Chapter 88: Book 2, Chapter 29: The Demon Priestess of Jehsha

“What’s that?” Chi asked. They were going through the traits of her priestess class.

“Another unique,” Jonkins leaned in and pressed the tab marked Aura of the Penitent Pilgrim. “What else?”

Jonkins read aloud as Chi read silently. Jack couldn’t make much of it out due to the calligraphy and his still poor grasp of written Tandrian, so he listened.

“As the penitent strives to right the wrongs of her past, she grants an aura of Jehsha’s favor to those who share her path towards the light, and the salvation of both herself and our world,” the guildmaster read, his voice slowly trailing off. “All members of the priestess’ party gain a 5% bonus to all experience, and 5% power increase to any healing spells cast.”

The guildmaster stared vacantly at the field for a few moments after he’d finished, before he scrubbed at his face again. “I need a drink.”

Jack watched Chi as she absorbed the import of what the trait conveyed.

“And that?” she asked in a small voice, pointing a shaky finger at a slowly pulsing icon in the lower right corner of the field.

Jonkins returned with a filled mug in his hand, foam coating his mustache. he leaned in. “It looks like an item,” he said. “Not sure.” he poked the tab, but the only thing that happened was a name field materializing to overlay it. “Bounty of a Sister’s sacrifice,” he read half aloud. “Here,” he stepped aside. “You come around here and lay your finger against the image. This, at least, I understand. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s not unheard of for boons to be granted directly from Jehsha that allow the new practitioner to access their class. Boosts that can only be granted here, at the chroniclers, where his connection to the material world is strongest.”

Chi moved hesitantly around the bar, almost afraid of what she was about to encounter. As the others looked on, she reached a tentative finger out and into the pulsing image.

A golden glow began to flow from the item tab, growing into a crystalline jewel the hue of a near colorless yellow diamond, and the size of a one liter bottle, spinning slowly on its lower point. It strongly resembled the life crystal she’d seen floating above Rosaluna’s head when she’d cast Identify on her that day in Tumblebrook village..

She watched and waited, but nothing happened. It simply hung there in the air before her, spinning slowly.

“Maybe you have to physically activate it?” Jonkins suggested.

“How?” she wondered. “Don’t these things come with instructions?”

He shrugged. “It’s a gift from Jehsha,” he said. “Not an imported gewgaw from some foreign merchant.”

“Just touch it,” Jack suggested. “See what happens.”

She narrowed her eyes and spared him a glance. “What if what happens is I explode?”

He waved a hand. “You said he liked you,” he told her. “What are the odds he’d give you a trapped item?”

“That was before I spent ten minutes cursing him,” she pointed out. “Maybe he changed his mind.”

In the end, though, she couldn’t really think of any reason it might be a trap. So Chi reached out and tapped the spinning jewel with a finger tip.

The jewel hurled itself at her neck. So quickly did it move, that she hadn’t the time to register the motion, let alone mitigate it or duck. It slammed into the dull grey metal of her suppression collar hard enough to rock her back. Her hands went immediately to her throat, but Jack had already covered the distance between them and grabbed her wrists.

“No!” he ordered, muscles straining. “Something’s happening.”

“Ya think?” she demanded. “That damned—”

“Not something bad,” Jack insisted, watching intently.

The jewel had splattered itself against the grey metal and had liquified, spreading to completely engulf the collar. Then, as had Cha’s collar before, it flared bright golden, pulsing to black, first thick, then thin, large to small, as though it were fighting the jewel’s power.

It’s gyrations brought a strangled cry from Chi as she struggled against Jack’s full strength. And then this collar, too, became no more than a cloud of floating mist, disbursing upward and outward, crackling as each minute particle of its substance flared incandescent and popped out of existence.

Jehsha had indeed known what she’d do when confronted with her sister’s peril.

For the first time in three hundred plus years, Chi was completely free. Not only of the Dread Lord, but of its cursed shackle. For even on Earth, when she’d been with Jack, the collar had remained. Hidden, invisible, but ever a reminder of what she was. Of whose she was.

Tears were flowing freely down Chi’s face as she clung to Jack, her head on his shoulder as he held her close. “That jerk!” she sobbed. “He knew! He always knew! Why didn’t he just...? But, no... he had to test me, didn’t he?”

Jack listened quietly, rocking her gently as she worked this new enlightenment through her system. Test, he thought. Sure. That must have been it.

He felt her tense and leaned his head back just in time to not take a horn in the chin.

“Guildmaster Jonkins,”she addressed the man behind the bar. “I need to look through the window!”

“Chi...” Jack started, but she’d already shrugged out from between his arms.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Jonkins tried as she stormed up to the bar.

“That’s what it’s there for, isn’t it?” she demanded. “Here,” and she began unloading her bag onto the bar. A full year of life stones, gems, coinage, and whatever she’d been saving to liquidate grew into an unruly pile, some of it overreaching the edges of the bar and tumbling to the floor.

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“Chi,” Jack repeated. “That would be a horrible idea. Jehsha, mad as you might be at him, is a god. An actual god.”

“I know what he is,” Chi scrubbed the back of a sleeve across her tearstained face. “He’s a jerk! There,” she announced to Jonkins without turning to face him. “That should be more than enough to cover the fee.”

Without waiting for an answer, she stormed into the window room. Belatedly, Jonkins surged around the bar and went after her, close behind Jack, who was still trying to reason with her.

Chi brought up to an abrupt halt before the window and groped for the pin, sticking her own hands and forehead. Then she leaned in, orange-red lava eyes yet brimming.

The others had nearly caught her up when she leaned into the glass, belatedly realizing they might have been better off running. Truth was, neither of them had expected her to apply the pin to herself. Both of them froze, wondering what sort of cataclysm would ensue.

Jonkins was the first to say anything. “Never seen that before.” he still wasn’t getting used to saying that.

“Seen what?” Jack wondered. “Nothing’s happening.”

“That’s what I mean,” Jonkins shook his head. “Good, bad, or indifferent, something always happens. Never seen it just...” he waved a hand helplessly. “Just stand there.”

Indeed, Iktchi-Chi may as well have been leaning against a normal pane of glass. She pressed harder, gritting her teeth, but the window remained stubbornly black and reflectionless.

Bob sauntered in and plopped down onto his behind, tongue lolling. Mercifully, he kept his yap shut, but he spared Jack a quick shake of his fuzzy orange head. The god hadn’t appeared.

Jack heaved a long sigh of relief.

Chi stood before the window for nearly ten minutes before turning abruptly away and storming from the room. She paused only long enough to grab a handful of coins from the pile of treasure mounded on the bar before storming out into the town, morphing into her blonde adventurer form on her way out. She was out through the front door before he remembered they hadn’t remembered to check whether she could now pass through. Well, there was that question answered, at least.

Jack took half a step in her wake before he stopped short, bemused. He wasn’t her babysitter, after all. And she’d been doing pretty well for herself over the past year, hadn’t she? Certainly better than he’d been.

“The hell?” Jonkins blurted from behind him.

Jack turned and his eyes went wide. In the window, a bank of fluffy, off white clouds could be seen rolling slowly by, left to right. Just for a moment. And then the glass was, once again, black. He turned accusingly to Bob.

The corgi tilted his head. “Still not here,” he informed the human. “Which isn’t to say he’s not watching.”

* * *

“That looks good,” Jack smiled, leaning over the archaic lathe and watching the long bar of steel spin slowly about its center.

Smitan Ferreyra, one of Mokkelton’s better blacksmiths at rank thirty-two, grunted as he crept along beside it with the runout gauge Jack had shown him how to construct braced along a bar running alongside the piece, its needle resting against the metal, ensuring its true. They’d already made sure that the work piece was chucked in at ninety degrees, both vertical and horizontal. Now they were checking for sag or imperfections.

Several stands supported the spinning bar along its length, topped, each of them, with small pans in which steel balls lay in an oil bath. “Third one up two tics,” the older man ordered.

Jack crouched beside the lathe and carefully adjusted the indicated stand. “There,” Smitan said. Jack tightened the set screw. “Good,” the blacksmith nodded. “You want to check?”

“Nah,” Jack shook his head. “After you’re in, what? Fifteen barrels? I’d just embarrass myself.”

The old blacksmith chuckled, straightening up with a soft groan. “Mebbe I build the next one higher,” he put a hand to the small of his back. “So I don’t have to bend so much.”

He moved to the end of the machine where the steel bar was chucked in and laid a hand against the gem inset into its surface, refreshing its charge and keeping the rotation steady. Then back to the opposite side.

The two of them loosened the set screws of the heavy armature holding the drill bit and slid it further away from the bar so they could swap the bit out for a shorter one. This would be the first pass for this barrel; a barrel that was nearly three feet long. Even with multiple enchantments laid on the bits to ensure they’d stay both sharp enough to cut and stiff enough to bore true, they’d need five passes with increasingly longer shanks to get through to the far end.

This first bit was stepped, so as to first drill a narrow, two inch pilot hole before widening in three steps to the full bore diameter. On its own, this single tool was almost more complex than the weapon it was being used to construct.

Once more, the two of them pushed on the armature along the tracks, bringing it into contact with the end of the spinning bar, ensuring its center. There were a series of notches along the leading edge of the armature housing, and into the topmost Ferreyra slipped the knotted end of a fine piece of string. Unreeling the string, he moved to the far end of the machine where a corresponding notch on the rotor end took the far end.

First the smith, and then Jack walked the length of both bit and barrel, peering down intently, and making sure that the bore would be directly through its center. Only when they’d concurred that they’d get a good center bore did they continue around the housing utilizing the other notches. If they screwed up here, the twenty or so man hours that had led to this point, from the initial forging of the billet to the setup and turning on the lathe would be wasted, and neither wanted that. Only once they’d assured themselves of a perfect alignment did they carefully retighten the setscrews, locking the armature to the rails.

There was a gem inset into the armature on this end of the machine as well, and Ferreyra laid his hand on it to start the process going. He held it there as the armature rails began to move slowly along the tracks and into contact with the barrel. They watched until the pilot section had vanished into the bar and the first step had begun shaving steel.

“Should be fine now,” Ferreyra nodded. “Bucket full?”

Jack checked the bucket set on a platform atop the armature, whose job it was to dribble oil down a passageway and onto the bit, lubricating and cooling it as it dug. “Half,” he said.

“That’s plenty,” the smith decided. “Enough for this one and the next.”

It had taken Jack weeks, even with Ferreyra’s aid, to work out how to proceed with what he wanted to accomplish. Things here worked considerably differently than they did on Earth. Some things he’d never expected to find were commonplace. The lathe, for instance. Some, that he’d assumed out of hand he’d find easily, like pattern welding, seemed completely unknown. Magic, and its ancillary skills had allowed the bypassing of a number of steps he’d considered basic.

They were sitting around a table out front in the sunshine with papers scattered around beneath various tools and scraps to keep them stationary. Jack was explaining, or trying to explain, an action. Not for the current batch, as they already had a functioning prototype, but for what he hoped they could move on to once they’d manufactured fifty or so of those they’d already tooled up for.

He still had to pay a visit to the cabinetmaker and alchemist once he’d finished here. And maybe a food stall, if he could remember.

He looked up to see Chi standing there, looking calmer than the last time he’d seen her.

“Oh,” he said. “Uhm, Smitan? May I introduce Ik—” Chi frowned and gave her head a quick shake. “Chi,” she finished for him. “Just call me Chi.”

“Right,” Jack nodded. “Chi? Smitan Ferreyra, one of Mokkelton’s finest blacksmiths, and her only riflesmith.”

“Ah, no,” Smitan shook his head brusquely.” I would not call myself a smith of rifles,” he waved his hands before him. “Not yet, at the least. Mebbe a year from now. Mebbe two, when I start building my own designs.”

Chi smiled and nodded. “Jack?” she turned to him. “Might I have a moment?”

Jack nodded and excused himself. “We’ll continue this later, Smitan, yeah? Won’t need to worry about any of it for a couple of weeks anyway.”

Ferreyra waved and started gathering up the piles of drawings and notes while Jack and Chi moved off.