by Frank Morin
“The swarm comes, and monsters of earth and fire have almost reached the one-mile mark,” Anton said.
That was a critical point. Kirstin’s Defense was located a mile out. Verena had no idea why it was situated so far, but it was possible any closer to the city might destabilize Merkland. She could still activate it, but did she dare?
Did she dare not?
“I still think we should send a squad of Sentries to support you,” she offered.
“Negative. They will be more effective working from the wall. The land swarm just sensed my presence and are actively targeting me.”
“Get out of there,” Verena said instantly, her fear spiking again. She’d seen the swarm from a distance. Not even Anton could stand against it.
“They are employing a new form of shielding. Warn the others. I will continue to do what I can from here.”
“Don’t do anything rash,” she cried, hating that her voice shook with her growing fear. Anton was legendarily powerful, but even he had limits. She couldn’t bear to think of losing him as the first casualty to the swarm.
“I am activating the sentinels,” she added.
Ivor said, “Good hunting.”
Anton said, “Preparation places the hunter in the path of the charging torc, but the heart who fights for love wields a mightier blade.”
Ivor grunted. “Like I said, good—”
His voice abruptly cut off with a cry of surprise.
“Ivor!” Verena cried, silently cursing as she scrambled to activate the sentinels. She needed to see what was going on.
“Some of them came in along the riverbed ahead of the others. Totally shielded.” Ivor’s voice sounded hoarse, still calm, but she could tell he was rattled. “They’re smarter than they should be. They—”
Again his voice cut out.
“Ivor? No! Get out of there!” Verena screamed as the sentinels activated in her mind like distant candles.
Her first line of defense was situated three quarters of a mile south of the city. Four tall pedestals rose from the depths where they had been concealed. Three rose in a line near the road, while the other rose up in the center of the river. As soon as they reached the surface, Verena activated the sightstones embedded within each one. The views appeared half a second later on the wall in front of her, replacing the previous ones.
The four views showed similar scenes, all facing south toward hordes of onrushing monsters. Verena gulped in rising fear as she stared at all of those summoned creatures tearing up the road and the river with single-minded purpose to kill everyone inside of Merkland.
She spotted a crenelated tower of earth standing near the road, already overrun by the front ranks of the land swarm. Monsters of all shapes and sizes were boiling over it in a tide of destruction. Even as Verena focused on it, the monsters ripped the tower apart, spraying dirt fifty yards in every direction. She saw no sign of Anton as the tide of destruction continued north, not even slowed.
“Anton? Tell me you got out of there!”
No response.
“Ivor? Ivor, talk to me.”
No response.
She felt cold with fear, but could not allow the terror to control her. Verena had faced difficult battles before. “Stay calm,” she urged herself, but staring at that fast-approaching swarm, her usual calm nearly cracked.
Then the rage hit.
Those monsters wanted to destroy everyone she had vowed to protect. And they would. Unless she killed them first.
“Spitter team one, fall back!” she ordered, switching to another speakstone line.
“Tallan’s fury, look at that,” one of them breathed. It was a woman’s voice, mature, but shaken. At the moment, Verena couldn’t remember her name.
“Get back to the city! Fortify the defenses and prepare for shielded monsters attacking from a quarter mile ahead of the main host.”
“What about General Ivor?” the woman asked.
“Don’t worry about Ivor. Just go. Now!”
Verena didn’t wait for a reply, but switched to the main commander line. “The swarm is almost to the one mile mark. Ivor and Anton reported elevated intelligence and tactics. The front ranks of the swarms are protected by shielding. Pass the word and prepare.”
“Can they retreat?” Rory asked, his voice grave, as if he already sensed the answer.
Verena refused to accept that Anton and Ivor might have died, but still had to report, “Communication was lost.”
“It’s happening too fast,” Shona breathed.
“Focus! I am preparing to engage with the sentinels,” Verena said, then switched off the line. She couldn’t deal with any distractions.
Verena prepared to unleash the devastation poised within the sentinels, but the sight of those swarms, still numbering in the thousands, boiling toward her viewscreens gave her pause.
There were simply too many. Even if every round from every sentinel destroyed a monster, she would barely make a dent in the hordes stretching back as far as the viewscreens allowed her to see.
Merkland would never survive that tide of destruction. No wonder the queen hadn’t sent her human armies with them. She didn’t need them.
That thought infuriated Verena. No. She would not allow the city to fall. She could not hold back any possible weapon.
She had to activate Kirstin’s Defense.
38
An Unexpected Meeting
With lingering doubts whispering that she was making a terrible mistake, Verena launched herself out of her command chair and up the ladder to the tower command room.
“Builder Verena, what are you doing up here?” the officer in charge asked, looking worried.
“Spread the word that at least parts of the swarm are shielded. Prepare all forces for unrestricted engagement,” she cried, but didn’t slow. She tore across the room and up the stone stairs toward the roof, taking them three at a time.
The rooftop was crowded with soldiers and officers, all staring south toward the distant swarm. Even at over a mile away, Verena could clearly see the swarm covering the land in an undulating, black mass. The air was heavy with fearful whisperings and she felt the mood turning grim. Even a fool could see that they were doomed.
Not if she could help it.
Ignoring the calls from officers asking her what she was doing, Verena pushed through the crowd to the crenelated outer wall to the obsidian plaque. She paused for a second, staring at the inscription, her doubts rising again. She was about to destroy perhaps the most powerful link to higher forms of Builder power in existence. Activating that mechanical was no guarantee of survival, but it guaranteed the loss of critical knowledge.
She glanced over the wall at the distant swarm and her doubts wilted under simple truth. If she did not activate the mechanical, she and everyone in Merkland would die. No truths concealed within the mechanical could help them then.
“I hope you knew what you were doing,” she whispered to Kirstin’s memory.
Then Verena pressed her hand to the sculpted obsidian plaque and plunged her Builder senses into it.
The eight sculpted soapstone roared to life in her mind like distant bonfires. Verena reached for the one due south, situated in the river. It was the keystone of the entire higher mechanical. As soon as her mind touched it, Verena activated the first command to initiate the mechanical.
She wasn’t sure what to expect, and now that she had committed to action, she felt a rising sense of excitement. Hamish would be so disappointed he wasn’t there to experience it too, but she hoped the mission to Jagdish proved easier than her fight was about to be.
Her mind was swept into the super-mechanical as it activated. The eightfold matrix of master-sculpted soapstone linked together. In Verena’s mind it was like sheets of silvery fire exploding from each stone and shooting across the space to the next stone, linking them all in an unbroken octagon of invisible power surrounding the city.
Then the entire landscape glowed silver in her mind, as if the sun ha
d risen in her thoughts. Vast amounts of energy poured through that linked matrix of stones, more than even such a collection of sculpted stones should be able to produce.
Linked to the mechanical, Verena felt herself rising above the city in that silvery cloud, and for the first time in her life she sensed a gateway hovering unseen just above her. She gasped as understanding struck like a jolt of diorite.
A Builder threshold.
Thresholds only existed for Petralists, but she felt it as clearly as she’d ever felt Connor’s strong hand in hers. She wanted to laugh with delight. It was awe inspiring. Dozens of questions arose in her mind, but she realized with a new sense of dread that she didn’t understand how that higher mechanical was pushing her to that threshold. She might never again experience it.
So she had to reach it today.
Verena embraced the flow of power. Connor had said that to ascend, he had to unite with the element. She had never understood what that meant until now. She cast herself into the current of raw power, and it filled her in a way she’d never felt before. It was exhilarating!
Activating mechanicals was always a more external act for Builders than walking with elements or tapping other affinities was for Petralists, but this was different. Verena was one with the mechanical, infused with power that flooded her mind and filled her with peace.
It accelerated her thoughts, but her mind raced so fast she couldn’t focus on the new ideas flashing through her mind. She sensed marvelous inventions, just out of reach, but if she paused to focus on any one of them, she sensed she would lose momentum and never make it to the threshold.
So she somehow lunged upward, swimming up through the silvery cloud of raw power and reached the threshold. She struggled to pull herself up through it, but her progress stopped right at the cusp of it. Something was missing, but she couldn’t comprehend what it might be.
In that second a fresh wave of pure energy flooded down through the threshold in a torrent so mighty she scarce comprehended it. It swept her down into the matrix, carrying her mind along with it as that power plunged into the river, seized the great Macantact, and gave the waters a savage twist.
The river south of Merkland exploded a quarter mile into the air in a geyser so insanely huge it sucked all the water out of a hundred yard section. As if from a great distance, she heard the soldiers around her shouting in amazement. She wanted to tell them what was happening, but her body felt distant and inaccessible. That should bother her, but she was one with the water, and it filled her with joy and a sense of power unlike anything she’d ever known.
The swarm of summoned monsters paused as it neared the new barrier. They might be mindless killing machines, but even they could sense the threat of that mighty wall of water.
The waters did not plunge back into the river, but swept eastward, as if blown by an invisible hurricane. The cascading, blue tide boiled across the landscape, aimed directly at the spot where the next sculpted soapstone was buried. It picked up speed, sucking more and more water out of the Macantact, and Verena sensed even more water, buried deep underground erupting upward as it was caught in the pull of Kirstin’s Defense.
When the flood reached the second sculpted soapstone, it again exploded high into the air, and the underground river joined the flood, doubling it. Waters rose over two hundred feet in a solid wall a full fifty feet thick. It continued to move, rapidly encircling the city, plowing across the landscape through trees and hills and roads, scraping a perfectly level furrow through everything as it circumnavigated Merkland.
It completed the circuit in moments, an eight-sided mega-manifestation of elemental water that mirrored the famous Merkland walls, only magnified a thousandfold. It was glorious, and it rivaled anything Verena had ever heard from the mightiest Petralists.
For a second, Verena feared the swarm would not dare the waters, that they would simply wait for the mechanical to exhaust itself. She sensed it could run for a long time, but would eventually peter out. Those soapstone sculptures were imbued with incredibly concentrated amounts of power, but staggering quantities were being consumed to keep the construct alive.
After their initial hesitation, the land swarm seemed to build upon itself as monsters piled atop monsters until they reared almost as high as the water barrier. Then one huge creature that looked like a rocky hill with squat legs that could plow right through Merkland without slowing, broke ranks and charged.
That triggered the entire swarm. Hundreds of monsters erupted into motion. The ones on top were flung high into the air, soaring right over the wall, some howling with blood lust, while others shot gouts of flame in front of them.
Verena blanched. She had never imagined the swarm might figure out how to leap the barrier wall. If they were that smart, Merkland was indeed in trouble.
In the river, the monsters had also massed, and they surged forward in a tight formation, attempting to spear right through the barrier wall.
Something seemed to click in Verena’s mind as an additional stage of defense kicked in. The waters of Kirstin’s Defense boiled higher, tendrils snatching at monsters attempting to leap over it. Those tendrils seized many of the monsters and yanked them down into the swirling depths.
It ate them.
Verena gasped in shock. With her mind connected to the mega-mechanical, she sensed the waters within the wall transform into icy spikes, arranged like interlinked gears in the most complex machine in the world. The ropy tendrils of water yanked earth and fire elemental monsters into those fast-spinning gears that tore them apart with unimaginable savagery.
Monsters exploded into muddy chunks or fiery clouds, but the gears of ice kept spinning, churning through more and more monsters. Feeling those many monstrous bodies torn apart in such an intimate way sickened her, but she still wanted to cheer.
Within the river, the first ranks of monsters that plunged into the swirling defensive wall met a similar fate. Churning gears of ice sucked them in and ripped them apart. The waters that gave them life were consumed and used to buttress the wall so that their demise only made the defenses stronger.
Verena wondered with sick horror what would have happened to any mortal army charging into that maelstrom of mechanical destruction.
The monsters kept coming, driven by their single-minded need to kill, to destroy, and to obey their master. At first the wall defenses stopped them all, and Verena lost count of how many of the swarm were ripped apart.
“Yes!” she exulted, surprising herself with the sound of her own voice, as if from a great distance. She’d been drawn in so deep, she was more part of the mechanical than separate from it. The experience was amazing, but as she recognized what was happening to her, she felt a growing sense of unease. If she lost herself in there, could she ever escape?
“Wisdom in one so young is as rare as it is vital for survival,” said a smooth female voice directly into her mind.
All of a sudden, Verena found herself standing in the midst of the watery wall. For a second she nearly panicked, but when she concentrated, she could still feel her body standing on the rooftop, one hand pressed to the plaque.
It was a strange experience. Her mind was somehow projecting into that space, as if the mechanical was forming a vision in her mind and she stepped into it. That was the kind of weirdness she’d expect from Connor.
An elegant woman appeared before her. Her face was flawless, but still somehow old. Her blue eyes seemed as deep as the ocean, and her long, greenish-blue tresses swayed behind her as if driven by gentle waves. She wore a shimmering, silvery gown that glittered like a thousand diamonds. No, it was as if she was wearing a gown of brightly polished scales. Ignoring the carnage around her, the woman approached through the waters.
“What is going on?” Verena asked, looking around nervously at the waters churning all around them, monsters getting ripped to elemental bits on all sides. She no longer felt it, as if she was standing in the midst of a sightstone viewscreen.
“
You have approached a threshold only one other has ever accessed. I wish I had sensed your coming sooner. Perhaps I could have prepared a more fitting greeting to one who walks the gateways to the sylfaen.”
“Please, I don’t know what that means. Who are you?” Verena asked. She sensed great power in the woman.
“My name would mean nothing to you, but you may think of me as Water. That’s how your friend Connor sees me.”
For a second, Verena could only stare as the ramifications of those words resounded through her mind like ever-multiplying whispers. Finally she managed to blurt, “How? Connor said he sees you, but he never said anything about speaking with you like this.”
“We have not yet spoken, but I hope he will succeed in crossing the final threshold to a bridge where my words can finally reach his ears.”
“Tallan’s mercy, this is hard to believe,” Verena whispered.
Water surprised her by frowning. “Tallan wasted his chance, but we have high hopes that Connor will finally prove a worthy candidate.”
“For what?”
“To act as our champion, of course,” Water said with a wide smile.
Verena wanted to ask a thousand questions. Connor had started speaking of the elements as if they were people. At first Verena had thought that weird, but he seemed convinced they had personalities, and that those insights were helping him walk with them better.
Now she was speaking with Water? Could the elements really walk and talk like people? She’d always thought the term ‘walking with the elements’ more poetic than real, but what if it wasn’t? The elements were so powerful, they might know how to stop Queen Dreokt.
She opened her mouth to speak, but in that second, Kirstin’s Defense reached its limit. So many monsters plunged into it through the river or boiled up over the top of it from the land side that not even that mighty mechanical could stop them all. Thousands of summoned monsters were attacking Kirstin’s Defense.
Hundreds got through.
Some were missing limbs or dripped fire in their wake like blood, but they resumed their charge toward Merkland. If Verena hadn’t triggered Kirstin’s Defense, Merkland would have been swarmed under for sure.