“So it must be related to the kidnapping,” Neila observed.
“It’s certainly the first thing we’ve found out of the ordinary,” Salim admitted. “But what sort of person would go to all the trouble of stealing a soul out from under the nose of the Lady of Graves, only to leave a bunch of rubbish as a calling card? And how do these pieces even fit together?”
Neila sat back on her hands, jaw tense with frustration. “I’d hope you could tell me, seeing as how you’re the one familiar with all this strangeness. To me, it looks like a lot of random junk.”
Salim sat bolt upright.
“That’s it!”
“What, junk?”
“No. It’s random.” Salim’s mind raced, and all at once things began to fall into place. “Neila—ever since we entered the court, have you seen anything that’s out of place? Anything that didn’t, at some level, seem to follow a pattern?”
She frowned. “No. Not that I can think of.”
“That’s because it’s the region belonging to Axis and the creatures of pure Law, who seek order in everything. To them, randomness and chaos are abominations, to be wiped out wherever possible. Yet here we see the system torn awry, senseless objects appearing out of nowhere, and the terrain itself twisted out of true. Look.” He picked up a small rock and threw it back the way they’d come, about thirty feet. It landed in a little puff of dust. “Go look at that and tell me what you see.”
Neila gave him a look that said she didn’t appreciate him issuing orders like a schoolmaster illustrating a point, but she went anyway. When she came back, her eyes were wide.
“It’s in a pattern,” she said. “Lined up with the other rocks. All the sand around it, too—it lies where it fell, but it’s all so ...perfect.”
Salim nodded, then picked up another rock and threw it down at their feet.
“And here?”
Neila bent to look, but Salim didn’t bother waiting for her reply. He already knew the answer.
“It’s not just the objects. This whole area’s been warped. The patterns of order and logic have been broken and then some. And that kind of magic—not to mention the audacity to pull the stunt in full view of the axiomites—tells us who we’re looking for. It was a protean.”
Neila straightened and looked at him. When he saw that she didn’t understand, he sighed.
“What do they teach nobles these days, anyway? It was a protean. A creature of pure chaos, from the depths of the void called the Maelstrom. They’re the sworn enemies of Axis, spreading madness and anarchy wherever they go. Simply their presence in an area can distort the very fabric of reality, making it run like half-cured cheese.” He kicked the little tree, knocking it out of line. “These little presents are just a hint of what it’s capable of. If it showed up in your manor in Thuvia, you might never recognize the place again. Or escape with your life.”
“And you think one of these is what stole my father?”
Salim nodded and smacked his hands together, one fist on top of the other. “I know it. There’s no other reason for a protean to risk its life in this part of the Boneyard, and the fact that the scar of its passing hasn’t healed yet means it must have been relatively recent. No, this is it. I’d bet my sword on it.”
“You’re already betting my father’s life,” Neila reminded him. “But well enough. Now what? Can you follow it?”
Salim’s sense of triumph faded. He thought hard.
“No,” he said. “If it were on this plane and traveling physically, I might have a shot, but I doubt both strongly. Teleportation is second nature to proteans, and there’s no reason to believe it would stay nearby.”
A thought occurred. Salim looked deep into Neila’s eyes, and saw in their reflection a new gravity in his own.
Things were spiraling rapidly out of control. Were this girl and her father worth the risk? Maybe. And maybe not. But Salim also knew himself well enough to know that it didn’t matter at this point. He might be the reluctant servant of a morbid bitch-goddess, but he kept his vows. And if this were the end of his road, perhaps he’d have earned his rest at last.
“I can’t track him,” he said at last. “But I may know someone who can.” He held out one hand, and with the other withdrew his spiral pendant. Neila frowned.
“Do you trust me?” he asked.
In response, she stepped forward and grimly took his hand.
Chapter Nine
The Eternal City
The Eternal City of Axis shone bronze and gold in a light that came from no temperamental sun, but rather seemed to spring from the air itself above the city, banishing all but the most persistent shadows. An enormous wheel of countless spokes, both narrow and cyclopean, the city spread out over the landscape in an orderly wave of buildings, its rim a ring of greenery and crystalline sand shod with an outer wall of flawless gold. Beyond it, should a traveler climb over the wall and venture into the wilds, he would find the base of Pharasma’s Spire and a lazily flowing elbow of the River Styx. Yet for all the city’s careful boundaries and demarcations, it too was infinite, making such metaphysical proximity the concern of poets and theologians rather than cartographers.
It was on a wide avenue of this urban matrix that Salim and Neila appeared, shivering and reeling slightly from their transition. Neila set out a hand to steady herself and almost collided with a passerby, an old man with the face of a scholar and the body of a massive snake. She recoiled as the naga’s skin slid against hers with the dry rasp of scales. The naga, for his part, pulled himself up to his full height of well over eight feet, looking down at her through wire-rimmed spectacles with an expression of casual disdain. With a noise that was more harrumph than hiss, he slithered pointedly aside and continued on in the direction he’d been heading.
All around them, a parade of even stranger creatures was passing: Four-armed men with veils and tall, conical hats. White-winged men whose skin and radiant armor were impossible to look at directly. A dark-bearded efreeti with smoldering skin and an enormous falchion at its hip, looking like something out of a Katapeshi fairy tale, eyes searching for anyone foolish enough to meet his gaze. Behind them, a pack of emaciated horrors with blank skin where their eyes should be wove silently through the throng, split jaws spread wide but apparently unconnected to any throats. Man and beast, humanoid and grotesque, the figures passed in the smooth-paved street like two meeting currents, threading into and through each other in paces and gaits as varied as their limb structures. Most walked, but there were also palanquins and rickshaws, strange one-wheeled carts and radiant discs that floated on nothing at all.
“Come on, over here.” Salim grabbed Neila’s arm and pulled her across the thoroughfare, up against the wall of a nearby shop. She came willingly enough, mouth hanging open a little as she strove to take in everything at once.
“Where do they all come from?” she asked.
“Here and there.” His gesture took in the crowd as a whole. “The Plane of Axis—which is mostly one enormous city that constantly builds on top of itself—is a plane of absolute law. As far as its masters are concerned, if your actions are reasonable—or rather, reasoned—morality is more or less irrelevant. Follow the rules, and everything else is your own business. As a result, it’s a nexus of trade for creatures from all across the multiverse.” He paused and jerked a thumb over one shoulder. “That would probably be true even if the God of Merchants didn’t make his home at one end, but the presence of the First Vault certainly doesn’t hurt. According to a lot of the folks around here, commerce is the perfect example of reasoned neutrality—laws and principles that operate completely free of bias.”
“But there are devils!” Neila still sounded shocked.
Sure enough, striding past them at that moment was a red-skinned man with the classic beard and features of a devil, save that curving ram horns of glistening black bone extended not just from his head, but also around from his back in a wicked tangle that stretched like a cage about to enc
lose him entirely. Several of these protrusions were draped with what looked like scrolls. Salim glanced over at the devil’s retreating back and nodded.
“Of course. Devils are evil, but they’re ultimately bound by codes and strictures that the axiomites can appreciate. That’s why your standard folk tales tell of them bargaining for souls, or being trapped by wordplay—both of which, for the record, are much more likely to result in the devil tearing you apart than the stories indicate.” Salim inclined his head in the direction the devil had disappeared into the crowd. “That one in particular was a phistophilus—a contract devil, responsible for helping maintain the infernal bureaucracy. They do brisk business here, both for their masters and as free agents. The Abadarans can practice all they want, but no one writes a contract like a devil. Now if a demon showed up here, that would be different. Those things don’t respect anything, and they’d be set upon by the city’s defenders before they knew what was happening.”
He took her arm again. “All of which means we should be on our best and most reasonable behavior. Now let’s go get our bearings.”
Without giving her time for further questions, Salim threw them both back into the tumultuous flow of the street, slipping along in the wake of a cart pulled by an enormous stag beetle.
The crowd wasn’t really as bizarre as he’d made it sound. While Neila was undoubtedly still overwhelmed by the array of strange faces and stranger tongues being babbled all around them, Salim knew that in truth the citizenry they passed was made up primarily of three factions.
The first, the axiomites, were the same as the shepherds they’d already met in the Boneyard, creatures who took the form of beautiful elflike men and women for the sake of convenience, but whose every movement revealed their true nature—that of pure, mathematical laws and absolutes, ideas and theorems made flesh and given sentience. Some scholars posited that they were the multiverse’s attempt to understand itself. On the whole, Salim thought they were an alright lot, and certainly easy on the eyes, though in conversation they were often detached and had an annoying tendency to slip into higher realms of logic where Salim couldn’t hope to follow. Few people could make Salim feel stupid on such a regular basis—but then, if you wanted to be racist about it, axiomites were only barely people.
Still, they were easier to work with than the second group, the hive people. Those oversized, ant-shaped creatures skittered through the crowd as well, their shoulders as high as his own, and Salim was careful to steer Neila around them. It wasn’t so much that the bug-men were mean, so far as he understood, but rather that their mindset made that of the axiomites seem relaxed and familiar. Their law was the collectivist order of an insect hive, a matriarchy of a million individuals existing in perfect understanding of their role and duty, and who could say what one of them might decide was in the hive’s best interest? Salim would just as soon not get devoured for accidentally showing disrespect, or proposing an unsanctioned idea or action.
The last group, with members seemingly stationed at every corner or marching quickly through the crowd, were the clockwork men of Axis. One of them brushed up against Neila, and she turned to gawk at the whirring gears and belts visible beneath the cracked and broken surface of the thing’s stone skin and gleaming armor.
“They’re machines!” she whispered excitedly to Salim, and he nodded without breaking stride, speaking to her from the side of his mouth.
“The most sophisticated on any plane. The axiomites built them in the early days of the war with Chaos, to hold back the madness of the proteans. They’re the shock troops and the law-keepers of Axis, both here and across the multiverse.”
“But why are they broken?” Neila was looking around now, frowning, and Salim knew she was seeing the inexplicable contrast between the perfect walls of the buildings they passed—the street itself as clean as a lord’s dinner plate—and the disrepair of their guardians.
“I don’t know,” Salim answered honestly. “But it’s been that way as long as I can remember. The war with the Maelstrom still rages, and it may be that the forges of the Crucible are too taxed to keep them pretty, so long as they’re functional. Perhaps their scars are badges of honor, though so far as I know the machines know nothing of emotions, even pride.” He frowned. “Or perhaps it’s a sign that Chaos is slowly winning, in which case we’re all in trouble. But it’s unlikely that anything will shift the balance significantly in your lifetime.”
Squeezing Neila’s arm, Salim pointed up into the air, where a strange construct like a giant eye with hands and wings was flapping awkwardly down the avenue.
“Not all them are the same, either,” he said. “There are a number of different types, all built for different things. That’s an arbiter, one of the weaker models. They’re designed to watch and report, as well as act as diplomats and emissaries across the plains.”
“It’s adorable!” Neila exclaimed, and Salim blinked. He cocked his head and regarded the arbiter, and for the first time saw it not as a machine, but as a creature—a fat little eyeball flapping comically to remain aloft, like a farmed duck who’d eaten too much grain.
“Yes,” he admitted, after it had passed. “I suppose it is.”
Now the street rose slightly and opened out into a large plaza, and here at last the crowd thinned as it dispersed into the open space. In the center of the plaza stood a high, narrow fountain. Three concentric rings of basins made a rounded ziggurat of placid water and streaming cataracts, shaped something like a tiered cake and rising from waist height at the edge to a narrow column as tall as Salim in the middle. From its center sprouted a gleaming statue of one of the man-shaped automatons, a broad-bladed sword held aloft and a ribbon of mathematical symbols draped around him like a fluttering pennant. Unlike the others they’d passed, this paragon was perfectly whole, all smooth faces and sharp-edged corners, its gray-white stone not defaced by so much as a bird dropping.
Salim vaulted up onto the fountain’s rim, soft boots never wavering on the stippled stone. He reached down to help Neila up.
The girl looked at his hand once, then hopped up lightly by herself. Her crossed feet, one in front of the other, caused her knees to bow outward as she rose in a single, smooth motion, like a ballerina’s plié. Her self-satisfied smile was so big and genuine that Salim couldn’t help but smirk a little in return and incline his head. Without offering his hand, he took two long steps upward to stand level with the life-size statue. Neila followed, leaping across the still fountain surfaces like a water fairy.
From the statue’s vantage, huge swaths of the city spread out before them. Though many of the buildings were tall—some impossibly so, by the standards of Golarion—most were flat-topped boxes no more than a few stories high, and the gaps between them combined with subtle rises and dips in elevation to let the pair see for miles across golden roofs and carefully maintained parklands. Salim stepped to the statue’s narrow plinth, putting one arm around the stone man for balance. When Neila followed him to it, his other arm slipped around her waist to keep her from being edged off into the pool. Together they stared out over the gleaming vista.
“Unbelievable,” she breathed. She scanned the view slowly, carefully, as if attempting to drink it all in, to commit every scattered steeple and onion-dome to memory. When she looked up at Salim, her face glowed with a childlike delight that drew her cheeks up and crinkled her eyes slightly at the edges. A faint breeze blew wisps of her black hair into her face, flickering in front of that beaming smile, and she made no effort to corral them.
“What are they all?” she asked.
Feeling strangely proud—as if he had anything to do with the magnificent view—Salim bent his face in close so that she could follow his gaze without his releasing one of his handholds and potentially dumping both of them into the pool.
“You see that?” he asked, pointing with his chin toward a distant block whose black and gray contrasted sharply with the majority of the bright buildings. From its hulking ce
ntral bulk, towers and lesser arms radiated outward, sending trails of black smoke and white steam into the sky, where they mixed and eddied before dispersing into the air. From the way conventional buildings shrank into nothingness at its feet, Salim guessed that the structure must be ten miles across—an artificial mountain, with only the plane’s perfectly clear air and peculiar horizon making it visible at this distance.
“It looks like a factory,” she said.
“That’s exactly what it is. That’s the Adamantine Crucible, where the construct warriors are forged. Inside, smelting pits like burning lakes hold metal stronger than steel, and great machines like nothing seen on any other plane assemble Axis’s guardians in a constant stream, stockpiling soldiers against the day Chaos decides to launch its next crusade against order and rationality.”
“And that?” Her cheek, smooth and warm against the rough stubble of his own, pressed his head over and up. Where she gazed, what looked like a second city floated calmly above the original. Only unlike Axis, this sky-city was made entirely of colored glass, in alien geometric shapes that twisted the eye and reflected a shifting barrage of rainbow light.
“That’s the Golden Lattice,” he answered. “The hive city of the wasp-men. They’re like the ant people in the street, but look—well, you can guess what they look like. You don’t see them down here much, but inside their hive are thousands or millions of drones that exist only to serve their queen. The whole thing is built out of fibers no thicker than your hair—so thin that the light can shine through and make those colors—yet somehow they’ve the strength to support a whole city.”
“Have you been there?”
He laughed. “Maybe a human’s been there before—I wouldn’t be surprised—but if so, I’ve never met him. I don’t even know that those glass walls could support me.” He used his hands to mime flapping without moving his arms from their load-bearing positions. “I don’t fly so well.”
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