There was one place where there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of magical ley lines that gathered and writhed like snakes. It was destiny that this should be the greatest city ever built: Frostford.

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 2 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-2

Transcript

According to Myer’s tracking spell, there were now nine Stepwises – eight of them outside of his control. Now it was time to panic.

Myer tried to slow his breathing and thought of his lesson on Runaway Magic. How could he not think of it? It was the highlight of every Ministry student’s first year of study. The magister who taught the course showed them how a magic spell that simply doubled objects would lead to disaster. He started with a copper coin and kept doubling it with a simple incantation. The single coin became two coins, then four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and by the tenth doubling the magister showered the podium in copper and told the students that there were now over a thousand coins…before he made all but one of them disappear with a flourish.

Any magic that was not properly cast could lead to runaway magic. There were rumours that this was one of the reasons the Ministry had been formed in the first place, but the magister would neither confirm nor deny this. He had scraped the chalk across the large slate at the front of the class, then tapped each syllable, emphasizing the word: “Cat-tas-stro-phe!”

Myer re-read the spell he’d written to conjure the first daemon. There were no flaws that he could see. No, Stepwise had been copied by human means, at least at first.

He bit his lip. “Stepwise, double yourself,” he said with some dread.

Stepwise stretched and split down the middle. Now there were two Stepwises in front of him. Eleven red spots on the line symbol. Cat-tas-stro-phe.

He could duplicate enough Stepwises to catch the other Stepwises now, but since at least one other person knew how to duplicate the rogue daemons, there was no stopping them.

And each daemon used a tiny bit of manna…unnoticeable at first, but once it became a case of Runaway Magic, the manna would start adding up.

Myer was a clever young man. He often had many clever ideas and brought these clever ideas to Alastair or the lower magisters. This time, he felt that the cleverest thing he could do was to…say nothing.

It would have been simple to deconstruct the Stepwises. All Myer needed to do to make them disappear was to reverse the spell inscribed on the sheet of parchment he now kept locked in the bottom drawer of his chest of drawers. He could even tear the parchment into pieces, if he did not mind the thought of every Stepwise suddenly deconstructing violently.

But the moment Myer broke the spell, all of the accumulated manna that animated the daemons would instantly flow back into the manna reservoir at the end of the street, and from there into the neighborhood’s ley line. The Ministry would not fail to notice an *increase* in the supply of manna…especially when a young, clever minister resided only a short walk away.

The next morning Myer noted with a dull resignation that there were fourteen red dots on the symbol. On his walk to the Ministry, he spotted at least two Stepwises flitting about the buildings above him: one had a hammer in its mouth, and the other carried an apple.

If Alastair suspected anything, he remained mute. Sueanna claimed to be busy with solstice preparations. Even Getty was busy with what he called “temple business.”

Raven, Myer noticed, had started to make elementary mistakes in the work room: using agate instead of tourmaline, trying to undo a spell by drawing a sigil in a clockwise rather than counter clockwise direction, even cracking her jade wand on the edge of her table as she attempted a particularly difficult incantation. She seemed newly preoccupied. Or, Myer thought, a bit ashamed, she had been preoccupied for a while and he had only now started to notice.

Raven usually stole away every midday on their break, leaving Alastair and Myer to eat hand meals and commiserate. On one break, Myer followed Raven at a distance, and saw her enter the narrow winding staircases that flanked the tower. When he stepped into the staircase, he saw her some flights above, huffing and puffing her way up. Then she suddenly reversed direction and came towards him.

She must have seen him, and Myer was trying to determine an appropriate excuse when Raven came upon him and expressed surprised. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“The…same as you,” Myer said, tentatively.

“I take exercise in these stairs every midday,” Raven said. “You are free to join me.” Then she turned from him and started back up the stairs.

Myer was not much for exercise aside from the flight of stairs he had to climb to his lodging every night, so he struggled to keep pace with Raven. They climbed stairs in silence broken only by his wheezing. When they neared the top of the Ministry building, Myer asked her: “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Raven said, turning again down the stairs. “Completely fine.” She said this in the tone of one who is not at all fine.

A minute later, Myer tried to bring the conversation back to life by saying, “I’m looking forward to the winter solstice. Are you?”

Raven did not reply directly. Instead, she asked, “Will you spend it with your parents?” Myer had never discussed his parents with her, but he still wore the family emblem around his neck. Despite his distance from them, he was proud of the family history of spell work and service.

“We no longer speak,” Myer breathed. The stairs were now causing his legs and lungs some distress. “I left them a long time ago.”

“I never knew my parents,” she said, picking up her pace and marching ahead of him. “I am sure you had your reasons, but I would gladly spend solstice with mine every year.”

Myer knew little of Raven, although they had worked side by side for two years. She was from a village in the east; she ate spicy food that smelled of cumin; and she sketched funny, distorted faces of himself and Alastair when she thought they were not looking. Had he known she missed her parents, he never would have spoken in so cavalier a fashion –

But of course she missed them, he thought as they came to a final stop at the bottom of the stairs. And as he heaved and gasped for breath, Myer compared her to Getty, the foundling.

Getty was happy to be apart from his parents: the temple elders were his parents now. But Raven – he had seen her looking unhappily at the higher-up magisters during Ministry celebrations. She had no surrogate parents among them. He had never heard her speak of friends, or other family. If anyone lived in shadows, it was her.

Everyone, it seemed, was in search of something they did not – or could not – possess.

The following morning, Myer could not find his ebony staff again, and as he was running late, he asked one of his Stepwises to locate it.

He felt no guilt. The miniscule amount of manna this would use would go unnoticed among the total amount used by all Stepwises. And the daemon was so helpful!

A Stepwise fetched him some freshwater from a nearby pond to aid in the Ministry work he brought home. A Stepwise quenched the light after Myer had gone to bed. A Stepwise even lit his way to the chamber pot in the middle of the night.

What else could a Stepwise do? Myer spent a tipsy evening testing his daemons with queries. A Stepwise could predict the weather, with some degree of success – about the same success as any lay prognosticator. A Stepwise could determine the best path to take to reach the archives and warn if a horse-drawn barrow had upended and blocked the way. What else?

The next night, Sueanna came up with some solstice pie of her own, claiming that Myer must be hungry. How had she known his pantry was bare? Could a Stepwise have…told her?

Myer cringed and asked: “Stepwise, how much food is there in Sueanna’s pantry?” And Stepwise told him.

Myer had always slept well, but now he stayed awake most nights. Not from the worry that consumed him – he had resigned himself to that – but to the fighting and shouts that started as a murmur and rose to a din each night as the days until the winter solstice ticked down.

“I know you were with that woman!” a man yelled to his partner from across the way. “You didn’t go to work today; you went to the tavern!” a woman scolded her partner. “You have been taking a potion, so you need not conceive!” a husband sobbed to his wife.

Every question had an answer, and every Stepwise could find out any reasonably-accessible information, even if it would normally remain a secret. The red dots multiplied along the line on the tracking parchment.

The saga of Stepwise took some unusual turns. On a day when he felt little like cooking, Myer went by Ogden the street vendor’s stall to pick up some rabbit-on-a-stick, but the old man was under a cloud.

Literally: Several Stepwises floated in the air above his stall, each holding a banner reading: “Terrible food,” “Bad service,” “Don’t eat here,” and so on. They were just high enough to be out of reach, but low enough that anyone in the street could see them.

Ogde