Alexander dressed carefully. He had been given a pass by Joaquim yesterday to start walking the streets with a partner. Five days of grueling workouts, both physical and magical, left him feeling sore but weirdly energetic. He had learned a dozen helpful tricks with his blessing, and even figured out a few of his own.
He wanted his uniform to look perfect his first day. He had been given a sky blue vest, to be worn over a white, long sleeved shirt with dark pants. Detectives usually wore leather jackets, but Alexander had been given permission to stick with his long coat. He didn’t have a badge yet, but he had been given a key with a glyph inscribed that would give him access to the Constabulary.
He also had an armband that told those that knew the codes his blessing talents. He knew that the stripe of sky blue cloth stitched to the leather was for Tranquilus, and the smaller stripes of indigo, orange, and dark green were for Algidus, Thermas, and Ventus, but he wasn’t sure why each band had a different number of white cross stripes, or what the golden beads that cinched each cloth strip at the end meant.
Satisfied with his appearance, he walked to the door of Lenn’s set of rooms. He’d found, with the priest’s help, a landlord with two rooms coming open. He was just waiting for the current residents to finish moving out. Lenn had assured him that he could stay as long as he needed, though Alexander was sure the number of boxes with his belongings had caused the young man a great deal of frustration.
The rooms were on the ground floor of a two story inn, and there was an outside door. Alexander slipped out of it and used a touch of Algidus to lock the door once he’d closed it. He then put a hand flat on the wood of the door, closed his eyes, and concentrated. Lenn was far more accomplished at Algidus than Alexander, and had put up a complex layering of energies in his doors that would prevent an unethical Atmos-blessed person from getting in by canceling out any Algidus or Thermas energy used on the door. Fortunately, activating the wards only required a few moments of concentration, which Alexander was happy to provide. He felt the wood of the door grow cooler as the wards hummed to life. He wasn’t good enough to see them; part of the complexity was because Lenn had wrapped each layer of security with one of stealth. On a cold, clear day, the door was easy to miss. With the stubborn fog that had blanketed the city, the door would be completely invisible.
Alexander was glad there had been no casualties from the second airship crash, but the huge amount of Tranquilus energy that had been expended had caused some fairly serious problems. If a group of people working in concert had brought the ship down, there probably would have been a gentle rain or a windstorm. But because something like three hundred people had been throwing a flurry of individual shields at the ship, then reaction had caused a massive fog bank to cover the city and stay there. It had been five days since the second airship malfunction, and Alexander could still feel the imbalance in the air. Priests had attempted to address the problem, but had been unable to do much. The high priest of the Godri Thermas had come from Aethros and performed a mysterious ritual atop the Zydobe Needle. Now, the Eye shone with a constant, ghostly light and any ship that sailed into the fog bank, which extended several miles into the sea, was taken by the Hand of Thermas and guided into safe harbor. The protection did not help ships sailing out of the harbor, though. They had to spend a great deal of energy lighting themselves and using sound to guide their way out, which only made the fog bank worse. The imbalance was slowly righting, but Alexander couldn’t tell how long it would take.
He stepped out into the street and began walking. Like everyone with an Atmos blessing, he could push the fog away from himself. He was only strong enough to create a bubble about a yard wide. It was enough to let him see the road ahead of him, and to warn anyone he was about to hit.
AS he walked, he practiced his shielding. He had managed to figure out a shield that would move with him, but it wasn’t strong enough to deflect a small stone Joaquim had thrown at him, and it reacted badly with his efforts to push away the fog. He was now working on what Joaquim called a “force bubble”. Rather than a sphere that resisted force, he was attempting to generate a cloud that actively projected force outward. It was much easier to move with, but it was exhausting to maintain, especially with the cool fog. Joaquim swore up and down that practice would make the technique less costly, so Alexander put it up anywhere he could. He hadn’t noticed any improvement in his skill, though.
A flash of green light distracted him, and the force bubble dissolved. His clear space wavered, then fog swirled around him before exploding away. A few green sparks hung in the clear dome that now stretched ten feet in the air, and showed about twenty feet of road. Several pedestrians stood as shocked as Alexander, and three of them were shedding the same green sparks as Alexander.
He took a step, but the dome didn’t move with him. He guessed that the few of them haloed in green had all been putting up clear air domes, and they had probably intersected and combined. He guessed that the dome would last several minutes before the fog reclaimed the street. He continued on his way; the transit station he was aiming for had one wall exposed by the sudden expanse of clear air.
When he walked into the wall of fog again, the remnants of green light around him sparked and fizzled out. The fog recoiled from the light, and Alexander took advantage of that to make a new bubble. There was another flash of green light, and he found himself inside the large dome again, which had expanded to about thirty feet high. He didn’t waste time trying to figure it out; now that he could see the entrance to the Kosmima station he hurried into it.
He showed the clerk his key. The clerk touched the glyph with a finger, which cuased it to glow gently. Satisfied, he waved Alexander onward. Alexander walked into the transit room, showed the attendant his key, and was transported directly to the Constabulary.
The cramped room that housed the Constabulary’s receptor circle was dull and drab, basically just a stone box. Alexander hurried out of the room, clearing the circle for anyone else who might be coming in.
When he walked into the main office, he saw Andrea standing there over his newly assigned desk. HE waved at her as he walked up.
“Cartwright. My office.” She turned and strode away. Alexander took off his coat and hung it from the chair before following her, wondering what she needed.
When he entered her office, she was writing something . Without looking up, she barked “Sit,” at him. He fell into the single chair, waiting expectantly.
She finished whatever she was writing before she looked at him. “Joaquim says he’s done all he can with you,” she said. “Which is good, because I need every hand I’ve got. Read this.”
She handed him a sheaf of papers. It was a detailed report of the second airship accident. Apparently, the two person crew that had been manning the ship had been checking their course from the upper deck when the woman was shot with an arrow. The injury had caused them to lose control of the ship, though the uninjured man had been able to maintain partial lift, which explained the airship’s slower glide toward the ground.
“This doesn’t say how the airships are kept aloft,” Alexander observed.
“Damned engineers won’t tell us,” Andrea said. “Apparently it’s ‘immaterial to the investigation, as it cannot be replicated’.” She snorted. “Does anything else jump out at you?”
He kept reading. “Wait,” he said, when one fact did catch his attention. “The arrow was fired from the shopping district between here and the Temple of Atmos?” he asked.
“Nearly as we can tell,” Andrea answered. “The woman told us the direction she was facing when she was hit, and approximately how high in the air they were. That, plus the angle the arrow hit her, was enough to give us a reasonably small area where the archer could have been.”
“I…I think I heard it,” Alexander said. “I heard a bowshot right when everything started happening, but I had no idea it was related.”
Andrea heaved a sigh. “Rookies. Always volunteer information, no matter how irrelevant you think it might be.” Alexander nodded sheepishly. “Next time, say something you have even an idea might be helpful. You’re Tranquilus, your intuitions are valuable.”
Alexander blinked. “My what?”
“Your intuitions.” Andrea looked at him expectantly, disbelief slowly growing in her expression. “You didn’t know? One of your passive gifts is intuition. All Tranquilus get that!” Disbelief turned to incredulity as Alexander showed no signs of understanding or recognition. “Atmos’s tits, Cartwright, open a book sometime! Get out of my office and meet your partner. Dismissed!”
Alexander hurried out, though once he hit the common office he stopped, completely unsure of where, or who, his new partner was. There were four detectives in the room. One had the black jacket that showed he had no blessing, two had scarlet Panida jackets, and one had a golden Petra jacket. Alexander slid over to his desk, hoping someone notice who he was and introduce themselves.
“Looking for me?”
“Shaking sands!” Alexander swore. Standing beside his desk was a young woman with a deep indigo jacket, an Algidus user. She had thick, curly blond hair, rosy cheeks, baby blue eyes, and a wicked set of steel-plated leather gloves.
“Dawn Sets, at your service,” she said, stripping one of the weapons and offering her hand to shake. Alexander complied.
“Alexander Cartwright. Are you my new partner?” he asked.
“Temporary. Rookies get assigned to a new detective every month or so, so we can all get new ideas on how to play nice with other blessings,” she explained. “Captain Fields’s idea, and a damn good one. No one works their blessing the same as someone else, so it keeps us on our toes.” She grinned at him, or bared her teeth, Alexander wasn’t sure. “So we’re going to have a little sparring match for a bit, so I can get an idea of how you work.”
“Great,” Alexander replied, feigning enthusiasm. He didn’t want his first partner to think he was a weakling, but he had expected to get outside of those warehouses, fancy as they were. “Terros or Atmos?”
Dawn snorted, slipping her fingers back into the gauntlet. “Don’t be ridiculous. Back alley. Let’s go.” She started moving toward the back of the Constabulary, and Alexander followed after, grabbing his long coat. Was he expected to have some sort of hand-to-hand weapon? He’d never been in a real fight.
Dawn passed through an inconspicuous door and immediately blended in with the fog. Alexander tried to follow her lead, cloaking himself with cold and mist, but his stealth was flimsy and unstable. He had already lost track of Dawn completely in the thick fog, so he built a shield around himself and increased his hearing as much as he could through the dampening billows of moisture.
He heard a shout, and spun toward it just to see a blast of icy indigo energy splash off his shield. He dropped it and moved right, drawing in Ventus energy to prepare a counterattack. Ventus power was unruly and wild, wrapping around him like a green strangling snake, but Joaquim had shown him a useful trick or two.
He split the energy two ways. The first bit he whipped into a funnel and tied to the ground, making the mists swirl and shred, clearing out a space around himself. The last of it he compressed between his hands, building a ball of air pressure.
As his gusts ripped at the fog, he caught a glimpse of Dawn. She was fending off two hulking brutes, both armed with wooden staves. All three had green aftertrails, signs that they were augmenting their speed with the fog, which was very quickly boiling away.
Alexander aimed at one of the attackers while circling to his left to get a clear shot. Dawn ducked under a heavy swing and swept her leg under both of them. One was quick enough to jump, and while he was midair Alexander released his pressure blast.
Wind howled through the alley and the huge man went flying clear out into the street. Dawn, who was clearly experienced in martial arts, was rolling away from the man she’d sent sprawling, so Alexander put up a shield over him.
“Good idea, but that’s no fun,” dawn said as she got to her feet. “Let’s take him down fair!”
“Shouldn’t we be arresting him?” Alexander asked.
Dawn laughed and pointed. As Alexander looked back at his shield, the fog retreated rapidly from them and a bolt of lightning hammer his shield, disintegrating it and sending both Alexander and Dawn stumbling back, hands clapped to their ears.
Alexander fought to put up another shield, but he couldn’t make one materialize; they kept falling away into sparks. The man was on his feet, and lightning was dripping from his fist, scorching the wood of his staff.
He saw Dawn shout something, though his hearing was filled by a roaring silence, an expression that he had never understood before now. The man grinned, and spun his staff, holding it behind his back and pointing an empy hand at Dawn.
Alexander didn’t have enough energy for a shield, so instead he focused on the chilly bite of the air and wove a confusion net around the man. His palm shifted to the right, and a strip of lightning licked ut, burning a blackened strip down the brick building beside them.
Dawn’s face had gone from cheerful to focused. She clapped her hands together, then thrust her palms out at the man. He was bowled over by an invisible wave, and in the moments that bought them Dawn grabbed Alexander’s hand and dragged him the opposite direction.
When they rounded the corner of the alley into the main street near a shoe shop, she stopped and slapped her hand onto the wall of the building. Frost formed under her hand, and Alexander could see her lips moving in a chant.
When she removed her hand, a glowing indigo glyph rimed with frost remained. She stretched out a hand toward the alley, and the air started to ripple, like it was a pond being rained on. She grabbed Alexander’s hand, and the roaring in his ears was swallowed by an intense heat, and suddenly he could hear.
“-n’t think he’d fall for that, but you caught him by surprise,” she was saying. “Can you hear now? Good, put my hearing back.” She offered him her free hand, releasing his. He gripped it, reversing their position from a moment before, and sent a wave of Tranquilus energy through her. He’d asked Lenn for help with healing, and while the man could barely heal a boil, he knew the theory well.
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