by Gross, Dave
DARK CONVERGENCE
DAVE GROSS
Cover by
MATHIAS KOLLROS
privateerpress.com
skullislandx.com
For R. Scott Taylor, who blazed the trail.
CONTENTS
MAP
THE FIRST HARMONIC
THE SECOND HARMONIC
THE THIRD HARMONIC
THE FOURTH HARMONIC
THE FIFTH HARMONIC
THE SIXTH HARMONIC
THE SEVENTH HARMONIC
THE EIGHTH HARMONIC
THE NINTH HARMONIC
GLOSSARY
THE FIRST HARMONIC
Precision is the opening theorem in the proof of perfection.
Nemo
The wagon creaked as the team pulled it along the muddy path winding south from the Dragon’s Tongue River. The horses snorted plumes of mist in the cool autumn air. A pair of half-shuttered lanterns glowed on the wagon’s front posts on either side of the drivers’ seat. Their yellow light reached just beyond the hooves of the lead horses, barely illuminating the leafless branches of the surrounding woods.
Canvas tarpaulins covered the wagon’s bulky cargo, except for a giant mechanikal limb lying on top. Lantern light glimmered over brass gears connecting the upper and lower lengths of the steel-and-chromium arm. A double-pincer formed a clawed hand at one end, while a ruin of mangled gears and axles jutted from the other.
High on the driver’s seat sat two hulking figures, their cowls pulled low over faces muffled by scarves. Through the wool, the driver whistled “The Last Maiden of Caspia” as he held the reins loosely in hands encased in blue steel gauntlets. The passenger sat silent and still but for the jostling when the wagon’s wheels dipped into ruts and bounced over roots.
The driver’s eyes widened as he spied something moving onto the road ahead. He stopped his whistling.
“Uh, oh.”
With a sound of ratcheting gears, blue-white lights appeared on the path before the wagon, moving in two distinct figures. Two humanoid shapes stepped forward, glowing panels set into their legs, arms, and torsos. On each head glowed a single unblinking eye, brighter than all the other lights upon their bodies except for one: a stylized icon of a woman’s face on each chest.
The driver reined in the team as six more figures stepped into the wagon’s path. The interlopers remained ten yards away, stepping back to maintain their distance as the wagon slowed and halted.
“Who’s there?” The driver opened the shutters on the nearest lantern. Light shone on the steel bodies of the intruders.
They looked like fanciful suits of armor inhabited not by men but by brass mechanisms. Heavy steel blades jutted from the backs of their right hands, a compact battery of six firearm barrels on the left. They raised their left arms in unison, pointing them like pistols at the driver and his passenger.
“Halt!” called a flat, mechanical voice.
“I just did,” said the driver. “You can see I don’t want any trouble.” His voice echoed deep and muted, as if from inside a steel helm. He turned toward the sound of coiled springs and heavy footsteps approaching from behind the wagon.
An enormous machine emerged from the woods to block his retreat. With every step of its four crustacean legs, its internal mechanisms whirred and clicked. Lantern light warmed its chromium-plated surface as it turned its ovoid torso to keep the apparatus on its right shoulder trained on the driver. A rack of razor-sharp saw blades fed a whining compartment inside the contraption. At the end of its left limb, a symmetrical pair of heavy pincers clenched and released—an operative version of the arm lying on the wagon’s bed.
“Step down,” said one of the clockwork soldiers. The tenor of its voice was the same as the first speaker’s, but its cadence differed. “Make no sudden moves.”
The driver looped the reins around the brake and raised his armored hands. “I promise you’ll have no trouble from me.”
As the driver uttered the code phrase, Artificer General Sebastian Nemo emerged from behind the tree where he had been hiding. He flicked a switch on the side of his storm armor. A dull thrum rose to a high whine as lightning flickered on the galvanic coils on his back. Tongues of electricity cast the bare branches of the trees into stark relief against the night sky. Nemo’s white hair floated on the static field, his blue eyes brightening as the charge increased.
At the same time, five heavy blades crackled with lightning beside him. Six blue-armored soldiers rose from the concealment of the camouflaged ditch, dry leaves rustling as they slipped out from beneath the tarpaulins.
Just off the path behind the wagon, Storm Chaser Caitlin Finch and another half-dozen Stormblades appeared. The men held heavy storm throwers at their waists, the storm chambers keening as the guns’ coils glowed brighter.
A brilliant, white flash rose to the north. An instant later, a heavy impact shook the ground, followed by another. A gradually accelerating rhythm thundered up the path behind the wagon.
The wagon driver shrugged, his hands held high as he spoke to the clockwork intruders. “Now I’ll keep my promise, fellas, but I can’t speak for these other folks.”
“Lower your arms and surrender,” said Nemo. He activated his tempest accumulator. Lightning leaped between the weapon and the voltaic coils of his armor.
“He means you,” said the driver. He pointed a steel-clad finger at the clockwork soldiers while keeping his hands raised.
Half of the clockwork soldiers fired on the wagon.
Slender projectiles shot from the batteries on the backs of their hands. They broke apart to form dozens of tiny missiles that swarmed their targets.
The driver covered his face with both gauntlets and dropped to one knee, presenting the smallest possible target. The projectiles tugged at his cloak and spit sparks from his armor as they formed a buzzing cloud around him.
Up on the driver’s seat, the passenger’s head jerked backward. His body slid sideways onto the seat and jerked as the swarm continued to ravage his corpse.
The remaining clockwork soldiers turned toward Nemo. Before they could fire, a blue-white circle of runes flashed around his outstretched hand. Three white arcs lashed out to wrack their mechanikal bodies. Simultaneously, five more arcs lanced out from the storm glaives to shock and burn the clockwork soldiers. Their metal bodies twisted in spasms before clattering to the ground.
At the rear of the wagon, the enemy warjack turned to target Nemo, seemingly unaware of the rising light and thunder approaching from behind. As its monocular lens fixed on his eyes, Nemo felt the prickling sensation he always experienced when a fellow warcaster was near. The feeling remained faint, and his adversary remained hidden.
She may not have revealed herself, Nemo thought, but she was surely watching.
Stormblades fired lightning into the chromium-plated warjack. The white-hot arcs scarred its chassis and twisted its pincers, but the apparatus on its right shoulder continued to whine and spark as a steel saw blade clicked into launch position.
“No you don’t!” Finch ran forward, thrusting her staff like a lance. Its crackling head unleashed a wave of coruscating energy across the warjack’s body. The whine from its saw-flinger wound down.
“Get back, Adept!” bellowed Nemo.
Finch backpedalled.
The thunder arrived, and with it came twelve tons of steel and lightning.
More than twice the height of a tall man, massive arms pumping at its sides, the blue-and-gold Thunderhead charged the enemy warjack. White-hot energy surged out of its lightning chamber to cascade across the coils on its back and shoulders. From there the lightning leapt down to feed all of its power into a pair of massive steel hands.
Nemo guided the Thunderhead
with his thoughts. It grabbed the enemy and heaved it up off the ground, only to turn and smash it down again. The impact deformed the warjack’s multi-jointed legs and sent a shower of dirt across the path.
Clicking and halting, the enemy reached up with its pincer hand. Before it could catch hold of the Thunderhead, the larger warjack lifted it again, smashing it down even harder than before. The saw-flinger cracked open. Steel discs, each two feet wide, spilled out onto the ground. The chromium warjack coughed, its limbs moving in short, erratic gestures.
The Stormblades stepped out to cover the fallen foe. One of them shot the twitching pincer arm a single time, watched it twitch again, and stilled it with a final arc of lightning.
“Careful with that!” barked the wagon driver. He stood and pulled back his hood to reveal the golden face of a Stormblade helm. Raising the beaver to reveal his black-bearded face, the driver turned to Nemo and said, “Sir, didn’t you want to take it intact?”
Nemo’s bushy white eyebrows leaped as he recognized the speaker. “Blackburn! I told you to put volunteers on that wagon.”
“Yes, sir,” said Blackburn. “I was my first volunteer.”
Nemo fumed. “That job was far too dangerous to risk my senior officer.”
“Yes, sir.”
“It would be one thing if I had an entire company at my disposal, but with so few—”
He fell silent and watched as another Stormblade stepped up to examine the fallen passenger. The infantryman pulled back the fallen figure’s hood to reveal a burlap sack, on which some prescient jokester had drawn a frown and large X’s for eyes. Straw spilled out from holes in the front and back, where the buzzing projectile had passed straight through the stuffed head.
“My second volunteer,” said Blackburn.
Nemo started to say something more, but he closed his mouth and let the sour twist of his mustache demonstrate his displeasure.
He didn’t want to reprimand Blackburn in front of the troops. Nemo knew the morale value of Blackburn’s willingness to assume risks he would not ask of his men, but he had enough mutiny on his hands with the storm chaser he still sometimes thought of as his “apprentice” despite her having risen to the arcane rank of Adept.
Turning away from Blackburn, Nemo barked, “Finch!”
Finch straightened from where she had been leaning over the defeated warjack. She ran to Nemo, holding her staff—her “tuning fork,” as she called it—a trifle higher than necessary to avoid tripping. It was one of many awkward gestures that prevented Nemo from thinking of her as a grown woman rather than a girl.
Caitlin Finch was not only an adult, she had also proven herself time and time again, especially in combat. She was already becoming known as one of Cygnar’s finest arcane warriors. Nemo only hoped she would survive her increasingly daring behavior on the battlefield.
Finch moved to stand before Nemo and saluted. “Sir!”
“The Devil Dogs lost four men recovering the first of those warjacks. What were you thinking to move so close to this one?” He raised an eyebrow, hoping the gesture would be enough to make Finch reevaluate her action.
“Sir, I was thinking it was about to cut you in half with one of those spinning saws.”
Nemo could hardly object to that point.
He and Finch had examined the first of the captured warjacks together before leaving it for the mechaniks at their impromptu camp. The saw-flinging apparatus was perhaps its deadliest feature. He wanted to know more about those who had created such a weapon and what they intended to do with it.
Even so, Nemo could not allow Finch to take unnecessary risks in a misguided, if laudable, effort to protect him—no more, he admitted to himself, than Blackburn could demand volunteers for a job he considered too dangerous when he could take it on himself. Recognition of his own hypocrisy did nothing to assuage his concern for Finch’s safety. “I require your obedience, Finch, not your protection.”
“Sir, if I may speak freely—”
“You may not.”
He knew what she intended to say. She’d been telling him for months that he should leave the fighting to the junior officers—the younger officers, like her. While usually Finch couched her advice in courtesy, she had increasingly skirted the edge of insolence, even daring to mention his own paternal attitude toward others under his command. If he allowed her to continue, she would soon join the Devil Dogs in referring to him as “the old man” or even less respectful monikers. While he could tolerate a certain amount of informality among mercenaries, he would not let it creep into his army.
“Yes, sir.”
Nemo looked up to the night sky. The heavy clouds of the previous days had dissipated. The stars twinkled through the gauze of a few wispy clouds. Artis, the smallest of Caen’s three moons, fled from Calder, the Lord Moon. The Baleful Moon, Laris, had not yet risen above the concealing woods.
A more superstitious man might have taken that for a good omen, but Nemo was not searching the sky for a heavenly portent. He could still sense the presence of an enemy warcaster, even though he could not see her.
“There!” cried one of the Stormblades. He pointed eastward, through the naked canopy.
Nemo ran to join the man, wincing as a muscle spasm caught his back. He had spent the entire day preparing this ambush, and he had ridden hard the day before with a scant few hours of sleep. It was no wonder his body rebelled. Anyone would have experienced the same, he thought.
Even a much younger man.
Nemo looked where the soldier pointed through the tree branches. Flying east toward Calbeck, a V of seven winged women fled the area. The smallest of them led the way, her body seeming even smaller in comparison to her expansive wings. The larger figures, their own size conversely exaggerated by their tiny wings, shielded her with their bodies, each in turn gliding behind her in a perfectly synchronized rotation.
By old habit, Nemo raised a hand to hurl lightning after them. With a weary sigh, he closed his fingers to form a fist. It was no use. By the time he could release his spell, they would already be out of range.
Finch appeared by his side. “You don’t think she knew it was a trap, do you?”
Nemo smoothed his mustache as he considered the question. “She is certainly more cautious after her encounter with the Dogs,” he decided. “She wouldn’t have risked these troops if she knew for certain. Yet she committed only one of the type of warjack we have already captured, not one of the other models our scouts have spied in the village. Also, she and her flying guards remained out of sight during the confrontation. She must at least have suspected the possibility of a trap.”
“At least we have these clockwork soldiers,” said Finch. “Maybe now we can learn why they all have the Face of Cyriss on their chests.”
That was the same question that gnawed at Nemo’s imagination.
The various cults of the Maiden of Gears usually struck him as cliques of harmless intellectuals: mathematicians, engineers, mechaniks, and astronomers. There were aberrations, as evidenced by the Witchfire Affair some years previous, but nothing to suggest that Cyrissists posed a threat. Nemo had never imagined them to be capable of fielding an army, much less of capturing a Cygnaran village so swiftly.
“Sir,” said Blackburn. He cupped a few brass objects in the palm of his gauntlet. “I dug these out of our second volunteer.”
Nemo leaned close, squinting to see them in the light of his storm armor. At first glance they appeared to be clockwork toys shaped like weird insects. On closer inspection, he saw they were half-cylinders connected by a tensor spring. What appeared to be wings on either end were actually tiny blades. Between them, like the proboscis of an evil insect, perched a sharp drilling cone.
Nemo took a pouch from his waist and held it open. Blackburn poured the queer projectiles inside.
“Clear the wagon,” said Nemo.
The major already had his knights dragging the fallen machine-men toward the rear of the wagon. One of them lowered
the tailgate while the others untied the ropes securing the tarpaulins. They pulled away the canvas to reveal a shell of chicken wire formed roughly in the shape of the enemy warjack. They rolled the decoy out to make room for their new captives. Removing the light cargo did nothing to jostle the war wagon, with its iron-reinforced bed of oak planks designed to bear a load of many tons.
Nemo once more guided the Thunderhead. It lifted the defeated warjack with an attitude of tender care and carried it to the wagon.
“Stand back,” Nemo warned the men. As they moved aside, the Thunderhead laid the warjack on the wagon’s bed. The wagon sagged, its spring suspension groaning under the enormous weight.
With the larger cargo in place, the Stormblades began laying the clockwork soldiers into the spaces between the warjack and the wagon’s sideboards. Lightning had mangled some of them almost beyond recognition, but a few remained essentially intact. Their flickering lights suggested their power sources remained operative, even as their bodies were disabled.
“Sir?” Blackburn offered Nemo a perch on the driver’s seat. Nemo ignored the major’s proffered hand and climbed up unassisted, hissing as another back spasm punished him for his pride. Blackburn climbed up beside him. He released the brake and slapped the reins. The team strained against the greater load, but gradually the wagon moved south and then east.
“What is our next move, sir?”
“First, I want to know more about these clockwork soldiers,” said Nemo. “When our reinforcements arrive, we’ll be in a better position to demand a parlay.”
“And in a better position to drive them out of Cygnar.”
“Exactly.”
From the initial reports of their scouts, Nemo knew as well as Blackburn that they were currently outnumbered. Capturing another of the enemy warjacks, along with these clockwork soldiers, provided Nemo with a slight military advantage as well as the intelligence he required to understand this new threat—and to drive it out of his country before it became more than a distraction from the crisis in the Thornwood.