Arcana Universalis: Terminus

by Chris J. Randolph

  Caleb stifled a groan. He hated the slip, and by the squirming evident throughout the room, he wasn’t alone.

  “Relevant scripture describes Zayin as a habitable world with a predominantly herbivorous ecology and few natural hazards. We have thus assigned this operation a neutral posture, requiring minimal arms and armour. The Revenant Cohort will remain aboard the Ashkalon, standing at ready should their services be needed.”

  “No green hoods,” Caleb whispered. “That’s some small blessing at least.”

  In reply, Bibbs let out a tiny sigh of relief.

  The Synod continued. “Adept Tarkanian, stand and be seen.”

  Off to the right, a dark skinned man with sideburns stood crisply and offered a curt bow. He wore sleek modern robes in shimmering grey, and on his right wrist was a silver bracelet adorned with a scrying crystal. Adept Tarkanian was a Seer, and from everything Caleb had heard, a damned good one.

  “By the Emperor’s will, you are charged with leading this investigation and are hereby granted authority over all ground operations on Zayin. These,” the Synod scanned the room quickly, “142 crewmen are now yours to command. May His divine grace shine upon your travails.”

  “His eternal wisdom illuminates my path,” Tarkanian replied, offering another bow.

  The Synod turned back to the rest of the assembly, and Caleb had the sickening feeling the apparition was looking directly at him. The weight of its gaze filled him with nausea. “There may be survivors, so time is of the essence,” it said. “Gate anchors are already en route. Report to the slipway immediately and prepare for shift procedure.”

  Book I — Second Fragment

  The slip facility sat at the lowest level of the Ashkalon’s keep, far from the noisy concourse and the prying eyes of its workmen. It was a large, hollow chamber with particularly ornate architecture; its ceiling and walls were obscured by a series of fluted arches like some massive creature’s ribcage, and a raised platform dominated the space within.

  The platform floated a few inches above the floor and was itself the slip device. Twisted iron pedestals surrounded it, each cradling a blue stone at its top that glowed and flickered like an open flame.

  Their light revealed the platform’s dark metal surface, which was engraved with six concentric circles, each containing its own unique string of geometric shapes and Urskrit runes. These glyphs together formed a single Theloglyph, a lens through which arcane energies could be directed and focused to perform a task. This was easily one of the most complex Theloglyphs Caleb had ever lain eyes on, and attempts to analyze it made his head spin.

  He and Bibbs were standing with the rest of their group in the antechamber; ahead of them, Adept Tarkanian and his men were already on the platform and ready to go. The unflappable Tarkanian sat atop a bleakhorse, a construct of metal and flesh that had once been a living thing, while the rest of his team were on foot and uneasily waiting for the inevitable.

  On the far side of the chamber, an unfamiliar physicist in a dark blue robe stood at an altar above the platform. His voice low and slow, he chanted and dragged his arms through an intricate series of forms, performing the technique that would initiate the slip.

  Caleb could see the immense energies in play even with his second sight constricted. They swirled about the physicist in surging waves and eddies, while their colours shifted and throbbed. The man was in deep concentration, using every last muscle in his body to slowly stoke the eldritch fire, gradually building a waveform that would slice open the skin of reality.

  A low moan rose up from the emptiness and the slip platform crackled with resonant power. The flickering of the blue stones came faster and faster, and beyond them, the physicist’s whole body began to glow with ethereal light.

  Then it happened. There was a low tone, as if the mouth of a giant glass bottle were suddenly cuffed, followed by a rush of wind from elsewhere. Tarkanian’s team was gone.

  “First team away,” the physicist said. He looked toward Caleb’s group. “Second team, proceed to the slip.”

  While the others walked past him toward the platform, Caleb stood still and whispered, “I hate this, I hate this, I hate this.” His shoulders collapsed in on themselves.

  Bibbs gave him a half-hearted pat on the back. “I hate it too, but what choice do we have?”

  Caleb looked at his teammates as they passed and found a sea of faces as pale and sweaty as his own. “I don’t know,” he said. “I could tell them I forgot something and then scamper off to retrieve it.”

  “Fine idea, Cabe. I’m sure the proctor’s never heard that one before.”

  “Proceed to the slip,” the physicist repeated. His tone was perfectly even, but somehow conveyed a deep annoyance.

  Bibbs took a step forward, but stopped when he noticed Caleb still rooted in place. “Come on, damn it.”

  “I can do this,” Caleb reassured himself. He took a deep breath, slapped himself in the face and only then began to slowly amble toward the platform.

  As the team approached, the nearest pair of blue stones dimmed and the edge of the platform dipped to the floor, then the men mounted it one by one. When his turn came, Caleb stepped lightly onto it as if it might suddenly give way. His rational mind understood how the device operated (more or less) and knew it to be perfectly safe and sturdy, but something deep inside him nevertheless distrusted everything about it. Absolutely everything.

  He and Bibbs shuffled along to the back of the circle, and everyone else filed in with as much enthusiasm, the last a pair of massive workmen holding either end of a heavy chest. It took more than a minute for the entire team to mount the platform and get settled, after which the physicist once again began performing his complex rite.

  The chanting grew swiftly in strength and intensity this time, and Caleb could feel a charge in the air. It was the needful ache of unspent lightning. He felt it pressing in on him from all directions, slapping against his damp skin like ocean waves crashing ashore.

  The quickened throb of the blue stones told Caleb that the moment was near. Then, standing right on the cusp of the dreaded moment, he dilated his second sight for a reason even he couldn’t guess. As he did so, his every sense deepened and the air around him came alive in colour and motion. Great charged currents flowed every which way, bounding off of and swirling through the carved symbols in the floor.

  “I can’t do this,” he said one last time.

  But it was too late. Blue lances of pure light emerged from below like the claws of a beast, and they slashed hungrily at the air. The pressure built to an immense level and Caleb felt himself pushed sideways. What side, he never could tell, but he was always sure it was sideways.

  There was silence. There were stars. The darkness thumped with a steady heartbeat. He was inside a living scream, a wounded shadow, an endless sadness, an echo with no source. Layer after layer of living membrane ripped away before him, and the taste of blood spread everywhere.

  And then he was on the ground. Green grass. Morning sunshine. Pink clouds. A pleasant spring breeze accompanied by bird songs.

  He was shivering, his heart was in his throat, and he could still hear the universe screaming behind his eyes.

  “You alright?” Bibbs asked.

  Caleb picked his spectacles up from the grass and put them on, then glanced around and took stock of his situation. He was splayed out on the ground as if a very large man had struck him in the jaw, and perhaps stomped on him a few times for good measure. The rest of the team was nearby, all visibly shaken but upright.

  “I think,” Caleb stammered. “Yeah, I think I’m alright.”

  He willed himself to sit up and cleared his ear with a finger, but the inhuman scream insisted on fading at its own leisurely pace. In another few seconds, he had his boots under him and was standing again, unsteadily but under his own power at least.

  “It really put a wallop on you this time,” Bibbs said.

  “I made a stupid mistake,” Caleb replied.
“Opened my sight up for some reason. Curiosity, I guess.”

  Bibbs looked genuinely amazed. “See anything interesting?”

  “Just the usual horrors at twice the volume.” He shook his head but a few of the cobwebs refused to be dislodged. “Bloody hell.”

  “For such a smart fellow,” Bibbs said with a smile, “you sure are a dumb son of a bitch.”

  That wasn’t the first time such charges had been leveled against Caleb, and he was once again hard pressed to deny them.

  Their landing site was a small valley surrounded by softly undulating hills, covered in a velvety carpet of grass that stretched to the far horizon. Caleb had never seen a landscape so charmingly barren; some low hills were capped by tufts of awkward looking trees, and a jagged rock-outcropping loomed a hundred yards off, but there was otherwise little to spoil the view.

  He surmised that the rocks were the Synod’s supposed “surface aberration.” So much for that.

  The gate anchor jutted out of the soil a dozen paces away like a bronze javelin still buried in its victim’s back, and Caleb eyed it with suspicion. Beside it, the two large workmen were busy unpacking their heavy chest, which contained the team’s field equipment. From where he stood, Caleb could see that its contents were fairly common for a search expedition: compasses, tonality pendants, dry rations, medical supplies and a handful of bows in case of emergency.

  Their troop commander, Harvid, was busy surveying the horizon. He was old and sinewy, with a slender but powerful frame and skin marked by a lifetime of hard labour and punishment. His face was riven by a motley collection of wrinkles and scars, and no matter how dim the light, he always seemed to be squinting.

  Like all the workmen, Harvid was mundane and thus belonged to the servile class, but Imperial society didn’t follow its usual rules aboard military ships. Any apprentice technically had noble standing but was regarded as something of a cross between a tourist and an indentured servant, while Harvid was a loyal crewman with years of experience and respect.

  This arrangement could sometimes be problematic, especially when less commanding crewmen encountered particularly snot-nosed apprentices, but it was never a problem when Harvid was in command. No one would ever think to question his authority.

  “Pair up,” the old salt said, still looking into the distance.

  The group split into partners quickly. Everyone there had been on dozens of away missions, and like Caleb and Bibbs, each had long ago settled on a regular partner. Once paired, they lined up at the chest and were assigned equipment.

  Caleb and Bibbs came to the head of the line and the two mountainous workmen filled their hands with baubles. They gave Caleb a compass, a brass disc that fit comfortably in his palm, its surface covered front and back with branch and leaf whorls, while Bibbs was handed a comparitavely plain looking tonality pendant which appeared to be little more than a simple silver necklace clutching an oblong crystal.

  Despite their appearances, both items were rather clever artifacts. Besides indicating cardinal directions, the compass could lead its owner back to the chest from which it was taken, and also had the ability to detect stores of energy that might otherwise escape notice. The tonality pendant served only one function, but it was an important one: it allowed distant communication without any need for a Seer.

  Before the two apprentices could step away, Harvid caught them in his sights and halted them with a gesture. “Bibbs and Gedley. What are your fields of study again?”

  “Interfector,” Bibbs answered while rocking his shoulders back and puffing up his chest. “Specializing in fire techniques, sir.”

  Caleb hesitated. “Thelosophy,” he said finally with a shake of his head.

  “I see,” Harvid said. He took a moment to appraise Caleb, and didn’t appear pleased with what he found. “D’ya have any talents at all, boy?”

  They’d already had this particular conversation before, and Caleb had grown tired of it then. He said, “Lux.”

  “Come again?”

  “I can summon light. It’s called lux.” It was a child’s technique, but Caleb didn’t feel the need to say that aloud.

  “I see,” Harvid said again, and stroked his ragged chin. After a bit of thought, he lifted a bow and quiver out of the chest and handed them to Caleb. “I assume you’ve had some training with these?”

  “Some,” Caleb said modestly. This wasn’t the time to brag about archery competitions, not that Harvid was likely to be impressed at second place anyway.

  “Good. I expect your interfector friend will keep close guard over you, but you never know what you’ll find on these uncharted worlds. There’s something foul on the wind.”

  With that, Harvid strolled away to attend some other matter, and left Caleb scratching his head. He didn’t know whether the old man’s concern was a sign of friendliness or disappointment, and he settled on assuming equal measures of both.

  It took a few minutes more to outfit the entire party, after which Harvid sketched out the plan in broad terms. They’d follow a simple search pattern radiating out from their camp site, and anyone who found anything of interest was to report in immediately. Then he gave each pair a direction and sent them on their way.

  Caleb and Bibbs set out toward the West following a slight depression which wove a path between the many soft hills. Creatures with wide, fan-shaped wings wheeled about in the cloud dappled sky and drifted lazily on the intermittent breeze, while small furred things in blue and green darted about in the feather-soft grass. Purple buds grew atop long curving stalks, and their cottony seeds hung in the air everywhere, bobbing up and down like bouys in calm seas.

  Both apprentices had saucer eyes. After most of a year locked up in a dark starship, the fields of Zayin were like a precious gift. There was life and light everywhere, the smell of sweet flowers, and the sedate calls of wildlife.

  The one thing they absolutely didn’t see were signs of a crashed ship or its crew.

  “As far as fool’s errands go,” Caleb said several hours into their trek, “this one is oddly pleasant. No cramped vapour helmet, no hundred pound backpack, no hulking, tentacled beasts trying to eat my face…”

  Bibbs said, “Hush.”

  “Afraid I’ll jinx it?”

  In harshly rasping whisper, “I said shut up.” Bibbs waved two upraised fingers to draw Caleb’s attention, then pointed toward an odd little hillock. It was shaped just like an upturned bowl and sat amid a small stand of trees which cloaked it in patchy shade.

  Caleb took Bibbs’ hint. The ache in his head had thankfully subsided, so he slowly dilated his second sight and watched the emptiness become full. Streams of luminous colour swirled and flowed like ribbons of dye in still waters, but none approached the hill. They instead broke around it, leaving it almost totally untouched.

  “Now that’s curious,” Caleb said.

  “Precisely.”

  He drew the compass from his pocket and pried it open it like a clam, and with his heightened senses, he could now see the device’s complex inner workings. The massive streams of energy outside collided with the compass’ case, where they seeped inside and branched into thousands of tiny swirling rivulets. Those rivulets threaded around three floating crystal shards, and dragged their tips this way and that.

  Of the three, the green crystal pointed convulsively toward the hillock. Caleb took a moment to watch its motion, noting the speed and distance of its wavering. A few quick mental calculations later, he said, “Quite a bit of power locked up there. Second order, maybe 130 jun.”

  “What do you think? Boobytrap?”

  Caleb pried his sight wider, near to the point of no return. The world became a nausea inducing kaleidoscope of light, sound, flavor, texture, and odor. It was like staring into the sun, except with all his senses at once; the strain battered his concentration, and he only managed to maintain it for a few seconds.

  As his second sight reflexively contracted, he was left with an image burned into his m
ind. Along the surface of the hillock, energies tinted unnatural shades of purple and red sat nearly still in overlapping crenellated patterns.

  He pinched the bridge of his nose against a suddenly resurgent headache and said, “No, not a trap. Some kind of barrier construct. A very old style.”

  Bibbs’ eyes flared bright amber as he widened his own second sight, and returned to their normal blue a moment later. “Hmmm, that’s not familiar at all. How old exactly? Which reign?”

  Caleb almost laughed. “Which reign? I’m not talking millennia, Bibbs. It dates back to well before the first emperor. Try eons. Millions of years. This design pattern hasn’t been in fashion since the Age of Two Seas.”

  The full gravity of that thought didn’t even strike Caleb until the words were already out of his mouth. This kind of barrier was already old when the planets themselves were in their infancy, and floated like islands within two conjoined seas. The technique of creating it had been conceived and mastered while the lesser gods still wandered the universe in flesh and blood.

  “Really gods damned old,” Caleb mumbled absentmindedly. And just like that, he had to know what treasures it protected.

  Bibbs scratched his head. “Do you know how to open it?”

  They were apparently on the same page, and that page didn’t include reporting back to basecamp.

  “Maybe,” Caleb replied. “These archaic barriers are usually built to open in response to a sound. A passphrase or something of the like.”

  “You can figure out the phrase?”

  “Not a chance,” Caleb said. “Well, I mean… there’s always a chance of anything, but this one’s pretty much insignificant. I’m more likely to be struck in the head by a meteorite made of diamond-studded gold than to just stumble across the key.”

  Bibbs nodded and looked on expectantly.

  Caleb closed his eyes and the image of the barrier was still there in his mind, fresh and vibrant as the moment he saw it. The barrier itself looked deceptively simple, and he knew there was more going on beneath the surface; an arrangement of sigils hidden within guided the energy flows, giving the outer barrier its structure, and that system held the key to cracking it open.