Architects of Ether

by Ryan Muree

  “You can?” Adalai asked.

  “Because you’re an Ingineer?” Emeryss had wanted to see this.

  Clove closed her eyes. She was going into a trance, but she didn’t have paper or something to write with. Her hand reached up for the panel.

  “Interesting,” Emeryss whispered.

  The door clicked, and Clove opened her eyes.

  “What did you just do?” Emeryss asked. “Did you go to the ethereal realm?”

  Clove shrugged. “I guess. Lots of colors. Hurts your eyes to look at too long.”

  Emeryss nodded. Exactly the same. Clove was a Scribe—or rather, an Ingineer.

  “But how does that work with the panels?” Adalai asked.

  “We can’t make sigils or see the sigils in the trance-place, or anything like that, but when I go there I can see the dashboards. They’ve got one stream of blue-green ether running through them, powering them. I can connect or disconnect them from it.”

  “Do you hear voices?” Emeryss asked, eager to match experiences.

  If she could do this much without any education in it, there was no telling what she’d accomplish with the help of a trainer.

  Clove nodded. “Just like in the mines, and it freaks me out. I have to ignore them. So much for being useless, right?”

  Adalai ignored her, opened the door, and peered through the crack. “All right, we’re clear. Stay close and look for any signs leading to the Goliath or grimoires.”

  They slipped inside and down a hall to the right. Most of the Ingini were in rooms wearing long white coats with pockets. They looked to be studying machines and parts. There were several empty rooms with papers and maps.

  Nothing out of the ordinary.

  Adalai pointed up and whispered. “What’s that mean?”

  Clove squinted at the sign across the way. “It’s new tech. Experiments.”

  “And the symbol?”

  “Dangerous. Raw ether.”

  Adalai headed in that direction, and they followed.

  A group of Ingini mumbling about numbers and data points entered the hallway.

  They darted into an alcove of offices and pressed themselves against the wall until they’d passed.

  Adalai checked over her shoulder and turned back to them. “I want to get down that other hall, but there’s a guy standing guard. I’m going to have to make us invisible.” She held out her hands.

  “You can do that?” Clove asked.

  “Take my hand.”

  She had done it in the library when she was pretending to take Emeryss hostage. She’d also come out of it sweating and panting. Emeryss thought it had been the stress of running and getting stabbed in the arm by Grier, but maybe it was more about the ether and the sigil. Invisibility was usually only meant for one person, and it took constant concentration.

  It was why Emeryss hadn’t learned it yet.

  “Adalai, are you sure?” she asked.

  Adalai jutted her hands out again. “Let’s go. We don’t have time.”

  They took her hand, and the surrounding air glittered like a pearl.

  She led them into the hallway as they stayed close.

  They weren’t just holding hands but pinning themselves to her sides. Emeryss even tried to hold her breath as best she could, but the guard was right there with an ether-gun on each hip.

  One step at a time, they inched toward him, but he made no notice of them walking down the hall.

  They were just a foot from him, and Emeryss inhaled quietly and held it.

  He blinked but never moved. He looked bored out of his mind, honestly.

  A few more steps.

  Adalai’s face was dripping with sweat. It beaded and dripped onto her chest.

  Almost there, they neared the corner.

  Adalai yanked them around it, dropping their hands, and putting her palm to her mouth as she caught her breath.

  Clove panted but pointed to a door in front of them. It was solid metal with another lock on the outside. The warning sign for raw ether was bright orange on the door, but so was the word “sigil.”

  BEWARE: SIGILS IN USE

  Emeryss looked to Adalai. She pressed her ear against the door and nodded.

  Clove closed her eyes again and disconnected the lock from the ether. The latch clicked, and Adalai pushed them inside before closing the door behind them.

  “Uh…” Clove pointed to the tables in the room. “Are those what I think they are?”

  Tables and tables, machines and equipment alike, had been littered with broken grimoires and torn grimoire pages.

  Chapter 19

  Lab — Sufford — Ingini

  Adalai ran up to the torn grimoires littered across ether-covered lab tables.

  This room was something like some experimental lab or training, maybe. It reminded her of some rooms in the academy.

  Not everything had been about battle training and conditioning. A good portion had been studying how ether worked and behaved, how to manipulate it, get the most efficiency out of your available ether, and ether management.

  Honestly, they were the more boring courses, but the rooms always ended up in one giant mess. Grimoires analyzed and inspected. Sigils copied and memorized. Ether explored and tested. And that was all before the war had gotten worse and rationing grimoires became a thing.

  These grimoires, however, were in a slightly direr state. Their spines had been bent at every angle and crumpled, the pages ripped from the binding. M’ralli paper had been scattered everywhere—even the floor and chairs. It looked like a massacre or a grimoire murder-room.

  No windows, there seemed to only be the door they’d entered through and another sealed door on the opposite wall.

  Tidbits flourished to life beside her. “Ear to the door, Tidbits. Let us know if you hear anyone coming.”

  Her pet nodded, and she patted it on the head.

  “This is incredible,” Emeryss mumbled. She stared at the only other thing in the room to look at besides the mess—the equipment.

  Tiny metal boxes with gears were connected to huge metal boxes with tubing and wiring. There were contraptions with toggle switches and blinking lights. Blackened flasks. Dark stirring rods. Burned tables and tubing.

  “What are they doing here?” Clove asked under her breath.

  “This is an energy grimoire.” Emeryss flipped through a book on the table next to her.

  If they weren’t stealing grimoires to create Casters, then what was the point?

  Clove walked up to a grimoire and turned through a few crisp pages. Her fingers roved over a red sigil. “What’s this?”

  Adalai barely acknowledged her. “A fire grimoire.”

  “What does this sigil do?”

  Adalai shrugged a shoulder. “Only Scribes can read all the sigils. They’ve got them memorized or something. We only know our own kind.”

  Emeryss moved down the table to another book. “We don’t exactly have them memorized. I mean, we do, eventually, but the ether just sort of tells us.”

  Clove nodded absently and turned more pages.

  Despite being Ingini and a pain in the ass, she at least had guts enough to come in here and do what was right. She couldn’t rectify all of her people doing terrible things, but every bit helped. Didn’t help Adalai hate her less, it just helped her not want to kill Clove or turn her in.

  “It’s beautiful,” Clove murmured.

  “You’ve seriously never seen grimoires until now?” Adalai asked.

  Clove shook her head. “Never. Old Man Ollie would talk about them now and then. I’ve seen pictures of them and blank bootleg versions, but never this. This is real.” Her fingers followed the glittering shapes.

  Emeryss had stepped up to a piece of machinery tall enough to reach the ceiling. It took up the entire corner of the room, and the tubing had been burned or aged.

  Or maybe their stuff was just old. Maybe all of their resources were absolute shit, and this was the best they could do.
>
  Probably that.

  Emeryss picked up an apparatus that looked similar to one of the Ingini guns. With a long barrel and hand-sized trigger, it was missing the ether cartridges.

  “Is this one of their weapons?” she asked her.

  “I guess, but it’s missing its cartridges.”

  Clove joined them and followed a hose around to the other side of the square box where a blank piece of grimoire paper lay flat in a receptacle. “It’s hooked up to this hose in the machine instead.”

  “Paper as fuel?” Emeryss asked, looking around the side.

  “No, the sigil is gone.” Clove shrugged.

  If the paper was there and the sigil was missing, where had the ether gone?

  Adalai looked back at the gun in Emeryss’s hand. “Pull the trigger.”

  Emeryss tucked her chin back and raised her eyebrows. “You want me to shoot it?”

  Adalai pointed to a chipped piece of metal mounted on the wall in front of them.

  “Won’t it make a sound? They’ll hear us.”

  “Have you seen this room? If any noise came out of this room, I’d doubt anyone would think something was wrong.”

  “Okay…” Emeryss aimed and pulled the trigger.

  An enormous bright-yellow fireball erupted from the end of the barrel and incinerated the wall. The kickback from the gun sprayed flames toward the ceiling.

  Not an ether pulse, but a Fireball.

  No cartridges, but ether. The gun had used sigils and casted?

  The pit of her stomach dropped out. Her skin shined with cold sweat.

  Emeryss thrust the gun into Clove’s arms and sketched a blue-green sigil on the air. Water sprayed from it onto the wall and ceiling, putting out the fire. “What in Goddess’s name was that?” she blurted.

  Clove set the gun down. “They’ve made fire weapons.”

  Adalai’s stomach was still in knots, growing tighter by the second. This wasn’t good. This wasn’t even bad. It was terrible. “They’ve made grimoire weapons.”

  She ran up to an energy grimoire and a tinier gun-shaped device beside it. The trigger was a hairpin, but through its tiny barrel, a bolt of electricity shot out, electrocuting her and the edge of the grimoire. She dropped it and shook her hand out.

  Their eyes followed every grimoire strewn across the tables until their gazes met in horror.

  “I don’t understand how this is possible,” Clove said.

  Adalai swallowed. “You don’t have Scribes to translate the ether. Your Ingineers just use it as a source of power, right? By stealing the grimoires, they’ve skipped a step. They don’t need Scribes or Casters. They’ve made Caster weapons…”

  What exactly were the Ingini capable of? How many more lives would they take from Revel? General Orr needed to know about this, immediately, but the Goliath was somewhere in this building, too.

  Emeryss brought her hands to her mouth. “Stadhold will be furious.”

  Clove crossed her arms. “I want to be proud we’ve figured this out, but…” She shook her head. “It just means more fights for power. More deaths…”

  “Everyone will lose their minds over this,” Adalai said. “Can you imagine the public when they hear that Ingini is using our grimoires against them? To kill them? They’ll go insane.”

  “And then to find out that one of you is selling them to us.” Clove whistled.

  Adalai glared at her. “It still doesn’t explain the Goliath.”

  Tidbits trilled at them.

  Adalai spun. “Someone’s coming.”

  Voices in the hall followed shortly after.

  She ran to the front of the room to peer out of the door.

  Three men approached from farther down the hallway. She slipped it closed and braced against it.

  They were trapped unless they hid in the closet across the room. The door had bright-yellow- and-green signs painted on the surface. E-4 had been marked in large, yellow letters. Adalai pointed at it.

  “We need to get out,” she whispered loudly. Tidbits dissolved. “Into the closet!”

  Emeryss tried the knob, but nothing happened.

  Did these people not even trust themselves not to steal their own things?

  Clove closed her eyes and placed her hand against the black sensor on the wall. When she opened her eyes, the door popped open as a whirling alarm started.

  Adalai ran for the door, pushing them inside the closet with her. “Close it!”

  Racing through the doorway into a dark space, they shut the door behind them. It latched closed with several clicks, but the alarm didn’t stop.

  “Shit.” Adalai jiggled the handle again.

  At once, Clove raised her hand to a tiny blue sensor on their side of the door.

  Shouting and footsteps running through the other floors echoed down. It was like this door had taken them between walls or floors.

  No time, Adalai grabbed both of their arms, pulled them flush against the wall with her, and made them invisible.

  The door opened, piercing their dimly lit space with brilliant yellow light, and a grizzled old face peered inside inches from Clove’s shoulder.

  Don’t move.

  Don’t breathe.

  She wasn’t trying to be Sonora or anything, but if she thought it hard enough, maybe Emeryss and Clove would get the gist.

  “False alarm,” the man said. “Or rodents again. We need to call pest services—” He slammed the door shut, his voice trailing off.

  Adalai released them and exhaled.

  “I swore he saw me,” Clove breathed.

  Emeryss drew a yellow-white sigil onto the air and pushed it forward. Her white light lit up not a closet, but a hallway. “This feels like it’s between rooms or like it was never finished and was forgotten.”

  Metal beams jutted out from the ceiling, lower than normal. The walls were raw rivets and bolts. The floor was uneven without grating to allow for easier walking. It was definitely unfinished, and not destroyed and overused like the rest of Ingini looked, or even like that equipment in the lab room.

  They inched down the long, narrow hallway toward a smidgeon of light.

  “There are windows and a door up ahead,” Emeryss said, hurrying onward and crouching in front of a small, knee-high glass window.

  “Is it to the outside?” Adalai kneeled beside her and peered out.

  The window looked down into a hangar, and in it was the largest ship Adalai had ever seen. Easily ten times the size of any Super S-Class airship they owned in Aurelis, it was white with silver and gold trim. It certainly looked like a Revelian royal airship, ready to float into Revel and destroy them. Goliath was written in gold foil along the side.

  “Hol-shit, that thing is huge,” Clove whispered. “This…”

  “We can’t stop that, Adalai,” Emeryss whispered, too. “We seriously cannot stop something like that.”

  But they had to.

  “Do you see a laser on it?” She was squinting, but it was too hard to see the underside of it or any cannons from their position.

  “Do I see a laser on it?” Emeryss scoffed. “Are you serious? Has it registered to you how big this thing is?”

  Maintenance crew meandered around it, welding and bolting. It wouldn’t be easy to get to the airship to see what weaponry it had, but it wouldn’t be impossible either.

  “Are those what I think they are?” Adalai whispered, pointing to the large, yellow tubing.

  “Fuel lines. It’s still using ether-fuel. Not grimoires,” Clove said. “And you only add fuel when it’s finished. When it’s getting ready to leave.”

  “We’re running out of time, then?” Emeryss asked. “Great.”

  Adalai cracked her knuckles.

  A plan. They needed a plan. If it had a laser, they could try to dismantle it right then and there. Clove could probably do it like she did with all the locks. That should be easy, right? Worst case, they hurried back to Revel, alert Stadhold and Aurelis about this thing, and be
part of the RCA to stop the ship as it floats in.

  “Are those grimoires, too?” Clove asked. Her finger was pressed against the glass, aimed at a stack of crates. “What color are those?”

  Purple? Pink?

  “Illusion grimoires,” Emeryss said.

  Illusion grimoires on a ship? Had it been fire or air, it would have at least made sense, considering they were useful in combat. But illusion? Were they going to disguise the ship to get it into Revelian airspace?

  Two men wearing glass eyepieces on their faces and cream-colored robes with black collars and sashes walked up to two maintenance workers. They clasped their hands behind their backs.

  “Who are they?”

  “Ingineers,” Clove breathed. “There are three that the UA know of, and two are right there.”

  Guns that cast, crates of grimoires being loaded into a ship… They needed to know what they were up against.

  “We need to get onto that ship.” Adalai moved to the door at the other end of the hallway.

  “What? No!” Emeryss pulled back from the window. “Are you crazy? We should get the others.”

  Clove nodded. “I agree. Going in there is suicide. Those two Ingineers alone could royally ruin our day.”

  Adalai went for the door anyway. “Then why don’t we get them out of the hangar?”

  “Get them out?” Emeryss hadn’t moved. “Why do we need to get onto that ship? We need to get to the others—”

  “We may never make it back in here again,” Adalai stressed. “We’re here now, and we have to get down there. We have to see or stop whatever it is they’re doing. This is what we came for.” Adalai tried the handle on the door.

  Emeryss grabbed her. “No—”

  The door opened without issue.

  “We don’t know what they’re using the grimoires for—”

  “Are you kidding me?” Adalai let the door slide closed. “They come up with new ether-tech all the time. We just found out they’re using the grimoires. They might have lasers or a million guns with fireballs, and we can’t fight it until we know what’s on it.” She opened the door again. No alarm. “Maybe Clove can disconnect the panels or whatever on their airships. She did it here.”