Spear of Destiny

by James Osiris Baldwin

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s because it doesn’t have any moving parts. The hologram is an illusion, a spell that’s showing us what’s on the plates.” Rin patted the side of the console. “If we break this open and remove the plates, we will have all the schematics. Then I should be able to reverse engineer this console, and we can build a new one in Myszno. It looks like a much older version of the map storage device we found in Withering Rose’s Chorus Vault.”

  “Huh.” I opened my inventory and took out the crystal plates I’d recovered from the lab. “We also found these in a smaller machine inside one of the rooms we looked into. These might have information on the Drachan we can use.”

  “Ooh.” Rin took them carefully, then added them to her inventory. “Kyanine? I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Me either.” I flipped back to see the other two available Warsingers. The first was Pure Land, a goat-headed Warsinger with massive curled horns and a spiked warhammer. The second was Hanging Star—one of the floating Warsinger types, it had a stylized Meewfolk face, a long, pod like body, and no fewer than six sword-like arms that rested around it in a loose spiral. “There’s only nine schematics on this machine. We’re missing one.”

  “There were only nine Warsingers, plus the prototype,” Rin said.

  “Yeah. That’s what I mean.” I tapped the dial. “There’s only nine blueprints on this box, and one of them is Nocturne Lament.”

  “Oh! Then…” Rin’s expression grew troubled. “The missing one has to be Withering Rose. It was built a couple hundred years after the first Warsingers were deployed.”

  I reached up to squeeze my hair in exasperation. “Of course. The one set of blueprints we need aren’t here.”

  “No, but we can figure out a lot about the technology used to make her from these diagrams. We might be able to repair Nocturne Lament first, and with that experience, we can piece out Withering Rose. Just remember: if it was built by mortals, it can be rebuilt by mortals.” Rin patted me on the arm. “Don’t worry! This is real progress!”

  “HAH! GOT IT!” Gar let out a harsh bark of triumph from the carcass of Perilous Symphony. “Rin! I found the drive!”

  “Great! Now we just have to figure out how to transport it without breaking anything.” Rin dashed her arm across her forehead, rubbing the condensation from it. “Phew… alright, leave this with me. I’m going to document everything I can before I take it apart.”

  “Do you have crafting prompts, or are you just winging it?” I asked.

  Rin giggled, pulling her toolbox out of hammerspace. “Oh, you know. A bit of Column A, a bit of Column B. But I need to do this alone, if you don’t mind. I get nervous working when people are behind me.”

  “No worries.” I stepped back. “I’ll leave the Spear here. Let me know if you need me to do any Paragon mojo.”

  “Yep!” She crouched down, plugged a pair of earplugs in, and began to tinker. “Can you go assist Gar with the sonic organs? He might need a hand.”

  “I never thought I’d get to help a man with his sonic organs.” I muttered, shooting an amused glance at Rin.

  Gar was still hanging from his bosun’s chair, muttering at and cursing the Warsinger as he tinkered with what looked to me like the brass columns of a church organ. Suri leaned back in her harness, keeping tension on the belaying rope as she stared off into space. Karalti had curled up in a little ball off to the side, snoozing with her hair over her face.

  “How’s it going?” I called up to him.

  “This fucking old piece of shit...” He banged on a mineralized plate of metal with the end of his wrench, scowling at it. “The AMEN is behind this panel, but I don’t have enough leverage to get the damn thing off.”

  “The what?”

  “The AMEN. Arcane Machima ENcoder.”

  I glanced at Suri. She shrugged.

  “What’s the AMEN do?” I asked, turning back.

  Gar leaned out and looked down over his shoulder. “You know what a ribosome is?”

  “That’s a sports drink flavor, right?” I beamed up at him.

  “Dios, ayúdame.” He made a show of crossing himself. “Ribosomes are cellular machines that turn amino acids into chains of protein, you dumbass. AMENs do the same thing, but for magic. They take mana and encode it so it can manifest functions without a wizard standing over it, waving their hands.”

  I crossed my arms. “So what you’re saying is that you need help getting the panel off?”

  “Ugggggh.” He made a sound of disgust. “Yes.”

  “Me not know what ribosome is, but me STRONG.” I tensed, adjusted my footing, and leaped up. I caught a handhold on the Warsinger and pulled myself to a narrow ledge, then monkeyed over to where Gar was struggling to reach. Clinging on with one hand, I reached back. “Give me a crowbar.”

  He handed over a short army-style crowbar. I wedged it in, then began to rock it back and forth, working the decayed rivets loose. The bolts shrieked as they gave way: first the two at the top, and then the rest.

  “Watch your head!” Gar called to Suri, giving her time to move as the plate tumbled off and clanged to the ground.

  “There you go. One thingimajig, served cold.” I scurried to the left a bit in case anything decided to blow up in my face. There was a strange device behind the panel: a double-walled metal cylinder with two tubes feeding through the top, and several dozen small tubes flaring out the bottom. It was inset with golden rings that spun like prayer wheels when Gar reached in.

  “Can you pull my swing forward and hold in closer?” He asked.

  “Sure.” I leaned out, caught the rope, and hauled it forward, wrapping my arm around a pipe so I wasn’t dislodged.

  “Thanks,” he grunted. “Damn, look at this thing. Ain’t seen anything quite like it.”

  “How’s it different to the things we have now?” I asked.

  “Because this puppy somehow handles twenty-seven different magical functions,” Gar replied, attaching some kind of small meter to one of the intake pipes. “Doesn’t sound like a lot, but the AMEN in an engine only handles six: intake and exhaust, fuel injection, conversion and catalyzation, and engine temperature. This thing’s got three command rings on it, nine functions per ring. Looks to me like the rings allowed custom functionality. It must have been red-hot when it was running, unless there was some kind of fluid to keep it cool.”

  “Huh.” I barely understood what he was saying, but I was interested anyway. “Man… the world of artificing is totally different to the world of combat classes. What made you get into it?”

  “I was into mechanics before Archemi,” he replied tersely. “Wanted to open my own shop. Was close to doing just that when the War happened and I got called up. Pull that wire there out of the way for me.”

  I leaned down and caught the cable, pushing it aside. “Wait: you were conscripted?”

  “Yeah. Who wasn’t?”

  “Anyone over thirty-five. Did you make yourself look older in the game?”

  He sighed. “No. I was overage, but I got drafted anyway. Served in TW1 as a UAS pilot. Left the army for five years. They recalled me to duty at the beginning of ‘69. Talk about getting fucked.”

  ‘UAS pilots’ were drone pilots: a soldier who flew unmanned aircraft. “Jeez. You must have been a real ace if they pulled you back in.” I clicked my tongue. “Which unit?”

  “The second time ‘round? 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne.”

  “Oh, hey, we did a lot of work with you guys.” I leaned out a little further. “I was a dogface for five years.”

  “Oh yeah? Lemme guess: 79th?”

  I laughed. “Yeah. How d'you know?”

  “How the hell else does some smartmouth city kid end up with eyes like yours? I knew the second I saw you that you’ve seen some real bad shit, and the brass worked that whole fucking division to death.” Gar hawked in his throat. “What company? Might even have flown for you.”

  “E Company,” I sa
id. “And yeah. I can’t speak for others, but the war gave a lot and took a lot from me. Took more than it gave, but hey—I was able to put my airborne experience to good use here.”

  Gar looked up at me. “Huh?”

  I laughed. “Yeah, we had to retake one of the counties of Myszno from this dickhead baron. He had himself a pretty damn good position, with air defenses and everything, but it turns out no one’d thought to invent a working parachute in Archemi yet. I was able to help Rin make blueprints for the old T-11 and the HI-5 systems. We trained a bunch of mercenaries to jump, then dropped straight into his damn castle.”

  “E Company didn’t do airborne.” Gar irritably shook his head, twisting his wrench deep in the bowels of the Warsinger.

  “Well, I wasn’t dreaming all those jumps, was I?” I laughed. “I did at least ten over five years.”

  Gar craned his head back to look straight at me. “I’m telling you, son. E Company didn’t have any damn airborne. The conscript C.Ts weren’t ever run through Airborne School. I know because I was there from the beginning through to the day when the whole of China dropped dead from HEX.”

  I blinked back at him in confusion. “Well, I know what I did and didn’t do. Don’t give a shit if you don’t believe me.”

  “Sure thing.” He gave me a wry, sardonic smile—a smile I’d given more than one person myself. It was the look any combat Vet would give to someone who was talking out their ass.

  I tsch’d. “You’ll see the chutes when we get back to Myszno. I know how they’re made, I know how they’re packed, and I can rig one with my eyes closed. Even if my memory got screwed up during my upload here, the combat jumps aren’t something I forgot.”

  “Hell, for all I know, it’s my memory that’s shot,” Gar grunted. “We’re nothing but computer programs in some fucking magic box in space. Only difference between me and a calculator is that the calculator doesn’t feel the need to eat and jerk off.”

  “Well said.” I eased down a little, and tried to push my doubt down to join all the other fears, anxieties, and other shit I’d successfully repressed over the years.

  Gar’s eyes narrowed as he turned the ratchet one final time, reached in, and extracted a perfectly round metal sphere covered in glyphs. “Alright. Pretty sure that’s everything Rin wanted. Rest of this thing’s basically just scrap. We got a good set of pictures of its big pipe organ thing.”

  “Great.” I’d expected to feel excitement, but the conversation had sucked the wind out of me. How did he know my company didn’t have airborne training? Had I had it before he’d been recalled back into service? I had a year of enlistment on him—I’d collected my punch card in ‘68. Was he just trolling me?

  Suddenly—inexplicably—I found myself feeling very tired.

  “Alright, Suri! Bring us down!” Gar called to her.

  “Righto. Hold on to your undies.” Suri began to let the rope out.

  I waited until Gar was on the ground before jumping. A few months ago, I’d have flinched at the idea of dropping from a height like this—roughly the same height as a five-story building. Now, I did it almost as a reflex, dancing into a thin curl of shadow just before hitting the ground to land softly on my feet.

  “Are you guys done over there?” Rin’s voice cut through the still air of the silo.

  “Sure am. These parts weigh a ton,” Gar replied. “What’cha got over there?”

  “I’ve got the plates!” Rin could barely contain her excitement. “But we don’t have a whole lot of lambidium. I can reassemble a terminal like this in Litvy, but we need to take as much lambidium scrap as we can.”

  “Then let’s portion it out between us. If we split the load to a maximum of eight hundred pounds, and Karalti can carry the lot in dragon form,” I said.

  “Snrrk!” Karalti’s head shot up at the sound of her name. “Whuu? I’m ‘wake!

  “I can pack about two hundred kilos myself, give or take,” Suri said. “I dunno what that is in pounds.”

  “Four-forty, or thereabouts,” Gar replied. “I can take some. If nothin’ else, lambidium is expensive as hell. We should get it while we have it.”

  “Then let’s get to it.” I avoided looking at Gar, focusing on Suri. “Because we’re about to turn Vlachia into the technological superpower of Archemi.”

  Chapter 47

  We backtracked through the portal to Devana’s Dragon Gate, and stepped out to find the Avatar waiting for us, along with six heavily armed and armored guards.

  “Is there a problem?” I took a cautious step ahead of the others, making sure Rin and Gar were behind me.

  “Problem? No, not at all, Paragon.” The rain had stopped, but the ground was still wet. Sanayam had his robes held up over his arm, a parasol resting over one shoulder. “After speaking with you in my cell yesterday, I realized that you all may need assistance. I also wanted to let you know that Priest-Queen Solai sends her regards. She has contacted one of her sisters of the Great Conclave, Priest-Queen Mil’ah’ao, and asked her to send engineers to help repair the airship which crashed within the territory of Wung’raah Waat.”

  Gar bristled. “You got strangers tinkering with my ship? Without me there?”

  “Your Lieutenant, Ambrose, assured us you would wish to be there to oversee reconstruction,” the Avatar replied mildly. “He ordered the materials he thought you would need. Delivery should have begun by now.”

  Gar eased down, muttering to himself. I put my hands together and bowed to him the way I’d seen the Meewfolk do. “Thank you. And please pass my thanks to Solai. We’re grateful for all the help you’ve given us.”

  “She wishes to speak with you and your bonded one before you leave,” the Avatar said. “Concerning the matters we discussed in the temple.”

  I looked to Suri. “No one else?”

  “The Paragon is the default leader of the Triad,” the Avatar replied. “There is no shame in fulfilling your role.”

  “It’s fine. I need to check on Cutthroat anyway.” Suri reached out and squeezed my shoulder. “Go. We’ll be waiting for you there.”

  Karalti looked between us, then back to the Avatar. “Okay! Sure!”

  The Avatar bowed, then gestured with a spell-gloved hand. Gar, Rin and Suri vanished, leaving Karalti and I together. With a second gesture, the Avatar warped all of us back to Ru Waat.

  We appeared in what could only be Solai’s personal lounge, a room adjacent to the lavish bedroom where I’d roused from my hedonistic sex-coma. The noise and bustle of the temple was absent: there was nothing but the tinkle of wind chimes, the scent of sandalwood, and the whispering warm wind brushing over our skin. Like many of the Meewfolk buildings we’d seen, the queen’s living space was open to the air, a gazebo-like room with wide balustrades perfect for lounging in the sun. Solai was doing just that, until she sensed our arrival and slid to her feet, yawning languidly.

  “Avatar Sanayam.” She went to her hands and knees and bowed to the floor, as her captain had done to her. “Thank you for honoring us with your presence.”

  “It is I who should be grateful you host me on your sacred land, Priest-Queen Solai,” the Avatar replied, with an air of ritualized formality. “I am taboo.”

  “A taboo of necessity, enshrined by all who have won their place in the goddess’s eyes before me, and in those who are yet to come.” Solai gave me a sultry glance, which earned a scowl from Karalti, and motioned to a pair of wooden chairs. “Is it true, Paragon? That you seek to release the Deceivers?”

  “I took a seat. “Only because we have to. As I said to Samayan, there are thousands of Starborn in Archemi now. A minority of them are power-hungry assholes, and it’s a matter of time before they unleash the Drachan. If we don’t destroy them in a controlled manner, the end result will be the same.”

  “Why would anyone believe the Drachan would assist them in their pursuit of power?” She didn’t drape herself over the sofa the way she normally did. Instead, she sat down and neatly drew h
er legs up and to the side, spine straight. The Avatar and his guard remained standing.

  “The short answer? Because humans are stupid. A human Architect is trying to resurrect the Drachan for his own purposes as we speak,” I said. “They’ve infected his mind. He keeps saying he needs to ‘cleanse the world of squalor’. He’ll kill everyone, or conquer them, and when there’s no defense against the Drachan, they’ll turn on him and destroy everything here.”

  “Squalor?” The Avatar cocked his head. There was no direct Meewish translation for it, so he mimicked my pronunciation. “That is a dark word.”

  “A dark word?” Karalti chirped aloud. “What do you mean?”

  “I do not know,” the Avatar replied. “But when you said it, the Shield of Ancestors fell silent. A ripple of disquiet passed through the multitude of souls who observe us here, on the sacred terrace we lifted in thanks to their sacrifice. It… scared them.”

  “Wait. Squalor is a name?” I frowned. “Is it one of the Drachan? He was ranting about the Drachan telling him or showing him things.”

  “I do not know. But I advise you to stop saying it aloud.” The Avatar shivered, his robes rustling.

  I narrowed my eyes. “Whatever it is, I’m not afraid of it. If you don’t name evil, if you don’t keep your eyes on it, you just make it stronger. Stare at it and speak its name, and it loses power. That’s what I think.”

  “Right. We can’t pretend it doesn’t exist,” Karalti said. “Maybe there’s a Drachan named Squalor, and it’s behind what’s happening?”

  “That is possible. The names of the Deceivers were not passed down through history,” the Avatar said. “And there is wisdom in what you say, Paragon. But until you have a clear understanding of what you are dealing with, it is best not to draw attention to yourself. We have a principle of war in our homeland: ‘if you are stalking a deer in the brush, there is a tiger watching you from the trees.’ It is easy to become prey to something larger and more powerful than yourself when you are hunting, if you are unaware of the predator stalking you.”

  “Okay… yeah. You’re right.” I nodded, and leaned forward on my elbows. “I just don’t want Ororgael to think I’m afraid.”