“You wouldn’t, though. Right? I mean, he wouldn’t stop at using it on us. Cerise and Avilla would be upset if they lost their patrons.”
“Yeah, I know. Believe me, I don’t want to see what the world would look like if he had absolute power. The things he does when his influence is limited are bad enough. I’ve just been dragging my feet here, while I try to come up with a plan that doesn’t get me killed. Or worse. I could see him kidnapping the girls so he can torture them until I do what he wants.”
“If the carrot fails, the stick will soon follow,” Alanna agreed.
“Yeah. But I think I’ve finally gotten an idea. Mara, how would you feel about helping me fake my own death?”
Chapter 15
The inside of the Sunspire was a strange and confusing place. It was like reality itself was twisted within those crystal walls, superimposing two very different environments. Sometimes I flew through air, with strange vapors wafting across my shields and lightning discharges leaping between the walls at random intervals. Sometimes I flew through water, lit by the eerie blue glow that warned of far too much radiation for my peace of mind. The dimensions of the halls seemed to shift and bend as I passed, and even gravity didn’t seem stable.
A dream it began, and a dream it remains, Alanna murmured, when I remarked on the strangeness.
I paused to examine a wall covered in intricate gold circuit patterns that pulsed in some complex rhythm. Was that a space warping enchantment? This was only one section of a greater whole, and it might take hours of exploration to find enough of them to be sure. But it looked an awful lot like some kind of wormhole spell.
“You never did explain what you mean by that,” I said.
What is there to explain? Once men dreamed of having mastery over the forces that drive the world. Wind and rain, the sun and the moon, the great spirits and even the gods themselves. The dream shamans called their vision into the waking world, and the wizards who came with it forged this tower to bring it fully to fruition. But while weather and spirits bowed down before man’s ambitions, and the sun itself became a tool in their hands, the gods were not so easily broken.
So there was actually some kind of dream realm in this world? Interesting. But it begged a lot of questions.
“So there was a war, and the gods won?”
Not just a war. A cataclysm. The Atlanteans thought they could play one pantheon against another, and pick off their enemies one by one until the balance of power shifted decisively in their favor. I warned them it wouldn’t work, but they paid little heed to the words of a minor nature spirit.
“You were there?”
Of course I was, Daniel. Do you think I would pass up the chance to bind myself to a man with such grand ambitions? I was the favored familiar of Ivor Stormbinder, one of the council’s most feared battle mages. Luckily he made no use of me in the later battles, thinking the power of the sun would triumph against all foes.
“That’s when Atlantis was destroyed?”
Yes. The island of Atlantis was broken, sunk into the sea and cast back into dreams. But it was more than that. The Titans broke the Dreaming itself, crippling the aspirations of men with nightmares of failure and torment. No civilization has dared to reach so high since then. For two thousand years I thought even the power of invention was lost to men, until Prometheus restored it to you.
I broke off my inspection of what was probably a gigantic mana relay network to consider that revelation.
“So that’s what inspired the old legend about Prometheus giving men fire? I can see why Zeus would imprison him for that. But the gods couldn’t undo it?”
They were no longer united in purpose, Alanna explained. Perhaps he could have cursed his own people, but that would only have made them vulnerable to their rivals from other lands. In the end he decided that with the Dreaming still broken it was a bearable risk, and left well enough alone.
“At least I don’t have to worry about him coming after me. Or do I?”
The Olympians are as dead as any god can ever be, Daniel. Besides, Dark Hecate was a peer of their realm while Olympus stood, and are you not her champion? You have many worries, but that is not one of them.
Good. I had plenty of enemies, without worrying about new ones popping up out of nowhere. Although the thought reminded me that Bast was due to be reborn soon.
No, not Bast. Erika. My daughter, who was going to be born any day now. She might have already been born, and I wasn’t there.
It was a little thing, in the grand scheme of things. But I was surprised at how much I resented it. I’d meant to be there for Tina. Not that she was going to need any help, between her own motherhood blessings and Bast’s magic, and if she did I couldn’t imagine anything that Elin and Avilla couldn’t handle. It was probably going to be the easiest birth in Varmland’s history.
I’d still meant to be there, though. To hold her hand, and keep her safe. A man should be present for the birth of his child, even if she is some strange reincarnation of a goddess. I felt like a complete heel for being stuck in Asgard instead.
There was nothing to be done about it, though. I needed to focus on what I was doing now, or I might not make it home to Tina at all.
Case in point, the crystal tunnels I was trying to follow were broken here and there, exposing a maze of enchantments that often didn’t take well to being mangled. At one point I found a wall of lighting arcing across the hall in front of me, a brilliant snake of energy that writhed in the air while its endpoints danced up and down the walls. I had to stop there, and consider how to get past it.
My force fields didn’t seem to work very well against electricity, but my armor had held up against lightning bolts just fine. Would it protect me, if I brushed against that arc?
The only way to find out was to try it, and that struck me as a really dumb idea. Instead I conjured a heavy bar of iron spanning the width of the tunnel.
Sure enough, the arc of electricity immediately grounded out, conducting through the metal instead of forcing its way through the much higher resistance of the air. The metal bar quickly started to glow a dull red, and I hurriedly floated past before the current melted it.
It was intimidating, how much energy was at play in this place. Most of the enchantments I could see were inactive, and I was pretty sure things like that lightning were just eddies from some relatively minor set of housekeeping enchantments. But there was still so much current my face was warm from the heat.
Wait, no. I was getting warmer, but the heat didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere in particular. What the heck?
I’d turned a corner, and found myself in an open space full of broken crystal where something had apparently exploded at one point. Now my healing amulet was drawing power, too. I checked the radiation detector that I’d improvised last night, and saw that the warning light was flashing frantically.
I never did figure out how to make a proper Geiger counter, but when I’d been cooking up a radiation weapon to use on Gaea’s army I’d come up with an indirect way of measuring it. My flesh sorcery can sense radiation damage just like any other injury, so I’d ended up using rats in enchanted cages to check for radiation leaks.
Judging from the brightness of the glow on the back of my wrist, I’d already soaked up enough radiation to kill a few hundred rats. Enough radiation that it was actually warming me up as it tore my tissues apart. If not for my healing spells I’d already be dead, and that was just what was getting through my force field and steel armor.
“Draw on my sorcery, and heal yourself,” I warned Alanna. “We’re soaking up a lot of radiation here.”
That invisible death magic? I thought I felt something odd. Can your healing protect us?
“I think so, but I’d rather not take chances. Let me see if I can manage a better solution.”
My force magic can affect anything that has rest mass, but getting a force field to stop something exotic could take a bit of tuning. What was nuclear radiatio
n actually made of, anyway? A bunch of different things, if I remembered my college physics classes right. Free protons and neutrons, helium nuclei, and high-energy photons. Well, the steel in my armor was thick enough that it would probably stop x-rays, and I should be able to block the rest of that. I just needed a force field tuned to stop tiny, incredibly fast-moving particles instead of big masses of normal matter.
The spell formed as I concentrated, expanding like an invisible ball of foam. It needed a lot more thickness than a normal force field, but as long as I was levitating there was plenty of space to work with. Six inches of thickness, and the glow from my radiation detector dimmed sharply. Another six inches and it faded a little more, getting down to a range I was sure my healing could handle. Just a few dead rats per minute, so to speak, and I’d tested that level in my lab.
But it wouldn’t go any lower, even when I ballooned my neutron shield out to several feet thick. I frowned, and shook my head at the obvious conclusion.
“Something in here is leaking gamma rays? Fuck. I’m not getting paid enough for this shit.”
You don’t think Aphrodite’s charms are worth the risk? Alanna teased. But think how happy Cerise would be, to have a chained goddess to play with.
“Yeah, until she seduces Sefwin into murdering us all in a fit of jealousy or something. No thanks. Alright, I’ve got a new ward up that stops most of this, but some of it is still leaking through so let’s not waste time.”
You’re the one who’s moving us, Daniel. Rush as fast as you like. Only, don’t forget to keep a wary eye for snares and pitfalls.
“Yeah, that’s why I’m not going faster. Alright, let’s see what this thing is.”
The far side of the devastated zone opened onto a towering central chamber that seemed taller than the whole Sunspire. Oh, joy. I wasn’t surprised to find that the inside of the spire was substantially bigger than the outside, but it was one more thing to worry about. Getting lost in here could be really bad.
The walls of the cylindrical space were covered with more golden circuit-pattern runework, forming an enchantment that dwarfed anything I’d ever seen. A harsh yellow glow lit the room from above, and a slender thread of eye-hurting brilliance descended through the center of the open space until it was swallowed by a crystalline engine hundreds of feet below.
I floated out into empty space, and a wall of stifling heat struck me for a moment before Alanna rewove her warmth spell into a climate control ward to keep us cool. I glanced up, and immediately regretted it. Whatever was up there was far too bright to look at, like staring into the sun with binoculars. I was blinded before I could even look away.
“This looks important,” I said, blinking away spots as my healing amulet fixed my eyes. Could I make a spell that would act like sunglasses? Invert a light spell, maybe? No, that wouldn’t work. No more looking up, then.
I think this must be the Hall of the Conduit, Alanna said. I was never allowed here when Atlantis stood, but I have heard it described.
“Conduit, huh? So what’s up there?”
The sun, Daniel.
“Wait, what now? You mean, like, the actual sun?”
Those enchantments on the walls of the chamber were colossal in scale, but full of familiar elements. Force fields, temperature containment, and something that reminded me of both the Dark Portal and the Asgardian gate spells.
Of course, the real sun. Of what use would an illusion be? I’m sorry, Daniel, I thought you knew this lore. Did I not tell you the Atlanteans tamed the sun to serve them?
“Yeah, I thought that was some kind of metaphor.”
No, I was being quite literal. The Sunspire is a needle that pierces the hide of the sun, and draws out its lifeblood to feed the Heart of Fire below us. What other source could empower such terrible weapons?
God good. It was a power tap.
The Atlanteans already had the equivalent of my mana stones, but they weren’t content with that level of power. So they’d built this insane artifact, enchanted to reach across a hundred million miles of space and tap into the energy of the sun to fuel their spells. I wasn’t sure how one would go about turning heat into mana…
No. My sorcery showed me exactly how to do it. It was more sympathetic magic than particle physics, using a piece of the sun to draw power from the whole. Creating that link in the first place was an incredible feat, considering the distances involved, and there was an immense amount of power tied up in maintaining the wormhole bridge. But the amount of power you could draw from such a link would be… five percent of the target’s energy output? Maybe ten? No, wait. Not energy output. Energy content. Ten percent of the Sun’s total heat energy.
That was enough power to not only kill everyone on Earth, but blow the planet apart and send the molten fragments careening off into interstellar space. Why the fuck did anyone think they needed that much power? How did they lose, with a weapon like this?
Well, no, they wouldn’t have been able to reach the theoretical limit. You need a soul to act as the conduit for that kind of magic. So the actual output would be limited by what the mages controlling it could channel. Or would they use themselves?
No, of course not. Why be hobbled by petty mortal limits?
“That’s what they did with the creatures they bound, isn’t it?” I said slowly. “The giant monsters and elemental spirits, and later on the gods they captured. They’re bound somewhere down below us, being used as cogs in the machine that channels the sun’s power into spells.”
Yes. Ivar boasted to his enemies that it was a tortured existence, bound in darkness and pain for all of eternity.
“I suppose that would be one way to build this thing. Let’s take a look, shall we?”
I descended quickly, carefully avoiding the vicinity of that burning thread of solar plasma. There was a hatch in the side of the shaft down near the bottom, that opened at the touch of the Devouring Rod I carried. It was probably intended as a maintenance access, like the cramped maze of tunnels it connected to. But the mechanisms here were all intact, and it only took a few minutes to find my way down into the chamber my sorcery was telling me must exist.
The reactor room was a spherical open space that was definitely too big to fit inside the Spire’s outer dimensions. A giant ball of seething plasma a hundred feet across hung in the middle of the space, putting out enough heat to cook an unprotected person in seconds. I covered my eyes against the glare, until Alanna grew lenses of smoky glass over my helmet’s eye holes.
Even with that protection, I still couldn’t look straight at the miniature sun. But I could make out the neatly organized structure of spun crystal and circuit traceries that surrounded it, supporting hundreds upon hundreds of dark spheres.
The small ones were the size of bowling balls. The biggest ones were large enough that I could have easily stepped inside one if they’d been hollow. But my earth sorcery told me they were solid spheres of onyx.
I floated close to one of the smaller ones, and studied the runes engraved into it surface. Another circuit pattern, that glowed with a dull red light. There was a soul binding, and those were the hooks that tied the prisoner inside into the power tap enchantment. There were other spells too, all of them nasty work. Sharp spines to puncture the captive soul, and steadily drain off any magic it might have. A pain spell, tied to a maze of triggers designed to set it off in response to any escape attempt. Some kind of empathic spell, projecting a constant dull ache of despair. Hey, was that a communication function?
I touched the sphere with one gauntleted hand, and tentatively opened a link.
Burningdarklostalonesuffering.
I wrenched the link shut, gritting my teeth against the flood of horrible impressions.
Careful! Alanna said. You’re too young to swim in such madness, Daniel. If you must speak with the prisoners warn me first, that I may shield you.
“There’s no one left in there to talk to,” I said. “Just a bundle of mindless suffering. Fuck, th
is shit is evil. Why couldn’t they at least keep them in suspended animation when they aren’t needed?”
They meant to strike fear in the hearts of their enemies, Alanna said, as if eternal torture were a perfectly reasonable intimidation tactic. I fear these smaller orbs will be of no use to you. They would hold lesser spirits, or perhaps even mortal souls, and it has been far too long for them.
“What about gods?” I asked. “That’s what the big orbs are for, right?”
Them, and the Ancient Beasts. Their nature will make them more resilient, I suppose. But I still suggest a cautious approach. Such beings are a wily lot, and the prisons that bind their power may have missed a scrap here and there.
“Noted. What’s an Ancient Beast?”
You might call them animal gods. They arose from primal chaos in the time before words, and roamed among the beasts for countless ages before men arose to bring grander dreams to the world. The first gods hunted them sometimes, just as mortal men hunted the wolves and lions, but they were always dangerous prey. In the days of Atlantis there were still many of them lurking the wilder places of the world, destroying any who dared venture into their territories. Some were even worshiped by men, and gained the mystery of speech from them.
“Interesting. So the gods didn’t come along until there were humans?”
Ah, so this is another gap in your lore? Do you, perhaps, fail to comprehend the nature of gods?
“Aside from being powerful assholes? Not a clue. I take it you know where they come from?”
You’ve seen the primal chaos that lies between and beyond the Nine Worlds. A god is an eddy in that endless sea of potential, given form and life by some momentary touch of the Dreaming. Most of them remain trapped in the sea of chaos, blindly floundering in ignorance until they dissolve once more. But sometimes one of them finds some purchase on reality, and claws its way into the waking world.
“So their true form is just a blob of energy? No wonder they’re so hard to kill.”
Thrall (Daniel Black Book 4) Page 22