Warsinger

by James Osiris Baldwin

  “It's not the babies I'm worried about. Call it a hunch, but I bet they'll start screeching for help or letting out pheromones or something, and we get reamed by Momma Worm.” I coiled the cable up. “Let's just stick to the plan.”

  It was trickier from here. We didn't have the benefit of elevation, and we didn't dare risk hammering supports into the roofs of the buildings. We had to tie and clamp them, which meant we weren't able to get as much tension on the lines. At the end of the path, we had to make a mountaineer’s tightrope, otherwise known as a Tyrolean Traverse. Karalti danced across it like a mayfly, but Suri hesitated on the other side, looking down at the thrashing mass of sandworm larvae below.

  “Dex isn't my strong point,” she said.

  “Then Tarzan it underneath.” I mimed going hand over hand.

  “Right. Neither is Intelligence, apparently.” Suri cracked her neck, rolled her shoulders, then crouched down and swung on underneath the wire. She pulled herself along, legs linked over the top for stability.

  “Sandworms can't jump, can they?” Karalti asked nervously.

  “Guess we'll find out.” Even if she could take one or two by herself, there were probably about fifty of them following us. We held our breaths as she got closer.

  There was a deep groan from underneath our feet.

  “Uh oh.” Karalti tensed as a rumble passed through the building beneath our feet. “Suri!”

  “Yep! Believe me, I’m on my way!” Suri picked up the pace, but began to rock wildly on the rope as the rumbling grew more intense.

  Karalti and I crowded to the edge of the roof, reaching for her as the sand and larvae below us sucked away, and a [Sandworm Juvenile] burst up out of its tunnel. It snatched two of the larvae in its massive antlike jaws, not even seeming to notice we were there. It didn't notice the line, either: the thing was so massive that it simply tore the cable free, sending it flying into the air. Suri shouted in alarm as she swung down, clinging to the rope, and struck the side of the building with enough force to drive the wind out of her.

  “Nope! Bad!” I threw myself to my belly, caught the cable, and hauled back. “Karalti! Grab the slack and pull!”

  Karalti grunted with effort behind me, and the cable started to slide up over the edge of the roof. I could feel Suri climbing, but the building itself was starting to lean toward the hole - a lean that intensified as the sandworm thrashed around to snatch another larva in its mouth.

  “Why is it eating its own babies!?” Karalti cried.

  “Bugs don't give a fuck.” I let go of the cable and held my arms out to Suri. “Come on!”

  Suri clapped a hand into mine, and used the rope and me to pull herself. She stumbled forward a step, then tagged me and started to run for the other side.

  There was a crunch below our feet. We fled with her, battling gravity as the building toppled. It was at a thirty-degree grade when we reached the edge of the roof. The courtyard to the temple was not far - but now we had to jump down, then run across the writhing sand to get to it.

  “Go go go!” Suri almost booted Karalti off. I followed her, landing neatly on the soft ground, and sprinted forward as Suri crashed down behind us. The cannibal sandworm party immediately stopped as they aggro’d onto us. I was conscious of every vibrating step as we cut for the temple and the promise of solid ground.

  The earth behind us swelled. Karalti reached the paving stones first, while I turned to wait for Suri. She struggled forward, red-faced with effort as the sand began to suck at her feet like water. I clasped her forearm and pulled her up.

  “Jeez. That was a bit much,” she gasped as we stumbled away. The back of the [Juvenile Sandworm] arched out of the sand, but as soon as we hit the masonry, it promptly forgot about us and went to prey on the larvae again.

  “At least we can be pretty sure no one followed us here.” I grimaced.

  “Sure hope not. Come on. The adults can obviously get up here, given they laid all these eggs.” Suri equipped her armor, slammed her helmet visor down, and drew her sword.

  The temple was not like any other church of Khors I'd seen. His image was painted and carved into every surface: a great red dragon with clawless hands and a three-layered, finned crest, standing behind a bearded human smith. Both dragon and man held their hands in the same position, as if offering the tools they carried to the viewer. The dragon held a gem in his left and a stylus in his right. The human offered a hammer and a levelling staff. They both had fathomless, glowing crimson eyes. I couldn’t help but note that the human aspect of Khors strongly resembled the Arch Smith, with his long false red beard.

  The architecture was almost the same as the tomb we'd found in Karhad, with murals, squared doorways, carved pillars, and inlaid sheets of engraved metal. A text-engraved band of electrum had been set into the walls all the way around the entrance, but I didn’t recognize the script. We had to make do with the pictures. In one, the dual aspect of Khors was slaying a multi-limbed black beast that had to be a Drachan. In the next image, he was drawing a black, oily smoke from it into a giant crystal that gleamed violet through his fingers. The next picture was clearly an image of Khors breathing life into some of the Warsingers. Withering Rose took pride of place, its golden humanoid frame, huge flaming halo and angular starburst helmet clearly recognizable, but there were others in the mural as well. One was an eerie, slim, matte-black machine with a fan of whiplike limbs. Another had a bestial look about it, with a hunched stance and a muzzle that reminded me of a werewolf. I paused in front of it and took a snapshot for Rin.

  “Ohh, I don’t recognize that script!” she said. “I’ll look it up. I think these pictures give us some idea of what they built in this plant, though.”

  “Yeah?” I moved down the wall, taking more pictures with the HUD’s camera for posterity.

  “Yeah. I think they made the engine cores here,” Rin said. “Everything I’ve read suggests that the Warsingers were each animated by the spirit of a captured Drachan, kind of like a bound servitor, and the Drachan’s energy was the main power drive of the Warsinger. That’s why I don’t think we’re going to be able to rebuild Nocturne Lament. When you destroyed it, you destroyed the core as well.”

  “Maybe that’s how it became a revenant… the Drachan spirit got loose and animated it, or something.” I recalled the malicious glee the machine had radiated as it woodchippered my poor quazi. “That thing was evil as shit.”

  Suri wrinkled her nose. “How does a Void Creature have a spirit of any kind, though? I’d’ve thought they had whatever the opposite of a soul is.”

  “Well, that’s the interesting thing,” Rin said. “I think there’s some kind of… like… well, my tentative name for what the Warsingers and other huge Artifacts might have used is called a ‘vacuum drive’. The Warsingers had a negative-positive energy exchange polarity.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Well, mana is nifty because it can take a charge from almost anything, including thoughts, and the expression of the energy is incredibly mutable. But all mana is functionally positive energy, right? It’s always trying to expand. In L.A.E.H.T systems, for example – uhh… Liquid Azurine-Emeraldine Hybrid engines – you have two types of mana of different densities agitating each other as they try to expand at different speeds. If you can imagine two teams playing tug of war, and the rope is wrapped around a crankshaft that’s connected to a simple engine, the back-and-forth motion agitates the crankshaft and turns the rotors. You follow?”

  “Surprisingly, yes.” I looked to Suri and Karalti. Karalti was scratching her head, but Suri seemed to be following along.

  “That’s like a super-simple and not completely accurate breakdown of it. But anyway, what I think the Warsingers had was like a more extreme version of a mana transmutation-exchange system that used the negative draw of a Void creature’s essence to release huge amounts of energy,” Rin continued. “We don’t know how it would work in practice, but it looks like this place you found is where they
might have made the cores. That would be SUPER exciting. If we could figure out that technology…”

  “We could make our own Warsingers,” I finished. “Hell yeah.”

  To my right, Suri approached the monolithic metal doors that led into the complex. It was inset with a double pair of handprints. The larger of the two was the four-fingered print of a dragon’s hand. Each one was half again as big as Karalti's full-sized hands, and had been made by a dragon with no claws on the end of their fingers. The second set, contained within the first, were human. Hesitantly, Suri placed her hands into them. They were a perfect fit.

  “You have to bleed,” Karalti said. “This is a Solonkratsu temple. The Words of Power enchanted into that door were written in blood.”

  “Right. You dragons sure love blood, don’t you?” Suri pulled her gloves off and tucked them through her belt, then took a knife. To my great relief, she didn't dramatically slash her palms open. She pricked the pads of her fingers, then pressed her hands back into the locks.

  A series of unseen tumblers unlocked. Suri stepped back, and the doors crunched and rumbled their way open, sliding back into the walls with a rolling boom.

  [You have discovered a new location: The Shrine of the Anvil]

  Chapter 48

  The entry to the Shrine was not really the entrance. By the size of the doors, the way they opened, and the cavernous, oil-stained warehouse that lay beyond, it was pretty clear that this was the back of the temple complex: the space in which the priest-smiths and their helpers quite possibly assembled the Warsinger we hoped to find.

  Temples of Khors had some parts that were more archetypally temple-y, but Khors the Maker was the god of the forge and the easel and people worshipped him by making stuff. This ancient place was no exception. There were two long, narrow pits on the floor, deep enough for a human to stand upright and work over their heads. Stone benches and broken scaffolding surrounded a big empty area in the middle of the workspace. There was a second-floor catwalk around the edge, and a ramp leading out into the middle of the room like a diving board.

  “Ugh.” Karalti shivered. “Feels haunted.”

  “Haunted?” Suri strode ahead of us, craning her head to look around. “I dunno... feels kind of peaceful to me.”

  “Don't you sense that? It's like we're being watched.” Karalti stuck close to my side, her shoulders hunched. It was dark inside, so we had to pull out our torches again.

  I eyed the dead mage lights that lined the walls. “We might be. I mean... these guys were pretty advanced in the magitech department. They could have cameras of some kind.”

  There was a corridor beyond the big room, with small storage rooms offside. We knew they were storage, because some of them had shelves - but other than some small [Aurum Gears] and [Greencrystal Mana Shards], the place was disturbingly empty and tidy.

  “Why is there nothing here?” I found a single stone chest, and kicked it open with my weapon levelled in case it was some kind of mimic. The lid slid off to reveal a disappointingly empty container. “There should be tons of treasure in a place like this.”

  “It's like they packed everything up and abandoned this place.” Karalti sniffed. “You know what's weird?”

  “Hmm?”

  “No mana smell,” Karalti said. “Temples of Khors always smell like mana - to me, at least. And this place really should, if it was used to make Warsingers.”

  “Huh.” She had a point there.

  “Hey, guys. Check this out. Rin'll lose her mind,” Suri called from the next room.

  We found her looking at a metal plate fixed to the wall. It was engraved with three rows of script. I couldn’t read any of them, but one of the language forms was recognizable.

  “That’s the Mercurion language.” I took a screenshot and sent it to Rin. “Here – this might help you work out the languages we’ve been seeing. It’s like… uhh… what’s that IRL thing called? The big stone that helped archaeologists figure out Ancient Egyptian?”

  “The Rosetta Stone,” Rin replied. “Okay, I’ve been working on the languages anyway while you guys have been exploring, and I’m about ninety percent sure that right-to-left alphabetic script is a language called ‘Old Aga’.”

  “Aga? Didn’t Davri say that the proper name for the Fireblooded was ‘Aga’?” I asked Suri.

  She nodded. “Yeah. What does this say?”

  “Let me see…” she went quiet for a few minutes, then started to giggle.

  “What?” Suri and I glanced at each other.

  “It’s a safety sign! The Tlaxik script reads: ‘Danger – High Concentrations of Mana in the Heart of Knives construction chamber. You must wear proper equipment’.”

  “Heart of Knives? That sounds ominous and kind of… pointy.” I scratched my head. “Alright, well, if we find anything else, we’ll run it by you. Other than stuff like this, we haven’t seen anything so far. I think they abandoned ship.”

  “They probably ran out of mana. Can you imagine how much mana it'd take to build this stuff, let alone fuel machines like that?”

  “Yeah. I've been wondering about how we'll manage that. Hang on… let me put Rin on a video feed.”

  At the end of the storage area was another blood-activated door, not nearly as big as the one that had led into the Holy Garage. The room beyond, however, was a sight to behold. Small solar lights hung from the high vaulted ceilings of the [Shrine Schematic Archives]. It, and all of the intricate carvings along the pillars, had been bored straight out of solid rock. Twelve smooth stone obelisks surrounded a metal-topped altar. Behind them was a large stone ring mounted on a pedestal connected to a series of pipes that fed into the floor, and behind that, a nearly life-sized statue of Khors in dragon form. In this instance, he reminded me of an Indian god: half-human, half-dragon, surrounded by a fan of arms that each bore some kind of tool. He held a pair of carved stone gems in his two lowest hands, one larger, one smaller.

  “It’s beautiful!” Karalti paced in, eyes wide with awe as she looked up and around. “Carvings! Art! So pretty!”

  “What are these big old bastards?” Suri drifted to the nearest obelisk, running her fingers over a round depression. “Hey, Hector… this looks like it would fit your Shield of Whatever-it-was. That necklace you picked up.”

  She was right. When I held up the medallion, they were almost a perfect match. Almost. The stone had the same basic pattern, but the script was different.

  “Hmm.” I tried it anyway, just to see if it fit. It went in, but nothing happened, so I moved to the next pillar along, and the next, and the next. None of them were quite right. “Blah. Mehkhet said the Shields are an information storage device. They must have all kinds of shit stored in these obelisks, if we could just get to them.”

  “Hector! Over here!” Karalti’s head popped up from behind the altar. “There’s another Shield slot!”

  The surface of the altar was made of smooth white-blue metal that hummed softly as my fingers touched it. I heard Rin gasp over the voicechat.

  “Omigosh! That's lambidium!” she exclaimed.

  “Lambidium is that fancy-pants metal Ebisa had opinions about.” Crouched down beside Karalti as she pointed excitedly at a round depression with a pattern of small grooves inside. I held up the medallion for comparison. Perfect match.

  “Yeah! Lambidium is one of the three Tier One metals,” she replied. “Which are aurum, lambidium and lazula, or bluesteel. That veneer alone is worth about ten thousand gold!”

  “Is it heresy if I find a way to pinch it...?” Suri mused aloud. “Nah. Better not risk it.”

  Suri and Karalti watched as I fit the medallion to the slot, tense with anticipation. When nothing happened, Suri frowned, stood, and looked down at the altar.

  “Blood for the blood god?” she asked Karalti.

  The dragon nodded. “Always worth a go!”

  “Wait a second!” Rin piped up. “Lambidium is as valuable as it is because of its mana conduction propert
ies. It’s got millions of tubules, so it’s really brittle and has to be smelted… umm… never mind. It conducts mana, so the altar itself is probably some kind of magical device. I don’t think you need blood. Check and see if there's somewhere to add mana into it.”

  “Any suggestions where we'd find a mana insertion device?” I squatted back on my heels.

  “Mana flows upwards unless pressurized, so most fueling points are near the base of an artifact to minimize leakage. It also might not be on the altar itself. Look around on the floor, see if you can spot some kind of-”

  “Found it.” I zeroed in on a small port set into the tiles, a small metal ring with tongued grooves.

  “-Valve,” Rin finished weakly.

  “Hmm.” I fiddled with it until I worked out how to open it. “I've got SOME mana, but not a lot.”

  “I can help,” Karalti said. “I don’t mind donating some blood. But you might also have to take some from Suri to get it to work. If the doors are keyed to the blood of certain people – Sachara, the Arch-Smith, maybe people who worked here – then this thing might have the same kind of security.”

  “Right.” I had never combined human blood and mana before, buuuut... “Let's try them separately, and if that doesn't work, we'll combine them with a reagent. I have a feeling if we mix straight-up human blood and mana, we'll end up with some Stranged-ass blood monster.”

  Suri sighed, and held out her arm. “Go on, then. Me first.”

  I took out my transfusion kit, and got to work. Suri was just as stoic about having her blood drawn than Karalti was. We experimented with a dropper: first Karalti's bright blue blood, and then Suri's crimson. By themselves, they did nothing - but when the two briefly mingled, I saw a flash of blue-green light flicker through the black surface of the altar. The blue liquid destroyed the red with a hiss, charring it black and causing it to contort and grow little branches until it looked like a tiny dead tree.

  “You know anything about combining blood and mana, Rin?” I asked.