Every world in this realm is crisscrossed by ley lines; filaments of earth energy that connect places of worship, monuments, and historical sites. You have passed through innumerable ley lines in your life: think of any desolate place you have been where the hair on the back of your neck stood up for no reason you could fathom...

Meet Myer, an absentminded young mage who works for the Ministry in Frostford. Now meet Myer's helping hand: Stepwise, the daemon he creates so that he can find the things he misplaces. Myer is about to discover that giving humanity the ability to search for anything, at any time, can lead to catastrophe.

Part 1 of 2.

Written by: Jonathan Cohen

Narrated by: Trevor Schechter

A Faustian Nonsense production.

To read the full transcript of this episode, go to https://thelavendertavern.captivate.fm/episode/myers-helping-hand-part-1

Transcript

Every world in this realm is crisscrossed by ley lines; filaments of earth energy that connect places of worship, monuments, and historical sites. You have passed through innumerable ley lines in your life: think of any desolate place you have been where the hair on the back of your neck stood up for no reason you could fathom.

The more ley lines that intersect in an area, the more magically powerful that area is. Some unfortunate towns only have a single ley line passing through – barely enough to allow a local mystic to dowse for water. Other towns are gifted with an abundance of ley lines.

And of course, once the men and women of this world understood ley lines and how they could work to their advantage, they built towns and villages at the great crossroads of these lines. A mage might wander an unspoiled land, with enchanted spectacles on his nose, until he found a spot that burned with a grid of reddish-gold ley lines arcing across each other. Then he would send back word to those who had sponsored his expedition: here shall be a great city.

There was one place where there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of ley lines that gathered and writhed like snakes. It was destiny that this should be the greatest city ever built. Those of temperaments sensitive to magic had already settled it as a village, but with the ley lines to power their efforts, it grew into a city of spires and minarets, columns and porticos. Frostford: The largest city in the known world.

One cannot simply dip a wand or a staff into a ley line and extract the magic needed for a spell or incantation; it takes training and skill to handle the ley lines. It takes a Minister.

And so, it came to pass, in a section of Frostford that was neither too poor nor too wealthy, that a young junior minister named Myer was late for his work.

Myer was no more than twenty, with a shock of black wavy hair that never quite stayed where it should. He had hazel eyes and the babyish curious face of a child, and at this moment he stood among a pile of his clothes, looking for his staff.

He could summon the staff, of course; this was a trifling cantrip for any minister. But Myer had nearly expended his allotment of magic for the thirty-days, and he did not want the Ministry to sanction him.

Thomas would know where the staff was. But Thomas was not here, Myer thought.

The staff was ebony. Why had he chosen ebony? With his black robes and furniture of dark wood, and black walls, the staff was nearly impossible to find. The only spot of light in his chambers was –

And here he turned to his cat, Bedlam. Bedlam was officially a familiar, as far as the Ministry knew, but the luminous white cat with light green eyes, pink nose and ears spent his time sleeping or looking on with disdain. As Myer now saw, the cat had his paws wrapped around the ebony staff.

“Give that to me!” Myer said, leaping for the cat. In a flash, Bedlam picked up the staff in his mouth and dropped it at Myer’s feet.

“Now,” Myer sighed. “Now you provide me with it after an hour of searching.”

Bedlam looked up with innocent eyes and began to lick his paw. There would be no useful argument with a cat, Myer thought, hurrying from the house with his staff tucked in his belt. Arguments were for his employer.

Myer was late to the Ministry, the largest building in the city, at the center of all traffic and all commerce, with multiple spires that soared into the sky. He ducked his head and rushed past the rows of desks where men and women copied papers and scrolls by hand.

The Ministry was arranged in the manner of the heavens: the higher a room was to the building’s top, the more important it was. Myer’s work room was in the basement, next to a wall that dripped water and the Scrap Heap.

His stomach spoke to him: Thomas had not made him a morning meal to take to work. He pushed the thought aside and entered the work room.

There stood his two collaborators: Raven, a short, stout woman with red hair and green lip tint, gesturing angrily with a sheaf of papers. And Alastair, the subject of her wrath, tall and lean and fidgety, with cropped brown hair, caramel skin and a finicky mustache. They were the least of the Ministry, and it made them angry…even if the anger ended up directed at each other.

“I do not want to make copies of these papers,” Raven said, slamming them onto a table. “I have written them and that should be enough.”

Alastair had the bored look of the magister. Which was only fair, as he had once been a magister before being demoted. “All requests for supplies must be presented with three copies to the Supply Magister.” He saw Myer come in and welcomed him to his cause. “What say you, junior minister?”

Myer sat on his wooden stool and started to lay out his work: leather blotter, rune blocks and ink, staff holder, bottles and papers of his own. The Ministry was said to produce all of the magic and the motive energy that drove Frostford, but it occurred to Myer often that their primary output must surely be papers. “I say that there should be a magical way to duplicate such papers,” Myer said, sliding into the groove of a discussion they had had many times. “Hand copying always leads to the introduction of errors into a work.”

Raven pursed her green lips at Alastair, who simply shook his head. “Not allowed,” Alastair told Myer. “It simply is not allowed.”

Myer did not tell Alastair that taking gold from the Ministry coffers was not allowed; this is what had led Alastair to leave his exalted position as magister and come to work in the basement. “There are some Ministry rules which should be broken,” he said instead. The former magister could not argue with that.

Raven nodded. “I stand with Myer,” she said. “If we were free of these papers, we could spend our time serving the public.”

Alastair wiggled his mustache at her. “How have you served the public today?”

“Once I have copied these papers,” she replied, “I shall send manna along the Ardium sector ley line to power their water wheel.”

“They have been without water for some time,” Myer pointed out.

“Ardium,” Alastair also pointed out, “pays the least taxation of all of the sectors in Frostford. They have the lowest average income in the city. It stands to reason that they may wait some time longer.” He put down his own sheaf of papers on top of Raven’s. “Bix sector is planning a harvest merchant festival for next week.”

“Bix has had three festivals in the last month,” Raven protested, and she and Alastair were off again. Myer bent his head of unruly hair to his own work and paid them no mind. He too would spend much of his day writing papers, copying papers, and ferrying papers upstairs to those who read the papers, stored the papers, and no doubt burned the papers.

The next item he needed was his peridot stone, but where was it? How could he infuse the vitality glyphs for the city gardens without the peridot stone?

Thomas would have told him he was absent-minded, that he could only keep his head by virtue of having a scarf around his neck. But everyone lost things at one time or another, Myer thought. It was not his fault that the things he owned were simply easier to lose.

There had to be a solution.

That night, in his quiet and echoing chambers, Myer put a pot of soup on the hearth for dinner and thought about the ebony staff, and the peridot stone, and all of the other things he had misplaced of late. A spell to retrieve them would not suffice: that type of ritual would draw enough manna from the ley lines to bring attention to him.

He scratched a purring Bedlam behind the ears and thought of the Scrap Heap. The Scrap Heap was a room next to his work room where the bits and scraps of magical materials ended up after the materials themselves had been consumed: fragments of milky opals, strips of fairy cloth, splinters and shards of warm golden amber.

Nobody was supposed to remove anything from the Scrap Heap without signing the correct papers. But six months earlier, Warren, the old man who had overseen the Scrap Heap had found wine more to his liking than papers, and the ministers were told to manage the access to the Scrap Heap themselves – “to economize on behalf of the Ministry,” as the paper announcing the change had read.

It was a temptation. Perhaps not a temptation for the average minister, but Myer was not average. He lay alone in the large bedding that night, thinking and scheming.

He needn’t have schemed. Myer discovered that he could have pulled a barrow into the Scrap Heap room and taken anything he wished. Even then, he was sure to rearrange the piles of materials just so, to cover what he had taken, and to scrawl illegible entries in the Scrap Heap’s ledger book.

If Alastair or Raven noticed that his minister robes b