Saturday, June 11, 2022 Aqrabuamelu compound; Flushing, Queens, New York, United States

“So how do we get Ekerri?” Ella demanded. She was sick of this. The fear. The constant anticipation of another attack.

“Hold on…” Zana said. She looked at Kothin who was comfortably seated in a chair in his dwarven form. “Why were you dealing with Everett Marr?”

Kothin looked at her, “Seriously? You can answer that without asking me.”

Zana sat back looking annoyed, “Fine. How many weapons and troops did Ekerri purchase?”

“That’s better.” Kothin smiled. “We purchased a million rifles and hired most of his Kenaz soldiers for training.”

Zana almost fell out of her chair, “A million?”

“For our first order. We had plans to buy another 1.5 million after.”

“You have two and a half million soldiers?” Ella asked.

“They have two million,” Zana corrected. “The rest are just overage for logistics.”

“Who? Where?” Ella asked. She held up her hand… “Never mind, I know where. One of the hidden kingdoms at least. But who?”

Kothin looked, “It is hard to let go of a secret, even when you have no reason to. The Al’tal.”

Ella looked over at Zana for an explanation.

Zana gave a low whistle. “One of the foundational myths of Utu-on-Earth’s empire is that he became the avatar of Utu while ruling the Al’tal clan. They rejected his divinity and benevolence and, in a show of even-handedness, he exterminated them. It was said, ‘The Emperor takes no sides.’”

Kothin’s rock-like visage gave a conspiratorial wink, “The truth is a bit more complicated. The Emperor was afraid that his clan would be leverage against him. Either they harbored secrets of his or he actually cared about them, I do not know. Maybe both? So he did something nobody had ever done before, he carved out several pieces of reality and wove them together, separating them from the world, and granted the Al’tal a sanctuary.”

“The Al’tal agreed and pretended to rebel, sacrificing tens of thousands of their own. Then retreated to this world — presaging the hidden kingdoms that he would create later — to prosper.”

Kothin leaned forward, in an intense whisper, “The Emperor knew that paradise alone would make them soft, so he established ritual combats and hunts. Every hundred years or so, he would enter the realm to make sure they remained loyal. And they have been there waiting, a hidden dagger for him to unleash.”

Ella thought out loud, “But then the Waning happened, and they were left behind. Hence the need for modern weaponry…”

“Exactly. The Emperor never wastes an opportunity. His clan has been waiting for him. They are armed now, and training.”

Ella filled in the gaps, “You mentioned different interconnected parts of the world. You mean geographically distant parts, which means when those gates open, these orcs will appear in multiple locations. And at least one million of them will be armed with modern weaponry. It will be a slaughter.”

Changing the subject, Ella pulled out the Dagger of Veils and put it on the desk. Kothin’s eyes widened.

“How do I use this?”

“I knew you had it after you killed Djara… but I am glad to see it confirmed. As for your question… I have no idea.”

“Not good enough… and who is Djara?,” Ella growled.

“Djara was Donna Arthurs.”

So now Ella knew her friend-but-was-really-a-spy’s name.

Ella continued on, “I can feel the dagger slightly, it makes everyone else nauseuous and disoriented to look at it, but if I look at it with magic, it is like a gaping void.”

There was a pause while Kothin appeared to think.

“Do you know why the Imperial Regalia were created?”

“Not really…”

“The Emperor had conquered the known world and eyed the Ascendent Realms. He Ascended himself, and I do not know how, and then returned. When he reincarnated on this plane, he was suffused with far too much magic to encompass. So… he created receptacles for his excess power. First the crown as a master key. Then various other items: the scepter, the dagger, the bracelet, and the orb. At first, each was just raw power. But over time, they each took on an ‘Aspect,’ some form of power.”

Zana spoke up quietly, “Our mythology says the scepter was a sign of martial might and the dagger one of subtlety.”

“Yes… The Emperor’s magic is that of semiotics, symbolism. He constructs stories and legends and mythology and thus makes them reality.”

Ella sat back, “That makes sense. When I freed the Aqrabuamelu, I could not remove the magic from them, only severe it. Because the myths and connection are generated by them, so it is really part of their magic and he harnessed it through symbols to bind them?”

Kothin shrugged his shoulders, “I am not a magician. But more importantly, it was used as a model for the drow’s daggers as I am sure you already have noted. And it is most likely bound in a similar way.”

Ella looked at the dagger, following the trace of thoughts, and then she recoiled, “The drow we captured, he killed his wife with the dagger. I… I don’t…” She trailed off.

“Yes,” Kothin said smoothly, “the dagger was an assassin’s weapon. A betrayer, a knife in the dark. Most likely you can partially bond with it, but to use its full power, you most likely have to sacrifice them with the dagger.”

Kothin smiled a bit, “Or maybe not? As I said, we dwarves enjoy our jokes.”

Ella almost shoved the dagger into Kothin at that moment. She knew he was telling the truth, but Ella wasn’t capable of doing what was needed. She looked at the dagger with her magical sight, the black void of a blade was more appropriate. She shuddered and then put it away.

“What does partially bonding with it mean?” Zana asked. Forcing Ella to consider it still.

“The drow’s daggers enhance their natural camouflage right away. The ability to drain magic comes after the kill.” Kothin answered.

Ella still didn’t want to think about it, she filed that knowledge away and switched to the most important question.

“Where is Ekerri?”

“Right where you left him. Down that ridiculous tunnel with the trains.”

“I went back there… It wasn’t there. Did the gate close?”

Kothin smiled, “It wasn’t there? Or you just didn’t see it? One of those things is true.”

After, they stood outside the interrogation room looking at Kothin who was sitting easily in a chair smiling at them through the one way mirror.

“We should kill him…” Ella said. “He was too easy, too eager to throw away his loyalty. We can’t trust anything he said.”

Arcsa, who had been watching the whole time, said “He was telling the truth. They play games of betrayal amongst one another as a way to stay sharp, but they regard true betrayals such as his Emperor’s as vendetta.”

“How can we know? Maybe this is a setup as well.” Ella said desperately.

Zana reached out and took her arms and looked into her eyes, “You need not take the dagger’s power. We just need deny it to Ekerri.”

Arcsa looked like he would say something, but he settled back, “Zana, ask him about the bracelet and the Manticore. And the orb… We can’t go without power when we face Ekerri. Eleanor, come with me and let’s check on the children.”

Ella watched as Sally climbed the walls of the creche, “She doesn’t look so scrawny.”

“Well, we were pretty hungry before, so I think it is okay…” Alicia said, holding Seb’s hand.

“How are you two doing?” Ella asked, and then she gave an exaggerated wink.

They blushed which was kind of perfect.

“Good…”

Sally made her way over to the table and slipped on the ring that was there and was suddenly a little human girl.

“Before you go… I want to show you sssomething.” Sally’s voice lisped like a child rather than the lizard voice she had the rest of the time. “We need to go back to the city.”

They made their way across town, back to near the soup kitchen where Ella had first met them. A few blocks past and down an alley.

Sally held her hand, pulling her along.

“Thiss is where I came here. My mom… my mom was on the other side.”

Ella stared at the brick wall in front of her. The alley itself was nothing spectacular, filled with litter and other detritus. The walls to either side had translucent windows for sunlight, but the offices were empty right now.

Ella regarded the end of the alley and then flared her eyes.

She could sense the magic from the ring Sally wore at her side.

And… as she stared, she thought about it. In her investigations of the Dagger of Veils, she had begun to discover something. These magical paradigms only went so far. Not everything fit within the frameworks of physics she had constructed. The Emperor used symbolic magic, how did she interact with that?

Before she had spoken to Kothin, she had taken the dagger to Xu, and he had said that the dagger felt like human blood magic to him. He didn’t know much more than that, but he said sacrifice and emotion would be involved. Ella had shuddered then. Kothin had confirmed it.

After meeting with Xu, she spent time trying to sense as Xu had, that intuition for whatever paradigm of magic was used.

But as she reached out with her magic, she could feel the hint of something. She used her physics frame of reference to start. It didn’t feel like quantum probability. It did not feel like entanglement. What it felt like was a… a wormhole. The Emperor had folded spacetime here. She kept examining it.

It was convoluted, it was winding… It was a knotted balloon. That was the best she could manage.The Emperor had pulled out part of the fabric of the universe, and tied a string of something, maybe pure magic, around the meeting point to reality. She explored that knot and started to get a sense of how it fit. It was multidimensional the way a string was and… here was the binding point. She gently tugged on it, loosening it.

Where the end of the alley was now stood open, into a rainy jungle. It was oddly askew, the opening hung in the air ahead of the end of the wall, slightly down and to the right.

Sally’s hand started to slip away in her grasp, and Ella grabbed it tight, “Wait!”

Ella was sweating, it was work holding the breach open and it collapsed. Sally cried out.

“I’ll get it open again.” Ella said, “And we will go find out what happened. But… we will go in prepared.”