Serenity grinned at Senkovar. It was fun to completely baffle the World Shaman. He didn’t seem to have a response to Serenity’s claim that he was only Jenna’s father and that he wasn’t in charge of her education. He was happy to give input, but he knew that he shouldn’t make all of the decisions when he wasn’t around enough.
“Let’s move on to why we’re here,” Rissa directed with a wide grin. The mirth that danced in her eyes made the paint in his hair totally worth it to Serenity. “Lord Cymryn, I think you’re up?”
Lord Cymryn also looked amused; Serenity could see his lips twitch. The happy expression fell off the Imperial’s face as he reacted to Rissa’s request and looked down at the map. “We have a map. It’s not a great map, but it is a map. We should be able to get a better one as we come in to land; the Death’s Wings can map areas it flies over. There are two problems. The first is where to land; the area is forests and swamps. Two of the nexus points, including one of the three dungeons, are underwater. The dungeon is in an ocean while the other is merely deep in the swamp.”
Serenity vaguely knew that. It didn’t seem all that important; both of the underwater nexus points were shallow enough to be reachable with a flyer. It wouldn’t be comfortable but it wouldn’t be that bad either. If they actually had to go through the dungeon, it was likely to be significantly more annoying; many dungeons that were actually underwater were mostly or completely filled with water inside as well. That made them far more difficult to deal with for land dwellers like Serenity and everyone else here; there was a reason many water dungeons were essentially monopolized by the water-breathing sapient species.
That shouldn’t matter. There was no reason they should need to enter the dungeons.
“The only real landing area is here, near the largest of the three dungeon settlements.” Cymryn tapped the map on an area near one of the nexuses, well outside the black lines that had to indicate the ley lines. “There’s a cleared area around each settlement, of course, but the other two are small enough that they haven’t needed to clear more trees than are necessary to have fields and maintain a field of vision from the walls. The largest settlement, creatively known as Golemton because the dungeon it surrounds is called the Golem Workshop, survived a forest fire last year. It sounds like they had to replace quite a few buildings with many of the trees that didn’t burn, so there should be enough space.”
Serenity nodded to himself. With luck, they would be able to find a place that didn’t even have skeletal tree remnants from the fire; the Death’s Wings was designed to be able to land on unimproved ground but it wasn’t made to handle a forest. It was simply too large. Soft ground like a marsh was probably even worse; it really needed rock or at the least solid earth.
They probably could have found a place without going into Themrys City, but having a place to start was a good idea. Serenity knew that Simurgh would check the landing area before she approved the site; there was no chance that she’d allow herself to land somewhere she couldn’t take off later without objecting.
“The only problem we’re likely to have is the monsters,” Cymryn continued. “There are man-shaped constructs at Golemton and a fairly wide variety of things throughout the marsh; they think some of the rays from the Seafire dungeon have swum into the marsh as well as the inhabitants of the Fecund Fen dungeon.”
Serenity frowned at that. “They’re not keeping up with the dungeons? I know that happened on Asihanya, but there are dungeon towns around those three, I expected them to keep up well enough to mostly prevent dungeon breaks.”
“All three dungeons had massive dungeon breaks within hours of each other four months ago,” Senkovar contributed. “Other dungeons have as well, though not too many. The interesting thing is that it has happened at some dungeons quite a ways away, but they’re all on ley lines that run through this area as far as I can tell. It happens sometimes on worlds attacked by World Eaters. I knew that, but I’ve never tried to link it geographically to a location; they’re too spread out. Most planets don’t have good ley line maps so I don’t know if they were all on the same ley line or not.”
The World Shaman did not look happy to admit that he’d missed a large clue. Serenity couldn’t blame him too much; saying that most planets didn’t have ley line maps was true but incomplete. Most planets didn’t have accurate maps at all; it was very easy to try to guess where a ley line was by linking dungeons that looked to be in a line together only to find out that each of them was several miles off the locations expected and not only were they not in a line, they were all on completely different ley lines.
Earth was highly unusual and even then Serenity knew that accurate maps on the scale and precision necessary for worldwide dungeon location didn’t really come in until satellites made it possible to map with that level of accuracy from space. They could have been created on smaller scales long before that, but accurately mapping locations hundreds of miles apart wasn’t easy.
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Earth’s fractured ley lines would complicate matters anyway. Dungeons were far too close together in many places, there were too many dungeons, and ley lines all too often weren’t nearly as straight on Earth as they were on other planets. Serenity suspected that Earth would have a fairly comprehensive ley line map soon enough anyway; he knew people were already starting, though the Skills that made sensing ley lines possible were still very rare.
“I wonder if the dungeons feel the same thing I did?” Serenity mused out loud. “If they’re in pain and overwhelmed, I suppose they might push their monsters out. But then … what would be inside?”
“No one knows.” Senkovar had an immediate answer. “The dungeons can’t be entered; the Golem Workshop doesn’t even seem to be there anymore. When they go to the entrance, it doesn’t respond. It hasn’t responded for weeks. It also hasn’t spit out any new monsters in that time, while the other two have; they’re spitting out a full dungeon’s worth every day or two. Even if Golemton wasn’t the largest town, I’d want to concentrate on the area near the former Golem Workshop since that may mean the World Eater is closest to it.”
Serenity frowned and tapped the map at the spot where the Golem Workshop should be. He knew he’d seen three dungeons nearby. A quick check of Aide’s recording told him that the Golem Workshop was one of them. He hadn’t checked on them beyond noting their presence; that was clearly a mistake, even though Serenity wasn’t certain his presence would have been helpful at the time.
“It’s still alive. I don’t know if it’ll be functional any time soon, but it’s alive.” Serenity knew that none of the dungeons could be serving their function as filters and regulators of the ley line network if they were simply throwing the monsters outside. That also had to be very bad for the dungeons themselves. Serenity remembered the pain Aki described as she progressively lost control of her minions as her dungeon faded; that had to be more or less what these dungeons were going through, though it seemed like it was quicker for them and was definitely from a different cause.
“In exchange for the map and the Governor’s permission to land near Golemton, he wants us to thin the monsters and stop the dungeons from continually spitting them out. The local towns have quit trying to deal with them at the dungeons at all and retreated to their walls; I wouldn’t be surprised if the residents of Fenbury have abandoned the village and fled to Golemton. The Governor wouldn’t say much about the monsters from that dungeon, but I’m sure they’re swamp monsters and swamp monsters can be sneaky.” Lord Cymryn almost spat the word “permission.”
“Thin out the monsters?” Serenity raised his eyebrows at that. “That’s ridiculous; if the dungeons have been sending them out for months, the older ones that survived the separation are residents outside the dungeons by now. We won’t even be able to tell which swamp animals are from the dungeon!”
Senkovar snorted. “Lord Cymryn’s being polite; the word the Governor used was eliminate. I plan to completely ignore his request; we’ll kill anything that gets in our way and ignore the rest. It’s a political move to bolster his position; it doesn’t actually matter what we do. He requested something impossible so that he can either claim we ignored his authority or that we didn’t meet our obligations. It won’t work on the Emperor, but it might work on other nobles.”
“Other nobles at his Tier,” Cymryn agreed. “Backwater nobles that don’t know what an Imperial Warrant means. I’ve seen too many of them in the past few years. The Empire needs to slow down and consolidate its growth; our hold on the outer planets is all too thin when it depends on people like this. Yes, the planet’s fairly low Tier and the population is tiny, but this doesn’t help! We’re supposed to be growing new strongholds of Humanity, not shitholes that can barely let people into Tier Four!”
Serenity cleared his throat. It was interesting to see that under the cynical exterior, Cymryn hid an idealistic belief in what the Empire stood for. Serenity didn’t share the belief; perhaps it was true at the top but Vengeance never reached that Tier in the time he spent in the empire. “Shithole where people barely get above Tier Four” was overstating things more than a bit in his experience, but he’d certainly never seen any effort from the Empire to grow the worlds he was on. “The core worlds, perhaps. The fringe worlds? Why would the core worlds want them to be strong enough to threaten the core worlds’ ascendancy?”
Cymryn opened his mouth as if to say something then snapped it shut into a firm line. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “That’s not what we stand for, but to those on the outside, those who see only the strong fist of the Empire and not the welcoming hand … I can see how it wouldn’t be clear. I wonder how many planets inside the Empire feel like they are outside.”
Serenity could only shrug at that. He didn’t remember Vengeance’s time in the Empire well enough to know which worlds were Imperial and which were merely adjacent. It was entirely possible that he’d never known. He was certain he hadn’t cared unless it affected him.
“You can look into that later,” Senkovar suggested. “For now, let’s see if we can accomplish something here. I think we’ll start with a good look at what’s inside the area from the air, then land and see what we can find.”
Serenity nodded. Senkovar’s suggestion matched what he thought they’d already agreed on.