by K. Eason
He followed Char for(ever) at least a kilometer, until at last they turned into a residential street hardly wider than an alley, a row of identical facades and uninspired architecture. Gaer didn’t need to wait for directions; the Brood emanations coming out of that one made it pretty clear where Iari’s code red originated.
And not just Brood emanations. Gaer’s optic scrolled out a new set of numbers. Oh, dark lords.
“Char, wait,” with all the breath in his lungs.
Not expecting they would—but they did, and stopped much faster than something that big should’ve been able to, at the base of the house’s front steps. Char’s hand flexed into a fist and back out again, all the fingers stiff and furious. “What?”
“Phlogiston leak,” because that was the most important bit. The basic structural instability of the house was the other part.
The door was partly ajar. Not a good sign. Also not good: the crashing sounds from the interior. There were micro tremors in the structure, which Char might or might not detect. The Brood-emanations were rising almost as fast as the phlogiston levels. And there was the faint whiff of hexwork to all of it, one worrying icon in the bottom right of his optic. Arithmancy at work. Someone was hexing right now.
He thrust his hand out, as if to hold Char back from a dash up the steps. The riev’s chest felt like a small furnace, uncomfortably warm even through the intervening layer of aether. Gaer slid a nervous glance sideways. The templar armorer Jorvik had welded a patch onto Char’s chestplate, but there hadn’t been time for hexwork. Examine the altar: that had been the priority. And that meant Char had nothing to shield and contain whatever galvanic atrocity passed for a riev power-core from hostile arithmancy. Or Brood. Or a well-placed jacta bolt.
“You need to stay out here. The house is not stable.” Though if the whole building came crashing down, Char was most likely to shrug it off and keep going. But if the whole building came crashing down, Gaer wanted Char outside to pull it off him. He dropped his voice to breathless. “And I think there’s an arithmancer out here someplace. You’re vulnerable.”
Char made a rattling noise. Rage, fear, acquiescence. But their voice was deep, steady, almost soft. “Acknowledged.”
Which left the shaky house full of Brood (and Iari, who must still be alive) for him to manage. Fantastic. He bounded up the steps. Flattened himself against the door. The locking mechanism was a charred mess. Not a jacta shot, though. An ugly hex-job, meant for speed. Gaer toed the door open. Let it gape wide for just long enough to be sure nothing was coming out—no jacta bolts, no whitefire beams—before he ducked around the edge and inside.
The noise was much worse in here. Splintering wood, shattering polymer. The high-pitched whine of whitefire, which, dear dark lords, with these levels of phlogiston was asking for explosion. Gaer blinked in the shade-drawn dim and saw Corso in the middle of the hallway fumbling with a jacta.
Gaer lunged forward and swatted the weapon aside.
“There’s a phlogiston leak,” Gaer snapped. “You shoot, you could set it off.”
Corso actually growled. He shoved bodily against Gaer (who was braced for it, toes dug in, and still he felt himself slip a few centimeters). He was intensely and uncomfortably aware of how very little resistance his skinsuit would offer a bolt from this range. Oh, sure, firing the weapon might set off the phlogiston and incinerate everything in a fiery explosion—but not before a high-velocity bolt hurt a great deal tearing its way through his body. And Corso was willing to do it. With Iari, most of her temper was noise, surface, flickers of crimson lightning over a cool, stoic cobalt. Corso’s aura was all boiling reds, and he was slowly muscling his arm—and that setatir jacta—back around. Gaer spared a moment’s consideration for the monofil clipped to his hip, and whether he could reach it (yes), and what Iari would think if he stabbed Corso with it.
This, Gaer thought, is what the Expansion war must’ve been like in the early days, tenju on vakar, before the Aedis and its setatir nanomecha and syn implants and templars. The vakari had been winning that fight. Remember why.
Gaer clamped his jaw shut, plates and lips, flicked his second lids closed, and slammed his forehead into Corso’s face. And in the moment’s respite he carved out—because it didn’t matter how tough a tenju was (or a human, or even some stringy little alw), a vakari skull in the nose stunned the neefa-shit out of you—Gaer jammed his (spiky) shoulder into Corso’s chest and steered them both out the front door.
Corso missed his footing as he went down the stair and slammed flat on his back on the front walk. Gaer made no attempt to soften his own landing. Twisted elbows and knees to drive his joint-spikes into Corso as much as he could. The skinsuit’s panels would keep the spikes from doing blood-letting damage. Bruises, stunning—that was fine. That was the point. There was that phrase in Comspek about knocking sense into someone, as if violence and injury could produce reasonable discourse. Gaer expected when Corso recovered—already he was sucking the air back into his lungs—he’d be even less inclined to reason. Best strike now, before that happened.
Gaer dropped his face blurry-close to Corso’s. “What’s happening in there? Tell me. Report.”
Corso might indeed have found sense through contusion and impact. He blinked up at Gaer. “Tunneler came up in the cellar. Iari went after it. In the hallway off the kitchen. Whole place is coming down right now.” Then a heave as Corso tried to shove him off. “She needs help, get off me.”
Gaer was close enough to see the little web of blood vessels in Corso’s hot blue eyes. Close enough to smell the remnants of lunch on Corso’s breath, and his sweat, which was not a bit like Iari’s, all male musk and sour with fear.
“I’ll get her.” He levered up off Corso—hard push, contributing to another gust of lost breath—and wrenched the jacta out of Corso’s hand and passed it to Char, who had come close enough to cast them both into shadow. Then Gaer stalked back through the front door. He drew his monofil on the way, left-handed, reversed his grip and folded the blade back against his forearm, careful, because a monofil would cut skinsuit and skin and everything else it touched.
A monofil and his arithmancy, against—oh, setat. Against a tunneler.
Against—that.
Coils thick as an adult tenju’s torso, maybe a little bit thicker, clogged the hall to what must have been the kitchen. Looping and segmented and sliding past themselves, slicked with corrosive slime. The whole caved-in hallway was thick with smoke as the tunneler’s excretions chewed through wood, plaster, whatever cheap materials had been used in construction. And out of that mess—a riev’s arm, rising and falling and tearing, followed by a riev’s shoulder and head. Brisk Array’s sensor cluster had taken damage, wilted on the edges (burned, broken). The rest of his hexwork blazed blue and white and solid.
Then another part of the floor buckled and Brisk Array, who’d nearly pulled himself loose, slid sidelong into that hole. And then, then, Gaer saw something squirming down there, something that wasn’t tunneler coils or a furious riev. A battle-rig—smoke curling off it, the headlamp dim and grey in the Brood’s light-eating effect. The Aedis shield emitted its own EM, red and furious, in defiance of Brood-effects as it scythed into the tunneler. Plasma burst from the point of impact, a little forest of finger-length lightning bolts that ignited the surrounding phlogiston in brief bursts of orange, yellow, blue, like stars burning themselves out.
Gaer’s throat felt too small, too tight for breath. Don’t panic. He was a setatir arithmancer.
Mathematics was the language of the multiverse. Equations described how reality behaved. A mathematician stopped there, imagining that the numbers only reflected what was. An arithmancer knew better: the numbers also described what might be. An equation was a request to which reality would try to conform. It was the alchemists (the alwar: be honest. They were best at it) who focused on changing things. The four states of matter
—Aedian Elements—were fluid. One could become another, with the proper external conditions. Aedian implants skipped past arithmancy (or incorporated it; SPERE intelligence was uncertain) and allowed direct interface with the material states. An Aedian priest could transmute mere oxygen into phlogiston and make fire. Gaer could only nudge substances into doing what they did naturally.
Phlogiston did love to burn.
Gaer cycled his optic to a different layer of the aether, until he could see the drift of phlogiston particles on the breeze blowing from the partly open door, the infinitesimal straight jumps the plasma made from particle to particle. Until he could see tiny matrices of solids: wood, polymer, Aedian polyceramics and steels. Iari’s rig resolving itself, layer by layer, into its components.
He calculated a possible gap between Iari’s rig and the surrounding phlogiston. Phlogiston contaminated normal, breathable aether. He could calculate the smallest possible percentage of phlogiston in that aether, and enforce that percentage improbably and completely, until he’d wrapped her in a combustion-proof layer.
In the layer of awareness marked reality, part of Gaer marked the tunneler arching into the ceiling, recoiling from Iari’s shield and a matrix of Aedian hexwork. He marked the trail of sparks made by Iari’s shield as she swung a follow-up strike. He’d be done with his hex before she finished.
But Gaer was only halfway through when a counter-hex eeled through his equations like oil, smearing across numbers and variables. Shifting decimal places and warping his carefully crafted reality and changing the formerly benign and unburning aether into phlogiston, just phlogiston, pressed up against Iari’s armor.
Gaer had just enough time to throw up a warding hex before all that phlogiston exploded.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The explosion lifted Gaer and threw him backward across the living room and out what would’ve been the front door, if that door or surrounding wall remained. He hit Corso on the way down, Corso having decided to try the stairs again, and they both tumbled back into the street. A rolling wave of heat followed, which might well have included a fireball, or fingers of flame, or setatir plasma—but which was also uncontrolled, so Gaer’s defensive hex deflected most of it. One searing second of awfulness, and then it was past.
Corso had landed on the bottom, lost all breath and capacity for violence—and he was intending the latter, obviously, with his hands balled into fists. Gaer put an ungentle, spiky knee into Corso’s midriff (surprisingly solid) and bounced to his feet. Oh, mistake. He didn’t have all his balance back yet, ears ringing, skull ringing. His vision hazed on the edges, threatening a retreat to full blackout. The optic rebooted, taking one eye asymmetrically dark, prompting a rapid, violent blinking, both sets of eyelids flapping out of sync.
He staggered, one arm flailing for balance. The other—miracle!—still held his monofil. He’d flexed it a little too far back, and the blade had sliced through both his skinsuit and his forearm’s flesh beneath it. Blood—bright! so very bright—welled up in the gap. Didn’t seem serious. But you couldn’t always tell with a monofil, you could cut all the way through bone sometimes without feeling it—
Blink, focus. Breathe, which had the twin benefits of chasing the fog out of his vision and reassuring him that nothing was broken. He shook his head, hard and perhaps unwisely, and looked for the house—oh yes. There. Fire and smoke and shattered walls. There was glass on the street from the windows. But as Gaer watched, the shards began sliding back toward the house. Slow at first, then skittering faster.
Gaer had never seen the phenomenon, but he’d read about it. When some of the larger Brood died, sometimes you got what they called the singularity effect (which led to the rise of a joke ending with the punchline, Killing Brood Sucks, versions of which were found in some form in the Five Tribes and Protectorate and Confederate forces). Theory said the effect was the result of tunnelers returning through the void to whatever layer of the multiverse spawned them, essentially punching through the layers like a tesser-hex. Little Brood—swarm, slicers, boneless—didn’t generate the effect, or generate it strongly enough to register.
This tunneler was sucking mightily as it died, dragging smoke and fire and even the shattered walls back in on itself. The effect plucked at Gaer’s knees, at his hips. Tentative fingers, nothing he couldn’t resist. For now. But if that Brood didn’t finish dying, oh, soon, it’d drag the whole setatir street in behind it.
Gaer let himself sag back into a crouch, not entirely an act; standing was hard right now. His optic was coming back online, reporting up an excess of Brood emanations and dissipating levels of phlogiston. And—oh, no. That was just Char stomping past, flinging debris aside, wading into the wreckage.
And possibly more pressing, there was a setatir arithmancer somewhere out here who’d just blown up the setatir house, and was likely to interfere with any attempt he made to suppress the fire or help Char.
Gaer lifted his chin and squint-scanned both rows of houses. The windows had filled up with faces, with auras as bright as the fire. There was no way to pick out a single anyone in that ambient noise. Much less an arithmancer, who would be shielded, especially knowing what Gaer was. Because she, he, it, they—did know. They’d countered his hex too neatly for accident. And they were still there, watching their handiwork. Gaer knew it, felt it.
So draw them out.
Gaer closed his naked eye, took a breath, shifted his perception into the nearest sublayer of aether. A simple matter to tune the optic to see the underlying hexes: equations describing the motion of heated air, the rate of phlogiston consumption, how fast the surrounding air heated. The force of the tunneler’s singularity-drag, the distortion of light.
And there, yes: brighter than its surroundings, a battle-hex concealing itself in an overlay of variables and constants and symbols. Gaer sketched out his equations, quick mental strokes aided by the optic’s pre-loaded list of components. You could make up wholly original hexes, yes, and arithmancers did—but not generally outside of a sealed laboratory (at least until the effects were cataloged and predictable). Gaer had the Five Tribes’ usual battle-hex library to draw from in his optic; but he had a few of his own, too, developed in those sealed labs.
He built a counter-hex, a standard hunter-seeker, and loosed it, and yes, there: a flare as it found its quarry.
The enemy hex was fast, oiled-eel quick in its response. It went for immediate evasion, throwing junk code in its wake. Chaff, to confuse Gaer’s hex. Which worked—annoying, but not unexpected. Useful, because that told him the arithmancer was still in range, and he had another chance to go code-to-code with that neefa-eater.
Gaer altered his attacking hex, trimming variables, eliminating the chaff’s ability to distract it. Then he pivoted hard and visibly, there on the street, made a dramatic I’m throwing a hex gesture at the burning house. He sketched out a standard ward that any damn fool watching would be able to see. Equations describing a limit to the fire’s reach, equations ripping the remaining phlogiston into atomic components. Equations to dissipate heat away from Char’s unshielded chest-patch. The riev’s remaining hexwork flared, sensing arithmancy; but the red-hot rim of that patch cooled a fraction.
And there, yes: another incoming battle-hex. Char’s armor flared again, repelling a new attack, even as the fire under their feet flared up as if they were standing on oil. The enemy’s battle-hex had come back around for another go.
And in the same instant, Gaer’s hunter-hex found its target, and tore the enemy code into fragments. The fire guttered and slunk away from Char’s artificed warding. Gaer let his breath go and chased sparks from the edge of his vision; stupid, to hold your breath like that, amateur, but he was upset, he was angry, that was Iari under there. He started to hex the air itself, strangling the currents that would bring oxygen to the fire. There was a risk there to Char, if he was too effective—even a galvanic heresy still needed to br
eathe—but if he kept the airless layer low, just over the fire, he might drive the fire back.
Then the enemy arithmancer struck again, an onslaught of code that tore through Gaer’s equations like shrapnel through bread dough. A nice battle-hex, very effective. You could admire that. Gaer grinned and countered, shoring up his constants and tangling the whole thing in infinite, repeating prime. It was like one of those clever slip knots that got tighter the more someone struggled, cutting into not flesh, now, but calculations, hexes.
The fire flared up again, burst against Char’s hexwork. And then didn’t, suddenly, as a piece of that hostile battle-hex sliced into the riev’s artificed shielding. Sliced through it.
Gaer traded a lungful of stale air for fresh (smoke-laced, Brood-sour) and countered. Slapped his own hex-ward across the gap in Char’s wards. Not that they noticed. Not that they missed one debris-tossing beat. This time, his modified counter-code worked less well, sliding off the enemy equation with little effect.
And—it should be working. The enemy’s constants were the same, he could see that much. One of the variables had changed, but given the order of operations that shouldn’t matter.
But it was mattering. And that made no sense. Not from an arithmancer’s aesthetic sense, either, but just plain logic, theory, the underpinnings of arithmancy itself. Arithmancy ran on rules that this person wasn’t bothering to follow, and somehow their code didn’t care.
Which meant—void and dust, Gaer didn’t know what, exactly, except nothing good. Someone could break the setatir laws of the multiverse, or someone knew a set of laws no one else did. It could be an effect of the tunneler—Brood disrupted all manner of natural orders—but that seemed unlikely. Riev were effective against Brood precisely because artificing was so resistant to their warping effects.