Thrall (Daniel Black Book 4)

by E. William Brown

  Even if I solved that problem, the soul manipulation would have been an even bigger challenge. Disembodied souls normally aren’t aware enough to do anything, and trying to modify yourself to fix that problem is a short road to insanity. Binding a soul to a device that can reel it in after you die would have similar problems, and then there was the issue of putting it into a fresh body safely. That was easily as complex as growing a body, and if I was dead I wasn’t going to be awake to direct the process.

  Besides, mortals who die in Asgard get their souls caught up in Odin’s resurrection system. Especially if they die in battle. I still didn’t have a clear idea of how that worked, so betting that I could avoid it somehow didn’t seem like a smart idea. It would be all too easy to get myself trapped here as some kind of wizard einherjar.

  “Alanna, can you access your bower from here?” I asked as I was mulling over my options.

  “Of course. Where do you think I kept those spears?”

  “You weren’t just making them as you needed them?” Aphrodite asked.

  “Ah, if only I were so adept. I could do that with wood, of course, but enchanted steel is another matter. Even with Daniel’s sorcery it takes too long to make such things properly, so I’ve been building up a collection. I simply keep them in my armory, and call them out when I have a use for them. Is there something you wish me to keep for you, Daniel?”

  “Several things,” I replied. “Can you still do that in armor form? Like, if I pick something up could you pull it into your bower?”

  “Certainly. Shall I help you pretend to have mastery of a personal space, Daniel? It might give your enemies pause, to see you drawing new weapons from nowhere as the need arises.”

  “That does sound like fun,” I agreed. “But I was considering something more elaborate. You don’t have a significant weight limit, do you? I remember your bower was pretty big.”

  “You could say that,” she said, sounding amused. “Where is this trail leading us?”

  “Oh, I was just thinking that if I’m going to fake my own death I’ll need to leave a body somewhere, and it takes a few hours to make one. So I’ll need someplace to stash it until I need it.”

  “A hollow shell won’t fool a god,” Aphrodite told me. “A body that has never had a soul feels different than one that’s been used.”

  “Yeah, I figured that part out. But what about a body that was used for many years, and then put in storage for a few days? Because I think I can see how to make a body swapping device.”

  Their dumbfounded expressions told me I was on to something with that idea. A device that could move a living soul from one body to another was a good bit easier than a remote resurrection system, but it was still fiendishly complex. It turned out neither of them had ever heard of a mortal pulling off a feat like that before, so it wasn’t something Odin was likely to suspect either.

  “Where do you get these crazy ideas?” Aphrodite grumbled.

  I shrugged. “An old story, actually. But hey, is it really a crazy idea if it works?”

  “Yes!” She insisted. “You do realize this isn’t going to be pleasant?”

  “I’ll cope. Convincing Odin that I’m really dead is the key to this whole thing. If he even suspects I’ve escaped he’ll go after my girls as leverage, and I can’t let that happen.”

  Aphrodite’s expression turned unusually serious at that. “You’re not going to be able to go home, are you?”

  I sighed. “Probably not. At least, not until Asgard is under siege and the Aesir have their hands full fighting Loki’s army. I suppose I could change my face and try to sneak back before then, but it’s a big risk.”

  “A single spy in the wrong place could ruin the whole deception,” Alanna agreed. “But we will have a journey ahead of us in any event. If I try to return us to my tree from here Asgard’s wards will see the effort, and they might well prevent it. At the very least we will need to travel far from the city before returning to Midgard.”

  “Jump to a different tree,” Aphrodite advised. “One that isn’t in Europe.”

  “A different tree? I have no idea what you’re referring to,” Alanna said in mock astonishment. “Surely you know that a dryad can have only one tree?”

  “Like a hamadryad only has one forest?” The goddess replied. “Fine, play dumb if you like, but don’t take any chances. They have some really good trackers here. I’ve escaped four times, but they always find me and drag me back.”

  “Not this time,” I said. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I need to show some progress if I’m going to keep them off my back, so it’s about time we took a look at this broken control run.”

  The fire I’d told Brand about emerged from a broken conduit, which was supposed to carry an uncomfortably large stream of compressed plasma away from the sun tap. I had no idea what it was for, but given the amount of energy involved I was cautious about touching it. There was no way I could dissipate that much heat with a spell, and engineering a magic item powerful enough to deal with it would probably have taken a couple of days. Fire wasn’t my best element, and I certainly didn’t want to throw a jet of water into it. I know just enough physics to realize that I’d get a huge steam explosion, but not nearly enough to calculate how bad it would be.

  Aphrodite laughed when she saw it. “This is your troublesome obstacle? A flame that’s already half tamed?”

  “I have no idea what you mean by that,” I said. “But it’s being drawn off of the main sun tap, and I don’t have a good way to measure the energy density. It would be really embarrassing to start putting it out, and then realize it’s ten times as dangerous as I thought and I just destabilized it.”

  “Bah. Stand back, puny mortal, and let a goddess show you how it’s done.” She cracked her knuckles theatrically, and stepped up to the barrier. I cautiously backed up a few feet, watching the magic swirl around her. She made a sweeping gesture, and an invisible vortex of elemental power gathered around her. A torrent of water-aspected mana a thousand times stronger than anything I’d ever worked, intermingled with complex weaves of life, earth and ice.

  She snapped her fingers. Just like that, the roaring flame was snuffed out. The crystalline walls of the passageway began to cool, and a sheet of intensely blue ice covered the gaping hole in the side of the plasma conduit.

  “There you go. One raging inferno quenched.”

  “Impressive. How long will that last?” I asked, eyeing the patch.

  She sauntered back over to me, and put her hand on my chest. “Still worried about the scary fire? Don’t worry, I’ll protect you.”

  “Wench.” I gave her a swat on the butt, and walked over to take a closer look at the patch. She giggled, and pressed herself against me as I walked by.

  “That’s more like it,” she purred, pressing those magnificent breasts against my side. “But shouldn’t you carry me again? You wouldn’t want me to accidentally get too far away, and die from the tower’s curse.”

  “I think you’re perfectly capable of staying inside my wards on your own,” I said.

  The patch wasn’t normal ice, and it was being kept frozen by a monstrously powerful spell that was still drawing power from Aphrodite. It would last as long as she was nearby and supporting it, but after we left it would probably fail in a few hours. Good enough.

  Aphrodite pouted at me. “So cold! Are we not allies, now? Think how tragic it would be, if my golden hair were to fall out.”

  “You just don’t want to bother walking,” I pointed out.

  “Why should I walk when there’s a man to carry me? Don’t try to tell me you didn’t enjoy it.”

  “Yeah, but now I need to get some work done.”

  Fear not, Daniel. I shall keep this troublesome wench distracted.

  Aphrodite was already pressed against me, so she had no time to react when the steel surface of my armor suddenly vanished and the wood beneath started to grow. In the blink of an eye the sultry sex goddess was bound
in wooden manacles, and a gag had plugged her mouth. Tentacles of dark wood flowed out to engulf her, moving like a mass of viscous fluid, and wrapped around her until she was completely hidden. Then the dark mass withdrew into my armor, leaving nothing behind.

  “Did you just drag her into your bower?” I asked.

  Yes. You were about to begin your work, were you not? Aphrodite would be bored in moments, and then she’d begin distracting you in search of entertainment. Allow me to keep her occupied while you work.

  “What are you going to do, tie her up in your basement?”

  For a start. She desperately needs a good spanking. These einherjar are far too soft, letting her bend their wills with her honeyed words. I know better than to let her speak.

  “It’s a good thing I have you here to look after me,” I said. “Alright, you girls have fun. I’ll just be out here working.”

  Poor, put-upon man. Would you rather I tie her up for you, so you can have your way with her?

  “Don’t tempt me,” I said. “I swear, that woman gets more beautiful every time I look at her. If I spend too much time around her I’m going to do something I’ll regret.”

  Not while I am here, Alanna replied, sounding short of breath. Ooh, I’d forgotten how delicious she looks in chains. I just want to pounce on her, and make her scream my name!

  “Knock yourself out,” I told her. “Just try not to be too distracting.”

  Of course. She pulled away, weakening our connection until all I felt was a vague impression of her. I sighed, feeling vaguely disgruntled, and shook my head. What did I expect? Like a dryad and a sex goddess were going to keep their minds on business for long.

  It took a couple of hours to build a more permanent patch, but I did that first. Just in case Aphrodite got a little too distracted in there, and let her spell lapse. Once I was sure I wasn’t at risk of getting a surprise plasma enema I relaxed a little, and settled in to finish tracing the Spire’s soul trap enchantments.

  Sure enough, there was a major junction right behind the area that the flames had blocked. A maze of control runs and astral corridors, sympathetic magic and ectoplasmic teleporters, all meant to transfer captured souls between the prison on the lower floors and the rods that every Atlantean wizard had once carried. Half the mechanism had been melted by long ages of exposure to that ruptured conduit, and almost all of the links were broken, so figuring out how any of it was supposed to work was a royal bitch.

  If not for my mana sorcery it would have been a doomed effort. Even with it I might not have gotten anywhere if I’d been a native of this world. The Spire’s mechanisms were far more complex than anything I’d seen the Red Conclave use, and they were full of strange abstractions and remarkably obtuse design elements.

  But I’d worked on software systems that had more complexity. If you want to do systems engineering you have to be good at wading into a tangled mess of poorly designed code and figuring out how it works, and this wasn’t that different. More like circuit design than traditional programming, maybe, but I knew a bit about that too. My mana sorcery was happy to translate between all those familiar abstractions and their magical equivalents, and it did a lot of the heavy lifting for me. At this point I could unravel enchantments even faster than I’d been able to read code in my old life.

  It was a good thing, too, because this was a tough job. It took hours to work out how the rod connections were supposed to tie into the rest of the Spire’s enchantments, and find one that was still intact. That was critical, because it would take forever to re-create something like without a working example. Rebuilding the router that handled switching between the various channels would be hard enough.

  Not that I actually wanted to do either of those things. But I was going to go back to Brand with a time estimate on this repair job, and the Aesir would be fools to just take me at my word. At the very least he’d have a lie detector, and there was no telling what else a god could come up with along those lines. So I’d better make sure anything I told them was as true and accurate as I could manage, and assume that if I actually promised to do something they’d know if I didn’t intend to deliver.

  Was it just arrogance, that Odin hadn’t bothered to get a formal promise out of me before? Or was there something else going on there? I had no idea, and I wasn’t going to disturb Alanna with random questions right now. It felt like things were getting pretty intense for her at the moment, and I didn’t really want to get a full-force impression of exactly what she was feeling.

  Back to the repairs. I roughed out an idea for fixing the router, and dug deeper into the piping to see what else might need work. There were barriers and wards, pumps and teleporters, all sorts of strange and complex enchantments. Most of the components made sense once I spent a few minutes studying them, even if the overall design was a horrible Rube Goldberg machine on a par with their matter-to-mana devices.

  Then I stumbled on a piece that didn’t fit. Visually it looked like just another crystalline doodad in a twisted rat’s nest of similar parts, but what was it supposed to do? The magic it radiated was mostly just random squiggles that didn’t accomplish anything, and the parts that were functional just attached it to the main soul feed and…

  I blinked, looking closer. That was a divination scrambler. I hadn’t seen anything like that in the Spire so far. My sorcery figured out the scrambling mechanism as easily as it had on the wards around Fenrir’s prison, and I adjusted my mage sight to see through it. But what I found beneath was even more confusing.

  A completely different style of enchantment. An intricate mechanism made of gold hidden inside that crystalline shell, with each part covered in neat, orderly inscriptions. Not the Norse runes that so many wizards in Varmland favored for their enchantments, or the Latin that the Runesage had used. This writing was all pictograms.

  Egyptian pictograms.

  “Fuck!”

  Alanna must have sensed my shock, because our connection suddenly strengthened again. Is something wrong, Daniel? She asked distractedly.

  “The Lightbringers have been in here,” I said.

  Suddenly I had her full attention. Have they? How?

  “Hell if I know. But this thing definitely isn’t Atlantean magic, or Aesir. It’s… oh, shit. This thing is a bomb.”

  Are we in danger?

  I studied the device for another moment, carefully tracing the threads of magic that reached out into the devices around it.

  “No, I don’t think so. This thing has been here for a long time, so they didn’t plant it just to deal with me. It looks like it’s designed to go off if someone tries to repair the soul router, and trigger an energy surge that would kill them and trap their souls in the prison. But as long as I don’t touch anything it won’t go off.”

  Good. But that is a bit perplexing. If the Lightbringers have the means to defeat the Spire’s curse, why haven’t they entirely destroyed it by now?

  “Interesting question. I can see reasons why they might be cautious about doing more damage, though, especially if they’re getting incomplete information from their divination spells. This thing is still connected to the sun, and breaking it the wrong way could cause all kinds of devastation. If it was still on Midgard there’s a small chance it could devastate the whole world.

  They would be hesitant to take such a risk, Alanna said. So you suspect they have merely set traps for any wizard who seeks to repair the Spire?

  “That’s what it looks like to me. It’s a little odd that I got this deep before running into one, though. There must be some serious issues involved in planting things here, or they’d have done more of it. Maybe their shielding just keeps agents from dying right away, but the radiation poisoning still gets them after a few hours. Or maybe it uses up something that they only have a limited supply of.”

  High wizardry often has such limits. Does this change your plans?

  “Maybe. If nothing else it means I have to worry about getting attacked here. I’d been
hoping we could use the Spire as a safe refuge, but if they got an agent in here to plant bombs they can probably arrange to send in some assassins too.”

  Perhaps we should retreat to our rooms?

  "They’ve already tried us once there. It’s only a matter of time before they make another try. No, I think this is still one of the less likely places for them to hit us. I’m sure they’re preparing for it by now, just in case they have to bite the bullet. But they almost got me the first time, and they don’t know how fast I can improve my gear. Whatever it costs them to get in here, they aren’t going to pay the price except as a last resort. Not when there are so many easy options they haven’t tried yet.

  You’re probably right, Alana agreed. Most likely they will obtain local assistance, and arrange for a whole hunter team to ambush us.

  One of those guys was bad enough. Trying to fight three or four of them at once would be a nightmare. Throw in a dozen guys like the ones Alanna had fought today, and that would be game over for sure. One way or another I had to end this before they could arrange something like that. But how?

  My gaze fell on the bomb again.

  “Alanna,” I said slowly. “Ask Aphrodite if she knows who these assassins would be getting their information from.”

  Of course. She claims to know all the dealers of gossip and secrets that infest the Golden City’s underbelly. Do you think to track them to their hidden lair, and prepare an ambush of our own?

  “If we were just trying to survive that might be a good idea,” I said. “But given all our other complications, I’ve got a different idea in mind. Are they talking to Prince Caspar?”

  Why would Caspar want to speak with… oh, that treacherous dog! Yes, she says he met one of them at the Slick Vixen just last night.

  “Excellent. Then all we have to do is drop a few hints in the right ears.”