Void Spheres, page 14
Smallwolf had graduated from a well-respected academy in the Kingdoms. Her training was likely inferior to, say, Cat’s—who had graduated from the Navy academy in the High Court—but she had a complete and competent education.
That education had never touched on self-sufficient pre-patterned constructs.
Armand smiled to himself as he saw Brushfire’s focus glow softly with power. The pieces fell into place slowly—this was the first time she’d done anything like this, after all—but fall into place they did.
And a show-me-once student was as capable of learning from others’ mistakes as she was of learning from seeing it done right. Brushfire took her time, but the will-o’-the-wisp construct was perfect, flitting to and fro about the shielded space while the three var watched it.
“Now.”
Armand half-whispered the word, knowing that Brushfire was waiting for it. Even expecting the next step and shielding against it, he still found himself blinking away afterimages once the brilliant blaze of light filled the room.
“I’m not the teacher, but that seemed closer,” Smallwolf said drily. “Or so I will guess, once I can see again.”
“The shield would prevent more than a moment of confusion, Officer Smallwolf,” Armand noted, his own vision returning to normal. “And yes, that was roughly what we’re after. A light source as we move and a first defense if the wraiths strike.
“Alloy’s lanterns are one thing, but they do require a touch more than a thought and a gesture. Any group with our mages should be fine, but the readier we are…”
“The safer our people are,” Smallwolf finished, which brought a smile to Armand’s face.
He’d expected that response from one of them, but he was a touch surprised the elvar had got it out first.
“Exactly,” he told her. “If we have these long stretches of time in the void, without even work on the engines to distract us all, then training may serve us well once we reach the Home.”
“Letting the crewvar get bored is a bad idea,” Brushfire rumbled. “But the ship’s Masters are on that. Letting us get bored, well.”
She chuckled.
“There is always something for a ship’s officers to be doing, but training is on that list. And, as Smallwolf notes, it falls to us as the mages aboard to do all we can to protect our crew.”
And vice versa, as Armand understood it. There were also, he suspected, officers who focused on the crew-protecting-them aspect of the deal… but he also suspected that Cat Greentrees would never have hired an officer like that.
The entire concept would probably offend Armand’s Captain, and that, the archmage knew, was why his people would follow Cat to the ends of the spheres.
He just wished, some days, that he didn’t need Cat to lead them there.
Chapter
Twenty-Three
Unlike a worldlet or a rock, a lodeplate didn’t rotate around any kind of axis. A worldlet in a sphere lit by a crystal or an ember had a definite day and night. Only in outerlit spheres, where light came in from every side, did worldlets approach the eternal day of a lodeplate’s upper side.
The lower side of a lodeplate was a different story, and Cat stared bleakly at the rocky and lifeless underside of the Home. Leagues upon leagues of stone drifted away as far as the eye could see as they approached the lodeplate, but while few plants and animals thrived on the underside of a plate, the hands of var had been at work beneath the Home.
The High Court was the same, with towers and fortresses and manufactories rising from places no one would seek to live. So long as a significant population of aethervar—those who could breathe aether—was available, the underside of a plate was a fantastic place to put any industry that would create sights or smells no one wanted.
That was part of how the High Court’s lodeplates remained pristine, with even the most developed having dozens or hundreds of leagues of nearly untouched wilderness.
The Home, however, seemed to concentrate as much industry onto its underside as all sixteen of the High Court’s plates managed. There were few natural tors or mountains in what he could see. Everything looked like it had suffered the touch of pickax and explosive.
Massive plateaus and clear fields had been forged by mortal hands, open spaces swiftly consumed by buildings of a thousand types. Massive chimneys marked foundries and other industrial sites—and Cat knew to look for the sites where long-gone balloons had marked the deliveries of air from the other side.
The var could breathe aether and work in it, but many of the processes necessary to work metal and lodestone itself still required air. The chimneys would sweep the byproducts up in the air and spew it out into the aether, well away from the plate.
“We’re coming up on the horizon,” he warned the other var in the control room. Cat knew that not only had none of his officers seen the High Court, none of his crew had.
He was the only person aboard Void Flyer with any existing experience of the vagaries of a lodeplate. He kept his hands on the wheel as the ship headed toward the edge.
They were moving relatively slowly, a sedate league every two minutes, but the edge of the plate was coming up quickly. It was hard for an unpracticed eye to see, too, with the light from the ember at the heart of the sphere blazing around its rim.
“I make it less than a league,” Streamwater confirmed, the second officer keeping her hands on the sextant. “Can’t see much of the underside anymore.”
The Ironhands had left—or created; he wasn’t entirely sure—a perimeter of raw rock and mountains on the lip of the lodeplate. From a league beneath the plate, they could easily see past it into the vast fields of factories.
As they approached the horizon, more and more of the undersettlement became invisible behind that semi-natural barrier. Then that barrier was all he could see—and it was blending into and lost against the league-and-a-half-thick presence of the Home itself, a continent floating in the open void.
As they rose past the lodeplate, the haloing effect of looking at the ember past the continent reduced, and Cat could turn his focus to the world they were now above.
“Give me a ten-second burn on the engines on my command,” he told Streamwater. The helm answered easily to his hands, practiced now at maneuvering the strange ship, and he sent a trickle of power to the lift crystals to align her.
“Burn… now,” he ordered.
The burn shed much of their remaining speed, now away from their destination, and sent them drifting across the vast plain of the Home.
As he’d expected, the surface looked like it had been quite different from the underside. Since then, of course, everything in IronHome had died.
The Home hadn’t been left as untouched as the High Court plates were, Cat observed. Where he could see open spaces, it felt clear that they’d been farms rather than parks.
As they rose farther above the IronHome capital, he noted three key things.
The first was that it very much felt like every part of the lodeplate had been given a specific purpose and built to it. In hindsight, he’d seen the districting pattern on the underside, but the underplate was an industrial zone.
The surface was an entire nation. He could see half a dozen cities already, and he didn’t have the angle to see clearly across the entire plate. But if there had been old roads or buildings shaped by the wandering of grazers, at some point in the past they’d been overwritten with a perfect grid, with everything from farms to residential streets clearly shaped to it.
The second thing he noted was the fortifications. Some of them were subtler than others, but it was far beyond the defenses around the rim of the plate that he’d expected. Four floating fortresses, smaller versions of the Seventh Ward in Brokenwright, hung in the skies above the Home. Forts and towers littered the outside of the plate.
Even beyond those, though, were the small and medium fortifications woven through the grid. Patrol stations. Watchtowers. Midsized forts anchoring small villages. It was quite unlike the High Court, where the Navy was a source of pride—and the Guard were rarely mentioned and almost never seen.
There were watch stations and exterior forts on the High Court plates, he was sure, but they would never have been this obvious, this integrated into everything. Not only had the people of the Home always had soldiers within a few hours’ march at worst, they had known it.
With those people long dead, he couldn’t ask if any of them had found that reassuring—or if they’d found the third thing he’d noticed reassuring, either.
At the center of the lodeplate rose a single stark white mountain. The mountain was probably natural, he figured, but the color was likely the result of immense magic. No natural structure of that size was just one color—unless someone with a great deal of power had decided that it was going to be.
An immense city sprawled around the foot of that mountain, all of it either built from white stone or whitewashed, and he could see several spots on the mountain he figured were airship docks.
“I don’t think we even need to consult the cards,” he said aloud. “Unless the archmage finds some good reason we shouldn’t be going there, I think that mountain is the destination.”
Because if that mountain wasn’t the heart of the Home and the Imperium, the capital and center of everything the Ironhand Dynasty had done and been, he’d eat the damn thing.
The presence of air made the flight across the continent more complicated than it might have been. Cat could have just tilted the rocket and sped up, crossing five hundred leagues in a couple of hours.
The need to get above the air envelope and safely descend through it meant that the thousand-league journey would take them over a clock-day. Somehow, Cat didn’t find the fact that nothing changed in that time particularly reassuring.
“No life,” Brushfire said quietly, standing at his shoulder as they finally descended toward the mountain. “Barely any wind, even, from what I can see. I know we keep asking this, but what happened here?”
“Nothing good,” Cat murmured. He glanced away from the mountain, back toward the ember lighting it. “Armand says there is something wrong with the ember, and he’s right. Every part of this sphere is wrong.”
“Something ate the aether and the life here,” his first officer said. “Yeah. Wrong fits.”
He shook his head, surveying the city sweeping out beneath them.
“There,” he said. “You see it?”
“The big plaza someone cut into the mountain?” Brushfire asked.
It might have been natural, but Cat doubted it. Easily a cable across and twice that deep, the cut was a sharp-sided flat area near the base of the white mountain. It aligned perfectly with the grid elements that defined the entire plate, with a major thoroughfare connecting directly to it.
Someone had decided it was a show of power and wealth to just have a two-hundred-yard-wide open space they’d carved out of the mountain. It was flat and open, smooth and polished on all sides, but with nothing in the middle to complicate their landing.
“The plaza is hard to miss, and it’s the right size and place. If we want to just… land in the front yard of this place, anyway.”
“We are flying a two-hundred-yard-high vessel that moves by literally lighting hundreds of gallons of alcohol on fire and blasting the result out a narrow hole,” Cat pointed out. “Even in aether, we can be heard from leagues away.
“Coming into a city with an air envelope?” He shook his head. “I don’t think it will matter if we land in the plaza or on the outskirts of the city. Anybody in the mountain is going to know we’re here.”
“Fair. Then we land in the plaza and see what we find,” she told him. “What happens if it’s more wraiths?”
He grimaced as she put his own fears into words.
“Everyone on this ship who can do a divination says there are answers here we need,” he noted. “That level of consistency and guidance is… concerning in itself, but it’s very clear.
“If we haven’t found any answers and the wraiths show up here, then we secure the ship and find a way to push through them.” He shook his head. “It won’t be easy, but I think we can do it.”
“What if…” Brushfire trailed off, and he turned to look at her when she didn’t complete her thought.
“Brushfire, you’re my first officer for a lot of reasons,” he murmured softly, so only she could hear him. “And one of those reasons is that you have a different background from the rest of my officers. Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I don’t know enough about the divinations we’re using to know, but is it possible that all of our divinations are being guided somehow?” Brushfire asked. “That the reason every divination we do says we have to come here, have to learn something here… is because someone wants us to be here? In this mountain?
“Because it’s a trap?”
Cat paused on his initial response to her first question as she continued her reasoning, then swallowed everything he’d been thinking. Many things were supposed to be impossible, but…
“Divinations can be blocked,” he noted slowly. “I’ve never heard of them being guided like that—and I would assume that no one could so influence the workings of an archmage.
“Yet… I have also never heard of magic that could tear all life and aether from an entire sphere, let alone four. I didn’t think of that chance—even the dangers here seem unthinking.”
“Unthinking, maybe, but so are the constructs Armand is teaching us to conjure,” Brushfire reminded him. “And I wonder if that’s… almost what we’re looking at? Armand said it was a manifestation of the spell that created this place, but it has become some kind of self-sustaining construct.
“And we can teach those constructs patterns, actions and responses that can almost fool someone into thinking they’re alive.”
“I want to say that no construct could weave a deception of that scale,” Cat said slowly. He wanted to be skeptical of Brushfire’s fears, but his paranoia had picked up her cause.
“But I can also see a trap like that being laid and a construct simply being part of it,” he continued. “Those same divinations, though, told us going forward without learning what was hidden here would doom us.
“That, too, may be a lie—but we must seek the answers nonetheless.” He held out his hand to her and grinned as she clasped his forearm.
“But we can make very sure we’re ready for a trap, can’t we?”
What she was suggesting was beyond anything he had ever known of magic.
But so were the void spheres themselves!
Chapter
Twenty-Four
The plaza was spectacular. Brushfire wasn’t, as a rule, particularly interested in anything that wasn’t practical, but she had to admit to the austere grandeur of the place.
At its deepest point, the plaza cut into over a hundred yards of stone, the walls as sharp and straight as any blade she’d ever seen. On the outside, the lower slopes of the mountain rose up toward it, with a paved roadway leading through the town right to it.
The ground had been covered in perfectly fitted white stones, placed so close together that it was easy to miss that no stone was the same size as the ones surrounding it. Each stone had been placed and shaped by hand, even as powerful magic had cut away the mountain itself to create the space for it.
And there was nothing in the plaza. Void Flyer had landed near the entrance to the cut, giving the crew a clear view out over the long-dead city. Looking toward the mountain, there was simply the expanse of white stone, still gleaming somehow after a thousand dances like it had been polished yesterday.
“If there was nothing else blatantly wrong about all of this, the fact that everything is still perfectly clean makes no cursed sense,” Paintrock said loudly. The elvar was standing with Fistfall and Smallwolf, the trio hanging just behind Brushfire in case something tried to jump the first officer on a dead lodeplate.
“Guess everything that would make it dirty is also dead?” Smallwolf asked. “That seems…”
“Thorough,” Brushfire said quietly. She surveyed the crew. Most were going to stay with the ship and were setting up Bellowforge’s lanterns and similar defenses.
“What killed everything here was very thorough,” she repeated, “but I’d expect that wind alone would leave some dirt on all this white.”
As if to prove her point, a chill breeze cut in from the city and sent a shiver down her spine. There was less dust on it than there should be—Paintrock definitely had a point—but it wasn’t just air, either.
“There is magic bound into these stones,” Armand told her, the archmage stepping up to join her. “It’s faint, long worn away, but what’s left may still be enough to repel dirt.”
“Does this whole affair seem as over the top to you as it does to me?” she asked the archmage.
The chubby halvar looked over to meet her gaze and shrugged, his expression somewhat embarrassed.
“I helped build something about as outrageous for the Shining King as one of my first contracts after my Trial,” he admitted. “And the Shining King only rules one sphere. A wealthy, powerful and independent sphere, but just one.
“The Ironhand Dynasty may have ruled more than we still know exists. So, yes, this is grand and pointless and a waste of space in many ways… but it served a purpose, and I have seen almost as foolish created by those with less to support it.”
“The High Court has similar places,” Cat added. The Captain was trailed by half a dozen var with halberd-wands as he joined them. The var were a mix of the two races aboard Flyer—which was the point of the halberds, to allow a group of mixed var to have comparable reach and armament.
“I don’t think we often magically transmute the mountains to white marble, but I cannot be certain we have never done it,” he admitted with a wry tilt to his smile.
