“Associate,” squeaked Celeste, recognizing the look Geezer had that said he would guess at their relationship and embarrass all of them with what he assumed. She quickly explained to Reeve that Geezer was the mage who identified the apotrope.
“Right, well, Holy Man, your associate Midnight here inspired a reading frenzy that I only just finished up a few hours ago when Baylen came knocking with the new globes.”
“Midnight?” She blinked, then shook her head—he had said he was bad with names. “You haven’t slept since we met?”
“Not a wink. It’s a sieve.”
Celeste and Reeve traded quick glances, and he looked as confused as she felt, which was a small relief. “What is?”
“The apotrope’s previous tenant!” Geezer looked absolutely thrilled.
“There was a colander in that jar?” asked Reeve.
“No, anarcanesieve,” said Geezer as he pulled out a scroll of parchment and a reed from pockets hidden in his scarlet robes. The scroll unraveled itself all the way to the ground, already covered in scribbles and calculations, but he found a blank spot and pushed it up against Reeve’s chest, using him as a surface to draw. “They look a bit like that,”—that being an amorphous shape that really told one nothing—“Sieves aren’t commonly used nowadays, they can be quite dangerous since they’re rather chaotic, but a couple centuries ago they were one of the core ways non-arcane folk got by. A gift from the elves long, long ago. There were three kinds, fire ones, water ones, and earth ones, and they were even color-coded.” He gave Reeve’s surcoat a tap with his reed. “Very cute, I imagine!”
Cutewas not how Celeste would have described the entity that had caused so many things to shatter and had spoken to her so darkly.
“Oh, yeah, I’ve seen one of those,” said Reeve, staring down at his chest and the scribble Geezer had made.
Celeste eyed him. “You have?”
“Last night. The fire in the f—”
“Forgive me, Geezer,” Celeste shouted, interrupting Reeve, “but I’m not so sure you’re right. The thing from the apotrope didn’t look much like that.”
“Ah, yes, your apotrope—now, that’s where it getsinteresting!”
She was terribly afraid he was going to say that.
He rolled up the parchment with a quickness, words tumbling out even quicker. “So, sieves naturally pull the arcana out of the air—because magic’s all around us, all the time, in teeny, tiny, itty bitty, unseeable pieces—and they distill that magic into its most potent, usable parts. It’s like what a mage does, only with a lot less direction and thought because sieves don’t really direct or think, they just gobble, expel, and move on. There’s actually a theory that mages have sieves inside them, which I find interminably fascinating—do we absorb this sieve or are we born with it? Does every creature have one lying dormant inside of them, and if so, how can they be tapped into?”
“Maybe they’re granted to us by the gods?” The holy knight’s eyes went wide.
“Maybe!” Geezer whacked Reeve with the rolled-up parchment to absolutely zero effect. “And how are there some existing outside of us? Can we produce more? Contain multiple?”
As Geezer rattled off questions and Reeve nodded with wide, unblinking eyes, Celeste listened to them theoretically wander further from the topic at hand. Her fingers tightened on her bag, the jar inside. “You said the apotrope was interesting?” she cut in.
“The apotrope! Yes! So, the way these lamps burst is classic out-of-control sieve behavior—one travels about thoughtlessly, finds a concentrated amount of arcana, absorbs it, and then tries to distill it until the very plane around it shatters. If the thing that came out of your apotrope is the thing that’s giving us all this grief, then I can only think that thing is indeed a sieve, and stopping a sieve is rather simple: one can just trap them in any old jar meant for containing arcana until they calm down.Unlessthat sieve is so advanced that it could only be contained by a much greater power.”
“Advanced?” The word tasted anxious on her tongue.
Geezer turned from them and began toward town. “Yes. You see, most sieves have just one function, and they take an awful lot of maintenance, hence why we just don’t use them anymore. However, I did find writings that suggested sieves could absorb one another and becomemore. I stumbled upon a theory that if you had one that had been fed properly on other sieves, that you could run an entire household, a palace, a city even, on asinglesieve just filtering in all of the chaotic arcana around it and producing clean water, and perfect crops, and lighting that comes on when one claps their hands.”
They were hurrying after him, deeper into the village, and Celeste wished he would keep his voice down.
“But plenty of mages can make fire with a snap,” said Reeve.
“Sure, mages can, but what about other folk? Arcane stones eventually lose their glow, and they’re expensive to begin with. We’re lucky that Baylen has a supplier who owed him a favor for these things.” Geezer gestured to one of the new lamps as he passed. “But there’s more. You see, in all the elven writings about wild sieves, they’re incredibly simple things. I wouldn’t even call them creatures, really—they don’t think, they just do—but the theory about combining sieves goes on to say that if a fourth kind of sieve could be found, or made, that it could perhaps manage itself.”
Celeste groaned. “You mean, like, it would come to life?”
“Sieves are alive, they’re just not as self-aware as me or you, but if they could be? Oh, I suppose it’s only a theory, but that apotrope of yours was crafted so meticulously, and the Ouranic on it translates to,for the siphon, which is just another word for sieve, after all. So perhaps our menaceismore than just an unthinking, unspeaking magic-gobbler. Perhaps it indeed was one of these advanced sieves, one that ate others of its kind and required a much more advanced vessel to be contained.”
“Oh, it can speak and definitely think,” said Reeve. “And that’s its name, isn’t it? Syphon?”
Geezer came to a halt, his pale eyes shining. “Itspeaks?”
They were both staring at Celeste, and though she didn’t want to at all, she nodded.
