Amily became the Viper’s secret blade. She didn’t mind killing and he always gave such nice rewards when she took care of an issue. It led her down a Path that wasn’t the one she’d intended to take, but she was content with it.

Serenity could remember none of the killings. He didn’t even remember the Path. What he did remember was little more than a sketch of a life with a great number of details missing. Amily must never have known why they came to Asihanya; all she knew was that the Viper asked her to climb in a flyer and throw spell-balls at whatever targets he selected. They’d assumed it would help her Path, whatever it was, but it didn’t. Amily knew they’d come to Asihanya with others, but the Viper gave her everything she needed; she didn’t care about them.

If Amily had killed anyone on Asihanya other than the killing Serenity witnessed, he didn’t remember it. Her task was to keep her head down and act like an ordinary person. Other than her official role as a bomber, Amily did help the Viper with one task when they set up the base: he needed someone to carry things when he warded the handful of safe rooms.

The Viper clearly didn’t have the skill to ward the rooms himself; Serenity could tell that he used a premade warding kit for each room. That wasn’t really that unusual; while a proper spellcaster’s ward was better, the person who created a ward could bypass it. If you didn’t have a spellcaster you trusted that much, or simply didn’t have anyone who could cast wards available, a premade kit was your only option. The nicest thing about it was that there was effectively no chance that the Viper would be able to gather any information at all from the ward Serenity broke.

While he warded the rooms, the Viper talked about what he was going to use them for. Those were by far the clearest and most detailed memories Serenity had from Amily; it was clear he’d decided those memories were the most important when he saw her life before her soul passed on. Given what little he remembered of Amily’s life, Serenity was glad those were the moments that he needed. They weren’t that bad.

The first room to be warded was the one in the Viper’s bedroom, his personal study. He didn’t mention the crystal ball to Amily, but it made sense to have a communication device in a place only the Viper could access. Serenity didn’t know why he thought the Viper was paranoid, but he was confident that the man was.

The word Amily would have used was “careful”. Serenity could remember that, even if he didn’t remember the interactions that led to the judgment.

After that, it was the pair of rooms Serenity thought of as “working rooms”. One was the “mages’ room” where they assembled the spell-balls to be thrown from the biplanes.

The other was the “planning room”. It was the central hub for the base; everything the Viper considered important had to be approved by someone in the planning room. Serenity had assumed it was more of an operations room, but as far as he could tell from Amily’s memories, a lot of things that Serenity had assumed the Viper wouldn’t delegate were actually handled by his staff in the planning room, such as changes to their target selection.

Amily didn’t care about the mages’ room as long as she had enough spell-balls. She cared a little more about the planning room, since she sometimes had to go there to describe what she’d seen on a flight. Most of the time, she was debriefed in a small unwarded room near the hangar, but sometimes that was followed by a visit to the planning room.

The room the Viper warded after that was the commander’s room. It was the one Serenity had identified as the main working room for the Viper. Amily had been in the room several times after it was warded; Serenity didn’t remember why, so it must not be relevant, but he did have a number of views of the room. It was completely unlike the commander’s study.

Specifically, it wasn’t a working room at all. It reminded Serenity of Lykandaeon’s room in his palace; while there was no indoor water feature, it was similarly opulent. In fact, it was far more opulent than the Viper’s bedroom. Serenity wasn’t sure what the room was for, but there was no sign of another communication device and Amily didn’t know of any reason to worry about the room.

That left the last two rooms, one small and not near anything important, the other large and near the aircraft hangar. The explanation the Viper gave for those two rooms when he warded them was the reason Amily was running scared when Serenity encountered her.

They were the Viper’s fallback plan.

“Why is this one different from the others?” Amily couldn’t resist asking. The other rooms were simple to ward; a patterned cloth on the floor, some salt, a few candles and the Viper took care of the rest. For this one, they’d started with moving some heavy things into the room in boxes. They had co carefully fit all of the heavy boxes within spaces edged with chalk … Amily supposed she’d call them circles, even though they really weren’t.

Once the weight was in the room, the Viper opened one of the boxes. It held a bunch of flexible wooden rods, made so that they could interlock with each other to form a large circle. The room was bigger than that, so it was more like a rounded square, but it was definitely strange.

Viper chuckled and grinned, showing his teeth. “This room and the next one are the important ones. They’re the ones that will save my life if everything else goes wrong.” He paused, then glanced at Amily. “Yours, too, if you play your cards right.”

That made sense; Amily was valuable to the Viper. That was why he kept her around, after all. “Oh? What do I need to do?”

The Viper didn’t seem to be paying attention to Amily as he walked around the flattened ring of connected wood pieces. “Replace this one; it has a fracture, and that’ll make a weak point in the protection. As for what you do, you need to have a heart.”

Amily brought over a replacement rod and gave the Viper a puzzled look. His instructions weren’t usually pointless, but that one didn’t make sense. “I have a heart,” she grumbled. “It’s right here.” She tapped her chest over her heart.

Amily sighed when the Viper laughed. He liked to baffle people, he just didn’t usually do it to her, because he knew she’d take him literally. It was her best protection against his “humor”.

“If you only have one, what I’m putting in here will kill you if I trigger it,” the Viper partially explained. “You need one for it to take or it’ll take the one in your chest. The more magical your spare heart is, the better; it’ll take one per living person. It’s supposed to prefer taking hearts that won’t kill, but it also prefers strong magic, so the more magical the heart you have is, the less likely it is to take yours.”

A phrase ran through Amily’s head: the thing to remember about vipers is that they are venomous. She didn’t dare to say it out loud, but she did need to remember it. He wasn’t safe, even if he valued her; he’d abandon her if it saved him. “Huh,” Amily grunted. “I’ll remember that. The next step is the cloth, right?”

The Viper shook his head. “This one’s metal. Silver, to carry the magic. Prevents wrinkles that can create openings and makes the spell stronger. The ward has to let the spell in the room out, after all, so they’re made together.” He seemed to think for a moment before he said more. “Do try to protect yourself if it comes to it; I’d hate to have to replace you. A Hollow One wouldn’t have your skills.”

Amily nodded. She might not know what a Hollow One was, but it sounded like it was the result of the heart-stealing spell. It also sounded like it might be undead, if it was made from her dead body; it wouldn’t be her, because she was dead, and that was not something she wanted.

The silver was surprisingly thick. It looked more or less like a bunch of squares with jagged edges, except that every square had both etchings and holes cut out of it like lacework. It was a giant puzzle that needed to be assembled, with the only clear features being the smooth edges on the outside of the puzzle and around the spots the Viper used to hold the supplies. It was clear that the reason he’d picked those spots was because they should be open spots in the silver floor.

It took hours to put together. The speed wasn’t helped by the fact that several of the boxes had to be moved for everything to fit; the Viper hadn’t quite gotten all of the positioning right when he drew it out in chalk. By the time they finished with that step, Amily was exhausted both physically from moving the heavy tiles of metal around and mentally from the detailed effort of figuring out which pieces actually fit together.

The next step was salt. This time, it was actually salt; it just wasn’t common salt, ground to a powder then spread in a sparse line in front of each door or window. No, this was fist-sized chunks of a yellow-orange salt that Amily recognized from some of the stores she’d visited over the years. Each of those chunks cost Etherium, and not just one!

The yellow-orange salt rook up most of the space in the boxes they’d brought into the room; no wonder they were heavy. It was placed around the entire room so that each chunk touched the ones on either side of them. The remaining chunks were placed in certain depressions; Amily didn’t know why they were chosen, but as long as the Viper took care of it, she didn’t have to know.

There was salt residue in each of the boxes that the Viper had Amily gather together; when she was done, he put individual pinches in most of the remaining cutouts.

The last box held candles and candlesticks. Like the other supplies, this was over the top compared to the previous ward. Amily just followed the Viper’s instructions on where to set things up; she didn’t care about magic. It wasn’t like she needed it.

Once they were done, the Viper sent Amily out of the room with instructions for where to get the stuff for the last room. It was smaller than any of the previous warded rooms, but it used essentially the same setup as the large room. The only difference was that the Viper had her cover the ceiling and walls with deep purple cloth.

Apparently, the cloth made enough of a difference that this would be the Viper’s way out if the Hollow Ones weren’t enough. His instructions to her were to make sure she had a heart before she came to the exit room; it wouldn’t protect her from becoming Hollow.

Lillene

The simplest way to make a warding kit is to put the pieces of a ritual in a box with instructions. The ritual actually creates the ward.