by Gross, Dave
“Why not simply destroy the whole tower?” said Bronwyn, sounding perplexed.
“We didn’t have nearly enough firepower out there. And didn’t you see the power field around this place?” snapped Finch. “It stopped bullets, lightning, everything we threw at it. We had to get inside the field to do any real damage.”
“‘Power field,’” said Bronwyn, apparently noting that term for later.
Nemo reminded himself that they were only temporarily allied with this blackclad. Much as he was relieved to hear that she was unfamiliar their technology, he did not wish to dispel any more of her ignorance.
“If we stop whatever this tower is doing,” said Nemo, “This Aurora will have no more reason to remain.”
Bronwyn nodded and continued running up the automatic stairway.
Despite the exhilaration of traveling so quickly upward, propelled as much by the moving steps as by his own muscles, Nemo felt a twinge of impatience that he was not leading the charge. After the carnage outside, he had expected the surviving storm knights to allow themselves a moment of relief, to prove less eager to die as heroes. Instead, the troops hastened to put themselves between the enemy and their leaders. Two of them had even shouldered their way past Major Blackburn, who Nemo imagined felt the same frustration.
Nemo’s pride bristled at the thought of himself as the protected rather than the protector. It was prudent. It was regulation. It just never felt quite right.
To either side of the escalating stair, plain steel plates lined the stairway, which rose in an elegant, graceful curve toward the tower center. Flexible tubes hanging like laundry lines emitted a steady luminescence. The exposed bolts on the panels suggested the absence of an intended outer layer, perhaps ornamental. Despite the elegance of its basic architecture, the tower entrance seemed incomplete. Nemo’s impatience flared as the automatic stairs stopped moving. The knights ahead of him tripped, recovered, and continued to run. Caitlin Finch followed close behind, elbowing Bronwyn whenever the druid tried to slip past her. Behind the women, Chaplain Geary followed with his ensign and more storm knights bringing up the rear.
With a sudden clutch and grind, the stairs reversed course. Nemo and his soldiers found themselves in the position of salmon swimming upstream—only weighted down by armor.
“Hurry!” Nemo urged those ahead of him.
“Yes, sir!” bellowed the knights, already puffing from exertion.
The lights along the walls went out.
They continued to run. The electrical light of their galvanic coils and weapons threw their fragmented shadows against the steel walls.
“Careful up ahead,” said Nemo. Even as he said the words, he realized they were pointless. Of course the men would be careful, rushing as they were into the stronghold of an enemy that had just decimated their army.
As they neared the apex of the stairway, Nemo saw sunlight reflected against steel walls. A shadow moved to one side of the opening.
“Careful ahead,” Blackburn echoed Nemo’s warning.
“Stop it,” hissed Finch, once more shoving the druid back.
With an impatient huff, Bronwyn leaped neatly onto the stairway rail. Unencumbered by armor, she ran light as a squirrel past Finch, Nemo, Blackburn, and the soldiers leading the way.
“What are you playing at, blackclad?” snapped Nemo.
Bronwyn did not even turn to look at him. She ran all the way to the top of the stairs and leaped forward, as if taking flight.
A gleaming axe head dropped behind her like a guillotine. Its razor edge sheared off a strip from the hem of her black cloak. Bronwyn tumbled forward to disappear over the crest of the stairs.
A pair of gleaming steel sentinels stepped out to finish her. Their statuesque figures resembled those of Aurora’s clockwork angels, only they were more heavily armored. In lieu of swords they raised heavy halberds as they stepped toward Bronwyn.
“Go, go, go!” bellowed Blackburn. “Help her!”
Somehow, the men found a new reservoir of strength, charging up the steel stairway so fast that their pauldrons sparked against the sides.
One of the sentinels, in the form of a female, turned to face them. A storm knight lowered his head, charged, and threw his armored arms around her steel waist. He pushed her back only a foot or two before her feet caught traction. She smashed the shaft of her halberd down on his back.
“Anything a druid can do,” muttered Finch. With a clatter of greaves, she swung up onto the railing and began running past the knights. Her shoulder sparked against the steel walls as she leaned in to avoid slipping back down onto the stairs.
“Finch, don’t be a fool!” bellowed Nemo. Without thinking, he raised one knee as if to jump after her, but it was no use. Even without the searing pain reminding him that his athletic peak was fifty years gone, his armor-widened shoulders wouldn’t allow him to stand on the narrow rail. Blackburn proved as much when he tried to vault up onto the rail, only to fall back into Nemo. Nemo pushed the man back onto his feet and urged him forward.
The knight at the top of the stairs hooked his ankle behind that of the sentinel, but shoving her was no better than pushing against a wall. When the man behind him added his weight to the struggle, the metal guardian slipped back a step. Together, the knights forced her back and shoved her to the side. They raised their glaives.
Finch leaped past them, gripping her coruscating staff like a spear. Like Bronwyn, she vanished over the edge.
Nemo and Blackburn reached the top. Immediately before them, Finch and Bronwyn leaned side-by-side against the wall. The Adept held her staff away from the druid, as if she had pulled it back just in time to avoid crushing her skull.
The blackclad crouched in a feral posture, her axe upon the floor, hands thrust out in a warding gesture. A ring of emerald-green runes encircled her wrists.
A steel sentinel slid across the grated floor toward an open expanse. Her weapon skittered beside her, propelled by the same invisible force with which Bronwyn had slammed her foes on the battlefield. The sentinel’s clockwork hands scrabbled for a grip upon the floor but found none. An instant later, she flew off the side of the open deck. The halberd teetered for a moment before plunging after her.
To the other side, two storm knights fought the other sentinel. One locked his glaive against the halberd’s shaft, driving the weapon up to allow his companion to drive the tip of his blade into the foe’s exposed abdomen. The sharp edge keened across metal and gears but barely scratched the chassis.
“Get back!” shouted Finch.
With one last shove, the knights threw themselves out of the way. The instant they were clear, Finch drove the tip of her staff against the sentinel’s throat. Lightning cascaded across the steel body, sending it into a paroxysm of shock.
“Now!” cried Finch. Together with Blackburn, the men swept their heavy blades down, shearing off the clockwork guardian’s arm and cutting a deep wound into her steely chest. A few springs and gears leaped from the injury. The defender sank to the floor with a sad, diminishing whirr that dwindled into an electric sigh before it died.
Nemo looked beyond the fight.
Before them spread a great circular platform, its center cloaked in a shimmering steel curtain. To either side, the platform looked down on the village of Calbeck and the surrounding battlefields. From here, Nemo realized, Aurora and her officers had been observing them while remaining hidden from his sentries in the camp. No wonder they’d had such good intelligence on the location of their mechaniks’ workshop.
Thinking of Mags and her betrayal hardened Nemo’s resolve. He turned, eyes searching for a portal or any sign of a control room. Another of the steel sentinels stepped out from around the western passage. She hefted her polearm and charged, fearless of their greater numbers.
Nemo pointed his staff and let the lightning flow. The guardian kept running, even as gears popped red-hot out of her shoulder joints. Halfway to him, she faltered. He released another surge, bre
aking her chassis open and scattering her internal components across the deck.
As he halted the galvanic beam, he heard another crackling behind him. Finch raised her own staff. Looking past her, he saw she had demolished—with the aid of Blackburn and his knights—another tower defender.
“Which way?” asked Chaplain Geary.
It was Bronwyn who answered. “The world reels beneath us,” she said. Her face paled, and she pressed a hand to her belly. She looked upward. “Something above us directs the change.”
Nemo pointed to a curving portal on the outer wall. One of Blackburn’s knights examined a panel by its side. Pulling down a brass lever triggered a sound of pneumatic pressure and ticking gears.
“It’s empty,” said Chaplain Geary. “What is this, a storage closet?”
Before Nemo could answer him, Finch voiced his thought. “It’s a lift. Like a dumbwaiter. It can take us to the upper levels.”
As Nemo stepped in to examine a panel on the interior wall, the others glanced around for any sign of more tower defenders. The doors began to close, but they hissed open again as they neared the knight obstructing the threshold.
“We can’t all fit in there. Finch, Bronwyn, and you, come with me,” he pointed to a storm knight. “The rest of you take one of the other lifts.”
Nemo watched Blackburn activate the northeastern portal and waited until he saw the doors open. When Blackburn’s party entered the chamber, he lifted the sliding lever inside his own lift. With a gentle bump, the cylinder began to rise.
Nemo noted the outline of a trap door on the floor and another on the ceiling. The cylinder slowed and stopped, and then the doors opened.
They emerged at the corner of two enclosed corridors. Luminous lines ran along the base of each wall, casting the passages in a sinister light.
At the far end of the corridor, another lift opened. Blackburn, Geary, and the remaining knights stepped out. One of the knights took up a guard position at the corner while the rest moved toward Nemo.
Nemo left his storm knight at the nearest corner and went to meet Blackburn beside a closed portal on the interior wall. Warmth radiated from the closed door. Nemo heard the hum and clatter of machinery from the other side. He put his ear close to the door and heard muted voices calling numerical values.
“Send two men around to guard the other corners,” Nemo whispered to Blackburn. The major conveyed the orders with hand gestures, and the knights obeyed instantly.
Nemo triggered the button beside the door. The panel slid aside. Humid air rank with ozone and body odor wafted into the corridor.
Inside, the chamber glowed with light from low panels and high displays. Armored figures, most with their helms removed, squeezed between clockwork apparatuses and exposed conduits passing through vents that descended from the ceiling and plunged into the lower reaches of the tower. A few of the room’s inhabitants wore complex optical apparatuses through which they peered at tiny mechanikal displays.
A bespectacled man turned toward the open door, his magnified eyes widening as he recognized intruders. He opened his mouth to alert the others, but arcane runes already orbited Nemo’s hand. Lightning sputtered like hot bacon grease in his cupped palm. He flung the energy into the room, squinting as it flashed outward to transfix all the occupants and fill the chamber with light.
The room’s occupants shuddered and slumped to the floor. Instruments leaped out of their panels and scattered across the floor, trailing sparks.
Blackburn rushed in with his knights, checking the corners for unseen defenders before touching the necks of the fallen in a search for survivors. There were none. After the major called the all-clear, Nemo entered with Finch, Geary, and Bronwyn close behind.
After his first step into the control room, Nemo felt perspiration slick his face as the heat enveloped his body. Through the clutter he spied another door on each of the other three walls of the chamber. He turned his attention to the devices crowded inside.
Most of the panels displayed banks of levers and dial gauges, illuminated by the blue-white luminescence he had come to associate with Convergence constructs. In several places the symbol of Cyriss appeared among the instruments, but its placement seemed the result of prefabricated devices rather than intention. In other spots, unfinished consoles and exposed conduits suggested once more that the tower had been a hasty construction.
Finch went to a wall panel in which brass cards flipped over to indicate a rising linear value. “Something’s definitely happening,” she said. “Whatever it is, it’s close to finishing.”
Nemo joined her at the panel, but movement in a relatively clear corner of the chamber caught his eye.
A large chromium Face of Cyriss orbited a lighted sphere of steel and brass. As the globe revolved in opposition to the mask’s motion, etched mountains and coastlines winked through its eyes. The continent of Immoren emerged as the mask passed over the sphere’s nearest face.
The globe was a representation of the entire planet of Caen, although only the lands of western Immoren appeared in detail. Elsewhere across the world, simple geometric shapes indicated unexplored territories. Across both the detailed land and sea, glassy filaments of blue-white light indicated river-like channels forming a network across the entire world.
“The Convergence have plans for the entire world.” Nemo moved to the globe and ran his finger along one of the lighted filaments.
“Ley lines,” said Bronwyn.
Nemo nodded, impatient to act and yet drawn to study the device further. “The Convergence might call them ‘geomantic channels.’”
Bronwyn shrugged. “Different words for the same thing.”
Nemo peered close at the portion representing northern Cygnar. He found the Dragon’s Tongue River, indicated by a blue-black line. There, at the point where Calbeck lay, he saw a filament shift out of place. As he watched, it moved gradually farther from its original location.
Bronwyn gasped. “They are rerouting the arteries of the world.”
Nemo nodded as he stepped back to avoid the next circuit of the Cyriss mask. He was far more interested in the models of the other celestial bodies hanging from the chamber’s ceiling. He recognized the sun, the moons, and upon a far wall, a globe marked with the Face of Cyriss. Its interior light glowed in sympathy with the ley lines indicated on Caen.
So too did the curving lines upon the walls. Nemo stepped back for a larger perspective on the relationship between the implied orrery and the suspended globes.
“They are repositioning these ley lines in sympathy with the passage of Cyriss,” he said. “But why?”
“To draw the power of their goddess to Caen?” suggested Finch.
Bronwyn wrinkled her nose at Finch, but then she appeared to consider the notion. “Perhaps.”
“Outrageous,” said Chaplain Geary. “It must mean they are preparing for some sort of arcane holy war. They are gathering power for their warcasters.”
“No,” Nemo said slowly. “Despite the emphasis on ley lines on this globe of Caen, there are no similar courses of energy indicated on the other planet. These lines seem to describe gravitational patterns.”
As Nemo considered the possibilities—divine, scientific, and arcane alike—a cold dread gathered in his stomach. Weighing what he had seen and heard of Aurora, her callow attempts at manipulation, her passionate advocacy of her cult, and its emphasis on immortality, he began to formulate the most awful hypothesis.
“What is it, sir?” said Finch.
“They are not trying to summon the power of Cyriss,” he said. “They mean to bring the goddess herself to Caen.”
Finch blinked. “They can do that? No, never mind that. Why would they do that?”
“To rule her own domain,” said Bronwyn, her voice filled with awe. “The Cyrissists reject the balance between this world and the next. They wish their goddess to rule this world alone, while the other gods reside in Urcaen.”
“And what of us, who l
ive our lives in hopes of serving Morrow in Urcaen?” said Geary. “What do they intend to do with the faithful?”
“What do all conquering faiths do with heretics?” said Blackburn.
A shout from outside drew Nemo’s attention to one of the closed doors. Blackburn moved toward it, but it opened before he reached it. The guard stationed outside fell inward, his throat slashed. Behind him stood one of Aurora’s clockwork angels, bloody sword poised to strike again.
An instant later, the other doors opened to admit two more clockwork angels from opposite doors, bloody swords at their sides. From the third, Aurora stepped into the room. Behind her, Nemo glimpsed the brass wings of more of her bodyguard.
“You are too late,” said Aurora. “I have already crushed your army, but I have no wish to destroy you. Surrender, Sebastian Nemo. Surrender yourself to the truth of the Convergence, and join us.”
Aurora
Aurora searched Sebastian Nemo’s blue eyes for any sign that he saw through her bluff. The same quality that made him valuable to the Convergence was also what made him so dangerous: his intelligence.
He stood beside the globe of Caen. All the clues he required to understand the Great Work lay before him. Even a mechanik like Margaret Jernigan would have been able to deduce their meaning in time. The question was whether the warcaster had been in the chamber long enough to understand those clues.
Nemo responded by raising his staff, activating its charge, and smashing its butt down onto a control panel.
“No!” Aurora leaped toward him. A knight interposed himself, raising his crackling blade.
“Destroy it all,” Nemo shouted to the others. “She seeks to delay us.”
Aurora shoved the knight away. He fell back, but only for an instant before lunging at her again.
As the runic halo of her spell surrounded her, Aurora drove the head of her staff into the man’s breastplate, crushing the steel deep into his abdomen. With a gasp, he dropped his blade and fell to one knee.
Continuing her furious motion, Aurora slammed the butt of the staff against the head of another knight, an older man with the sigil of Morrow displayed prominently on his white armor. He crumbled.