I chipped carefully away at the weirwood's flesh, the sap smelling powerfully like blood. The bark was only a thin protective skin and bled freely when broken, and the flesh beneath was unsettlingly soft.
Ellir and I had found a tree not far from the Lodge, young enough to be pliable, whatever that meant, and old enough to survive the process of carving.
I was very careful not to use any of my supernatural abilities, as much as I could refrain from. I didn't have a choice with Masterwork all but guiding my hands, but most other stuff like Woodworking I could set aside. This meant I'd be coming back to the tree over the course of a few weeks while perfecting it.
Apparently, doing this step by step was important. Go too fast and the whole tree might die, take too long and the work would begin to rot, and you still needed to take enough time that it was a
real personal investment. At least, that's what I understood from the story about three men who started carving at a new moon, but only the man who finished on the full had a tree that survived.
Noticing my grimace, Ellir nodded sympathetically. "Here, this is enough for today."
Taking the offered towel and wiping my hands clean of tree viscera, I leaned back and frowned. What I'd done so far looked like I'd flayed part of the tree, reminding me unpleasantly of scalp-less skulls.
"I didn't realize these trees were so… Gross." I shrugged, putting my tools aside. "People really drink the sap?"
Ellir chuckled. "Most haven't done what we're doing. The sap doesn't go bad and is sweet, you know. Try some?"
She scooped a bit of the bloody sap with the tip of a finger and stuck it in her mouth, smiling exaggeratedly.
Skeptically, I took a little sap and sniffed at it. It wasn't nearly as bad once I was far enough from the tree that the raw meat smell wasn't overpowering everything. It had an almost spicy quality along with a slight hint of iron, but that was all.
Sticking the glob in my mouth, I judged it with care. It was
bitter, but that was balanced nicely by the sweetness. It ended up feeling quite tart and I could imagine a piping hot flagon of the stuff would be a treat indeed.
Nodding, I spit the ball back out. It might taste nice, but I wasn't going to
eat that! "Tastes pretty good!" I told her.
She nodded, taking an empty clay vessel and swapping it out from the little sap-catcher she'd made. "We don't want to needlessly wound the trees for this, but if we're carving an ancestor tree, it's a good chance to collect this. I'll make sure nobody messes with the carving, but we'll need to keep collecting the sap and making sure it continues to flow. If it scabs over the carving and it begins to heal too soon, it may bring illness when you continue."
"Sounds reasonable." I nodded, "I'll make time to finish this the right way."
"Good." She stood, stretching. "I wondered how long it would take you to start listening. I'm glad you have."
She offered a hand and pulled me up to my feet once I took it.
Threads of Air collected my scattered toolset, cleaned them of sap, and neatly stored everything. Putting the bundle atop a full vessel, I hefted the pot in both hands while Ellir grabbed one of her own.
"It's hard for me to square everything." Turning, we set back down the game trail that led us here. "It would be so much simpler if I could lean back and flatly deny magic.
Saidar took any hope of that," I complained, "And I'm scared that if I wholesale adopt
your worldview, or Tunerk's, or
anyone's, that I'm going to miss something that's going to get people killed."
Ellir was quiet, so I continued, dragging thoughts that needed to be aired one by one out of the parts of my mind I shied away from. "Where I'm from, I should be put under very close scrutiny and face
real punishment for what I encouraged everyone to do with the slavers we captured."
She barked a sudden laugh at that, "For that? Well, maybe you should have killed them outright out of practicality, but it's a good tale the way it's told." She snickered, "Would've been funnier if you took their heads, but I guess their hair will do."
I eyed her askance, "They were prisoners in our care by then. I don't like the idea of treating
anyone we capture like that." Grimly, I confronted a concern that had been bubbling away since then. "I worry they lived. Everything I've heard about how the Southerners view these lands says they wouldn't come here lightly. Some of those men wore silk under their coverings and that's never been a cheap fabric. They were prepared, as much as they could be, for the land itself and the people they
knew they'd find."
I mused for a moment, finally putting everything out in the sunlight. "Someone wealthy paid for that. Wealthy enough to foster an expedition into
savage and hostile lands, as Symon put it, and that wealth might pose a problem. If, and I know it's a big if, but
if one of those prisoners survived and made it back to tell the tale, we should prepare for reprisals."
Ellir sniffed, "We beat them, they won't be back until they recover strength. Even
if they knew. Naked, in the snows a moon- Month, right, ago?" She shook her head, "Even if they found shelter, and made fire, they are no Hornfoots to walk barefoot along the river. If the cold didn't kill them, blood-sickness would."
Nodding slowly, I relaxed a bit. "Well, still good to prepare for incursions anyway. We didn't hit the ship, so they presumably took the people back, so they may be back
anyway. Prisoners, though, we need to treat better in the future."
Ellir scoffed, "If they aren't slavers or man-eaters, do what you want. We've the food for extra mouths now, but it may not always be so."
Well, it wasn't a condemnation of the idea, but it certainly didn't sound like an endorsement.
"If it's the worst case, I'd rather release the prisoners than hold them. If we can't adequately care for them when they're under our power, we can't hold them. Killing prisoners when things get bad like that, though…" I shivered, reminded of something I couldn't quite place.
Hazily, a scene came together in my head. I was atop some elevated balcony, there was a mountain of a man with blazing gold eyes standing next to me, and below was a plaza with men kneeling in ranks. Each was chained, restrained, and
forced to kneel there.
The man rumbled something and soldiers entered, as though on parade, a grand show. One soldier for every chained man, and the mountain raised his hand before slashing it suddenly down.
Steel flashed and heads fell, blood flowing along grooves in the ground, channels leading into a great cauldron-
Ellir nudged me, bringing me back to the present. "I'm not killing prisoners," I said flatly, dropping the subject. Ellir must have heard something in my tone, as she was quiet until we returned to the village. She bade off for her rituals and said I should meet her tomorrow in the evening, leaving me once more to my own devices.
I dropped off the sap in the kitchens before heading over to the fabricator. It was high time I started putting some of my
ideas into use.
First off, I produced a couple of blank tablets. Bringing them over to the hangar where I'd scraped together a basic workbench, I disassembled them into their component parts, then let myself have some fun with it.
The more I used
saidar in place of the tools I'd otherwise need for this, the easier it became. I wondered if there was a point where I'd be able to do complex things like this without needing to focus entirely on it, but if there was, I'd not found it yet.
One day, I thought to myself,
We'll have machines to do this for us. I was lucky to find two other women with the ability, and that's certainly not enough to industrialize with.
Components isolated, I put together a basic testbed for my power relay design. It seemed to work well enough, two separate devices both wirelessly connecting to
my tablet, which never seemed to run out of power. Both batteries were filling consistently and steadily, though there was a severe drop in efficiency beyond just ten meters.
Heh, just, I chuckled. Ten meters with any degree of transmission efficiency was
huge. The individual transmitter load was small, though, even if the larger network helped balance everything. In practice, each relay within range of a device drawing power would pick up the slack, governed by programming I barely understood and hardware that seemed straight out of science fiction.
It wasn't a replacement for a municipal power grid, but boy was it the foundation I wanted. Decentralization of electric power would be huge in the event of a natural disaster like a hurricane.
I ordered a few more tablets, tinkering around. Eventually, I settled on a reasonable compromise between size and power, each individual relay unit fitting in a square form factor two centimeters thick and twenty wide. Each was capable of relaying power and data, but I'd need a much larger and higher array if I wanted anything long-distance.
Or a few dozen satellites, but I would take what I could get.
Free Folk Space Association?
Well, that was lame. Maybe something like
the Association for the Study of Space? Wait, that's just ASS
.
I'll let everyone else find a good name that won't make us out to be an international laughingstock. Well, maybe that's better than being known as rapists, murderers, and thieves? No, no, if I stuck with that, I'd never hear the end of it from Ygdis. Considering she would live for a long, long time by virtue of learning to channel
Saidar, it seems prudent to give her as little ammunition as possible.
Unfortunately, we only had enough gold for five of the relays, and that was with me keeping enough in reserve to pass out eleven tablets. Five would go to Symon for him and his people, once I hooked the Apollo database up to the nascent network. The other six would go to Grenwin, Ygdis, and the two platoon leaders and their second officers.
Hopefully, we'll be able to streamline a lot of stuff with this. Lines of communication, note-taking, actual
reports! It'd all start simple, sure, but given time to develop, this was going to be a
major help.
Once we find more gold, we'd be set. Each tablet didn't use a lot of it, but the relays needed significantly more, and I'd only been able to scrounge together trace amounts for, well, playing around with. Symon might call it an ongoing process of testing and examination of results; I felt they'd wanted to see if gold made things more explosive and I didn't have the heart to deny them. It hadn't, it had just melted down and I collected the scraps after, but the explosion had been quite dazzling.
It took a bit to get everything finagled in place, relays connecting the Archive and networking all the way out to Symon's house, which was right next to the Lodge and was about as far as I could figure out to chain them. Still, most of our meetings had been done there, and that probably wasn't going to change anytime soon.
Finally, though, I was able to sit in the Lodge and use my PDA to start looking through the archive without monopolizing one of the few terminals. I was mostly interested in tracing back the Yin-Yang because I could
remember seeing that in two
very different places.
Eventually, I found the archived Wikipedia instance buried under taxonomical reports and transmission data from sonar buoys in the South Pacific. From there, the symbol led me to
Taoism, but that seemed a whole
mess to get into.
Might as well start from the top, and one of the oldest documents was titled the
Tao Te Ching.
It was way older than I'd expected! There were dozens of translations, and with translations tend to come alteration of meaning. Figuring out which ones I should bother with took some time, but eventually, I settled for Le Guin's. I remembered her, or at least I thought I remembered something called Earthsea, but it was fleeting. She'd been an author, that much I knew, and one I respected.
Still, the very first chapter resonated disconcertingly well with what Ellir had said.
The name you can say isn't the real name, eh?
The more I read, the more I
felt the parallels. That might not mean anything on its own, it was
super vague.
Then again, the original text was purportedly begged out of a traveling sage by a guard, so it makes sense that it'd be vague. The guard got exactly what he asked for, solid life advice and all, not religious scripture.
It wasn't any sort of rulebook I was going to adopt, but I wanted to show her this and get her opinion. Maybe saying 'ten thousand things' could be a general way of putting the world, like how people would say ten generations but mean something like 'beyond living memory.'
It was a short read that left me more bewildered than before. Maybe it was so general that I was seeing connections where there weren't. When it talked about the balance between force and yielding, how even the strongest force will be worn away by softness, I couldn't help but think of how
Saidin and
Saidar interacted, complimenting and balancing each other.
Out of curiosity, I dove back into my internal starscape, searching about for the light that represented my ability to touch
Saidar.
Oddly, I couldn't find it, or the rest of the cluster. I had vague memories of those lights doing something, but it was hard to place when.
It took a minute of thinking, but eventually, I narrowed it down to sometime after we'd entered
Stedding Tsofu. After I'd collapsed, after things started
burning.
I could still
feel the One Power, still use it, but the lights themselves were
gone.
…One of the so-called rules of channeling I'd had to break myself out of was relying on sight to weave. The closer I worked to my own body, the harder it was to make out the weaves. I'd learned to do it by
feel instead, each thread of the Power giving me
just enough proprioceptive feedback that I worked out how to do things reasonably close by without seeing.
So, I tried the same here. Doing my best to ignore the
sight of the starscape, I instead just tried to see what
felt.
Surprisingly, I found an area of peculiarly cold heat just behind my naval, and shortly after something similar just behind my sternum. As I breathed in the air in reality, the hot spot would flare, then bank as I exhaled. The spot behind my sternum pulsed energy throughout my being, fed from the hot spot.
I couldn't
see but I still
felt like the cold fire had a sort of composite hue. Hues that I'd used to identify my lights before.
…Did I somehow eat that cluster? Was that even
safe? Was
anything safe???
In my bewilderment, my self-control slipped and I lashed out at a passing cluster, grabbing frantically at
anything in reach, as though this part of me raged at being
denied.
I couldn't even bring myself to feel afraid, anymore. It was just me, and I needed to learn how I worked, and holding myself back like this was… It hurt, stretching, and I wondered how badly it might hurt if I'd waited longer. Like a limb that had fallen asleep, little prickles and tingles signaled that I really should start getting some blood flow going.
Finally feeling sated, the new lights were drawn back towards me, and I resigned myself to whatever happened next. I knew it would significantly change things,
every light had done that so far, and part of me was honestly excited to see what was what.
As they passed by the folded light I still didn't understand, it reached out and tagged some of them, and they began changing, crunching inward, and coming together into something else entirely.
Compared to what'd been happening lately with these lights, nothing really changed once they settled in.
The big one that resulted from the merger was, I thought, deceptively simple. It offered me
options. Instead of giving me
everything, it was almost meekly presenting little bundles of knowledge. I took one, and
I put the coffee mug down, looking over the test rig. Men and women in achingly familiar casual clothing worked around me, putting the final touches on the myomer actuator. The clear-the-area alarm sounded, and technicians retreated into the armored control room. Early experiments had been fatal, but they were at the stage where they could finally start applying this tech-
I shook my head, retreating from the memory. That… I didn't like how
real that had felt. The memory wasn't
mine, but then, who had it come from?
The memory had brought with it a peculiar slice of understanding. Limited to the manufacture and development of myomer-based actuation, but
very detailed, from the earliest conception to application. Applications that were, frankly, anything that could benefit from a reliable and incredibly strong set of artificial muscle fibers.
One more, then I look at the other lights.
I gently plucked another, curious.
I was standing in a dim room, surrounded by seated men in military uniform. From the four and five stars on their shoulders, they must have been generals. The flag was different, with many fewer stars than there should have been with the red and white bars.
I was holding a remote, and behind me a projection on display. It was test footage of a bipedal mech, little more than a naval gun mounted on legs. It displayed agility far beyond what I would have expected, moving deceptively quickly across an obstacle course.
My mouth moved without my direction, and a voice not my own spoke. Smooth, cultured.
"As you can see, Generals, we've seen sufficient progress in muscle tracer engineering to offer a true concept of 'mechanized infantry.' Real-time control allows for the machine to match the pilot's reflexes, and perhaps in time with further development, to operate autonomously."
A hard-jawed man with close-cropped white hair scoffed.
"Murakumo has been promising this for five years now, and only now do we see results? Our men are dying on the front lines while eggheads try and think of new solutions to ancient problems. Doctor Schenberg, we need tanks, not walking maintenance bloat."
The memory ended, leaving me with a small feeling of resentment and an entirely unique method for reading and decoding neural signals. That so-called muscle tracer was controlled by a pilot wearing a suit designed to detect those signals and pass them on to be decoded and applied to the artificial musculature driving the machine.
Oh, wow.
Moving on from the packet-giver, I found another seeming hole in the starscape, one of those paradoxically dark lights that I could see the results of but couldn't feel at all. It certainly didn't feel like a good thing, and the more I looked at it, the more I thought I felt something looking back and laughing at me.
One of the three little lights granted me the ability to pilot some type of modular weapons platform. If the variable fighter is a hyperspecialized weapon, this would be closer to devoting an entire category of military equipment to the concept of
modular mecha.
The second offered me a mode of thinking I could use to negotiate with less-than-savory parties. Black marketeers, smugglers, battlefield looters, I hopefully could pass as just another one of them when negotiating deals.
Ironically, the greatest strength it offered was the potential to set up my own subtle networks that would also operate beyond the scope of lawful authorities. We would probably need that sort of thing after everything is out in the open.
The third light was a mech.
I jolted out of my meditation, surprising a couple of the kids who had snuggled near the hearth.
Dashing over to the garage, I found a crowd of people surrounding
oh my god that's a big mech.
"Excuse me," I offered as I pushed through the crowd of people scratching their heads. Standing under the ten-meter monster, I turned and told the crowd, "Okay, this is pretty cool, but don't we all have something to be doing other than gawking at the…" I looked up at it, thinking. "Giant suit of armor?" I offered.
People looked between me and the mech, some shrugging and some shaking their heads before they started dispersing back to whatever they'd been up to before. Most looked to be heading into the greenhouse, working in teams to carry basic wooden crates laden with the recent harvest out to be stored near the kitchens.
Probably shook the whole place, like the last time something new showed up.
Standing beneath that mech, looking up at it, I felt very small. I hadn't
seriously been thinking of industrializing an entire society to create weapons like
this, had I?
It felt too big for any one person to handle. The weight of responsibility settled across my shoulders and I sighed in resignation.
The very least I could do was try to keep weapons like this from being
necessary.
I didn't even
care about the mech, anymore. What good was it? In practically every military context I thought I knew, there was no way this would be feasible! That general had been an asshole, but he wasn't
wrong. The Valkyries were built to get in and get out, with alien-derived integrity stabilizers keeping the whole thing in one piece and even a little armored.
This, though, was like a mountain designed to take fire and keep standing. Even then, it looked sleek enough to be agile, if that muscle tracer had been anything to go by.
I'd have a few more of those knowledge bits later, after dinner. Whatever the little crumpled light had done to change that cluster, I wanted to hug and thank it. I had
a choice now! I didn't
have to try and keep myself from getting
worse! I could study on my own terms, I could actually have time to
think. It just made things
better.
I hoped that I'd never need to deploy this, but next time the Others came, there weren't going to be any last-second scrambles for weapons. I wish I'd not taken the Valkyrie apart, that we hadn't been saved by a
miracle.
I had my suspicions that I'd learn more about muscle tracers the more of those packets I took. I wasn't going to take this one apart until I could build another
from scratch!
***
Captain Heijo was having a fairly good day, all things considered. They only needed to stick to their travel plan headed down the coast to stop at Asshai for a few more hours, then he would send a messenger pigeon describing how they met with a 'hostile naval incursion' and 'gave pursuit.' Afterward, they'd bank from south to west, then follow the Great Eastern Current through to the Vigilant Isles. From there, the maps were blank.
He was an educated man, however, and a sailor. The size of the world was well known, and the currents they studied carried the shattered sea-treated wood and other peculiar debris from
somewhere. Ancient scrolls stored in the dustiest archive he'd ever seen had held records from
several different expeditions to map the Eastern Current, and a few had succeeded in learning whence it flows.
In short, they had determined there was land and civilization on the far side of the Ocean, yet they didn't know exactly how far or what obstacles they would face. So, they would be traveling along the latest expedition, one that had taken place two thousand years ago.
With modern naval maps, they should be able to navigate there. It was risky and with the thousand crewmen and two thousand civilians housed across the fleet… Well, anything was better than staying in Carcosa. If the Ochre Emperor himself inquired, well, they had the records to back their deception.
He checked the maps, then the ship's clock once more.
One of the ship's bosuns entered the bridge, saluting. "Captain, the healers say that Prince Bei should recover in time. He's safely past the tribulation."
A man of his station did not sag in relief, as much as they might want to.
"Thank you. Keep me informed."
The bosun nodded and departed.
"I'm glad the prince is safe," Helmswoman Hu turned her head from her station, "Figure we're gonna need a prince if the dragon comes after us."
"I as well, Ensign." He tapped a foot on the deck impatiently as they passed through the first defensive blockade. "If the commanders of the Blockades try to stop us, we're going to need his authority."
He took out a spyglass, watching the semaphores on the closest warship. The older wooden-hulled steamships were ambling past, crews lined up to look at the Navy's best. Thankfully despite the interest, they'd been given no signals to stop or receive inspection, and they'd hopefully be out of sight by the time anyone twigged that anything was amiss in the capital.
"That's right boys," Lieutenant Deng murmured, "We're just heading to the front. A whole bunch of supplies loaded nice and snug, plenty of blankets for the army."
Nobody wanted to say the word, but they all recognized what they were. Defectors, traitors to the Emperor, but they'd gotten their families arranged over the last month and now they
just had to make it a little further. There would be no reprisal executions, not for them. When Lord Liu recovered, there'd be nothing for him to strike at.
Handing the spyglass to his second, he turned back and watched the clock. At twenty-three knots, they were traveling nearly 24 yards each second. Faster than anything else on the water, but if word got ahead to the second Blockade…
He'd just have to stick to the plan. It was
solid.
It was also a
massive insult to the Lord of Carcosa to steal his flag fleet from under his nose. Hopefully, the plan could withstand an enraged spinner. Training with Bei had taught him that the best way of getting away from their webs of fire is to not be seen, and one of the best ways of not being seen is to look so ordinary as to be unremarkable.
Soon, the first Blockade fell out of sight behind them, and Captain Heijo allowed himself a moment of respite.
"You have the bridge, Deng. I'm stepping out for a smoke."
At his second officer's nod, he stepped out onto the balcony, breathing in the sea breeze. Rolling up some Ashina tabac, he stuck the back end in his mouth and sharply exhaled. Flipping the tube around, he puffed to even out the burn, then let his mind purposefully wander.
He needed a clear mind for what was to come, by the hints the Prince didn't even realize he was dropping. What ice demons and sorceresses had to do with the Princess, well, he'd rather say he didn't know for sure than suggest Bei was
mad.
Captain Heijo allowed himself a single fervent prayer to anything listening, a sincere plea for safe passage. Heedless, the waves chopped, the wind blew, and the sun continued to shine.
