064 – Effigy

***

“Come on, you little monster,” I said. “You owe me for ransacking my workshop.”

“Nimblesto no sack shop.”

The goblin and I stood on an outer ledge of the citadel’s superstructure, huddled in the rain and wind. The fortress glistened in the violet moonlight as thin strips of clouds passed in front of the moon. All the sensible people were locked inside, warm and dry, and even the devil-birds took shelter in their nests. In the past, this weather would have chilled me to the bone, but now wisps of vapor rose off my exposed flesh. I felt little discomfort in the cold.

“I’ll go first and haul you up on the rope.”

I unwound a coil a rope with an iron weight attached to one end. Then with my new levitation rod, I sent the weight high into the air. Gusts of wind battered the trailing rope and tried to send it flying off into the night sky. With a few clumsy attempts, I managed to pass the weight over the narrow bridge above me and catch it on the other side.

The secured rope helped me to climb the wall. In a few minutes, I ascended and then pulled the child sized monster up to join me on the slippery footbridge. We had bypassed the first door—the one connecting the citadel’s upper level to the bridge—and in doing so had avoided any witnesses to our nocturnal crime. However, a second door kept the small tower sealed shut. I needed the help of this goblin thief to open the lock.

“Here we are, Nimblesto. Time to test your new skills at lockpicking. This one can’t be harder than the boxes in my workshop.”

“Human trick goblin. Human lock box. Box no have treasure.”

“I thought you never ransacked the place?”

Nimblesto’s red cap looked almost black when soaked with water. He inserted his picks into the keyhole and went to work. The goblin resisted any sort of useful labor and refused to help with my other projects, but he made an exception for mischief. It didn’t take much effort to convince him to raid the witch’s private residence with me. In his opinion, the whole citadel belonged to the tribe of goblins, meaning he had the right to go wherever he pleased and take whatever the trespassing humans left lying around.

The lock snapped open and the goblin giggled with delight. The doors swung outward with an eerie silence. Because all the doors and gates set into the Ancient structure were recently installed, their well-oiled hinges didn’t make a sound. We slipped quietly inside.

Dripping wet, we tracked rain water across the slate floor. Malisent’s apartment was cold and empty. Unlike Veylien, she lived completely alone. She had no servants to watch over the place while away on missions. I lit a lumestone to the lowest degree.

“We’ve made it inside. It’ll be simple from here. I just have to grab my things, and we can escape without anyone knowing we were here. Don’t touch anything, Nimbly. The witch is less forgiving than me.”

The cold prison sat in front of a large window facing out toward the mountain range. The sight of this squat, ugly lump of iron reminded me of awful time within it. I slid aside the bolts and flipped back the giant lid. Shining from a familiar darkness, a faint light flickered at the bottom of the cauldron. Not wanting to go back inside, I used the levitation rod to grab hold of the object of this burglary.

“There we are. Looks more or less intact.”

The golem core had lost some of its internal light while inside the mana-draining prison, but the daemon inside had not collapsed. Keeping it trapped there prevented it from spontaneously jumping to another object or person, as I had witnessed with Fat Wellez the Werewolf. There was no telling what sort of monster an unlucky minion might become if possessed by this daemon. And keeping the core in Malisent’s apartment prevented the sneakthief Nimblesto from running off with it. But I had not anticipated her going on a mission and leaving me locked out in the rain.

The crystal sphere floated in front of me like a soap bubble. It sparkled as the daemon’s mana began to cycle again.

From another room came a loud crash.

“Nimblesto! I told you not to touch anything.”

I followed the source of the noise. Naturally, the goblin had ignored my order and started searching for anything shiny the moment I looked away. He was half inside an open chest with his legs sticking out. A large stand had tipped over and dumped out a mess of broken swords and blades. This room was an armory for Malisent’s weapons and armor.

“You can’t resist, can you? Even when I told you I’d pay for your help, you still resort to thievery at every opportunity.”

Malisent had once told me that murderous swordsmen liked to collect trophies from their victims. ‘Sword-hunters,’ she called them. I would have assumed this was her own trophy room containing the blades of her former enemies, but the many swords mounted to these walls were all the same. They almost seemed mass produced, they so closely fit a standard pattern. Each had an identical weight and dimensions. Besides those on display, a number of badly damaged blades filled waste containers. Used up scraps.

The broken weapons were cracked, shattered, bent, chipped, or dulled, and many had severely corroded edges near the tip of the blade. That was odd, because normally a swordsman would extend a filament of fire up the blade to strengthen it and help keep it’s cutting edge. Malisent was a projection specialist, who should have mastered that simple technique early on. But for some reason, she went through swords as if they were made of tin or aluminum.

The corroded tips gave a hint as to what happened. Like Iiyluzh’s poisons discolored his blade, Malisent’s cursed blade techniques left a mark on her swords. Her fire was so destructive that it ruined the weapons it passed through. These wrecks were proof of that.

It was no wonder she lent me her sword of spiritual steel. She would have broken it like a twig.

I put the metal fragments back into the trash. This was probably something I was not meant to see, a small clue as to how her powers worked. Putrizio’s compendium might describe similar techniques, but that could wait until after exiting the scene of the crime.

“Glogloball!” Nimblesto gasped. He forgot whatever had caught his attention in Malisent’s chests and darted for the golem core. “Mine!”

“Stop right there.” I whipped out the lev rod and caught hold of the core.

Nimblesto ran in place as if he were on a treadmill, his wet feet smacking against the floor. He hugged the orb to his chest. “Nimblesto take glogloball. Human give!”

“Don’t touch that thing, you menace. It’s dangerous.” I levitated the crystal orb off the ground, but the goblin refused to let go. He flipped around through the air. “I can make you a safer lumestone in the future. Now let’s get out of here before you really break something.”

We exited the armory leaving no permanent evidence of our crime. Our wet footprints would dry by morning.

***

The solar system formed several billion years ago from a mass of hydrogen gas and star dust. As gravity sucked matter into the newly ignited sun, smaller blobs of material began to coalesce in the accretion disk. After a chaotic period, where they knocked into each other like billiard balls, these blobs became the planets and moons.

The planets were made from the same stuff, more or less, but in different amounts. Each developed its own composition and personality. They were airless rocks, or gas giants, or molten seas of lava, or ice balls, or even a world with oceans of liquid water. The Earth and the Moon split in half during the chaotic period, forming a pair of twins of equal size rotating around a central point. Somehow our half ended up with all the water and the Moon became a wind swept desert.

For the first few billion years, the Moon and Earth had a tempestuous relationship. The gravitational forces between them caused massive earthquakes, volcanoes, and eternal storms. Plate tectonics ripped the continent to pieces and scattered the islands around the globe. It wasn’t until the Earth and Moon became tidally locked, spinning together in harmony, that things quieted down enough for life to timidly spread across the land.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

But mixed in with that original cloud of stardust were invisible substances. Spiritual essences with physical elements. Those aetheric substances drifted toward the proto-planets and bonded to the matter there. The process by which this happened was less well understood, but it resulted in planets with both distinct chemical and aetheric compositions.

The Earth had a particular set of essences, including an ocean of mana to go along with its ocean of water. Earthly essences were all mankind knew until the construction of the massive Lunar Array. We couldn’t physically cross the empty space between the two worlds, but science devised a way to snatch essences from the sky and bring them down to the Earth. That was also how we first discovered the lunar daemons and their many uses.

The world had changed since my era twenty five millennia ago. Lunar daemons had grown more powerful and more common. What were once incredibly exotic and hard to produce essences, now polluted the entire continent. They could be found in many of the weird lifeforms haunting the land. That meant I could create new whole new types of runes and arrays, potentially even surpassing the Ancients’ aetherics.

I placed the golem core in the center of my pentagram, and it flooded the room with crimson light. The rune scripts binding the daemon had been damaged in the mana-quake, making the core unsafe to use. At the edge of the of the magic circle, I set down my newest device, a cube of orange topaz inlaid with thin bands of brass and electrum. This was my homemade rune tablet. All it needed was a daemon as the final touch.

My array had no natural power source, so I had to carefully extend my fire extended along circle and channel mana into the script of runes. The daemon resisted the magic that pried it out of the core and forced it into the tablet.

Making runes by hand was a slow and laborious process. A tablet would allow me to store runes like blue prints and then reproduce them as needed. The daemon would assemble them on my behalf in a fraction of the time. However, creating runes required mana as a power source and essences as raw materials. I would have to gather essence bearing items from nature just as alchemists did.

At last, the daemon popped free from the old golem core. It floated in the air, glowing visibly to the naked eye like a knot of luminous threads. A daemon could only exist for a minute or two without a physical anchor. It needed some type of body. For a moment, I worried that the defiant daemon would collapse before entering the cube, destroy itself rather than be bound, but it soon relented and slipped inside the tablet.

In a way, it was a waste using this high class daemon for a primitive device. It was like strapping a jet engine to a rickety wooden cart. Trying to use this tablet to its full power would cause it to burst into pieces. But, I had to start somewhere. This was an important step in my one-man technological revolution.

The quartz core went dark. I probed it with my fire to inspect the damage. Most of the original runes had been obliterated. What remained had no function, but could make for a good reference if I ever wanted to revive the old golem for construction work.

***

The eastern sky turned a light gray before sunrise, and I crept back to the Hall of Discipline after a long night of crime. First I burgled the witch’s apartment, and then I worked on my projects forbidden by the fightmaster. Sneaking out to my workshop now and again, because Fightmaster Putrizio was so rarely around. The place was almost empty.

“Junior Disciple. Where have you been at this hour in the morning.”

Hwilla stood in the doorframe of the girls’ dormitory with her arms akimbo, hands on her hips. She had clearly just woken up, as she wasn’t wearing a mask and held a stuffed doll in one hand.

“I was… uh… thirsty. Getting a glass of water.”

“Now you compound your offense by lying to your senior? This delviltry has gone too far,” she huffed. “You’ve been playing with your toys again, haven’t you?”

“I just needed to attend to a few things in my workshop. It’s not as if it’s distracting me from my other training.”

She balled up her fists in anger. “Oh! That’s it! Prepare for your punishment!”

Hwilla shot across the room. She launched into the air with a flying kick, but I ducked and sidestepped the attack.

“There’s no need for violence, senior.”

“There is. I’m going to beat you senseless. Then I’m going to beat you sensible. It’s the only way you’ll ever learn.”

Hwilla delivered a vicious series of punches, which I managed to block. This was going to be an unarmed battle, and it wouldn’t end well for me if I lost. She was a small but hyper aggressive fighter. Her fire burned hot, enhancing her physical abilities at the cost of mana.

“Look. My brain needs some exercise too. I’ve been training and meditating and sparring every day for weeks now.”

“It’s done you little good. You’re weak and lagging behind.” Hwilla gave a painful snap kick to my right knee. She wasn’t as skilled an unarmed fighter as Yurk, but somehow her strikes always hurt twice as much.

“Oh yeah? I’ll show you. Knockout Punch!”

I spun around and delivered a punch straight to her solar plexus. A blast of fire burst from my fist. She stumbled back momentarily.

“Is that it? Pathetic. You won’t knock out a fly with that.”

“Well, it won’t work on someone burning all their mana. Your fire’s too extreme.” I tried to drive her back with a follow up punch, but she rolled out of the way.

“That’s because I’m actually working on my techniques, unlike you. I’m going with a combat enhancement for sure.”

Hwilla was small and not physically powerful, so choosing an enhancement made sense. She could temporarily boost herself to superhuman levels of strength and speed. Enhancements let a swordsman match any opponent, no matter their size. But those techniques also required a large amount of mana to sustain them. She couldn’t last long in a fight.

“Have you developed a new technique already?”

“Yes. Let me demonstrate. Blazing Comet Kick!”

I lifted my hands to block the incoming attack, but then she dropped low and performed a vicious leg sweep. My feet shot out from under me, and I landed solidly on my back.

“Cheater! You can’t call out one move and then do something else. That’s so dishonorable.”

“A delinquent junior deserves no honor. Only punishment.” Hwilla started kicking me in the ribs.

“Yield! Yield. Stop kicking me. I yield already.”

“You big idiot, Strythe. I wish you had enkindled your flame first. Then I wouldn’t have to be the senior disciple responsible for your training. Whenever you do something crazy, I’ll get in trouble too for not guiding you properly.”

I lay on the floor holding my bruised ribs. “Nothing to worry about. Just finish your technique and leave me behind when you graduate to being an officer.”

“It’s not that easy. I don’t know whether I should create a general enhancement or a narrowly focused one.”

Putrizio’s compendium of swordcraft gave me a better understanding of her dilemma. A general enhancement would increase many attributes at once, such as her speed, durability, and strength. But a more focused technique, such as one that only increased strength, would be more powerful at the same rank. Of course, one could learn multiple enhancements, but it took skill to maintain them all and a huge amount of mana. Only those people specialized in the enhancement method could have three or more techniques active at once.

“Well, what methods will you prefer? You need augmentation or projection to balance your enhancement.”

“But I’m not very good at projection. And I don’t want to turn into some augmentation weirdo with huge muscles or creepy stigmas. I can’t decide…”

Hwilla was having as a hard a time picking an initial technique as I was, although for different reasons.

“Take your time. No need to rush. Maybe I’ll graduate first, and then you won’t have to deal with my chronic misbehavior. You’ll be free to train in peace.”

“You are not allowed to graduate before me, junior. I’d have to strangle you for embarrassing me like that.”

I stood up and dusted myself off. After pulling an all nighter, an early morning beating had woken me up. “Senior Disciple Hwilla, what is that thing you’re carrying with you?”

“What? This?” She held up a lumpy rag doll. “It’s my Yurk doll. I made it myself.”

“It doesn’t look like Yurk.” The doll had a huge head and a skull mask. In one hand it held a little staff.

“Well it used to be a Strythe doll. I suppose I should remove the staff and replace it with a sword now.”

I was horrified by my ugly effigy. Seeing her squeeze it made me feel, through some sympathetic force, as I were suffocating in its place. “Hwilla, you can’t just recycle a doll. That’s no good. Yurk wouldn’t approve.”

“Really? Why not?”

“It’s a matter of pride. No man wants to be represented by a doll with a history. It’s best to start over from scratch. New relationship. Fresh doll. Forget the past. Look to the future.”

“Oh. I guess I could make a new one,” she said.

“Good. Good. I’ll just take this thing then.” I picked it up by the cursed item by the tip of its staff and held it arm’s length. If anything were to be possessed by a stray daemon, it would be this vile creation. “I’ll dispose of it properly. In an incinerator.”

Later I’d have to review the compendium for information on exorcism techniques, just to be sure.