The World Walkers: Quiar: The Case of the Counterfeit Enchantments (part 9, 110th continuation)

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Part 9, 109th continuation

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“Not everyone would agree,” Lucille said. She knew there was a growing number of people who believed that she shouldn’t be in Seahorse Port or taking part on a Quiaran investigation, because she was a Council Moonjumper. They hadn’t met her, but they didn’t trust her due to what she was, and it was something that was beginning to worry her. “That’s the problem with what I am. Just because you’ve accepted me it doesn’t meant that everyone will and there will come a time when we’ll need to deal with that. Right now they’re enough of a minority not to affect things too badly, but with all the work I’ve done in the market I can’t help thinking what might happen there if they do decide that I’ve had too much of an influence there.” She sighed. “Sometimes I can’t help wondering if I should be following the first rule better. Then I wouldn’t be in this position and I wouldn’t have to think about what sort of damage my help might be doing.”

“Without your help I doubt the market would still be open,” Sal replied, shaking his head. “I understand why you’re worried, Lucille, because I’ve heard some interesting rumours about you and the Council, but I think it’s something we will be able to deal with. I’m sure it’s not unusual for there to be a vocal minority against you being on any of the worlds you visit.” Nodding, Lucille bit her lip, as she knew how dangerous those vocal minorities could be. “Hereward, the moment he heard about them, started taking names and keeping an eye on how often they met. We take these things seriously, especially when they might harm someone who has done us so much good, so I promise you that if it become more than a minority or they plan on doing something against you we will know in advance and we will be able to stop them. You chose to help us. From someone in a position as difficult as yours that does mean a lot.”

“How can you make that promise?” Bertram sounded curious. “Do you have someone within that vocal minority?”
“It’s one of the first things we did, Bertram, because we take the safety of our Moonjumper seriously.” Sal smiled. “Unlike the counterfeiters it’s an easy enough process. My brother was one of the volunteers and I get regular amused updates about what his group is talking about – they really do believe that the counterfeiters were put here by the Council in order to rid themselves of the people of Quiar.”

“That’s illogical.” Lucille sighed. “If the Council were going to attempt to rid themselves of a race, or more, of people the last thing they would do is use charms, because they’re too difficult to keep track of. One could easily go from here to a world that the Council wouldn’t have any problems with and in the end it would be traced back to whoever made it. When that happened…” She shrugged. “No one trusts the Council as it is. Finding out that they did something like that would bring an end to it and Kester wouldn’t want them to happen. The fae, on the other hand, would be happy to rid themselves of the Council and the races of Quiar, but I doubt they would be able to convince someone here to help them do that.”

“You can’t know for certain that the true leader of the counterfeit ring is Quiaran.”

“No, we can’t, but it’s unlikely that they aren’t. They’re going to have started off with a small group who all believed in the same thing they did, which, most likely, has something to do with money. Sometimes I can’t help wondering if the Web would be better without it and yet I understand why most of the races thought it was the best option if they were going to be able to trade with someone from another world. Anyway I think for that to have happened they must have been friends for a long time, otherwise this would never have grown the way it did, and now they have more control over Quiar than anyone else, thanks to the ‘hard work’ they’ve done. I doubt someone from another world could have inspired the sort of loyalty that would have been needed for them to have started all this off, although I do admit I might be wrong about that. People have managed to live on other worlds by hiding what they look like using a charm.

“That actually isn’t unusual for Quiaran Moonjumpers to do, so it’s not obvious what they are, because the only way many of you can leave this world is by being a natural. Many of the races here can’t have the tattoos and creating a charm that will take you from one world to another is difficult. Often you’ll find that they’ll take you to the world they want you to go to rather than the world you were aiming to visit. Even though there are times when the doors might do the same things it’s a much more regular occurrence with those sorts of charms, so it isn’t something I would suggest that anyone uses, although there are times when you might have no other choice.”

“No other choice?” Sal asked.

“I know Moonjumpers who’ve found themselves in difficult positions. Like every other Council trained Moonjumper I have a charm myself, which is meant to take me back to Athare if anything happens that I can’t deal with, like an attack, but almost everyone who’s one of them has ended up somewhere that isn’t Athare. I’ve pretty much decided that I’m not going to use mine unless I really do have to, because it’s not unusual for us to get lost.”

“Moonjumpers get lost?” Durai laughed. “Aren’t you supposed to know everything about all of the worlds? You’re not supposed to be able to get lost.”

“Unfortunately the Council doesn’t know anywhere near as much as it needs to about the worlds, which means that we can’t know it either, without spending hours reading the journals that the creators left behind. It doesn’t help that Emrys took the majority of his with him, which hold the secrets to the many Gaeloms and the other worlds he created, including Quiar, probably because he didn’t want them to fall into the wrong hands. The fae who were a part of this knew it was the only chance they’d ever have to do something like this, so they made the most of it. Making the most of it meant experimenting as much as they could.” Lucille brushed her hand through her hair as she thought about the choices she might have made if she was in that position and she had a feeling she’d probably do the same thing. “That’s why we have the races we do.

“Of course part of the reason they were experimenting was to ensure their own survival.” She glanced over at Meriwether. “We’ve never been though anything like that, so we can’t know what it was like to them, and it’s easy enough for us to call them selfish for the decisions that they made. However I believe we would all do the same thing, if we could. We would want to survive after losing the people that we cared about, we would want to feel safe and feel that our children would be safe too, and we would do everything we could to make certain that it happened, even though I think we all live to fool ourselves that we’d be better people.”

“Then the fae decided that what we were doing was dangerous too.” Meriwether sighed. “We couldn’t win. They wanted us to ensure their survival, but they didn’t like the way we were going about it. Putting so many races on over thirty worlds… I can understand why they were worried. It was just that they’d asked us to do the job and then didn’t listen to us when we explained why we had to do the job the way we were. Maybe, if they had, they would have been able to accept the choices we were making were the best ones we could, although I don’t think we ever would have told them that Athare was helping us. Learning that the worlds were sentient… I have this feeling that they would have left Athare behind and found themselves somewhere else. We would have stayed.”

“Would that have been better for the Web?” Durai looked between Lucille and Meriwether. “I know the choices that they made have often been seen as mistakes, but were they points in time that had to happen?”

“Some of them were.” Lucille smiled at Durai. “Others of them weren’t. The choice the fae made to rid the Web of the natural Moonjumpers was a fixed point, even though I think all the worlds wished it wasn’t. Had it not been the fae something else would have happened, because it had to happen, and, honestly, at least this way it meant they thought about how they could make certain there were still Moonjumpers. Without that the Web wouldn’t be the place it is now.”

Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.

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