Nasty Little Witchling

I clicked my tongue as the safe didn’t open, rotated one of the four illegible dials to a new sequence and shook the handle again; it wouldn’t budge.

Through the darkness, the lifeless eyes of a ghoul slumped in the doorway mocked my attempts at guessing the combination. I’d avoided fighting the group that came to investigate my fight downstairs, but some had wandered too close to my hiding spot. None were as resilient as the dead ghoul in the garden and were easier to handle quietly.

Luckily, the rest of the group didn’t care that several of their members were missing when they exited the building.

I’d cleaned off the blood splattered across me, mine and theirs, but still had gashes in my clothing to deal with. The cuts themselves had already closed up, with streaks of pinkish skin peeking out through the tears. They were incredibly itchy, and my mana was being used up near them to oppose something left behind by the ghouls' nails. The safe was a nice distraction to my fading willpower not to scratch them.

After the incursions had stopped, I was curious if I could find any of the jewellery the girls had spoken of in the bedrooms. Instead, I uncovered a small, rusted iron safe nestled in the bedside drawer. There was a keyhole, but no key to be found, and my attempts to pick the lock were rebuffed. The inner workings were completely different from door locks, and I felt nothing obvious to push against.

After giving up on that method, I tried my luck with the second mechanism. Each of the four dials to the side of the keyhole had ten letters on them, and I played with random combinations for a long while before trying to go in a sequence.

The ordered approach bored me to death, and I realised quickly I’d vastly underestimated the number of different ways the dials could be positioned.

The mathematics I did for the number of possibilities kept changing with each new consideration, and I gave up before the onset of a headache. The fact that it would take weeks was a good enough conclusion.

I clicked my claws across the wooden floor, where I was sprawled out in front of the safe.

Force was an enticing option, but was it worth it?

There was a chance I wouldn’t be able to break through the iron despite its worn state. And that wasn’t considering the ghouls skulking around the building that would be alerted by the commotion.

Guessing the correct combination was a delusional yet pleasant dream. I tried once more before sighing and pushing off my knees to search the room more thoroughly. Asking the witches how they got through the safes was an obvious follow-up question I’d missed. They possibly found the keys hidden somewhere, yet I doubted that worked consistently.

With my luck, it’d take both the combination and key.

I turned over items caked in dust and pulled out drawers, fabrics disintegrating in my hands and cobwebs tangling around my fingers. Iron seemed to be a common material in the capital. Nails in every piece of furniture were made of the stuff, along with various pieces small enough to be mistaken for a key.

If the palace and castle district had any, it was there deliberately to disrupt mages.

Finally, a key clattered to the floor from a collection of clothing, and I was mildly surprised to have found it. Honestly, I was planning to waste time until dusk to rejoin the girls and hadn’t expected to make any progress.

A smile broke through my fatigue as the key turned, and something clicked inside the safe.

However, my hopes were crushed; the handle remained immovable. Instead of punching the drawer like I wanted, I squinted at the safe, contemplating its inner workings. To get a better look at the whole thing, I pulled it out and hefted it onto the floorboards with a groan.

Despite being smaller than my head, the thing must have weighed more than me.

It was a solid piece of iron except for the seal and locks, but there was a narrow gap between the dials that I might be able to slide a narrow blade in. I reformed my claws from the poorly made lock-picking tools but couldn’t get the point thin and long enough to reach inside.

I crept downstairs to retrieve the knives I'd noticed in the kitchen, past a lingering ghoul, who turned in confusion as I passed by. I struck at its neck before it understood what was happening and flinched as it thudded to the ground. The ghoul writhed while its healing tried and failed to catch up with the injury.

I stepped over it to grab the wooden slab with the knives embedded and hurried back out, skipping over the body to run upstairs. Nothing followed me up, so I settled next to the safe again with my prize.

The various kitchen knives were mostly undamaged except for the discolouration that came with time. Steel wasn’t supposed to rust, but maybe it wasn’t as good as the stuff they made now. They would be thrown out of the palace kitchen along with angry shouts about quality, yet they were still good enough to imagine a thief using.

I wedged the smallest blade into the crevice, amused I could identify it as a fruit knife from my lunches at the palace. As I poked around, the rust chipped off in pieces, revealing very little besides an impassable iron bar holding the dials in place. I jabbed at the next two with similar results and considered spending my time practising my steel manipulation instead.

For the sake of completeness, I went for the fourth dial. The blade got caught in a slight indentation in the otherwise smooth cylinder. I moved the dial, and the indent moved along with it. Believing that meant I had identified the right letter, I adjusted the other dials until I felt a matching gap.

I cursed when the handle didn’t budge.

Frustrated, I retreated from the contraption and pulled out the largest knife, melting it into a puddle and discarding the wooden handle.

The blades were useful tools for killing ghouls by themselves, but they had a few problems. For starters, I hadn’t practised enough with steel for it to channel my wind blades unless it hugged my skin.

Metal would hopefully catch up to my control over the likes of water and dirt with practice, but it wasn't useful currently.

The next issue was hiding the blades as I did my claws. While Darine had her own knife, she was the most trusted member of the group. When I got back to the abbey, they would be confiscated and absolutely get me in trouble.

Re-forming the knives quickly from bangles wasn’t feasible, and judging by the lock-picking tools I made, it was not worthwhile. Where would I even keep the handle?

I solidified the puddle into another set of claws for my off-hand and spent more time making the bangle look presentable, not wanting more insults towards their shabbiness. I wanted to make a full gauntlet but had no clue how the parts moved together.

My attempts at it rewarded me with a solid hand of steel unable to bend, useful to no one. I’d finally found an excuse to visit the iron and leather working shop if I got back to Drasda. The justification for why I needed to know how to make steel gauntlets could come later.

I had ideas for the rest of the steel blades, except no skill to carry them out, and taking them with me as bangles would have me jangling down the street, ringing the dinner bell for any ghouls in the area. So, they’d sadly be left behind.

Cloud cover blocked out the moonlight coming through the single window and made my work of prettying my bangles more difficult. By the end, the bangles were decorated with blob-like carvings of Sweeka that probably looked nothing like her in the light.

I sighed, moving to the doorway to find a new building to search through.

I paused at the door and spun on my heel, looking to try one last idea for the safe. The indentation lining up likely signalled that I was on the right path but had it in the wrong orientation. I moved all the dials the same way, trying the handle at each movement. Even though I expected the handle not to move, I was disappointed with each try.

Until the fifth attempt, where it clunked downwards from my forceful pulls.

I tugged at the door, the rust putting up a final struggle before allowing it to swing outwards. The light wasn’t enough to see inside, so I brought the contents over to the window. I was already disappointed by their feel but still eagerly looked through the compensation for my efforts.

Paper was the most abundant item, and most of it crumbled at my touch or was unreadable, but some smaller pieces held up. There were three of them with descriptions of people on a kind of identification card—a family with a young son. I scratched at the rusted letters on the dial, noticing a pattern. The first three were their initials, and the fourth was the start of their family name.

I didn’t think that was the safest thing since people probably knew their names, but it was a cute gesture. Several silver and gold coins had spilt out of the safe, and while they were supposed to be valuable, there were no shops in the city to use them in.

I took one of each to play with and left the rest behind.

The biggest prize was a single tiny mana crystal that I balanced with the ambient mana so I could take it with me. The witches were scared of the ghouls' ability to sense mana, but that was because they didn't truly understand the limitations of those senses. Something like this wouldn’t attract them.

However, they did enter seemingly random houses, so maybe their senses were that good.

Either way, I needed a crystal if I ever wanted to leave the city and not get executed by the remnants for being weird. There was no Annalise to save me from the Tometh roaming beyond the walls this time. It wasn’t as large as my necklace, but it would get the job done once I found a way to keep it near my chest.

I went downstairs to leave the pub, keen to find another group of ghouls to fight. Hopefully, without a lesser knight to chase me down through my blades.

A thought in the back of my mind called me demented and murderous, but I dismissed it. These things weren’t alive; if they were like I suspected, I was doing them a favour.

Noisily killing an entire group wasn’t sustainable since I needed to hide from the flood of ghouls called by the action. Maybe every room I hid in would have a safe to bash open, but I doubted that and wasn’t interested in finding another to toil over.

I skulked through the shadows, applying a light touch of the shadow walking Evie did. The mana usage should have been subtle enough not to alert them, and if it did, it was a good indication I was doing something wrong.

Another interesting mana art was the lightning that arched through Alp’s feathers when he was a storm eagle. They were a shallow version of the spell used by Barick, and there wasn’t much to learn from them, especially when Alp didn’t seem to be making an effort to form them. A shiver went down my spine as that night in the forest jumped to the front of my mind, and I pushed my thoughts to anywhere else.

His changing form was far more interesting, but that had to be what his species did rather than mana.

The possibilities were endless if it was a mana art. However, it was not so appealing to consider testing. I still had the description of what a shrinking spell did to a person in mind and wouldn’t experiment with changing limbs without Morris within arms reach.

But I doubted that it was possible at all.

I ducked into a new building and slashed the throats of isolated ghouls wandering the halls, plunging my latest set of claws into their chests to stop their thrashing swiftly. Only the closest ghouls noticed the confrontation, and when they came to investigate, they met a similar fate.

Although the number of chins and collarbones I clipped in my strikes decreased, I was still far from proficient.

The tears from glancing scratches across my arms and torso were mounting up, so I stopped trying to find more before I ended up in tattered rags.

I didn’t feel Alp’s gaze on me as I approached our lonesome house at the first light of dawn. The hoard of ghouls had dispersed enough to sneak by, those buried still struggling below the rubble. More confident from my few scrapes with the ghouls and less rattled from having dealt with Alp, I shifted the rubble to reach those trapped.

“Patela?”

I spun on the rough stone, hiding my hands behind my back, Darine looking down at me from the rooftop.

“Yes?” I whispered.

“What are you doing? Get back up here.”

“Something was making noise underneath. And I think we can leave anyway.”

“We’ll wait for sunrise. It blinds them for a while.”

I nodded, shifting my claws back to bangles and climbed higher up the building’s remains to sit down. Climbing back up without being able to make handholds would have been too tiresome with the sun already rising. Rays of soft light poured over the wall into the street, and I shivered as it hit me, not noticing how cold I’d been.

Only then did the girls start their climb down, nimbly moving their grip and footholds like they’d done it a hundred times.

“Should we check if there’s a safe inside?” I asked when they were halfway.

They looked at each other, and Maisie started giggling.

“What?”

“It’s just…that’s what everyone wants to do at first,” Andria said. “But it gets old quickly. Most people keep deeds and identification in them or some coinage—hardly useful or exciting stuff.”

“I found my dagger in one,” Maisie said, dropping to the ground. “But yeah, you can’t even use the coins without trading them in for the latest sort outside the walls.”

“I guess,” I said, already having a taste for what they spoke of. If the mana crystal wasn’t useful to my situation then I would have been disappointed. “How do you open them?”

“Putty,” Darine said, holding out a jar of submerged dragon’s breath.

“What does that do?” I asked, trying my best to sound curious.

“You’ll see,” Maisie said, grinning ear to ear. “We used to corrode the locks, but this is quicker…and much more fun.”

“And that’s why you aren’t allowed to have any,” Darine said, putting the jar back in her robe. “It’s not a toy.”

I desperately wanted to ask how they detonated it without mana, as that was how they used it at the Opera house, but couldn’t without revealing too much.

Andria kicked the rubble where a ghoul still struggled beneath before heading off towards the abbey. Darine hurried ahead of her to lead us there, stopping to collect the knapsack of warding crystals and my bag of firewood. The ghouls did as she said, shying away from the morning light by staying in the buildings and shade.

I half expected Darine to say we would set up the crystals before returning, but her hurried pace didn’t slow for almost the entire way to the door. We stopped once after Darine and Maisie’s combined complaints got her to stash away the knapsack full of warding stones with the promise to place them tomorrow.

It helped that the fault of the two in the matter was overshadowed by Darine nearly falling.

We almost ran head-first into Ulia when she exited the abbey, her eyes widening at the sight of us.

A smile almost formed on her lips before she scrunched her face. “They were about to make me go find you. You’re in such a pile of it I’d suggest hiding away for the rest of the day while they relax.”

“Ulia! Quit standing in the doorway and go drag their asses back here.”

Ulia raised her eyebrows in question, and while I considered her words, Darine didn’t. She pushed past and opened the door. “Elder Eudralia, sorry, we’re back.”

“Where are the other brats?”

Andria and Maisie hesitated, but I walked in to take the brunt of the elder’s glare. I wasn’t sure if she was annoyed because she thought I was responsible for this mess or didn’t like me.

“What did she do?” Elder Eudralia asked Darine, confirming it was the first.

“No, it was—”

“Nothing, Elder Eudralia. The ghouls were out in force because of the screecher, and we couldn’t get through a certain street.”

“Is this true?” the elder asked.

“Ah,” Darine hesitated, probably rethinking her words due to how angry the elder looked. “Yes, elder.”

“As long as you were able to place the wards. Since you missed the gathering yesterday, I’ll let you know Elder Resna has made a finding, and you’ll have new crystals to place next week.”

Maisie sighed behind my back and while the elder’s eyebrow twitched, she kept her gaze locked on me.

“And you girl,” the elder continued, shaking her head. “Couldn’t you have made this easy and not come back…A slim majority of elders have decided you can stay in the abbey for the time being, but the council does not welcome you into the coven.”

“Thank you, elder.”

“Make yourself useful if you wish for a favourable outcome,” Elder Eudralia said and walked off through the garden.

The other girls from the dorm were scattered throughout the courtyard, not bothering to hide their interest in our conversation over the vegetables.

“She's like that with everyone,” Andria said, placing an arm around my shoulder. Her fingers found their way into one of the holes in my robe, and she leaned in to inspect the damage. “The morning chores look handled, so we have time to patch our clothes and make breakfast. I think Maisie chewed a hole in mine in her sleep.”

“What?” Maisie asked, turning away from the open fire pit with thin strips of meat sizzling on a grill. “Oh, I caught mine on a nail while climbing down.”

Darine had already knelt in the dirt to pluck carrots and didn’t offer us more than a glance as we went to the dorm. We sat at the empty kitchen table, and Darine dug a sewing kit out of the cupboards.

The two girls took off their robes and started effortlessly weaving threads into them while I bit my tongue, trying to push a length of thread through the eye of a needle.

A few incredulous looks were thrown my way as I stitched up the first tear because of how long it took me. I ignored their stares and the smaller rips, not having enough excuses for them, and focused on the more prominent ones.

I asked Andria for a piece of scrap cloth for a larger tear near my collar, and I left the stitching on the inside undone on the top to hide a mana crystal.

Maisie rushed through her work so she could start on breakfast, but Andria took pity on me and handled the other half of my robe. She glanced at me for every new tear she found while I kept my eyes focused on the needle.

The girls working outside filtered in, taking a bowl of Maisie’s porridge and sitting close enough to ask questions about the evening.

Andria extolled our virtues, and the body count of ghouls increased at every new turn in the story. The real reason for our ordeal was brushed over, and she made sure to exaggerate the danger we’d been in.

At least, that’s what I gathered from the body language of everyone in the kitchen since they’d switched languages.

When an older voice shouted into the kitchen, I turned to Andria for a translation.

“Time for class,” she said with a heavy sigh.

I had the opposite reaction, excited to learn about another side of witchcraft.