Dark Convergence

by Gross, Dave

  As the woman called Finch smashed a geomantic conduit, Aurora levered the staff to sweep her legs out from under her. With a startled yelp, the adept hit the floor.

  As Finch fell, the blackclad leaped toward Aurora. Turning to strike the druid, Aurora felt her wings catch on the surrounding conduits. Even so, one blow from the center of her staff sent the small woman tumbling away.

  Aurora’s bodyguard held back, recognizing her frenzy and waiting for it to end before joining her in the fight. Aurora had one more target to strike, and his attention was locked on the room’s controls.

  Aurora swung the polynomial staff with all her might. Scant inches from his skull, Nemo caught the blow upon his own weapon, lightning crackling along its length. He shoved back with surprising strength. His eyes narrowed, and for an instant Aurora saw arcane runes circling in his irises.

  As her spell faded, his struck.

  A brutal impact sent her hurtling across the chamber. Aurora’s own body became the projectile with which Nemo destroyed the room. Her sharp wings severed cables and vents, shredding the fine interfaces of the control panels.

  She crashed against the chamber wall and crumbled to the floor, shaking her head to clear it from the tiny explosions of light that dazzled her vision. She had seen nothing of the origin of the blast but knew it came from Nemo.

  “Bronwyn, get out!” cried Nemo. “Geary, you too!”

  Someone grabbed Aurora’s arm and lifted her to her feet. “Numen, leave him to me.”

  Beyond Sabina, Aurora saw the rest of her bodyguards moving in to attack.

  The first angel raised her blade to strike the white-clad Morrowan, but rather than block with his mace, the man lowered his head and bull-rushed her out of the chamber.

  Another bodyguard stabbed at the druid. The diminutive woman tumbled backward, rolling back to her feet while retaining hold of her gnarled axe. She gestured with her other hand at the clockwork angel standing between her and the chamber door. With a halo of green druidic runes and a whoosh of invisible force, she blasted the angel out into the corridor. Without giving her opponent a second glance, the blackclad rushed out the opposite door, after the Morrowan.

  “They’re clear!” shouted Finch.

  Simultaneously, the adept and her master raised their staves. Threads of lightning shot forth, leaping from console to panel, through the storm armor of the knights, crisscrossing the room in a blinding web of deadly force.

  “Stop!” Aurora leaped forward in a vain attempt to block the lightning with her body.

  Sabina dragged her armored body along the wall, her own steel body jerking as lightning coursed into her steel frame. “No, Numen. You— You must— escape!”

  With the last word, Sabina shoved her out the chamber door and into the passage.

  Acrid smoke and a stench of ozone followed her into the corridor. Through the thickening haze she saw the sparks continue their devastating work as orange flames blossomed on the control boards.

  Sabina crawled out of the control chamber. She struggled to rise and activate the switch shutting the door.

  She slumped against the corridor wall, cradling her sword arm against her chest. Aurora knelt beside her. “Sabina.”

  “Hurry, Numen. You must escape— to report to your— to the iron mother.”

  Aurora pulled Sabina’s arm over her shoulder, shrugging her wings out of the way. It took all her strength to help the clockwork angel stand. Together, they staggered to the lift. Aurora slapped the button to summon it, but before the doors opened she heard a sound of fighting in the adjacent corridor.

  Another of her bodyguards, Mina, fought a Cygnaran knight, not the white-clad Morrowan but a big man in blue storm armor. Aurora recognized the severe dent she had left in his breastplate. Raising his glaive, he struck a two-handed blow against Mina’s wrist, lightning augmenting the damage from the heavy blade. The angel’s binomial blade leaped from her grip and skittered across the steel deck.

  Aurora gripped her staff and moved toward the fight.

  “Numen— please,” said Sabina. Her mechanikal voice popped, since the lightning damaged her voice box. “Allow me.”

  Gripping her sword in her good hand, Sabina ran haltingly toward the knight, even as he raised his blade to finish his foe. Sabina parried the blow awkwardly, revealing worse damage to her arm than Aurora had realized.

  The knight kicked Sabina away. As Mina scrambled after her dropped weapon, the knight pursued her. Reversing his glaive, he brought the point of the crackling weapon down between her brass wings. The whirring of gears within her chest cavity sputtered, coughed, and ceased. Aurora heard the crack of glass and saw the luminescent fluid of the essence chamber pour out beneath her body.

  The knight had not just defeated her. He had slain her, irrevocably.

  With an angry screech, Sabina thrust her blade up through the knight’s damaged breastplate. The blade plunged through the man’s chest and out the back, briefly giving the impression he had sprouted a wing of his own. He sank to his knees, lips moving in a prayer or curse.

  The lift doors opened. Aurora stepped inside the tube. “Hurry, Sabina!”

  As her bodyguard staggered toward her, the door to the control chamber opened once more. Smoke billowed out. Caitlin Finch emerged, coughing. Squinting through the lenses of her goggles, her eyes widened at the sight of the knight kneeling nearby, his blood spreading across the deck.

  “Blackburn!” she cried. “Chaplain, come here quickly!” Her gaze turned toward Sabina and Aurora. Lightning snapped up and down the length of her staff.

  “Sabina, run!”

  Instead, Sabina looked back over her shoulder. Finch saw her, raised her staff, and unleashed its lightning.

  The blast lifted Sabina from her feet and held her for an eternal instant above the deck. Its charge blasted the brass feathers from her wings and shook her wounded arm out of joint. Sabina fell limp as a discarded doll.

  Aurora shrieked her loss and fury. She raised her staff and took a step toward Sabina’s killer. Her hands turned to ice as her heart seethed with vengeance. She would tear this adept to pieces.

  Aurora stopped as she saw Sebastian Nemo step out behind Finch. Behind him came another pair of knights, galvanic blades in hand.

  Fear overcame her rage. Aurora rushed back into the lift, grabbing at the lever even as lightning caught the closing doors. She pushed the lever up and held it there, even though she knew the gesture would not speed her ascent.

  Trying to control her breathing, she thought of a way she could strike back at her foes still trapped within the astronometric nexus. She reached out with her thoughts. Her mind touched the interface node built into the control room. Despite the damage Nemo and his adept had caused, it still functioned.

  The instant Aurora triggered the nexus’ self-destruct protocol, the lift shuddered and halted. Her heart skipped a beat as she imagined Nemo had somehow trapped her to share his fate, but an instant later she remembered the escape hatch in the ceiling. Knocking it open with her staff, she rose up through the opening, folding her wings close while rising by virtue of the arcane displacement field. She continued to rise until she emerged on the tower pinnacle. She ran to the edge and leaped away.

  She had only enough time to recall her army to the geomantic translocation chambers below the tower. Swooping low, she called out to Pollux, Bogdan, and finally Septimus as she spied them organizing the withdrawal among the remains of her army. Her command was simple.

  “Home!”

  The remaining clockwork angels flocked to her, escorting her final circuits around the army as every surviving trooper rushed back to the base of the recalibration tower. There, they streamed under the arches to descend the ramps opening behind each of the four legs of the structure. None of them knew how little time they had left to escape with the self-destruct counting down.

  She hoped more than calculated that the tower would take Nemo with it in its destruction, moments after she an
d her army escaped.

  Most of the vectors had fallen, destroyed or disabled on the field. Only a handful of servitors accompanied the troops running at top speed toward the shelter of the tower. More of them fell as they ran. She saw the Prime Axiom lying on its side, smoke rising from gaping holes in its chassis, larger than artillery craters. Both of the Transfinite Emergence Projectors had fallen as well; clockwork soldiers streamed over them, rushing toward the recalibration node.

  Her forces were no longer in retreat. With the thunder of rifles and the lightning of the stormsmiths at their heels, the Convergence were in full rout.

  Aurora landed beside Pollux, who stood sweeping his arm beside one of the ramps. “Move it, move it, move it!” he chanted.

  All the troops obliged, a few carrying their injured fellows, even more helping the enigma foundries carry back the essence chambers of those whose bodies had been left behind, beyond repair.

  As the last of the troops descended, Aurora lingered, watching the feet of the tower legs for what she hoped not to see.

  And then she saw it.

  Nemo and his surviving raiders emerged from the recalibration nexus. Two of the knights bore the body of the man Sabina had slain, her sword still caught in his chest.

  Her anger at seeing them escape paled beside her shame at having left her faithful bodyguard behind while her enemies managed to retrieve their dead.

  She took a step toward them. Her surviving bodyguards moved to follow her. She knew they would go with her, even if it meant going to their destruction.

  “Numen,” said First Prefect Pollux. He gestured with his bladed right hand, showing her that virtually all the troops had descended. “We need you to activate the geomantic translocation apparatus and return us home.”

  Aurora’s shame deepened as she realized what a relief it was for Pollux to remind her that she had a reason not to avenge Sabina’s death yet. An excuse not to die today.

  She followed him down the spiraling ramp. It converged with the other three, past the open shield gates and beside the immense shaft through which the realignment probes sank deep into the ground. At last, in the vast excavated cavern, she found the remains of her army.

  Within the circumference of the walls, a smaller perimeter of displacement tethers encircled the pattern of the Face of Cyriss on the grated steel floor. They seemed so few standing within the borders of a translocation field built for a group over twice their size, especially without the Prime Axiom or the battle engines. The optifex and enigma foundries continued their work, extracting essence chambers from ruined bodies and salvaging others as they awaited transportation home.

  Septimus and Bogdan waited by the activation console. As Aurora moved to join them, the first explosions shook the earth. A murmur went up among the troops.

  “You already activated—” began Bogdan before reconsidering his words. Beside him, the prime enumerator merely bowed his immotile face toward her.

  “Prime Enumerator,” she said. “Confirm that our forces have all withdrawn to within range of the geomantic translocation apparatus.”

  “Numen, all surviving forces are within range.”

  She looked down at the console to confirm her hopes. The gauges showed what she desired: the realignment was complete.

  Aurora raised her voice for all the nearby troops to hear. “We return home in triumph!” she cried. “Our work here is done.”

  A halfhearted cheer stirred among the troops. Another tremor from the node above silenced them.

  Aurora knew she deserved no better, but the tepid response still burned her cheeks with shame. She reached for the controls with her hand even as she reached out with her mind to the interface node inside the device. She triggered the geomantic translocation apparatus.

  She felt the invisible field folding her material essence into a point inconceivably small. She could not feel the motion as the geomantic translocation apparatus hurled her and the rest of the army across a vast distance. An instant later, the same energies that had transported the thought of them restored their bodies. The survivors of the battle of Calbeck stood high in the Wyrmwall Mountains, beside one of the several strategic repair stations they had left in the wake of their southern advance.

  Far to the north, Aurora knew the astronometric nexus was already destroying itself. She wished she could observe the blinding pillar of light that marked the final destruction of the realignment node. It had served its purpose. While she had tempted Sebastian Nemo with many truths about the Convergence, Aurora had no wish to leave him so much more technology to study. The man had already proven himself so dangerous.

  But not dangerous enough to stop her. Despite the intolerable losses to her army, Aurora had succeeded. The alignment was complete. Her mission accomplished, the Convergence was one great step closer to completing the Great Work.

  THE NINTH HARMONIC

  The journey to enlightenment is initiated by the brilliance of discovery.

  Nemo

  The morning after the battle of Calbeck, Sebastian Nemo stood at the edge of the ruined village. He received the reports of his officers while the enlisted troops dragged a few remaining vessels—for some reason he could not think of them as “bodies”—into designated areas divided by type. There were precious few clockwork soldiers and vectors remaining. The rest had vanished beneath the tower as hidden charges brought it down into a heap of debris that continued to smoke.

  The final destruction of the tower came soon after, even as the Cygnaran forces scrambled to escape the blast radius. Even those cautious enough to turn away suffered burns from the incandescent flash of the tower’s final blast.

  Only a few lonely buildings remained standing on the outskirts of the village, and those were blackened by the heat that had all but destroyed the remains of the Convergence colossal and battle engines, along with most of the fallen clockwork soldiers.

  Nemo wondered how many essence chambers had perished with the disposable bodies. How many dead had the Convergence suffered? His forces had endured more than he cared to consider.

  It would be days before Nemo dared send pickers into the wreckage. He held little hope of recovering substantial salvage. The control room, the ingenious automatic stairs and pneumatic-mechanikal lifts—all had been consumed.

  For all the regret he felt at the loss of such precious technology, Nemo most wished he had been able to retrieve that globe of Caen. Even apart from its intrinsic scientific value, its map of ley lines would have proved critical in anticipating and countering the future schemes of the Convergence.

  Could they really intend to bring their goddess to Caen? Nemo would not have believed such an absurd proposal if he had not seen the incredible geomantic technology these Cyrissists wielded. He would not have thought anyone capable of such an audacious dream before meeting Aurora.

  He weighed the positives. Whether by the blessing of Morrow or random chance, Nemo had learned of their presence in time to oppose Aurora’s army. He had driven them off Cygnaran territory and learned enough of their design to heighten watchfulness throughout the kingdom.

  A storm knight captain brought him the initial casualty report. Just the weight of the several pages was cause for despair. Nemo knew he would have sacrificed far fewer lives with a less aggressive response to the intrusion, but then he would not have stopped Aurora’s scheme in time.

  Not that he was certain he had done so.

  “Sir,” said Caitlin Finch. She threw a perfunctory salute as she ran to him, breathless from gathering the reports of her stormsmiths. “Is that the new status on the wounded?”

  Nemo knew why she asked. One of her Jimmies had suffered grievous injuries from a swarm of buzzing projectiles. The stormsmith had been first on the amputation triage, but he had remained weak and feverish throughout the night.

  Nemo passed her the wounded list and continued scanning the much shorter list of those who had died of their wounds. His gaze fell upon a familiar name: Lieutenant James
Baker.

  He lowered the page and squeezed the bridge of his nose.

  “Sir?”

  Nemo handed her the page. “I’m sorry, Finch.”

  Her eyes widened for an instant, but then she nodded. “Thank you, sir. And I’m sorry about Major Blackburn. I know you were old friends.”

  Old friends? Nemo wasn’t sure that was true. He had liked Blackburn and admired his courage. In the past years, he’d had little time for anything resembling friendship unassociated with the army: apprentices, comrades-in-arms, a few eccentric officers here and there.

  Troublesome sorts, like Mags Jernigan.

  Nemo had seen her name on a list immediately after the battle: the missing.

  During the battle, a squadron of Aurora’s winged swordswomen had attacked the camp. They had scattered the refugees to cause confusion, but their true target had been the tent where guards had confined the treacherous mechanik. They had slain her guards and had flown away with her.

  The rangers had not been able to pick up her trail anywhere. The report both angered and relieved Nemo. Mags deserved nothing so much as to face a court-martial and answer for her crimes. The result would certainly be execution.

  And then Nemo would have one less friend alive in this world.

  “Yes, Finch,” he said at last. “Blackburn was a good friend.”

  One of the ranger sergeants approached. “Sir, the druid is gone.”

  Nemo nodded, expecting the news. “There was little reason for her to remain after we disabled the tower. Her assistance was valuable, but she never offered her allegiance, only her help with this matter.”

  “Shall I assign a team to follow her?”

  Nemo shook his head. To send even his best rangers after a blackclad would be a waste of time and talents. No one could find a druid in the woods who did not wish to be found.

  “Send another team across the river. If the Convergence burrowed away, they must have come up nearby.” With any luck, he thought, Aurora will lead us to another of their hidden temples.