by K. Eason
Riev still had those, though, didn’t they. Hearts that still beat, however hexed and coerced into service.
“There’s no aura. There’s no—anything, except Brood readings. What does that yellow mean for the eyes?”
Iari had stopped, with one foot raised. Now, slowly, slowly, she began to set that foot down. “Don’t know. But light at all means offline, not dead.”
Oh dark lords, riev were nothing but dead. Gaer forbore to say it. The finer points of what made someone deceased could wait for a civilized venue. Far more worrying now: “What does that mean, offline? Can they come back online?”
“Not an artificer, Gaer, I don’t know. I don’t see any damage. No ruptures. You see anything?”
Gaer forced a swallow down a dry throat. Wished he could blink himself somewhere else. No: he wished he could blink that thing somewhere else, say behind a good barrier. Iari was too close to it, if offline decided to become online. “No smoking hexes. No. Do riev just . . . die? Of old age, or hex-rot?”
“No idea. Ask Char.”
It wasn’t the worst idea. Gaer flipped comms to external speakers. Pinned all his attention on the dormant Swift Runner and called, “Char?” into the dark.
A moment, a beat, and then, “Ambassador?” echoed off the metal hatch.
“There’s one of you down here. Yellow eyes. What does that mean?”
“Amber optics indicate either hex failure or breach.”
Iari swung her faceplate Gaer’s direction. Her voice boomed out of the rig, bodiless. “There’s no visible damage. Hex-failure, then.”
A Char-shaped silhouette cut into the light from the staircase as they leaned over the open hatch. “Do you require assistance?”
Gaer ground his teeth on a yes, please, go kill it.
“Negative,” said Iari, predictably. “Hold position.”
At least she kept her shield up, Gaer thought, even as she sidled up to that monstrosity and peered over the rim. “Brood could’ve done this.” She sounded doubtful. “I don’t see any swarm, though. Or effluvia. Is there another floor-drain down here? Gaer? By the altar, maybe? Somewhere they could’ve gotten out?”
Gaer looked and yes, there, another grate. “Yes. There’s a grate under the altar. Hard to see from my angle. Impossible from yours.”
“Figures.”
Gaer gave lip-service to the five dark lords because that’s what you did, that’s what everyone did; but imaginary personifications of elements, superstitions about ancestral ghosts, that was all neefa-shit. The multiverse was numbers, that was all. Numbers didn’t need blood to function. Numbers didn’t want blood.
But someone’s god or gods or ancestors did, clearly. Or someone thought they did, which was worse. (Or, worst thought of all: someone had decided to worship Brood, and this altar was for them.)
It was hard to talk with his jaw-plates clamped this tight. He forced the words through. “So who builds altars these days, besides the Aedis?”
Iari grunted. “Don’t know. You see anything on it?”
He didn’t want to get close enough to try. Made himself take the necessary steps, toes clenched so tight in his boots, with his talons fully deployed, that they cramped. “Symbols. They—huh. That looks like old k’bal script.”
“K’bal? They’re extinct.” Wiped out by the Protectorate during the Expansion, Iari did not say; she didn’t have to. “Long way from their territory, though.”
“They visited a lot of worlds.” Gaer leaned a little bit closer. The script seemed to squirm on the altar. He blinked himself into the first layer of aether, but the sense of the equations just eluded him, like grabbing at wisps.
“There’s arithmancy involved, but I can’t say what it’s doing without a closer investigation.”
“Don’t touch it.”
“No intention.”
“Lieutenant.” Char’s voice sounded sharper. “Brisk Array reports activity in the alley.”
“Acknowledged,” Iari started to say. All that Gaer heard was ack, appropriately, before a crash that sounded like something large slamming into something larger, followed by a metallic scream like (exactly like) the sound warehouse doors might make if they came suddenly and violently off their tracks.
The ceiling shivered. Then came another clattering, and a bang as the vault door slammed shut. Gaer whipped toward the hatch. His prism-hex, deprived of its source, winked out and dropped the cellar into darkness.
Betrayal spiked through his chest, cousin to panic. The setatir riev had shut them in. Gaer skeined a new hex from the meager teslas on his headlamp and the pinpricks of light bleeding from the ceiling grate, and turned to gather more beams from Iari’s headlamp.
Just in time to see Swift Runner come online. The right arm snapped up, and Gaer watched, horrified, as the riev’s hand retracted, fingers peeling back, exposing a hollow wrist and a cloud of hexes, ugly and patchworked and effective. A whitefire cannon, where there should’ve been reanimated flesh and bone. Decommed riev didn’t carry weapons. But someone had made Swift Runner into one.
“Drop,” Gaer shouted, and followed his own advice with a hard kick-and-roll. He came back into a crouch in time to hear the shriek of whitefire, to see Iari’s shield take the blast. She staggered, recovered, lunged at Swift Runner and managed to knock the cannon-arm out of line with the rim of her shield. The riev’s second shot sizzled past her helmet and splattered on the far wall of the cellar. The stone melted where it hit, dripped and cast the room into a flickering orange glow. Iari snapped the axe into her hand, blade materializing as she swung past the lower edge of her shield. Not a clean shot, not good: but it caught the riev on the knee, splitting metal plate and hexwork alike.
Swift Runner kept their momentum, even as they collapsed on that damaged knee. They punched a fist under the edge of her shield and knocked Iari off her feet, no, lifted her. She took momentary flight, arcing up and back, before she crashed into a nearby pillar. Her armor’s hexes flared, dispersing force across the rig in a ripple of static. She kept hold of the axe, somehow. But she lost her balance and slid sideways, off the pillar, down onto a knee.
Swift Runner leveled their cannon arm and paused. The artifice patterns in their metal skin glowed first red, then white, then blue. Charging the cannon, Gaer realized. That took time.
Which told him, first, the riev had two shots to a charge, and second, that the cannon had a wicked power-draw, which led him to third: that power-drain would be straining the riev’s galvanic core. It wasn’t a native weapon. It was a graft. It was a weakness.
Iari was getting up, graceless lurch and stagger, raising her shield. Gaer’s optic, amped by his visor, showed him gaps in the shield’s hexwork. It wouldn’t survive another hit from Swift Runner’s black-market cannon.
The light coming off the semi-molten wall was suboptimal as a source for a prism-hex. Iari’s headlamp wasn’t much better. The two together made complete neefa-shit, but you could throw shit and have it stick, and so Gaer did. He wove the numbers and made a little flare that he tossed into Swift Runner’s face. The riev turned again, twisting from the torso: a reflex, maybe leftover from their days as an actual living person, maybe just a matter of identify what just happened.
And in that moment of distraction, Iari moved—so fast, that must be the templar syn—and sliced through Swift Runner’s outstretched forearm. Aedian axes (and swords, and occasional pole-arms) were meant to deal damage to Brood. They worked just as well on the riev. Gaer saw, with an arithmancer’s awareness, the way the equations meshed. How the whitefire insinuated itself into the riev’s artificed defenses, split them as neatly as the blade itself split the riev’s metal shell. The blade didn’t even hitch on its way through.
Swift Runner jerked their ruined arm up as Iari shouted, hoarse and wordless, and lunged again. She took another low cut that swept the bad leg out from
under them. And this time, there was no shower of sparks. The riev’s hexes ruptured, and something else came spilling out—a smoking slime that triggered every hex-alert in Gaer’s rig. His HUD flared, and his optic, tuned to the first layer of arithmancy, adjusted, turning briefly, defensively opaque. He suffered a moment’s half-blindness, during which his HUD flashed again, this time with good old-fashioned movement detected.
Behind him. The hatch.
Let it be Char, he wished, but then daylight came gushing in and he turned and he saw it was not Char, no, although it was a very big riev. This one had both arms, and a head with a single optic wrapping the skull’s circumference, glowing that same corrupted amber as Swift Runner’s. This riev was missing most of the lower jaw, but enough of their jagged namesakes still jutted out of the splintered metal that Gaer knew which one they must be.
Sawtooth didn’t bother with the stairs. They jumped the distance to the floor and crumpled upon landing, collapsing down onto one knee. Sparks sprinkled down from the other. The riev had taken some damage, then. Probably Char’s doing. The wound in their jaw sparked and oozed—that same awful something Swift Runner had bled. Setat if Gaer knew what to call it. Not blood, riev didn’t have that particular fluid. This was Brood-tainted, corrosive, undeniably toxic, almost-but-not-quite Brood effluvia to his sensors.
Riev were blasphemy bordering on horror on a good day. Whatever had been done to this one was simply obscene.
This, all this—altar, corrupt riev, Brood in B-town—was more than coincidence. It was news; it was, oh, maybe epic in its implications. It needed to be known, reported and dealt with. Preferably a unit of templars and a few of those Aedian witch-priests and a great many whitefire weapons, plus every SPERE arithmancer on Tanis.
It was a bigger problem than a single vakar with a very small jacta, whose job (and oaths) it was to observe and report to SPERE command. Gaer owed no oaths to the Aedis. Certainly no oaths to a single templar fool enough to come down and pick fights with Brood (those were her oaths, he knew that, not really foolishness). Gaer measured the distance from self to stairs and the circle of light beaming down. Step aside, step back, and let Sawtooth charge at Iari (who would not step back, who would give the riev cause to attack her, sure as the sun rose in the east). Then he’d have time to cross that space, to climb. To get out, so that he could report what he’d observed, and fulfill his duty.
And likely earn the Knight-Marshal’s contempt, even if Tobin never said anything. (Setat on Tobin’s good opinion.) But Iari would die thinking he had betrayed her, if she got to think anything at all before Sawtooth ripped her apart. Maybe she wouldn’t hate him for that; Iari understood duty.
That he’d hate himself if he left her: that was a certainty.
“Sawtooth!” Gaer shouted, in case Iari hadn’t noticed. Then he unclipped his jacta. Oh dark lords, he’d trade his immortal soul for a longcaster; but this poor little sidearm was the best diplomatic dispensation could provide. His arms-turing came online, found a target, and locked. Gaer emptied the jacta, the entire charge, into Sawtooth’s face and chest. The riev’s hexwork, that slagging wichu artificer bastard cousin to arithmancy, held. The whitefire bolts glanced off its armor, careened and ricocheted and peppered the walls and ceiling with fresh spots of heat and light and molten stone.
Sawtooth slammed both fists into the floor and lunged onto their good foot. All Gaer had, when Sawtooth charged, was a depleted jacta and a slagging monofil clipped to his rig.
And arithmancy.
The ganglord’s riev-trap in the alley had been amateur work. By the time Gaer had completed his mandatory military service, the Five Tribes had been decades past setting riev traps in actual combat. But the exercise of doing so—the need to build a complex hex in high-pressure combat conditions—remained part of the training. They’d even had actual riev at his training facility, part of the exchange program with the Confederate regulars. One of Gaer’s fellow trainees had spent a week in medical after his trap failed and the riev broke four ribs and an arm.
Because he—that trainee, what was his name? Kerik? Kerask?—had panicked, had misaligned two equations. It was an easy mistake to make, with your hand shaking, with half a ton of riev coming at you (even when that riev was friendly-ish, participating in joint operations, with no-kill orders).
So don’t let the hand shake. Steady the limb, steady the breath, steady the mind.
Gaer dipped just under the skin of the world, past that first layer of aether, just far enough to see the patterns of hexwork of Sawtooth’s armored skin. Whatever had been done to fill them with Brood had also damaged their hexes. Some of the symbols had slipped out of true. A little off. Just so very little.
The part of Gaer’s mind still entirely inside his body made note, on his HUD, of the rapidly shrinking distance between him and the riev, of the rapidly shrinking time to impact. That part of his mind directed his body to crouch and to extend his left arm. The part of his mind in the aether traced this symbol here, that equation there, aligned them with Sawtooth’s weakened hexes.
Iari would say, now pray, as if the multiverse cared. No, the multiverse obeyed its own laws, and those laws were math. Gaer grinned, all teeth, as he slashed the final symbol.
Steady.
The equations flared and locked, and then Sawtooth crashed into them.
* * *
—
The syn and the rig were the only things keeping Iari upright. Her HUD was all over alarms, from yellow to red. Shield damage, hex-damage, an actual physical breach in her chestplate where Swift Runner had punched around her shield. The plating had split, just there at the bottom of the ribcage, driven inward. Broken a couple of her ribs, by her reckoning. It felt like knives and steel bands every time she drew breath, and that was through the syn’s damping.
And she was breathing hard, fast, little bites of humid air because the rig’s cooling system was one of the HUD’s yellow alerts. At least she wasn’t breathing wet. No blood bubbling up her throat, both her lungs fully inflated. That was something.
Void and dust, though, it hurt.
She reckoned Swift Runner was dead. Looked like its optics were grey, like most of its insides were outside, and that meant—
A new rash of alerts scrolled across her HUD, just as Gaer’s voice cracked through the comms. “Sawtooth!”
Her eyes blurred, sweat or tears, didn’t matter. She didn’t need to see with hard edges. She knew where the hatch was, and the stairs. She aimed herself that way. Saw, with hazy edges, as Gaer unclipped that little whitefire jacta, pointed, fired. Sawtooth was damaged, something with the knee, something else with the jaw; but they were fast, and they aimed straight at Gaer. Iari wanted to scream at him, just go, but the syn wouldn’t make room in her lungs. It sheeted under her skin, threaded muscle and nerve. Moved her, in cooperation with the battle-rig. A conspiracy of nanomecha and implants that, please Elements, would get her across the room in time to keep Gaer alive (but it wouldn’t, not fast enough).
Then Gaer knelt and slapped his palm on the floor, and Ptah’s plasma erupted from Hrok’s aether. A vakari battle-hex that lit up every seam in Sawtooth’s armor, made every hex flare up into the visible spectrum.
Sawtooth stopped.
“This won’t hold long,” Gaer said, brittle and cool in her helmet comm. “Hurry—oh, setat.”
The riev-trap burst. All the force went flying outward, an expanding shockwave bubble of lightning and superheated aether. The shockwave hit Gaer, spun him like leaves in an autumn gust. He kept his feet only because he slammed into a pillar. He clung to it one-armed, and with the other, dragged his monofil out of its sheath.
The shockwave had thrown Sawtooth a fortunate meter or so in the opposite direction. For a heartbeat Iari thought the riev was down, dead—not moving, a heap of metal and leaking slime. But then whir-click, Sawtooth dragged their legs under themself
, and their fists.
“Gaer. Gaer.” Please, Elements, he hadn’t broken anything. “You need to move. You need to get out. Get back to Tobin.—Hey you fucker, I’m over here.”
She banged the axe shaft against the edge of the shield. The hexwork shrieked a protest, sent a corona of angry plasma radiating off the rim. Damn sure that got Sawtooth’s attention. The riev adjusted their aim and started to charge, a hands-and-knees scrambled launch to upright.
Her biometrics were edging up red. Fine. You could run in the red for a while. That’s what the implants and the nanomecha were for. Iari cycled the syn one more time. Something broke in her nose. Hot rush down the back of her throat, out both nostrils. She licked blood off her lip.
Sawtooth—whose jaw and knee leaked (impossibly, but the HUD was sure) Brood-slime, whose hexwork glowed and writhed like snakes, thundered at her. Iari braced the shield, reckoned that it, she, could take at least one hit from a riev that size, which meant she’d get at least one strike on Sawtooth, too. She might cut that knee in half, if she hit it right. And if not, well, she’d wreck the joint badly enough it wouldn’t be charging. Gaer would be able to evade and escape.
“Go, go, move,” she screamed at him.
A shadow spilled through the open hatch. Her rig’s motion-sensors sent out an alert, one more flash, one more wailing drag on her attention. Silence, she wished the rig. Die in peace, couldn’t she, or at least fucking quiet. Her ears were already ringing.
But then shadow resolved itself into a silhouette—one-armed, massive, icy blue teslas like stars. Char—trailing smoke, bleeding sparks from their forearm, their fist, their chest, came down the stairs in two leaps and crashed into the crippled Sawtooth from behind. They went over together in a tangle of metal-plate limbs.
Gaer was shouting something, competing with the alarms in Iari’s helmet and with the noise of two massive riev beating all five vakari hells out of each other. Char was losing the fight. Sawtooth was just that much bigger, had both arms, and Sawtooth was biting, or trying: jabbing that mangled face at Char, spattering Brood-slime all over. Smoke curled off Char’s plates where the slime touched the hexwork. Char clubbed at Sawtooth with the shattered arm, clawed at Sawtooth with the other; but Sawtooth had one fist on Char’s throat, the other hammering Char’s chest, over and over, same spot, a seam between armor plates. It was a Brood trick for getting through armor, which Iari had seen work before on templar rigs. At Saichi, where Char had been, too.