011 – Cataract

***

We pulled our raft out of the water at the break of dawn. Rocks and boulders jutted from the Spitpoison River ahead of us and formed a swirling cataract. A larger boat could cross the turbulent waters, but a cork raft made by goblins would burst apart. We didn’t risk it. Instead we decided to haul the thing a few kilometers overland to the end of the rapids. The devil-birds hunted in the morning, which made it a good time to quit the open waters.

I tied a rope around the raft and pulled it like a sled. It scraped along the turf and got caught on every root and rock along the way. A long path of flattened weeds marked my passage.

“You’re so slow and clumsy, novice. I should have kept those mercenaries alive for this sort of brute labor.”

“Sorry. I’m still a little stiff. After somebody paralyzed me. With snake venom.”

“Don’t hold a grudge for that. It helped with your training, didn’t it? And you should feel honored I let you experience one of my secret techniques. Since you might use that knowledge to create an antidote, it shows a great amount of trust on my part.”

“Trust. Or you think I’m too weak to be a threat to you.”

“But you have strong potential to be a threat. Those are the best sorts of people to cut down early.”

These sword maniacs were paranoid as well as psychotic. And sadistic. Malisent subjected me to a brutal training regime, alternating between exhausting exercises and incredibly dull meditations. My predecessor had no skills here, because he only had a spark, not a fire. He didn’t know magic. And although he excelled at meditating for hours on end, he possessed the natural advantage of being a complete idiot. With no thoughts cluttering up the place, clearing his mind took almost no effort.

In the end, I could make the lumestone glimmer on command. All that pain for a flashlight.

“Get down, novice,” Malisent commanded.

I dropped the raft and crouched near a tree. The skies above looked clear. I saw no devil-birds soaring above us or leafy treetops swaying in the wind.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“Orma tastes blood in the air.”

I inhaled. The atmosphere near the river was thick with moisture and carried the smell of damp vegetation. I did not have sharp enough senses to taste blood, but I could detect a faint scent.

“Smoke. There must be a campfire nearby.”

We crept closer to the center of the rapids. Along the shore, a flat table of stone supported a fortified camp. Upright logs formed a pallisade wall that encircled a thatched roof building. It looked sturdier than the goblins’ reed huts, but no more well made. This was the handiwork of some brutish monsters.

For several minutes we waited, staring out from the underbrush at the camp. Nothing stirred within. No plumes of smoke rose from the building, but the smell lingered in the air. A great number of black birds with saw-toothed beaks perched atop the walls and scared off any other scavengers attracted by the smell of blood. The place looked recently abandoned.

The front gate of the camp had fallen inward. In the small courtyard within the walls, birds pecked away at about a dozen corpses. They ruffled their feathers as we approached and let out shrill screeches. The black birds did an admirable job picking the bodies to bloody skeletons, which made the differences between human and monster less obvious. Small tusks and horns showed they had belonged to trolls.

These feathered scavengers were not responsible for the carnage. They showed up after a battle to clean up the mess. Many of the corpses had been mutilated or split in two. Others had holes drilled through their skulls. Powerful enemies had wiped out the camp in moments.

“Greeth and Veylien. Those traitors! They came through here days ago. They must have decided to take the same route as us after the horses went missing.” Malisent kicked a rock at the saw-toothed birds and they scattered noisily.

“Will we catch up to them?”

“No. Neither of them is wounded. They’ll outpace us on foot.”

This small outpost on the river belonged to the same tribe of trolls from the power station. Most tribes of trolls lived in very remote spots on the continent, rarely encountering humans. But under strong leadership, they would attack human settlements and caravans. Browsk lead his tribe to distant areas to raid. The trolls traveled down the river and out into Brimwater Gulf, and they returned up the river with their stolen goods. At the rapids, they would carry their boats over the portage to this small outpost.

The trolls hijacked boats from humans, which were better than anything they could craft themselves. This building was a storehouse for canoes and skiffs. But everything useful inside had been burnt to ashes. A ragged hole in the roof let daylight spill down on the ruined hulls and burnt up sails.

“This is Veylien’s doing. She’s trying to make my escape as difficult as possible.”

“How would she know you escaped? Wouldn’t this be to fend off the trolls?”

“She doesn’t care about a few trolls in a raiding party. Look how quickly they dispatched them. This is a way to sabotage my standing in the Void Cult. She’ll deliver a report to the dark lord with her own version of events.”

“Office politics, huh? Sounds nasty.”

I was glad the two other witches raced ahead of us, as I didn’t want to be near Veylien and Malisent when they finally met. It was bound to explode into violence.

Gritha and Veylien had claimed one of the rowboats before setting the place ablaze. With it, they would beat our dinky raft down river. And with food supplies, they would not have to stop to hunt, fish, or gather wild herbs. This irritated Malisent to no small degree. She hated losing in any sort of competition, not just fights.

The camp held nothing more for us, so we continued to drag our humble vessel over the shore. We plopped the raft in the calmer waters on the south side of the rapids.

“Damn that woman. I wish some of those trolls were alive for me to vent my anger on,” Malisent fumed. I rowed us out into the Spitpoison.

“You need to learn some anger management techniques. And conflict resolution skills. Maybe I can teach you some of the lost arts of therapy. ‘Cause you sure need some.”

“I resolve conflicts better than anyone as long as there’s a blade in my hand.”

“That is not healthy,” I said. “I can actually feel the heat coming off you right now.”

“Good. Your training is making you more aware of the spiritual realm. Sensing another swordsman’s intent will keep you alive.”

The meaning of the words ‘spirit’ and ‘magic’ had baffled me at first, but after several days of lessons under my short tempered instructor, I figured out more or less what she was talking about. Magic roughly related to the subjects my generation would have called aetherics and daemonics, the use of mana and lunar daemons.

Both Ancient aetherics and modern magic required material objects to work. Mana did not have an independent existence, it flowed through matter, welling up from the planetary core, through the stone, the sea, the sky. It swirled on currents through the air. More complex aetheric constructs needed objects with crystalline structures to bind them in place, usually gemstones and metal. When cut free from their physical anchors, runes and daemons quickly evaporated into nothingness. They could continue for, at best, a minute. That fact hadn’t changed.

The central distinction between the old and new technology, was that the magi used their own bodies as physical anchors instead of machines. I formerly believed that to be impossible, but could not deny the evidence in front of me. What the magi called the ‘inner fire’ was some type of aetheric organ controlled by the human mind. This fire could directly manipulate spiritual things. It allowed them to store mana like a battery and then release that mana to create real world effects, such as lighting up a lumestone or igniting a fire.

Aetherics used runes to shape mana into useful purposes. The real runes were invisible, but we usually placed corresponding symbols on the devices so that users and technicians could see how they worked. Runes were bound in arrays, circles or strips of metal and gems. Arrays could be small, on a hand held instrument, or very large, such as the arrays beneath the power station. Since many arrays were inscribed on crystals, it was conceivable a few technological remnants survived to the modern day. But Malisent didn’t know anything about them, which made me assume that such knowledge was uncommon or entirely lost. Magi did not use aetheric runes, but performed like feats with their inner fires.

Daemonics was a newer branch of aetherics, only a few hundred years old at the time of my birth. Scientists had long known that the moon had a radically different environment than our planet. It had a hot temperature, an unbreathable atmosphere, very little water, and no living things—an absolute desert. But we later found its aetherics were alien as well, with a different set of essences and no mana. We constructed a large research device in the center of the continent to study the moon and snatch little pieces back to the earth. The lunar conduit. That’s how we discovered daemons.

Daemons were like living runes, capable of sensing and reacting to their environment. They had innumerable uses for controlling machinery and manipulating mana. The most advanced could operate golems. But the fragile things could only be bound in specially made cores of quartz. Daemons also needed additional runes inscribed into their cores to give them instructions, otherwise they would do random things or not act at all. Daemons were finicky but useful.

People in the modern era knew of the existence of daemons but had limited means to control them. They also thought of them as living creatures instead of aetheric constructs. Somehow the modern daemons had grown strong enough to inhabit other objects, such as a large golden head or Malisent’s snake or even people.

As much as I disliked meditation and breathing exercises, this new brand of ‘magic’ was a tremendous discovery. I wished I had the community and resources of the Research Society at my disposal to study these new phenomena. Until I had some better way to study it, Malisent’s lessons were better than nothing. Her methods relied on feeling and instinct and repetition. All practice no theory. It was true that you couldn’t learn to swim from a book, but on the other hand, you couldn’t become a marine biologist by swimming at the beach.

I spent days on the raft pondering these topics. Truthfully, thinking about technical matters was a way to expel the darker thoughts plaguing me. Escaping the power station had been so hectic it gave no chance for me to stop and dwell on my problems. But on the wilderness trek I had plenty of time to brood. All my friends and family had died tens of thousands of years ago. I was completely alone, a stranger to everyone in this era. The metropolis fell, leaving me no home to return to. The world had become a bleak wasteland of monsters and flesh eating murderers. I couldn’t live in a place like this. And to top it off, I was in the company of a sociopathic woman with unnatural strength and a bad attitude.

The future looked awful for me. So I tried to distract myself by thinking about science.

“There’s still a lot about this magic business I just don’t get. Lots of questions. Are there any experts out there? Professors or universities?”

“Don’t turn around,” Malisent said.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m washing my clothes and hair.”

Her wet shirt flopped on the raft next to me. It wasn’t easy living on a two by three meter chunk of cork with another human. We had little in the way of privacy. I faced down stream and kept my eyes on the horizon.

“So are there any experts in magic? Professionals?”

“Yes. They’re called magical swordsmen.”

“I mean are there any experts without the sword part? Researchers. Crafters. Are there any people who create magical objects?”

“Of course. The civilized nations have many magical smiths.” The boat shook as she used the logs as a washboard. I perked up at this news.

“What sort of devices do they make?”

“Swords.”

“Ugh. You people are obsessed. I’m going to have decode this all by myself, aren’t I?”

“Worry about the basics, novice. You can do your antique magic later. And don’t turn your head or Orma will bite.” She took off her sling and threw it on the raft. Her arm had healed to the point she no longer needed it.

“I’m not turning anything, sister. Don’t flatter yourself.”

Malisent was an attractive woman. All three of the witches were, which was part of the reason I had thought them to be a troupe of dancers at first sight. Maybe they only let good looking people join the witch school, or perhaps a few extra eons of natural selection had weeded out all the uglies and Malisent was totally average. After more than a week of sharing a raft with her and enduring her lessons and watching her scarf down dead animal organs, her beauty had lost its luster in my eyes, and I was not tempted to steal a glance at her nakedness.

It would have been better if I had. My eyes stayed glued to the path ahead, and she bent over the side of the raft washing her long, curly hair. Neither one of us kept an eye on our surroundings. It was the middle of the day, not the customary hour for the devil-birds to hunt, and so we dropped our guards.

A massive impact snapped apart the vine-ropes that held our watercraft together. The raft burst to pieces. I flew a meter in the air and came down with a splash in the river. When my head broke the surface, no monstrous birds flew over the river. No monster was in sight at all. Whatever hit us had come up from below.

Malisent gasped for air nearby, among the drifting logs. Her hair was slicked back against her scalp. Washing her hair had unexpectedly turned into a full bath.

“Swim for shore! I’ll distract it,” she shouted.

I still hadn’t seen anything but did not wait around to find out what happened. I swam toward the shore. The gray water of the Spitpoison hid everything below me. Horrifying monsters could be lurking below, and I wouldn’t know it. Starfish, crayfish, jellyfish, hagfish: the water contained all kinds of gross animals even before they mutated into monsters.

Behind me, the water burst up again. I turned around to see a huge dome rise from the river. At first, it looked like a the hump of a whale, but then the water spilled away from the shell of a giant turtle the size of a bus. The turtle’s head emerged and chomped onto one of the cork logs. The monster’s sharp teeth that could have easily bitten me in half. Horns and spikes grew from its skull. The turtle did not find the log pleasing and spit it out with distaste.

I now knew what lurked underwater. A giant turtle was less disgusting than other options, but I was not particularly happy to see it. I swam as fast as possible.

My soaking clothes dragged against me as I waded onto a rocky beach. My clothes and the lumestone in my coat pocket were all I had. The bag and tent and food and supplies went overboard. The paddle floated away and the polearm sank. We lost it all.

The monster dove below and breached the surface several more times. It snapped its mighty jaws on the logs. The huge turtle did not have good eyesight, so it could not distinguish the broken raft from the passengers. It finally sank underwater and did not return. A minute later, Malisent trudged out of the water and wiped off her face. She had her sword in hand. The metal weapon sank like a rock, which meant she dove all the way to the river bottom to retrieve it.

Malisent hadn’t gone overboard entirely naked, but her wet underclothes covered very little. She breathed heavily, her chest rising and falling. Her eyes practically glowed with a cold rage. A dark energy spilled out from her soul fire.

“I didn’t mean to look. I didn’t see anything. I’ve already forgotten it. Don’t get mad at me; that turtle wasn’t my fault.” I held my hands in front of my face to shield my eyes.

“I am going to kill that woman,” she hissed.

At least her venom wasn’t directed at me. Her hatred for Veylien eclipsed all other annoyances. Orma the snake slithered across the water and returned to Malisent’s arm. I wrung out my coat and handed it over. While the coat was a tad too short for total modesty, it was better than the alternative. I still had to avert my eyes and spend a lot of time staring up at the clouds.

“Now we don’t have a raft or any supplies. Things went from worse to worse,” I said.

“We’re almost to the abandoned settlement. We can reach it by morning if we march through the night,” she said.

“What good is a settlement with no people?”

“None. It’s in our way. But from there we may be able to signal a ship on the gulf to pick us up.”

“Uh. May I ask why the settlement was abandoned?”

“Because it’s teeming with undead. You’ll feel right at home, ghost.”