by J. Langland
“What about Rupert?” Jenn asked.
Vaselle was not in any good condition to improvise, but he had to try. “Last I saw him, he was studying with a friend of his named Fer-Rog at Edwyrd’s home.”
Jenn stared at him as if she did not believe him. “Edwyrd’s home? What? In Eton someplace? He’s never mentioned having a home.” She turned to inspect the room, as if looking for holes in Vaselle’s story.
“No, it’s off-plane, and he just moved in a few days back.” Vaselle had to think fast. “He felt that Astlan was getting too dangerous for Rupert, what with the Rod, the Oorstemothians and all the other insanity that has been going on recently.”
“And how exactly are they plane-hopping?” Jenn demanded.
“Uhm...” Vaselle was at a loss for an answer.
The silence built, as no one had an answer. Finally Gastropé spoke up. “The demon Tom is assisting them.”
“What? That thing? What would have possessed them to summon that monster after he kidnapped that Knight and possessed all those people?” Jenn demanded.
Gastropé shrugged. “He’s still the same demon we knew.”
“Aghh!” Jenn vented raising her hands in the air. “Why is everyone around me insane!” She started to turn away and then spun back to stare at Gastropé, arching an eyebrow. “Wait! You knew this and didn’t tell me? Why would you not tell me this? You know I’ve been worried sick about Rupert!” she demanded.
Gastropé gulped and winced. “Because I knew you’d be angry that Edwyrd and Rupert were involved with the demon Tom again.”
Jenn growled, “You think? Am I like the only person who thinks that trying to utilize a greater demon, or maybe an archdemon even, as your personal stagecoach is insanely stupid?”
“Well, Tom seems like a reasonable guy,” Gastropé said.
“He’s a demon! He kidnapped a knight of Tiernon and stole mana from a god!” She shook her head. “Even if the demon Tom could be trusted, Tiernon is not going to be happy about what he’s done, and anyone near the demon is going to be angel dust!”
Jenn paused for breath and no one said much of anything. “Wait, you said Edwyrd had a new home on another plane. They aren’t with the demon in the Abyss, are they?” She stared back and forth between Vaselle and Gastropé.
Gastropé laughed nervously and Jenn squinted at him suspiciously. He said, “That would be ridiculous. Humans can’t live for that long in the Abyss. There’s nothing to eat, and you can’t keep those little cool spells going for ever. Besides, you really think Edwyrd and Rupert would want to live in that dark cave of Tom’s?” He shook his head at the silliness of it.
“Rupert? Yes, given his previous actions. Edwyrd? I would hope not,” Jenn said, shaking her head.
Oubliette
Tom had tried to follow the training session on the consoles along with everyone else and correlate that to what the Rod was feeding him from Tartarus. It was tricky, though. Eventually he gave up and just followed the lecture like the others. A lot of the value came from Phaestus explaining the background of why things were the way they were.
One good thing was that the Command Center upstairs had summary consoles for monitoring and fine-tuning Tartarus so they wouldn’t have to keep people stationed down in the Oubliette. When things were working properly, the only times they needed to be in the TPCC was during prisoner intake and in emergencies where they needed full control of the system. Theoretically, they also needed to be there for prisoner release, but that happened very rarely.
“So let me see if I understand this,” Ayega Death Tusk asked. “We have the best prison in the multiverse, but we don’t torture anyone in it? They are all just sleeping?”
“It does seem like a waste,” Velma Snargspitter said.
Völund sighed, shaking his head. “D’Orcs.” He closed his eyes for a moment before opening them and continuing. “They are all in suspended animation—asleep, if you will—because they are much easier to contain that way. If we tortured them, they would wake up and fight us.”
“Yeah, but this place was built as a prison for the gods. From what I’ve heard, the gods like to punish their enemies far worse than simply putting them to sleep,” Ayega said.
Phaestus took over. “That is certainly true, so while we don’t physically torture them, their dreams are anything but pleasant.” That caused a few murmurs.
“What do you mean?” Velma asked.
“For example, one of the titans imprisoned here with a checkered history, both with the other titans and the Olympians, or more specifically with the husband of my accursed mother, is stuck in a continuously looping nightmare where he is chained to the side of a steep cliff and a giant eagle flies down and lands beside him and begins picking at his belly with its beak. Eventually, it reaches in and rather slowly and painfully eats his liver. Really long torment. And then it starts over again the next dawn.”
“Okay, well, I guess that’s a pretty good punishment,” Velma conceded.
“What did he do to deserve this punishment?” Ayega asked.
Phaestus shrugged. “Well, it’s very complex. But at the root, it was a betrayal of friendship. Officially, it was for teaching mortal mana users how to access the elemental Plane of Fire, thus giving them a very powerful weapon capable of challenging the gods.”
Tom shook his head. So that was the true legend. So Prometheus was in his dungeon? The Titan who had angered the gods by helping mankind and was doomed for thousands upon thousands of years to this horrible fate? Tom had a disquieting thought about releasing him. It would be the right thing to do. But it might also be a very stupid thing to do. He really didn’t need to be pissing off any more deities and if he had learned anything lately, you really couldn’t trust the legends you grew up with. So he would absolutely have to do more investigation before doing something that rash. If the guy had been down there for over fifty thousand years, what was one more year, or ten?
The class was wrapping up now and the D’Orcs heading out. Tom nodded at Phaestus. “Great introduction, thanks.”
“My pleasure. A burden shared is… somebody else’s problem.” The smith grinned.
“I was trying to follow what you were doing on the consoles with the Rod, but it really gets tricky,” Tom said.
“Yeah, the Rod has direct stream access to the animatic quantum core, so it is very direct,” Phaestus said.
Tom just shook his head, having no idea what he was talking about.
Phaestus smiled. “It’s like a techno-magical computer.”
“Oh, that makes more sense,” Tom said.
“We were working on an AII—Artificial Intelligence Interface—for it, but got only to late beta stage when Etterdam shut us down. Our techs working on it were with Orcus and were killed. We also lost contact with the Altrusian consultants at the same time; Orcus was our key point of contact with them.”
“That’s too bad,” Tom said. “That might have made things easier for me when working through the Rod.”
Phaestus raised his eyebrows and made a “hmm” expression with his mouth. He spun, sat down at the console and began typing something in very rapidly. “There we go.”
Beta mode access activated.
Tom heard in his head the Rod’s connection to Tartarus. “What did you do?” he asked.
“I activated beta test mode for the Rod. That means you can access the AII if you want,” Phaestus said. “Just to be clear though, it had some bugs that we hadn’t worked out. You know, the odd code instability issues and such.”
Code instability issues? Tom shrugged. So it would blue screen every now and then. He could deal. “How do I activate it?”
“By default it has a mental-audio interface; you can ask it to turn on a visual interface as well. In both cases, only you will hear it,” Phaestus said.
“Mental-audio?” Tom asked.
Phaestus shrugged. “You think words at it. You can talk too, but then people will look at you funny.”
/> “Ah, sort of like a telepathic conversation,” Tom said. He had been doing a fair bit of that lately, both over links and with Vaselle.
“Exactly! You activate it by think-saying, ‘Hey, Tartarus.’ ”
Tom wrinkled his eyebrows. That sounded rather patent-infringing. Of course, if this was written over four thousand years ago, it was Phaestus’ patent. “Okay, trying it out loud first.” Phaestus nodded in understanding.
“Hey, Tartarus!” Tom said.
“Hello, Tommus, how may I help you?” An oddly familiar female voice said in his head.
“What is the status of Aqua-Chamber K?” Tom asked.
“Aqua-Chamber K recently experienced thermal abnormalities resulting in a lowered sleeping state, approaching wakefulness. Temperatures have returned to normal; however, while the patient has started returning to deeper sleeping states, it has not yet reached the desired level,” Tartarus said. “Would you like a visual of the patient?”
“Yes, that would be nice!” Tom thought to Tartarus.
Suddenly Tom saw in his mind’s eye a very large cylindrical tank filled with slightly glowing blue water and a horribly huge and terrifying sea creature. “Holy crap, that thing’s a monster!” Tom said out loud.
“Confirmed. That is the term used by Poseidon,” Tartarus said.
“Thank you, Tartarus, that will be all for now.” *
“You’re welcome, Tommus,” Tartarus replied.
“Tartarus show you a live feed of the Kraken?” Phaestus chuckled.
“She did,” Tom said.
“She?” Phaestus grinned and tilted his head. “Interesting.”
“Why?”
“The AII tries to take the most familiar and comfortable persona for the user—meaning the person holding the Rod,” Phaestus said. “I would expect her to be someone familiar to you.”
“Indeed.” Tom nodded.
“And yes, the Kraken is something, but that tank image does not do it justice. You see that thing off a coastline?” The god shook his head in wonder. “Well, it takes a strong man, or god, not to soil himself.” He chuckled ruefully.
Chapter 123
Murgatroy: DOA + 3, Late Third Period
Teragdor had just sat down with his morning—oatmeal?—when Stevos entered the tavern’s common room. The priest had risen a bit late this morning, having been up later than he had intended last night. He had gone out and rounded up his few local followers and performed their daily worship. It was very hard to skip worship when the avatar you were sending the mana to was going to be visiting you right after the service.
He’d been sleepy and had a mild headache. He wasn’t used to drinking so much; he rarely had the money to waste on ale. Fortunately, Vaselle had been quite generous. Teragdor grinned tightly to himself. When the blessings of Tiernon rained down upon one, they truly poured. Thanks to the avatars, he had access to more money than he’d had his entire life—something they referred to as an “expense account.” And Vaselle had assumed, rightfully so, that he was poor.
Stevos had acquired some stale bread and honey from the barkeep, and took a seat at Teragdor’s table. From the looks he gave the bowl in front of the priest, he clearly did not trust the contents any more than Teragdor did.
“Good morning,” Stevos said, smiling at the priest.
“Good morning. So we are on our own today?” Teragdor asked the saint, tentatively bringing his spoon towards his mouth.
“We are,” Stevos confirmed. “Beragamos is going to attend to the backlog he’s incurred being down here, and Hilda has a private audience with Tiernon himself.”
Teragdor’s eyes went wide in shock. “She is getting a private audience with our god?” He said in awe.
Stevos chuckled. “Isn’t that why people pray to saints? Because they have the ear of their god?”
“Well, yes, but there are so many saints, not to mention archons, I sort of assumed that it was more like passing a message along or something,” Teragdor replied.
Stevos grinned wider. “You have an exceptional understanding of how things work in Tierhallon. You are absolutely correct. For a saint, and the majority of archons, to get a private meeting with Tiernon is extremely exceptional. Large group meetings and gatherings are the norm. If you are lucky, you get to bow personally to him, get a few moments of conversation every hundred years or so. Tierhallon is a very large organization.”
Teragdor nodded. “I have always assumed it would be, considering how large the church bureaucracy is in Astlan, the huge number of saints, and I have no idea how many archons.”
Stevos nodded. “And that is just for Astlan; now add the rest of our localverse and then all the other localverses that the Five Siblings operate in—it’s almost mind-boggling.”
“I know. I am having trouble just keeping track of the names the three of you have mentioned in our conversations,” the priest said humbly.
Stevos grinned again. “Very understandable. It took me some time to learn the hierarchy. Of course, I went to saint school, so that helped.”
“Saint school?” Teragdor asked. He also suddenly realized they were having a very weird conversation in the common room of a tavern. He glanced around to see if they were being overheard.
Stevos saw him looking around and made a small waving motion. “I’ve shielded our conversation so that what we are saying will seem to be in an unknown language. It is similar to a Ritual of Overlooking, only for conversations. People will basically ignore what we are saying.”
“That’s a relief!” Teragdor said.
Stevos nodded. “But yes, there is a saint school that new saints have to go to. Someone has to teach you all about answering prayers, channeling mana to priests, collecting mana from priests. We also get much more in-depth teaching on church dogmata.”
Teragdor’s eyes widened. “Truth literally from the mouth of Tiernon and not filtered through mortal misconceptions!” He shook his head. “It must be amazing.”
Stevos shrugged. “It is a lot more accurate than what they teach in the Planes of Man, and we have plenty of very high authorities. And unlike the church here in Astlan, it is possible to actually get Tiernon’s opinion.”
“Tiernon’s opinion?” Teragdor was shocked by the idea that his god might have opinions rather than pronouncements.
Stevos grimaced. “Perhaps I should have said his judgements, but sometimes, if it involves a new issue, it can be an opinion. If it involves the provinces of another Family member, he may need to consult with them before issuing a judgement or pronouncement.”
Now it was Teragdor’s turn to grimace. “Seems rather, uhm, democratic.” He hesitated on using such a controversial term.
Stevos grinned, acknowledging the potentially insulting term. “I know, but they are all Family and they have a shared operation with overlapping interests. We don’t see that as much in Murgandy and the Federation, where Krinna, Namora and Hendel don’t have large presences.”
“I have never met anyone from those churches. I’ve met a few Torean Rangers,” Teragdor noted.
“Hard not to run into the Rangers in any far-flung region. They love to explore and discover,” Stevos agreed.
Teragdor paused for a moment before asking something that he was not clear on. “So on this point of the large Tierhallon organization?” He paused and Stevos nodded for him to continue. “I am not exactly sure who the other members of this ‘project’ are and the exact structure you have.”
Stevos nodded. “It’s actually a very unusual arrangement; as we’ve hinted at, we are trying something new outside the normal channels.”
Stevos sat back a bit, thinking of how to describe things before continuing. “All saints in Astlan ultimately report to the senior prophet of Astlan. Those of us who operate regionally also report to a greater saint in our region. As you know, this region isn’t officially staffed at the church level, nor is it at the Tierhallon level. So I sort of side report to Feronus Tibius, the Greater Saint of t
he Cythanian Federation.”
“So then when you received my petition, you went to him?” Teragdor asked.
“Actually, he was busy, so I went directly to Baysir Tomgren, the Prophet of Astlan,” Stevos said. Teragdor nodded; everyone knew of Baysir Tomgren. “He had been coordinating with Moradel, the Attendant Archon of Astlan, in regards to the mana-stealing demon. Moradel is the head of the archons in Astlan; the archon equivalent of the prophet of Astlan.”
Teragdor shook his head, trying to put this together. “You have all mentioned Moradel; he is part of your team?”
“Yes, he is personally overseeing the investigation that was started when Hilda detected the mana-stealing event.” Stevos chuckled. “As you can imagine, someone compromising the Holy Ciphers and intercepting the mana stream between a saint and their illuminaries requires the attention of those responsible for the world involved.”
Teragdor nodded. “Of course—an unbelievable story.” He had heard the entire story over wine and food with the others. “So then, Hilda is a regional saint, like yourself?”
“Yes, although a bit less regional; her region was pretty much wiped out and her legend and illuminaries have spread out around Eton. She is also older than me and has more illuminaries,” Stevos told the priest.
“Who then are Beragamos and Sentir Fallon?” Teragdor asked. “I know I have heard of Sentir Fallon before, and I think I might have heard of Beragamos, but I am not sure.”
Stevos nodded and grinned. “They are the big swords. Sentir Fallon is the elder archon for the localverse.”
“Elder archon? I have not heard of that title,” Teragdor said.
“Very few have; it is really only relevant at the multiversal level. He is in charge of Tiernon’s operations in what you and I call the localverse. He had been the Attendant Archon for Etterdam up until about thirty-five hundred years ago, when he moved to Astlan to become the Attendant Archon here. He was here up until about six hundred years ago before being promoted to Elder Archon in charge of the localverse, and Moradel took over in Astlan.”
Teragdor shook his head, trying to grasp these timescales. “So Sentir Fallon is Moradel’s boss?”