Drunk Wizard and the Cowardly Knight

Clearing the debris from her table, she searched carefully for a much older scroll. She pushed aside bits of worn paper. Quills and leftover crumbs spilled quietly onto the floor. Finally, under a bit of moldering bread, she found the Inkspeech Scroll.

Unwilling to wake her guest just yet, Cadma rolled the scroll up and quickly went into the kitchen. With a very practical flick of her wrist, she unfurled the scroll across the kitchen table and looked down into its inky black surface.

The edges of the aging scroll had been dipped in a mix of crushed emerald, sapphire, and amethyst. The whole of its face was filled with the magic-infused black liquid needed for ink-speech.

The blackness moved and shifted to roll across the surface in soft, demure ripples. It had become a habit to pul the scroll out from time to time and tinker with the enchantments. Careless, rough mistreatment had damaged the parchment with beerstains, smeares of dropped food, and tattered, worn spots over the years, mostly because she had so little use for it.

She picked up the torso-length scroll and held it at arm's length. The slowly shifting ink sank slightly with the shift in gravity. Taking a deep seething breath, Cadma barked at the scroll, "Valyn the Grasping Hand, Deadlock of the Locks of Rhyla."

The outline of a head with an hourglass-shaped hat answered. "Regent's scroll. Whom, if I may ask, is this?" the strange man answered.

Cadma mustered authority into her voice and said, "I've come calling on the bloody Deadlock. 'Tis treason to take a Locks' scroll, so where is he!"

Her tinkered scroll was a bit outdated, but quite functional. No reason it should have gotten the wrong scroll, not since that once incident with the tapestry in the Gatelock's bedroom.

The oddly hatted shade harrumphed and, in a nasal voice, said, "The Regent is quite busy and has instructed me to take his callings that have no appointment, specifically including through Inkspeech Scroll. Now, what business have you with the seat of Rhylan power?"

Scowling down at the parchment, she imagined his hat catching fire. "The Deadlock can't take a piss without the whole council voting," she growled. Unbalanced by the drink, she took a step back for more balance, but a bottle got underfoot and sent her sprawling to the floor. The scroll landed next to her, and thinking quickly, she rolled over to put her face above it as if she were still holding it before her. Keeping herself still, she tried to act as if nothing had happened.

On the other side of this connection, at his desk in Ozeer, the dapper wizard stared at the inverted woman's silhouette in the scroll, confusingly hanging from the ceiling. "Are, are you drunk?" he asked, his face leaning closer to the scroll as if he could smell her breath through it.

Cadma snarled at the floor-bound scroll, hair draping toward it. Leveling a finger at the inky face, she said, "I'd be drunker and less a problem for you if I weren't on my way to give you both an arse-kicking! Send. Me. My. Shipment!"

Silence. The silhouette looked down. Cadma imagined his tongue in his teeth, his fingers thumbing through pages of notes on his desk.

The moment it dawned on him was marked with a harumph. "Ah, that's who this is," the inky wizard said. His solid ink face consumed the empty spaces on the scroll before he answered, "No." Then he severed the connection.