The Nine

by Molles, DJ

  Part of being a good fighter was learning from your mistakes. Another part of it was knowing when those mistakes couldn’t have been avoided. Many a great duelist had dampened their skills by trying to correct for every misstep. The greater duelists accepted that missteps were going to happen.

  So she accepted it. But that didn’t mean she had to like it.

  That didn’t mean she couldn’t be infuriated with the halfbreed.

  So she lay there stiffly, thinking about the look on that little runt’s face as he spun on her and released…what the hell was that? She’d never seen the longstaff used that way before. All the training around longstaffs was in the rapidity of firing. To feed yourself through the staff with such an enormity of will that it fired a string of bolts as fast as it could conjur the energy.

  But that?

  Mala had to admit a certain begrudging respect for the halfbreed. He’d managed, in just a few short weeks of having possession of this sacred weapon system, to learn something that centuries of training had failed to discover.

  A quick learner indeed.

  As she lay there, pouring over things in her mind, she sensed the slow trickle of energy from her shield. Its contact with the roiling sea below her was a slow drain, but it was constant. She still had a while to go. But after that? She was in the middle of the ocean, wearing a heavy battlesuit. She’d sink like a rock if it weren’t for the shield keeping her atop the heaving swells.

  As she was pulled under, she might be able to shuck enough of the suit off to float again, but then she’d still be stuck in the middle of the ocean.

  She didn’t think of it as an inevitable demise, but instead another problem that needed to be solved.

  As fate would have it, Rixo solved that problem for her.

  The column of steam rising from her shield suddenly wafted away, and she observed the belly of a skiff lowering down to the surface of the waters. She watched it with a calm, focused gaze, waiting for the next step to become apparent.

  Rixo appeared over the side of the skiff as it descended to within arm’s reach of her. “Lower your shields and try to stay floating for a second!” he shouted. “I’ll grab you before you sink!”

  Mala considered this proposition and found it reasonable. So she extinguished her shield and thrashed into an upright position, pumping her legs as fast as they could move in the turbulent water. Even so, her head began to slip into the briny sea.

  She thrust her longstaff up—not energized—and held her breath as her head plunged under.

  She felt something grab ahold of the end of her longstaff. She clung to it with both hands, and felt herself rising out of the water. Rixo made a minor noise of effort and then dragged her aboard the skiff, which immediately rose into the sky to avoid an oncoming wave that would have buried them.

  It leveled out as it gained enough altitude over the sea, and hovered.

  Mala dragged herself to her feet, sodden and cold and dripping. She wiped the water from her eyes. Squeezed it from her braid. Looked to Rixo.

  His usual cocksure attitude was gone, replaced by a hard-bitten irritation.

  “Well, that didn’t go like you wanted, did it?” Rixo demanded. “Should have killed the little bastard when I told you to.”

  Mala shook her head and scanned the paladins gathered on the deck. She spotted Callidus, also soaked, standing at the fore with his arms crossed over his chest, glaring at her.

  “What are you shaking your head for?” Rixo cried. “Your plan is shit and you just got bested by a halfbreed!”

  Mala managed a smile and pointed to Callidus. “As did he.”

  Callidus strode forward. “I was blindsided by the legionnaire. He kicked me overboard while I was trying to kill the halfbreed.”

  “You mean the barely-conscious legionnaire that couldn’t even stand up?” Mala asked. Then she smiled at Rixo. “You didn’t see what the halfbreed did. He used his longstaff in a way…”

  “My longstaff,” Callidus grunted.

  Mala took a breath and shook off the chill overtaking her. “Frankly, I’m more confident than ever that we’ve made the right choice.”

  “Oh,” Rixo threw up his hands. “She’s more confident than ever. As she stands there, sopping wet, after being pitched overboard by a halfbreed’s random energy blast.”

  “Not random,” Mala held up a finger. “It was well-directed. And powerful. Very powerful. No one could have withstood that. The force of it…” she trailed off again. “He’s a fast learner. He’s taking to the weapon system like he was born to it.” She fixed Rixo with a stern look. “And that’s why I’m more confident than ever that he’s the one we need.”

  Rixo looked heavenward, squinting against the pouring rain. “Excuse me for pointing it out, dear Mala, but young Percival McGown doesn’t seem inclined to do anything you want him to do.”

  Mala shrugged. “He’s a difficult student. The best ones always are, aren’t they, Rixo? Like a horse that hasn’t been broken yet. But when I break him, he’ll be everything we need him to be. And more.”

  Rixo lowered his face, then wiped it. “You’re mad.”

  “We’re all mad,” Mala returned. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be creating a war against our fellow demigods, would we? Nothing has changed. A minor setback is no reason to tuck tail and run. The threat to our existence is still there—now more than ever. And I intend to proceed. With or without you, Rixo.”

  “Oh?” Rixo gestured to the skiff. “You’ll take my craft from me?”

  “I’d rather you just went where I told you to go, but if taking it from you by force is the only option, then we can arrange that. And you don’t have your vials of War to sharpen you this time. Who do you think will win?”

  Rixo waved her off with a growl. “Your theatrics are unbecoming in a lady of such breeding.”

  “So you’ll do what I ask of you?” Mala pressed.

  “That depends. Do you even know where to go from here?”

  Mala nodded, then pointed westward. “The East Ruins.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  THE EAST RUINS

  Perry stared at it, feeling a deep, primal fear, as though his ancestors from hundreds of years before whispered to him from their graves, telling him it was a place of terror and wrath.

  They’d outrun the storm, though it roiled behind them, and the breeze that buffeted at Perry’s back smelled of rain and a smell he’d never known before, but knew that it was the sea.

  The skiff now hovered, a few yards above the tops of the waves as they rolled onward, towards the destination that loomed in the distance.

  The East Ruins.

  The sky over the ancient remains of the city was overcast, setting the jutting towers in gloom. A low lying fog hung about the place like a sickness, obscuring the streets that must have criss-crossed the bottoms of all those crumbling structures. The square roofs of squatter buildings could just barely be seen, poking up above the fog like the backs of monsters floating in a still sea.

  It was vast. Stretching from one side of Perry’s vision to the other, and extending deep beyond the wave-crashed shores, until the back regions of the city were just ghostly monoliths in the distance.

  At the shore front, the waters beat and frothed at the bones of buildings that lie askew on foundations long since sunken into the sands, and overtaken by rising tides. From its northern and southern edges, to its depths far to the west, the East Ruins looked like nothing so much as a long-abandoned graveyard, the buildings that still stood like tottering gravestones, moldering and defaced.

  Perry felt a shiver run through him that had nothing to do with his soaking clothes. His hands felt shrunken and cold. The skin of his face pinched and drawn. The mysterious, discordant hum filled his ears again, this time louder than ever before. More than just a single note. Now he could detect a pulse to it. Heavy. Rhythmic.

  Threatening.

  It’s coming from in there.

  To either side of him,
standing at the fore railing of the skiff, Stuber, Teran, and Sagum bore the same expression that Perry believed was scribbled across his own countenance. In their hearts, Perry had no doubt that they all felt the same thing. That they were trespassers into a sepulchral tomb.

  The soft stride of Whimsby’s boots behind him.

  Perry turned his head, but was not able to take his eyes off the Ruins.

  “We are at the demarcation line,” Whimsby said, his voice bereft of its usual cheer. “I have never crossed this line. All that I know of the East Ruins I have already told you. If we continue on, we will all do so with no idea of what’s ahead.”

  “I understand that,” Perry said quietly. “And you should all know that I’m not even sure at this point that there’s anything in there that’s even close to what we thought was there. All I can tell you is that the East Ruins has something in it that the demigods are scared shitless about.” He finally tore his eyes away from the grim view. “There’s a chance that, even if we do find this thing, we might all die, and it might all be for no reason. I know that’s not what you all signed on for. I won’t—”

  Stuber cut him off with a negative grunt and a wave of the hand. He was, at least, able to stand now, but the wearing off of the pain medication had left him in a foul mood. “Enough of that bullshit. We’ve all come this far. At the very least, I think we’re all morbidly curious.”

  “Morbidly curious enough to die?” Perry asked, earnestly.

  “Meh.” Stuber shrugged. “They haven’t found a way to kill me yet.”

  “Teran?” Perry asked. “Sagum?”

  Sagum swallowed hard. “Yeah. I need to see it.”

  Teran was silent for a moment, gripping the fore rail. Eventually she nodded. “We’ve all got our reasons, Perry. We can’t turn back now.”

  Perry let out a slow breath through his nose. “Alright, Whimsby. Take us in.”

  Whimsby went to the aft controls, and the skiff sped forward again, angling to the north, where a dilapidated structure sat half sunken in the waves, but had obviously been some sort of port, once upon a time. It took them only a few short minutes to cross the fifteen miles of dead space between the demarcation line and the beginning of the East Ruins. Minutes that seemed to drag for a few seconds, and then catapult forward through time, depending on whether Perry was feeling intensely eager, or intensely reticent.

  Whimsby brought the skiff down on the edges of a massive concrete peninsula that jutted out from the city, its tip crushed and crumbled by time and waves. Despite never having seen this place before, Perry could identify things by their modern counterparts that he was familiar with, and through that, pieced together a picture of what this place had looked like once ago.

  There, on the side of the huge concrete peninsula, a fallen structure of rusted metal girders. Cables long since snapped through, their frayed ends lying tangled in the girders and across the peninsula. A crane, perhaps once used to lift things from their berths aboard ships that had once sailed across these waters.

  There, a few hundred yards away, a type of vehicle lay on its side, like the remains of a great beast felled long ago. Something like a buggy, with numerous large tires rotting away, its innards rusted and pitted and broken. A square container attached to the vehicle, the metal eaten through by time and salt so that it looked like ochre lace. Something that might’ve been used to transport goods across a place long since scorched by the wrath of the gods.

  Buildings beyond. So many buildings. Not the delicate spires of The Clouds, that Perry suspected existed for little else than their beauty. No, these buildings had once had a purpose. Were they houses? Had so many people once lived atop of each other? Or were they businesses? Were you expected to climb to the top to access the business that did its commerce there? How would those businesses have survived, and what could they have sold if you had to climb so high to reach them? Whatever they sold must have been very valuable to people.

  They pilfered the holds of the skiff, as they’d done before. But this time they didn’t pack as heavy. They bore no illusions. They would either find what they sought, or they would die, and neither possibility seemed so far away.

  They each took a rifle and a few spare magazines, though they seemed like pitiful implements in the face of what Whimsby had described might roam those misty, forlorn streets. Machines with weaponry that Whimsby could not describe. Ceaselessly hovering over the ground. Constantly patrolling.

  Patrolling for what?

  Trespassers like them.

  Stuber turned to look at the skiff, one hand holding his rifle, the other holding the raw scar that bisected his torso. He appeared grim, his face drawn, clearly dealing with some pain. And after what Perry had seen the Surgeon do to him, he didn’t begrudge the man the sour look on his face. No matter how well the Surgeon had put his friends back together, they would feel the afteraffects for some time.

  “We shouldn’t leave that just sitting out in the open,” Stuber commented. “If the demigods pursue us—and I’m sure they will—it would be best not to give them a quick starting point.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Whimsby offered. “Have we taken what we need from it?”

  Perry nodded. “We’ve taken everything that might be of use.”

  Whimsby then vaulted up into the skiff, went to the aft controls, manipulated them for a moment without the skiff moving, and then hopped down.

  After a few moments, the skiff rose into the air, glided out over the thrashing seas, and then dropped. The nose hit the water first, in a spray of white froth, and then the entire craft sunk until nothing of it could be seen.

  “Well,” Whimsby said. “That solves that problem.”

  The group then bore their supplies down the wide, concrete path towards the city beyond the peninsula. They passed the overturned vehicle and looked at it curiously. A relic from times passed.

  At the edges of the city, they climbed through the ruined entrance of a squat building that seemed to be holding up better than its neighbors. It was there they chose to stash their supplies.

  It was cold, and the air was dank. The wind coming off the ocean pulled the heat from them, and none of them were dressed for this environment, least of all Stuber, who’d only escaped with his pants.

  While the others set about equipping themselves and stashing the supplies, Perry stepped out through the broken wall of the building and looked around the misty streets. Were they always like this? Was the fog perpetual?

  He listened for a time. Wasn’t sure what he expected to hear, but there was nothing but a funereal silence over the place. The hum was still there, though. But Perry had begun to suspect that it was not an actual noise. The others could not hear it. It was a pulse through the fabric of reality. A toxic energy that Perry realized he sensed only through his connection to Confluence.

  Looking out at the ruins, Perry saw that nature had not reclaimed it, as though it knew to stay away. No birds sang. No insects chirped. Nothing moved, save for the slow creep of the thick billows of moisture along the ground.

  Were they out there? The Guardians? Whimsby had claimed to have seen them. How many of them were there? Would they be able to hear them coming? Whimsby said they floated along the ground. Would they make a noise as they did so, like a skiff in a hover? Or were they silent? Would they creep through the fog, unheard until they were right on top of them?

  It was all an alien landscape to Perry. A world entirely different from any he’d known. Rife with hazards. Danger around every corner.

  Perry raised his eyes along the skyline, spotting the closest tower. It was approximately a mile from them. Several blocks of buildings west, and a few north.

  The building itself seemed to glitter darkly, despite the lack of sunlight. Perry frowned at it, wishing for Whimsby’s enhanced vision. It seemed nonsensical to him, but the tower appeared to have been made of glass.

  Glass? Who the hell made buildings out of glass?

  Were Perry�
�s ancestors so pretentious? Was this the type of pridefulness that had led to the gods destroying the world in the first place? To take so fragile a substance and insist that it be used to create a building so large? It was almost as though they were mocking nature. Challenging the elements.

  But it was a high vantage point.

  Perry ducked back into their hideout. Stuber sat hunched on the ground, cross-legged, scowling. Teran gingerly stretched her legs. Sagum just looked exhausted.

  “How are you guys feeling?” Perry asked.

  “Like I’m hungover,” Stuber griped. His fingertips touched his torso. “And also like a Surgeon was prying around in my guts.”

  Teran nodded along. “Not much better here.” She massaged her right thigh, but kept her hands away from the raw incision mark. “This whole leg keeps going back and forth between feeling like its on fire and not being able to feel it at all.” She bared her teeth in a grimace. “Did those bastards permenantly fuck up my nerves?”

  Whimsby perked up from nearby. “I took the liberty of conducting a scan of everyone,” he said. “Your common peroneal nerve was excessively stimulated during your torture, but it appears to be intact and working normally. There’s no reason to think that it won’t heal with some time. Though, admittedly, when I say time, I’m thinking more like months.”

  “Fantastic,” Teran said, not voicing what they all thought.

  They weren’t likely to survive for months.

  “How about you guys take it easy for a bit?” Perry suggested.

  “We need to find the Source,” Stuber growled. “Or whatever the fuck else it might be.”

  Perry nodded. “Yeah, but we don’t even know where to start. I’ve got an idea to get a lay of the land, but in the meantime, you guys can rest up. Get hydrated at least. Maybe try to get some food in you, if you can stand it.”

  Stuber made a small gagging noise in his throat. Shook his head. “I’ll drink some water.”

  “Whimsby.” Perry turned to the mech. “Do you have any sort of map of the East Ruins?”