by Ren Cummins
“You know what I mean,” Rom chided. “I mean, I guess even knowing as much as they did, they’re likely to get something wrong.”
Kari regarded her friend for a moment. “What happened to you, Rom? In the city, I mean.”
With effort, Rom pulled her eyes from the statue to face Kari. “What do you mean?”
“You weren’t like this, before. You never really…well, you didn’t used to think so much about things like this.”
Rom could feel her cheeks darkening. “I know,” she confessed. “But nothing special really happened in Aesirium. It was just a place, you know?” She turned towards the temple and Kari followed beside her.
“I can’t even imagine what it could be like. Was there a lot of technology? They’ve had hundreds of years to study, it must have been amazing!”
“There were a lot of people,” Rom explained. “You wouldn’t believe how many people they have there. They have so many people that people are only allowed to have three children in each family.”
“Really?”
Rom nodded. They walked through the threshold of the great doors, and crossed the center foyer towards the stairs that led to the private rooms. “I knew a married couple that only had two children of their own, so they got another child from another family who had too many. It’s kind of a weird place.”
“Wow,” was the only word Kari could find to reply. A family still remained an unusual concept for the two girls; Rom had never had a family of her own, and Kari had lost hers many years before. Life in Oldtown was a difficult one. Even with access to healing arts, some injuries and diseases couldn’t be patched up; hunger, thirst and exhaustion were factors that dramatically shortened the lifespan of those who had managed to survive the obstacles to healthy childhood.
“But it’s also strange. Maybe it’s because they have so many people, but it’s like they don’t all matter to each other,” Rom continued. Arriving at the far wall from the entryway, they began to climb the stairway leading up. “Remember when Briseida was sick, right after we moved in with Goya, and how everyone came by with different cures to make her better? People we didn’t even know were so aware of her that they came from all over Oldtown to try and help her.”
“I remember,” Kari answered. “It was why it was so hard for us to try and hide you from the Queen’s agents, because everyone knows practically everyone.”
“Right, but it’s not like that in the city. They have tall buildings, taller than anything in Oldtown. And they’re filled with people: the streets are sometimes so full. It’s like Saturday mornings in the market, but every day, and all over the city.” Rom paused, letting their shoes on the stone steps be the only sound for several moments. “Maybe it’s because there’s so many of them that they don’t care about anyone so much. Like, if you have a big field full of seeds, you don’t worry if one seed never takes root.”
Kari didn’t know how to respond to that, so the two girls walked the rest of the way to the room they’d slept in the night before in silence. She’d been so angry when Rom had left without taking her along, but that had faded over the years. Now, starting to understand what she hadn’t experienced, she was almost glad she’d been spared.
The corner of the room had the contraption Kari’d been examining the previous day; she set her toolkit down and swept her hand across the floor below the device, revealing a series of dust-covered holes in the stone tiles. “I can’t believe I didn’t check this before,” she said.
“Check what?” Rom asked, stepping closer.
“I thought the upstairs floors would have, I don’t know, some kind of bathroom or something, but why do that when you can have everything you need right here in the room you’re sleeping in?”
She pulled a few small pipes from her toolkit bag and fastened them on one of the connecting tubes from the core of the machine, and then replaced the stone that had been originally connected. The engine began to spin and glow; another few moments later, and warm water began pouring from one of the ends of pipe, to splash and pool up on the floor, only to disappear into the small holes in the floor. Satisfied, Kari picked up the toolkit and pulled out a small towel from the travel pack and handed it to Rom. “There’s a small bar of soap in there, too, so you can wash up and maybe even start to work on your dress.”
Rom grinned. “That sounds good. I never wanted a bath so much!” She kicked off her boots and looked back over at Kari, who was moving towards the door. “Thank you, Kari,” she said.
Kari turned back, and Rom had to stifle a giggle at her armored friend. “What?” Kari asked.
“Well, how long are you going to wear that?” she asked. “Do you even know how to take that armor off?”
Shrugging, Kari confessed that she didn’t. “But until we know we’re safe, I’m okay with keeping it on a bit longer.”
Rom nodded, and Kari excused herself. “I’m going upstairs to check on something.”
“Be careful, Kari.”
“I will,” she said, and closed the door behind her.
* * * * *
Looking through the small scales that covered her face was easier than she would have expected. Beneath the ones which covered Kari’s face, they were supported by rows of smaller bands which capped off the scales above her eyes, ears and mouth, allowing her to see, hear and breathe normally, but with holes too small to allow any but the smallest possible objects entry. There was also no diminishing of flexibility, and very little noise generated by the scales. She could feel the tiny gears working between the layers above and below, applying their strength to the armor, and keeping the weight of it from her small frame.
In no time at all, Kari found herself back in the room with the immense Morrow Stone, still set within the machine structure as they had left it. The light from the hole in the ceiling above illuminated the room much more effectively now, and the light which touched the stone’s yellow-orange clarity was magnified throughout the room, coating it in the warm light of an early autumn’s evening.
“It took me a day to build the airship, but I bet you could do it faster, huh?” She approached the Morrow Stone machine. “Okay, now, don’t do anything crazy to my gloves again, all right?”
Kari pressed one glove against the machine, and, when nothing happened, pressed the second as well. She pulled them away from the machine and touched it again; she was still able to pull the gloves away. “Guess you got what you wanted, huh?” she asked it rhetorically. “Well, that’s good, then. I need to figure some things out about you, and I don’t want anymore surprises. Besides,” she added with a sigh, “I really don’t want to leave you here by yourself.”
She studied the machine for an hour, eventually feeding small rocks from a nearby stack into the machine and watching it work. It broke the stones down into smaller pieces, and in some cases melted it down on the spot, filtering it away into an assortment of materials. Then, all she had to do was to select the melody of the many in the stone, and the stone would fashion the matter into the corresponding design. She had it make simple items – silverware, cooking items and the like, eventually evolving her challenges up to much more complex items, including a spellshot similar to Cousins’ pistol and an elaborate pressure condensing reactor used in some of the advanced workshops within the college’s laboratory departments.
At long last, she nodded to herself, satisfied that this machine could and would do what she needed. Using the massive leveraging skills of the gauntlet armor, she began breaking the larger stones up and feeding them into the device until it had broken them all down into their corresponding elements. Then, she lifted the entire device over her head and moved it towards the wall facing away from the mountain, pressing its feed side against the stone. The machine whirred and vibrated, grinding away at the stone itself, pulling the machine with it, and into the rock.
“Let’s get you outside,” Kari grinned behind her steel mask.
Chapter 32: Taken
Rom held the black dress
up to admire her handiwork. Though she’d been on laundry detail many times under the watchful tutelage of the Matrons who ran the orphanage, she’d never had the chance to work on dresses as nice as the ones she’d found inside the city. But once there, she had little spare time to really care for them. There had been an older woman on the floor of her apartment who did washing for their floor as part of the terms of her housing agreement, so this was the first time in almost two years that Rom had done her own washing, but she was satisfied with the results. It wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t stink anymore, and for that, Rom was content.
She hung the dress up from a bit of pipe that jutted from the wall and ended only a few centimeters into the room and took a generous moment to relax and breathe deeply. It felt as though she’d been going non-stop for days now and idly tried to remember the last time she’d just been alone with her thoughts. Her fingers twitched with the sudden urge to summon Yu or Rickets or – she winced, remembering again that Terenaa was gone. Gone, her mind repeated; not just dead. The animal Terenaa had been had died almost two years earlier but temporarily reborn through the mysterious powers of the Sheharid Is’iin. Through Rom herself. Rom shook her head. I still think of them like I’m not one, she thought with a bitter smile.
The jumpsuit Kari had loaned her itched. It was also a bit too big for her. Kari had always been a bit taller than Rom, and she’d widened the gap even more in the past years. Rom leaned against the sill of the open window, looking out from the trees and canyon walls to the darkening sky above. The sun had already descended past the highest points of the canyon, sending out a darkened blanket across the clearing. The image gave Rom a sudden twinge of homesickness, which struck her as odd. Oldtown didn’t see the sunlight until the sun had risen almost halfway through the sky, thanks to the great Wall that lay at its eastern border. The evenings were usually bathed in the warmth of lazy sunlight, as the sun lingered on the horizon before finally setting. Rom realized with a start that it was not so much Oldtown that she was missing, but her life in Aesirium. In spite of the many differences between Aesirium and Oldtown, she had somehow come to miss it.
She’d felt so alone there at the beginning; but once she’d found a job and a place to live, all her time had developed into a routine. Her whole purpose for crossing the wall in the first place, to track down Artifice, had gotten swept up in the day-to-day necessities among a people who rarely if ever spoke of Reapers or Shepherds, and, in fact, never seemed to have even heard of the Sheharid Is’iin. This made for a stark contrast to Oldtown, where the mythos of the angelic (or demonic, depending on one’s perspective) beings was reflected everywhere, from the decorative architectural flourishes on the old buildings to the most common epithets in their speech. Aesirium had its own form of religious practices, but they all dealt directly with two things: the royal family which ruled the city, and the advanced forms of science that powered it. If any citizen suspected that another power existed beyond regal lineage or aether, they gave no hint of it.
This cultural distinction provided Rom a certain degree of anonymity she would never have maintained in Oldtown. As instrumental as she had been in defense of the town, word had spread quickly of the “Return of the Shepherds”, as it was being called. Even had the Queen not been desperate enough to destroy the entirety of Oldtown in her mad quest to find her, Rom had instantly grown too uncomfortable with the sense of scrutiny that her identity had given her. Now, standing in one room of an ancient temple clearly dedicated to her and her fellow Sheharid Is’iin, she wondered if she would ever be able to bear the weight of that title.
She sighed. The breeze from outside was cool and fresh, reminding her more now of Oldtown than on the other side of the wall. The pale hairs on her arms flickered and rose, gooseflesh spreading across her skin. Rom’s brows furrowed. Strange, she thought, it’s not that cold. An odd smell tinged the air, and a low hum vibrated past her ears. Rom spun about, hand reaching for her bracelet, but not in time for the loud snap that filled the room and the bright spot of pain that erupted across her ribs and threw her into unconsciousness.
*****
Favo had a decent fire going by the time Kari returned. His eyes widened appreciably at the sight of the slender girl, clad in armor and holding the enormous egg-shaped amber stone, still encased in the larger framework machine. She placed it carefully down, moving until it sat flush against the crushed remains of her airship. Immediately, the machine began to hum, and a soft glow surrounded the stone.
Kari stood nearby, watching appreciatively as the machine went to work.
Clapping his hands against his clothes to dust them off, Favo approached. After several moments of quietly awaiting her explanations, he was forced at last to speak. “So many questions, my dear.”
Her laugh echoed from behind the scaled faceplate. “I couldn’t leave it there, I just couldn’t. I was thinking, maybe that’s what the sandmen were looking for, right?”
Favo shrugged. “It’s possible. What does it do, exactly?”
“It’s a great big magical brain,” she said. “It knows how to make things – some are magical, some are scientific, I think. But it remembers how to do it all, and this machine it’s attached to can do all the work.” She held out her arms, fingers extended. “It’s what taught my gloves how to become armor.”
He could perfectly imagine the smile of unrepentant glee on the girl’s face. “So it knows how to fix your ship?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so, I couldn’t find a song about that in the stone. But I think I found something that it can make – something that can carry us all back to Oldtown, too.” Looking up at him and seeing his unspoken question, she added, “Oh, and it can carry the stone, too. You’ll see, it’ll be great.”
The machine seemed to hiccup, and then various gears and pistons began to move as the entire device came to life. The wreckage of the airship was slowly drawn into the frame of the machinery, where impossibly fast mechanical fingerlike extensions flicked away fragments of the metal which vanished into the device itself. To Favo, it looked as if the device was eating the airship. The thought made him shiver nervously.
“It’s taking it all apart, so it can use the pieces,” Kari explained, pointing towards the process in case he wasn’t already staring at it. “It can store a lot of material inside it – but it can process it better if it doesn’t have to refine it, too.”
He was about to inquire further, but at that moment, Cousins and Mulligan returned to the makeshift camp, breathless and clearly distraught.
“What?” Favo demanded, placing an impatient hand on Cousins shoulder while the younger lad paused to catch his breath. “What’s wrong?”
Mulligan was able to respond first, his feline eyes wide with concern. “It’s Rom!” he pleaded. “She’s gone!”
Kari spun about at the mention of her friend’s name. “Are you sure? She was upstairs in one of the rooms –“ her voice trailed off as Cousins held up the still-damp black dress that Rom had been cleaning.
As he handed Kari the dress, Cousins pointed to the goggles on his forehead. “It wasn’t too long ago, there were a few of them. They hit her with some kind of glowing ball that rendered her unconscious, and they bound her hands and feet and carried her off. We followed them as far as we could, but they jumped up along the canyon’s ridge, that direction.” Cousins pointed along the uppermost lip of the natural walls formed by the sheer cliffs, eventually back east, towards the mouth of the clearing. “They can’t have gotten far,” he added, already moving away from the others.
Favo paused a moment, clearly considering which of the two he most needed to protect, but Kari resolved the conundrum for him by running after Cousins herself. He nodded towards Mulligan and picked up his spellshot rifle as he ran to keep up. To himself he muttered, “And this would be why I never had children of my own.”
The trail ended far sooner than they would have hoped. Only a few meters past the entryway into the clearing
where the canyon walls narrowed, Cousins found the images of the sandmen with their motionless captive. They had dropped from the wall and engaged some sort of device that allowed them to pass through a hole in the stone which was no longer present. He described the scene to the others, and they spent the next hour trying in vain to break through.
Dirty, bruised and emotionally battered, the four were forced to consider other options. It was Favo who recognized the most viable alternative. “We might never break through this wall,” he conceded. “And we’re going to need to rest, eat and drink, and, also, get back to town.”
Kari, holding and attempting to comfort the agitated Mulligan, shook her head. “We can’t just leave her!”
Sighing, Cousins put away what remained of his stack of spell cards and nodded towards Favo. “No, I think he’s right. She didn’t look hurt, just bound and unconscious. I think she’s safe for now, but I also think I know where they’re taking her.”
Favo double-checked the cartridges in his weapons, concealing most of his anxiety under a mask of focused assurance. “Clearly, they will take her back to the Queen, so we must return as quickly as possible and affect a rescue.”
“Rescue?” Cousins said through clenched teeth.
“Of course,” Favo replied with a flourish. “For what other good is a hero?”
Kari looked past them towards where they’d left the Morrow Stone-powered machine, and she nodded as well. “Well, at least now we have a way home.”
The two men turned around to see what she was referring to. Cousin’s eyebrows rose dramatically, and Favo laughed outright.
“Oh, Miss Kari,” the latter said with a pat of his hand on her metal-clad shoulder, “it’s a wonder you don’t already run that school of yours.”
Kari shrugged, striding ahead with a purpose. “Give me time,” she said. “But that’ll have to wait until Rom’s okay.”