by E. M. Hardy
The three hunters nodded after seeing the Chi-infused taijitu, accepting her orders with practiced ease. This crest was the sign of the Balancers, Her Majesty’s secret agents seeded throughout the Empire, and all four parted ways as they went back to playing their assigned roles.
Chapter 11
Martin was not surprised at the state of the pyramid in the Leizhu Swamp when his dolls managed to clear the way to the entrance. Most of the lower levels were flooded, with no hope of salvaging anything from them. He instructed his dolls to begin sealing the cracks in the pyramid’s walls, filling them up with hardened clay before pumping out the muck and water in the flooded chambers.
It was strange how the dolls reacted to his desires. They were like teams of engineers trapped in the bodies of little toddlers. He simply thought what he wanted, and the little guys would work on the specifics for him. For example, the dolls would form these long chains with their arms attached to one another. The dolls at the end of the chains would shape their arms into tubes and begin sucking up the muck out of the flooded lower chambers up to the surface. Once enough mud was sucked out of the bottom layers, other dolls would waddle over toward the cracked sections of the walls and begin sealing them up with hardened clay. Some of the lowest sections, however, simply had too much water flowing in for the doll chains to handle on their own. In these cases, the dolls would just walk underwater and seal up the damaged sections with paste.
Apparently, the paste that made up Martin’s constructs was waterproof. It could also harden underwater, which surprised Martin. He really needed to find an archive somewhere that could explain the properties of this miracle paste. He didn’t know the specifics, but he could ‘spot’ the difference between Magical Mud™ and ordinary mud. One was just that—mud—while the other could be processed into some sort of paste when brought to a refinery. If he could just find an archive containing an entry on this pnevmatic paste that Amun and his cohort Mut had talked about, then he could do more with it—maybe even discover its secrets on his own with the right facilities.
Right now though, Martin needed to learn the secrets of this pyramid, this facility that his constructs were fixing up.
This pyramid was huge—easily four, maybe even five times the one in the Qleb Sierra. That was a lot of space for him to work with. This pyramid was also surrounded by usable mud. Scratch that, the entire swamp was filled with the stuff. If he could get this pyramid up and running, he would be able to build enough vats to ramp up production tenfold. It would be an excellent manufacturing hub once finished. He started working on the generators first, though. He would need the extra power if he wanted to get the pyramid up and running. He could already feel his connection to his constructs starting to become constrained due to the distance of the obelisks from the Qleb Sierra pyramid, and he had a sneaking suspicion that the extra juice from these super-generators ought to help out with that.
His dolls also stumbled upon a nice surprise: a sealed facility. It was located behind a particularly well-contained chamber in the very heart of the pyramid. The walls were reinforced, with the inner layers keeping dirt and water out even as the outer layers became thick with mud and moisture. The door itself was multilayered. Just like the walls, the first seal and even the second seal were corroded shut. The third and fourth seals, however, held against the ravages of time.
Once the dolls were finished breaching the chamber, Martin glowed in delight. It was an archive, albeit containing only one well-preserved database, and Martin learned why when a doll hooked up to it. It contained schematics for a secretive project that the original Builders were still working on—one concerned with pnevma. That meant it was connected to the soul magic powering Martin’s consciousness, which only made Martin even more eager to unlock its secrets.
Martin did not, however, expect to encounter the butchered remnants of a dead man’s soul.
This knowledge locked within the archive was different from the data that the Builders stored in other archives. That kind of data was just that—data. It was information that Martin could use, could pass on to his dolls or production vats so that they could build things.
This kind of data held real knowledge. Ideas, memories, beliefs, fears, anxieties—and fragments of all these were locked within the shattered soul of this man. He was a young rider, just a few decades old, and not as powerful as his progenitors, who were millennia old and had absorbed many souls to fuel their powers. This had been his first harvest, his first reaping of souls, and he had been eager to gather as much as he could. He did not care if he put himself in harm’s way. He needed to take risks if he wanted to go higher in the ranks of the Order of Riders, high enough to be deemed worthy to face the true enemy. He had watched his own world burn, and he would do anything—even spill the blood of the innocent and siphon their souls—to pay back the heartless things responsible for the death of his homeworld. He steeled himself for the task ahead, and remembered his mother’s voice urging him to…
Martin recoiled from the shattered soul, horrified at the implications. This was the soul of the young knight, the one that Amun and Mut had been talking about! This was the original soul that had kicked off the development of pnevma when he had been captured. This was also the soul of a man who had come to this world considering the men, women, and children within it as livestock to be harvested.
It was also a soul consumed with revenge for some unforgiveable sin levelled against him, and he had not cared what he did as long as he slaked that thirst for vengeance.
Unfortunately, this was all that Martin could gather from the remnants of the soul. It wasn’t the only thing stored in the archive, though. It contained the schematics for an experimental construct, one that looked surprisingly like an ordinary man. A head, a torso, two arms, two legs, all forming a body about six feet tall. It also functioned very much like an ordinary man with one key difference—it had no face. It lacked the specialized tools that other constructs possessed. It did not have any shifting tools like the Shaper dolls. It could not carry an inordinate load like the cow-boxes—the Loaders—could. It didn’t float in the air nor did it peer into the distance like how the eyeball-like Drifters could.
Instead, it had a much stronger pnevmatic core—a larger soul that was more malleable than any construct Martin had met thus far. He immediately absorbed the schematic into himself, linked up with the Qleb Sierra pyramid, and produced a copy of this walker. Paste churned within a production vat, and a man-sized doll stood on its own two feet after twelve hours of ‘cooking’ in the vat.
Martin immediately felt a difference as soon as he linked up to it. This new construct, this walker, had a soul core that was very similar to the knight it was based off from. Martin could see that this design was far cruder than the other constructs. It was a blank slate, one that did not amount to much.
When he looked through its eyes though, it was something he thought he would never experience.
No longer was he looking through a window, like with his other constructs. He twisted arms and bent fingers that curled into his palm. He felt solid stone under the soles of his ceramic feet, he heard the generators humming with power, and he could smell the scent of mud drying through non-existent nostrils. He felt unbreathing lungs heaving with sobs that just came out no matter how hard he tried to force them back, and he was sure tears would be wetting his face if he had functioning eyes.
It was not exactly the same, but these were sensations he never thought he would feel once more. It was also the closest Martin felt to being human once again, and he felt them twice over when he manufactured a second walker.
He saw through two sets of eyes now, felt through two pairs of arms and legs. He moved them independently from one another, like how he moved limbs, except far more complicated. Despite the rush of emotions, he nevertheless found himself fascinated by how the system worked. His thoughts and emotions were tied to the walkers, unlike the other constructs that were connected to
but still separate from him.
Simply put, Martin was the walkers, and the walkers were Martin… except more. Yes, there was something definitely different about these walkers aside from Martin’s ability to sense the world through them. The knight’s fragmented soul had left a pattern that Martin couldn’t quite identify just yet. All he could see at the moment was potential. Potential for what, he didn’t know, but he felt that there was a void in the souls in these walkers—their pnevma—that had yet to be filled.
He focused his attention on one of the eyeballs in the historian camp near the Leizhu Swamp pyramid and had it orbit near Yao Xiu. “Miss Yao, are you free right now?” Martin wanted to chuckle at the way the words rhymed in his head, though the sounds that came out from his eyeball were very different.
“Um… wait one second.” The young historian stuck her tongue out, busy posing a little doll in front of her. It had one hand tucked at its waist and another at its head while sticking out its butt in a classic pinup model pose. Martin mentally shook his head, as it was not quite the posture he had in mind for this session. The other girls were squealing in delight as the dolls they were supposed to be sketching were chasing them around in a game of tag. Even the boys were busy arm-wrestling the little tykes, laughing their heads off at their attempts to overpower their larger opponents. Only their teacher, their leader, their lead historian or whatever she was called was not playing around. She was busy inspecting a cow-box, humming to herself as she quite impressively sketched it out on a piece of paper. She did not, however, disapprove of their antics, and Martin could almost make out a smile when she saw one of her students trip while chasing a doll around their camp.
Yes, the vast majority of Martin’s constructs were busy excavating the pyramid, laying additional roads around it, and setting up new obelisks to extend their operational range. He was not, however, so strapped for constructs that he couldn’t spare a few to the endlessly curious troop of historians messing around. They were walking on glass the first few days, and they were relaxed as could be almost a week later. He ought to reconsider the role of his dolls as adorable weapons of mass public relations, the way they disarmed the previously-hesitant historians and had them comfortable enough to start playing around.
“And… done!” Yao Xiu clapped her hands in delight as she finished posing her doll. Martin smiled internally, basking in the happiness of these people. “What did you need, Mar-Tin?”
Martin found it strange how she and the other Renese pronounced his name. Mah-Teen, softening the ‘R’ into a roll and saying it as if it were two names plastered together. “Just wanted to ask if you recall any myths or legends about the invaders fighting other invaders?”
“What do you mean?”
“I came across some information that these invaders to your world—I mean, this world—were fighting an enemy of their own. Did your histories reference any of these enemies of your enemies?”
Yao Xiu paused for a moment, scrunched her lips, and squeezed her brows together in thought. “No, I don’t think so. The scrolls focused largely on the exploits of the heroes of legend and their enemies. The enemies of their enemies? I don’t recall the scrolls talking about any of that.”
“Oh. Too bad. Could you get in touch if you ever have time to check up on it? Knowing the enemies of our enemies would be pretty useful in the future.”
“Sure thing. Ah, wait, Mar-Tin!”
Martin sent his eyeball back, as it was about to float away and resume its patrols. “Hm?”
“I never had the opportunity to say this before, but I just wanted to thank you for guiding me back to my associates. You know, back when I got lost. And so…” She bowed deeply to the eyeball in front of her, her hands clasped together and laid primly on her legs.
“I offer my most profound gratitude to you, my savior, who aided me in my time of need. I thank you, I thank you, I thank you once again. Please, do not hesitate to ask anything of me should you find yourself in need, for I will return my gratitude in kind when the time comes.”
The formality of the whole affair surprised Martin. He wasn’t the only one, though. Everyone else in the historian camp seemed to freeze in the middle of their tracks, wide-eyed at the display that Yao Xiu was making.
“Yao Xiu! That… are you sure you want to…” It was Cai Ping, the boy who had been laying googly-eyes on Yao Xiu even when he had that other girl, Song Lan, practically draping herself over him. “You ARE aware that he, I mean it, is not Renese—not even human!”
When Yao Xiu raised her head, her grin was wide as she turned to Cai Ping. “I haven’t forgotten what you did for me as well, saving me from the boar and all.” She bowed just as deeply to him—repeating her vow of gratitude, addressing it to him this time. “I offer my most profound gratitude to you, my savior, who aided me in my time of need. I thank you, I thank you, I thank you once again. Please, do not hesitate to—”
“NO! You halt your words right this instant!!”
Confused, Yao Xiu could only look up at Song Lan, who interposed herself between Cai Ping and Yao Xiu. “You would carelessly throw around an oath of gratitude like rice grains off a mill? Do it with whoever you want, but not with Cai Ping! He is mine! I claim him, and you had better stop playing around unless you intend to contest me for him!” Song Lan’s petite face flared up as soon as she realized what she had just said. Yao Xiu was just as red, though Martin wasn’t sure if it was from shame or from anger.
“Woaaaah…” Martin couldn’t help himself. “Now that is one kick-ass, claws-out confession if I’ve ever seen one.” The eyeball vibrated up and down slightly as he chuckled to himself. “You’ve got your work cut out for you, brother.” The hapless boy could only gawk as Song Lan pulled him away from the camp, making good on her promise to stake a claim on him. Yao Xiu, however, didn’t move an inch and let the girl take away the boy. It was a bit of drama to cap off the whole event—and it was something that Martin did not miss from his college days.
A few hours later, and the historians broke up camp and headed back home, waving to the little dolls that waved back at them with equal gusto.
And with that, Martin was all alone again, save for the constructs who were laboring away on the pyramid. Instead of moping around though, Martin decided to task one of his eyeballs to follow the historians and check up on their progress. Maybe they’d get chased by swamp boars again. Maybe they’d lose their way back to this Five Gorges city they had talked about when they thought he wasn’t listening. Maybe they’d encounter some unexpected trouble and he’d have to help them out again.
What he saw, however, reminded him of how most civilized people react when they find someone else setting up shop in their backyard—no matter how crappy or out-of-the-way said backyard is.
Chapter 12
Prince Suhaib was still filthy, dust on his face and his traveling attire torn in different places. His boots were scuffed and trailed sand in his wake, while he sported a hastily-bandaged wound on his neck. The return from the hidden valley had been rough, but they had managed to evade all but one of the bandit parties sent by the cartels. They had been lucky as the goons were spread thin, expecting to finish off prey weakened by the elements. What they had found, however, was a well-rested, well-rehydrated force that blew through their tired and strained search parties. The only casualty in the breakout had been the prince, who got grazed on the neck by a lucky arrow as they rode through the first patrol.
Still, the young prince beamed with delight as he marched down the hall of his father’s palace within the fortified port city of al-Taheri, the capital of the Ma’an Emirate. The smile never left his face as the guards let him pass unmolested into his father’s court, where the Emir Rifaah Ma’an the Sturdy sat on his throne. His first wife, Leyla Ma’an, sat to his right side while his second wife and Suhaib’s mother, Latifa Ma’an, sat to his left. The first wife’s wry grin revealed her pleasure at seeing her husband’s son return alive, whi
le the second wife did all she could to contain her horror at seeing his injured, bedraggled state.
Emir Rifaah Ma’an the Sturdy, however, was true to his name. He kept his mouth in a flat line, his eyes blank and calculating. These were gestures that Prince Suhaib had gotten used to, especially when it came to finding ‘new’ things. He could almost hear his old man disparaging him for going on a fool’s errand, that he should stick to his sword and sorcery lessons instead of spearheading an expedition into the mountains. Only desperation allowed his father to permit him to leave, and it was a desperation that the young prince would be glad to ease.
“Father, mother Latifa, mother Leyla! I have returned from my expedition, and I bring good tidings! I can confirm that there are people on the other side of the Puruzlu Mountains!” The prince decided to leave the discussions about doom and gloom for later; he did not want the orb’s prophecies ruining his triumphant return.
The emir tried to keep his expression neutral, attempting to appear regal, but the young prince could discern the skepticism flaring in his eyes. Even his father’s jinni, Shakhum, crossed his ethereal but muscular arms and fixed a disapproving glare on Suhaib.
“And what good does this do us, Suhaib? I have already heard from the armsmasters I sent to protect you, and they tell me that your party was barely out of our borders when it was beset by bandits.” He huffed and shook his head, the hairs of his substantial beard shivering with the motion. “Bandits… anyone with half a brain can see that they are hired dogs hungry to collect you as a prize to keep me in check. And we both know who they would have sold you to, if they had succeeded.”