Someone eventually made it to the Starweave guild to summon some assistance. Several people in nearby houses who were woken by Síle's yelling upstairs had gone over and banged on the guild hall's door until someone came. Two guild men were at the house, along with Bastien, who looked like he had not spent much time waking up.

"Alyx," he said a little breathlessly as he came in the door. "You're okay. You're okay?"

In spite of the situation, I had to laugh a little inside. One sure thing, Bastien was Bastien; we wouldn't have to doubt him.

"Tell me what happened," he said.

I explained the situation as well as I knew it - an assassin of some kind had snuck into the house, gone up the stairs, and been stopped by one of our party who had happened to be up. He was still lying upstairs on the floor, seemingly dead.

He shook his head. "Dreadful business. This is probably one of the worst crimes to have happened in this town for years. It's a sleepy place."

"Shall we go up to take a look?" one of the men asked.

"You should bring some observers, too," Bastien said quietly to me.

"Mom, Síle, can you come upstairs with us?" I asked them in Clair.

We all stepped gingerly around the body, and they started examining him. One of the first things they did was to roll him over on his back, to get a good look at his face. I was surprised as they jumped back as if uncovering a deadly snake.

And I guess maybe that's what it was - his mouth was still overflowing with a foamy mess.

"Poison?" I asked, and one of the guild men nodded.

"I'm afraid so."

Outside of the poison, the man's face looked strangely calm.

"What's that on his neck?" I asked them.

One of them used a toe to pull back the collar of the assassin, and he breathed in sharply.

"Ashga Zan," he said, then looked over at me. "You have some powerful enemies, friend. Step lightly."

The body had a tattoo on its neck, a 9-pointed star, two of the points longer than the others.

"What is... Ashga Zan?" I asked.

Surprising me, Mom answered.

"They are assassin monks from the west," she said. "Through the times I spent in Saillvert, we heard tell of them, but rumours only. Alyx..."

I put an arm around her shoulders and squeezed them.

"Even with this, you wish to stay?" she asked me.

I nodded.

She looked at the floor and sighed.

"But how can I protect you?" she mumbled to herself in English.

That just about crumbled me the rest of the way.

"Okay," Bastien said, clapping his hands once, quietly. "We've kept you all awake quite long enough. We'll put the body somewhere out of the way and freeze it, and tomorrow I have a colleague at the university that can help us examine it. Can you grab one of the extra sheets so we can use it to move the body?"

Still avoiding the poison, the men laid down the sheet and rolled the body onto it, rolling the whole thing over several times to wrap it.

They picked up the body as best they could and carried it downstairs. As we started down, everyone suddenly hushed, watching the grizzly affair. They put it in an out-of-the-way corner of the kitchen, and then Bastien froze it: hand weaving, streams of frost, and a spoken word I didn't recognize, and it was done.

"Not that I need to say, probably," Bastien said, "but please do not disturb it in any way until we come for it."

The three guild men headed for the door, but Bastien pulled me aside again on the way out.

"A moment, Alyx," he said. "If you're able to come with me to the university tomorrow, it would be extremely helpful."

There was an urgency to his words that didn't seem to match the request.

"I will, my friend."

I waved, and he went outside to meet his fellow guildsmen. I closed the door.

"All right! Who's ready to go back to sleep?" Jack asked. "Yep, yep, noooobody!"

"Your mom told me what happened," MacKenzie said. She looked more deflated and shaken than I'd ever seen her. "I'm glad I didn't kill someone, but... damn."

"Bastien said not to disturb the body," I said to everyone, probably unnecessarily. "I got the impression it has some sort of magic seal on it."

I looked up at the skylight above the fish pond, and it was no longer the black of night. It was well on its way to dawn.

"Hey Síle?" I asked.

She was over staring at the front door lock, and I had to call her name a second time.

"Ah, sorry," she said.

"When did that restaurant by An Lien open, do you know?"

That brought the smile back to her face.

"Businesses here open when they open," she said, "and they close when they close. But I bet he opens pretty early to catch passengers."

"All right, my friends," I said, throwing my arms wide expansively. "You're in for a treat."

We'd just gotten back from breakfast, and we were planning to go out and do some sight-seeing at my insistence.

("No point in wasting the trip," I said. I didn't explain to them why the trip was potentially expensive - I didn't want to think about the face.)

But then Bastien knocked. I was, I think, understandably worried about a knock after the night before, but his face was there in the peephole.

"Hi Bastien," I said when I opened the door.

There was a long cart with a horse lashed to it out on the street.

"Alyx," he said, and then, "Síle".

I hadn't realized she'd walked up behind me.

Walking back into the kitchen to where we'd placed the body, Bastien took out something that looked like a stack of large postal stamps. The top one looked like thick parchment and contained an intricate design I couldn't make much sense of, visually, but I could see bits of magic circling around it. He peeled it away from a slice of... wax paper? A few finger gestures later, and the stamp was dampened on the back. Bastien finished this ritual by gently slapping the stamp onto the sheet, and the whole body immediately floated upwards. I could see an intricate web of aether wrapped around it, the individual strands shifting and moving. On a closer look, it looked almost like words.

He must have seen me squinting at it.

"I guess you can see that now, huh? What do you see?"

"Umm," I started out, simultaneously not wanting to disappoint him with an incorrect answer, but also wanting to prove I had potential. "It looks like an intricate web of words flowing around the body from head to toe. There's a little whirlpool of it around the seal. Shifting cyan and blue colours. Somewhere underneath all that, solid threads of icy blue."

"Wow," Síle said behind me. "I see a seal paper with a symbol about... air, movement, keeping. It's glowing a little. And then the ice weaving, yeah. That's about it."

Bastien nodded. "Yes, that's about what I'd expect. A student of magic relies on the mind, logic, and the ability to call power from the Flow. A Fí-Réalta, on the other hand... In some ways we still don't understand, you are the Flow. It's like reading your own writing. Lucky you."

He grinned at me.

I stared at the seal spell more deeply, and my awareness seemed to shift further and further into the stream of words, away from the house and the body. The words were no longer sparkles, but forests, mountains, continents, worlds. I had no idea what they meant, what language or alphabet they were built from, but I could read them anyway, and I did so almost in a trance. An airquake was happening around me. Airquake? My vision was shaking, I was... being shaken.

The entire spell broke when I suddenly felt myself flying. Upwards. Then, the cracking and crashing sounds, and a lot of pain in my back. Then the pain in my front as I fell back down.

A minute or two later, I came back to the land of the living, lying on the floor with a worried Bastien and Síle hanging over me.

Bastien let out a heavy sigh.

"For the love of Danna," he said, "please don't do that right now. Impressive, but you're not ready for it. How many fingers?"

He held up one finger above me.

"One," I said, resisting the suddenly urge to say "thirty" as a joke.

Síle was dabbing my lip with a wet towel.

"Tell me if this causes sharp pain," he said, lifting my head gently with one hand and squeezing it all over with the other.

"I mean, it hurts," I said, "but nothing a little ibuprofen can't fix."

He looked confused, and only then did I realize I'd said it in English - not even Danna's help could give me Clair words that didn't exist.

We went through several more tests as I sat up, then stood up. I figured I was in for some bruising, but nothing permanent seemed to have happened.

I couldn't say the same for the ceiling, when I looked up. An Alyx-shaped crater had formed. Also the whole house had come to the kitchen, looking worried.

"What the heck happened?" Síle asked. "What were those words? It was almost like rainbows were dripping out of your mouth."

Bastien chuckled. "It's sort of unsettling when it's not done properly. This seal is a word spell, and Alyx just peeked in and pulled out the words of deep magic that make it up. Speaking them aloud caused a much more powerful version of the same spell to grab her. Most of us dip a hand into the Flow and work with a little aether. Alyx here can go deeper. Much deeper. Diving into the ocean deep.

"All of which you will both learn about," he said, "but for now, we really need to get this body over to the university, and I need Alyx with me for that. Are you coming, too?"

Síle shook her head. "Alyx can fill me in. I'm going to try to take their minds off last night." She pointed at the crowd that had gathered. "But I wanted to tell you, I'm pretty sure the door lock had been activated last night. But no alarms happened."

Bastien shook his head. "I'd guessed as much, but hearing it confirmed is unhappy news."

I sat with him on the seat of the cart as we drove toward the Starweave buildings again. It was a bit overwhelming to think about, but I'd finally started to understand how they might have been made.

And... their purpose?

"Do you trust me?" Bastien asked, looking over at me briefly, then back to the street.

I sniffed. "I'm here with you, aren't I?"

He sat quietly for a moment before continuing.

"There are two reasons I've been involved in your life here so far," he said finally. "One, I'm the one who met you at the Gate, so to speak. And two, I'm one of the scholars of the Gate. Let me warn you, not everyone likes the idea of the Gates. Nor influential Fí-Réalta from foreign lands."

"You're saying the consoeurie did this?" I asked incredulously.

He shook his head. "Unlikely. Whoever it was did have some connections to our guild, though. At this point it's hard to believe otherwise. Few even have the influence to hire a nine-star monk.

"Until we can figure this out, be very careful, my friend."