Alium, page 37
“Aye, tell us m’Lord,” Ramcrone grunted. “If this luxint technology is so mighty that our animal eyes see only magic, it must have some capacity for changing the war. I’ve no qualms with secret-keeping—or sorcery for that matter—if there’s a way to put an end to it all.”
“Truly,” said Nubes, staring through Chalem’s eyes. “There is a way to end it.”
Chalem smiled nobly under the penetrating glare, though there was anguish in his razor-burned jowls. “My Captains…” He looked at each of them. “What do you know of the Elechlear?”
Nubes was silent, but the word sent a tremor through even Vespia. Ramcrone blinked as with sudden recollection. But it was Donlan that spoke. “They were a mythic empire said to have conquered all Altum. Their powers were far greater than the Xol. But they travelled to the stars, and never returned. We call them Elechlear because they are eldest. That is what we are all told as children, you must know.”
Ramcrone shrugged his blocky shoulders. Vespia simply stared, though there was in her eyes an understanding which demanded the point.
“Well then,” said Chalem, rising from his seat, straightening his spine so that the sceptre hung like a deadly icicle from his grasp, veined with the blue light of his ring. “Your story is only mythical for the great gaps between its truths…” He folded his hand over the hanging spire of ice, and looked into the eyes of each listener as he spoke with a voice more clear and noble than many had heard in years.
“Millennia ago there lived a race of beings we call the Elechlear, whose technology far outran the crude instruments of modern man. They constructed vast cities over whose beauty Caelare would weep. All of the continents of Altum were plumbed and understood to them, and layered with their might. Most grand were their exquisite machines, both of society and war. Among these were ships which sailed among the stars and visited other worlds, weapons which could vaporize duravium walls, vehicles which sped over the roughest lands with the speed of a thousand horses, and suits of armour that allowed one to breathe beneath water, or endure even the most hellish bowels of volcanoes.
“But the might of the Elechlear was such that they grew to distrust their fellows, and their society was split in twain. They discovered a source of power which rivalled the gods, for it tore apart the fundamental particles of the universe to expel from its savaged seams waves of inexorable death that would melt the very code of life and strip the world of fertility. By containing and controlling this new energy, the Elechlear produced what they called luxint, the light within light. They used this energy to power their ships, weapons, and cities. The most powerful of these weapons were the Luxint Rays, great cannons set in sequence around the planet like moons. So destructive was the potential of their firing that the schism and war had begun purely over the debate of their use.
“Naturally, the time came when one side unleashed against the other this very worst of armaments. And naturally as was the conflict born, there was no return fire. Yet many Luxint Rays were called upon at once. Their beams annihilated all life on the face of Altum. Everything was powered by luxint energy at this time, and when all systems collapsed, the main cores of the cities were exposed, and they sank into the world along with all they had supported. The luxint cores became one with the world then, and over billions of years new life forms grew and flourished from a landscape and sea imbued with that energy. This explosion of new life and climatology is referred to in their records as the Great Mutation.
“Only Nubes and myself—and now you, my Captains—know why, to this day, the sea is poisonous to our flesh. To all others it is merely a fact of life. But the water of the ocean was once blue as that of the inland lakes and rivers. The war of the Elechlear fundamentally changed not only Altum, but the very laws of its nature, the walks of its life, the races which would evolve over millions of years to come, yet so it was that, like the gods they—and all of their cities and stupendous technology—who shaped the world we know were hidden away, not in the stars, but under the layers of crust as the surface settled anew.
“For millions of years the technologies of Altum’s most powerful race have lain dormant, and never would have been found if it were not for the obsessive plumbing of our ancestors some six thousand years ago. Novare have always been obsessed with deeps, and have always dug, as they do all throughout the mountains and land that they inhabit. It was the father of my fathers, King Chalor himself, that found in the passionately and fearlessly deep mining of his workers the great Elechlear city on top of which Lucetal was then built, and still resides. Ever I have sat directly above Fort Soarlin, an ancient military base encased in geologic ages. The first Novare to live in Lucetal knew of it, walked its halls, tasted of its gifts. But that information was smothered for the good of Novarekind, so that we should not succumb to such devastation as the Elechlear, and now the knowledge of it only exists between Kings, though I have shared much with Nubes.” Chalem glared at the wizard with blazing pride.
“And today the High Wizard has made good on my trust, for today he has convinced me to open the Fort to our armies. It contains weapons that will allow us a swift victory over the Xol!” He spat as he issued this last statement like the command of a great conqueror, smiting the stone floor with his sceptre.
Nubes rose like a great spirit of shadowed crimson, and the flames snuffed out, sputtered brilliantly to life all at once, and died again. Now only the pale blue light of Harbinger glowed in the room, and in that alien wash the wizard’s face was terrible to behold. “Son of Chalor. You make a grave error.”
Chalem sat silently in the dark, his face all shadow. “The Xol will never join us, Nubes. I will wipe them from the face of the world.”
Nubes trembled with rage, and it was a strange sight even for the Captains who knew his presence well, for he was thought of in the palace as much as in Lucetal as a tranquil creature. Yet now it was not at all difficult to see that he was full of wrath. Grave waves of purpose seemed to crush the lungs of all, and the King could not but turn his eyes upon the floor.
Suddenly the torches flared again to life. “So be it,” boomed the wizard. “I will not stop you. But the Xol shall play their part. This world is doomed, and your foolish war only hastens the end.” Without another word, Nubes nodded each to the captains, lastly and oddly most honourably to Harbinger, and made his exit in a flourish of crimson cloth.
*
Donlan was last to take his eyes from the empty passageway, and those final words he took the most heavily. Nevertheless, he would not argue with his King, for despite his long friendship with Nubes he was loyal foremost to the blood of Chalor. The wizard would understand. Donlan perceived as well as the others that Nubes invoked some greater threat than the Xol, but even he who knew so well the wisdom of the Red Tower could not imagine that the purple folk would ever unite with Novare against any cause, even if it meant the destruction of the world. Grand and wise as the wizard was, he knew nothing of battle. So it was that for the first time in many years the Captain of Cavalry thought Nubes wrong.
So too were the feelings of Ramcrone, unprejudiced against users of magic and respectful of Nubes’ legend as he was. For all his knowledge and power, the wizard himself had admitted not to have seen what the black legions had worked against their soldiers, and the heart of the Captain of the Knights was forever hardened against those deeds. Many of his finest and most skilled warriors had fallen in the war. His father was incinerated by Ezfled on a front far away while he brooded, locked up in the palace for his value and leadership. Whether or not the Xol were capable of forging some league or alliance with Novare in the darkest times of Altum, Ramcrone knew that he would never look a one in the eye without the will to fight.
The wizard’s warning had stirred nothing in Vespia, who could think only of Chalem’s speech. Looking up from the glory on her brow which had calmed him, now too observing the stout resolve and grave acceptance of Ramcrone and Donlan, the King saw that none of his captains were yet prepared to betray him. He nodded to Harbinger, and the sheer metal panel along the opposite wall noiselessly lifted. Through its clean perimeter they followed the blue figure into an angular hall made purely of bright, sleek and stainless metal. Their footsteps echoed all down the length of it, over which Harbinger glided on vestigial limbs, flickering out of existence, appearing again further down, now close to them, now perhaps halfway to the far, silver doors which parted smoothly to admit them. They passed here into a small chamber.
“Armoury,” said Chalem, standing his sceptre between his sandalled feet, closing his eyes as before some object of reverence.
The polished floor sank smooth and sudden. Breathtaking speed was accomplished in an instant, though for a seemingly endless expanse of alien time the box-shaped cell plummeted directly into the world, only the endless droning of its machine intelligence pulsing in the ears of its riders. As they fell, Donlan envisioned the palace as if it were miles above their heads. Vespia stood rigid, eyes flaring with black exuberance. Ramcrone leaned against the cold wall stoically, as if he were comfortable, though his stomach had quite turned over. When the platform at last abruptly halted, only Chalem and Vespia had not begun to shake. Donlan breathed a sigh of relief as Ramcrone slowly extricated himself from the wall which had in the final minute of their endless plunge all but melded with his spine.
A vertical line of blue light bisected the door, and the delineated halves hissed apart. They stepped into a vast darkness troubled only by the diffuse blue-white flame which was Harbinger flying out and up in the void. Suddenly that same hue snapped throughout the entire enormous space, revealing dimensions so massive as to contain the King’s great hall twenty times over. Yet each remotest corner was as clearly revealed by the piercing clean light as the featureless metal floor beneath the brilliant lamp-strips themselves, so impossibly distant above, arranged in hexagonal patterns along the angled, dizzying ceiling. To their left, a sheer silver plane extended at length to meet another looking precisely like the tall surface through which they’d passed from the tiny cell doors. At about the height of their waists ran the fine relief of a narrow shelf, seeming wholly unconnected yet to hover motionlessly before the surface of its own accord. Out to the right and from this low-tabled wall the smooth, lamp-veined ceiling angled acutely upward to accommodate and flatten above numberless rows of towering argent columns arranged in exacting procession all down the length of the hall, expanding into a distant though ubiquitously bright and clear horizon like an immense geometric forest of naked metal trees. The high wall beyond them seemed rather like a grey sky.
Chalem went to one of these structures, the click of his gemstone sceptre echoing up and out through the enormous room, and enacted some exchange with a progressively more formless Harbinger, who had descended above him like an electric cloud. The electric blue vapours of the figure seemed to mingle in the flow and folds of the King’s cape. With a sonorous click, the face of the metal obelisk parted in a slender slot to admit his reach, and the ghost of Harbinger rushed away as in an impossible wind.
The King came away with a slim, black box, which he placed upon the hovering table against the wall. Low-profile, entirely without marking, and dark as night, it rested there like an object out of another world, and none could say what to do with it until Chalem touched his index finger to the centre of its surface, and there pulsed a soft blue line of light along its perimeter. The box opened back from this line with a jet of white steam. A metal platform rose up and flung itself forward from within, presenting a strange artifact to the eyes of the Captains. Small, silver, and sleek, it had a hilt like that of a crossbow, yet protruding therefrom was merely a short gleaming cylinder no thicker than an arrow, seeming wholly without purpose. An inexplicable hexagonal metal panel sat angled up from the meeting of hilt and cylinder, but as Chalem drew the thing from the depression moulded to its form, a radiant blue light blossomed up into that surface suddenly alive with energy, and shot down the length of the barrel, coursing softly at its end.
“This is a blaster,” he said quite plainly, holding the instrument gently in one hand. “A more powerful killing machine than anything you’ve yet beheld. Harbinger, authorize the range.”
The blue spectre was not there precisely, either thinking its Novare shape unnecessary, or too at home now in the bowels of Fort Soarlin to think of itself as a physical entity, but all the same the King’s commands were carried out in an instant. The wall behind the shelf suddenly rose, and a long, low-ceilinged shaft was revealed. One by one throughout the space appeared floating, circular targets composed—like Harbinger, the hexagonal lights, the sudden animacy of the blaster—of that strange blue energy. Each bore concentric, spectral rings and a central dot. Chalem levelled the weapon so that its slender barrel pointed down the range. One thin line of blue light whispered forth and struck the edge of the closest target. A small bright white dot simmered just within the outermost ring, glowed, pulsed, turned blue as the rest of the display, and vanished.
Vespia smirked; Donlan gasped; Ramcrone frowned. “Such is as impossible as this Harbinger and that sick falling room,” said the knight. “But how can a feeble light outdo a lucidium blade in good hands? Even the weakest Xol sorcerers cast such trifles, and a strong shield is enough in some cases.”
Chalem smiled, weighing the weapon in his old hand. “Indeed, this is a very small and simple hand blaster, and of the Elechlear arsenal it is perhaps the most common and least destructive. Yet one pass of that feeble light over your strong shield, Ramcrone, and hardly a plume of dust would mark the spot of your annihilation.”
“Incredible,” breathed Vespia.
“It is like the lesser Gort,” said Donlan, ever the lover of animals. “Small and simple to the eye though it carries a deadly venom. Sometimes the most dangerous things are improperly judged. See how precise and swift the shot was. As soon as it was released it had already arrived at its mark, and the beam was straight as an edge. This is unlike even a bolt of the strongest crossbow in range and accuracy. Yet it really does seem in some way different from magic, like it is a tool, a tool that we have never seen before, the bow and arrow of some distant future. Well, I suppose I should say past.”
“Its force can be modulated as well,” said Chalem proudly. He indicated the glowing blue arc that ran across the hexagonal panel. “At this level of power, one shot will completely erase an organic being from existence, no matter where or how they interact with the beam, or whether they are armoured. Well, armoured, I mean, like we outfit our own warriors.” He passed his thumb over the arc, and the gradient of light depleted into a blue sliver. “Now it will merely stun a man for about five hours.” He held the blaster out by the barrel, the blue light disappearing as soon as his palm left the hilt. “Who will try it first?”
Vespia took the thing almost before he could finish speaking. As soon as her hand touched the handle, the gun lit up once more in blue light, the arc slicing along its raised panel, the thick bright vein striating the barrel, charging in the tip.
“How does it fire?” asked Donlan, leaning in.
“There is a release,” said Ramcrone. “Under the forefinger.”
“You’ve a close eye,” said Vespia, aiming deftly and without hesitation at the furthest target. Chalem’s heart leapt to see how naturally she handled the weapon. A sharp blue thread unvarying in linearity from blaster to target connected dead centre, vanishing quickly as it came. The perfect shot illuminated the entire circle. “Bellumroth, what a tool this is. And this is the simplest?” She had begun to grin wildly, and all around her were startled seeing her so excited.
Ramcrone tried his hand at the blaster next, standing awkwardly like a man pointing off at some distant object. Donlan after him fired with like technique to the King, discovering quickly, however, that subsequent blasts could be fired instantaneously, and that by maintaining pressure one initiated a sequence of bolts which fired in far more rapid succession than one could affect manually.
As they practised, Chalem brought out new types of arms from other black cases of varying sizes and lengths. There were stout, large-barrelled cannons which expelled spreading waves effective at short range; there were long, slender rifles which fired ultradense beams very precisely at long ranges—these Vespia took a great liking to; and there was a vast gamut of bulkier variants of blasters which could be set against the shoulder and fired without much extraneous movement. Donlan and Ramcrone much preferred these automatic rifles to the other weapons, and quite enjoyed themselves in overwhelming a target. Yet of the three Captains, Ramcrone was least able to hit the targets consistently, and though he certainly enjoyed the powerful close-range weapons and the blast rifle, he could not help but miss the feel of a sword in his hands.
“These guns are surely powerful and terribly accurate,” he exclaimed, having missed the nearest target once again, “but my men and I are more suited to the life of the blade. Did the Elechlear fight hand to hand at all?”
“They certainly did,” said Chalem. “But let me tell you one last thing about the Elechlear. Harbinger!” The figure of Harbinger silvered into being beside the King. “Who were the Elechlear?”
“Your tense confuses me.” Harbinger floated very still for a moment, and its empty eyes seemed to look elsewhere.
“The legend says they went to live among the stars, like the gods,” Donlan murmured. “And my Lord, you said as well that some of the Elechlear escaped their fate.”
“Isn’t it obvious,” said Vespia coldly, firing another methodical round at the most distant target, with the long-range tactical rifle she had not put down in some time.
Chalem nodded. “Allow me to finish the tale. In the years before the great war, one group of Elechlear abandoned their world in a fleet of magnificent starships, though they planned not to seek new homes. Those that escaped entered a state of hibernation, and their luxint-powered computer pilots, such as Harbinger, automatically returned them to Altum when it had become reasonably habitable again. Even millions of years after the Luxint Rays poisoned the world, the residual radiation killed many shortly upon arrival, but a rare few survived by the chance of their practices, and Altum was home again to Elechlear peoples, though they remembered little of their former civilization.
