The train clattered straight through a crossover junction as my mind frantically sorted through new connections and horrified realisations. Mary was Skids. Skids was Mary. Mary was a mage. Skids was a mage, that mage, the mage responsible for last night's trouble. I had given directions to the mage responsible. I was responsible.
I slumped down further into a miserable pile of crouching humanity. As if that wasn't enough, my legal wits chose that moment to return from their unexplained absence. I could remember and recite every law I had broken, every statute I had contravened, and every counter-civil act I had made myself an accomplice to. That was bad enough, but my crisp memories of the Codex of Purity and attendant clerical works included the corresponding punishments. Obviously, I had earned the same fate as a mage, but the scale of my transgressions would require financial reparations from my family as well. If the full facts were known to a clerical court, that was.
Only Skids and I knew about our conversation at the herb garden. If no one else found out, my family would not have to suffer for my mistake. They did not deserve that. But the law said otherwise, and who was I to question it?
But who was I to jump onto this train? Everything else I had done wrong had been unwitting. This, I had done on purpose.
I uncurled myself a little and looked up to the sky, half expecting the Great Maker's holy messengers to swoop down out of the clouds and whisk me away for my crime. For intentionally abandoning my people, for fleeing my fate in quarantine and putting my trust in our enemy. And for allowing that enemy to escape.
Some very dark thoughts crossed my mind, involving one of both of us falling off the back of the carriage.
"You alright?" the mage asked me.
I sat up straight, and shrugged. "Not really."
"Sorry, I didn't really think through how you might react to being rescued."
"Um." I still had no idea what to say to that.
"I could start by doing something for your injury, if that helps."
Right, my injury. The only real punishment I had received for my wrongdoing. Other than being on top of this train, talking with a dangerous enemy, moving further from home by the minute. "Yes, please." This was what I had wanted, right? I wanted to live, and for some reason the mage wanted me to live too. No, not 'the mage'. Skids. That was what she had asked me to call her. Wait, she? Skids was still wearing the dress Mary had stolen from Gloria, but Skids had worn trousers. No woman ever wore trousers. But no man wore a dress, so where did that leave Skids?
On the other hand, Skid was a mage. The beings of the underdark knew nothing of our laws or our ways. And the whole 'Mary' identity was a disguise. So...
Skids had retrieved a familiar black backpack out of the sack from Val's Bakery, and was rummaging through it. "Let's see what I've got in here to help you with that. Nope, those are for seeing in the dark. That's my water purifier... Maybe under the food bars? Ah, there it is! My emergency medical kit." This appeared to be a small cloth pouch made of yellow fabric, containing several assorted small items.
"Uh, Skids?"
"Yeah? You must have a lot of questions, I'd imagine. Here, swallow this."
I took the offered small white pebble from Skids' gloved hand. It was lighter than a stone, and felt powdery. "What is this?"
"It makes you feel better, and helps you recover."
"How?"
Skids shrugged. "By swallowing it. I dunno after that."
I stared down at the object. "This is a mage thing?"
"Yeah."
"And you are a mage."
"That's right."
"And you have no idea how it works?"
"You tell me how this train is moving."
Easy enough. "The steam accumulator contains both steam — which is water vapour — and superheated water at high pressure. The steam is directed to alternate sides of the pistons, pushing them back and forth and turning the wheels around. The loss of steam causes a drop in pressure which in turn allows more of the water to flash boil, replacing the lost steam." I had picked up the basic principles, though there was a lot more to it than that.
"Oh. Just swallow it already. How it works doesn't matter."
"I thought it would need magic to work."
"Does everything you do use steam? Or mirrors?"
"Well... Alright, you have a point there." I swallowed the pebble. "Ow, that is... not comfortable."
"Sorry. Hang on, I've got water." Skids pulled out a tall metal bottle, unscrewed the lid, and poured some liquid into the lid.
I accepted the makeshift cup — or was it designed that way? — and examined the liquid. It looked clear, smelled fresh, and felt cool. It seemed safe enough, and Skids was drinking some straight out of the bottle. I drank it down quickly, and my throat felt much better.
"Ahh, that really helps. After putting that accent on all morning I wasn't feeling so great in the voicebox," Skids said.
"Thanks. May I ask a question?" I asked with careful politeness.
"Sure, I think it's your turn. Ask away."
"Um, so Skids... is that a man's name or a woman's name?"
"It's my name. I'm not sure what you mean beyond that."
So the mage was not making this easy for me. "I mean, when we met you were wearing trousers. And Mary is a woman's name but that was only pretend, and now you have a dress on but it isn't yours and the hair too and do you even have hair?" Now I was rambling like an anxious child.
"Er, yes? I have hair. It's very short. Was there another question in there somewhere?"
"Do you normally wear dresses? Or trousers? What about other mages? I mean, what do they wear?"
"I've never seen a dress before today, but it's pretty comfortable. I might keep it, now that you mention it. Trousers or robes are the most common kinds of outfits, but I don't really like robes."
This was interesting, but it was getting me nowhere to finding out what I actually wanted to know. "Are you saying that mage men and woman wear the same things?"
"I don't know what those are."
"You don't know... men and women?" Maybe mages used different words, like the way the clerics sometimes used different words for ceremonies and official business. "Male and female?"
"You mean like animals?"
"Animals?"
"Male and female animals?"
I shook my head. "No, I mean male and female mages."
Skids looked briefly perplexed, then had a moment of sudden realisation. "Oh of course, I never put it together until now."
"Put what together?"
"People said that the daywalkers 'live like animals', but I never really quite believed that until I heard you and Kim talking about... about birth. That's when I decided I had to get you out of there. But I didn't quite get the implications. Wow, it's so weird... people, self aware people, talking about being male and female. That's just... mindblowing. And more than a little creepy."
I stared.
"Sorry, I guess it must be so normal to you. Wow. It's normal to you... for a person to have another person growing inside them, like a kitten."
"B... buh... bweh?" This had to be the strangest conversation I had ever had, by a long way. "How do you get new mages?"
"Me?"
"I mean mages in general. There are no baby mages?"
"Of course there's baby mages! But we grow them the safe, sensible way."
"With magic?"
"Something like that. They're grown in pods. The growth pods. I've never seen them myself though."
"Then how..." No. This was too much. And I really had no need to know. "So, mages have cats? Normal cats?"
Skids laughed. "I don't think 'normal' is a particularly useful word between the two of us."
Right, of course not. That was rather dumb of me. "Sorry. I mean, they are not, like... dark?"
"Dark? What a strange... No, they're proper glowing cats. What use would a dark cat be to anyone?"
I couldn't help but join Skids in laughing. "Yes, how silly! Can you even imagine?"
"Feeling a little better?"
"A little," I said, after evaluating myself. I was already feeling less pain, and my head was clearer.
"Good, but that's just the start. I've got some cream to put on your cuts too. It'll help keep the wounds from making you sicker."
I nodded in understanding. "My mother gave me some herbal salve, but it was not much help. Let's see if this works better." The cream was in a squashed tube rather than a tub, but applying it to the cuts was simple enough. I had a few new abrasions, likely from the bakery explosion, or from being carried.
Skids was deep in thought while I worked. "You have a mother. What a concept."
"Mages don't have mothers," I said, realising that had to be the case. "Or fathers. Or families." How did that even work? "Who cares for the babies?"
"The carers," Skids said. "Oh, you wouldn't know about that, would you? No wonder you were confused when I asked yesterday."
"About what?" I thought back to that confusing conversation, which now felt so long ago. Skids gave me time to think, which I appreciated. "There was a whole thing about my family name, and what we do right? Something about my role. Was that it?"
"Yes, exactly," Skids said, clearly excited that I was understanding something. "Carers are one of the six roles. Rall are responsible for caring for and training the young, as well as providing medical care, and everything relating to education and entertainment."
That seemed like a rather wide scope, but that made sense if there were only six main groupings. "I think I follow, but what is 'rall'?"
"Oh, that's just how we refer to multiple carers."
It seemed that it worked like a specialised 'they'. "Why 'rall'?"
"Because casters are 'sall'. Calling either one 'call' would be confusing, right?"
I could see how that would be even more confusing. "Right. Um, so I figure you are not a carer. Or, not a medical one?"
"I'm not a carer, and I'm not a caster either. Sall are our fighters and hunters. Oh and security, and emergency response."
"You might as well give me the whole list," I said, realising that I was actually interested in learning about mage society. Even if it was never useful, it was a good distraction from... everything that I was decidedly not thinking about.
"Yeah, you'll probably need to know all this later," Skids said.
"Later? What happens later? Where are we headed?"
"We're going to a hive, of course. To get you proper medical attention."
I gasped, and almost choked on my own spit. "You're taking me... to where mages live?" I had not known what their cities were called. The only Pure who knew such a thing would be high level clerics, I expected. To enter such a place was unthinkable. Actually, learning any of this information about mages was a complete abandonment of Pure principles, but that meant little after I had physically jumped onto this train. That was what I had to make myself believe.
"Yeah, that's where we're going. Don't look so shocked. What did you expect?"
I had not actually thought that far ahead. A hive of mages, that was a daunting thought on its own. And the medical treatment on top of that... I did not know how to feel about all this. The mere concepts were overwhelming. "Um. We can talk about that later. You were going to tell me more about the roles?"
"Alright, one thing at a time. So, I covered carers and casters. There's also conjurers, who are the ones in food production, resource collection, and manufacture of goods. Also art, I think? There's a bit of contention over that between the greens and the yellows."
"The what now? How do colours come into this?" Noticing that I had finished treating my hand, I passed the tube of healing cream back to Skids, who returned it to its place in the medical kit.
"Whoops, I forgot to explain that. It's simple. Each role is associated with a colour. That's how we identify ourselves. So the conjurers are green and the carers are yellow." To illustrate this, Skids waved the medical kit in front of my face, then dropped it back in the black backpack.
"Let me guess, the casters' colour is red."
"Correct! How'd you know?"
"Red is reserved for our patrols," I said, remembering Shenks and his muddy bicycle. Red was the colour of war, which was one of the most strongly forbidden concepts in the Codex of Purity. "Are... are the casters a military force?"
"No, not at all," Skids said with a vigorous headshake. "If sall got samselves at all organised, well it wouldn't be accepted by everyone else. Sall are more focused on guarding, scouting, and fending off wild creatures. Plus dealing with cave-ins, flooding, and such."
Samselves? That must be the caster-specific version of 'themselves', I figured. And it was a relief to know that the mages were as war-averse as the Pure. The similarity amongst all the differences felt odd though. "What about blue?" I asked, since Skids was still wearing the blue dress and bonnet.
"Blue are the seers. Shall are about finding new knowledge, research, development of technology, that sort of thing. And then there's a sort of light purple? Hexmages. Um. I don't really understand hexmages. Hall're sorta... new? I think they split off from the seers just a few generations ago."
"That's five out of six. I guess you saved yours for last. Black?"
Skids chuckled. "Nah, orange. Drones, we're called. Manual labour, transportation, all sorts of fairly basic work."
Drones. I knew that was something bees had. "Are mage hives like bee hives?"
"No idea," Skids said with a casual shrug.
So, Skids was a 'drone'. "Oh, so when you told me you name is 'Skids Dro'... That means drone?"
"You've got it! Now you see why I was confused about 'Wilison'. What does that mean, by the way?"
I echoed Skids' shrug. "No idea. Oh, but I guess it works as a family identifier? Um, I mean, it was my father's name, and his fathers before him. Does that make sense?"
"Not really. Seems like an odd thing to put in a person's name. Are fathers more important than mothers?"
"Er... both are vital but... I suppose if you put it that way..." It was surprisingly difficult to explain how my entire world had worked my whole life, to someone who had experienced none of it. "We take our father's name because he bears ultimate responsibility for the family, and—"
"Hold up, did you say 'he'?"
"Is that a problem?"
"That's how we refer to a hexmage. As in, 'He is doing some mysterious hexmagery.'"
"Ohhh. We do not have any of those, obviously. I have no idea why. Now that I think about it, 'he' has no connection to any male-related words that I can think of. Weird."
"Yeah, that's gonna get confusing fast. Please tell me you don't use one of our words for females too."
"Not unless you call your seers 'she' to avoid getting mixed up with 'see'," I said, but as Skids' expression drooped further the more I said, I could tell the answer was yes. "Maker rust it all!" I swore. "This is going to be an utter pain."
"Yeah," Skids said, wincing. "You might want to keep your voice down a little. The train is pretty noisy but there are people sitting right under us, so they could possibly hear us."
"Oh, right."
"So, back to what you were saying. Can you explain what exactly you mean by a father's family? That obviously has something to do with tracking offspring but since we don't do that I don't understand the implications."
I explained a bit about the role of parents in society.
"But if each child is brought up by that child's parents, how do you keep track of it all? We just put a bunch of new young in a group and assign a few carers to them."
I explained monogamy.
"Hold up, are you seriously trying to tell me that there's multiple people with the same parents?"
This would be a long conversation. I let out an embarrassingly long yawn.
"Looks like the medication is really kicking in."
"Wait, what?"
"Yeah, it's making you drowsy. I should get changed and sort out my gear so you can use this sack as a pillow. Don't worry, I won't let you roll off the roof in your sleep."
I yawned again. Perhaps this would be a long conversation for another time.