Content Warning: Topics Pertaining to SuicideConvergentiarum
Knight World, Segmentum Pacificus, 50 Standard Years Prior to DiscoveryAmidst the acrid and murky haze of the vale's lower atmosphere, sheet lightning blossomed and cast an ethereal luminescence through the murk as though daybreak had come once more over the otherwise gloom-shrouded confines of the lowlands. The illumination was all but soundless for its intensity.
A good omen, in Heinret's reckoning. Even with such light filtering through it, the industrial murk of the vale obscured vision beyond more than a few meters - but in the distance, the outlines and silhouettes of distant terrain, ridges, and buildings were faintly outlined in the gloom. For a moment it was as though the world had been lain bare, the shadows of its very bones cast in relief. The beleaguered vale-dweller put a hand to his brow and attempted to etch what he could of the distant delineations into his memory. They were being hunted, and the only advantage the Hemogeists had over their pursuers was their admittedly still tenuous and incomplete knowledge of the terrain.
The clarifying veil of ethereal light swiftly snapped away, and was soon followed by a sharp, attenuated column of crackling energy close by in the distance. The moment of edifying serenity was sundered by the sharpened, billowing roar of the direct strike - so close to the searing flash that had accompanied it that Heinret immediate knew that the worst had come to pass. A calamitous omen. Direct lightning strikes were rare in the vales outside the industrial settlements, where the massive sprawl would frequently aggregate differential charge at the lowest depths of the seething murk. There were no settlements or permanent structures out here though. For a direct strike to be possible at all-
Almost as if in response to the thunderous roar of the polluted gloom, an ear-splitting, bass warhorn bellowed from some monstrous engine, unseen through the smog but close enough that Heinret knew the end was fast approaching. He could not yet hear the monstrous footfalls of the towering mechanical deities over the air currents of the churning fog, but that was all the more terrifying. That meant they were moving slowly, likely formed up in a tightening net around the Hemogeists as they fled.
Only the Hemogeists' experience with evading the heightened senses of the god engines kept them from being instantly found out. The deific constructs had sight far superior to any mortal being, and could see a lone serf hiding in dense foliage from more than a kilometer away, even in the darkest passages of the thick smog in the lower atmosphere. Certain precautions and measures were necessary to evade them - which explained much of Heinret's unusual accoutrements. He wore a makeshift, patchwork bodyglove that had been pieced together from insulation foam and heating tape, stained to the color of soot and soaked in the blood of the god engines themselves - reactor coolant, procured from pools of industrial runoff that spilled over with the effluvia of the engines themselves, run down from high in the mountains where the noble Pilot Citadels presided to collect in the lowest, dimmest basins of the lowlands.
With a cowl and gas-mask patched over with more foam covering his head, Heinret looked nothing less than some monstrous trash-heap golem. The other members of the Hemogeists were much the same. A band of professional thieves who dared to encroach within the encampments of the god engine pilots whenever they dared respite in the lowlands, they had stolen their share of priceless relics and arcane artifacts from under the noses of the highland nobility for nearly a decade now. They had finally committed one of their profession's cardinal sins with their last effort however - they had stolen something far too precious. The god engines and their pilots had been driven to insensate frenzy when they had discovered its absence, immediately razing the entire settlement they had been encamped by until naught but cinders remained, and then they had begun to scour the surrounding wastes. The Hemogeists' handcrafted bodygloves were effective at concealing them from the gaze of the god engines themselves, but not from their mortal retinues - including skilled coursers who could could seemingly track the Hemogeists as they fled.
That was the only thing affording the Hemogeists even the faintest shred of hope. The god engines were moving slowly, dependent on their retinues to spot for them. If the geists could fool and waylay the coursers, escape would still be narrowly possible.
Heinret leapt from his the tall formation of boulders he had been perched on to try and spy outline of the pursuers, but the thunderous cacophony of their warhorn had all but given away their position: Too close. Heinret landed in a thick film of rancid muck boiling over with oily dreck and pollutants, where the other six members of the Hemogeists crouched both out of prudence and in utter terror.
"What's the point of it sounding off like that? It has to know we'd hear it!" Groused Arnswold, the bulkiest of the Hemogeists with so much bulk he seemed a corpulent ghoul in his own patchwork bodyglove. He was strong enough to bend steel bars and snap iron fixtures with his bare hands - whether by raw cultivated strength or some quirk of mutant physiology, none of the others knew, nor cared. One did not look too uneasily upon mutants, or the suggestion thereof, in the lowlands - rife with its polluted haze as it was. The immense man had a singular, practiced talent for moving silently in spite of his bulk, and snapping victim's necks from behind before so much as a whimper could escape their throat.
"They
want us to hear them. They knew we'd pinpoint them from that lightning strike, so they're tryin' to rattle us. Make us panic and make a mistake. They know we're close." Growled Lukler. A wiry man with a spry build, who claimed to have once been an aspirant to the retinue of one of the highland households and armed with great insight into their strengths and weaknesses.
"We have to move
now." Heinret hissed out. "I could see the crest of the Southern line after that bit o' glow. One good slip and we'll be away from here, but they'll figure that out soon if they haven't already. They might get desperate and charge in a line, odds no better than a toss they'd stumble right over us."
"We can't move fast enough with this damn relic! It was already practically coming to pieces when we took it!" Exclaimed Marnor, the group's ex-apprentice artificer. He had been on the verge of being sent offworld to study the secrets of the Machine God when scandal had ruined his prospects. Even with what little knowledge he had, on occasion he verged on the aspect of witchery with his insight of the devices they handled - such as the artifact he now cradled in a bundle sack of more insulating foam and heat tape. "If we're going to bolt, we have to stash it."
Stashing delicate machinery and components in the lowlands was scarcely any better than violently throwing it into a firepit. The tumultuously hideous weather patterns of the smog, flash-flooding, bizarre atmospheric anomalies and the shifting of the ruined earth itself could taint even the contents of buried watertight containers. The prospect of a ruined payout was still preferable to certain death at the hands of the god engines and their pilots however, and so the rest of the Hemogeists had already begun to cast their gaze about in search of a likely nook to cache their prize in.
"Not here." Heinret made a cutting motion with his hand and then jabbed at the sodden muck they crouched in. "This is a spillway. See the wear on these rocks and how mixed the filth is? The flow'll practically form rapids at this spot. We'll ditch it the first mo' we see a good spot."
The Hemogeists broke from their cover and ran, taking what care they could to baffle their trail and markings so the pilot coursers could not follow - though wearing their cumbersome bodygloves and with their pursuers within spitting distance, the Hemogeists' methods were more desperate than inspired, and rushed rather than expedient - and made all the slower for their need to preserve their haul. They slogged through the vale at an inconstant pace, making for high ground as far as they dared to get away from the spillway and find drier, stabler terrain to hide their prize in. Their faint lead grew fainter with every moment, until they could hear the distant shouts of the god engines - and the muffled impacts of the god engines' footfalls as they trudged through squalid mud.
"Nothin' that big has any business bein' that quiet!" Lukler spat.
"I beg to differ..." Arnswold murmurred. "Though speakin' of big things, check there." He jabbed ahead through the haze - to a warren of heaped, twisted foliage and mechanical scrap, all agglomerated and held together with packed and layered mud. A hovel for a local strain of mammalian mutants known as Ambuscades. It was said, in bygone lore, that when the world of Convergentiarum had still been hale and unbesmirched, the Ambuscades were opportunistic ambush predators who built modest lodges atop riverside hills, and would gather logs of wood to push downhill in order to stun or kill other small and medium-sized animals. Their mutant strains were different only in that they had become larger, more aggressive, and fearless of Humans.
There were signs of movement in the warren itself. The distant warhorn from the god engine early had doubtlessly unsettled them, though they had been so far distant at the time that they had not abandoned their hard-wrought lodge.
"Marnor, split. We'll cover your tracks and lead the god engines over the lodge." Heinret motioned to the bundle-laden man. "With luck the mutants will distract the Coursers if we unsettle them 'nuff."
The gambit was nothing fanciful. The Hemogeists simply scattered the remnants of Marnor's trail before then all turning and scrambling over the debris comprising the Ambuscade warren, clawing their way directly over its hump and over the other side. This served to unsettle the Ambuscades somewhat too well. One of the mutant animals reached straight up through the warren's roof with a limb of mattered fur oozing with lesions and ending with razor-serrated claws perfectly shaped for carving up tree stumps and also, conveniently, through Human bone. Easily as long and twice as thick as a Human leg, the mutant limb punched straight up through a sheet of iron scrap metal and then clasped at one of the passing Hemogeist's legs - lopping the appendage off with an effortless snap-clenched motion. None of the remaining geists slowed to assist their stricken member as they fell atop the heap of the warren's roof, howling in anguish as blood stained the edges of their bodyglove while the ambuscades worked themselves into a killing frenzy at the scent of fresh blood. The geists had their distraction.
The sounds of the shouting coursers and the footfalls of the god engines receded as they ran across the scene. The Hemogeists convened with Marnor another kilometer ahead, and seized the opportunity to fully baffle their trails before continuing to flee.
"We're not in the clear yet. We'll be out of the vale soon, more room to move in, but it'll be open terrain. Harder to shake them on, an' easier for them to follow us through." Lukler indicated. "They'll catch back up soon and we still need to stash the artifact. Heinret, this'll probably be our last chance to look ahead on high ground. See what there is to see."
Heinret nodded and scaled up a nearby metal pole jutting up from out of the terrain, perhaps what had once been some manner of waypoint marker or support for helpful device. Managing to balance himself precariously at its tip even in his bulky bodyglove, his scanned the horizon - and was graced with another omen.
The heavy, particulate-laden clouds of the lowlands parted ahead of them, revealing the unobstructed night sky of the Eastern mouth of vale. Unstrained starlight beamed down upon the Hemogeists like a noble maiden's smile, constellations twinkling like jewels.
Heinret gasped at the sight. It was something he had only seen once before in his life, when he was younger and more foolish still for it. He had a thought to creep through a window of a pilot citadel and make off with whatever he could carry. The highlands, set high above the polluted murk of the lower atmosphere, had seemed tranquil, serene, and utterly idyllic. He had been assured when he had asked innocuously that the cold and snow were not life-threatening, and security at a distance had seemed trivially lax compared to the citadel gates and bulwarks at the base of the mountain where the god engines came and went from their holds.
He had not made it far before the thin air had caused him to collapse, leaving him to stare breathless up at the unblemished night sky for hours before he had been found and consigned to indentriture for trespass. The memory of that breathlessness struck Heinret again in that moment as the stars glittered in his eyes. He could only stare on at them, awestruck.
His rapt attention was drawn, then, to several of those gleaming lights. They were moving, and far brighter still than the rest. With each passing moment they seemed to grow brighter and closer. At first, Heinret figured it was just some manner of illusion - but then, the other Hemogeists began to call out in startlement as they too saw the descending, luminous rain. It was no illusion. The stars were falling from the void.
Turning from mere pinpricks to long, scathing lines of fulminous radiance cutting across the horizon, the stars cut so close through the air that Heinret swore he could have reached up and plucked them out of the sky, if not for that the sound of their passage was but a dull, subdued churn of rushing, burning air. Out of reach. Each of them was wretched in a fiery aura of sputtering, wavering empyrean flames, casting off debris in jagged bursts that released plumes of iridescent plasma as they vented from their parent bodies. The cascade of stars curved and fell into the heavy mists as they broke apart in celestial fire, coming down from whence the Hemogeists had fled and their impacts with the earth casting an echoing groan across the whole of the vale.
For several moments, Heinret neither moved nor said anything, still agape and staring into the sky in disbelief. He was peripherally aware that the rest of the Hemogeists were shouting up at him, though their cries seemed muted and faint to him somehow. There was something about the sky. The sky he had only ever seen once before...
There.
Following in the wake of the preceeding shower of stars, a final ray of celestial light was curving down from on high - falling far shorter than the others had. There was not sputtering aura of flame about it. This was no flawed jewel of the heavens. This one was unmarred and perfect, not so much falling to the stained earth as alighting upon it. It was a sign.
An omen.
Already the haze of the lower atmosphere had begun to reassert itself, the oppressive gloom once more pouring back in to strangle the skyline and obscure it from view - but in those final moments, Heinret saw precisely where the immaculate star had fallen. "We have our way..." He muttered before hopping down from his perch.
The journey took the better part of half an hour. The others Heinret had neither needed nor bothered to persuade to follow, and they made no efforts to baffle their trail. The god engines would be entirely preoccupied with the shattered starfall that had rained practically on top of them - so the Hemogeists hoped without dwelling too long upon it. Their reason gave way to the portents of mythical phenomenon and legend. Come what may, they were now a part of it.
When they came upon it, the immaculate star had burnt away the dross of the polluted landscape, leaving only clean, scoured bedrock behind. There was no impact crater, quite. It was simply as though some great, invisible fist had swept away the filth and laid the star gently upon the eroded stone. Only the bedrock immediately beneath the fallen capsule had been dissolved to molten lava upon its arrival, and the raw kinetic force of its impact had pulverized it further into jagged, dusken glass that beamed with a dark, iridescent sheen - and which eerily terminated in a circle less than a meter in diameter. Three jagged spires of stone rose sharply in a wall at the base of which the construct of light had been lain, perhaps the remnants of a streamfall channel that had long been entirely buried in muck until the vessel had descended - for that was what the fallen star was as they approached.
A vessel - a silver casket, trimmed with gold and perhaps three by two meters wide, its sides emblazoned with two symbols. The first was the gold-textured impression of an unfamiliar, winged avian creature. Set directly atop it, as though its wings were an underscore, was a set of numerals.
The vessel was hollow, with a canopy of armaglass set over a bed of countless thin, nerve-like silvery tendrils. The canopy was cast open. No trace of its contents was evidenced - but the mud-encrusted tracks of several sets of footprints across the otherwise pristine stone, leading back the same way the Hemogeists had come, was telling. Another party had beaten them here, taken the contents of the vessel, and then immediately set off in direction of where the rest of the star shower had fallen upon the vale. Heinret felt a stab of envious annoyance at having been robbed of some grandiose, imagined destiny awaiting him - them - here.
Marnor pushed passed Heinret to collapse on his knees in front of the vessel, where he muttered something most peculiar and made an alien gesture with his hands.
"Omnissiah, I understand! The Machine Spirit guards the Knowledge of the Ancients! This is one of your universal truths! I accept your call! I will heed this test!""What are you babbling about?" Arnswold demanded as he came up behind the kneeling Marnor. "What is this thing? Is it valuable? Out with it!"
"Valuable - does not begin..." Marnor stuttered for a moment, but composed himself before standing and peering with a more discerning eye at the vessel. "This - friends, this can only be Archeotech. Its value is incalculable. You could buy bondsmanship - no, you could buy a full Barony with this alone. Its contents, whatever they were - that would be worth entire worlds."
"Yeah, well, it seems like whatever lucky bastard was chasing us is about to lay their noble-ass mitts on it then!" Scoffed Lukler as he eyed the vessel, equally calculating as he was enraptured by its make. "If I were the same deadites who found this thing after seeing the stars fall, I'd be thinking all of them probably contain treasure just like whatever they took from this." He gestured at the vessel, and then to the muddy tracks. "Only they don't know about the god engines. They're thinkin' they're gonna be the first ones to get all the treasure from the heavens, but it's gonna be the lord pilots get and win everything again and blow everyone that crosses them to pieces. Probably including these sorry bastards."
Marnor had approached the vessel more closely now, though still he did not touch it. "Found an interface here." He announced, pointing to the rim of the vessel - where there was a crystalflex pict-screen. There were no evident manual controls of any sort, and the pict-screen was flashing with obvious alarms and alerts, though purely in unhelpfully indecipherable symbols. "Not seeing much of use here. Seeing something that
might reseal the canopy, probably a dummy fail-safe. I would need to take this apart to tell its real worth."
Arnswold snorted. "Well I can tell you right now, even I'm not strong enough to move something like this. We'd have to come back with a gantry."
"...And I don't think we're gonna get the chance either way, check that." Lukler pointed up towards the jagged edges of the three stone spines rising behind the vessel. From between the sharpened cracks, rancid, fluid ooze was beginning to rapidly dribble over the edges and splatter along the edges of the glassy impact point. With every passing moment, the flow of muck grew almost imperceptibly more voluminous. "This place is gonna be sunk in dross again in just a few hours, especially if this was actually a streamfall channel like I think these raised stones are suggesting."
"...Ritual honors the machine spirit..." Marnor muttered, and before anybody could stop him, he hefted the crude sack of insulation foam he had been carrying and, ever so gently, laid it upon the bed of silver tendrils within the vessel.
"What are you
doing?" Heinret demanded as the others uttered a mixture of invectives, dismay, and halfway coherent threats.
"We still need to stash our prize. This Archeotech is about the only thing that can keep its contents uncontaminated by outside factors - and it is about to get buried in several tons of running mud and dreck. Nobody is going to be able to find it later except for us." Marnor explained. "We seal this up, split and make a clean break, wait for the heat to die down, and then regroup to dig up our prize."
"Dig it up? You cracked?" Arnswold growled. "You just said it yourself! TONS of fucking runoff! We'd need a whole damn operations crew for that!"
"We'd need that just to move the vessel anyway." Heinret remarked, one hand poised over his gas mask's rebreather in contemplation. "You were serious when you said we'd be able to buy a Barony with this?"
"At
least a Barony." Marnor agreed. "Not to mention our prize itself of course."
"I think you're all forgetting that a whole bunch of Ambull shit is also happening not far away?" Arnswold spat. "We have NO idea what else has been discovered! It might make this precious little casket worthless in comparison!"
"Either that or somebody might be missin' a piece of a set and lookin' for it. Making it more valuable, even if empty." Heinret pointed out. "Either way, this buys us time to get more information on what this is and what it's really worth, along with the trinket we took. And if it's worth even a fraction what you're suggestin'..." He nodded to Marnor. "...Then it'll be worth galling a crew into helping us fetch it back later. This is an unexpected good turn, we can't be wasting it. Seal it."
Marnor nodded and pressed a sigil on the vessel's pict-screen.
"Understanding is the True Path to Comprehension. Comprehension is the Key to all Things." He subvocalized as the vessel seemed to shift upon itself. The armaglass canopy descended and encapsulated the makeshift foam sack with a rush of atmosphere - just in time for a thick glob of slime to shoot over the edge of one of the rock spines above it and splatter across the armaglass surface.
"Time to go." Lukler said, taking several performative steps back while making a sweeping gesture with his arms. "The floodtime comes."
Lukler was true to his promise. Less than ten minutes later, the increasingly violent spillage of unsettled ravine mud and sediment had completely buried the sealed vessel, and a river of mountain runoff once again flowed between the raised tips of the stony spires, only now just barely above the tainted waterline.
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"...They don't even cry!" Murmured Claraine as she pinched at the cheek of toddler swaddled in her arms - or at least she tried to. The impassive child's face and their skin may as well have been cast from adamantine for all the give it seemed to have beneath Claraine's fingers, somehow. The child's expression, set in the gaze of their glacial steely-colored eyes, was utterly placid in spite of their circumstances and surroundings. The nomads had attempted to fit the toddler with a mask and filter to spare it the worst degradations of raw exposure to the lower atmosphere's caustic particulates, but the bare-headed babe in a fit of fussy pique had taken the sturdy plasflex mask and simply pulled it apart with both of their comically smaller hands. Its exposure to the unfiltered atmosphere did not seem to be ruining its vigorous disposition however, at least yet. The child was also far, far heavier than they looked at first glance - only Claraine, a mutant with a second set of ears, a grotesquely distended gut, and bulging, cancerous musculature could heft them at all - fittingly, as the nomads had then promptly dismissed the child itself as some form of mutant grown by the ornate vessel they had found it in. Its odd temperament, its weight, its raw physical strength and apparent resilience, and its complete lack of genitalia were all components of mutanthood - even if it was unheard of to see all of those features at once, and in a specimen that was otherwise so seemingly unblemished and unbowed by the twisted anatomical capriciousness of mutation. Which could only mean the child had been fashioned by the pilot lords.
"Those other vessels what fell had better not ALSO hold more freakish brats." Grumbled Tenket, the nomad leader, a man in his Summer years who through the ravages of the polluted atmosphere passed readily for one nearly twice his actual age. The treated, waterproofed, and oil-repelling fabric of his ragged outfit was unremarkable to those of his peers, the only sign of his status being the ritual notches gouged off the tips of his ears, adorned with small, unremarkable rings of various metals.
The nomad band, numbering perhaps twenty or so individuals of various stock, had hastily extricated the child from its vessel and moved on nearly as swiftly as they had rushed to the starfallen vessel that had contained them. They had counted more than a dozen other fallen stars when the smog had parted, and as their leader had remarked, the more time they spent gawking and gibbering over one find, the less time they had to find the next one before somebody else beat them to it.
"I've got a feeling if we can't ransom this one, it won't even be good for eating." Claraine declared. "Skin alone is so hard our teeth'd snap on it."
"There's the value right there then, idiot girl!" Tenket scoffed. "We can sew ourselves up a sturdy poncho from its skin! Though I'll still be real and proper mad if all we get out of all this mucking with these voidcraft is some new cloths. Everybody git! Somebody else was bound to have seen them fall, we've gotten git right on them!"
Tenket was so preoccupied with driving the band of nomads and the excitement of their new pursuit on that he did not even realize that the band's scouts were overdue by more than ten minutes - and so it came as a complete surprise when the gods themselves and their retinue of bondsmen fell upon them.
The bondsmen appeared first, all of them wearing thick leather and fur greatcoats over form-fitting plasflex bodygloves trimmed in red and emblazoned with the heraldry of House Tarantalos - a black-iron tree growing blades as its fruit, set within the center of a cogwheel on a starburst-patterned plaque crossed by a pair of tridents. Each of the bondsmen was armed with flintlock rifles at a glance, though careful examination would reveal the artifice of the pilot houses augmenting them, ornate bronze fittings running the length of the weapon to form a curious choke at their ends and encasing a ribbed power-nodule directly integrated into the body foreward of the trigger-guard. Most of the nomads knew from simple exposure before that these deceptively antiquated rifles were more powerful than even the best handheld las-projector, emitting bursts of bewildering ball-lightning. The maneuver was not so much well-executed as it was simply sudden and without warning, with more than two dozen of the bondsmen rapidly charging out of the fog, each of them covering one of the nomads in turn. All of them were dead silent, forgoing the necessity of issuing demands or shouting imperatives. That was the task of another.
A scant second after the first bondsman had charged from the thick obscurity of the fog to accost the nomads, the earth itself had begun to rumble, and very close by, the sound of earth and soil being upheaved and displaced by rapidly sequential, massive footfalls pounded louder than any wardrum and accompanied by the blaring of four tremendous, bass warhorn blasts that seemed to liquefy the innards of the unprepared nomadic band with their intensity. The raw volume and abruptness of the booming horn-calls forced several of the nomads to their hands and knees almost immediately due to the disorientation of the assault to their senses.
Charging headlong out of the fog came four tremendous figures. The smaller three, each of them six meters tall, were metal giants with adamantium limbs, armored joints, and an exaggerated hunchbacked profile that saw their mechanical skulls affixed to encapsulated hoods set in the center of their chests rather than atop their shoulders - where instead sat swivel-mounted autocannons. Each of their massive arms ended with a gargantuan weapon of such excessively destructive means that it could only be concluded they had been forged to slay others of their own kind. Massive chainblades longer and thicker than even the doughtiest mutant complimenting massive double-barreled meltacannons that hummed with ominous intensity. The most terrifying aspect of the countenance of the three leading figures was not their vast armored frames or their imposing weaponry, but the manner in which they moved. Their gait, the subtle twist and articulation of each joint, the way in which their heads and optics veered about in their cradles and their feet were set and poised as they braced - all was poised at the nadir of a valley set between the peaks of wholesome life and of unhinged imagination, both impossibly familiar and alive, and yet freakishly foreign and alien at once. Each of the giants was similarly festooned with banners and shield emblems all emblazoned with the heraldry of House Tarantalos, which they somehow managed to bear with some mechanically emulated semblance of perverse pride.
Looming beyond and above its three smaller giants came their similarly shaped but proportionally more massive superior, an engine reigning nine meters in height and nearly as wide. In spite of its more heavily armored frame and bulk, its motions were nearly as mimetically uncanny as those of its smaller counterparts - and it managed to halt the momentum of its charge with almost impossible ease, a disgusting sort of almost-mammalian counterbalancing motion evidenced in its stride.
The God Engines of the Pilot Knights.
Scarcely had the air-sundering warhorns ceased bellowing than the massive Questoris-pattern Knight roared with its warhorn once more, seeming to leer down at the cornered nomads. Almost as if by its unseen imperative, two of the accompanying Armiger-pattern Knights opened fire with the autocannons mounted atop their frames, lines of fire stitching up and around the circular clutch the nomads had huddled into with paralytic fear and disorientation in a mercilessly overdone show of intimidation - with several stray rounds catching fringe members of the group, their bodies bursting into grisly, visceral pieces as the massive autocannon rounds rated to punch through tank armor tore through them instead. A few of the nomads who had not completely abandoned their senses rose from their circle as if to break away and run - only to be met by the surrounding bondsmen, Galvanic rifles raised to the nomads' heads. No warning was issued to those who defied the evident will of the Knights. Those who even dared to suggest they might attempt flight with their demeanor were shot at nearly point-blank range, explosive bolts of crackling energy flash-vaporizing flesh and bone into runny, molten rudiments of organic frailty that billowed with massive plumes of steam as they fell into the lowland muck.
The odd dozen survivors understood the message: Move and die.
Amongst their number, the starfallen child was sat up, kneels folded and arms set atop them. It silently examined the massive Knight engines with curious and unworried eyes.
Several minutes passed as the massive Questoris Knight settled, braced and locked its limbs and joints in place, and went through some manner of cyclic signaling ritual where it crooned with ghostly vox-hails. Eventually its motions ceased entirely, its joints hissing with finality as a hatch along the upper ridge of its hunched, armored framed unfurled with mechanical slickness, and the Pilot Knight emerged from the confines of their engine. One of the Armigers side-stepped with impossibly articulated ease, and then knelt down and permitted the smaller figure to climb down a set of runs from the Questoris frame onto it before leaping in a practiced fashion from its crouched back, onto frame of its thermal lance and then down into the wet sediment below.
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Austean Aienbek Derecho, Count of Shadowgate, Knight Scion Uhlan of the Second Noble Lance serving at the pleasure of the High King of Convergentiarum, was wroth in his displeasure.
He was a patrician in his golden autumnal years - technically older still than the leader of the filthy nomadic dregs he now confronted, though blessed by habitation of the blessed mountain arcologies and augmented with extensive bionics as he was, he could have easily been mistaken for a man in his early thirties, with thick and silken black hair, two sunken bionic optical implants that shivered in their cradles as he cast his gaze between the individual specimens in the pack of thieves he had caught, and skin that was practically ashen in coloration. He wore custom-fitted carapace armor embellished with the crest of his House and festooned with his many superfluous honors, seals, and medals - few of which he cared for having earned, but which the strict, tyrannical protocol of the Royal court instructed that he should bear at all times while in a public setting outside of the chambers of his own estate or within his own court. It was measures such as those very protocols that separated the Count and his peers from the filthy, weak, licentious crowds of serfs and peasantry who wallowed in the lowlands. Honor, pride, and valor through fealty and adherence to a higher order and code. The very fundament and firmament of culture and society, with which the Nobles reigning under the High King were charged with governing and preserving.
So that wretched, inbred, half-witted ingrates would
dare to besmirch his repute, and impinge upon the very dignity of his rule, was something that could not be tolerated. Those who threatened the legacy of enlightened noble rule and enrichment of the masses had to be met with the most forcefully proportionate of responses. The fate of these thieves was already sealed - it was simply a matter of extracting truth and satisfaction out of them before dealing with them.
"Which of you churlish wretches..." Derecho snarled imperiously down at the group as he clasped he hands behind his back, speaking in the tongue of the low-Convene - a dialect of what would later come to be known as Low Gothic. "...speaks for you all?"
"That would be me, mi'lord." Tenket provided. His voice was low and hushed from fear, but clear enough nonetheless.
"Stand." Derecho demanded. Tenket obeyed, clambering onto his feet to stand before the Knight Pilot - only for the Count to viciously bring one of his fists around to viciously backhand the decrepit nomad across the face, causing him to almost comically pinwheel about on his feet before falling to the ground again. The Count casually leapt over Tenket's prone form, pivoting around with eerie precision on the slick, muddy surface of the terrain and transferring the momentum of their maneuvering into a brutal kick delivered to Tenket's ribs.
"What do you suppose you are doing, thief? I did not give you leave to rest. Stand at once." Derecho spat. Tenket, winded and with their mind practically roiling with panic, could scarcely even contemplate compliance with the demand.
"Such impudence! Far too sluggardly! Bondsman." The Count gesticulated to the nearest Bondsman, who snapped to attention with parade-precision. "I charge you to express the extent of my displeasure. Make an example of..." The Count waved a carapace-armored finger across the heads of the assembled nomads even as Tenket struggled to breath and right himself so he could stand.
"...That one." The Counter's finger alighted on a young, teenaged boy amongst their ranks. The bondsman immediately snapped their rifle back up and fired, a crackling sphere of ball-lightning briefly charging the youth with an aura of surging radiance that poured through his veins and organs, visible even from beneath his rags, before his chest cavity imploded. Bones, tissue, and interstitial fluid were all transmuted into rapidly flash-vaporizing, wine-colored slop that sprayed and slopped out from the ruined carcass across the shrieking faces and countenances of the remaining nomads.
The placid child finally made an expression - their lips quirked in the faintest intimation of a frown as they flicked a globule of oozing, molten gore from their bare chest. They did not otherwise move. The Count, focused entirely on Tenket once more, took no notice of the toddler's abnormal behavior and countenance.
"Do you see, you laggardly, putrid excuse of a fool? When I issue an imperative, I expect it to be followed with
that exacting standard of immediacy. Commendable responsiveness, bondsman." The Count nodded ever so faintly at the masked bondsman, who simply snapped a smart salute and stood at attention once more without uttering a single word. Tenket, pure, uncomprehending horror dawning upon his face, finally managed to stagger to an upright position roughly in front of the Count once more.
"Now that I seemingly have your attention, thief," Derecho began, "I instruct you to tell me for what purpose you saw fit to abscond with my property, how you learned of its existence, who provided you with the necessary information with which to perform your heist, and of course to effectuate its immediate return to my personage or else in the alternative prepare adequate remuneration for its loss with the sum totality of your worthless life."
"...Stole? You think I-"
"That one." Derecho pointed at an older woman in the crowd. The bondsman's rifle snapped up immediately once more, the sharpened, whining crackle of its discharge interspersed with terrified screams and wails of the victimized nomads as another one of their number was reducing to a molten, ruinous mound of vaguely humanoid shape.
"I will brook no deceit from the likes of you." Derecho remarked briskly. "I will now reiterate my imperatives for your benefit. I instruct you to deliver unto me a full accounting and explanation on the aims of your benighted mind with particularity towards how and by what means you discovered the existence of, and arranged to pilfer, my property. You will reveal the identity of the conspirator who devised this plan, having cast you in the role of their tool, evidenced by your clear inability to have prepared a campaign towards such an end or with such methodology save for the provision of an educated mind."
"...The child just fell from the sky, mi'lord. In some manner of voidcraft, mebbe a savior pod of some kind?" Tenket attempted with a pleading tone, gesticulating directly at the serenely countenance child sat amid the terrified and sobbing nomads. "We
did figure it was probably the work of one of some nobility, though I swear we did not know it was yours! We was just there when the pod came down, we fished this one out and came right this way looking to loot the rest what had fallen!"
Count Derecho arched a single skeptical brow, his orbital ridge rising above the narrow port of his bionic eyes. "You stole a child...from the debris that made planetfall some time ago?"
"Yes, mi'lord! I confess! We would've stripped the pod down for parts, if'n we hadn't thought we needed to rush and loot the rest of them as quick as quick."
Derecho turned his gaze finally to the child, giving them an unimpressed appraisal for several moments before turning their attention back to Tenket. "...Mildly interesting if true. How does this pertain to my stolen property, precisely?"
Tenket gaped with such genuinely confused bewilderment that there was simply no possibility any rational person would not have immediatedly determined he had no idea what was going on. The Count observed it with the interest of a man dissecting a small amphibian while it was still alive, and then gestured at the child without looking back at them.
There was another immediate snapping discharge, which blew the odd child's right arm into dilute vapor and visceral mist, slamming the rest of their body directly down into the ground from the force of the impact and spraying Claraine's despairing face with a thick sheet of blood.
The confrontation only lasted until there were no more intact bodies for the Count's bondsmen to shoot at, save for Tenket himself. The Baron rolled his bionic eyes in his skull with and, with a nigh theatrical sigh, ordered Tenket bound and prepared for transport to the Highland Shadowgate Arcology for more intensive interrogation.
Before the Count moved to ascend the kneeling Armiger and board the Questoris Knight once more, one of his bondsmen signaled for permission to speak. The Count reversed his motion and nodded expectantly.
"My liege. The hemisphere core was not amongst their belongings. Given its delicate state, it must have been handed off to the mastermind shortly after they absconded with it, elsewise it would very shortly deteriorate to uselessness in the present environs." The bondsman gestured to the dense haze of atmospheric pollutants around them. "The only viable alternative would be for them to have sequestered it in some remote cache. Shall we commence an exhaustive search of the vale?"
Derecho gave the suggestion serious consideration. It was not lost on him that if the hemisphere core had been stashed in whatever crude dead drop the savages had been able to devise, it was already on the verge of being lost forever. His immediate bondsmen could not be faulted for being unable to find it in time across the vast span of perpetually fog-enshrouded wilderness, and the bondsmen who had originally failed to safeguard it had already paid for their negligence with their lives. Dedicating manpower to such a forlorn task would simply be a waste. He shook his head. "No, though the suggestion is prudent. The assumption that it was handed off to the true culprit is the most likely eventuality. We shall return to Shadowgate at once and commence a purge of the court."
The Count mounted up and entered the Knight Questoris, and several minutes later once it had returned to full animation, it and its lance of Armigers hastened away through the murk of the lowlands while the bondsmen formed up into a single-file line and began the considerably slower march back in the same direction - leaving the twenty-odd group of partially vaporized bodies behind in an abandoned heap.
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"Well now. Looks like we missed the show." Calaston crooned as he and his two lackeys came across the corpse pile hours later. Unusually finely adorned for a lowlander, he wore a short, fluid-sloughing gown and poncho over a bodyglove of indifferent patchwork quality that had nonetheless once been of the same make as those worn by Derecho's bondsmen. The balding head beneath his high-quality gas-mask with its built-in vox earpiece still bore long, oily strands of dark hair hung in a wide crown around his skull.
"Bodies have already turned and looks like their shit got rifled through pretty thoroughly." His first lackey Ferdrank, an obese man with a wide-brimmed rain-hat reported after peering over the heap with an appraising eye.
The second lackey, Tatronda, pulled up her own gas-mask with a motion of habitual practice and inhaled deeply before setting it back in place. "Knights were here. At least a lance. Think they must've had bonders with 'em as well, or at least a couple of guys with galvanics. Can't have been too long ago, maybe a few hours."
"Wowie. Not often you see shitheels like this bunch getting a full lance called down on them." Calaston whistled. "<Ill omened stars>." He spun off an abrupt, somewhat spurious phrase in the highland tongue that would later come to be recognized as High Gothic. "Guess that light show we saw from earlier might've drawn 'em here, gotten them killed for whatever it was about."
"You really think the nobles were behind the lights, boss?" Ferdrank asked.
Calaston shrugged. "Maybe. Hardly matters now. We shouldn't stick around too long, there'll be others coming here same as we did. <Similar minds, similar actions.>"
All three of them startled as the pile of corpses shifted abruptly. "Ah - whoops, looks like I called it too soon boss!" Ferdrank chortled. "Maybe somebody still has enough of a pulse for us to take it from them?"
"You'll be wantin' some quick fieldwork boss?" Tatronda asked as she reached into one of her belt-pouches and produced a plasflex-wrapped bag of worn surgical tools as Ferdrank started to dig through the pile, handily managing to drag dismembered limbs and fused segments molten viscera and hurl them away one piece at a time. "Can't promise the organs will keep, better to do this sort of thing in a sealed environ all clean-like, but I can probably get one or two good bits out of them."
"Depends. First let's see if - ah! Profit!" Calaston steepled his hands together with a smile as Ferdrank managed to pull a still-writhing body completely stained with muck and gore out of the heap. They looked to be a completely bald pre-adolescent teenager, though much more than that even he could not quite discern through all the filth. There were no evident injuries or missing bits at any rate. "<Bad news and good news>, lovely. This one is healthy enough for us to march back home!" He laughed as Ferdrank swore and dropped the youth abruptly.
"Little shitheel is a lot heavier than they look." Ferdrank hissed. "You're damn right we're marching them back! No way you could pay me to haul this fucker, they must have been feeding 'em rockcrete paste."
"You have a name, kid?" Tatronda asked slyly as they produced a switchblade with a wavering sleight of hand, running the tip of the blade across their filth-laden cheek as they stood up. The youth did not answer or move, simply standing up and peering with discernment between each member of the trio and completely failing to react to the knife being dragged across their skin. Tatronda frowned beneath her filter mask.
"Guess your name is either gonna be food or marks, stinky." Tatronda muttered darkly as she rounded behind the filth-stained youth and prodded at their back with her dagger.
"<No time to lose.> Let's get moving." Calaston gestured broadly into the softening haze of fog leading Westward into the vale proper - from where Compunctio, the system's star, shone as day broke, even if only to ever-so-briefly lighten the thick perpetual murk of the lowland and increase how far one could see by a few meters.
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"Gotta admit, even by our standards, little mutie here is a strange one." Tatronda remarked.
Much later, with the trio having led the youth back to their hideout, several increasingly peculiar things had arisen. It was set in a condemned warehouse in the intermediary ring of the squalid industrial city of Dolor. Technically not condemned in fact, merely labeled as such due to a few well-placed bribes and favors, it was conveniently located to a logistics hub with access to the other city rings where they could rub shoulders with all their different breeds of clientele. The hideout accordingly was well-lit and furnished if not particularly clean, owing to the gang's lackadaisical hygienic priorities. It had atmospheric filtering, airtight seals, and cold running water, which was easily a step up as far as accommodations went anywhere below the highland realms.
Once they had hosed the youth down with ditch-water, they had immediately discerned, very clearly, that they had no genitalia. If not for their lack of hair, they would have appeared almost bewilderingly androgynous.
When the slavers had tried to place restraints on them, the youth had simply snapped them off. First the economic Plastek ties, and then steel cord, and then finally a set of plasteel manacles that had been made specifically to keep inhumanly strong mutants bound up. Then the trio had attempted to brand the youth with a chattel-mark, only for the superheated brand to simply fail to make any lasting marks on their skin. The youth had not resisted in any way while they tried to bind and brand it, merely breaking through each restraint in turn with casual motion. It had appeared momentarily interested in breaking the plasteel manacles down even further and peering into the locking mechanism, but had cast the twisted metal away after only a few moments. The young figure had otherwise been wholly compliant and passive, allowing the trio to poke and prod at them and to otherwise guide it around without complaint. The skin where the brand had been pressed had not so much as even tanned from the intense heat, and the naked figure had not even seemed to react disfavorably to the attempt beyond treating the slavers with an unimpressed frown.
...For additionally, by all determination, the youth was seemingly mute.
"Maybe catatonic?" Tatronda suggested as she casually lobbed a throwing knife directly at the figure's head, only for the weapon to bounce off, its tip slightly deformed from the impact. The youth simply continued to placidly stare at them in response. "You can see this kind of behavior from certain boys and girls who get passed around a bit too much."
"Or from people who survive a lot of explosive blasts. Soldiers and miners and the like." Ferdrank contributed, munching on on algae bar. After a moment of thought, they offered it to the naked figure - who simply stared at the bar for a moment with a blank expression, before reaching out and peeling away the wrapper to peer at the printed script on it.
"...That doesn't read catatonic to me. That reads
simple. Simple as
mud." Calaston shook their head. "Too dumb for speech and probably can't understand it either. Hey idiot, a grenade is about to blow your ass off! <Get fucked!>" The youth did not react at all beyond offering the algae bar's wrapper back to Ferdrank, who bemusedly took it.
"Ok. Well. Can't chain them to anything, they'll just get up and walk away. Bet they probably won't be able to climb out of the hole though."
"Only one way to find out. <Let's give it our best shot.>" Calaston agreed. "We can all get drunk and sleep on what we want to do with it. Pretty sure this little shit is some pilot lord vanity project, that or some Mechanicum experiment. Reeks of their bullshit, albeit with less metal bits than usual. <Religion is poison.> That means it might be worth some marks to the right person."
"Think maybe we could train them to respond to commands, like a dog?" Ferdrank attempted to wave the bar wrapper in front of the youth's face enticingly. The figure simply stared at them.
"I think it has about as much chance of being able to understand commands as boss here has of teaching it how to speak the Highland Tongue." Tatronda drawled as she collapsed in a nearby chair.
"Hey! I resent that!" Calaston quipped back. "My affinity for the Highland tongue is so refined that I can legitimately do business with the nobility! <Talent without peerage! I could teach this queer little ploin how to dance, juggle, and jump through hoops too if I felt like it!>" He rattled off the high tongue segue to and for nobody in particular other than himself and his own vanity, though the youth, for a moment, had cast a cool look of appraisal in the slaver's direction as he did so.
"Sure, whatever that all meant." Tatronda groaned. "Last one to call has to chuck this heavy little twit down the hole, one two three not it."
"<Not it.>" Calaston remarked expeditiously in the high tongue once more.
"Not- shit." Ferdrank swore.
The first half of the job proved reasonably easy. Ferdrank simply led the naked youth by the hand towards the edge of the hole that had been knocked in the floor of one of the second floor rooms. When it came to actually throwing them down the hole, things became difficult - as the rotund slaver, even with his considerable mass and muscles, was unable to make the figure budge in the direct of the hole itself once at its lip. Evidently their passivity was not
so pronounced that they were going to let themselves be pushed down.
"Fuck me, did you get even heavier?" Ferdrank squinted at the youth with exasperation. "Am I going to have to get a damn shock maul to knock you in with? Come on, dumbo, I don't have time for this today! Could you please just jump in the damn hole?"
Much to Ferdrank's surprise, their plaintive request worked, as the naked youth then calmly proceeded to hop backwards straight down the hole. Startled, Ferdrank hesitated for a moment, turning what had just happened over in their head for a few moments. "...It must have picked up on my tone." He muttered to himself as he left the room.
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Time passed. As they had intended to do, the trio of slavers managed to drink themselves to stupor and completely forget about the peculiar oddity they had picked up in the vale wilderness earlier. Days passed by, and inside the enclosed, sealed first-floor storage annex the hole dropped down into, several ill-fortuned future slaves and indentured servants subsisted on dripping water from a single tap left slightly running alongside small insects and vermin that habitually made the mistake of finding their way into the annex.
From the moment the youth had appeared amongst their number, the other slaves had immediately taken an intense disliking to it - its peculiar, androgynous anatomy, its disheartening lack of anything resembling so much as a skin blemish, and the fact that it was not bound in the fashion as most of them were, and also most damningly that it and it alone the slavers had seemingly elected not to brand with their chattel mark.
What made it all the more infuriating, was that the youth did not appear to desire any form of companionship or connection with any of them. After simply standing beneath the hole above for several minutes, the strange youth had simply walked over to the nearest wall, sat down with their back to it, and calmly watched the other slaves. Day in, day out, scarcely moving save to crane their head and flick their eyes from one end of the annex to the other. They did not ever approach the tap to eek out precious droplets of hydration, and they did not move to challenge any of the others over the privilege to hunt and consume the various vermin that found their way inside. The youth simply sat, and observed. It unsettled the others who, in the confines of the annex, had no means to escape the dreadful sense of bareness, of vulnerability they felt as the strange figure's penetrating stare fell upon them.
It only took a few days for Berginanda to decide enough was enough. The slave was naturally tall for his age, was still young and fit, and had been completely forgotten about by the slavers themselves since they had abducted him more than seven standard months ago. It had not taken long for Berginanda to prop himself up as the petty, insufferable king of the dismal annex, and he had ruled it with coercive brutality. The strange youth that had jumped down the hole displeased the slave king. They did not eat or drink, robbing the self-declared petty king of half his coercive influence, and even worse - they said nothing back to Berginanda at all, ever. Not in protest, not to insult or taunt him as some other slaves used to do, and not in response when Berginanda demanded they answer.
Having decided it was time to teach the new mutant slave a lesson about their place down in the annex, Berginanda stalked across the room to where the strange youth sat.
"You miserable waste of skin." Berginanda scowled. "I don't care if you're dumb or mute, when I talk to you I expect you to show me some respect, and it's clear I'm going to have to teach you some." He reached out with both arms to grab at the sitting figure.
The youth, in that moment, stood up - and Berginanda felt suddenly very terribly small. Not merely compared to the youth, who had seemingly grown substantially in the few days they had been in the annex and seemingly was just as tall as Berginanda himself, but also simply from the abrupt immensity of their presence. It was as though Berginanda were suddenly reaching towards some preening predator rather than naked, unarmed slave. Berginanda did not relent, recognizing defiance when he saw it and knowing he could not save face unless he acted.
Then, with a calm motion, the tall, androgynous figure reached out and gripped Berginanda by the right side as he moved to grapple the newcomer. With an imperceptible adjustment of their grip, they fractured Berginanda's arm.
Berginanda immediately howled with pain, tears welling in his eyes as he began to hyperventilate and gasp for breath. He instinctively tried to pull himself away from the figure's grip, but it was like trying to pull plasteel rods out of rockcrete. Their grasp was as immovable and uncaring as the mountains. Shivering with pain, Berginanda all but collapsed on the spot, still sobbing and choking back spit and snot, with their right arm still gripped tightly by the figure.
For several long moments the androgynous figure simply stared and watched as Berginanda writhed, anguished, in their grip. Other slaves in the annex looked on with some mixture of relief and trepidation. The petty tyrant was being dethroned - but perhaps they were about to be replaced by something even worse. At least Berginanda was Human.
...but then, with the faintest of gestures, the androgynous figure released Berginanda's arm, allowing the man to stumble back, still gaping. No longer in pain however - for to Berginanda's own astonishment, his forearm, which he had sworn the mutant had fractured and had been bent at nearly a full ninety-degree angle, was whole once more. The figure had simply gently twisted his forearm back into the correct orientation, and as they released Berginanda his bones had seemingly been remade whole. Even the pain was rapidly receding - though the memory of it would linger.
"Witch! Mutant freak!" Berginanda shouted, though now his tone was one of fear rather than denigration. The androgynous figure simply stared, and after several long moments, simply sat back down once more while Berginanda skulked away in confused shame.
Another several days passed. Actual hair emerged and grew at an explosive rate from the seeming mutant's scalp - long, black, wavy hair. By the third day is reached down to their shoulders. By then, the slavers returned.
The sliding cargo door set against on end of the annex was opened, and both Calaston and Ferdrank marched in. Raising an eyebrow, Calaston gestured towards the androgynous figure. "Looks like they've hit their mutant growth spurt. Imagine if we had let them have actually food? Their head would be scraping the ceiling. <Inconceivable!>"
"You sure about using this one, boss? We couldn't even brand them." Ferdrank whined.
"<Sure as sure.> Yes. That's the best part. Just look at their skin. It's fucking flawless, no brand will help sell it for this. Not even going to need a wig now. Making me feel a little self-conscious." Calaston rubbed with some awkwardly at his own balding cranium, from which only a few tresses of hair still hung around the ridged. "Well? Come on, dummy, we've not got all day." He began to reach for the shock maul he had brought with him to goad the slaves with, but much to his relief the androgynous slave - who was now the same height as Calaston himself and in no way mistakable for a mere child - moved to follow them.
"Wait." Growled a voice from the dark. Calaston turned as Berginanda emerged from the dark. "That thing is not just a Mutant. It is a witch! It has to be destroyed."
Calaston and Ferdrank shared a glance before guffawing. "Good one, slave." Ferdrank chortled. "There haven't been witches on Convergentiarum in millenia. Not since the Harrowing."
"Just look at them!" Berginanda insisted, jabbing as the androgynous figure. "They're unnatural!"
"Yeah, they're definitely a mutant or something." Calaston admittedly in an unbothered tone. "But honestly this one is tame compared to some stuff the Mechanicum makes. You remember the last doctrine war?"
"Why is it you're even sayin' this, meat?" Ferdrank challenged, drumming his fingers on the haft of his own shock maul, still hanging on his belt. "Not like this one could've even fucked you in the ass with how bothered you are."
"It broke my arm, and then...healed it immediately! Like it had never happened!" Berginanda scowled before calling out into the dark. "You all saw it happen! Tell them!" None of the other slaves secluded in the annex moved to the larger slave's aid however, much to Calaston and Ferdrank's impatience. Berginanda did not relent however.
"This one simply is not worth the risk-" He began.
"They're worth plenty more than you, dimwit. Unlike some other slaves, they do what they're told, they don't cause trouble, and they don't give us any backtalk." Calaston interjected as he unfastened his shock maul. "And they're a damn deal worth more than
you'll ever be!" He lunged forward and jabbed at Berginanda with the maul, causing a cascade of energy to course through the slave's body, sending them crashing to the ground while convulsing uncontrollably.
"Here's what a break is
actually like, meat." Ferdrank taunted as he strode over and stepped on the stricken slave's arm - affixing it in place before then raising his boot and stomping down viciously, once, twice, three times. Every stomp was accompanied by the sinuous, snapping sound of muscles and flesh tearing, and once Ferdrank stepped away, Berginanda's maimed arm was a bruised, swollen, and misshapen mess. The abused slave could not even scream properly, still writhing and convulsing on the ground as Calaston continued to press the end of their shock maul into Berginanda's gut.
"Now think about what you've done." Calaston spat as he returned the shock maul to his belt. "Come on, let's go. We're burning time here."
He and Ferdrank began to move towards the annex door, but halted when they saw the androgynous figure simply standing and staring down at Berginanda's broken body. An expression had finally broken its way across their face - dismay. Neither of the slavers saw it.
"Hey, you too, dumbo." Ferdrank said with exasperation, unholstering their own shock maul and prodding the androgynous figure in the back without switching it on. The naked figure turned to the slaver, their appalled look still evident on their face - but it faded a scant moment later, returning to the serene and untroubled look they had been wearing since the slavers had first pulled them from the pile of corpses in the vale. They willfully followed the slavers out of the annex, pausing only to cast a single placid look back through the sliding door as Calaston hauled it shut to peer at Berginanda's prone form.
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"Right, so here's the plan."
Tatronda had joined them in one of the storerooms, which was filled with racks of old clothing. They had sat the androgynous figure down in front of a dressing table and started to look them over critically.
"I've got some noble prat coming down from the Highlands who has expressed an interest in our stock. He's being coy about it, so I figure he's looking for a new concubine or consort or whatever. I've intimated that we handle and trade in only the best stock, and this idiot is just oozing with marks - so we dress this one up, make it look real pretty, and get rid of them for a fat payout."
Tatronda sniffed. "Noble won't be happy that their new plaything has no bits on it." She jabbed at the androgynous figure's completely smooth and featureless groin.
"Well that'll be on them for failing to specify what they actually wanted, yeah? <Let The Buyer Beware.>" Calaston indicated dismissively. "All we need to do is take their money and split, lay low until they forget about it, and live like the nobility themselves in the meantime. There is one tiny detail however. I'm also going to need to dress up real good. <Time to put on my best look.> This noble is having some kind of private party, and wants both me and the product to attend. Probably so he can check the quality and make sure it can be
domestic, yeah?"
"That might be trouble, boss. This one is still completely mute by the looks of it." Ferdrank interjected, reaching out to muss with the figure's hair emphatically. The figure let it happen without comment. The slaver thought for a moment, and then added, "Though actually they did follow a basic command right earlier. Maybe they
do understand Convene?"
"Well they'd better. We have about a week before this little audience takes place. <No time at all>! So we've got to make this thing look refined and proper, maybe even see about teaching it some table manners."
Tatronda frowned. "So - we are dressing this thing up as a girl?"
"That's right. You'll forgive me if I consider you an expert in the subject! <Uppity harlot>." Calaston smiled. "Just pick out something from this collection here, maybe sort out that messy hair of theirs, get some perfume sorted so they smell less like a pit, and Ferdrank here will do what they can to teach them some basic fucking etiquette - and I will be going out and getting myself a real suit!"
"How did you manage to impress this noble anyway, boss?" Tatronda asked suspiciously. "You liquor them up first or something?"
"Such little faith! Believe it or not, it was my own clever tongue that caught their attention. They've never spoken with a lowlander before who was fluent in the high tongue. <Pompous, condescending bastard was practically starved for conversation somehow.> That's why I'm going at all, they have sort of indicated this'll be a small gathering with a couple of other friends, and we'll all be talkin' in highland."
"Uh, boss, that may be a problem then for teaching this one table manners." Ferdrank interjected. "This one MIGHT be able to follow simple commands in Convene, but I don't know if they understand a lick of your highland."
"Shit, you're right. Ugh, FINE, I'll see if I can teach them some basic commands as well." Calaston bemoaned.
"Weren't you saying earlier you could do something like that if you really felt like it?" Tatronda chimed in mockingly.
"<I said what I meant and I meant what I said!> You're damn right!" Calaston swore, jabbing a figure in Tatronda's direction. "You watch! By the time I'm done with this mutant, they'll be eatin' ashes out from my hands!"
The week passed. Tatronda managed to piece together an outfit made from some of the finer pieces in their collection, supplemented by a few costume pieces extorted from a nearby theater for effect. In the end she put together a somewhat over-embellished ocean blue ballroom gown, with long gloves and a little too much lace sewn on in places. The fabric was cheap cloth with a bit of plasweave, but in a dark parlor it would fit right in, gleaming with evident smoothness in the right places. Tatronda made a token effort to shove the androgynous figure's feet into a pair of heels - but the task proved all but impossible. The apparent mutant's flesh seemingly had no give to it whatsoever, and they managed to ruin every set of heels Tatronda tried to fit them with. Disgusted, Tatronda had simply stuck them with more flexible flats from another stage costume. To mask this a little, the slaver fixed several ribbons around the figure's wrists and ankles, and finally fashioned the figure's hair into a crown braid, with a second longer plaited braid tied at the end with a stage-bangle that had been painted gold.
"We're going to need to name it, boss." Ferdrank indicated later when they met again. "Got a good, classy highland name we can stick on them?"
"Hm. Names aren't my strong suit." Calaston ventured cautiously. "Not sure how much I want to oversell it either, this guy will probably know if I just pick a name from the list of historical crests or something." Calaston mulled over the prospect for several moments. "Aha. What was the name of that old techno-saint way back?"
"The one who made all those atmospheric engines in the mountains?"
"That's the one. It's
historic, see. Nobody'll think twice about it if they think they're named after a saint."
"Don't recall offhand. Marini or something? Ended with something like that anyway." Ferdrank struggled.
"Their name was actually Kresimir." Tatronda threw in as she joined them, having finished playing dress up with with androgynous figure. "Then the highland nobility sort of washed it over in highland and it became Cresimir with a C. It's why you see a bunch of women named Cressy, Cressi with an i, Cress, Cresimi, that sort of thing."
"No need to try to get creative about it. We'll just call them Cresimir then." Calaston clapped.
"That's a male name though boss." Ferdrank pointed out.
"So just slap a highland ending on it. Cresimirae or something." Tatronda shrugged.
"Fuck it, good enough. <If it works, it is not broken.>"
Training the dressed-up Cresimirae the bare bones of etiquette and verbal commands proved to be a far simpler ordeal than any of the slavers had anticipated. Much to their grateful surprise, the mutant seemed able to obey simple commands, usually on the first attempt. In the few instances it had not, it managed to pick up the gist of it after a single demonstration. It even seemed to have perfect recollection for commands it had been taught days earlier.
"Good memory it looks like. Shame they are as dumb and mute as mud." Calaston mused. "If they grow any bigger they'd make for some good muscle. <Force has a wit all of its own.>"
Cresimirae simply sat and stared, their expression serene. In the gown and with their hair braided as it was, along with the lace and ribbons, Calaston found himself admitting even he might have mistaken the creature as female, even flat-chested as it was - and if could have, the idiot nobles definitely would, especially in a dim, smoky parlor after they were all liquored up. The plan was foolproof.
888888888888
The plan was terrible and Calaston was sweating bullets now that the time to execute it had come.
Everything about the circumstances were as wobbly as a ploin. The slave could not be bound up during transport, Calaston would have to surrender his shock maul to the noble's retinue of guards, and while the slave could evidently obey simple commands it still had not spoken or even so much as grunted - and what would happen if the nobles tried to get handsy with the mutant freak and discovered it had no interesting parts?
"Going to have to start rationing the drink in the future." Calaston muttered to himself as the groundcar he had rented for the occasion came to a halt. Cresimirae was sitting across from him with the same cool look as always, hands folded. That, at least, seemed like it was the one thing that might go according to plan. As long as Calaston could contrive an excuse for their silence, the Mutant not being capable of speech was the least of his problems. The possibility of profiting off of this ill-conceived, so-called plan seemed increasingly remote.
He stepped out of the groundcar, chaffing at the ill-fitting suitcoat he had stolen. They were at the far Northwestern edge of the tertiary habitation dome, the one most proximal to the pilot lord ground-level bastion and the macro-lifts that connected to the palace arcology in the mountaintops above. Accordingly, the environs were richer and better maintained than the other habitation domes. The streets were clean with only the occasional instance of graffiti, and the large pict-screens adorning the buildings displayed far subtler and more tasteful advertisements than would be seen elsewhere. Only two-hundred meters above, the ceiling of the habitation dome had originally been lavishly painted to display a map of the world, prior to being built over and the original surface largely obstructed by a tangled mess of catwalks, suspended chambers, and rail-platforms - which at least had the side-benefit of presenting plenty of surface area with which to ensure the environs of the dome interior were brightly illuminated.
The building at which Calaston and Cresmirae had arrived was set very close to the noble promenade, where the habitation dome connected with the pilot lord bastion. It had all the markings of an upscale lodge deliberately built in the slums so that the nobility had a place to get away from the entanglements of their high living, with an exterior made from quarried marble and set with stained armaglass windows no less. Small, scale statues of several god engines were set into their own external alcoves in the walls, though Calaston recognized none of them.
Directly at the front entrance - a set of double doors that looked like they had been carved from professionally sawn lumber rather than haphazardly cobbled together from dead driftwood and cheap industrial adhesive - were a pair of household guards. They wore long, turquoise greatcoats with gold trim along with fanciful ivory-colored masks with narrow slits over the eyes. The purpose of such masks was utterly lost on Calaston, who could only imagine that they dramatically limited one's field of vision and provided little in the way of protection.
"Halt. Sir. Lady." The first of the guards held up a firm flak-armored hand. "Identify yourselves."
"I am Calaston, entrepreneur. I have been formally invited by the Baron Verinais to take part in the gathering be held here this day." The slaver smiled thinly, endeavoring to hide the full extent of his rotten teeth from the guardsman. "The lady here is an entertainer, procured at request."
"...Your last name, sir?" The guard inquired, though he raised his other hand to his ear where a vox-bead was concealed and began to subvocalize faintly.
"...I was an orphan, guardsman." Calaston's already thin smile wavered ever so faintly.
"I see." The guardsman said noncommittally. After several more moments he lowered his hand and nodded. "...and it seems you are indeed expected, sir. I will have to ask you to surrender any and all weapons you may be carrying, and I do apologize in advance, but I will have to search both of you. I am certain you are both upstanding gentlefolk, it is just bothersome procedure. You understand."
"...Of course." Calaston said, ever so testily. Surrendering his shock maul he had anticipated, but he had not predicted they would want to pat both him and the mutant Crisirmae down. They were not even through the front door and already there was a chance for catastrophic failure! If whoever felt Crisirmae down suspected they were a mutant...
He was thankfully spared the possibility of failure when the doorway to the establishment opened, and the target of Calaston's shoddy scheme emerged: None other than the Baron Verinais himself. He was an elderly man, easily eight decades old or more, with minimal bionics or other augmentations of note to alleviate the signs of his advanced age, save for a cortical jack visible at the base of his neck behind his fraying silvery hair. His face was pale, with a hint of gray pallor to it - a hereditary trait potentially inherited from some distant branch of the Shadowgate nobility, perhaps. He wore an ornate ivory eyepatch over the left side of his face, and a bodyglove with the same turquoise and golden livery of his retinue alongside a long bronze-textured sash. He also bore what appeared to be an ornamental blade with an altered sheath that had an extended base, which he used as an impromptu cane.
"<Calaston, young man.>" He conveyed in perfectly natural highland tongue. "<It is good that you are here. The others are eager to meet with both you and your...company.>" He eyed Crismirae with an appraising look, before switching to Convene with his next words. "What would be the name of this fine lady here?" He inquired.
Before Calaston could even open his mouth, the mutant spoke in answer. The utterance nearly knocked Calaston completely off his feet in amazement - and panic.
"Cresimirus." They said, presenting the Baron with a faint, cordial smile. Their voice was as clear and airy as a highland winter's breeze. Calaston's heart nearly exploded in his chest from panic. That was NOT what they had named the thing! That was not even a feminine ending of the name! Where in the darkest depths had
that come from?!?
The Baron Verinais, if he found the name at all unusual, did not visibly react. He simply nodded and raised a hand to his chin to rub at it as he responded. "Ah. Named after the Engine Saint I see. A very
handsome name, that."
Calaston hurriedly leapt to interject and explain the inconsistency. "Ah, you know how lowland conventions go, my Baron. They will just slap any kind of highland ending on their names without knowing what it actually means." He grinned nervously.
"Ach, it happens all the time even up in the highlands." The Baron waved congenially. "But come in, come in. The day is just getting started." He led both Calaston and, evidently, Cresimirus into the ostentatious parlor building. The household guards who had been intent on searching the pair more thoroughly conveniently elected to forget the need to do so - perhaps so as to not gainsay their own liege lord.
The Baron led them both through a small entry foyer - lavishly paneled with more wood, doubtlessly harvested, carved, and shipped from the alpine arcologies at tremendous expense - and onto a lift platform that took them up two stories. He then guided them down another hall and past an archway leading into an ornate and decadent parlor-room. A vast rug woven with the crest of House Crescentius dominated the floor, depicting a two-toned ornate shield with turquoise and white halves, rimmed with gold. A depiction of some manner of brass obelisk was emblazoned upon the shield, wreathed in thorns that sprouted roses. The shield itself was crossed by a pair of blades, and the household name was inscribed on a sheathe lain underneath the shield itself. Three long wooden couches and two highbacked chairs upholstered with turquoise silk occupied the center of the room, surrounding a great wooden table set with glass and already heaped with delicacies the manner of which Calaston had never before seen in his life. Exotic fruits lain appealingly on beds of fresh vegetables atop ornate silver platters, leaves still dripping with botanical dew. Whole animal carcasses stripped, cooked, and stuffed with spiced marrowcurd still steaming with wavering heat. Lavish pastry rolls, iced with a dazzling rainbow selection of glazes and a side of silver tins heaped to the point of overflowing with a multitude of butters and jams. Glass decanters filled with liquor and stamped with wax seals of smug vintage, dazingly with so many sorts and colors that even Calaston, no stranger to drink, could identify only a few. The far wall was dominated by a massive pict-screen showing what must have been a live view from the edge of the Sterine mountain range. Set high above the lower atmosphere's dense, polluted smog, the pict-screen showed only the uppermost bounds of the dense cloud coverage habitually blanketing the planet. From above, they roiled with a tranquil and brilliant mixture of red, yellow, pink, and greyish hues - swirling in puffy spirals and hazy columns, spanning on and outwards over the horizon as Compunctio shone down on them. The air of the upper atmosphere was a clearly, breathtaking shade of blue.
Calaston all but tripped over himself as he stared at the scene before him. It was like something out of of a dream. He knew he
would see it again
in his dreams. The obscene display of wealth completely eclipsed his capacity to envision it. This room and its contents alone was worth more in marks than perhaps an entire habitation dome on its own, maybe. So Calaston was forced to speculate. Already, the incident with Cresimirus' unexpected introduction had been completely driven from his mind.
The Baron Verinais strode into the parlor with a sort of wary apprehension, eying his two guests as he did so, almost as if afraid at what their reaction might have been. Calaston's stunned awe evidently alleviated his own anxiety somewhat, and Cresimirus striding directly into the parlor itself without any evident reaction whatsoever seemed to put him entirely at ease. He then turned towards the other two occupants in the room.
"<Baron Acephethon and Baroness Galatrode, may I please introduce to you Calaston. A merchant of indentured servants and skilled folk.>" He waved over airily to where Calaston still stood, evidently stunned, at the entry archway. "<Alongside his charming companion, Cresimirus.>"
The two peers the Baron introduced were dressed far more ostentatiously than their elder. Acephethon was a short, hunched man with dark skin and hair, missing his right arm and adorned in a voluminous veridian cloak draped over his right side, while his bodyglove was a blinding ivory-white trimmed in orange and embroidered with fluid golden emblems. He bore some manner of peculiar bionic augmentation around his throat, almost like a collar of plated metal that had been sewn directly into his skin. Galatrode was an ashen-skinned woman with faded blonde straight hair that fell like a curtain about her shoulders, somewhat on the short short side at only a meter and a half in height and wearing a long vermillion caftan brocaded with imagery of rolling clouds over her otherwise spartan, pitch-black bodyglove. She wore a golden circlet along her brow, and both of her hands were bionic prosthetics with distinctly ridged knuckles with evident nicks and scratches along their rims.
"Not going to speak in Convene for the benefit of our guest, Verinais?" Galatrode asked coyly, raising an eyebrow.
"Ah, but that is what makes our guest special. Calaston here is completely fluent in highland." Verinais explained, gesturing enthusiastically towards the slaver. "Come, Calaston, a demonstration if you would?"
"Ah, of course - <That is to say, of course, your lordships.>" Calaston finally managed to recover and hurriedly enter the parlor proper, gently tugging on the hem of Cresimirus' upper sleeve to keep them from wandering too far in past the point of politeness. The figure obediently stopped in their tracks and surveyed the two other guests with a faintly beaming expression, much to Calaston's relief.
"<My my. A lowlander, fluent in the high speech? A rarity indeed. You certainly know how to find them, Verinais.>" Acephethon remarked, snapping the fingers of his one hand as if to effectuate a clap. "<You must tell us about how you came by the talent, merchant.>"
"<Indeed, I understand it is quite the tale as well!>" Verinais exclaimed as he rounded the first of the long couches and seated himself right in the center. "<Then of course, afterwards, we can discuss business. Come, come, have a seat. Help yourself. The lady Cresimirus as well, of course.>"
"<Ah, well, I am not certain it is all that much of a tale to the likes of noble pilot lords such as yourselves.>" Calaston began, approaching the arrayed seating and the table heaped with culinary treasure with some manner of trepidation. Cresimirus, seemingly without further promptly, selected the highbacked chair furthest from the table itself and sat down, folding their hands and coolly surveying the rest of the group with mild interest.
"<I am certain the tales of your mighty clashes with other pilot lords, not to mention all that infamous courtly intrigue us lowlanders love to speculate about, have far more flair and substance to them.>" Calaston tentatively seated himself to the left of Baron Verinais, both as a sign of deference and also so he could attempt to keep an eye on Cresimirus - though in that moment, his gaze became completely lost in the sea of delicacies lain out before him.
"<Bah, there are not really any epic battles or instances of legendary intrigue the sort of which is worthy of stories. That sort of thing only really happens once every other generation anyway.>" Acephethon waved his one good hand as he sat on the opposite couch. "<All our battles have been sordid and our intrigue
petty.> The Baron practically spat out the word as he reached for a nearby fruit from the table.
"<That, and of course it is always interesting to hear how charmed individuals like yourself make your own way down here in the lowlands. We only really ever go out in the murk to fight in it. Every other time I've been down here it's just been to come to quaint little retreats like this one.>" Galatrode gestured emphatically as she seated herself in another of the highbacked chairs, though she made a point of drawing it closer to the table itself. "<By all means, regale us.>"
"<If you insist. Well you see, I had a run-in with a certain artificer during the Sacristan scandal around...I think seventeen years or so ago->"
"<The same Sacristan scandal where the Princeps committed suicide and led to the rise of the secular High King?!?>" Galatrode asked, eyes widening.
"<Well when you put it like THAT it sounds all nigh-mythical!>" Calaston laughed cordially. "<But yes, that very ordeal. I am not certain whether this particular artificer was involved either but - ah, may I?>" He gestured to the array on the table.
"<Of course. Help yourself.>" Baron Verinais nodded encouragingly.
Calaston started off light with some cuts from the stuff meats as he retold the story of how he had been hired to transport an artificer between the settlements below noble Counties, on foot through the wastes of the lowlands. He dissembled slightly in the retelling, downplaying substantially the significance of the artificer in particular while exaggerating the detours and conflicts they had run afoul of along the way. He then made the mistake of pouring himself a measure of liquor from one of the glass decanters, and the rest of the night devolved into a muddy blur of lavish consumption, intoxication, and generally perverse divergences.
Calaston only partially returned to his senses nearly six hours later, when the lights in the hab dome had been lowered to help encourage some scant adherence to diurnal activity and he was stumbling on the sidewalk outside the noble lodge.
One of the household guards caught him by the elbow and gently propped him up against the wall. "Sir. Sir. Can you hear me? Seems you may be the one who actually stole all the oceans away."
"Thefleurgh?" Calaston inquired.
"Figuratively speaking, sir."
"Watta-the purdy? Verrrruy impun-impun-spotty purdy." Calaston was drooling slightly out of the corner of his mouth.
"The Barons - and Baroness - were all exceptionally pleased with your discourse sir. By my estimation." The guard supplied, evidently somewhat versed in completely insensate nonsense. "It is above my station to know of course, but I believe you concluded your business with them and managed to make it down here of your own...volition." He gave Calaston an appraising look through the slits of his unusual mask. "...Whatever was left of it."
Calaston seemed to visibly hesitate with his mouth half-open for several moments before he remembered something important. "Payduhrit?"
"...Yesss?" The guardsman speculated. "At least, I gather that would be the contents of this little number here." The guardsman leaned down, and hoisted up a small lockbox that rattled promisingly with the familiar sound of precious metal marks. Calaston greedily grabbed at the box, nearly fell over from the weight of it and dropped it a second time, and finally used it as a weight to help prop his upper body more firmly against the wall.
"Hork. Rrrrooty. Cahr?" Calaston ventured.
"Yes. Baron Verinais called down and suggested you might need one, a groundcar has been called for you."
"Grud! Wuffle it urp en blit gergers, hank." Calaston then promptly fell over on the ground, the strongbox clattering beside his head, and began snoring.
888888888888
"Calaston! Wake the fuck up you dipshit!" Calaston was rocked to his senses a good half-day later when Tatronda beat him over the head with an empty tin for algae bars. He was back in his their commonroom at the warehouse, having been passed out on the couch.
"Ack, fuck me woman," Calaston howled as he scrambled upright, moaning as sharp lights cut through his eyes and brain. "Oh saints, my
head. How long have I been out- no, wait, more important, did I get back with the marks?"
"
Calaston, what the fuck did you do?!?" Tatronda screamed, gripping his lapels in order to properly project spittle into his face.
"I
just woke up and FUCK YOU!" Calaston screamed, bodily shoving Tatronda away as he tried to sit up. "MORE IMPORTANTLY, where are the fucking MARKS?"
"Marks are here boss." Ferdrank, sitting at a nearby makeshift table fashioned from plastek palettes, spoke up. He pointed to the strongbox from before - now open and heaped with several stacks of precious metal marks. "Uh. Perhaps too many?"
"What the fuck does that mean?" Calaston swore.
"What it means is that we thought you had
stolen them, because the entire fucking dome is
crawling with house guards looking for you!" Tatronda howled. "There are two RIGHT ACROSS THE WAY right now asking vagrants about you!"
"What- but-" Calaston spluttered. "That is
not what happened! I think?!? I got completely shitfaced in there, but I definitely remember walking out with that box! A house guard called me a groundcar to leave!"
"I think they may've just discovered that you sold 'em a mutie then, boss." Ferdrank mused.
"Enough to search the entire damn hab for me?" Calaston demanded.
"Well, that's the thing boss. It may not
just be that you sold 'em a mutie. It may be how much you suckered them for." Ferdrank then took the strongbox and upended it onto the dim warehouse floor. More than twenty rectangular marks tumbled from inside to clatter with a distinctive metallic jangle on the floor. Every single one of them had golden lining with insets of platinum and engravings of the high king's face in electrum. Calaston gaped. The marks were worth more than he had ever seen in one placed before - probably than all three of them combined had ever
had to their names before.
"HOW did you con those idiots for a literal
king's ransom?!?" Tatronda demanded.
"I- I don't know! I was completely drunk out of my mind less than an hour in! It had to be-" He halted abruptly, horror cutting its way across his face. "Oh saints. Fuck. Maybe that slave was right? Maybe that fucking mutant
is a witch? I don't remember anything! If anything weird happened, it had to be the stupid mutant - and- and they
talked!"
"The mutie TALKED?!?" Ferdrank gaped. "What did it say!"
"They asked for its name - and it gave them a botched version of what we named it!" Calaston moaned, bringing his hands to his face. "But that's all I remember! I didn't think it had same anything else, but it must have said
something while I was out of my mind!"
"Boss, there
are people who know we are staked out here. Eventually those greatcoats are gonna storm the place and we'll be proper fucked." Tatronda snarled. "We've got to take the marks and split! Do you have anywhere we can lay low?"
"Fuck - yes, yes, I do." Calaston muttered. "We're gonna have to make it to the airlocks and make a bit of a trek across the wastes, but there's a place I know of in the next hab over. We at least have the marks to bribe our way through any trouble-"
"I'm not so sure, boss." Ferdrank indicated. He picked up one of the fallen marks and held it out for the three of them to all look at. "Check that. These're
serialized." He tapped at a sequence of razor-thin lines stamped near the bottom. "That, and they're too high denomination. We try and split even one of these and we'll need a whole case just to carry the change on top of the guards running in once they get alerted."
"Well isn't that just great! We're the richest fucking pissants in the whole of the lowlands and we can't even spend any of it!" Tatronda spat. "This is
your fault, Calaston. You had better get us out of this mess or I swear I'll send you straight to the depths!"
888888888888
They had
almost gotten away.
All three of them having disguised themselves with more of the stashed outfits and some wigs, they had flipped a breaker for the lightning around the warehouse and made distance from it under the cover of darkness. They had hired a groundcar to take them to the nearest airlock terminal, but had ditched it in a hurry when they saw that the household guards had set up checkpoints at various road intersections. They crossed the rest of the hab on-foot, doing the best they could to stay out of sight and stick to backroads, all of them clutching at barely concealed shock mauls - which did plenty to deter the interest of other unsavory sorts with an eye for trouble.
They had finally come within shouting distance of the airlock terminal when they were forced to step out into the open. There were household guards present at the terminal itself, but only a few - and they were having clear trouble inspecting the crowds of lowlanders coming and going. It
should have been a clear shot out of the hab.
"Fuck. Don't look now but we've got a tail." Tatronda muttered. "Looks like four guards. They're coming right for us from down the way."
"The fuck-
How?!?" Calaston swore. "Do they actually see us?"
Tatronda cast a quick, discreet glance behind them. "...No. I don't think so. The one in the lead has a dataslate though, they keep looking back down at it. Maybe they're here to set up at the terminal."
"If worse comes to worse, we'll have to use one of the maintenance hatches up top or something." Ferdrank groaned. "Let's just shake 'em."
The three broke off from their approach to the terminal and turned at the last intersection instead, before dipping into an alleyway. They started making their way for a maintenance-level lift when Tatronda swore. "They're still followin' us!"
"
How?" Calaston hissed through gritted teeth.
"The guy with the dataslate keeps looking back to it and all of them adjust their path each time! It's like it's tracking us or something!"
"Well they can't
all have that sort of thing. Time to make a break for it. We've just got to make a run for the nearest lift." Calaston declared. He looked between the other two, who nodded - and then as one, they all broke into dead sprints, Ferdrank doing his best to run as fast as he could while hauling the strongbox with him. The group of guardsmen immediately caught on and began to run in pursuit, shouting after the trio of slavers while the one in the lead put a hand to the side of their head and began to put out a vox.
They did not make it far. The lead guardsman had apparently alerted several other nearby squads of guards, and less than a minute later the three found themselves surrounding on all sides in a cargo lot.
"Ok, that was quite the chase, but it's time to do things the
easy way now." Growled the lead guardsman with the dataslate as he came up behind them, while two more squads of guards raised their rifles and kept them aimed at the trio. "You there, with the stupid wig. You'd be Calaston, right?"
"...Never heard of him." Calaston said through gritted teeth. "What do you want?"
"Never heard of him eh? Well then, he will be wanting his marks back I gather. That lockbox you're lugging around belongs to him." The guardsman pointed to the lockbox clutched in Ferdrank's grip.
"Hey! Nobody said anything about marks! There could be anything in there!" Tatronda desperately bluffed.
The guardsman shook his head and turned the dataslate around for the three of them to see. A neat, digital outline of the ground-level hab and its layout was displayed, and right in the middle of the cargo lot all of them were gathered in, there was a blinking dot with shifting coordinates under it right where the trio were standing. "Those marks are valuable enough that they're individually doped with radioactive isotopes to track them. We couldn't find you at first, probably because you were holed up somewhere with lots of insulation - but we found your trail quickly enough once you came out into the open. Now, no more games. I don't suppose all three of you want some of this?"
Ferdrank and Tatronda both glanced to Calaston with some mixture of sympathy and calculation.
"Sorry, boss." Ferdrank said apologetically, and then called out to the guards. "Yeah, fine, this here is Calaston."
"That's what I thought." The lead guardsman said, stowing the dataslate in his pack. "We need you to come with us. Your presence has been requested. Did you want to take the marks with you, or leave them with your friends here?"
"...We're were just moving these actually, so you can just take him." Tatronda indicated before Calaston could protest.
"You conniving, Ambuscade-faced bitch-" Calaston spat.
"Yeah, that's what I thought." The guardsman said dryly as he gestured to his squad to move in. "Take him."
888888888888
"You are going to need this." One of the guards remarked, passing Calaston a rebreather. "We'll be four kilometers above the surface once we get where we're going. You're not acclimatized to the atmosphere up there."
"What, the air up there is little too good for us lowlanders?" Calaston sneered. "I've spent my life in the worst pollutant smog on the surface. You think a bit of mountain air will hurt me?"
The guardsman laughed. "Yes. I do think...just a tiny, tiny bit of mountain air might cause you some discomfort."
"He's fucking with you." Another guardsman said tiredly. "There's not
enough air up there. If you're not adapted to it, you'll get sicker than sick."
Calaston sourly fit the mask over his face and crossed his arms as they waited.
He had been roughly frog-marched back across the city, through the noble promenade (an otherwise momentous occasion), and through a lateral railcar leading from the hab dome into the heart of the mountain bastion of the pilot knights. From there, he had been escorted through a tight series of metal corridors until they had come to a larger rail-car that could seat thirty people plus cargo on its spacious floor-area. For now, it was just Calaston and two squads of guards.
The railcar began to ascend with a jolt. The journey would not be a quick one, Calaston realized. The railcar was moving at standard speed, but lifts in the habs could already take minutes to get to and from certain levels. The railcar was going to take them to the mountaintops.
"So, while we wait, what is this about? What'd I do to get a whole manhunt?" Calaston bit out, still fuming.
"That's the question on all our minds right now." The guard across from him drawled. "We were hoping
you might tell
us."
"Orders were just to take you up for an audience quicker as quick. Without breaking anything." Another guard added.
"An audience? With
who exactly? The Baron again?" Calaston demanded. That got him an odd look from most of his chaperons.
"...The new House Chiurgeon." The guard across from him said. "Spoke of you real familiar-like."
"Chiurge- what, you mean a stupid
Medicae?!?" Calaston snarled from behind his rebreather. "You're telling me a
Medicae can order a hab-wide manhunt like this?"
"Well no." The guardsman admitted. "They mentioned wanting an audience with you to the Baron, and then he told us to jump and handle it."
"Really? And the Baron thought sending all of you was necessary? Sweeping the hab and putting up checkpoints?" Calaston questioned.
"I...guess you wouldn't know, huh?" Another guardsman contributed. "This
is a little irregular, but the Baron was feeling especially
grateful, see. After-"
"Everyone, be quiet." Snapped the squad's sergeant. "Are you guardsman or housemaids? Stow the chatter. Especially in front of hab scum." The atmosphere in the railcar soured notably, but the guardsman complied - and no matter how Calaston needled them, he could not get them to answer him.
As the railcar rose, a number of automatic thermal regulators kicked on to warm the interior - even with them, Calaston could tell why. The air was growing gradually colder and colder. What felt like an eternity later, as the railcar reached its destination at the mountain summit, the atmosphere had grown utterly frigid. Even in the radiant heat of the regulators, Calaston had to suppress the urge to curl up into himself from the piercing chill. The house guardsman, all of whom had parkas in the house colors and whose bodygloves seemed insulated for this exact temperature, all seemed perfectly comfortable - and had no trouble hauling Calaston out of his seat and frog marching him outside.
The view was one of astounding immensity and beauty. Once more, Calaston was treated to a topside view of the lower atmosphere's cloud layer from above. Whorls of red, yellow, orange, pink, and grey mist swirled and danced in an endless sea in every direction - only broken up in the far distance by mountainous plateaus and mesas looming up from the clouds like hunchbacked giants. From one end of the horizon to the next, the sky was a perfectly clear and deep blue in coloration. Seeing it in person rather than through a pict-screen, Calaston felt like if the guardsmen let go of him, he would fall upwards and never stop.
The chill outside was intolerably cold - it seemed to flay Calaston alive, his skin going numb as an icy frigidity settled into his bones, organs, and marrow. He could feel his muscles screaming as they fought to tighten in upon themselves. Even with the benefit of a rebreather, he felt like the sheer cold had jabbed him in the gut and blown the air out from him. There was only a light wind, but even that light wind seemed like a hail of knives to his senses - especially so as the wind carried with it glittering dust that shone in the light of day like diamonds as they flurried through the air.
Following the path of the diamond dust, Calaston turned his head and surveyed the whole of the mountaintops. They were drapped in a flawless, immaculate blanket of shining white sheets - snow. He had heard about this before. It was snow. Frozen, crystalized water. There was so much of it here he swore it could have refilled the drained oceans. He flinched as starlight from Compunctio gleamed off the snowy drifts and blazed in his eyes.
"Don't look right at the snow. You'll burn your eyes." One of the guards muttered - and suddenly Calaston realized the purpose of their peculiar, slit-eyed masks. They must have helped limit visibility so that they were not blinded by the light beaming off the terrain.
Regularly dotting the peaks were stony crags and implacable stony cliff-faces, sharp as daggers rising from the fog below. Interspersing the rock face and the fields of snow were copses of trees, but unlike any manner of tree that existed in the lowlands. Lowland trees were miserable, colorless, stubby things nearly wider than they were tall; all gnarled and hungry roots starving to draw energy and sustenance from anything nearby. The trees up in the highlands - they were vast, taller than some buildings, with concentric crowns of green foliage that drank up starlight.
Then, jutting directly from the mountain peaks, or else emerging abruptly directly from cliff faces, were the palatial Pilot Arcologies.
The one immediately before him was nothing less than a massive spire of gleaming cyan metal, with buttresses, towers, tiers, domes, and balconies all along its length, easily more than a kilometer tall like a serrated needle piercing into the sky. Its base, where they now stood, was a massive metallic platform - perhaps a cylinder - anchored into the heart of the mountain itself, a massive plaza festooned with lifts, railcars, and what even looked to be a landing pad for small voidcraft.
...and of course, there were also the God Engines.
Arrayed in order on macro-lifts that doubtlessly led down to the lowland bastions, and exposed inside a hangar in the side of the mountain spire itself, they loomed like vigilant giants. All adorned in turquoise and gold, draped in banners and pinned with shield-crests, wielding weapons of such potency there was no doubt they could have been used to topple the very tower they were housed in, had they deigned it. Crowds of artificers swarmed over them in groups - which Calaston knew were called Lances, with three engines apiece. There were more than twenty of the colossal engines in various states of repair or transport. One of them - one of the larger ones, which moved purposefully across the plaza - sent whirling cyclones of glittering ice adrift in its wake as it went, a cape of crystals adorning it as it moved to one of the plaza's macro-lifts and prepared to descend below.
"Yeah yeah, we've all seen it before. Get moving. We don't have all day." One of the guards indicated, jabbing at Calaston in the back and urging him onward.
The guards continued to frog march Calaston, leading him into the spire itself through a small set of engraved ceramite doors, themselves set into a larger ceremonial gate more than thirty meters tall. The arcology interior was a bizarre mixture of aesthetic between remote, impregnable fortress and sprawling and open luxury resort. Vast hallways or marble, adorned with rugs, banners, and exposed vista-balconies were interconnected by spartan metal corridors and hallways with multiple security airlocks. The personnel at this level were an even mixture of well-dressed servants and low-courtiers, intermixing freely with household guards and artisans.
Calaston was eventually taken to a lobby filled with more lifts. Only two guards accompanied him onto one of them, which then rose at a blistering pace compared to the railcar they had ascended on earlier - stopping only moment later on a floor which a pict-screen indicated was more than thirty floors above the base. There were substantially fewer inhabitants in the halls here, perhaps only a few dozen - and their manner of dress revealed their status as actual family members of House Crescentius, or else as highly ranked courtiers and aides. They wore fine gowns and silks worth more than the entire warehouse Calaston's trio of slavers had resided in. The more he saw, the more Calaston began to realize that even the unwholesome sum of marks he had evidently been paid amounted to just a pittance in the grand scheme of the house's wealth. It was unreal, like he had been spirited away to some fantasy realm.
Eventually, the two guards brought him to a particular doorway. "Here we are." One of them announced, and then approached to smartly rap on the doorway.
It swung open, and the familiar visage of Baron Verinais himself appeared. Both of the guardsmen immediately saluted. "Sir!" The one in the lead said smartly. "Forgive us, we were unaware your noble personage would be present."
"Quite alright. At ease." Baron Verinais said with an easy smile and unmasked delight in both of his eyes. "I was just having another session with our new Chiurgeon. Quite the miracle-worker, that one. I am feeling younger already."
Calaston blinked, screwing his own eyes together and taking another look. He was not imagining things. The baron had two eyes.
...When just the other night, he had been wearing an ornate eyepatch where one of them currently was.
"<A pleasure to see you again, young Calaston.>" The Baron beamed at him as he spoke in the highland tongue. "<I personally cannot fully express the gratitude I feel for your provision of such a fine and talented servant. I can only hope you are satisfied with the sum we agreed upon earlier. Do let me know if it is not enough.>"
Calaston gaped in disbelief at the baron, too stunned for words.
"<The House Chiurgeon, who has requested your presence, is within.>" The Baron indicated with a collegial wave to the doorway. "<Best not to keep them waiting.>"
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The House Chiurgeon's quarters were simultaneously lavish, and barren. It was a two-storied chamber, with a balcony along the inner wall adjoining an array of armaglass windows providing an immaculate view of the exterior. The opposite wall was dedicated to the tall shelves of a private library - all the shelves being virtually empty, save for a small collection of half a dozen books that looked to have been recently propped up at the far end. The floors and walls, carved and tiled marble, were bare of any of the adornment otherwise commonplace in the halls. A rolled-up and dusty carpet along one edge of the chamber alongside several crates of bric-a-brack made clear that the chamber was either in the midst of being emptied, or perhaps furnished, if not both. A massive, barren desk carved from wood dominated the far end of the chamber, where stood a familiar figure and two highbacked chairs.
Cresimirus stared at Calaston with a calm, tranquil expression, their hands steepled together as they sat in the highbacked chair behind the desk. They were now dressed in a matching set of white trousers and long-sleeved tunic, along with a long, turquoise-hued and gold-rimmed apron across their front. The crest of House Crescentius was sewn into their right shoulder.
"You!" Calaston all but screamed.
Cresimirus raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. They gestured towards the highbacked chair opposite them. Calaston approached the desk, but refused to sit, glaring murderous down at the androgynous mutant.
A long silence passed between them, neither saying anything. Calaston wringing his hands in fury as Cresimirus gave him a familiar, placid stare. Finally, Calaston broke the silence.
"I know you can talk, you mutant shit." He spat. "So
talk. Explain this!" He gestured to their surroundings. "Explain
yourself!"
"<I would first like to thank you for your education, Master Calaston.>" Cresimirus spoke in perfect highland. Their voice was light, mellifluous, airy, and clear in tone. It was like listening to the chords of distant chimes, or ringing bells, carried in the wind. "<If not for your knowledge of the highland tongue, I do not envision my...>" Cresimirus paused and they seemed to think over their own wording for a moment before proceeding. "<...elevation here would have been so swift, nor so effortless. You were an adequate teacher. The extended conversations you had during the meeting last night were especially informative.>"
"That is Ambull shit!" Calaston spat. "
Nobody can learn a new language in just a day, let alone over the course of a single party!"
"<I am an unusual specimen.>" Cresimirus ceded, unmoving, their expression unchanged. "<Which brings us to why you are here.>" They finally turned to gaze out the nearby array of windows, and at last, their expression shifted - they appeared very nearly
unsettled, the curve of their mouth finally descending into something like a dissatisfied frown as they looked outwards.
"<...Perhaps more appropriately, why
I am here.>"
"You must have done something to the Baron while I was drunk last night. You...did something to their eye!" Calaston accused, jabbing a finger at Cresimirus.
"<Yes. That is not what I meant however. Not why I am here, with House Crescentius. Why I
exist. What my
purpose is.>" Cresimirus intoned. "<I came to be...only some days ago. My first moment of awareness when I was taken from some manner of...I do not know the word for it yet. A container of some sort. Then, by several turns of circumstance, here. I know...I simply...
know, that I am not yet fully grown. Perhaps I never will be. I also
know, with certainty, that I was fashioned for a special, specific purpose. A function. Something...I am meant to execute.>"
Cresimirus then turned back to stare coolly at Calaston. "<That is why I called you here. Desperately. Master. There is something I need you to teach me. Something that, of all the people I have met, I think only you - perhaps Tatronda and Ferdrank as well, but they obeyed you - only you may know the answer.>"
"You keep calling me Master." Calaston said flatly, his eyes wavering with confusion, his tone a mixture of uncertainty and bitterness.
Cresimirus shrugged. "<You were factually my Master for a time. I was your slave. You kept many slaves. You still do. A Slave Master is what you are. Perhaps not mine, now? Though the people of House Crescentius are insistent on formality and title. Even if they do not recognize yours.
That is why you are here. Why you are...the way you are.>"
"What, you still hung up on that? Deal with it. You're not special, mutant." Calaston sneered.
Cresimirus stared a Calaston passively for a long moment before continuing. "<Since the first moment I saw them - people, Humans, even the mutated ones. I knew. I knew, instinctively, with every fiber of my being, that there was nothing more precious in the entirety of the world than them. Humans. Humanity. A truth that is the foundation of my very being. I was made this way, I believe. I must have been. It is...not something the Humans of this world...appear to believe themselves.>"
"What." Calaston said flatly. "You think you're some kind of living saint or something? Think you're going to save everybody from themselves?"
"<I do not know what I am. Or what I shall become. Or even what I will do now. That is why I called you here.>" Cresimirus answered, gesturing lightly at Calaston with an open palm. "<It is simple. There is nothing more precious than Humanity. Nothing. It is...the most valuable, desirous...noblest state of being that there can be. That is why...you fascinate me so, Master Calaston. You, who takes other Humans as slaves. You, who trades and sells them for marks, objects, and favors. That is what I must learn. How...do you manage it? What secret do you know? How do you know, what Humans, and Human life, is worth?>"
It was finally Calaston's turn to stare at Cresimirus. His own gaze was narrow and spiteful. His lips were pursed in a thin line. He loosened the grips of his fingers however, as he finally came to understand what it was the mutant wanted from him. He did not answer.
Cresimirus's expression fluttered once more, a flash of what could only be yearning dancing across their face, vanishing almost as quickly. They opened their mouth to continue speaking, hesitated, and then stopped. They peered into Calaston's eyes, and frowned.
"<...Perhaps it was presumptuous of me to assume you would share your knowledge freely.>" Cresimirus finally continued. "<I ask of you. I beg of you. Anything that is within my power to give you in exchange, I shall. My means are...limited. I have little understanding of what else has value on this world, except for the people themselves. Perhaps marks? Or perhaps I can heal you, as I healed the Baron? I must understand the nature of my being, that part of me which knows without understanding. I feel that you can teach me. Master.>"
"You worthless garbage." Calaston finally answered. His voice was trembling with barely contained fury. "The nerve of it. I thought that me and the others were low, but you are amazing. Amazing like some grotesque gutter freak, by the way. You are so revolting I cannot help but be astounded by it." Cresimirus stared coolly at Calaston as he carried on, their expression serene and passive.
"I have to believe you now, and I suppose my first guess was right. You are some bastard vanity project by the Pilot Lords, or the Mechanicum. You are so
perverse that they literally had to...I don't know,
inscribe some instinctive awareness of Human worth in you. Like a
machine. And somehow, you can perfectly learn the high tongue and probably Convene too in less than a day, but when you look at people you can't understand what makes
anybody worth
anything."
Calaston laughed then. It was an ugly, full-bodied, rancorous laugh. Spittle flew from his mouth, spraying across Cresimirus' apron. Cresimirus was frowning now, ever so faintly.
"You're less than mutant filth. Damn, you're less than fucking insects and literal water scum. You
look Human, but there's nothing Human about you. You've got none of the right pieces or parts, especially where it matters. The way you look at everybody now makes so much sense now. You've literally been trying to figure us out this whole time, but even with your perfect memory and perfect learning and what I can only assume are miraculous witch powers, you literally cannot figure anything out about us except what you already
know because some sick pervert somewhere literally wrote it into you. You are so
disgusting that you even make slavers and Mechanicum zealots look alright in comparison."
"<...It is true there are many things I do not understand.>" Cresimirus began, their brow knitting into itself. "<Much as I do not understand what you are doing by saying these things to me. These...slights. Are you trying to make me angry? I ask this earnestly. I do not understand why you are saying this.>"
"I'm saying it so that you understand why you should kill yourself." Calaston spat. "There's a window right there, pretty long way down. You should jump, and good riddance, you piece of Ambull shit."
"<...I do not think a fall like that would harm me...>" Cresimirus ventured.
"Well fuck, turn on a furnace and lock yourself inside it. Drown yourself. Whatever works." Calaston said dismissively.
Cresimirus raised a hand to the side of their head, their expression one of pained bewilderment. Still, there was no anger. Only confusion. "<...You have not answered my question, itself. You have only...hurt me for not knowing the answer.>" They spoke, their voice falling in intonation, low and almost whispered in volume. "<I cannot know what I should do unless I understand. Please.>"
Calaston laughed again then. "I can't help but laugh at you. Some machine-freak trying to learn how it can
commodify Humanity because it had some stupid rule raped into it. You want to know the truth? The truth is that you were probably
made to be a slave. It's actually kind of fitting that you were one for a while - well, and you probably still are kind of, only even the most useless slave would still be worth more than you. Whoever made you decided that as a slave, you probably didn't need unnecessary things like
empathy, or that you should be able to feel
pain. That's the thing that really makes this so ultimately
gross, by the way. You
look perfect, you can't be meaningfully hurt, I bet you don't even feel much of
anything, do you?"
"<...I feel pained from what you are saying.>" Cresimirus seethed. "<I do not understand why.>"
"You know, I don't know what's actually worse. The idea that somebody actually made you in order to make better slaves, or that Human slavery is just, on its face, objectively more moral and preferable to the alternative of something like you existing." Calaston threw in. "That's coming from me as a slaver as well, so I promise you I'm in a good position to make that judgement call."
Cresimirus raised the fingers of both their hands to their temples and stared at Calaston, wide-eyed. "<I have done nothing to deserve this->" They began. Then they stopped. Calaston began to laugh again as Cresimirus continued to stare. After several long moments filled with Calaston's hideous laughter, he quieted down, letting out a few final chuckles before looking smugly down at Cresimirus from where he stood.
"<...I think I begin to understand.> Cresimirus said, their voice and expression returning to their previously serene and tranquil states. They returned to steepling their fingers once more as they began to coolly stare at Calaston once more. "<None of the slaves you kept and traded away, none of them deserved that, did they? That is why you are acting this way. You know that they are worth infinitely more, and you...you use them as marks, for infinitely less than they are worth. That is why you denigrate yourself. That is why you are attempting to hurt me.>"
"Completely and utterly wrong, you dismal, festering
stain." Calaston sneered. "You are
incapable of understanding, as long as you think in terms of
value or
worth. Your
existence is a sick joke, your 'instinct' is a
degenerate paradox."
Cresimirus rose from their seat. "<I did not learn what I needed to from you, Master Calaston. Though you did teach me something nonetheless.>" They said. Their gaze was still serene, but there was the faintest hint of bitterness now carried in their tone. "<I agree that there is...a paradox here.>" They crossed over to the other side of the desk to face Calaston.
"There is nothing you can learn that will do you any good, whatever you are. You
thing." Calaston smiled at Cresimirus, wraping one hand across his waist and planting his opposing elbow atop it, making a flippant gesture towards them with his supported hand.
888888888888
A short time later, Cresimirus emerged from their chambers, and signaled to a nearby guard.
"Whenever any are available, please call a pair of menials up to my chambers. There is a statue that has been left by my desk that I would like moved. I would do it myself, but I cannot even bring myself to touch it."
"No shame in knowing it is too heavy to move, uh...sir...or...lady?"
"You may call me Cresimirus, if I may also know your name." Cresimirus smiled faintly.
"Ah. Well, you can call me Guardsman Fontebond, Cresimirus." The guardsman threw the androgynous figure a lazy salute. They then gestured towards the door. "May I?"
"Whatever you would like, Guardsman Fontebond." Cresimirus intoned, beaming. He nodded and peered through the door.
A perfect statue of Calaston right down to the clothes he had been wearing, with a peculiar smile and with one arm poised upon the other making a flippant gesture towards nobody in particular, stood right by Cresimirus' desk.
"Oh hey, I think I saw this guy come in!" Fontebond exclaimed, somewhat puzzled. "Did he come in to stand for this depiction or something?"
"Yes." Cresimirus said without elaborating.
"This is good work.
Very likelike. Where do you want it moved, in case the menials come by while you aren't here?"
"The wall just left of the entrance, facing the windows. So you can see him right as you enter or leave."
"So you're always reminded of them or something?"
"Yes." Cresimirus smiled. "That. And something."
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