disliking both results.

Either way, his life was about to be altered drastically. Trask seemed to recognize the degree of change he had imposed on him. He came up and placed a hand on his shoulder. "Look, I'm sorry it came to this. If it comes to the worst, I will say I hypnotized you into believing me, so you won't share in the counter accusations he will level in response."

Kuvarakh stared in shock. "You...you mean you think the worst is NOT killing him?" he stood up, turning to face Trask, "If your son's body is NOT down there, then you have no reason to keep suspecting him!"

"I know that!" Trask protested, "but think about it. All that would mean is that I GO ON never knowing what happened to my son. Bitter as it is, I still NEED to know if he's there. Can you understand that? Forgive me for saying this, but you haven't had 10 YEARS of not knowing! You haven't confronted the person you think is responsible and had him sneer in your face and challenge you to 'prove it'. I've been waiting all this time and I might finally find out!" He paced as he spoke, flashing both looks of hope at Kuvarakh and rage at the stairway down.

"I won't lie to you, I both WANT to find my son there, and not. I do, so I can KILL that bastard and end my doubt and put it to rest, finally. But, of course, I can't truly want to find my son...dead." His head hung and Kuvarakh felt the terrible weight that must have been dragging this man down.

It was true, though he had lost his daughter, he had only been in the anguish of doubt for three weeks or so, and then been able to begin the cycle of healing. How would it be to never know? How close had he come to sharing that agony? What if the man that had killed his daughter had thrown the body overboard? What if he never had found out? He'd have gone mad, he didn't doubt it for a moment. Better the bitter truth all at once with no doubts, than the slow agony of unresolved worrying and dread. An open wound, festering indefinitely.

Trask had promised to repay him for whatever negative impact this episode had on his life. Kuvarakh had no interest in learning the basics of Malediction. But hypnosis? He shook off the sense of exploitation he had as he considered what reward he would take. He and Trask both knew what this was going to do to his life. Trask would feel better if he repaid the sacrifice Kuvarakh was about to make. And Kuvarakh knew he was going to need to find something else to do with his life. 'A new Master? Why not Trask?'

He let Trask know that he accepted his offer. He would study hypnosis with Trask as his instructor. Trask asked if he was sure, considering that it might appeal to him to take over the alchemy lab if this resolved the way they both anticipated. Kuvarakh shook his head. "If this turns out the way we think, I will be turning over the bodies to the Council and I guess they will take over the lab, or maybe the University."

They discussed things casually and distractedly for several hours. Kuvarakh grew more and more nervous, while Trask grew more and more relaxed. Finally, Kuvarakh stood up. Swallowing hard, he announced "It's time."