by K. Eason
Gaer raised hands and visor toward the ceiling. “Dear imaginary plasma-god, please tell this templar—Sss. He’s your god. He won’t listen to me. He’d probably tell you to do exactly what you’re doing, which is look for a fight we’re underequipped to win.”
“Ptah doesn’t talk to me. Maybe to the priests, I don’t know. They’ve got different implants.” Iari dismissed the axeblade and clipped the shaft back to her rig. “A trap door would be under something. And something not too far from the door. So one of these stacks of crates is my guess. Char. Help me move these. Brisk Array, you’re our sentry.”
“Understood.” Brisk Array moved to the ruined door and snugged themself into a gap they shouldn’t be able to fit into. They didn’t quite disappear, if you knew where to look; but your eyes wanted to slide off.
“Huh. Stealth-hexes.” Present Gaer with something new, he forgot to be angry. “That’s a nice bit of artificing.”
“Great. Admire it later. For now.” Iari put her shoulder to a stack of crates. “Help me shift this. See if there’s something underneath.”
“A patch of floor, I bet,” he muttered. But he came and took the other side of the stack. “Which way?”
“Left. On my count.”
* * *
—
Char found the trap door on the fifth try—the collective fifth, Gaer noted, since he and Iari had moved only two stacks so far, and Char was a setatir riev. Even one-armed, Char was more formidable at crate-shifting. Not that it took arms. Hips, mostly. Weight. Of which Iari had the balance, in their pairing.
Iari was almost to three, time to shove, when Char said, “Lieutenant. There is a hatch.”
Which meant Gaer got to stop, and straighten, and lean against the stack. Meant he got to find his breath again. He spread his jaw-plates as far as the helmet allowed and dragged rig-tepid air through his mouth. The rig did most of the load-bearing, but it took all its cues from him. Where to bend. How much effort to spend.
Aedian rigs ran on some unholy combination of bioelectric interface through the needle-socket and Aedian—oh, call it alchemy, lacking a better, more accurate term. (The Protectorate had one: heresy. But the Protectorate were a bunch of neefa-eating egg-breakers, so.) Vakari rigs used a very tiny on-board plasma core, hexed and engineered against breach or overload. Neither system was perfect, but the Aedian model was more—and Gaer hated to think it, but it was the right term—more efficient at sustaining high-intensity bursts over time.
And oh, be fair: some of it was just Iari. Tenju physiology was formidable. Heavy bone, dense muscle. Dense brain to go with it, the joke ran (alwar and vakari told similar versions); as without, so within.
Tenju weren’t stupid, in Gaer’s experience. Iari certainly wasn’t. But she was stubborn, sometimes to excess. She’d’ve spent the next hour shoving crates around, looking for that door.
So thank Char for finding it first.
“Gaer.” Iari trotted over to Char’s summons. Didn’t look back to see if he was coming, but Char did. Cold blue teslas in a face that looked artistically, generically tenju. There was an actual dead tenju under there. An actual body under all that grafted alloy and armor, however alchemically altered. Unsettling thought.
Gaer came over, not trotting, because a vakar actually approaching a riev seemed unwise enough without rushing.
Iari was leaning over Char. “Huh. It is a hatch. A real hatch. A voidship hatch.”
Gaer gathered breath to argue, because a voidship hatch had no place on a warehouse floor, but no. Char and Iari were right. A hatch made of metal, with a hollowed indent and an actual wheel, set to be flush with the floor and easily covered by crates.
“There’s reinforcement under that floor,” Gaer said. “You don’t just bolt metal into a wooden frame.”
“Huh. They’d’ve had to shore up the basement after the flooding. It’s probably stone. Maybe more alloy.” Iari extended a hand toward the handle. Stopped. “Is it hexed?”
Gaer sighed, audibly and for effect. His rig’s scanners, more acute than his optic, could see that it was. But the hexes’ exact nature required a little more finesse. He took another breath, and then sank his awareness, just a little, into the first sublayer of aether, under the skin of the world.
Everything solid shifted just a fraction out of true, acquiring hazy edges, a blurriness that might be translucence if you didn’t stare at it. That was the first skill an arithmancer learned, that soft-eyed unfocus. Look at nothing, but see everything.
Information collected on the periphery of Gaer’s vision. Iari and the riev were all over Aedian hexwork, those distinctive (and wrong-headed) crypto-matrices of correspondence, both limiting in their possibilities and limited by the implants and, yes, extremely effective for all that.
He floated his attention back toward (and not quite toward) the hatch. Blood and burgundy alphanumeric equations swirled like eddies in a river, fracturing and reforming. These hexes were not Aedian. Not vakari, either Five Tribes or Protectorate. There was an inelegance to them, an imbalance that could’ve been merely dynamic but instead was ugly with a side of unpredictable. Particularly those two alphanumeric strings there, chasing each other around the lock, flickering like a shorted-out tesla.
A palpable chill prickled behind his eyes. A matching chill further down closed fingers around his heart and squeezed. If he could catch one of them, just for a moment, he would know what they were.
Gaer shot his awareness out as one passed close, caught the tail. Willed it still, so that he could look at the alphanumeric sequence, identify familiar parts. Arithmancy had formulas, patterns, there had to be something.
And just as he thought he saw a familiar pair of symbols linked by the symbol for—no, that wasn’t right, a tesser-hex had no place on a ward, tesser-hexes were for moving ships very great distances, straight through aetherless void—the whole string writhed and doubled back on itself like a worm dodging a bird’s beak. He had a moment’s premonition, perhaps his subconscious, perhaps years of arithmancy, perhaps simple luck. His mind flexed and he let the string go just as it realigned into a very familiar sequence, blue-white and blinding.
Gaer pushed his awareness away from it. Felt his body stagger back, like an afterthought.
One layer of aether away, where things had hard edges, the hatch crackled with a fine web of plasma. A ward. On that same, hard-edged layer of reality, Iari grabbed hold of Gaer’s rig and set off the proximity and impact alerts and kept him from falling into a stack of crates.
“Gaer. Hey. You all right?” He noted the sharpness of her voice, squeezed as it was through the comm speakers. Worry. Maybe anger. It was hard, without auras or even faces, behind armor, to tell.
“Fine,” he tried to say. Coughed instead. His mouth tasted sour, like—oh, setat. Blood. He backed out of the aether. His skin fit around him again. He coughed a second time, and sniffed hard and twitched away from her.
No. He tried. She kept a grip on him. “Gaer.”
“It’s a nosebleed. Minor. Nothing.”
“How did it get through your rig? You didn’t touch it.”
“I did, actually. Just not with my hands.” He sniffed, swallowed. Grimaced. Wished to all five dark lords he could spit. “I was trying to get a look at variables in the hex. I’m not even sure I was seeing actual letters from any real alphabet, but I am sure I saw part of a tesser-hex equation in the mix.”
Iari was staring at him, the attitude of shoulder and hip more eloquent than any scowl hiding behind her faceplate. “I didn’t say to hack the hex.”
“And I didn’t. I just looked. Did you hear me? I saw a tesser-hex. On a hatch. In a warehouse. Quantum hexes do information, that might make sense if it was some kind of alarm, but a tesser-hex is for, for voidships. There are other ways—”
“Doesn’t matter what it’s supposed to do.” Iari grabbed
his rig by the elbow fin and jerked him around to face the hatch again. “Because you got it open.”
The hatch was ajar, not quite open, as if someone had dogged the wheel and popped the seal and walked away.
Gaer blinked. “When . . . ah. Did that happen?”
“Just now. When you went flying backward like a slagging bomb went off in your rig.”
“I didn’t fly back.” But his HUD was flashing unhappily, now that he paid attention to it. Minor damage to the shielding, like he’d been in an actual blast. Elevated biometrics, straight across. Gaer swallowed. Grimaced. “All right. Maybe I did. I wasn’t trying to hack, though. I was trying to look.”
“You.” Iari didn’t so much let him go as snatch her hand back. She flexed her hand into a careful fist. Gaer found himself running the probabilities of just how hard she could hit someone.
Then she turned a shoulder to him, and managed to insert herself between him and the hatch at the same time.
“Well, since you did open it, I’m going down. Stay behind me and don’t touch anything. Or think about touching anything. Or whatever you just did.” She moved toward the hatch. “Char. Can you open the hatch for us?”
“Yes.” The big riev leaned over with surprising grace—the torso looked solid, all those tubes and plates, but flexed like living tissue—and grabbed the hatch with their (now he was doing it, thinking of Char as a person) remaining hand.
Gaer expected a sizzle. Some repeat of whatever had happened to him. But there was nothing. Not even a creak as Char dragged it open. The floor was unusually thick, about a meter, and stone, so it was more than enough to support the hatch.
Gaer had expected a ladder, some spindly collection of rungs, leading into an ominous, light-swallowing darkness. Instead, there was a perfectly innocuous set of stone-and-tile stairs leading down into, yes, well, darkness, but it was the ordinary sort that gave way to wedges of light and Iari’s headlamp, when she got far enough down. A faint crosshatch of light came down from the grate in the ceiling, maybe four and a half meters that way.
Iari canted her shield down, to catch any swarm coming up the steps. Nothing.
“Lieutenant.” Char sounded unhappy.
“It’s all right. Looks like the stairs descend maybe three meters.”
Gaer cleared his throat. “We’ve set off two sets of wards, Iari. That’s two sets of alarms. No one’s come yet. Maybe think about why.”
“I am. They reckon we’re dead, so why hurry, or they reckon we’re going to be, so why hurry.” She was almost flush with the warehouse floor now, crouched and descending behind her shield. Alone. Into a cellar full of Brood.
Idiot templar.
Char looked at Gaer. The riev’s aura flared a deep, expectant cerulean. “Will you follow the lieutenant, Ambassador?”
Like that was even a question.
“Just don’t let that hatch close behind us,” he snapped, and went after Iari.
* * *
—
The basement was clearly a product of reconstruction. The stonework was smooth, seamless—Aedian work, probably, priests of Chaama and Mishka sent in to clear earth and water and help rebuild. It was the sort of thing the Aedis did, as part of duty and calling.
It pissed Iari off, to think the Aedis had helped rebuild this place just so some voidspit smuggler could move in, take over, start murdering people. No way Tzcansi was working without PK collusion, and that was expensive. So was the hexwork. So was the slagging hatch. Whatever Tzcansi was storing down here, it had to be big. Given the hexwork on the door and the hatch—and, truth, after Gaer’s explosive moment as a projectile, she’d had a moment of pure red-line biometric panic—Iari was expecting a basement full of weapons.
Instead it was . . . empty. Or at least, not full of interesting contraband. The whole place was a series of low half-domed arches with pillars running to the ground for support. Iari’s rig started pinging, building a rough map on her HUD. It wasn’t quite as big as the warehouse, by width and breadth. Seemed like there might be a meter missing on all the edges, which’d make the walls the same kind of thick as the ceiling. That suggested more than Aedian repair work. Whatever this place had been before the flood, it’d had stone walls originally. An old temple, maybe? Wasn’t much else that would’ve rated shape and dimensions like this. Might be records in the Aedis she could consult.
Right now, that didn’t matter. It was dark. No motion-activated teslas down here, and she didn’t see any switches on the walls. There were pinpricks of light spangling through the grate, and the open hatch behind them spilled a sliver of light in their wake.
“Gaer.” Knowing he was behind her: the green dot on her HUD said as much. “Can you light this place up?”
He didn’t answer with words, for once, and she thought he might’ve taken more of a hit than he wanted to own. But he did respond: light sliced down from the hatch, rays and beams finding their way through the dark like a fistful of headlamps. They dragged across empty floor, brushed empty walls. Illuminated the fine swirls of dust like diamond fog. And settled, finally, on the room’s centerpiece, which appeared to be some kind of wrought iron—
Oh, Mishka’s left tit. That was an altar.
You didn’t become a templar, didn’t sit the vigils and do the work and not know a focus for worship when you saw one. This, though, was not of Aedian construction. It was squat, a matte black metal that Gaer’s light hex couldn’t gouge a shine out of. Ornate spikes and spires jutted out of the corners. It seemed to have six sides. No, seven, and not symmetrically proportioned, covered with designs and carvings. Two of the points crowded together, one taller than the other, with a fine mesh of wire draped between them like a moth-spider’s web.
“Gaer—”
“I have no idea what that is.”
“It’s an altar. And it’s setting off all my alerts.” And more than setting off: it was the source of the Brood readings. Iari angled behind her shield, feeling a little bit like an idiot—it’s a chunk of metal, templar, what are you afraid of?—and edged forward. The alert flashes on her HUD got brighter, the readings smearing into one glowing mass. “It scans just about like a Weep fissure.”
“Yes,” he said grimly. “It does. So maybe don’t walk up to it.”
“I’m not going to touch it.” Except maybe with her axe tuned all the way to immolate. She willed her muscles loose and ready and breathed around the hot thump in her chest. The syn hummed under her skin like live current.
“Iari. Seriously. Just stop. There could be hexes. I might not see them.”
“I’m not getting any closer.”
She could see the altar’s surface more clearly from this range. Asymmetrical bodies—clearly bipeds, that was all she could identify—with mismatched limbs (that one had a single vakari leg, and two short arms) and disproportionate features reached out of the metal. Instead of a single offering surface, the altar had seven, one for each side, but they were all empty. No vessels of any kind. No candles, or cloths, or burners. Nothing of the usual altarish trappings.
The hell else did you use an altar for, though, except as a focus for prayer? Aedian altars had the Elements’ symbols on them, one in each quarter, with a physical representation of that element for meditation. You shifted your focus and position in the sanctuary based on which set of prayers you were attending: Chaama in the north at midnight, Hrok in the east at dawn, Ptah in the south at midday, Mishka in the west at dusk. You could do that with this altar, too, and its position in the center of the room seemed to suggest that was the intent. But the symbolism wasn’t there. Just these flat, irregular platforms covered with grotesque figures and—Oh. The surfaces weren’t entirely irregular. They all sloped, very slightly, toward the center of the altar, where there seemed to be a little hole.
Iari had been largely ignoring the march of readouts on the periphery of her HU
D. Alchemical composition, density, all of that was data for the report she’d owe Tobin. Now she did look. And yes, there. Organic residue.
Well, sure. You could use an altar for sacrifice.
“There’s blood on this thing,” she told Gaer.
“Of course there is.” He sounded grim. “But there isn’t any warding. None. And that seems odd.” His voice sharpened. “I’m getting Brood readings.”
“Yeah, me, too, from the altar. You think they’re inside?”
“Not from the altar. From the northwest corner of this cellar.”
So that’s where the swarm had gone. How civilized of them to wait this long to attack. Iari peeled her lips back, a grin Gaer couldn’t see, and activated her axe.
“So light it up. Let’s see.”
Only it wasn’t swarm that Gaer’s arithmanced beams found in the dark. It was dark metal, brushed and dull and meant not to reflect, carved and channeled and molded into interlocking plates of armor, segmented, over two arms and two legs and a standard bipedal frame. It was a pair of teslas that should have been steady, cold blue, and were instead a throbbing amber.
Oh, ungentle Ptah. It was a riev.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Gaer blinked through the info-splash on his HUD. Scout-class, built on an alwar frame, small and light, probably fast. So guess: that must be the missing riev, Swift Runner, there in the basement’s furthest corner. Not quite sitting—riev weren’t well-suited for that position—but not standing, either. Propped. Slumped, really, head tilted a little bit out of alignment. One shoulder a little too low.
And those tesla eyes, which might be looking at him, or at Iari, or at nothing. Pulsing, like a heartbeat.