Chris Willrich - [BCS314 S01] Read online

  “A key,” Bone murmured, pinning the last wrap. “It’s just a key.”

  “Words,” Gaunt said, patting his cold hand with a bandaged one, “are best reserved for what’s not obvious.”

  Bone kicked impromptu snowballs into the air with his right foot. This made his teeth chatter, as he was still missing a boot and had to make do with a goatskin shoe. “Maddening! We’re no closer to destroying the bane that we keep locked in Archaepolis. Meanwhile we have not a weapon but a mystery.” He raised Eyetooth. The sunlit metal glinted but revealed nothing.

  “A key implies a lock...” Gaunt noted.

  “I am certain there was no portal in that stone.”

  “A lock implies valuables...”

  There came a hint of a smile to Bone’s face, like the first note of morning birdsong.

  Gaunt added, “Perhaps the Vuuhrr weapon is not this key, but lies instead behind our hypothetical lock.”

  “Your Vuur...”

  “Vuuhrr.”

  “Yes, them. They had an odd sense of humor if so.”

  “Perhaps it was your skull friend’s true purpose that we find the lock.”

  Bone frowned. “Now that you mention it, a name returns to me... the Logos Lock. The skull spoke those words... I think...”

  “I have never heard of such a device.”

  “Nor I,” Bone confessed, “except that once. Now, it occurs to me I investigated the term on my occasional research jaunts, sneaking into the Biblioteca Asteria in Archaeopolis or the Caliph’s Library in Mirabad. No luck.”

  “You do know those libraries are famously accessible to the public?”

  “It’s the principle of the thing.”

  “I...” Her voice trailed off like a distracted mountaineer at the world’s edge.

  “What?”

  “Bone, you are waving the key...”

  “You say that like it’s some vulgar act.”

  “Bone, look at it.”

  He did. He stared. Then he twisted the key a trifle, to be sure of what he was seeing.

  Yes. Its shape changed.

  Held in one position, it was as he’d seen it before, a sapphire-eyed handle with seven prongs. As he turned the metal, the shape grew more complex, seven prongs branching into fourteen, then twenty-one, until he held what resembled a small metal tree...

  “Try reversing the movement,” Gaunt suggested.

  He did. The metal branchings raveled back to seven. He repeated these actions with the same results. “How can this be?” he marveled. “I see no seams, no hinges.”

  Gaunt peered, hawklike. “Try continuing the reversed movement.”

  Seven prongs flowed smoothly into one.

  “What are we dealing with?” Bone said.

  “Hush for a moment. Hold still. I must think.”

  He had learned it was wise to obey. He wanted to ask, How still? Could he scratch his aching nose? How quietly should he breathe? Were his thoughts inordinately loud, thoughts like How beautiful you look, standing there thinking? She was lovely, and his nose itched terribly. Life was like that, all glories and vexations...

  “Bone.”

  “Eh?”

  “I said, try shifting your body as you turn the key.”

  He did so, turning toward her. He gasped as the prongs separated from the handle entirely. They did not fall, however, but rather tracked his movement even as they doubled and tripled, the new divisions separating also. And it was as though his motion caused the metal rods to be blown upon a wind, for they fanned out to his right like a great wing sweeping toward Gaunt...

  “Bone, stop!”

  He froze, wishing he’d remembered to scratch his nose.

  Gaunt said, “Aim it elsewhere! On no account should you point the key directly at a sapient being. I am uncertain how much the shape can expand.”

  He turned away, spinning the key down to its basic proportions. “It stayed in one shape earlier. Why is it misbehaving now?”

  “I notice you have your thumb upon the sapphire.”

  After a little experimentation, Bone said, “Aha. Yes, touching the gem seems to awaken these strange properties. So... the key might conceivably stab someone from a distance?”

  “Disconcerting, how quickly you seize upon violent applications.”

  “I am a peaceable soul! I prefer all violence to be kept at one remove. Especially if I’m responsible for it.” He frowned. “But surely it can’t grow to gargantuan proportions. I’ve seen magic, even powerful magic. There are limits...”

  “Well, I’ve also seen a bit of magic. This seems different somehow. You see, the transitions between the key’s different states are seamless. With magic I would expect something more dramatic.”

  “Prismatic flashes, bone-jarring vibrations, ghostly choirs, that sort of thing?”

  “Yes. And more abrupt alterations. The way this key’s metal smoothly changes shape seems practically mundane.”

  “We must be using different definitions of ‘mundane,’ Gaunt.”

  She shook her head. “In my studies, Bone, I’ve read about the possibility of higher-dimensional objects. Complex forms that only partially impinge on our plane of existence. Such things might appear to change shape as different aspects of them pass through our familiar three-dimensional environment. They might even appear discontinuous. I venture Eyetooth is such an object. It may be that only its handle will remain consistent. Perhaps not even that.”

  He thought about this. “I understood perhaps every third word. But I think you are saying that the full extent of the object is impossible to know?”

  She nodded. “Its true mass may be mountainous.”

  He stared at it.

  She sighed. “Once again you are considering its use as a weapon.”

  “Actually, I was wondering if such a thing might be used to conveniently haul treasure. Though I can see advantages to hitting a foe with a portable mountain...”

  “Incorrigible. You are neglecting a more important question. What manner of lock requires a higher-dimensional key?”

  “One that guards a higher level of treasure?” Bone mused. “And my friend the skull wanted us to have that treasure, surely...”

  “I think we should get that corroboration I spoke of.”

  “And learn about this treasure, yes! I know just the people. They’re just over the hill in Loomsberg. Well, not people, precisely. And it’s probably more like a thousand hills.”

  She rolled her eyes but also drew the sign of the Swan Goddess over her heart. “Lead on, my bootless thief.”

  There was a kingdom of evil. No kingdom starts as a kingdom of evil, and many such find their way back to a modest and decent path after a few adolescent centuries of invasion, oppression, and architectural narcissism. But there are a few who walk the path to its end, like Jargoskaraklarga.

  As its statutorily beloved ruler Jargo XIII once said over the shallow grave of Jargo XII, “If there’s no god of evil, it’s necessary to invent him. This, then, is his first sacrifice.” Jargo XIII soon raised a hundred statues of Klarga, god of power and lamentation and doilies (doilies being something Jargo XII, the colossal slob, had forbidden.)

  “Someone seeks the First Prisoner, master,” Jargo XIII’s seagull, Johann Sebastian, told him from atop a doily set onto the head of a palladium bust of Klarga in Jargo’s sanctum. The god’s aquiline countenance looked grim as an executioner, stern as an inquisitor, smug as a card cheat. Jargo XIII, who aside from raw materials greatly resembled dread Klarga, thoughtfully smoked a pipe and carefully tapped the ashes into Klarga’s mouth. His salt-and-pepper beard was neat as a new arrowhead. His tanned bronze skin and fine physique were the result of the miniature sun in the left pocket of his black robe and the muscle-enhancing serum in his right. His shaved and tattooed head was a map of the world he meant to rule.

  “I beheld it in the daily augury,” the seagull went on. “I flew to the Temple of Slippery Truths myself and made sure they offered up a wi
zard this time.”

  “Anyone we know?”

  “It’s difficult to tell them apart from the inside.”

  Some preferred ravens for their lurking-assistant needs, but in Jargo XIII’s opinion such people had not made a proper study of seagulls. He reached across his soothingly tidy desk of teak imported from jungled Kpalamaa, lowered his hand into a tall box, and from it tossed the gull a miniaturized dissident. Puffing, Jargo XIII thoughtfully listened to the dissident’s tiny wails as the gull swallowed it, the renowned author of Jargo XII, a Tragical History in Five Acts and One Axe.

  “You cannot be serious, Johann Sebastian,” Jargo XIII said. “The pathways are all watched.”

  “I have no sense of humor, nor irony,” said the seagull with a belch. “I have consumed so many sublime souls that if such could rub off upon me, they already would have. Do you have more playwrights?”

  Jargo consulted the box. “Only a couple of rogue generals.”

  “Chewy,” the seagull squawked. “Perhaps later.”

  “I’d best find another hive of rebellion soon. Where is the key now?”

  “The entrails place it in the mountains along Eldshore’s eastern border.”

  “We may yet have time. Attend.”

  First, Jargo found a flask of bubbling blue slime and drank. Next he opened a beaker and set it upon the stone floor. Last he climbed onto the desk, raised a vial of transparent liquid, and sipped. He quivered, shook, and shrank, a mass of writhing red mist peeling off him and shuddering into the beaker, where it congealed and frothed, somehow conveying the attitude of a newly caged animal.

  Jargo, or to be precise a perfect homunculus of Jargo bearing a compressed version of the true Jargo’s brain, now took up much less of the desktop, for he was half the size of a common quill. The froth in the beaker contained enough of his memories to form a substitute Jargo should the homunculus not return. But there was little worry of that.

  “I take it,” the seagull said, “the blue stuff is a loathsome poison to which only you are immune.”

  “Indeed,” said the tiny Jargo. “You have an appetite.”

  “I was merely observing. When you are ready to die, you’ll stop being cautious. All beings secretly want what’s coming to them, as I remind myself when my food shrieks. I assume we are intercepting these interlopers at Starfang?”

  “Without delay. A way of life is at stake.” He waved gallantly to his errant generals in the box as he strode to the bust of the god of evil and climbed the steps carved into the neck. From there he mounted the seagull. With a flick of his hand the window to his sanctum opened, and out over the garden of carnivorous plants, the death maze, the gladiatorial slave pits, and the Golden Marketplace for Very Good Citizens and Their Pets, Jargo XIII flew and saw that the order of things was good and well worth sacrificing others to protect.

  Far to the south gleamed a tower room domed with crystal hexagons, with an expanse of savanna and jungle and sky shining in every direction but below, where a graceful golden city rose like waves of stone-and-metal wheat.

  But the many-voiced argument humming against the domed roof was anything but graceful.

  “The Four Skulls Society will ravage our coast, and there you sit, talking naval doctrine—”

  “Pirates have been bought off before and will again! Our coffers—”

  “Buying them off just encourages them to come back, year after year. The navy—”

  “Is fully occupied with the eruption of the Hellmaw supervolcano, the sixth clutch of the Antarctic Icewinders, and the rising of the Octoqueen’s lost island—”

  “Just how many times must a lost island rise before we can at least consider it found? I—”

  A tall dark woman stepped forward from the shadows, previously unseen, a sack slung nonchalantly over one shoulder. Though the council that half-ringed her was slightly elevated upon five chairs of ivory, the sudden silence underscored that she in truth was their equal.

  “You have a mission?” she asked. In the dome’s light her coiled black hair glinted with flecks of sunlight as if reflecting some fiery animation within her. Her brown face was marked with freckles.

  “We may,” said the ebon man in the central seat. With his long black beard and his hair like a thundercloud and his flowing golden robe, he was an imposing presence. He gestured, and the magic embedded in the dome overhead responded. Sunlight twisted, and the ghostly image of a mountaintop appeared in the chamber’s midst. A black rectangular slab jutted from its crystal summit.

  “The tomb of the First Prisoner,” the tall woman said in recognition, “sealed by the Logos Lock.”

  “You know of it?” The council leader sounded chagrined, as though he’d been hoping to surprise her.

  She chuckled. “O mighty Ghana of Kpalamaa, in the service of your predecessors I’ve walked upon the Heavenwalls of far Qiangguo, sipped mare’s milk with the nomadic Karvaks, dwelled long enough among the barbarians of Swanisle to be ordained a very priestess of their Goddess. Yes, I’ve heard of the First Prisoner.”

  “My apologies. Without preamble, then: the key has been taken.”

  “Indeed? How long until the key-finders reach the summit?”

  “Unclear. They are not participants we were aware of.”

  “How quickly might I reach it?”

  “Are you still rated to ride an Olitiau?”

  “Of course.”

  “Under ideal conditions, astride our finest Olitiau, it will take twenty days. Conditions are unlikely to be ideal. And you will be alone, with only what you can carry. Up against unknown adversaries armed with Eyetooth.”

  She smiled. “What are the council’s wishes?”

  The Ghana stroked his chin and studied the sky. “This is the most powerful, most civilized, most stable nation the world has ever known.” He stared directly into her eyes. “Kill anyone you have to, to keep it that way. Kill them twice if necessary. Do you feel up to it?”

  Wordlessly she hauled up the sack and flung it. Things clattered forth, shattering into white fragments amid gasps.

  “What?” said the Ghana, his composure gone. “What are...”

  “The skulls of the four most powerful pirate captains,” Eshe of the Whispering Hunt told them. “It seemed only appropriate. I don’t think the Society will be back for a while.”

  To their silent stares she added, “Well, I’d have given you their heads, but boiling them down to four skulls was more practical for a long journey. And more poetic. And you’re welcome. Where’s my Olitiau?”

  There was a cavern much closer to the surface than Eyetooth’s former shelter. When sorcerers of this place performed great works, the sunlit world spoke of earthquakes, stampedes, and the wrath of forgotten gods.

  In a chamber in the fastness called Ebontide, the sorceress Sarcopia Vorre paced over a floor pattern of eight shining colors plus a black region that seemed a wedge of purest void. As she glared at her councilors, her face was awash with sanguine red, icy green, swirling purple, smoky orange, exquisite turquoise, sickly yellow, gleaming crystal, stormy ocean blue.

  A white raven crouched upon her shoulder. With the colors swirling over it, it studied the councilors as though counting eyeballs.

  “Am I to understand, Lord Raz,” said Sarcopia, “that someone plucked Eyetooth without anyone noticing?” She had a complexion that made people think of winter avalanches, salt mines, and bones. As such, she was a good canvas for the mad colors rioting across her features.

  Though his neighbors flinched, Sarcopia’s spymaster responded in a voice of nearly supernatural calm. “We noticed, and alerted you at once.” He was a lean, dark-bearded, genial-seeming man who looked tanned beside Sarcopia. He possessed an air of nonchalant competence that held true whether fencing verbally in the council chamber or kinetically in a moonlit alley with a dozen blades aimed at his heart. “Our spells upon the key were negated when the ferret-like thief plucked it. His accomplice was a red-haired woman wise in lore.
Yet she seemed unaware of Eyetooth’s nature.”

  “Mm.” Sarcopia twisted one of her locks. Her hair was a shade that, away from the lights of this chamber, reminded observers of blood and funeral pyres. “Daring. I respect that. I may recruit them. Otherwise, they will die. Loremistress, you say they are not magic-workers?”

  A willowy, elegant woman, with close-cropped brown hair and skin like Sarcopia’s if Sarcopia ever saw the sun, answered. “I cannot prove a negative.” There was a certain regality to Lady Cynthia of the Dark Archives that remained constant whether she was reading diplomatic missives from the Earthe’s other face, leading raids against the Stygian Weavers of the deep caverns, or pounding back shots of Old Boggargle. Her gaze held a piercing intelligence that could even make Sarcopia blink. “All I can affirm is that they are not on the Ledger. This would seem in line with the spymaster’s report.” She and Lord Raz shared a fleeting nod of collegial respect, unusual in this chamber of intrigue.

  “Then,” Sarcopia said, “there is a chance they have reached Eyetooth unknowingly, and are uncertain of its powers. Master of Sacrifices, I must reach the First Prisoner swiftly, to fight for our future.”

  There came an aggressive sibilance from a dark corner of the chamber. “A living being cannot transit through the Warpweft, great one! Even a non-corporeal sapience will lose cohesion. We have tried—”

  “Regret!” cried the white raven, looking hungry.

  “But,” the voice continued swiftly, “your bird can be there in twenty days.”

  “Wish to be rid of it, do you?” purred Sarcopia.

  “Eyeballs!” said the raven.

  The shadowy form of the Master of Sacrifices seemed to find a bit of dust in one eye. “Ah, if we dispatch sufficient peasants... we can invoke the Form of Coruscating Mentality and bond your essence to an elegant conveyance around the raven’s neck. You may reconstitute at your destination.”

  “Yes. Uncomfortable but effective. See it done. Round up as many sacrifices as you can from the surface realms, to spare my own citizens. For mine is an enlightened rule. Lady Cynthia, Lord Raz. Your skills may prove valuable. Prepare yourselves to join me in dis-corporation. Master of Sacrifices, ready the conveyance and whet the knives. A world is at stake.”