037 – Skin

***

When the great disaster struck the continent, it forced humanity to flee to the ocean islands. The survivors arrived there in small numbers. Inbreeding depression would have been a major problem for several generations until the population grew larger. Those genetic bottlenecks would have caused what's known as ‘founder effect.’ If a boatload of fat people landed at one island, their descendants would be typically overweight. If a boat of fair skinned people founded another, their descendants would also be paler than average. Because these groups remained isolated for thousands of years, confined to small gene pools, they developed into ethnicities with distinct phenotypes.

…and that was through the normal course of evolution, without considering any funny business by daemonic possession.

To the modern people, things had always been that way; to me, it was very strange. People from all over came to colonies on the continent, and then they intermingled after a few generations. So, the average person from Sandgrave ended up resembling their Ancient ancestors: slightly dusky skin, brown hair, brown eyes. We were boring and normal compared to the exotic weirdos that inhabited the civilized islands.

The Void Phantoms were a highly mixed group. Every ethnicity was represented here. This mattered little to the Faceless, because most of them had grown up in the cult with their faces hidden behind skull masks. But it was more significant for the officers who had joined later in life and for the hired work crews, who segregated themselves by national origin. Everyone spoke the two common trade languages of the east and west seas, but among their compatriots, they communicated in their wildly different native tongues. People wore different styles of clothing and played their own types of music and cooked foods with spices deemed inedible to outsiders.

I had no context for these far off places and had the hardest time keeping their names straight.

The witch Gritha came from the island of Kwall in the western sea near the equator. Like her countrymen, she had bronze skin and copper colored hair. She was tall and lantern-jawed. Kwall was not a large island, but its inhabitants made excellent sailors, so the Kwallmen could be found all over the globe at any sea port and on the deck of nearly any ship.

Gritha was technically the senior witch, since she had served the dark lord the longest, but the other two only gave her a grudging respect. No one wanted to kneel to someone so close in power to themselves. Malisent and Gritha did not enjoy one another’s company, but they did not have the same level of boiling animosity that Malisent and Veylien displayed. Gritha stood at the edge of the dark lord’s throne room, watching the workers get the place ready.

“Gritha,” Malisent said. She gave a very casual salute, bordering on insubordinate. “May I ask what you’ve decided to do about that big guardian in the labyrinth.”

“What can we do? It’s too powerful to fight. You should know that, since it broke your arm in our brief encounter with it.”

“That’s why I’d like to get my revenge. I have an idea on how to immobilize the beast.”

Gritha looked over at me and narrowed her eyes. She wasn’t too fond of me after the little mishap with the eye-titan. “Strythe. What are you doing here?”

“Mistress Gritha.” I gave a salute. “While stuck in the labyrinth, I had a chance to observe the Ancient golem and how it functioned.”

Malisent said, “The golem has a finite supply of mana and burns through it by walking. It also aggressively chases anyone that enters its domain. My idea is that we can trick it into exhausting itself. You could wait at the entrance to the labyrinth and ring a loud bell. When it arrives, you would retreat. Then Veylien would ring a bell at the bottom of the labyrinth, drawing the golem down to her. She would also retreat at the first sight of it.

“By repeating this several times, you two would force the golem to run up and down the ramps until it runs low on mana. Once slow and weak, it would be easier to deal with.”

“But how do you know,” Gritha asked “that the monster really will lose its mana? It might generate energy faster than it expends it.”

“I don’t know for sure. This would be a way to test the theory. If it doesn’t work, we lose nothing but time. Because you stay close to the exits, the test is safe, and you can flee without fighting the monster directly.”

“Hmm. A very strange idea. And one uncharacteristically cautious on your part. I have noticed that your plan assigns Veylien and I roles, but not one for you.”

“The main part of the plan requires only two participants, one at the top and one at the bottom. Neither of you need me at those sites. Because your loud alarms will occupy the golem with running up and down the ramps, that temporarily leaves the rest of the labyrinth unguarded. My part will be to explore the lower levels for a place to trap the monster, perhaps a pit, or chamber with a gate, or dead end that can be closed off with a cave in.

“Should your trick successfully slow down the golem, we could then lure it into the trap and seal it in, thus opening the underground areas for the cult’s use.” Malisent grinned.

“An odd idea. I doubt running a marathon will actually impair the guardian monster. But on the other hand, I would like to judge the golem’s speed and how long it takes it to run from one end of the labyrinth to the other. That would be useful knowledge for all further sallies into the old dungeon. When did you want to try this plan of yours?”

“Whenever you feel ready,” Malisent said.

“And what’s your part in this, disciple? Having you involved makes me hesitant. You’re a bad luck charm if ever there was one.”

“I’m going along to help map the labyrinth. I already have a good idea of its general layout from our scouting trip.”

“If you find some other titan or great wonder down there, please don’t lead it back to me.”

“Yes, Mistress.” I saluted once again before departing.

Of course, Malisent hadn’t discussed the whole plan. For one thing, there were no good places to capture the golem. We had no realistic way to trap it anywhere. Any sort of gate or wall we could erect, the stone and metal monster would bash to pieces in no time, and causing cave ins needed serious explosive charges.

Merely trapping the golem wasn’t good enough for Malisent. She wanted to knock it offline. She wanted a victory to brag about to the big boss. We had to defeat the monster.

I also had reservations about our plan and doubts about it chance for success. But Malisent wanted to push forward. The only good thing about the plan was that it was fairly safe. We could hear the loud monster approach and would have escape routes through the elevator shafts. As long as the malfunctioning golem didn’t pinch me in half, the success or failure of the plan didn’t particularly matter to me.

***

Captain Slezeanor, the Peerless Rake of Mount Rosejoy, left me his magical sword. The blade measured over one arm in length and two fingers in width, much too delicate for prolonged combat. The sword required a fire extended down the blade to prevent it from breaking in half when struck against a larger weapon or suit of armor. Fortunately, the spiritual metal of the blade made that easy to do.

From what I learned, ‘spiritual metals’ came from special mines on the continent, often ones hidden in remote locations. Those mines produced ores with mystical virtues that, when properly smelted and alloyed, became the special metal so coveted by blade smiths. The craftsman had learned to create the material through trial and error over many generations; I could replicate their feat much faster.

Slezeanor’s sword gave me a good template to work with. It showed what essences qualified a blade as spiritual steel. These essences were not carefully assembled into runes, rather they evenly permeated the material. It was less like a machine with moving parts and more like a copper wire for carrying an electric current. That put it within the reach of my crude aetherics workshop.

I sent my staff to the wood turner and he carved a spiral groove down its length. Once I made the steel, I laboriously drew it through a die to make lengths of thick wire. The wire went into a bubbling pot of vulcanized rubber to coat it for corrosion resistance. Then the wires wrapped tightly around the staff. I added some brass rings to keep them in place.

That was it. A long wire on a stick. It wasn’t exactly one of the Wonders of the Ancients, but it did its job. Extending my fire up the staff became a thousand times easier.

The real difficulty in the project was finding the essences to mix into the metal. The new world had a dizzying variety of lunar essences scattered all over the place, but they were not evenly distributed. Those secret mines had a high amount of the right types which naturally mixed with the ores. But I had to locate the required essences in other objects. By sheer chance, the plant spikes the goblins’ traded to us and the molted feathers of the devil-birds contained what was necessary. With those, I could roughly duplicate the metal of the existing sword.

The modern people already had an art dedicated to the study of these essences. It was called alchemy. Mostly they used it for making medicines that could affect a mage’s fire. They made magic elixirs that increased natural healing rates. If it weren’t for Malisent’s awful cauldron, she might have given me some alchemic pill that had a similar effect. I needed to find some books on alchemy, because those would catalog the types of essences and where to find them. Essences especially accumulated in weird plants and monster parts, or anything else that had been daemon possessed.

If one in a hundred people received a spark, and one in a hundred of those people enkindled their fires, that meant one swordsman existed per ten thousand people. Out of those swordsmen, how many bothered to learn magic outside of fighting? Maybe one in twenty. Or one in a hundred. That left a vanishingly rare number of people who seriously studied magic. Those isolated scholars would not necessarily have students to pass down their knowledge to, master to apprentice. So the bulk of their learning would be lost at their death. Without a scientific community, mankind rediscovered and then forgot the same secrets over and over.

Forgotten masters left behind artifacts such as the cold prison, but each one was a handcrafted masterpiece, totally unique and incompatible with any other. Conversely, the benefit of Ancient runes was that they functioned like standardized parts. You could assemble them into all sorts of machines, and you didn’t have to waste time redesigning the nuts and bolts every time. Runes were meant for technicians, not artists and artisans.

I gave my staff a spin and lit up the stone.

Malisent entered my workshop. “Strythe? Are you here? Are you ready for our trip to the labyrinth?”

“Yes. I’m ready. The workers have the equipment ready to go.”

I wished I had some advanced method for disabling the golem, some magic trick to paralyze the daemon inside the core, but my ambitious research project was still in its infancy. I was still in the wire-on-a-stick phase. My workshop had produced about a barrel full of colorful beads, but it hadn’t made any aetheric technologies beyond a few functioning lumestones.

Our assault on the killer golem would be a much cruder affair.

***

The barges returned from the harbor, completing their second delivery trip up the Spitpoison River. The vessels brought another load of supplies and more cultists. A new work crew arrived at the citadel. They wore bandages wrapped around their arms and legs and shapeless brown robes with hoods to hide their faces. Each one of them had some kind of deformity, be it a clubfoot, harelip, hunchback, dwarfism, withered limb, or skin disease. All of them looked unhealthy. They should have traveled to a hospital, not a remote citadel in the wilderness.

The three witches watched as these new cultists shambled through the gate.

“Disgusting creatures. Why did we bring the Ugloids with us? We should have left them behind at the old temple to be rid of them,” Veylien said.

The witch radiated pride and cold contempt. Veylien, decked out in her crisp, white finery, was the polar opposite of these pathetic cultists. She possessed an unnaturally perfect beauty, like a statue carved from white marble. Veylien belonged to an ethnic group called the Elves, who inhabited parts of the eastern archipelago. They were a people with blonde hair, unusually pointed ears, and fair skin—although not quite as colorless as Veylien.

“Who are they,” I asked.

“Just the Ugloids. They do the cleaning,” Malisent said. “And they’re in our cult because no one else will accept them.”

The other two witches ignored the line of disabled Ugloids and made preparations for our return to the underground labyrinth.

“Veylien, you have the most difficult part of this mission,” Gritha said. “You have to go down to the bottom of the dungeon by yourself. It’s too difficult for the Faceless to make the climb to accompany you. Do you have any objections to that?”

“A task like this is nothing to me,” Veylien said. She turned up her nose at the idea that it would be too difficult. In her hand she carried a white piece of elephant tusk fashioned into a horn.

“Alright then. I’ll be at the gate with a few Faceless beating on drums. We’ll start a ruckus first to draw the golem up to us. That will give you a chance to get into position,” Gritha said. “Malisent, you can head down to the middle part of the labyrinth and start exploring.”

“Right. Come on, disciple,” she said to me.

Our ropes down the elevator shaft made our journey easier. Veylien removed most of her outer garments until she just wore a suit of silvery mail. The elevator shaft was still completely coated with soot. I suspected Malisent assigned Veylien the bottom position specifically to get her all grimy. The witch disappeared into the dark pit.

“It’s your turn next, disciple. I’ll go slow for you.”

“Gee thanks, boss.”

Climbing down the shaft was far simpler than it had been the first time around. Basic augmentation exercises made my body more durable and enhancement training meant that, when my fire burned hot, I did not become tired as quickly. Magi didn’t label these basic skills as techniques, although they more or less were minor examples.

We descended down to the lower levels. At level negative three, we hopped out of the elevator into the corridor. This was the lowest of the mechanical levels. It had a more complex layout than the collector arrays on the bottom four levels, and not all of the corridors here had low ceilings. We’d have to be cautious.

“Do you know the way?”

“More or less. I still think we should have told Veylien that she could go into the smaller tunnels to avoid the golem.”

“Absolutely not. It would be great if she got smashed.”

“But wouldn’t you get in trouble for coming up with a bad plan?”

“It would be worth it.”

We crept forward through dark tunnels and chambers. My staff lit the way.

“Why are those disabled people treated so poorly?”

“Because they’re deformed. Most babies born with deformities are drowned and then cremated for fear that they might be possessed with a daemon. Changelings, they call them. The people who develop problems later on are cast out for the same reason. They look like monsters.”

“But they aren’t possessed. Those are medical conditions.”

“People who aren’t magi can’t tell the difference. They assume any deformity is a stigma caused by a daemonic possession. It’s safer to err on the side of caution.”

“Veylien should know the difference. She’s a mage.”

“Yes, but she’s extra sensitive since developing her own stigma. Witches get marked by their familiar spirits when they’re not careful.” Malisent pushed a lock of hair from her face. “The yeti has given her snow white skin. She’s a bit of a freak now.”

“Could that happen to you?”

“Never. My soul fire is to strong to be corrupted.”

The Ugloids’ medical conditions brought unfair prejudice against them. But after seeing what happened with the werewolf in Turnfield County, I also understood why people would overreact to anything that might hint at a possession. In such a dangerous world, people valued survival more than fairness to a few pariahs.

“Why did they join the Void Phantoms?”

“Because we’re an evil cult comprised of madmen, monsters, and freaks. The dark lord took them in, and the rest of us had to accept his wisdom…”