by Chris Fox
The lift brightened noticeably when Voria stepped inside, and grew uncomfortably warm when Frit joined us just before the door closed. It was like standing next to an open kiln, but man, the view was not at all bad from the rear.
We zoomed down and for just a moment I spied something out of the corner of my eye. A face reflected in the metal of the wall, indistinct and impossible to make out. I turned to look, but of course it was gone. At first I wondered if there was a spirit, but then I noted the shadows at the edge of my vision. They had lengthened. They were stronger here.
“Prepare yourselves.” Voria stepped to the front of the lift, next to Frit, and the two goddesses adopted combat stances.
Briff bared his fangs, and wrapped a hand around his cannon, which had not shrunk. I maintained a grip on both weapons, and tensed as the doors slid open.
The archive, a wondrous room full of towering shelves, now lay completely enshrouded in web. Thick ropy strands of silk covered the dragon scales that represented the sector’s best repository of knowledge. The room stretched nearly a hundred meters above us, and every level of it had been taken by the spiders. That mound quivered, and countless shapes slithered within it.
“There must be millions of them in there.” I stepped from the lift, but didn’t bother to aim with my pistol. “Frit, you’re all about fire, right? Could you, ah, do whatever it is you do?”
I didn’t want to seem like I was giving her orders, but this really was my op. My idea. I should at least be involved. Not “the boy.”
“Gladly. Stand back, please.” Frit stepped forward. She didn’t raise a hand. She didn’t use a spellstave. She didn’t do anything obvious.
Flames roared up around her entire body, not the paltry stuff of campfires, but the star stuff that lit the frigid darkness of empty space. It boiled out from her in all directions, save the lift. Only that area was protected from the tremendous heat, though it did nothing to block the shrieks of dying spiders, nor to shield us from the stench of charred bug.
The mound burned away, and within seconds the room had been cleared. The shelving was blackened, but under the soot lay pristine golden metal and their precious contents.
“Anyone within ten light years felt that.” Voria clanked along the deck with Ikadra as she strode past and into the archive. “If Necrotis didn’t know what we were about, she certainly does now.”
“And the divine act you and the boy will attempt—that would not have drawn her notice?” Frit stalked up to Voria, and the pair walked along, neither willing to let the other walk so much as a meter ahead.
“Yes, but not until the moment of our triumph.” Voria glared right back at Frit, unafraid despite the relative differences in power. If it came to a fight Frit would bat Voria aside, Spellship or no. That in no way deterred her. “By revealing ourselves with divine magic now we give her a chance to intercept us before we are about our purpose. A risk, though I’ll admit a slight one.”
Frit merely rolled her eyes, and the pair continued on.
“I miss our old crew,” Briff whispered in a not-whisper. The shrink spell raised his voice a half octave. “I don’t like traveling with gods, and I don’t like being back in this ship. Though I would love to see Cindra and her people. We still owe them for helping us with Jolene.”
“If we’re successful maybe you can take some R&R,” I offered as I followed the goddesses. “Get an Arena league going. That will give me time to start studying destruction.”
“Tiiimmmmmeee.” An inhuman voice, the voice of the swarm, hissed through the entire ship. “No more time. You have woken the nests, and now you will feed our new progeny.”
2
Reaching The Bridge
It’s never good when the swarm decides to upgrade itself, and the moment I spotted the magma spiders skittering toward us I understood where the arachnidrakes had gone. They’d been blended with the regular spiders, who now had scales. A dozen transport-sized many-legged monstrosities came streaming into the remains of the archive, and swarmed toward us.
Behind them countless smaller versions carpeted the deck. The young, perhaps. This time Frit raised her hand and sketched a conventional spell, and a river of liquid blue flame engulfed the spiders. Their chitinous carapaces drank the magic, and every spider it touched swelled in size. That made the large ones very large indeed.
“I didn’t expect fire to be effective.” Frit had already begun casting another spell, something involving void sigils. “Empowering them though? I should have seen that coming.”
“Let’s see how they handle life.” Voria raised Ikadra and loosed a beam of pure brilliance, the divine will of the universe, and it too washed over the spiders.
Again, the spiders swelled. The largest now scraped the hundred-meter ceiling as they crashed down on our location. Frit added some elder cousin to a void bolt, with the same effect.
I acted on instinct and triggered a blink spell with my armor, which set me directly next to the lift on the far side of the room that would carry us to the bridge. The spiders were converging on our previous location, but everyone had already moved.
Both goddesses appeared near me, while Briff launched into the air and twisted around fangs and claws as he flew past hundreds of spiders. I jammed the lift button as hard as I could, and prayed for it to open as Briff desperately struggled toward our position.
He began a final dive, but a spider claw the size of a lance punched through his side and he tumbled from the air.
“No!” I roared and raised Dez. Power I’d never tasted surged in Ardaki, and enhanced the void bolt I squeezed off. It took the spider that had speared my friend right between its eight eyes and the head ceased to exist. The creature toppled, and crushed several of its smaller brethren.
I blinked directly into Briff’s landing zone, then jerked my pistol up and fired off a heal spell. The golden energy burst into my friend, and repaired the worst of the damage. He somehow corrected his flight, and angled for the elevator as he whooshed over me.
I extended my hand, and Briff caught it in his scaly claw, then carried me to safety a moment later as we crashed into the miraculously open elevator. Both Frit and Voria had made it inside, and Voria stabbed the close button a moment before the spiders reached us.
A deep booming thud sounded from outside, and a dent appeared in the door. The car whirred down, away from the awful shrieks of the enraged magma spiders.
“Just for a moment.” Briff interrupted himself to heave lungfuls of air, that massive chest working like a bellows, even the reduced version with the shrink spell. “For a moment I could feel that claw draining my magic. It was horrible. Thanks, Jer. You saved my tail.”
“Any time.” I holstered Dez. We didn’t keep track any more, especially when still in the thick of it. I turned to Frit and Voria, both of whom resembled a cat who found you suddenly sitting in their favorite chair. I bet neither liked being shown up in front of the other. They probably hadn’t encountered a problem magic couldn’t solve in a long time. “So when we reach the bridge we’re likely to see something worse. There’s only so much Briff and I can do to protect ourselves. I’ll need to focus on the ritual, and it will have to be me in the matrix since I have the link to the Web.”
Voria nodded primly, while Frit closed her mouth and ate whatever she’d been about to say. The chestnut-haired goddess straightened the collar of her uniform, a pleasant shade of confederate blue. “I will need to funnel magic to the ritual as well. We’ll be relying on your Wyrm, and on Frit, to protect us during the final stage of the ritual. I believe them more than equal to the task.”
“You have way more confidence than I do.” The golden staff pulsed as Ikadra joined the conversation. “Did you see those things? If throwing magic at them only powers them up it doesn’t matter how big the fireball is.”
No one answered.
I rather enjoyed how snarky the staff was, though part of me preferred Ardaki’s judge-y silence. When he did say something it would be about
me, and how badass I wasn’t.
The lift slowed and planning time ended. It opened onto a nearly empty level, small, except for the door to the bridge on the far side. The golden metal had been coated in the same sticky substance the spiders secreted elsewhere, and the opening had been gummed shut.
“The spiders might eat magic, but this stuff doesn’t.” Frit stepped forward, raised a hand, and cooked away the goo. The resulting stench burned my eyes, and I wished I could bottle it and send it to people who insult waitstaff or don’t listen attentively to toddlers.
Once the door was clear I stepped forward and rapped Ardaki against it. The door obligingly ground inward, fighting against something in the mechanism. More spider goo, no doubt.
A wave of heat pulsed from the bridge, enough to kill an ordinary person. It stung my skin through the armor, which is saying a lot as I had not just one, but two fire Catalyzations, plus the armor’s own protection. I could hold my hand in an oven to work on my tan, but this flame hurt.
As before, the bridge was empty save for a single spell matrix, also a link to the Web of Divinity. All four rings spun invitingly, too many for a standard matrix. This thing could mess with time, and I couldn’t even guess what white-silver metal it had been forged from.
The entire device glowed an angry orange from heat, which pulsed from an open pit at the far side of the room. The pit Kek had jumped into when he’d bonded with the ship.
As the bridge’s door closed behind us, magma boiled up from the pit and arranged itself into a familiar arachnidrake. The changes were impossible to miss. His body appeared the same, but the eyes glittered with malevolence, a desire to inflict pain. What had the poor bastard been through since he’d merged with the ship?
“You’ve returrrned at last.” The Guardian took a step closer, and I instinctively retreated, right into Briff. “Have you come to open your mind? To use the Web once more? It awaits you….”
It wasn’t hard to figure out his angle. I could feel the shadows gathering in the corners of my vision, the lingering madness I’d brushed ever so briefly when I’d used the mirror to take down Jolene and save my people from the Inuran Consortium.
“I have.” I stepped closer to the matrix, and tightened my grip around Ardaki. I still had no idea if this was going to work, and if not, there was no coming back from what I was about to attempt. “I’m going to use the Web, and I’m going to try to cleanse it.”
A thousand, thousand spidery voices laughed all over the ship, their terrible amusement echoing for long moments before they fell to stillness. Magma-Kek took a step closer. “You may try, as I tried. But it will end in failure, and the madness will take you. Come, friend Jerek. Together we will work many dark miracles.”
Yeah, that didn’t make me want to run. Only the idea that I’d be running right back into those magma spiders kept me on the bridge. I had to do this. I’d committed myself the moment we’d landed.
So I walked over to the matrix, rested Ardaki in the air next to it, and ducked through the glowing rings. The heat became a living thing, and my skin burned as I tapped a fire sigil on each to bond the vessel.
The moment the being senses our inevitable success, Ardaki projected into my mind, he will turn on us and use all his magic and minions to end us. Be prepared, in whatever small way you can.
Thanks, Lord Obvious, I thought back.
Power surged in me as I fully linked to the vessel, and once more experienced its sensors as my own senses. Imagine suddenly discovering a thousand new limbs, a couple dozen new eyes, some ears, and some new organs you can’t even understand. All of them opened to me, and vertigo nearly dropped me to the floor of the matrix.
Steady yourself. Ardaki’s tone became all business. Focus on what you must do. The ritual.
I took a series of quick breaths as I sought the strength to do what I must. “Screw it.”
I harnessed the Web, and used it to peer into the Sanctuary storm, where I sought Necrotis. She wasn’t there. I was certain of it. She’d moved her forces. I could scan for them….
A rising tide of bile swam up inside me as darkness ate at the edges of my vision. Madness slid into the cracks in my mind, filling in gaps with dark thoughts and darker memories. Pain and rage and terror and regret and need competed until the emotions grew so powerful I could neither contain nor control them.
I tried to remember that this was all part of the plan. Gods, the stupid plan. My hands shot up to my helmet, and clawing at my eyes. If I couldn’t see, then I’d never have come back here. Eyes only caused pain. I had to remove them. I had to get my helmet off.
“No!” I roared as I forced the madness back. “I will not let you take me!”
Magma-Kek had moved to stand next to the matrix, and now folded two of his arms as he stared down at me. “It already has. If you leave now there is enough to twist you as they wish. The madness only grows, you see. Do you know how they took me?”
“No,” I managed through gritted teeth. More dark shadows flowed into my mind. More and more every second. The flow seemed never ending. “Why don’t you tell me all about it?”
I closed my eyes, which helped, but my hands began to shake, and I began to sob uncontrollably.
“I will show you.” Kek extended a clawed hand, and then we were elsewhere. Elsewhen.
3
Madness
Mists swirled around me and as they dissipated I realized I stood on the Flame’s bridge. As with the Word of Xal, though, the walls could be mentally reconfigured to display any style of decor, and this version greatly resembled the architecture of the archive, with several consoles positioned around the temporal matrix.
Each matrix currently bore a robed arachnidrake, their many limbs flying across keys as they tended to running the ship. One far wall had been turned into a scry-screen, and currently displayed the largest orbital battle since Trakalon’s Fist.
Several Great Ships were battling dark featureless vessels, similar to the ones that the Inurans had produced, if more primitive.
“Why didn’t we see it?” My strange mouth garbled the words. “How did the Web not show us this betrayal?”
That put things in context pretty nicely. Until I learned otherwise I assumed I was witnessing whoever had run this ship during the battle that had marooned my people on Kemet. The same time that Seket had come from.
“Unknown,” two of the techsmiths chimed in unison. How I knew they were techsmiths remained unclear. Purple pulses flowed down a cable from their temples, down to the console. “The Web still predicts calm, even though we can quite clearly see threads unravelling. This is beyond us. We need her guidance. She should not have left us in charge.”
The arachnidrake, me, tapped all four sigils on the rings of the matrix, which rotated around me just as they did in my own time, the one unifying link. I knew what he was about to do. I could feel him open his mind to the Web.
I winced, but the flow of madness didn’t come. The arachnidrake simply touched the web, and it vibrated in answer. It reached out into myriad realities, and into many places in all of them, all in search of a single entity.
He browsed millions of disparate realities as I might browse for holos on a Saturday morning back at the academy. In each we paused for a moment, long enough for him to sense for the presence of his goddess, and then we moved on.
As my host didn’t think her name I had no idea who she might be, though even odds it had to be some sort of fire goddess. The vessel had been designed by someone very similar to Frit, but probably a lot stronger, and a lot wiser from the sound of it.
Finally he settled on our reality, and hesitated. Thousands of possibilities floated within reach, but he dismissed them and instead began to comb through our own. “I can sense her. Somewhere. She is in our reality, but not anywhere I can reach. And there is nowhere I cannot reach. Hmm.”
You ever have one of those moments where you see something life changing? Something that crystalizes how the universe works
, and what your place in it is?
My host raised a pair of scaly arms, and the scry-screen shifted to show a cycle. In one area a map read Spirit Realm. Another read Dream Realm. Both flanked the existing screen, which of course had to be our own realm, the life realm.
He browsed through the entire cycle. His mind quested for the nameless goddess, and somehow scanned every entity in the spirit realm. As I understand it the spirit realm mirrors our reality, which means it has just as many galaxies. In seconds he knew, conclusively, that his goddess was not there.
We moved onto the swirling chaos of the dream realm, where empires lived and mated and died all in the span of a single evening. Where souls were reborn, and refined into something ready to become another mortal.
Here too he scanned it all in a matter of moments, certain that his mistress did not linger there. The Web’s scanning capabilities were insane, and any military that had them could win all wars, or simply choose not to fight ones they couldn’t.
Pain flared in my temple. I ignored it and focused on my host’s actions. He’d scanned all three realms, the entire cycle, and found no sign of her. That left only one place to search, and I came to the conclusion the same time my host did.
“The Umbral Depths,” he thrummed excitedly. “I have found her. She must be there.”
All four techsmiths clapped their arms together in applause, and purple pulses flowed to their consoles. Soon the whole network would know.
My host focused on the web once more, and this time turned its perception to the Umbral Depths. He began to scan, and within a few moments a sound like turning pages rasped at the edge of consciousness. Darkness grew in the corner of his vision, and every fiber screamed at him to run, even though I knew he couldn’t hear me.
Darkness flooded his mind, not a torrent as I’d feared, but a moderate amount. Enough to infect, and over time consume.
My host seemed unconcerned, and continued to scan. Eventually he located a world in the darkness, but try as he might could perceive no further. And, the moment his thoughts touched the world, it vanished.